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Some Intellectual and Political Influences of the Huguenot Emigrés in the United Provinces, c. 1680-1730^*
G.C. Gibbs

In 1686 Petrus Francius, professor at the Illustrious School of Amsterdam, in an oration entitled De usu et praestantia linguae Graecae, delivered a warning against the dominance of French culture and, in a passage which has attracted the attention of Dutch historians, referred to the danger that spiritual annexation by France might bring in its wake political subjection to France^1.. The warning, though it came somewhat ironically from a doctor of Angers, articulated the fears of the embattled Latinists of the Netherlands - of whom Francius was one - that the advance of French culture was being made at the expense of Latin, and of the classical, humanist tradition in general^2.. If, as has been asserted, the particular enemy that Francius had in mind was Cartesianism, then his attack had come too late, because Cartesianism had sunk too deep into the basic assumptions of Dutch intellectual life, and was too widely dispersed, to be rooted out^3.. Nevertheless, there was a sense in which an attack on French cultural dominance, which enlisted as its ally fears of a French imperium, could not have come more appropriately than in 1686, and in which, far from having been over-taken by events, Francius displayed a fine sense of timing, indeed, a remarkable prescience. I refer of course to the fact that in 1686 the Dutch Republic was experiencing a massive infusion of French influences. The Huguenot exodus from France, consequent upon the revocation of the edict of Nantes by Louis XIV in the previous year, seems to have reached its first and greatest peak in 1686, judging at least from the establishment

* This is a revised, corrected and somewhat enlarged version of the lecture delivered to the general meeting of the Nederlands Historisch Genootschap on 25 October 1974 at Utrecht. I have profited from the questions and comments of Professors Boogman, Kossmann, Roorda and Swart, and I hope that I have been able to remove some of the inadequacies of the original paper.

1. J.G. Gerretzen, Schola Hemsterhusiana. De herleving der Grieksche studien aan de Nederlandsche universiteiten in de achttiende eeuw van Perizonius tot en met Valckenaer (Utrecht, 1940) 9; Th.J. Meijer, Kritiek als herwaardering. Het levenswerk van Jacob Perizonius (1651-1715) (Leiden, 1971) 84, 107. For some particulars on Petrus Francius, see Jan Wagenaar, Amsterdam in zyne opkomst, aanwas, geschiedenissen... (3 vols; Amsterdam, 1765) iii, 236.

2. Meijer, Kritiek, 99, 107; Gerretzen, Schola Hemsterhusiana, 39.

3. Gerretzen, Schola Hemsterhusiana, 41; Rosalie L. Colie, Light and Enlightenment. A Study of the Cambridge Platonists and the Dutch Arminians (Cambridge, 1957) 66. But for Cartesianism in the Dutch Republic, see C.L. Thijssen-Schoute, Nederlands Cartesianisme. Verhandelingen der Koninklijke Akademie van Wetenschappen, afdeling Letterkunde N.K., LX (Amsterdam, 1954) passim.

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in that year of fifteen new Walloon churches^4. and, over the next thirty years resulted, it is commonly said, in the permanent settlement in the Netherlands of an estimated 70,000 or more, or less, French refugees^5..

Counting churches, of course, is a good deal easier, if not positively more elevating, than counting heads and, until recent years, has attracted a good deal more attention, certainly more attention than has been devoted to counting Huguenot heads. If historians have settled for the moment upon the figure of c. 70,000 for those Huguenots who remained in the Netherlands, then it has to be admitted that they have done so for no explicit, or even very obvious reason. It is simply another guess, or rather a scholar's guess, distilled from contemporary, near contemporary, and later guesses, of greater or lesser apparent validity, some much larger than 70,000, some much smaller. Moreover, since the process by which the present guess has been reached is not made clear, the suspicion may lurk that in the last resort it rests upon nothing more substantial than the assumption that the truth lies somewhere, preferably mid-way, between the extremes, or upon the equally suspect assumption that if a figure is mentioned often enough in contemporary sources, or by historians, then it achieves credibility by virtue of that fact - a process which has made credible many lies.

Let me hasten to say that I am not suggesting that this is the way in which historians have arrived at the figure of c. 70,000, and that I have no reason not to regard that figure as the best available working hypothesis - give or take 20,000 or so, which is the accepted margin of error. Nor am I suggesting that actually counting the Huguenots of the Republic, or trying to do so, will likely produce the kind of blow to received wisdom, or current orthodoxy, recently inflicted by the attempt of an American scholar to produce a census of the Atlantic slave trade, though that case is an instructive exercise in the numbers game^6.. But no-one can tell for sure, because a systematic count of the Huguenot diaspora in the Netherlands has not been made and, in the nature of things, will never be possible. Even where relevant records have survived, the problems posed for historical demographers by migration in the early modern period remain particularly intractable^7..

4. F. de Schickler, Les églises du refuge (Paris, 1882) 40.

5. Warren C. Scoville, The Persecution of Huguenots and French Economic Development 1680-1720 (Berkeley - Los Angeles, 1960) 125; I. Schöffer, ‘De Hugenoten en Nederland 1540-1787’, in: De Hugenoten in Nederland. Tentoonstelling in het museum ‘Het Prinsenhof’, 23 november 1963-27 januari 1964 (Delft, 1963) 25 (50,000 to 75,000 finally settled); H.-H. Bolhuis, ‘La Hollande et les deux refuges’, Bulletin de la société de l'histoire du protestantisme français. Le Refuge Huguenot. Le colloque de Montpellier 3-10 octobre, 1969, CXV (1969) 417 (70,000 at least).

6. Philip D. Curtin, The Atlantic Slave Trade. A Census (Madison - Milwaukee - London: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969) passim.

7. A.M. van der Woude, Het noorderkwartier. Een regionaal historisch onderzoek in de demografische en economische geschiedenis van westelijk Nederland van de late middeleeuwen tot het begin van de negentiende eeuw. Afdeling Agrarische Geschiedenis Landbouwhogeschool Wageningen (3 vols; Wageningen, 1972) I, 222-233.

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It is highly unlikely, therefore, that the majority of Huguenots will ever be rescued from their present historical limbo to achieve even a digital heaven in those majestic and seductive columns of statistics which are the crowning glory of much present historical research. Nevertheless, judging at least from the materials and the techniques used by Dutch historical demographers, and from the recent demographic study of Rotterdam and Cool in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it is possible in certain cases to test contemporary guesses, and to reach a greater degree of certainty about the order of magnitude of the Huguenot influx, and its probable incidence, than exists at present, even if the attainment of precise figures must be dismissed as a hopeless delusion^8..

In terms, however, of the over-all and the longer-term demographic development of the Netherlands in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries the fact that the Huguenots remain uncounted does not make a scrap of difference. Whatever its actual size, the Huguenot influx was in the last resort a statistical irrelevance, one wave, or, to be precise, a series of waves in the constant ebb and flow of contemporary migration, which both failed to increase the total population of the Dutch Republic and to prevent its decline. For that reason, as well as because of the intrinsic intractibility of the subject, it is not surprising that the counting of Huguenots has attracted little, or only a passing and occasional attention from Dutch historical demographers. Nor, for the same reasons, is it ever likely to become a matter of compelling interest to historical demographers as such^9.. No-one wishes, or should be expected, to spend time questing after some historical grail

8. G.J. Mentink and A.M. van der Woude, De demografische ontwikkeling te Rotterdam en Cool in de 17e en 18e eeuw (Rotterdam, 1965) 102-108, which gives decennial baptism figures for the Walloon church from the 1670's onwards, as well as total and reformed baptism figures for the same decades. However, the relevance of these figures for the size and development of the Huguenot community in Rotterdam is not explored. On the basis of baptism and marriage records, Hazewinkel estimated the Huguenot population of Rotterdam in 1687 at around 5% of the population, or about 2,500. In the same year a Huguenot refugee described Rotterdam as having become ‘nearly French by the arrival there of a great number of the inhabitants of Rouen and Dieppe’. See H.C. Hazewinkel, Geschiedenis van Rotterdam (3 vols; Amsterdam, 1940-1942) III, 264. It may be relevant here to point out that a recent re-examination of the numbers of Huguenots received into one London church during the period 1680 to 1705 has revealed a hitherto unused category of documentation, and has produced a much larger estimate of Huguenot arrivals than has prevailed until now. It is the kind of luck often produced by a hard slog at the archives. See Robin D. Gwynn, ‘Arrival of Huguenot Refugees in England 1680-1705’, Proceedings of the Huguenot Society of London (PHSL), XXI (1965-1970) 366-373. I should like to thank Mr. D. Jones of the University of York for having drawn my attention to this article.

9. See for example S. Hart, ‘Historisch-demografische notities betreffende huwelijken en migratie te Amsterdam in de 17e en 18e eeuw’, Maandblad Amstelodamum, LV (1968) 66, where the author, after estimating that the combined communities of the Walloon church, Anabaptists, Remonstrants, and Jews, probably constituted about 12% of the population of Amsterdam, continues ‘Naturally it would be interesting to analyse the membership records of these communities, but so far as immigration in general is concerned it is not so interesting’.

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in the knowledge that, if succesful, all he will have achieved is to establish beyond peradventure of scholarly doubt that, in the longer historical perspective, a particular matter has minimal significance.

But in the case of the Huguenots there is the further disincentive that, even though the present view of the Huguenot impact upon the Dutch Republic is based on imperfect knowledge, it is unlikely that more research will alter the present general conclusion. This is that in the longer historical perspective, Huguenot influences upon the culture and economy of the Republic were neither as injurious culturally, nor as beneficial economically, as was thought at the time, and later; and that, in their overall effect, the Huguenots did not set the Dutch Republic on any important new courses, but reinforced and temporarily arrested some existing tendencies. That this should have been so, however, is a matter of some historical interest, since it not only high-lights the structural and psychological difficulties which beset the Dutch economy at the time, but also raises questions about the rate and manner of Huguenot assimilation into Dutch society, and about the character of the Huguenots themselves, which still lack, and surely deserve, the systematic and sophisticated attention of a modern social historian.

The longer historical perspective however should not be allowed to blind us to the fact that in terms of immediate impact upon the Dutch Republic, the size of the Huguenot influx, its incidence, and its character, were, and are, matters of great importance, since they gave rise to a variety of immediately pressing problems, as well as some enduring tensions, about which, again, too little is known - sometimes only the general outline, and an occasional detail which does service in several hands.

There was, for instance, the problem of finding employment for a large number of Huguenot craftsmen. Much was expected from an injection of Huguenot manufacturing skills and capital, a good deal more, it seems, than was in fact realised, and than was commonly supposed to have been realised in the eighteenth century, and by the first serious historians of the Huguenot influx into the Dutch Republic, Koenen and Berg^10.. Precisely what was achieved remains uncertain. There is agreement, however, that although a boost was probably given to some already established industries, the boost was mostly temporary and, in terms of the Dutch economy as a whole, was of marginal significance, at best slowing down Dutch economic decline^11., and that in so far as there was an influx of Huguenot

10. H.J. Koenen, Geschiedenis van de vestiging en den invloed der Fransche vluchtelingen in Nederland (Leiden, 1846) 4-5, 255-286; W.E.J. Berg, De refugiés in de Nederlanden na de herroeping van het edict van Nantes (Amsterdam, 1845) 157-312.

11. Schöffer, ‘Hugenoten en Nederland’, 27; F.R.J. Knetsch, ‘Een vluchtelingenprobleem uit de zeventiende eeuw. Hugenoten in Nederland’, Spiegel Historiael (1971) 76 (which argues the need for further investigation); Leonie van Nierop, ‘De zijdenijverheid van Amsterdam historisch geschetst’, Tijdschrift voor geschiedenis, XLVI (1931) 52-55 (an article frequently cited for the view that the importance of the Huguenots for the Amsterdam silk-industry has been overestimated); H. Brugmans, Geschiedenis van Amsterdam, III (Utrecht - Antwerp, 1973) 237-239; P.J. Blok, Geschiedenis eener Hollandsche stad. Eene Hollandsche stad onder de Republiek (The Hague, 1916) 203; N.W. Posthumus, Bronnen tot de geschiedenis van de Leidsche textielnijverheid, V. Rijks Geschiedkundige Publicatiën, XXXIX (The Hague, 1922) xi; J.G. van Dillen, Van rijkdom en regenten. Handboek tot de economische en sociale geschiedenis van Nederland tijdens de Republiek (The Hague, 1970) 396-398 (where the usual point about the traditional over-estimate of Huguenot influences upon the development of the silk industry is made, but where reference is also made to a more enduring Huguenot contribution to a branch of the Haarlem silk-weaving industry); Scoville, Persecution of Huguenots, 343-347 (based largely upon Koenen, Berg, and Van Nierop). Unquestionably the Huguenots made a large contribution to the Dutch book industry, for which see pp 18-19 of this article.

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capital, this accelerated the shift - in so far as there was a shift - to a rentier economy in the Republic^12..

The chronic difficulties of the Dutch economy in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, therefore, were not resolved and, in some respects, may even have been aggravated by the Huguenot influx. In the light of these difficulties, however, the degree of interest, and even of zest, shown by the Republic in acquiring Huguenot emigrants becomes more intelligible. For Huguenot craftsmen were not simply accepted; they were welcomed as the saviours of languishing industries and of depopulated areas, and they were even sought out, as in the case of Leiden, where the contacts and literary skills of the preachers of its existing French community were enlisted in a publicity drive to attract from France immigrants of the right sort^13.. Self-interest, it is clear, was as prominent a con-

12. To what extent Huguenots managed to move their capital outside France, and how, remains one of the most obscure problems connected with the Huguenot exodus. It seems agreed that there was a great displacement of capital from France, and that it may have taken the form of apparently normal banking and commercial transactions. Herbert Lüthy, La banque protestante en France de la révocation de l'édit de Nantes à la révolution, I, Dispersion et regroupement (1685-1730) (Paris, 1959-1961) 28-29. Scoville, Persecution of Huguenots, 293-300, 348, drew attention to a substantial rise in both the deposits and the reserves of the Bank of Amsterdam after 1685, and argued that the Huguenots must surely have had something to do with this. More recently, however, attention has been drawn to a technical change in the facilities offered by the bank, which, it is said, largely accounts for the upsurge in deposits. See M. Morineau, ‘Quelques remarques sur l'abondance monitaire aux Provinces-Unies’, Annales, XXIX (1974) 769. The role played by Huguenots as investors in English funds has been the subject of pioneering studies by Mrs. Carter. See Alice C. Carter, ‘The Huguenot Contribution to the Early Years of the Funded Debt, 1694-1714’, and ‘Financial Activities of the Huguenots in London and Amsterdam in the Mid-Eighteenth Century’, PHSL, XIX (1955) 21-41, 313-333. Some further particulars on this aspect of Huguenot financial activities are to be found in P.G.M. Dickson, The Financial Revolution in England. A Study in the Development of Public Credit 1688-1756 (London, 1967) 306-307, 314-315. For a recent and stimulating questioning of the movement towards a rentier economy in the Republic and of its significance, see P.W. Klein, ‘Stagnation économique et emploi du capital dans la Hollande des XIIIe [sic] et XIX siècles’, Revue du Nord, LII (1970) 33-41.

13. Posthumus, Bronnen Leidsche textielnijverheid, V, 85; Blok, Geschiedenis Hollandsche stad, 201; J. de Hullu, ‘De overeenkomst van refugiés in westelijk Staats-Vlaanderen gedurende de zeventiende eeuw’, Nederlandsch archief voor kerkgeschiedenis, N.S., VIII (The Hague, 1911) 44; Leonie van Nierop, ‘Stukken betreffende de nijverheid der refugiés te Amsterdam’, Economisch-historisch jaarboek, VII (1921) 147, 152; Scoville, Persecution of Huguenots, 341.

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sideration as compassion, and sometimes extinguished it. If Leiden sought out Huguenots for economic reasons, it also excluded them for economic reasons, because, as was said of one group of suppliants in 1682, their poverty was such that in consequence no great business for the town was to be expected from them^14.. A numberless, but not always nameless legion of Huguenots went to swell, at least initially, the proletariats of Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Leiden and Haarlem. The prospects that faced them there were a good deal less alluring than the land flowing with milk and honey which seemed to beckon Jean Rou, and caused him such sore temptations to an abandoned life of promiscuous delights - delights he seems to have foresworn, or perhaps discovered, in service to the States-General as secretary-interpretor, a post, it seems, subsequently monopolised by Huguenots^15.. Many Huguenots, indeed, stood in need of financial assistance, and the task of providing it, especially in times of financial difficulty, soon proved too large a problem for organized charity, whether in the form of repeated church collections, or municipal largesse, or a rash of municipal lotteries. In Amsterdam in 1688, for instance, the city government put to test what Montesquieu later unflatteringly called the camel-like patience of the Dutch in matters of taxation, by introducing new taxes on wheat, wine, and brokerage in East and West India company shares^16..

Nor was it simply a question of finding jobs, or of dispensing a financial dole, but of finding somewhere for Huguenots to live. Tantalisingly little is said in general accounts of the Huguenot reception in the Dutch Republic about the problems of urban housing their arrival must surely have created for a number of towns, and perhaps little can ever be said. Moreover, since what is said comes usually from the contemporary comments of refugees, it has to be treated with caution, as subject to the natural distortions of perspective imposed by life as an emigré. Nevertheless the statements, although exaggerated, usually contain a kernel of truth, even if it is difficult to establish its exact size. There is, for instance, the oft-repeated statement, which apparently comes originally from Benoit, the first historian of the revocation of the edict of Nantes, that in 1681 Amsterdam constructed 1000 dwellings for letting at minimal rents to Huguenots^17.. Historians have been unable to find corrobation for this statement, which has been pronounced highly improbable^18.. However, a more modest enterprise in the provision

14. Posthumus, Bronnen Leidsche textielnijverheid, V, 86; Blok, Geschiedenis Hollandsche stad, 201.

15. Jean Rou, Mémoires inédits et opuscules de Jean Rou, ed. by Francis Waddington (Paris, 1857) 166-167. Rou's successors as secretary interpretor were Daniel Louis, Philippe Saurin, and Pierre Lyonet. Some names are provided in Van Nierop, ‘Stukken nijverheid refugiés’, 180-195, and Posthumus, Bronnen Leidsche textielnijverheid, 91.

16. J. Wagenaar, Beschryving van Amsterdam (Amsterdam, 1760) I, 694. The reference to Montesquieu is taken from H.H. Zwager, Nederland en de verlichting (Bussum, 1972) 39.

17. Scoville, Persecution of Huguenots, 342.

18. Berg, De refugiés, 34.

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of municipal housing certainly took place around the same time, and Benoit may have been referring to this. In 1683, Huguenot weavers, the employees of Pierre Bayle, a much-favoured Huguenot emigré silk-manufacturer, were housed en bloc in Het Noordsche Bos, a recently built extension to the city, planned to facilitate the expansion of its textile industries, especially its silk industry; some 400 houses are mentioned^19.. It sounds like a Huguenot ghetto and, although the housing problems of Amsterdam may have been particularly acute, since the city was a powerful magnet for immigrants from all over Western Europe - indeed was the most West European of all European cities in terms of its population^20. - similar ghettos may have existed elsewhere. The classic accounts of the Huguenot dispersion contain assertions of new housing taking place at Leiden as a result of the Huguenot influx, and of Huguenots entirely occupying the Nieuwstad, a newlybuilt suburb of Haarlem^21..

Whether or not the Huguenot influx also contributed anything, or anything significant, to the delinquency problems of Dutch towns, which, it is sometimes said, were aggravated by an infusion of immigrants, or contributed in particular to the delinquency rates of Amsterdam, as collected by Dr. Oldewelt, is another uncertainty^22.. The influx, however, certainly contributed to social friction in Amsterdam. It soon seemed to some of the tradesmen of the city that the Huguenots were getting too good a deal, especially since assistance was not confined to the needy amongst them, or to cash payments, and subsidised housing. In 1690 the city government was converted to this popular view - to the extent of rescinding all tax exemptions for Huguenots, except for those who had just arrived^23.. Further, as popular resentment at the conferment of what seemed unduly preferential treatment for Huguenot traders was succeeded by popular disillusionment, triggered off by the celebrated bankruptcy of Pierre Bayle in 1695, more favours were withdrawn^24..

However, my brief is not to enumerate the social problems to which the Huguenot

19. Van Nierop, ‘De zijdenijverheid’, 53; J.G. van Dillen, ‘Omvang en samenstelling van de bevolking van Amsterdam’ in: Mensen en achtergronden (Groningen, 1964) 491.

20. Hart, ‘Historisch-demografische notities’, 64.

21. Charles Weiss, History of the French Protestant Refugees from the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes to the Present Time (London, 1854) 360. Both the structure and the detail of Weiss's section on the Huguenots in the Dutch Republic are closely dependent upon Koenen. Berg, De refugiés, 34, without citing any evidence refers to a remarkable rise in house rents in Amsterdam as a consequence of the Huguenot influx.

22. W.F.H. Oldewelt, ‘De zelfkant van de Amsterdamse samenleving en de groei der bevolking 1578-1795’, Tijdschrift voor geschiedenis, LXXVII (1964) 39-56. Arrests reached their peak in the period 1680-1700.

23. Berg, De refugiés, 196; Van Nierop, ‘Stukken nijverheid refugiés’, 170.

24. Van Nierop, ‘De zijdenijverheid’, 52. Collections for Huguenots also fell after 1688, and there were not enough takers for a lottery in 1695; whether this is to be interpreted as a reflection of financial difficulties, or diminished concern for the Huguenots I do not know.

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influx gave rise. I refer to them in part because they seem worthy of more attention from historians than they have received, but also as a reminder. If, as we have been recently told by a Dutch scholar who has made a considerable contribution to our knowledge of Huguenot history in this period, the history of Huguenot influences upon the Dutch Republic has been the history of the influence of an élite upon an élite^25., it is because the nature and availability of historical evidence, the fashions of historiography, and the affections and antipathies of individual historians have helped to make it so, and not because it is a complete reflection of the contemporary situation.

It is to this élite that I now wish to turn and, in the first instance, to the élite of scholarship, as an example of the way in which a concern with the Huguenots may lead to a concern with matters of more general concern to Dutch history.

The closure of the protestant academies of France accelerated the flow of Huguenot luminaries to other lands and to appointments in foreign institutions of learning. In the Dutch Republic the roll-call of Huguenot émigrés who found such appointments in the republic from the 1670's until c. 1730 includes - in addition to the celebrated appointments of Bayle and Jurieu at the Illustrious School at Rotterdam - Stephen Le Moyne, Jean Gaillard, and Jacques Bernard at Leiden university, together with Pierre de Villemandy, last regent of the Walloon college at Leiden^26.; at Groningen, Jacques Gousset, Michael Rossal, and Jean Barbeyrac^27.; at Franeker, Henri Philoponeau de Hautecour, Pierre Latané, Jean Anthoine Tronchin - of the great banking, journalistic, and scholarly dynasty of that name -, and two successive librarians of the university, Louis Pouiade and François Chamois^28.; at Utrecht, Paul Bauldry d'Iberville^29.; at the Amsterdam Athanaeum Étienne Morin^30.; at the Illustrious School of Maastricht, Jacques

25. Knetsch, ‘Een vluchtelingenprobleem’, 78.

26. Matthijs Siegenbeek, Geschiedenis der Leidsche Hoogeschool van hare oprigting in den jare 1575 tot het jaar 1825, II, Appendix-Biografische lijst der hoogleeraren (2 vols; Leiden, 1829) 150-151, 171-172, 292.

27. Gerretzen, Schola Hemsterhusiana, 27-29; Koenen, Geschiedenis Fransche vluchtelingen, 226.

28. W.B.S. Boeles, Frieslands Hoogeschool en het Rijks Athaneum te Franeker (2 vols; Leeuwarden, 1878) I, 68-69, 243-244, 324-329, 330-334. The advice given to Bayle not to accept the chair of philosophy at Franeker because no-one there spoke French seems particularly inappropriate in view of the fact that Franeker had been the first Dutch institution of higher learning to afford students the opportunity of following courses in French. See Elisabeth R. Labrousse, ‘Documents relatifs à l'offre d'une chaire de philosophie à Bayle à l'université de Franeker au printemps de 1684’, Pierre Bayle, le philosophe de Rotterdam. Etudes et documents publieés sous la direction de Paul Dibon (Paris, 1959) 233 and K.J. Riemens, Esquisse historique de l'enseignement du français en Hollande du XVIe au XIXe siècle (Leiden, 1919) 131-134.

29. G. Kernkamp, De Utrechtse universiteit 1636-1936. De Utrechtse Academie 1636-1815 (Utrecht, 1936) 285.

30. P.C. Molhuysen and Fr. K.H. Kossmann, ed., Nieuw Nederlandsch Biografisch Woordenboek, X (Leiden, 1937) 651-652.

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Alphée and Isaie Tugnat^31.; at the Illustrious School of 's Hertogenbosch, Benjamin Binet^32..

It would take more expertise than I possess to assess the contributions of these scholars to their particular discipline, or to the particular institution with which they were connected. Bayle was clearly an international figure, and in the van of the intellectual movements of his age. Jurieu also moved on the international stage, and undoubtedly Barbeyrac was a scholar of international distinction. The rest, however, seem to have been at best scholarly light-weights of little influence in their various disciplines, and largely uninfluential, or of only very modest influence, outside them. Gaillard and Le Moyne, both theologians, were zealous servants of the Walloon church in the Republic, but are said to have stood outside the circle of questions with which the Dutch reformed church then concerned itself, and therefore to have lacked the occasion and the opportunity to exercise much influence^33.. Bauldry d'Iberville appears to have been coveted as much for his library, which Basnage later managed to retrieve from France, as for his scholarship, which remains an unknown quantity, though it excited some praise in his day^34.. Gousset, a philologist, was an emphatically reactionary scholar who resisted equally the renaissance of Greek studies in the Republic launched by Hemsterhuis, and the comparative study of eastern languages begun by Schultens^35.. In a sense, indeed, Gousset was so reactionary as to be positively creative, since Schultens was inspired to new approaches in direct reaction against ‘Gussetismus’^36.. Rossal, another philologist and Gousset's successor, has been damned with the faintest of praise, by being dubbed progressive as compared with Gousset, but intellectually insignificant^37.. Moreover, it seems clear that the few Huguenot swallows who migrated to the northern climes of Friesland contributed little to the Indian summer of academic excellence enjoyed by Franeker in the last decades of the seventeenth century, and the early years of the eighteenth century^38..

It is not easy to know what general conclusions, if any, may be drawn from this spate of foreign appointments, though some of them may perhaps be held to give some support to the view that the French protestant academies declined in aca-

31. F.H. Gagnebin, ‘Pasteurs de France refugiés en Hollande’, Bulletin de la commission de l'histoire des églises wallonnes, I (1885) 144.

32. Ferd. Sassen, Het wijsgerig onderwijs aan de Illustre School te 's-Hertogenbosch (1636-1810) (Amsterdam, 1963) 84-85.

33. Christiaan Sepp, Het godgeleerd onderwijs en Nederland gedurende de 16e en 17e eeuw (2 vols; Leiden, 1874) II, 252-254.

34. Kernkamp, Utrechtse universiteit, 288; Sepp, Godgeleerd onderwijs, 438-439.

35. Gerretzen, Schola Hemsterhusiana, 27-29; J. Nat, De studie van de oostersche talen in Nederland in de 18e en de 19e eeuw (Purmerend, 1929) 34-36.

36. Nat, Studie oostersche talen, 36.

37. Gerretzen, Schola Hemsterhusiana, 29-33.

38. Meijer, Kritiek, 44-83.

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demic stature in the seventeenth century^39.. But the appointments of Bayle and Jurieu say something, it has been argued, about the discords of Dutch political and religious life at the time. In Rotterdam in 1681 the divisions between counterremonstrants and remonstrants were so pervasive as to make it virtually impossible to find acceptable Dutch candidates as teachers at the newly conceived Illustrious School. A solution, therefore, was sought in appointing Huguenot scholars who, it was hoped, would stand above, or even be able to mediate between the contending camps^40.. The hope seems naive and parochial, because French protestantism was as divided as Dutch protestantism^41., and it was a hope soon disappointed. Within two years of his appointment at Rotterdam, Jurieu, who came, as did Bayle, from the Gomarist stronghold of Sedan, found his lectures boycotted by remonstrant students^42.. Worse was to follow. Not only did Bayle and Jurieu take sides in the Republic, they took different sides. Whatever other difficulties they may have experienced in assimilating themselves to Dutch society, they were assimilated with remarkable rapidity into its political and religious feuds^43..

It would be unwise, however, to try and draw conclusions about the quality of Dutch intellectual life at the time on the basis of these Huguenot appointments, as has been done in the case of the many German appointments to Dutch universities in the eighteenth century^44.. Dutch universities and high schools had always possessed, and were to retain, a strongly international flavour. In part this was no more than a reflection of the international community of scholarship. It also reflected the fact that Dutch provincialism had conferred upon the Republic such a multiplicity, if not superfluity, of institutions of higher learning as to make their staffing always dependent to some extent upon the importation of foreign scholars^45.. The existence of many institutions of higher learning, indeed, produced sharp competition amongst them for students, and there came from Leiden university in the 1670's demands, and proposals, for protection against this competition^46.. Competition must have been sharpened from the mid-1690's by a decline in total student numbers, or in total student registrations, which proved to be the beginning of a trend^47..

39. E.G. Léonard, Histoire générale du protestantisme, II, L'établissement (Paris, 1961) 319-346. Hirsute students were a matter for reproach, it seems, to academic authorities in the seventeenth century.

40. F.R.J. Knetsch, Pierre Jurieu. Theoloog en politikus der refuge (Kampen, 1967) 131. There is a synopsis of this work in English in Acta Historiae Neerlandica, V (Leiden, 1971) 213-242: ‘Pierre Jurieu: Theologian and Politician of the Dispersion’.

41. Léonard, Histoire générale, 319-338.

42. Knetsch, ‘Een vluchtelingenprobleem’, 138-139.

43. Idem, ‘Pierre Jurieu’, 226, 232.

44. P. Geyl, Geschiedenis van de Nederlandse stam (Amsterdam - Antwerp, 1948-1959) II, 345.

45. Kernkamp, Utrechtse universiteit, 124; Boeles, Frieslands Hoogeschool, I, 71.

46. Kernkamp, Utrechtse universiteit, 265, 285, 287.

47. Boeles, Frieslands Hoogeschool, I, 67, 70-71.

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What produced this trend and sustained it would be worth closer examination than it has yet received. In so far as it has been examined the decline has been explained largely in terms of the impact of war and of competition from foreign universities^48.. War certainly disrupted, and at times seriously disrupted, academic life in the Republic. Moreover, from 1694, with the establishment of the university of Halle, followed just over a generation later by the establishment of the university of Göttingen, there came competition from new German universities, as well as from revivified older German universities, and in the eighteenth century there was strong opposition from the rulers of Prussia and from the Empress Maria Theresia to their subjects studying in foreign universities. The result at Leiden was a dramatic decline in the course of the eighteenth century in the numbers of Prussian and Austrian students attending the university.

The parallel with Dutch economic decline, therefore, is clear and close; just as foreign competition, buttressed by protectionist economic policies, injured the industry and trade of the republic, so competition from foreign universities, and the extension of protectionism into education, undermined the position of Leiden university^49.. But clearly this is not the whole story. Complaints emanating from Leiden university in the 1670's and later in the seventeenth century, suggest that a change of educational taste may have been taking place; a movement, it is alleged, away from the universities, or from Leiden university, on the part of the sons of the rich on the grounds that the universities were only for those who had to work to earn their bread, and in favour of private tutors^50.. A somewhat similar development, it may be noted, was occuring at the same time in England, where Oxford and Cambridge experienced catastrophic falls in student enrolments from the 1660's onwards, and where a marked preference was expressed for educating the sons of gentlemen at home by means of private tutors, who appreciated ‘the ways of carriage and measures of civility’^51.. In both England and the Dutch Republic Huguenots facilitated this movement away from the universities by their role as private tutors^52..

48. Ibidem, 52-53, 71; J.J. Woltjer, De Leidse universiteit in verleden en heden (Leiden, 1965) 48.

49. Woltjer, Leidse universiteit, 48-49.

50. Kernkamp, Utrechtse universiteit, 285.

51. Hugh Kearney, Scholars and Gentlemen. Universities and Society in Pre-industrial Britain, 1500-1700 (London, 1970) 142-143, 149, 159, 160, 161; Laurence Stone, ‘The Educational Revolution in England 1540-1640’, Past and Present, XXIX (1964) 51, 73-74.

52. See pp. 14-16 of this article. Moreover in so far as there was a decline in the enrolment of native students it may have been the consequence also of the Republic's declining population and of its declining capacity to sustain as easily as in the past its many institutions of higher learning. In the case of Franeker Boeles drew attention many years ago to the possible impact upon student numbers of the province's economic difficulties in the early eighteenth century when, he argues, flooding and cattle pest reduced the value of lands, and, therefore, the means of those who might otherwise have sent their sons to the university. A much more detailed picture of the nature and extent of these difficulties now exists as a result of the researches of Professor J.A. Faber, and the evidence for a correlation between the fortunes of the university, as expressed in the size of its student population, and the economic fortunes of the province has been strengthened. Compare the figures for student enrolment, as provided in Boeles, Frieslands Hoogeschool, I, 67 with the summary of the economic ebb and flow of the province as provided in J.A. Faber, Drie eeuwen Friesland. Economische en sociale ontwikkelingen van 1500 tot 1800. A.A.G. Bijdragen, XVII (Wageningen, 1972) I, 50.

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The existence amongst Dutch universities of fierce competition for a diminishing body of students may have been an additional inducement for the recruitment of Huguenot scholars. One way of attracting students, and more especially foreign students, was to entice a foreign scholar with pulling power. One such case apparently was De Hautecour, who was appointed professor of theology at Franeker in 1686, and held the post until his death in 1715^53.. Certainly he seems to have won the respect of his academic colleagues, because he was twice offered the rectorship of the university, and twice declined it, or escaped it, on the grounds that he knew no Dutch. It is perhaps worth recording that his second wife, Louise Mauricette L'Huilier, Dame de Chalandeuse, made some amends for his lack of social accessibility, and carved a small niche for herself in the history of social protocol in Friesland, by allowing herself to be called Mevrouw, the first lady of her station, it is said, to do so in Franeker^54..

Whether in fact De Hautecour attracted students it is impossible to tell, at least from student registrations, because no-one can tell what difference it would have made if he had never been appointed. A recovery in student numbers had begun at Franeker shortly before his arrival and was maintained until the mid-1690's, when a decline set in. Upon his death in 1715 student enrolment was less than half what it had been at his appointment^55.. If, however, De Hautecour did attract students, he attracted few French students. In the decade from 1685 to 1695 there were 1169 registered students at Franeker, of whom about 40 were French; in the following decade out of a student body of 912,13 were French; as a group the French were outnumbered by the Hungarians^56.. In percentage terms, there was a movement from less than 4% of the official student body to less than 1½%, and the movement was repeated more or less exactly at Groningen, and, from the samples I have taken, at Leiden also, where, as a group, the French were outnumbered by both the English and the Scots^57..

53. Boeles, Frieslands Hoogeschool, II, 325.

54. Ibidem, 328.

55. Ibidem, 67.

56. S.J. Fockema Andreae and Th.J. Meijer, ed., Album studiosorum Academiae Franekerensis (1585-1811, 1816-1844), I, Naamlijst der studenten (Franeker, 1968) 239-266.

57. I have consulted Album studiosorum Academiae Groninganae (Groningen, 1915) 125-141 and W.N. Du Rieu, ed., Album studiosorum Academiae Lugduno Batavae. MDLXXV-MDCCLXXV (The Hague, s.a.) for the years 1686 to 1691. For what it is worth, Harderwijk attracted five registered French students between 1682 and 1698 and had no refugees among its staff. See D.G. van Epen, ed., Album studiosorum Academiae Gelro-Zutphanicae MDCXLVIII-MDCCCXVIII. Accedunt nomina curatorum et professorum per secula (The Hague, 1904) 37-53.

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Still, numbers can be misleading. The English and the Scots, and I presume the Hungarians, were academic birds of passage. The French students, or most of them, had come to stay, and some of them, like Binet, Rossal, and Pouiade, stayed in Dutch university or higher education^58.. Many were destined for the ministry and fulfilled their destiny by means of the free places which were set aside in Dutch universities in 1686 for those whose anticipated careers as ministers had been disrupted by the revocation of the edict of Nantes. 26 of the 53 French students at Franeker to whom I have just referred benefitted from this scheme^59.. Together with the more than 300 Huguenot ministers who arrived in the Republic after the revocation of the edict of Nantes, the largest single contingent of whom seems to have come from Languedoc, they provided the Walloon church with a crucial accession of strength^60..

But not all those whose occupations had been so disrupted were able to resume them elsewhere, or perhaps wished to do so upon finding themselves in a more open society than the one from which they had fled^61.. If, however, Dutch society was more open for Huguenots, in the sense that they were no longer, as they had been in France, legally barred from certain occupations, their opportunities for employment in education, outside the universities and high schools, were restricted in the first place by a lack of Dutch^62.. Here was one great difference between the refugees of the first and the second refuge. The teachers among the refugees from the southern Netherlands in the sixteenth century, having Dutch as well as French and Latin, were able to make an immediate and a remarkable contribution to Dutch education at all levels, the true extent of which has been revealed to us only recently^63.. Having no Dutch, the immediate contribution of Huguenots to education in the Republic was necessarily more limited. Moreover, as a result of the first refuge, the Republic was already well endowed with French schools, so that

58. Binet was registered as a student at Leiden in 1687, Pouiade as a free student at Franeker in 1686 and Rossal as a free student at Groningen in 1688.

59. Boeles, Frieslands Hoogeschool, 68-69; Fockema Andreae and Meijer, ed., Album studiosorum Academiae Franekerensis, I, 239-266. Groningen admitted fifteen free French students in the rectoral year 1685-1686.

60. I have used the list in Gagnebin, ‘Pasteurs de France’, 97-151.

61. Here is another problem worth investigating: what happened to the sons of Huguenot merchants, financiers, and industrialists in the Republic?

62. K.-J. Riemens, Esquisse historique, 151.

63. J.G.C.A. Briels, ‘Zuidnederlandse onderwijskrachten in Noordnederland 1570-1630’, Archief voor de geschiedenis van de katholieke kerk in Nederland, XIV (1972) 89-169; together with his ‘Biografische aantekeningen betreffende Zuidnederlandse onderwijskrachten in Noordnederland 1570-1630’, in ibidem, 277-298 and ibidem, XV, 263-297. I am grateful to Mr. A.C. Duke of the University of Southampton for having drawn my attention to this pioneering and solid series of articles, and for other bibliographical assistance.

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Huguenots found themselves in a competitive situation. Nevertheless some Huguenots found employment in established French schools, and some founded new schools to cater for the needs of refugees, or some of them, and for the children of the nobility and the well-to-do in the Republic^64.. The exact extent of this Huguenot contribution to the development of French schools in the Republic after 1685 remains uncertain^65.; even more uncertain is the contribution made by second and third-generation Huguenots to the teaching of French later in the eighteenth century, though the presumption is that, knowing both Dutch and French, it was destined to be considerable^66.. What is certain, however, is that Huguenots helped to stimulate and to satisfy an existing and a continuing educational demand.

The same may be said of their role as private tutors. Young Huguenot men with a knowledge of French and Latin, and good connections, could find a life-belt in tutoring the sons of the rich and the influential^67.. This was a form of private education increasingly fashionable in England as well as in the Dutch Republic, the demand for which in both countries was presumably increased by the movement away from the universities to which I have already referred, and it would be useful to know more about it^68.. One such private tutor was Paul Rapin, or Rapin de Thoyras, the author of a highly influential history of England^69.. De Thoyras fled from

64. Riemens, Esquisse historique, 145-153.

65. Riemens took issue with Koenen, Geschiedenis Fransche vluchtelingen, 200, who had argued that the numbers of French schools had increased considerably after 1685. It is certainly true that Koenen produced little in the way of concrete evidence to support his argument, pointing in fact to one school, the celebrated Luzac establishment at Noordwijk. At the same time Riemens's own conclusions are rather wobbly and imprecise. The refugees are said to have scarcely added to the number of French schools, and not to have increased their number significantly. As Riemens admits his evidence for the eighteenth century is incomplete. Riemens, Esquisse historique, 148.

66. Ibidem, 177. Riemens noted that French names occurred frequently amongst schoolmasters in the eighteenth century, but went on to say that to establish their origins would require long researches. Riemens makes the further point that the superior classes among the refugees would scarcely have been tempted by the profession of ‘maitre d'école’. Much depends upon what is meant by superior classes, but the ‘kohieren’ (income tax returns) of 1742 list a number of French teachers with an annual income of 600 guilders and one with an annual income of 1,200 guilders. See W.F.H. Oldewelt, ‘De beroepsstructuur van de bevolking der Hollandsche stemhebbende steden volgens de kohieren van de familiegelden van 1674, 1715 en 1742’, Economisch historisch jaarboek, XXV (The Hague, 1952) 165-248.

67. On tutoring as a suitable occupation for young men whose anticipated careers as ministers were frustrated by the revocation of the edict of Nantes, and on the probability that independent French teachers in England were conducting classes, or visiting pupils at a wide range of social levels, see, E.S. de Beer, ‘The Huguenots and the Enlightenment’, PHSL, XXI (1965-1970) 182; for some general comments on Huguenots as tutors, see Riemens, Esquisse historique, 148, 181-182.

68. See p. 11 of this article.

69. The standard life and treatment is R. de Cazenove, Rapin-Thoyras, sa famille, sa vie et ses oeuvres (Paris, 1866). But most of the details of his life come from the preface to Tindal's translation of De Thoyras' History of England.

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France in 1686 to England. In England his true bent as a historian was recognised apparently by William III who, in what bids fair to be regarded as his most enlightened military decision, helped to deflect him from the military career upon which he had embarked into service as tutor to Lord Woodstock, son of the Duke of Portland, thus giving De Thoyras entrées into both Dutch and English society^70.. When he left the Portland employ it was to go to The Hague, where, with the encouragement of Le Clerc and Fagel, and with a battery of languages, which included Dutch, he devoted himself to English history, laying the essential groundwork by slogging away at abstracts of Rymer's Foedera - a fifteen volume folio compilation of acts concerning British history - for publication in Le Clerc's Bibliothèque ancienne et moderne, from a copy of the Foedera lent to him by Fagel. Forced to leave the Dutch Republic in 1707 for Wezel in the duchy of Cleves, where living apparently was cheaper, he there completed his great work-in-French in 1719. Upon its translation into English in 1725 by Nicholas Tindal, it established itself at once as the best general history of England, holding that position until the appearance of Hume's History^71., and, by virtue of its appearance as a serialised publication soon after translation, also quickly won a popular audience in England^72.. In addition, however, it acquired both a transatlantic and a continental standing. In America its Whiggish sympathies continued to commend it to American political leaders throughout the eighteenth century, and beyond it, as the most faithful of general histories of England, and as an arsenal of useful historical precedents in the ideological struggle against British imperial policy after 1760^73.. In Europe it constituted a major contribution to the process by which Huguenots gave Europeans access to the English achievement^74.. Highly prized by Voltaire, and much used by Montesquieu, to whom it provided an essential

70. The part played by William is told in Jean Rou, Mémoires inédits, II, 226-233. An indication of De Thoyras' activities, and difficulties, as tutor to Lord Woodstock, together with a plan for a grand tour in 1701, is to be found in a letter from De Thoyras to Portland, 2 March, 1701, in Correspondentie van Willem III en van Hans Willem Bentinck, eersten graaf van Portland. RGP, Kleine Serie, XXIII (The Hague, 1927) 526-529. Copies of letters from De Thoyras relating to this grand tour are to be found in British Museum, Egerton, 1706.

71. Girard d'Albissin, Précurseur de Montesquieu, 32-42. Much of the work of translation was done apparently whilst Tindal was a guest aboard a British man-of-war cruizing in Baltic waters. See R.M. Wiles, Serial Publications in England before 1750 (Cambridge, 1957) 96.

72. Wiles, Serial Publications, 96.

73. H.R. Trevor Colbourn, The Lamp of Experience. Whig History and the Intellectual Origins of the American Revolution (Chapel Hill, 1965) 10-12, 27, 86, 105, 109, 128-129, 158, 177, 200-232 (various mentions of Rapin's History in eighteenth century catalogues of public and private libraries in America).

74. A recent learned and succinct account of this is to be found in De Beer, ‘Huguenots and the Enlightenment’, 179-195.

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introduction into English politics and the English constitution, it contributed significantly to the development of Anglo-mania in France^75..

For De Thoyras, therefore, tutoring was not only a life-belt but a spring-board to international fame. This was not true of the majority. As private tutors and maitres d'écoles, however, Huguenots undoubtedly contributed something to the process by which Dutch society, or its upper ranks, became permeated with French influences, and by which the French language was raised to the status almost of a second national language in the Republic^76.. The extent of this contribution is difficult to determine because the process of ‘Frenchification’ in the Dutch Republic was well-established before the Huguenot exodus of the 1680's, and, in part, was a natural response to the gravitational pull of French culture and French power to which the rest of Europe also succumbed in the course of the eighteenth century^77.. Moreover, as has been remarked often, Huguenots also contributed to the process of ‘Frenchification’, and arguably made a more substantial contribution, via the activities of Walloon church which, once it had settled back into its élitist groove after the initial populist surge of the 1680's became in the eyes of its critics, and even to some extent eventually in the eyes of its defenders, less a church than an extension of French theatre, where the best of Dutch society went to hear good French spoken well^78..

Nevertheless, whatever the precise extent of the Huguenot contribution to the process of ‘Frenchification’ in the Republic, it came to seem to Dutchmen as both large and pernicious, and perhaps to seem the more reprehensible because the

75. Rapin de Thoyras, as a precursor of Montesquieu, is the subject of Nelly Girard d'Albissin, Un précurseur de Montesquieu: Rapin - Thoyras, premier historien français des institutions anglaises. Société d'histoire du droit. Collection d'histoire institutionelle et sociale, II (Paris, 1969). In the preface to this work Professor André Cocatra-Zilgien salutes Rapin as a pioneer in political sociology on the basis of the latter's Dissertation sur les Whigs et les Tories (1717).

76. Riemens, Esquisse historique, 148, 181-183; Koenen, Geschiedenis Fransche vluchtelingen, 199. I have taken the phrase about a second national language from a Walloon religious journal started in the 1890's in an article by a Walloon minister, E. Lacheret, Le Refuge. Journal des Eglises évangeliques wallones des Pays-Bas (18 May, 1893).

77. Briels, ‘Zuidnederlandse onderwijskrachten’, 131-134; Riemens, Esquisse historique, 78-142, 149-150; Schöffer, ‘Huguenoten en Nederland’, 30; Knetsch, ‘Een vluchtelingenprobleem’, 78.

78. Schöffer, ‘Hugenoten en Nederland’, 28-29; Koenen, Geschiedenis Fransche vluchtelingen, 169-171; Riemens, Esquisse historique, 149-150, 177. For a reference to the élitist character of the Walloon church in Rotterdam in the second half of the seventeenth century, and its bon ton, see Hazewinkel, Rotterdam, III, 265. For a general statement on the character of the Walloon church in the eighteenth century, its preaching, and the decline of preaching see E.G. Léonard, Histoire générale du protestantisme, III, Déclin et renouveau (Paris, 1964) 41-42. Lacheret, in the article quoted above, admitted that its recruitment had long come from the ‘superior classes’, that it was ‘une église de ville et de composition plutôt aristocratique’, and that in the popular estimation ‘l'église wallonne n'est pas une église, c'est un auditoire. Le ministre s'y réduit à la prédication. On y va pour entendre un discours français’.

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saved had repaid their saviours by corrupting them^79.. In the 1730's the Huguenots came under bitter and indiscriminate attack from Justus van Effen in the Hollandsche Spectator. Not only were Huguenot tutors and maîtres d'écoles ridiculed as the agents of French culture, French taste and French frivolity, but the Huguenots as a group were condemned variously as the authors of abominable heresies, servants of the devil, dabblers in magic, drunkards, adulterers, and whoremongers^80.. It was a remarkable outburst, though it becomes more intelligible in the context of the apocalyptic times through which the Republic seemed to be passing in the 1730's, rocked by the great sodomite scandal of 1730 and encompassed by a combination of natural disasters, such as cattle pest, flooding, and the pile worm, which, it was argued, could only be explained in terms of a divine punishment placed upon the Dutch people for having strayed so far from the path of righteousness and the simple virtues of the traditional Dutch way of life as to have allowed the city of Sodom to be rebuilt in the Republic^81.. Given the argument that the moral decline of the Republic was the consequence of an erosion of traditional Dutch values, it was natural to look for a scapegoat, and to find one in the Huguenots, a recent and influential alien intrusion from a country which, as was noted, had not only known sodomites, but also, in Henry III, a sodomite king^82..

To what extent Van Effen's moral strictures on the Huguenots were shared, or repeated by others at the time, I do not know, though raillery at the expense of private tutors and maitres d'écoles was common form in all spectator periodicals^83. Van Effen's charge, however, that the Huguenots were the authors of abominable heresies can scarcely have seemed strange to contemporaries familiar with the controversy sparked off within the Walloon church in 1730 by a sermon on lying

79. The phrase comes from W. Bisschop, Justus van Effen geschetst in zijn leven en werken. Bijdragen tot de geschiedenis der letterkunde in de 18e eeuw (Utrecht, 1859) 204.

80. Willem Zuydam, Justus van Effen. Een bijdrage tot de kennis van zijn karakter en denkbeelden (Gouda, 1922) 161-163.

81. I have derived my information about the sodomite crisis from that wonderfully informative periodical, Europische Mercurius (Amsterdam, 1730) I, 283-304; II, 289-304; (Amsterdam, 1731) II, 283. According to this, the first discovery was made at Utrecht, and was followed rapidly by other discoveries at The Hague, Amsterdam, Kampen, Zwolle, Rotterdam, Heusden, Delft and Groningen. No names are given, because, it was said, ‘aanzienlijke en deftige’ families were involved. Dozens of people were executed in a variety of appallingly barbarous ways. We may expect further enlightenment upon this extraordinary episode from Mr. L.J. Boon of the Institute of Social Studies who, after my paper, jolted my memory about this matter. Justus van Effen, as quoted in Zuydam, Justus van Effen, 161-163, specifically referred to the pile-worm as a punishment from heaven for sodomy.

82. The Europische Mercurius (1730) I, 265-314 carried a history of sodomy throughout the ages which made this point, and also asserted that sodomy was new to the experience of the Netherlands and to the law of the Netherlands. In the event punishment was fixed as public execution by some means, the exact means to be fixed by the judge trying the case.

83. P.J. Buijnsters, ‘Les lumières hollandaises’, Studies on Voltaire and the eighteenth Century, LXXXVII (Geneva, 1972) 207.

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by Saurin, and kept hot by the activities of Huguenot journalists in the republic, in which the perfectness of God was called in question by the argument that Scripture provided examples of God praising and rewarding those who had disguised the truth for good ends^84.. It was the kind of disturbance to religious peace which lay beyond the pale of Dutch tolerance. The Court of Holland quickly intervened to still the troubled waters, and to bring to heel and humiliation the Huguenot journalists who had kept the controversy on the boil^85.. A similar concern to smoothe over divisions - this time apparently cultural and social divisions - seems to have prompted the resolution of the Vroedschap of Amsterdam in 1743 that in order to make the posterity of French refugees and of other foreigners into one nation it was necessary that they should go to Dutch and not to French schools^86..

But, of course, Huguenots contributed not only to the spread of French influences within the Republic, but also throughout Europe. The importance of Huguenots as the disseminators of French books, principally for the European market, has been amply demonstrated in Dr. Van Eeghen's magnificent and inexhaustibly useful volumes on the Amsterdam book trade. Of the 230 booksellers listed by Dr. Van Eeghen as active in Amsterdam^87. between 1680 and 1725, more than 100 belonged to the Walloon church, and 80 have been counted as Huguenot refugees, most of whom came to the city after 1680 and before 1710^88.. Not even Dr. Van Eeghen's tireless labours have succeeded in illuminating the business activities of the majority of these booksellers, but 20 Huguenots can be found as having dealt exclusively or very largely in French books^89.; only 6 are listed as

84. For a brief account of this see J. Gaberel and Des Hours Farel, Jacques Saurin et sa correspondence (Geneva - Paris, 1864) 61-65, but it needs to be supplemented by M.M. Kleerkoper and W.P. van Stockum, jr., De boekhandel te Amsterdam voornamelijk in de 17e eeuw. Biographische en geschiedkundige aanteekeningen (2 vols; The Hague, 1914-1916) II, 964-989, which gives the legal proceedings in the Court of Holland. The case would seem to demonstrate the great value of the records of the Court for the student of Dutch journalism in the eighteenth century.

85. Ibidem.

86. Berg, De refugiés, 74. In England the Huguenots apparently came under comprehensive attack much earlier. In 1709 it was charged against them, amongst other things, that frequent intermarriages between them and English subjects might go a great way to blot out and extinguish the English race. 1709 was the year of the Naturalisation Act, and the year in which at least 10,000 protestant subjects of the Palatinate arrived in England. Their arrival also provoked xenophobic and racialist outbursts. See Parliamentary History of England (London, 1810) VI, 780-783; H.T. Dickinson, ‘The Poor Palatines and the Parties’, English Historical Review, LXXXII (1967) 464-485.

87. I.H. van Eeghen, De Amsterdamse boekhandel 1680-1715 (4 vols; Amsterdam, 1963-1967).

88. For the figure of 80 Huguenots, see H.-H. Bolhuis, ‘La Hollande et les deux refuges’, BSHPF, CXV (1969) 424. The figure of over 100 members of the Walloon church is my count.

89. J.F. Bernard, P. Brunel, F. Changuion, N. Chevalier, H. Desbordes, J. Desbordes, J. Desbordes, D. du Fresne, H. du Sauzet, P. Humbert, D. de la Feuille, P. le Grand, F.C. l'Honoré, T. Lombrail, N.E. Lucas, J. Malherbe, P. Marret, C. Mortier, P. Mortier and L. Renard. The names have been extracted from the lists in Van Eeghen, Amsterdamse boekhandel, III and IV. The material in these lists is of great interest to the social historian. In terms of Huguenot assimilation, however, booksellers may be unrepresentative, since as a group they tended to be inbred.

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having published any books in Dutch, and in all these instances the publishing of Dutch books was decidedly a minority, even a miniscule interest^90..

Moreover the Huguenots not only published books, they also wrote them - endlessly. As a group, indeed, the Huguenots were conspiciously literate, and they became compulsive scribblers in a country noted for its multitude of scribblers; as numerous, said one of them, as the statues of ancient Rome^91.. In part this compulsion was ideological, and sprang from the need some felt to justify themselves before the public of Europe for having left their sovereign and their country. For more, however, it was economic, and sprang from the simple need to earn their bread in the way that came most naturally. Many Huguenots with a knowledge of French and Latin were able to win a temporary meal-ticket, and to make the vital, initial break-through into the world of letters, and into more settled and better-regarded employment as writers, by taking on work as proof correctors or/and as translators^92.. Opportunities for translating work were numerous, not only translating books, but also, in the expanding world of journalism, translating foreign news^93.. If much of the translation was mere hack-work and deserved the opprobrium heaped upon it, and its practitioners, by writers of the day, some of it - such as Pierre Coste's translations of Locke - was both creative and highly influential in introducing the Dutch Republic and Europe to English empiricism and experimental science, and contributed significantly to the age's reputation as the golden age of translation^94..

Huguenots, however, were influential not only as cultural disseminators, particu-

90. P. Brunel, D. de la Feuille, P. Marret, P. Mortier, D. Pain and I. Trojel or Troyel. The publishing of Dutch books among non-Walloon, non-Huguenot booksellers was much more common.

91. A. Sayous, Le dix-huitième siècle à l'étranger. Histoire de la littérature dans les divers pays de l'Europe depuis la mort de Louis XIV jusqu'à la révolution française (Paris, 1861) I, 29. For an indication of the high incidence of literacy amongst Huguenots, based upon a couple of samples, see Scoville, Persecution of Huguenots, 129.

92. La Barre de Beaumarchais, Lettres sérieuses et badines sur les ouvrages des savans, VIII, i (The Hague, 1733) 255.

93. Georges Ascoli, La Grande-Bretagne devant l'opinion française au xviie siècle (2 vols; Paris, 1930) II, 22-25; Hendrika Johanna Reesink, L'Angleterre et la littérature anglaise dans les trois plus anciens périodiques français de Hollande de 1684 à 1709 (Zutphen, 1931) especially pp. 106-107. Much of contemporary journalism consisted of pirating and translating foreign news.

94. Reesink, L'Angleterre, 130-131 and Robert Adams, Told in Letters. Epistolary Fiction before Richardson (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1966) 28, 30 give some contemporary criticisms of translating work. For translators of quality and influence, see Erich Hasse, Einführung in die Literatur des Refuge (Berlin, 1959) 401-404 and De Beer, ‘Huguenots and the Enlightenment’, 189.

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larly as disseminators of English culture, and as erudite journalists, but also as polemical writers. As propagandists against Louis XIV, their activities, or the activities of some of them, lent to the struggle against France more the aspect of a holy war, and fed William III's messianic drives by casting him in the role of a second Moses and a second David^95.. This Huguenot picture of the struggle against France and of William was clearly overdrawn. If the war of the league of Augsburg was a holy war, it was a distinctly odd one, in the sense that the forces of light and the forces of darkness cannot readily be identified, and cannot be identified with religious labels; the defeat of a catholic army at the battle of the Boyne, for example, was celebrated with Te Deums in many Austrian cathedrals^96.. Still it cannot be denied that the psychological climate created by Louis XIV's persecution of the Huguenots, and by Huguenot accounts of it, contributed to the initial moves towards the formation of the great coalition of 1688, and, in the Dutch Republic, contributed to a healing of the divisions between Amsterdam and William III^97..

That healing process, however, was strictly confined to the external affairs of the

95. For a general statement of the divisions among Huguenots on this, and related matters, see Haase, Einführung, 114-125. For more recent accounts of the controversy between Jurieu and Bayle over William's role in the English revolution, see Walter Rex, ‘Bayle's article on David’, in: Essays on Pierre Bayle and Religious Controversy (The Hague, 1965) 197-255, and Knetsch, Pierre Jurieu, 257-345. Likening William to Moses and David was also a characteristic of English apologists of the revolution of 1688 and of William, for which see Gerald Straka, ‘The Final Phase of Divine Right Theory in England, 1688-1702’, English Historical Review, LXXXVII (1962) 641, 647 and Idem, Anglican Reaction to the Revolution of 1688 (Madison - Wisconsin, 1962) 78, 97. For references to William's view of himself as an instrument of providence set the task of turning aside the threat from Louis XIV, which ante-date 1688, see M.A.M. Franken, Coenraad van Beuningen's politieke en diplomatieke aktiviteiten in de jaren 1667-1684. Historische studies uitgegeven vanwege het Instituut voor Geschiedenis der Rijksuniversiteit te Utrecht, XXII (Groningen, 1966) 19-20, 115, 150, 236, 254. A recent account of the impact of the revocation of the edict of Nantes on Louis XIV's relations with the Dutch Republic, and in provoking what is described as ‘in its beginnings the last of the religious wars’, based on D'Avaux's despatches, is to be found in Jacques Solé, ‘La diplomatie de Louis XIV et les francais réfugiés aux Provinces-Unies 1678-1688’, Bulletin de la Société de l'histoire du protestantisme français, CXV (1969) 625-660.

96. J.G. Simms, Jacobite Ireland 1685-91 (London, 1969) 144.

97. Solé, ‘La diplomatie de Louis XIV’, 660; Knetsch, ‘Pierre Jurieu’, Acta Historiae Neerlandica, V, 227; Georges Pagès, Le Grand Electeur et Louis XIV, 1660-1688 (Paris, 1905) 555-574; G.H. Kurtz, Willem III en Amsterdam 1683-1685 (Utrecht, 1928) 141-180; Koenen, Geschiedenis Fransche vluchtelingen, 126-127, 129. For some details on the reportage of French persecution of the Huguenots, see A.J. Enschédé, ‘Extraits de la Gazette de Haarlem sur les persecutions dirigées contre les protestants français 1679-1704’, BSHPF, XXVIII (1879), XXIX (1880), XXXIX (1890), XLI (1892), XLV (1896). Dr. de Beer has drawn attention to a remarkable series of reports on the persecution of the Huguenots which appeared in 1696 and 1697 in The Post Man, written by De Fonvive, and suggests that the reports may have come from one of the French language newspapers published in the Dutch Republic. See E.S. de Beer, ‘The English Newspapers from 1695 to 1702’, in: Ragnhild Hatton and J.S. Bromley, ed., William III and Louis XIV, 1680-1720. Essays by and for Mark A. Thomson (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1968) 123-124, 128.

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Republic. Its catholic community suffered from a re-awakening of the persecuting spirit, with the Huguenot refugees, and Jurieu in particular, cast by Neercassel, the apostolic vicar, as ‘buglers of persecution’, intent on exciting the country to an ‘English fury against catholics’^98.. That picture too was overdrawn. If Huguenots scorched catholics, as well as roasting each other, the orchestration of catholic persecution in the Republic did not depend upon Huguenot buglers. Judging from the repeated demands of successive synods of the Dutch reformed church in the period since 1648 for the enforcement and extension of edicts against catholics, there was no lack of native trumpeters to summon the godly to action^99.. Nor were the fears of an ‘English fury’ justified. There was no re-enactment upon Dutch soil of the Popish Plot, though, as in England, the main targets for attack were the regular clergy, and especially the Jesuits^100.. Persecution of catholics was allegedly widespread in 1686, and strongest, as in the recent past, in Zealand, Guelderland, Groningen, and Friesland, and strongest of all in Friesland, which had a very small catholic population^101.. Also as in the recent past, persecution was held in check by the moderation, and enlightened obstructiveness of the States of Holland. On this occasion, however, the States of Holland were assisted by William III, mindful of the repercussions of catholic persecution upon the creation of an anti-French coalition, and perhaps seeing in the situation the possible materialisation of his suspicions that the revocation of the edict of Nantes had always been part of a French conspiracy to sow discord between the catholic and protestant princes of Europe, and thus to prevent their common action against France^102..

Given William's over-riding sense of his duties as a European statesman, he was always an unlikely instrument for the achievement of Huguenot aims, and he proved a distinct disappointment as Moses. At Rijswijk he was in no position to

98. J.A.G. Tans, Bossuet en Hollande (Paris-Maastricht, s.a.) 60; R.R. Post, ed., Romeinsche bronnen voor den kerkelijken toestand der Nederlanden onder de apostolische vicarissen 1592-1727, II, 1651-1686. RGP, LXXXIV (The Hague, 1941) 780-781; P. Polman, OFM, ed., ibidem, III, 1686-1705. RGP, XCIV (The Hague, 1952) 18.

99. W.P.C. Knuttel, De toestand der Nederlandsche katholieken ten tijde der republiek (2 vols; The Hague, 1892) I, 250-252, 257-260, 263, 265, 276, 287, 290; L.J. Rogier, Geschiedenis van het katholicisme in Nederland in de zestiende en zeventiende eeuw (2 vols; Amsterdam, 1947) II, 207-208; Tans, Bossuet, 103.

100. Rogier, Geschiedenis van het katholicisme, II, 266-267; Post, ed., Romeinsche bronnen, II, 787; Knuttel, Toestand Nederlandsche katholieken, 248.

101. Post, ed., Romeinsche bronnen, II, 780-781, 782, 787, 788; Polman, ed., ibidem, III, 18; Knuttel, Toestand Nederlandsche katholieken, 248, 310-331; Koenen, Geschiedenis Fransche vluchtelingen, 81. The smaller the catholic population the more active the spirit of persecution. The catholic population of Friesland at the time has been estimated by Faber, Drie eeuwen Friesland, II, 433, at around 16,700, or between 9.9-11.4% of the total population of the province.

102. Rogier, Geschiedenis van het katholicisme, II, 267; N. Japikse, Prins Willem III. De stadhouder-koning (2 vols; Amsterdam, 1930) II, 211. William's view was also shared by the writer of Discours politique sur la reformation qui se fait aujourd'hui en France (1685), quoted in P.J.W. van Malssen, Louis XIV d'après les pamphlets répandues en Hollande (Paris-Amsterdam, s.a.) 46.

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force terms upon Louis XIV, was scarcely able to press Huguenot demands without exposing himself to reciprocal demands from Louis XIV to ease the situation of Jacobite exiles in France, and, in any case, had more urgent priorities^103.. Moreover the Huguenot demands were not only unrealistic, but some of them were very unrealistic, and called for not only the re-establishment of the edict of Nantes, but a solemn and perpetual guarantee of specific religious and political liberties to be made by the Estates General on behalf of the French nation^104.. In the event the only reference to the Huguenots in the official instructions of both English and Dutch representatives at Rijswijk was a request that they should be allowed either to enjoy the revenues from the possessions they had left in France, or to sell and alienate them; and this the French refused even to discuss^105..

Similar disappointments were experienced at the peace negotiations at Geertruydenberg of 1709-1710, and at the peace of Utrecht in 1713, when the Huguenots renewed their demands for a re-establishment of the edict of Nantes, or at least the inclusion in the peace treaty of a clause guaranteeing to protestants in France freedom of conscience^106.. By 1709, however, it was not simply that a restoration of the edict of Nantes continued to be unacceptable to France, but that it had come to seem economically damaging to Britain and the Dutch Republic, since it might pave the way for the return of Huguenots and Huguenot wealth to France^107.. Basnage, the leading Huguenot spokesman in 1709-1710, admitted the force of this anxiety, and attempted to assuage it by pressing upon Heinsius the need to enact at once in the Republic, before the peace, a naturalisation act on the model of the British naturalisation act of 1709, in order to take away from France the pretext of reclaiming Huguenots as French subjects, and of disputing the enjoyment of their wealth^108.. Basnage's efforts, however, made no difference to Huguenot fortunes at Geertruydenberg and Utrecht. The Huguenots were dropped,

103. F. Puaux, jr., ‘Essai sur les négotiations des réfugiés pour obtenir le rétablissement de la religion réformée au traité de Ryswick (octobre 1697)’, Bulletin de la Société d'histoire du protestantisme français, XVI (1867) 257-267; O. Douen, Les premiers pasteurs du désert (1685-1700) (2 vols; Paris, 1879) II, 275-293; Knetsch, Pierre Jurieu, 350-352; Mark A. Thomson, ‘Louis XIV and William III, 1689-'97’, in: Hatton and Bromley, ed., William III and Louis XIV, 24-48.

104. Puaux, ‘Essai sur les négotiations’, 264.

105. Gallus Koch, Die Friedensbestrebungen Wilhelsm III von England in den Jahren 1694-1697. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des Ryswijker Friedens (Tübingen - Leipzig, 1903) 58, 91, 96; A. Legrelle, Notes et documents sur la paix de Ryswick (Lille, 1894) 57.

106. E. André-Mailhet, Jacques Basnage. Théologien, controversiste, diplomate et historien (Geneva, 1880) 52-61.

107. G.M. Trevelyan, England under Queen Anne, III, The Peace and the Protestant Succession (London, 1946) 36.

108. Basnage to Heinsius, Rotterdam, 4 May 1709 in: Algemeen Rijksarchief Den Haag (ARA), Heinsius Archief, 1379. The province of Holland did issue a naturalisation edict in 1709.

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and Basnage had to confess the futility of all his efforts to persuade the powers to give the Huguenots a thought^109..

However, if the Huguenots failed to wrest any treaty concession from Louis XIV, they may be said to have achieved some measure of posthumous compensation for their failure in the sense that they provided Europe with the first histories of Louis XIV's reign, upon which others subsequently built^110.. The histories by De Limiers and De Larrey were probably commissioned immediately upon Louis's death to cash in on the anticipated market and, in the case of De Limiers, apparently did so, since a second, revised, and much enlarged edition appeared less than a year after the first edition, and was reprinted in 1719, and again in 1720^111.. Central to their view of Louis XIV was the revocation of the edict of Nantes,

109. Basnage to Desmaizeaux, 11, June, 25 [June?], 1709 in: British Museum (BM), Birch Collection, Add. Ms. 4281. There were, however, two postscripts to Basnage's activities. In 1719 the Regent of France lifted the sequestration upon his properties in Normandy in return for the services Basnage had given as an intelligence agent and intermediary for France in the Republic during the early years of the Regency, and, in particular, as a return for his pastoral instruction to French protestants in 1719, calling upon them to remain loyal to the French crown in the face of the efforts of Alberoni to revive the war of the Camisards. See André-Mailhet, Jacques Basnage, 18, 65-67; Dom H. Leclercq, Histoire de la régence pendant la minorité de Louis XV (Paris, 1921-1922) I, 425, 487, 506-507; Léonard, Histoire générale, III, 22.
In 1728 when the Dutch were dragging their feet in support of the alliance of Hanover it was suggested to Townshend, the Secretary of State for the northern department, that the Huguenots in England might be encouraged to write to Huguenots in the Republic to get them to mount a campaign in support of the alliance. Townshend recalled his experiences in the Republic in 1709 when ‘the famous Mr. Basnage was an emissary of Mr. Torcy's and his brethren were in the interest of France just as your Lordship finds those at present are, and endeavoured to do us all the mischief they could’. See: Townshend to Chesterfield, 21 May, 1728 in: Public Record Office (PRO), S.P. (Foreign-Holland), 84/300, f. 141-141 v. It is worth adding that whilst Townshend attacked the Huguenots as the instruments of French policy, when in fact he was aggrieved with them for not being the instruments of British policy, the Dutch in 1707 had suspected the British of using the Huguenots in order to prolong the war. See Gaberel and Des Hours Farel, Jacques Saurin, 166.

110. For a general introduction to what follows, see Ph. de Vries, Het beeld van Lodewijk XIV in de Franse geschiedschrijving (Amsterdam, 1948) 111-117.

111. H.P. de Limiers, Histoire du règne de Louis XIV (7 parts; Amsterdam, 1717); I. de Larrey, Histoire de France sous le règne de Louis XIV (9 parts; Rotterdam, 1718). For the point about cashing in on the market, see De Limiers, Histoire du règne, Preface to the first edition. De Limiers, it seems, was commissioned to write his work when De Larrey's publishers found the early pages of his manuscript unsatisfactory. See Masson to Desmaizeaux, Dordrecht, 14 July, 1716 in: BM, Birch Collection, Add. Ms. 4824, ff. 247-248. According to Masson, De Limiers was a former papist and lawyer by training, who was converted to the catholic faith, and assumed the name of De Limiers. According to Sautijn Kluit, De Hollandsche en Fransche Utrechtse Couranten (Amsterdam, 1877) 34-35, as quoted in my ‘The Role of the Dutch Republic as the Intellectual Entrepôt of Europe in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries’, BMGN, LXXXVI (1971) 342, De Limiers was born in the Dutch Republic of French Huguenot parents who had fled from France for religious reasons during the reign of Louis XIV. De Vries has him born in the Republic and living there his whole life; he also mentions his legal training, but he gives no references for any of this. See De Vries, Het beeld van Lodewijk XIV, 115, footnote 1. De Limiers himself refers in Histoire du règne, Preface to the first edition, to the difficulties of writing a history of the reign for someone who suffers the inconveniences of proscription. For information on the editions of De Limiers, see Gibbs, ‘The Role of the Dutch Republic’, 342.

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condemned as an offence against humanity as well as against Christendom, and as the breaking of a solemn engagement from which Louis could not escape personal responsibility, and which prepared the way for his many subsequent violations of good faith^112.. At the same time both authors formally eschewed passion and partisanship, and, even when dealing with those religious aspects of the reign which concerned them most directly, attempted to give a rounded picture, to the extent at least of being prepared to speculate that Louis in revoking the edict of Nantes might have acted in ignorance of the true facts, and of the actions taken on his behalf by his agents^113..

De Limiers and De Larrey thus possessed something of the approach of the modern historian and also anticipated something of the conclusions of twentiethcentury revisionists of Louis XIV's reign. De Limiers's work also possessed something of the apparatus and techniques of modern historical scholarship in providing regular, marginal references to the sources consulted. It was a practice which distinguished him from many historians of repute in the seventeenth century, who followed the rule of the celebrated Père d'Orleans in not indicating sources because scholars would know where the information came from, and those who were not scholars would not want to know^114.. In terms of approach, technique, and, more modestly, in terms of achievement. De Larrey, but more particularly De Limiers, are entitled to their ranking among the precursors of modern historiography, to the development of which other Huguenots - Bayle, Barbeyrac, and De Thoyras - contributed more significantly^115.. The sources they consulted, however, did not amount to much, though De Limiers deserves rather more credit in searching out information than his contemporaries were prepared to concede; when writing up the section on the peace negotiations of 1709-1713 he sought the assistance of another Huguenot, Desmaizeaux, the contemporary biographer of Bayle, and the literary agent in London for a number of erudite periodicals published in the

112. De Limiers, Histoire du règne, V, Book ix, 157-164, 253; IX, Book xvii, 33; De Larrey, Histoire de France, II, 64.

113. De Limiers, Histoire du règne, Dedication to Bruno van der Dussen, III, Book vi, where he stressed the animating role of the Gallican church in the persecution of Huguenots; V, Book ix, 163; De Larrey, Histoire de France, I, Preface, II, 27.

114. As quoted in Girard d'Albissin, Précurseur de Montesquieu, 33. For a statement about customary scholarly practice, see Elisabeth Israels Perry, From Theology to History. French Religious Controversy and the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes (The Hague, 1973) 59.

115. The ranking is made by De Vries, Het beeld van Lodewijk XIV, 113. The part played by even polemical Huguenot contributions to French religious controversies of the period in bringing about more sophisticated historical approaches and techniques is a theme of Perry's book mentioned above. De Beer has drawn attention recently to the tremendous apparatus of scholarship deployed by Barbeyrac in his De jure naturae et gentium. De Beer, ‘Huguenots and the Enlightenment’, 190.

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Dutch Republic, and probably secured from him a copy of the House of Commons enquiry into the peace^116.. For the most part, however, both De Limiers and De Larrey relied upon contemporary published memoirs, collections of documents and newspapers of the period^117.. In practice this meant much recourse to the works of other Huguenots.

Huguenots, indeed, were responsible for the publication of a large body of materials essential for a study of contemporary European history, both as the compilers of collections of historical documents and as journalists, activities which were sometimes combined in the same person, and naturally so. Some of these collections of documents were intended for a wide readership; to serve not only the interests of future historical scholarship, but also the immediate interests of a contemporary public avid for political news and for information which would make more intelligible what appeared in contemporary newspapers. It was an approach to contemporary history anticipatory in some respects of the statistici of the later eighteenth century^118.. Rousset de Missy, for example, a figure of somewhat ambiguous political loyalities, but who for a short time, albeit a very short time, possessed formal Orangist affiliations - another characteristic of the statistici - as historiographer to the stadholder, William IV, professed a concern in his Recueil historique to see that people should enjoy their right to be informed of the decisions made on their behalf by their governments^119.. The fact, however, that Fagel and Slingelandt sponsored Rousset in his work^120. suggests that his

116. De Limiers to Desmaizeaux, Amsterdam, 6 July 1716 in: BM, Birch Collection, Add. Ms. 4284, ff. 247-248. For contemporary attacks upon De Limiers as a mere pillager of gazettes, see Gibbs, ‘The role of the Dutch Republic’, 342. A full-length account of Desmaizeaux's activities as a literary agent is to be found in J.H. Broome, ‘An Agent in Anglo-French Relationships. Pierre des Maizeaux 1673-1745 (Unpublished Ph.D. Thesis of the University of London, 1949). Parts of this thesis have been published in Idem, ‘Pierre Desmaizeaux. Journaliste. Les Nouvelles littéraires de Londres entre 1700 et 1740’, Revue de littérature comparée, XXIX (1955) 184-204 and Idem, ‘Bayle's biographer. Pierre de Maizeaux’, French Studies, IX (1955) 1-17. For Bayle's part in establishing Desmaizeaux in English society, see Elisabeth Labrousse, ‘Bayle et l'établissement de Desmaizeaux en Angleterre’, Revue de littérature comparée, XXIX (1955) 251-257.

117. Judging from his footnotes De Limiers made most use of Tronchin du Breuil, Lettres sur les matières du temps, but he refers also to Dumont, Actes et négociations de Ryswick; De Larrey, Histoire de l'Angleterre; Rapin, Dissertations des partis; and various contemporary newspapers.

118. For the statistici, see A.Th. van Deursen, Geschiedenis en toekomstverwachting. Het onderwijs in de statistiek aan de universiteiten van de achttiende eeuw (Kampen, 1971) passim.

119. Rousset de Missy, Recueil historique d'actes, négotiations, mémoires et traitez depuis la paix d'Utrecht jusqu'à présent (21 vols; The Hague, 1728-1754) IV, 3 (Avertissement). Rousset was appointed historiographer in 1748, and was dismissed in 1749, apparently for double-dealing in the ‘Doelisten’-troubles. See, Nederlandsche Jaerboeken (Amsterdam, 1749) 625; N.J.J. de Voogd, De Doelistenbeweging te Amsterdam in 1748 (Utrecht, 1914) 83-84; Extrait d'une lettre d'Amsterdam du 7e juin 1749 in: PRO, S.P. (Foreign-Holland), 84/451, f. 173; R. Wolters to Newcastle, The Hague, June 24, 1749 in: ibidem, f. 191; Extrait d'une lettre d'Amsterdam, 3 juillet 1749 in: ibidem, f. 204; Extrait d'une lettre d'Amsterdam, 12 juillet 1749 in: ibidem, f. 217.

120. For the sponsorship by Fagel and Slingelandt, see Rousset de Missy, Recueil historique, IV, 3.

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Recueil was also intended to serve the interests of the state, which arguably required that, since the newspaper habit could not be extirpated, it should at least be made a more discriminating habit. That was the avowed purpose of the work of another Huguenot writer, the Mémoires politiques pour servir à la parfaite intelligence de la paix de Ryswick of Jean Dumont, who spent the years from c. 1692 to c. 1710 as an emigré in the Dutch Republic, and married into a Dutch family, whose long history of public service to the Republic may have provided him with contacts valuable in the collection of information about contemporary history^121.. It was published in 1699, when Dumont was occupied with the compilation of the Lettres historiques, one of those monthly political periodicals published in the Dutch Republic, new to the intellectual life of Europe, to which Huguenots contributed so much, and about which practically nothing is known at the moment. It was addressed to all those capable of reasoning, defined as everyone from the senator to the artisan, and at correcting the tendency to make instant judgements on inadequate information^122..

But Dumont was writing for himself as well as for others. His Mémoires was intended as the preliminary to a large-scale history of Europe in ten volumes covering the years 1675 to 1701, designed to commemorate for posterity the great things done by William III and Their High Mightinesses in favour of the persecuted church and of a Europe about to fall into slavery^123.. He never got around to it,

121. Mémoires politiques pour servir à la parfaite intelligence de l'histoire de la paix de Ryswick (3 vols; The Hague, 1694) I, Preface - no pagination given, but in fact pp. 2-4, 11. The fullest account of Dumont's life and writings is to found in G.F. von Martens, Supplément au Recueil des principaux traités d'alliance..., I (Göttingen, 1802) lxxiv-xciv. But the reference to his marriage comes from Dumont to Heinsius, 1 February, 1700 in: ARA, Heinsius Archief, 2196.

122. Mémoires politiques, Preface. The reference to Dumont's part in the compilation of the Lettres historiques in 1700 comes in the letter from Dumont to Heinsius quoted above. A copy of Lettres historiques, XVI (1699) in a run of the periodical held by the British Museum, contains an inscription for the month of January in an eighteenth-century hand - ‘par Mr. du Mont’. Whether Dumont took a part in the compilation of the periodical before that date is uncertain. Martens, Supplément au recueil, lxxxii, cites some contemporary speculation suggesting participation from the beginning of the periodical in 1692. If that was so, then the periodical enjoyed collective editorship, because it seems agreed that Jacques Bernard, another Huguenot emigré who fled to the Dutch Republic, was associated with its compilation from 1692 to 1698 at least. J.G. de Chaufpié, Nouveau dictionnaire historique et critique, I (Amsterdam, 1750) 252. My own impression from the evidence of the periodical itself is that a change of editors may have taken place in 1699. Until that date the periodical, which is in the form of letters, is signed ‘Je suis a L-’ (Loo?), by someone who announced his editorship in 1692 with the declaration ‘Je suis Hollandois par inclination et par devoir, si je ne suis par la naissance’. After December 1698 it is signed ‘Je suis, Monsieur, Votre etc.’. It seems agreed, however, that Dumont's editorial rôle ceased in 1710.

123. Dumont to Heinsius, 1 February, 1700 in: ARA, Heinsius Archief, 2196. In the same letter Dumont asks Heinsius for money to buy necessary books, and sets out what he considers the essential qualifications for a contemporary historian. Suetonius, Tacitus, Aristotle and Lipsius are of little help; much more relevant are wide reading in contemporary sources, a good collection of private mémoires, and contacts with men of affairs - ‘What most scholars regard as time wasted’. There is a further reference to the project, and a renewed plea to be allowed to write the history under Heinsius's protection in Dumont to Heinsius, 4 June, 1700 in: ibidem.

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though he did get as far as a detailed plan for a somewhat different work of contemporary history, a massive history of the reign of the Habsburg emperor, Charles VI. That project was conceived whilst Dumont was imperial historiographer^124.. Again only the preparatory work saw the light of day; perhaps once again the best had proved the enemy of the good. What emerged was the Corps universel diplomatique, a collection of twelve good volumes of European treaties etc., from the time of Charlemagne, culled from archives all over Europe, and from Dumont's own personal collection of 12,000 acts. It was designed as part of the permanent furniture of an eighteenth-century foreign office, and rather hopefully, as a portable archive for ambassadors^125..

Dumont's duties as imperial historiographer, and perhaps his temperament, frustrated his plans to write a major work of contemporary history. Other Huguenot historiographers in the Dutch Republic were not so frustrated. Rousset scarcely counts in this context because he held the office of historiographer for such a brief period. But, in addition to De Larrey, a historiographer to the States General, and Jean Claude, French historiographer of Groningen and the Ommelanden, there was of course Basnage, appointed historiographer of the States of Holland upon the recommendation of Heinsius. Basnage, writing in tandem with Le Clerc, aimed to provide a complete history of the Dutch Republic from its birth to the peace of Utrecht^126.. Perhaps in terms of Dutch literature, and of the interests of a passionate advocate of the seventeenth-century Dutch patriciate, Basnage's Annales des Provinces-Unies deserves no more than the six, curt, dismissive words allowed to it by Geyl in his Geschiedenis van de Nederlandse stam^127.. The point

124. Anna Coreth, Oesterreichische Geschichtschreibung in der Barockzeit (1620-1740). Veröffentlichungen der Kommission für Neuere Geschichte Oesterreichs, XXXVII (Vienna, 1950) 65, 80.

125. J. Dumont, Corps universel diplomatique du droit des gens (Amsterdam - The Hague, 1726) Preface.

126. The preface to Jean Le Clerc, Histoire des Provinces-Unies des Pais-Bas depuis la naissance de la république jusqu'à la paix d'Utrecht et le traité de la barrière (2nd ed.; Amsterdam, 1737) contains the statement that since neither he nor Basnage was a young man, they had decided to take on different sections of the history of the Republic. For the rôle of Heinsius in securing the nomination of Basnage as historiographer, see André-Mailhet, Jacques Basnage, 73; Koenen, Geschiedenis Fransche vluchtelingen, 237. Both Le Clerc and Basnage justified the decision to write in French on the grounds that French was an international language, whereas Latin had become the apanage of a small number of scholars, and Dutch was known only to a few outside the republic. Basnage sought to make a virtue out of not being native-born Dutch, as enabling him to transcend the prejudges of birth and party.

127. Geyl, Nederlandse stam, II, 346. where Geyl simply says that the Annales does not belong to Dutch literature. His only other reference to Basnage expresses astonishment at the appointment of a non-Hollander as historiographer to the States of Holland. Even Koenen, Geschiedenis Fransche vluchtelingen, 416, thought the appointment was stretching hospitality too far, but on the grounds that at the time of his appointment Basnage probably knew no Dutch. As a religious historian, Basnage had a high reputation for scholarship and probity, and, in the estimation of a recent scholar (Perry, From Theology, 68) came close to realising the ideal of a good historian as it was then defined. In any case historical scholarship does not always seem to have been required in an historiographer; see, for instance, the offer of a post as historiographer by Fagel to Pierre Lyonet, Master of Ciphers to the States General, in the hope that it would still his importunings to be made Secretary of Secret Correspondence. W.H. van Seters, Pierre Lyonet 1706-1789 (The Hague, 1962) 18-21. There is a short sketch of Lyonet, who was also an enthusiastic and learned entomologist, in Alice Carter, ‘Some Huguenots in Professional and Administrative Functions in the Netherlands in the Eighteenth Century’, PHSL, XXI (1965-1970) 560-568.

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I wish to make, however, is that Europe's view of the Dutch Republic, and its institutions, came via Huguenot writers. Montesquieu possessed his own copy of Le Clerc's Histoire des Provinces Unies, and derived his understanding of the stadholdership from Le Clerc, and from the work of another Huguenot writer who had fled from France as a youth, the État présent de la république des Provinces-Unies of François Michel Janiçon^128.. Janiçon's État présent was also in Voltaire's library, as was Basnage's Annales^129., and Janiçon was used extensively, and, indeed, verbatim and unacknowledged by Diderot, an incorrigible plagiarist, in his Voyage de Hollande^130..

It was as journalists, however, that the Huguenots made their most enduring contributions as contemporary historians. As journalists of all sorts the Huguenots were supreme; they were ubiquitous, influential, and responsible for innovations in genre and in editorial technique nowadays such commonplaces of journalism that one tends to forget that someone must have invented them^131.. Part of this story has received a good measure of modern scholarly attention; for instance, the contribution made by Huguenots in the Dutch Republic to the emergence and development of erudite journalism.

In the case of political journalism, however, the contribution of Huguenots has been more often assumed than demonstrated, and many gaps remain to be filled. Rousset de Missy, for example, to whom some reference has already been made, cries out for fuller treatment than he has yet received. Meinecke, it is true, has drawn attention in a perceptive essay to his stature as a political commentator and

128. M.P. Masterson, ‘Montesquieu's Stadholder’, Studies on Voltaire, CXVI (Geneva, 1973) 97 footnotes 22 and 23.

129. J. Vercruysse, ‘Voltaire et la Hollande’, Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, XLVI (Geneva, 1966) 195-197.

130. Ibidem, 21; G. Charlier, ‘Diderot et la Hollande’, Revue de la littérature comparée, XXI (1947) 199-206, 227. For Diderot as a plagiarist, see Peter Gay, The Enlightenment: an Interpretation. The Rise of Modern Paganism (London, 1967) 364-365.

131. For a general statement with references, see Gibbs, ‘The Role of the Dutch Republic’, 331 ff. Though Huguenots did not exactly invent the monthly political periodical, they gave it its characteristic form. In addition they elevated the periodical of entertainment into a professional and respected genre and, apparently, introduced the device whereby an editor invited the aid of contributors. Walter Graham, The Beginnings of English Literary Periodicals (New York, 1926) 44; Idem, English Literary Periodicals (New York, 1930) 30, 57.

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as a masterly contemporary historian^132., and from Meinecke's essay Rousset may well be held to emerge as largely assimilated to, or at least giving voice to, the Holland tradition in Dutch foreign policy^133.. But since the essay is based on little more than an analysis of one of his lesser-known works, with occasional quotations from his major work, the Mercure historique et politique, any such judgement must be regarded as premature, and, in the light of Rousset's activities in the late 1740's, as somewhat uncertain^134.. What is required in the first place is a systematic study of the periodical he compiled for over twenty years. It was the first real monthly political review in Europe, and the exemplar of those which followed. It enjoyed an extra-European as well as a wide European audience^135., and its anti-French fulminations in the 1740's earned for its compiler the surely unusual distinction of provoking the creation of an opposing journal advertising his name in its title, Le Courier véridique, ou l'Anti-Rousset^136.. Moreover, apart from the Mercure historique, and the usual string of miscellaneous publications spawned by Huguenots, including in Rousset's case a short treatise on those lethal worms which were eating away at the vitals of the Dutch Republic from the 1730's, Rousset was also responsible, like other journalists of the day, for a news-letter service to foreign gazeteers and European governments^137.. Information was picked up by hanging around the coat-tails of European and Dutch diplomats, with some of whom Rousset maintained a regular correspondence^138.. On occasion the information so

132. Friedrich Meinecke, Machiavellism. The Doctrine of raison d'état and its Place in Modern History (London, 1957) 263.

133. A point made to me in questions after my paper by Professor Boogman. The references would seem to be ibidem, 266, 268, 270.

134. The work in question is Les intérêts présens et les prétentions des puissances de l'Europe (3 vols; The Hague, 1733). In the preface, p. 4, Rousset makes the point that the Dutch Republic has no pretentions, only interests. For an earlier, anonymous statement of the same distinction, and a discussion, see E.H. Kossmann, In Praise of the Dutch Republic. Some Seventeenth-Century Attitudes. An inaugural lecture delivered at University College (London, 1963) 1-2 ff.

135. For some particulars about the standing of the Mercure historique and the geographical extent of its readership, see Gibbs, ‘The Role of the Dutch Republic’, 348; Meinecke, Machiavelism, 245.

136. Martin Fontius, Voltaire in Berlin. Zur Geschichte der bei G.C. Walther veröffentlichen Werken Voltaires (Berlin, 1966) 124.

137. For the pile-worms, see Van der Woude, Noorderkwartier, 595, 613. The title of Rousset's treatise was Observations sur l'origine, la constitution et la nature des vers de mères (The Hague, 1733). For Rousset's newsletter service, see L. Paul-Dubois, Fréderic le grand d'après sa correspondance politique (Paris, 1903) 185. Abel Boyer was another Huguenot journalist and newsletterwriter. The combination was common.

138. In 1726, for example, Rousset was held to have been the confident of the Portuguese envoy at The Hague, the Count De Mendoza: see, Dayrolle to Townshend, The Hague, 19 November 1726, N.S. in: PRO, S.P. 84/288, ff. 124-125, which encloses a begging letter from Rousset in 1727. Described as ‘a meddling man’, he is reported as being in correspondence with the secretary of the Portuguese embassy in Vienna, see Dayrolle to Townshend, The Hague, 29 April 1727, N.S. in: ibidem 84/295, ff. 106-107. I am grateful to Mr. Hugh Dunthorne of the Department of History at Swansea for putting me on the track of these references. For a reference to further correspondents of Rousset, see Marianne C. Couperus, Un périodique français en Hollande. Le Glaneur historique 1731-1733 (The Hague, 1971) 75.

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purveyed seemed alarmingly confidential. The imperial vice-chancellor, Schönborn, once complained at finding in the bulletins of Jean Rousset circulating in Vienna, ‘des choses qu'on regarde ici comme du dernier secrèt et qui ne sont connues que de quelques rares initiées’. He might have been more alarmed if he had known that the information in fact came from the secretary to the Dutch legation at Berlin, Marteville, perhaps another Huguenot^139..

The essential basis for Huguenot supremacy in the business of news collection clearly lay in the dispersal of Huguenots all over Europe, which made them ideally qualified for the role of correspondents or news-letter writers, and in the need they must have felt, at least initially in their exile, to keep in contact with each other, and with what was happening in France and elsewhere in Europe^140.. Here was a natural grapevine, marvellously effective for the collection and dissemination of news, and, in times of difficulty, readily transformable into an equally effective escape route for Huguenot journalists fleeing the wrath of the authorities they had crossed^141..

Let me in conclusion give one illustration of the gravepine, which also illuminates

139. Paul-Dubois, Fréderic le grand, 185. The incident raises a more general point of interest to students of Dutch foreign policy in the eighteenth century; namely the difficulties and opportunities created for the conduct of foreign policy by the leakage of information into newspapers. In the Dutch Republic such difficulties constituted a chronic infirmity; what Dayrolle at The Hague in 1729 described as ‘an evil of its nature incurable’. Incurable or not, cures were offered. What provoked Dayrolle's remark in 1729 was the discovery of the existence of a spy-ring in the Greffier's office, some of whose clerks had for twenty years been selling information to the courts of France, Vienna and Madrid, and, for part of the time, to Janiçon in his capacity as compiler of the Utrecht Gazette. The discovery gave Slingelandt the opportunity to press his proposals for the establishment of a special committee to which all affairs of importance and dispatch in the republic would be referred and determined, without the interposition of the provinces. The case is to be found in Sententien van den Hove van Holland tegens Jan van Amelonse etc. (25 March, 1729). The case was followed with close interest by British diplomats at The Hague who sent home a copy of the Sententien. The references to Slingelandt's interest in the affair, and his proposals for a structural change in the machinery of decision-making are to be found in Dayrolle to Townshend, The Hague, 19 November 1728, N.S. in PRO, S.P. 84/290, f. 284 v.; same to same, 26 November 1728, N.S. in: ibidem, f. 288 v.; same to same, 10 December 1728, N.S. in: ibidem, f. 302 v.; Chesterfield to Townshend, The Hague, 25 December 1728, N.S. in: ibidem 84/302, f. 258; Dayrolle to Townshend, The Hague, 10 January 1729, N.S. in: ibidem, 84/306, f. 11.

140. Gibbs, ‘The Role of the Dutch Republic’, 332. The Oprechte Haarlemsche Courant in the period 1738 to 1742 seems to have had at least two Huguenot correspondents in London: M. Pinau and Pierre Desportes. See D.H. Couvée, ‘The Administration of the “Oprechte Haarlemse Courant” 1738-1742’, Gazette. International Journal of the Science of the Press, IV (Leiden, 1958) 106.

141. For an extremely well-documented case concerning François de Bruys, his part in the so-called civil war in the Walloon church at The Hague in 1730, his flight to, and return from England, bearing a letter of reconciliation from Desmaizeaux, see Kleerkoper and Van Stockum, jr, De boekhandel te Amsterdam, II, 964-989.

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a more general pattern of news distribution between England and the Dutch Republic. In this particular case the grapevine begins with Jean Dumont, who as imperial historiographer, or whilst he was imperial historiographer, wrote occasional pamphlets defending the pretentions and interests of the House of Habsburg, pamphlets in which Dumont the scholar provided Dumont the pamphleteer with plenty of ammunition. One such pamphlet was Les soupirs de l'Europe, and the title was surely deliberately evocative^142.. It was written in 1712, at a time when the battle for peace with France was not yet won, and it provided a learned and wideranging statement of the Habsburg case against trusting France to keep a peace, and against placing any trust in a peace whose stability appeared to depend upon the validity of Philip V's renunciation of the French throne^143.. The pamphlet then was grist to the Whig mill in England, and it was immediately translated into English by Abel Boyer, another Huguenot journalist and contemporary historian, and much else^144.. To an anonymous critic of Boyer and the Whigs^145., it seemed one more example of the way in which Huguenots took in each other's washing, and manipulated the media for particular purposes. According to this anonymous critic, notice of the impending publication of the translation of Dumont's pamphlet, and a puff for it, first appeared in the French-language Amsterdam Gazette, at that time under the control of the celebrated Huguenot journalist, Jean Tronchin du Breuil, the founder of the dynasty which was to hold an uninterrupted monopoly of the newspaper for nearly a century, and it had been planted there at the request of Boyer. Such practices, the critic continued, were common - never lacked for foster-parents - and their purpose was obvious.

Now, as the Correspondence between those French Huguenots, viz. Du Breuil at Amsterdam, and Du Boyer in some Garret in or near the City of London, is no secret; it seems to me an easy Matter to guess at its Usefulness. The Former writes the Amsterdam Gazette; the Latter The Political State of Great Britain, and Annals of the Queen's Reign. Supposing, therefore, Du Boyer is displeas'd with any Proceedings of

142. Les soupirs de l'Europe à la vue du projet de paix contenu dans la harangue de la reine de la Grande-Bretagne a son parlement du 6/17 juin 1712 (1712).

143. It was one of a series of pamphlets written by Dumont in 1712 and 1713 to demonstrate to English public opinion the justness of Habsburg policy and of continuing the war against France. See Bela Kopeczi, La France et la Hongrie au début du XVIIIe siècle (Budapest, 1971) 509-510.

144. In English it bore the title, Les Soupirs de l'Europe etc. Or the Groans of Europe at the Prospect of the Present Posture of Affairs. In a Letter from a Gentleman at The Hague to a Member of Parliament. Made English from the original French (1713). Some idea of the extent and variety of Boyer's writings, and of his life, is to be found in the Dictionary of National Biography, but much more remains to be said.

145. The author of The Queen, the Present Ministry, Louis XIV and Philip V Unanswerably Vindicated, with Respect to his Catholic Majesty's Possession of Spain and the Indies confirm'd to him in the Treaty of Peace now on Foot. In a Letter to a Noble Lord, Concerning a Scandalous Libel, Entitled The Groans of Europe etc. (2nd. ed.; London, 1712).

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HER MAJESTY, or those who are put in Authority under HER, he has nothing to do, but to commit his own Reflexions thereupon to Writing, and deliver them in at the Foreign Post-Office. Du Breuil soon inserts them in his Gazette, and then Du Boyer and the rest of 'em will give you a fair Translation, in spite of your Teeth^146..

The account has the hall-mark of authenticity. The practice of planting items of news in Dutch newspapers in order to be able to cite them subsequently in English newspapers was, indeed, common. It was a device useful to, and often adopted by, British governments, as a means of flying diplomatic kites, or of issuing statements with which they did not wish to be officially and publicly associated^147.. It was a device also used by opposition groups in England to give publicity and verisimilitude to malicious rumour and downright invention, and to keep their friends in heart, in England as well as in Europe, since the information so planted was picked up subsequently by opposition papers, and appeared as a bone fide item of foreign news^148..

The practice helps to make sense of a remark of the greatest of contemporary English journalists, Daniel Defoe, who incidentally began his journalistic career as a translator of foreign news. Defoe wrote ‘We can read more of our own affairs in the Dutch papers than in any of our own’^149.. In one respect, hitherto unappreciated, that was literally true. I refer to the reportage of British parliamentary debates. In England the reporting of parliament's debates was in the eighteenth century a matter of parliamentary privilege, as, indeed, strictly speaking it still is. In the early eighteenth century parliamentary privilege was enforced with determi-

146. Ibidem, 1-2. For some details about the life and literary activities of Jean Tronchin du Breuil, and his successors, see E. and E. Haag, La France protestante, IX (Paris, 1860) 428-429; Kleerkoper and Van Stockum jr, De boekhandel te Amsterdam, II, 840-846; Van Eeghen, Amsterdamse boekhandel, IV, 143-146. For high contemporary praise of the Amsterdam Gazette under Jean Tronchin and his son, see Couperus, Un périodique français, 81. I know of no other information that suggests a direct contact between Boyer and Tronchin apart from the above mentioned pamphlet, but whilst Boyer was a student at the university of Franeker, Jean Antoine Tronchin, brother of the journalist, was professor of foreign languages there. The only other personal contact of Boyer's in the Dutch Republic known to me is his uncle with whom he fled from France, Pierre de Campdomerc, who in 1712 became pastor-extraordinary at the Walloon church of Amsterdam. Gagnebin, ‘Pasteurs de France’, I (1885) 114; III (1888) 26. In the obituary of Boyer in The Political State of Great Britain, XXXVIII, 604 he appears as Campdomerius.

147. For an illustration, see Gibbs, ‘Newspapers, Parliament and Foreign Policy in the Age of Stanhope and Walpole’, Mélanges offerts à G. Jacquemyns (Brussels: Free University, 1968) 300. The trick did not escape the attention of contemporary students of the press in England. See the remark of John Oldmixon quoted in Henry L. Snyder, ‘The Circulation of Newspapers in the Reign of Queen Anne’, Library (September, 1968) 211.

148. W.R. Ward, Georgian Oxford. University Politcis in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 1958) 73. It was alleged at the time of the Atterbury plot that the Amsterdam Gazette published an account of it before it was known to the city of London because one of those in the know betrayed his knowledge. See The Freeholder's Journal (16 May, 1722) in BM, Burney Collection of Newspapers.

149. G.A. Cranfield, The Development of the Provincial Newspapers 1700-1760 (Oxford, 1960) 71.

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nation and success so far as the reportage of debates by the London press was concerned. Less was reported on the parliament of Westminster in London newspapers in the first half of the eighteenth century than was reported on the parlement of Paris. But parliamentary privilege could not be enforced abroad, and, in fact, throughout George I's reign, as well as before it and after it, regular extracts from the parliamentary debates, or what was described accurately at the time as ‘scraps of parliamentary eloquence’^150., appeared in newspapers and periodicals published in the Dutch Republic, as well as elsewhere in Europe. These scraps supplement to some extent the scraps hitherto available to British parliamentary historians of the period, and are as reliable, because they come from the same source^151.. The source, or one certain source, was a newsletter service operated by Abel Boyer, whose Political State has for long constituted the main source of information on the debates of the reign of George I, and the service was taken up by foreign ambassadors in London, by diplomats abroad, and by the editors of European newspapers and periodicals.

In a more specific sense than has been realised, therefore, British history in the early eighteenth century was a part of European history, and, indeed, of Dutch history, and this because of the activities of Huguenots. It is a further illustration of the acknowledged rôle of the Huguenots as the intermediaries of English culture and English politics, and may serve as a reminder that even in an area which has attracted considerable attention from historians small discoveries can still be made. In other areas of Huguenot history in the Republic serious historical enquiry has scarcely begun.

150. Whitworth to Delafaye, 20/31 December, 1720 in: BM, Add. Ms. 37382 (Whitworth Papers), where Whitworth says, referring to the financial crisis in England, ‘I do not question but our good Brethren the Dutch news-writers will be very witty at our Expence, and flourish with scraps of Parliamentary eloquence’. I should like to thank Mr. Hugh Dunthorne for providing me with this reference.

151. I am preparing a study of this material, its provenance, transmission, and value. The periodicals include the Mercure historique and the Lettres historiques, but the most frequent, and fullest extracts are to be found in the Dutch language Europische Mercurius.