The Global Refuge by Stanwood Owen;

Author:Stanwood, Owen; [Stanwood, Owen;]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780190264741
Publisher: OxfordUP
Published: 2019-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

In 1713 the War of the Spanish Succession ended and peace returned to Europe and its colonies. Few were more jubilant than the Huguenot refugees, who had suffered so much during the previous decades of conflict. Only two years after the end of hostilities another signal event occurred, as the old persecutor Louis XIV met his demise. His great-grandson Louis XV, a boy of five, took the throne, leading to a period of uncertainty as regents assumed control of the kingdom. Writing to his brother in Normandy, New York merchant Thomas Bayeux reflected on these changes. He hoped that the Sun King’s death would lead to a relaxation of laws against Protestantism, and he “prayed to God” that he would forgive and bless the nouveaux convertis, the poor Protestants who had become Catholic to stay in France. While he hoped for improvement, he did not believe that he himself would ever return to his homeland. He earnestly desired to “have occasion to see you again and embrace you and your dear family,” but he and his family were “so well established and so attached here,” and the voyage home was too long. Indeed, his descriptions of his life made Bayeux somewhat resemble John Laurens, another merchant he may have known personally. In other letters to his mother he made clear that he was raising his children to be good English subjects. They did study in a local French school, but he also made sure they learned the empire’s dominant language, and he intended to send his children to England for schooling when they reached the proper age. Bayeux retained family and business ties to Europe and France, but he plainly declared where his own allegiances lay. He was a New Yorker and more importantly, a subject of King George I.87

Bayeux’s letters suggests a kind of end to the history of the Huguenot refuge. The diaspora formed in order to preserve the French Protestant churches in exile. Ministers like Pierre Simond or even Claude Philippe de Richebourg, as they cozied up to their Dutch and British patrons, tried to preserve some level of autonomy in their communities. For Bayeux and others, though, the rewards of blending in were just too great. For their children, often raised in a bilingual environment with no memories of the homeland, the process was even more rapid. In the second generation, as numerous historians have attested, levels of outmarriage were quite high among the Huguenots, and by mid-century many of the French Protestant churches were gone, as they had few people left in the pews. With a return to France now out of the question, Huguenots had no reason to remain French any longer. They became British, or Dutch, or German, and gradually their ancestry became a point of pride but little more than that.88 This was undoubtedly the case for some refugees. But it was not the universal experience, and indeed, in some isolated cases refugees did manage to go home again, even as they

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