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Huge Not Refugees
Huge Not Refugees
Protestants, and inspired thousands of Huguenots to flee the kingdom and find refuge abroad. This Dutch
woodcut illustrated the perils of flight, depicting families of refugees as they attempted to evade capture
and reach the ships that would take them to safe harbors such as London or Rotterdam. For some of these
migrants, this was only the beginning of a journey that ended much farther from home, in British America or
Dutch South Africa. “Het weg vlugten der Gereformeerde uyt Vrankryk” [The Escape of the Reformed
Refugees from France], from Élie Benoist, Historie der Gereformeerde Kerken Van Vrankryk (Amsterdam, 1696),
Typ 632.96.202, Houghton Library, Harvard University.
Between Eden and Empire:
Huguenot Refugees and the Promise of New Worlds
OWEN STANWOOD
IN THE FALL OF 1687, CONDITIONS appeared dire for Huguenot refugees who had re-
cently fled Louis XIV’s France. As their minister in Zurich, Paul Reboulet, reported
to a colleague in Geneva, the normal paths of escape, through Switzerland into Ger-
many, had become uncertain. Refugees could no longer go to Bayreuth, Reboulet
wrote, as “there are not the means to receive them there,” while authorities in Ulm
“no longer permit the Refugees to lodge there in passing.” There was a glimmer of
hope, however, from somewhere much farther afield. The Dutch East India Com-
pany offered assistance to any Huguenots who would “go to establish themselves at
the Cape of Good Hope,” aiming to build a community of “thousands of families.”
“The country produces everything,” the minister noted, “and especially Wine.”
Looking for a silver lining in what must have appeared an extreme option for French
families in search of a stable community, Reboulet looked at the big picture. “For
a long time,” he wrote, “I have believed that God’s design was to disperse us to carry
the Gospel to all the World.”1
Reboulet’s letter provides a fitting introduction to a nearly forgotten chapter in
the history of European expansion and imperialism. Over the last two decades of the
seventeenth century, around 200,000 French Protestants fled the kingdom as Louis
XIV restricted and eventually banned the practice of Protestantism. The refugees
flocked to neighboring Protestant states, while a much smaller number, perhaps
5,000 to 10,000, chose to leave Europe altogether, heading to the farthest reaches
of the English and Dutch overseas empires. The communities they formed in colonial
America and South Africa have never lacked scholars, but no one has systematically
examined the rationale and the structure of this global migration.2 However it may
The author thanks Phil Benedict, Jon Butler, Alison Games, Susanne Lachenicht, Marie Pellissier, Ber-
trand Van Ruymbeke, and several anonymous referees for reading and commenting on previous drafts
of this article, and audiences in Providence, Paris, and Bayreuth for offering helpful suggestions at
several points. Financial support for research came from the John Carter Brown Library, the Eccles
Centre for North American Studies at the British Library, and a Newberry Library/British Academy
exchange fellowship.
1 Paul Reboulet to Jacques Tronchin, October 4, 1687, Archives Tronchin, vol. 50, Bibliothèque de
Genève [hereafter BGE]. For background on Reboulet, see Eugène Haag and Émile Haag, La France
protestante, 10 vols. (Paris, 1846–1859), 8: 396.
2 The French scholar Charles Weiss coined the term “Refuge” in the 1850s to describe the networks
of Huguenots in Europe; see his Histoire des réfugiés protestants de France depuis la révocation de l’édit
de Nantes jusqu’à nos jours, 2 vols. (Paris, 1853). While no one has attempted a monographic survey of
the global Refuge, there have been a number of important edited collections; see Bertrand Van Ruym-
beke and Randy J. Sparks, eds., Memory and Identity: The Huguenots in France and the Atlantic Diaspora
1319
1320 Owen Stanwood
have looked to those caught up in the crisis, the international dispersion of the ref-
ugees was far from random. The refugees themselves set out to form ideal French
Protestant communities overseas—Edenic new worlds where they could live in peace
and plenty. Their state patrons, meanwhile, had other aspirations. They believed that
these migrants could become agents of empire, exploring and exploiting new worlds
in the service of their protectors. Never before had European leaders used a de-
mographic crisis within Europe to expand overseas, but it inspired far greater ex-
oduses in the following century, when Germans and Ulster Scots, among others,
crossed the oceans in large numbers.3
This story reveals a great deal about formal and informal politics in early modern
Europe and the Atlantic world. The key protagonists were a number of prominent
Huguenot ministers and gentlemen—something of an unofficial refugee senate that
sought to maintain a French Protestant church in exile. The Huguenot senate did
not always speak with one voice, and it lacked institutional formality, but it had a
great deal of influence, and many of the trappings of a state. Its members possessed
a common religious vision, the moral authority of persecuted people, and personal
connections to many of the most powerful kings, princes, and church leaders in Prot-
estant Europe. What they lacked, however, was money, so the Huguenots became
supplicants in courts across the continent, where they used their informal connec-
tions to gain access to formal bureaucracies and the financial resources that flowed
from them. Essentially, the Huguenots hoped to create a transnational quasi-state
that would operate within, but also beyond, the European state system.4
Despite such high hopes, however, the Huguenots never succeeded in building
a new Protestant France either in Europe or beyond. The Edenic dreams of the
refugees, embodied most clearly in the writings of the gentleman projector Henri
Duquesne, collided with the cold logic of empire, and with the visions of political
economists and statesmen who cared more about national interests than the Prot-
estant cause. The Huguenot networks proved powerful enough to procure the re-
(Columbia, S.C., 2003); Eckart Birnstiel and Chrystel Bernat, eds., La diaspora des huguenots: Les
réfugiés protestants de France et leur dispersion dans le monde (XVI e–XVIII e siècles) (Paris, 2001); Mickaël
Augeron, Didier Poton, and Bertrand Van Ruymbeke, eds., Les Huguenots et l’Atlantique, vol. 1: Pour
dieu, la cause ou les affaires (Paris, 2009), and vol. 2: Fidélités, racines et mémoires (Paris, 2012). See also
the sections on the Refuge in Patrick Cabanel’s magisterial work Histoire des protestants en France,
XVI e–XXI e siècle (Paris, 2012), 709–864.
3 On German and Irish migration, see Philip Otterness, Becoming German: The 1709 Palatine Mi-
gration to New York (Ithaca, N.Y., 2006); Aaron Spencer Fogelman, Hopeful Journeys: German Immi-
gration, Settlement, and Political Culture in Colonial America, 1717–1775 (Philadelphia, 1996); Patrick
Griffin, The People with No Name: Ireland’s Ulster Scots, America’s Scots Irish, and the Creation of a British
Atlantic World, 1689–1764 (Princeton, N.J., 2001); and Marianne S. Wokeck, Trade in Strangers: The
Beginnings of Mass Migration to North America (University Park, Pa., 1999).
4 While scholars have not neglected the European leaders of the Refuge, few have examined their
political importance, focusing instead on the theological and intellectual aspects of the Refuge; see, for
instance, Hubert Bost, Ces messieurs de la R.P.R.: Histoires et écritures de huguenots, XVII e–XVIII e siècles
(Paris, 2001); and Gerald Cerny, Theology, Politics and Letters at the Crossroads of European Civilization:
Jacques Basnage and the Baylean Huguenot Refugees in the Dutch Republic (Dordrecht, 1987). My notion
of a “Huguenot senate” is influenced by Marie de Chambrier’s discussion of the politics of the Refuge
in Henri de Mirmand et les réfugiés de la révocation de l’édit de Nantes, 1650–1721 (Neuchâtel, 1910),
104 –105. In addition, Susanne Lachenicht has contended that Huguenots possessed a “nation of their
own” during this period; see Lachenicht, “Huguenot Immigrants and the Formation of National Iden-
tities, 1548–1787,” Historical Journal 50, no. 2 (2007): 309–331, here 311.
sources to move thousands of refugees to the farthest ends of the earth, but by the
end of the century these migrants found themselves subject to the whims of imperial
bureaucrats who sent them on any number of quixotic missions. They made silk in
Carolina, converted Indians in the New England backcountry, and grew wheat and
produced wine for East Indian trading fleets. While they made a few efforts to spread
the gospel to the ends of the earth, as Reboulet had envisioned, they served above
all to empower the expansion of their host states, especially Britain and the Neth-
erlands.
This ironic conclusion suggests a reconsideration of the relative strength of states
and networks in the early modern world. As oceanic and global approaches have
proliferated in historical scholarship, historians have stressed transnational net-
works, whether economic, ethnic, or religious, as the key to understanding global
history. The movement of goods and people often depended more on these informal
links than on states that were still in the process of forming.5 As the stock of networks
has risen, that of states and especially empires has fallen. Historians of the Atlantic
world frequently label empires as “elusive” or “negotiated” entities whose power
dissipated quickly as one traveled from the metropole.6 As the fate of the Huguenots
demonstrates, however, even powerful networks needed state patronage to prosper,
and imperial officials were more than capable of using networks for their own ag-
grandizement. Moreover, when the goals of the refugees conflicted with those of the
5 See, for example, Jonathan Israel, “Diasporas Jewish and Non-Jewish and the World Maritime
Empires,” in Ina Baghdiantz McCabe, Gelina Harlaftis, and Ioanna Pepelasis Minoglou, eds., Diaspora
Entrepreneurial Networks: Four Centuries of History (Oxford, 2005), 3–26; Ole Peter Grell, “Merchants
and Ministers: The Foundations of International Calvinism,” in Andrew Pettegree, Alastair Duke, and
Gillian Lewis, eds., Calvinism in Europe, 1540–1620 (Cambridge, 1994), 254 –270; Francesca Trivellato,
The Familiarity of Strangers: The Sephardic Diaspora, Livorno, and Cross-Cultural Trade in the Early
Modern Period (New Haven, Conn., 2009); Sebouh David Aslanian, From the Indian Ocean to the Med-
iterranean: The Global Trade Networks of Armenian Merchants from New Julfa (Berkeley, Calif., 2011);
David J. Hancock, “The Triumphs of Mercury: Connection and Control in the Emerging Atlantic Econ-
omy,” in Bernard Bailyn and Patricia L. Denault, eds., Soundings in Atlantic History: Latent Structures
and Intellectual Currents, 1500–1830 (Cambridge, Mass., 2009), 112–140; Rosalind J. Beiler, “Dissenting
Religious Communication Networks and European Migration, 1660–1710,” ibid., 210–236. For works
that explicitly link these networks to imperial histories, see Alison Games, The Web of Empire: English
Cosmopolitans in an Age of Expansion, 1560–1660 (New York, 2008); Daviken Studnicki-Gizbert, A
Nation upon the Ocean Sea: Portugal’s Atlantic Diaspora and the Crisis of the Spanish Empire, 1492–1640
(New York, 2007); and Kerry Ward, Networks of Empire: Forced Migration in the Dutch East India Com-
pany (Cambridge, 2009).
6 Historians of the French Empire have been most eager to contend for its weakness, while those
studying the British have stressed its “negotiated” qualities; see James Pritchard, In Search of Empire:
The French in the Americas, 1670–1730 (Cambridge, 2004); Eric Hinderaker, Elusive Empires: Construct-
ing Colonialism in the Ohio Valley, 1673–1800 (Cambridge, 1997); Kenneth J. Banks, Chasing Empire
across the Sea: Communications and the State in the French Atlantic, 1713–1763 (Montreal, 2006); Jack
P. Greene, “Negotiated Authorities: The Problem of Governance in the Extended Polities of the Early
Modern Atlantic World,” in Greene, Negotiated Authorities: Essays in Colonial Political and Constitu-
tional History (Charlottesville, Va., 1994), 1–24; Greene, “Beyond Power: Paradigm Subversion and
Reformulation and the Re-creation of the Early Modern Atlantic World,” in Greene, Interpreting Early
America: Historiographical Essays (Charlottesville, Va., 1996), 17– 42. For a volume that extends this
argument to empires in general, see Christine Daniels and Michael V. Kennedy, eds., Negotiated Empires:
Centers and Peripheries in the Americas, 1500–1820 (London, 2002). Historians of the Huguenots have
embraced network analysis to describe the Refuge; see, for instance, Mark Greengrass, “Informal Net-
works in Sixteenth-Century French Protestantism,” in Raymond A. Mentzer and Andrew Spicer, eds.,
Society and Culture in the Huguenot World, 1559–1685 (Cambridge, 2002), 78–97; J. F. Bosher, “Hu-
guenot Merchants and the Protestant International in the Seventeenth Century,” William and Mary
Quarterly, 3rd ser., 52, no. 1 (1995): 77–102; and many works by Susanne Lachenicht, especially Hugenot-
ten in Europa und Nordamerika: Migration und Integration in der Frühen Neuzeit (Frankfurt, 2010).
empires that sheltered them, it was rarely the Huguenots who came out on top. By
the eighteenth century, the dreams of a French overseas Eden remained unfulfilled,
and most refugees were barely tolerated strangers working for the betterment of
foreign states.
THE GLOBAL HUGUENOT DIASPORA EMERGED from the ashes of a French Protestant
church decimated by the policies of Louis XIV. The 1598 Edict of Nantes guaranteed
limited rights to France’s Huguenots, but the Sun King spent much of his reign
chipping away at those privileges, finally revoking the edict entirely in October 1685.
Beginning in Poitou, but soon extending throughout the kingdom, royal dragoons
terrorized Protestant residents, forcing distressed Huguenots to abjure their religion
if they hoped to save their homes and families. As Louis XIV triumphantly noted,
most of France’s approximately 800,000 Protestants officially abandoned their faith,
although many continued to pray in private. At the same time, though, many resolved
to leave the kingdom, and by late 1685, in spite of heavy penalties, a steady stream
of Huguenots had left France by sea and land in every direction.7
The newcomers crowded into cities around Protestant Europe. Those in the north
and west tended to escape by sea to England or the Netherlands, places with frequent
trading links to towns such as Dieppe, La Rochelle, and Bordeaux. By 1687 Rot-
terdam “had become almost French,” a Norman visitor noted, “because so many
inhabitants of Rouen and Dieppe had sought refuge there.”8 An even greater num-
ber of refugees trudged through the Alps from Languedoc, Vivarais, and Dauphiné
toward Geneva and the Swiss cantons beyond, which according to one witness re-
ceived 350 new arrivals each day during the summer of 1687. Even smaller cities were
not exempt; between 1684 and 1692, 26,543 Huguenots passed through the Swiss
town of Schaffhausen, which had only 5,000 permanent residents but was strategi-
cally located on the German border.9
A network of Huguenot ministers and gentlemen formed to manage the throngs
of new arrivals. Most were prominent ministers who had fled France as the crisis
deepened during the early 1680s. Sédan’s minister, Pierre Jurieu, for instance, took
a post at the Walloon Church in Rotterdam in 1681, where he established himself
as an intellectual leader of the Refuge. Montpellier’s Isaac du Bourdieu chose Lon-
don, negotiating for a spot at the Threadneedle Street Church before settling at the
7 For a good portrait of French Protestantism on the eve of the Revocation, see Philip Benedict,
The Huguenot Population of France, 1600–1685: The Demographic Fate and Customs of a Religious Mi-
nority (Philadelphia, 1991); Samuel Mours, Essai sommaire de géographie du protestantisme réformé fran-
çais au XVII e siècle (Paris, 1966); and Janine Garrisson, L’édit de Nantes et sa révocation: Histoire d’une
intolérance (Paris, 1985). On French religious policy in this period, see Cabanel, Histoire des protestants
en France, 507–606.
8 Dianne W. Ressinger, ed., Memoirs of Isaac Dumont de Bostaquet, a Gentleman of Normandy,
Before and After the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes (London, 2005), 143. See also David van der Linden,
“The Economy of Exile: Huguenot Migration from Dieppe to Rotterdam,” in Jane McKee and Randolph
Vigne, eds., The Huguenots: France, Exile, and Diaspora (Brighton, 2013), 99–112.
9 For the Swiss numbers, see Philippe Joutard, “The Revocation of the Edict of Nantes: End or
Renewal of French Protestantism?,” in Menna Prestwich, ed., International Calvinism, 1541–1715 (Ox-
ford, 1985), 339–368, here 355; Rémy Scheurer, “Passage, accueil et intégration des réfugiés huguenots
en Suisse,” in Michelle Magdelaine and Rudolf von Thadden, eds., Le Refuge huguenot (Paris, 1985),
45–62, here 49–51.
newer Savoy Church in Westminster. Though somewhat less prominent, Paul Re-
boulet made a similar trek from Vivarais to Zurich. These ministers and their
churches, some formed more than a century earlier, became centers of power in the
Refuge, offering spiritual and practical support for the new arrivals.10 Alongside
these ministers, a number of prominent refugee gentlemen also led efforts to relieve
the newcomers, including the former Protestant deputy in Versailles Henri de Ru-
vigny and the Nı̂mes lawyer Henri de Mirmand, who relocated to Zurich and used
his own wealth as well as his facility in navigating European courts to help the many
Huguenots languishing in Switzerland.11
These ministers, gentlemen, and nobles formed a transnational lobbying group
with a profound religious message. Their chief goal was the preservation of the
French Protestant church in exile, to keep it functional in preparation for a future
return to the homeland. But while their concerns centered on their own flocks, they
also had to attract support from other Protestants. To do so, they claimed that the
troubles in France presaged a fundamental challenge to the Protestant world. Louis
XIV’s salvo was just one sign of the impending struggle between the true church and
the anti-Christian forces of Rome. As Jurieu wrote in a pamphlet that appeared in
English in 1689, “Popery is a Monster that devoureth without ceasing, and that never
saith, it is enough: can it be imagined that when it hath finished in France, and put
that Countrey into the same condition as Hungary, and Bohemia, that it will stop
there?” The only answer was for “Protestant princes” to band together, to put aside
their petty differences and meet the enemy, whether on the battlefield or in the
subtler battle for souls. One way to do this, Jurieu and others noted, was to offer
refuge to the hordes of persecuted saints. A group of refugee ministers in Switzerland
made this position clear in an appeal to the “kings, princes, magistrates, and all other
evangelical Protestant Christians” in 1688. They called for a “union and communion
of saints” that would stretch across Protestant Europe, and specifically begged au-
thorities to “give our poor people retreats, and lands to cultivate wherever they are
available.” In short, the Huguenots placed themselves at the center of what scholars
have dubbed a “Protestant International,” a global network of believers that would
save the world from perdition.12
10 For Jurieu’s arrival, see Hubert Bost, ed., Le consistoire de l’Église wallonne de Rotterdam, 1681–
1706 (Paris, 2008), 46– 47; and on his role in the Refuge more generally, see Guy Howard Dodge, The
Political Theory of the Huguenots of the Dispersion, with Special Reference to the Thought and Influence
of Pierre Jurieu (New York, 1947); F. R. J. Knetsch, “Pierre Jurieu: Theologian and Politician of the
Dispersion,” Acta Historiae Neerlandica 10 (1971): 213–241. On du Bourdieu, see Robin Gwynn, ed.,
Minutes of the Consistory of the French Church of London, Threadneedle Street, 1679–1692 (London,
1994), 123.
11 Marie Léoutre, “Député Général in France and in Exile: Henri de Massue de Ruvigny, Earl of
Galway,” in McKee and Vigne, The Huguenots, 145–154; Chambrier, Henri de Mirmand et les réfugiés
de la révocation de l’édit de Nantes.
12 Peter Jurieu, Seasonable Advice to All Protestants in Europe, of What Persuasion Soever, for Uniting
and Defending Themselves against Popish Tyranny (London, 1689), 7–8; “Les pasteurs, anciens et autres
chrétiens protestants de France réfugiés en Suisse pour le cause de l’Evangile, aux rois, princes, mag-
istrats et tous autres chrétiens protestants évangeliques,” Bulletin de la Société de l’histoire du protes-
tantisme français [hereafter BSHPF] 9 (1860): 151–152. The idea of a “Protestant International” comes
from Herbert Lüthy, La banque protestante en France de la révocation de l’édit de Nantes à la Révolution,
2 vols. (Paris, 1959–1961); see also Bosher, “Huguenot Merchants and the Protestant International in
the Seventeenth Century”; and Robin Gwynn, “The Huguenots in Britain, the ‘Protestant International’
and the Defeat of Louis XIV,” in Randolph Vigne and Charles Littleton, eds., From Strangers to Citizens:
The Integration of Immigrant Communities in Britain, Ireland, and Colonial America, 1550–1750
(Brighton, 2001), 412– 424.
13 “Papers Relating to Brief, 1681,” Proceedings of the Huguenot Society of London [hereafter PHS]
7 (1901–1904): 164 –166, here 164; Mark Goldie et al., eds., The Entring Book of Roger Morrice, 1677–
1691, 7 vols. (Woodbridge, 2007), 2: 210–211; Randolph Vigne, “Huguenots at the Court of William and
Mary,” in Charles Wilson and David Proctor, eds., 1688: The Seaborne Alliance and Diplomatic Revo-
lution (Greenwich, 1989), 111–130; Cécile Holtz, “La Bourse française de Genève et le refuge de 1684
à 1686,” in Olivier Fatio, ed., Genève au temps de la révocation de l’édit de Nantes, 1680–1705 (Geneva,
1985), 439– 491.
14 “Mémoire par le dessein des colonies,” Collection Court, 17L, fols. 105–108, BGE. The Collection
Court abounds with similar plans and correspondence laying out the rationale behind colonization. See
also Susanne Lachenicht, “Intégration ou coexistence? Les huguenots dans les ı̂les britanniques et le
Brandebourg,” Diasporas: Histoire et sociétés 18 (2012): 108–122.
still desolate from the Thirty Years’ War. Thousands of refugees flowed into Bran-
denburg, and soon into neighboring German states as well, taking most of the avail-
able land.15 Fading prospects in Germany inspired a turn in the 1690s toward Ireland,
another kingdom depopulated by war. In 1691 Charles de Sailly conducted a lengthy
tour of the island, during which he was accosted by dozens of Protestant landlords
seeking to populate their empty estates. The design to colonize Ireland stretched
from the British Isles to Switzerland, where Henri de Mirmand and other refugee
leaders lobbied the English ambassador, Thomas Coxe, to arrange transportation for
refugees who “desire to be joynd to such a Colony, and cannot subsist any longer
here, by rason of the extreme dearth of all things.”16
The Huguenot colonial vision represented a blend of old and new political the-
ories. On the one hand, it drew on the composite nature of governance that dom-
inated much of early modern Europe, where sovereignty was often divided between
distant overlords and local leaders.17 On the other hand, there were fewer precedents
for newcomers seeking to settle in new lands and receive special status. This plan
had the potential to succeed because the stateless Huguenots adopted the language
of national interest that central planners found so compelling. One proposal for an
Irish settlement provided a perfect example. The unnamed projectors began by stat-
ing a truism of political economy: that “the multitude of peoples is the felicity of
kingdoms, in effect it is not the vastness of lands but the number of subjects which
makes kings and states great and powerful.” After a historical digression, the pe-
titioners noted that Ireland was “naturally one of the most fertile countries in Eu-
rope,” but lacked “good and faithful subjects.” The native Irish, lazy and bigoted by
Catholicism, could never develop the land or abandon their rebellious ways, but if
the king could encourage “good colonies of new inhabitants whose religion and mor-
als were opposed to those of the Irish,” the kingdom would soon realize its potential.
These Huguenot colonies would develop Ireland for the king even as they provided
security and purpose to the refugees.18
Despite high hopes, the Huguenots’ ambition for a network of colonies within
15 On the German refuge, see Lachenicht, Hugenotten in Europa und Nordamerika; Myriam Yardeni,
Le Refuge huguenot: Assimilation et culture (Paris, 2002), 111–150; and François David, “Les colonies
des réfugiés protestants français en Brandebourg-Prusse, 1685–1809: Institutions, géographie, et évo-
lution de leur peuplement,” BSHPF 140 (1994): 111–142.
16 “L’émigration en Irlande: Journal de voyage d’un réfugié français, 1693,” BSHPF 17 (1868): 591–
478, fol. 30, Bodleian Library, Oxford. Of course, this petition drew from the long ambitions by the
English to colonize Ireland. For an introduction, see Nicholas P. Canny, Making Ireland British, 1580–
1650 (Oxford, 2003).
Europe met several difficulties. Even in Brandenburg, offers for land declined after
1690, while logistical challenges limited the numbers moving to Ireland. More than
that, however, the political theory behind the colonies—that ethnic enclaves could
exist that were both within and without their host nations—proved difficult for many
Europeans to accept. Some English officials were nervous about large communities
of French people in their midst, preferring that the refugees disperse around the
country. German leaders generally upheld the French desire for a “nation apart,”
but even in Germany problems emerged. In the town of Erlangen, for instance, under
the rule of the margrave of Bayreuth, new German refugees from the Palatinate
arrived soon after the French, and by the end of the 1680s the French were a minority
in their own colony. And everywhere, from Switzerland to London, Huguenots
feuded with locals who saw the newcomers as competitors for jobs and resources.
In almost every case, the colonies were not really separate; they were artificial com-
munities in the middle of someone else’s country. In order to really fit in, the refugees
would need to assimilate, to surrender some of their Frenchness—an outcome that
alarmed those Huguenot leaders who imagined that colonies would help to preserve
the church in exile.19
There was another solution. Beyond Europe lay vast stretches of productive land,
from the forests of North America, to the jungles of South America, to fertile islands
stretching from the Caribbean to the Indian Ocean. These overseas territories were
harder to reach than Germany or even Ireland, but at least in the imperfect per-
ceptions of Europeans, they were nearly empty of people, and far from the political
and religious storms that threatened to destroy the remnants of the faith. Thus it is
not surprising that many refugees began dreaming of new worlds as soon as the
migration started. Huguenots, after all, were in some ways ideal overseas migrants.
During the sixteenth century, Protestants had led during the first, mostly unsuc-
cessful phase of French colonization, and during the following century, Huguenots
abounded in the Atlantic and beyond, both in Louis XIV’s navy and in the powerful
merchant families in La Rochelle, Bordeaux, and Normandy that dominated Atlantic
trade. In addition, a number of Protestants lived comfortably in the island colonies
of Saint-Christophe and Guadeloupe, where they found toleration, if not outright
acceptance; and a smaller cadre lived more discreetly in New France. Many Hu-
guenots knew the Americas well, and those who did not had easy access to infor-
mation.20
From the early 1680s onward, the Refuge buzzed with reports from overseas
19 Robin D. Gwynn, Huguenot Heritage: The History and Contribution of the Huguenots in Britain
(London, 1985), 110–143; Myriam Yardeni, “Refuge et intégration: Le cas d’Erlangen,” in Yardeni, Le
Refuge huguenot, 137–150.
20 On early Huguenot colonies in America, see Frank Lestringant, Le huguenot et le sauvage:
L’Amérique et la controverse coloniale, en France, au temps des guerres de religion (1555–1589) (Geneva,
2004); and Mickaël Augeron and Laurent Vidal, “Réseaux ou refuges? Logiques d’implantation du
protestantisme aux Amériques au XVIe siècle,” in Guy Martinière, Didier Poton, and François Souty,
eds., D’un rivage à l’autre: Villes et protestantisme dans l’aire atlantique (XVI e–XVII e siècles) (Paris, 1999),
31–61. On Huguenot merchants and mariners in the 1600s, see Bosher, “Huguenot Merchants and the
Protestant International in the Seventeenth Century”; and Mickaël Augeron, “Se convertir, partir ou
résister? Les marins huguenots face à la révocation de l’édit de Nantes,” in Augeron, Poton, and Van
Ruymbeke, Les huguenots et l’Atlantique, 1: 349–368. For Huguenots in the seventeenth-century French
Empire, see Leslie Choquette, “A Colony of ‘Native French Catholics’? The Protestants of New France
in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” in Van Ruymbeke and Sparks, Memory and Identity,
colonies. This was especially true in what one scholar has dubbed the “Atlantic Ref-
uge”—the communities of Huguenots in the British Isles and the Netherlands, who
faced the Atlantic and tended to come from parts of France that bordered the
ocean.21 Presses in Amsterdam, Rotterdam, and The Hague issued a number of
colonial promotional pamphlets, covering South Carolina and Pennsylvania, and a
comprehensive book by the Rotterdam minister Charles de Rochefort chronicled
opportunities in all the American colonies. In 1685, as London teemed with refugees,
elders of the Threadneedle Street Church approached the proprietors of both Penn-
sylvania and Carolina “to ascertain what they are offering” to prospective migrants
who could not expect employment or relief in the capital. Such activity was not lim-
ited to London or Amsterdam. Geneva printers also produced colonial tracts, and
manuscript descriptions of colonies, including a 1687 eyewitness report from New
England, circulated by way of the established network of Huguenot worthies.22
The boldest design for an overseas Huguenot colony transcended not just the
“Atlantic Refuge” but the Atlantic Ocean as well. The son of Louis XIV’s leading
admiral, Henri Duquesne had retreated in 1685 to the barony of Aubonne in the
Swiss Pays de Vaud, a hamlet on the shores of Lac Léman between Geneva and
Lausanne. The former home of the Huguenot traveler and writer Jean-Baptiste Tav-
ernier, the castle included a tower built in a distinct Near Eastern style, a monument
to Tavernier’s voyages. In this otherworldly setting, Duquesne made plans for his
own venture in the East Indies, a colonial vision that, had it come to pass, would have
changed the face of the Huguenot Refuge.23
Duquesne’s project involved moving refugees halfway across the world to an is-
land in the East Indies. In a number of tracts eventually collected in a single volume,
he laid out the rationale behind a Huguenot overseas colony. He began by noting
the proliferation of schemes: “Since the dispersion of the Reformed of France and
those of the Valleys of Piedmont,” he noted, “there has been nothing but talk of
Colonies and New Establishments.” These plans were flawed, however, by several
255–266; and Gérard Lafleur and Lucien Abénon, “The Protestants and the Colonization of the French
West Indies,” ibid., 267–284.
21 Bertrand Van Ruymbeke, “Un refuge atlantique? Les réfugiés huguenots et l’Atlantique anglo-
huguenote du marquis Henri du Quesne et la voyage du François Leguat (Paris, 1959). For more recent,
shorter treatments of the episode, see Paolo Carile, Huguenots sans frontières: Voyage et écriture à la
Renaissance et à l’Âge classique (Paris, 2001), 97–136; Philippe Haudrère, “À la recherche de l’ı̂le d’Éden,
aventures de protestants français sur la route des Indes orientales,” in Augeron, Poton, and Van Ruym-
beke, Les huguenots et l’Atlantique, 1: 389–395; and Randolph Vigne, “Huguenots to the Southern
Oceans: Archival Fact and Voltairean Myth,” in McKee and Vigne, The Huguenots, 113–124.
considerations. Most especially, there was the problem of diversity; such colonies
tended to be in the middle of other people’s countries. Many Huguenots would pre-
fer “to live among men of the same Language, of the same Nation and of the same
Religion, [among] which the humors consequently would be less incompatible, than
among those who were born in different countries, which is almost always a source
of divisions, of quarrels, and of many other inconveniences.” In addition, while
Duquesne appreciated the charitable efforts of Protestant princes, he recognized
that the refugees taxed resources, and hoped that Huguenots would no longer have
to wander “from country to country to find some asylum among their brethren and
some subsistence from their labor.” If these “poor sheep” could be “gathered into
a flock” once again, they could “eat their bread with joy, without being a charge to
their brethren.”24
Duquesne proposed that his flock be brought together in an overseas colony that
would be both French and Protestant. His location, initially secret but revealed at
the end of his pamphlet, would be Île Bourbon (modern-day Réunion), a place he
called the Isle of Eden “because its bounty and its beauty could make it pass for an
earthly paradise.” He proposed the creation of a French Calvinist aristocratic utopia
on this remote island, a “république” run by one “chef” with the aid of a senate of
godly people. He called for colonists who desired not a new “Peru,” a “country abun-
dant in pearls and precious stones,” but “a society composed of honest men, es-
tablished in a fertile and agreeable place with the blessings of health, liberty, tran-
quility of the conscience, justice, charity, and above all the hope of safety.”25
Duquesne’s proposal drew from the colonial plans that abounded in the Refuge,
but it departed from them in one important respect. The key point of locating the
colonies in Germany or even Ireland was to preserve the French Protestant church
for an eventual return to France. Duquesne rejected this goal. Looking into the
future, he believed a “general persecution in all of Europe” to be more likely than
“an imminent deliverance of the Church.” And even if Protestantism could be re-
established in France, Huguenots would remain minorities, “only tolerated, and not
dominant,” waiting for the next tyrannical monarch to withdraw that toleration.26 A
Protestant France was not to be—at least in France itself. Only in a new Eden beyond
the seas could Huguenots build their perfect society.
Duquesne’s vision of a Huguenot New World was far from unique. It drew from
several strands common in European thought in general and Calvinist thought in
particular. His description of Eden echoed French travel literature, but he also built
on the Protestant utopian ideas that had inspired colonial ventures from the Hu-
guenot efforts in the 1500s to Puritan settlements in New England, and that pre-
24 Henri Duquesne, Recueil de quelques mémoires servant d’instruction pour l’établissement de l’Ile
d’Eden (Amsterdam, 1689), avertissement. A version of the tract is included as an appendix in François
Leguat, Voyage et aventures de François Leguat et de ses compagnons en deux ı̂les désertes des Indes ori-
entales (1690–1698), ed. Jean-Michel Racault and Paolo Carile (Paris, 1995), 241–264; page citations
refer to this modern version.
25 Duquesne, Recueil de quelques mémoires servant d’instruction pour l’établissement de l’Ile d’Eden,
244, 247. His somewhat confused political theory represents the strange amalgam of republican and
monarchical ideas that characterized Huguenot political thought; for a summary see Myriam Yardeni,
“French Calvinist Political Thought, 1534 –1715,” in Prestwich, International Calvinism, 315–337.
26 Duquesne, Recueil de quelques mémoires servant d’instruction pour l’établissement de l’Ile d’Eden,
242.
dominated especially among French Protestant writers during the reign of Louis
XIV. This was to be a “New Jerusalem,” a colony meant to preserve the faith rather
than gather riches, where humble Christians would work for the glory of God, and
where Duquesne himself appeared as a Moses figure in a replay of the biblical exodus
to the promised land.27 Other contemporary refugees, both in print and in private
correspondence, mirrored Duquesne’s vision. Charles de Rochefort, for instance,
promoted America not as a place of tremendous wealth, but as the perfect refuge
for pious people who desired a simple competency. “Those who work the land,”
Rochefort wrote, “will be rewarded with bread.”28
This utopian impulse, a desire to create an ideal Protestant France on foreign
shores, captivated refugees and worried Huguenot leaders. Duquesne met a decid-
edly frosty reception from Henri de Mirmand when he promoted his colony to the
great leader of the Swiss Refuge. In a letter that is now lost, Mirmand apparently
complained that Duquesne’s scheme was impractical, and would provide more dan-
ger than security to those who boarded ships heading to the ends of the earth.29 While
Mirmand was probably sincere in his concern for the refugees, Duquesne’s scheme
surely raised other concerns with the leaders of the Huguenot senate, especially
Pierre Jurieu and his followers. To Jurieu, known for his apocalyptic speculations
as well as his political leadership, the Glorious Revolution and the start of the War
of the League of Augsburg of 1689 portended the imminent fall of the Antichrist and,
consequently, the return of Huguenots to France. That same year, Jurieu circulated
a letter claiming that refugees were languishing in Rotterdam and London, that they
were dying in large numbers, and that those in Switzerland were better off staying
where they were.30
Despite some official qualms, however, the promise of new worlds appealed to
many ordinary refugees. As early as 1679, Huguenot refugees sought aid in London
to pay for passage to the colonies, and the numbers only increased as the situation
in France deteriorated.31 In 1687 and the first months of 1688, the French Committee
granted money for at least 152 indigent refugees to gain passage to colonies in “the
27 On Duquesne’s intellectual roots and religious vision, see Carile, Huguenots sans frontières, 97–103;
and especially Jean-Michel Racault, L’utopie narrative en France et en Angleterre, 1675–1761 (Oxford,
1991), 63–67, who posits commonalities between Duquesne’s vision and the contemporaneous “Fun-
damental Constitutions of Carolina” designed by John Locke and Anthony Ashley Cooper, the first earl
of Shaftesbury.
28 Rochefort, Recit de l’estat present, 4. On utopianism in French Protestant thought and writing, see
Myriam Yardeni, Utopie et révolte sous Louis XIV (Paris, 1980), which includes Duquesne and Leguat
as examples of utopian thinkers; Yardeni, “Protestantisme et utopie en France au XVIe et XVIIe
siècles,” Diasporas: Histoires et sociétés 1 (2002): 51–58; Racault, L’utopie narrative en France et en Angle-
terre ; and Laetitia Cherdon, “L’imaginaire comme refuge: Utopies et prophéties protestantes à l’époque
de la révocation de l’édit de Nantes” (thèse doctorale, Université de Liège, 2009).
29 Duquesne’s response to the letter survived; see Duquesne to Mirmand, February 19, 1689, Col-
which quickly appeared in an English translation and made a great splash throughout the Protestant
world. His letter is partially reprinted in Chambrier, Henri de Mirmand et les réfugiés de la révocation
de l’édit de Nantes, 100. For a useful summary of Jurieu’s views of the Glorious Revolution, see Dodge,
The Political Theory of the Huguenots of the Dispersion, 34 –93. On tensions of thought between Jurieu
and Duquesne, see Racault, L’Utopie narrative en France et en Angleterre, 64 –66.
31 George B. Beeman, “Notes on the City of London Records Dealing with the French Protestant
Refugees, Especially with Reference to the Collections Made under Various Briefs,” PHS 7 (1901–1904):
108–192, here 154.
West Indies”—usually Carolina, but also Virginia, New England, New York, and
New Jersey.32 This evidence cannot be used to establish the actual numbers of Hu-
guenots who crossed the ocean: after all, some of those who received money may
never have traveled, and many other emigrants may have traveled using their own
or private funds.33 But whatever the numbers, there is no doubt that many refugees
were captivated by the idea of distant colonies. When a French official made a tour
of English ports in 1686, he found that dozens of refugees had already left Bristol
and Plymouth, heading “to the islands of America.”34
Reports from the colonies occasionally reflected Duquesne’s utopian vision. For
instance, in 1688 a refugee wrote from Carolina to a correspondent in the Neth-
erlands, laying out conditions there. Like Duquesne’s projected colony, he wrote,
Carolina was not a place of easy riches. But if one was willing to work, and wanted
only to pass his or her life “calmly,” the colony was perfect. He invited those refugees
“who still have some belongings, who want to work, who are resolved to suffer, and
who prefer peace to anything else.”35 The path to Eden, as Calvin himself would have
confirmed, was not an easy one, but the trials of the wilderness appealed to many
Huguenots.
NONETHELESS, MORE THAN UTOPIAN DREAMS inspired the exodus of Huguenots beyond
Europe. The refugees appeared at a fortuitous moment, during a time of state for-
mation and imperial expansion. The ideal example came from France itself, where
Jean-Baptiste Colbert put forward a particular vision of what one scholar has labeled
an “information state,” but the “revolution in political economy” extended to Eng-
land, the Netherlands, and beyond, where statesmen discovered what the Anglo-
Irishman William Petty called “political arithmetic,” the attempt to use numbers to
build a more rational state.36
32 These numbers come from MS 2/1-2/6, Royal Bounty Papers, Huguenot Library, University Col-
lege London. While refugees went everywhere, the most popular destination was South Carolina, with
New York a close second. For studies of the American refugees, see especially Jon Butler, The Huguenots
in America: A Refugee People in New World Society (Cambridge, Mass., 1983); on South Carolina, see
Van Ruymbeke, From New Babylon to Eden; and on New York, see Neil Kamil, Fortress of the Soul:
Violence, Metaphysics, and Material Life in the Huguenots’ New World, 1517–1751 (Baltimore, 2005); and
Paula Wheeler Carlo, Huguenot Refugees in Colonial America: Becoming American in the Hudson Valley
(Brighton, 2005). For a good analysis of the historiography, see Geneviève Joutard and Philippe Joutard,
“L’Amérique huguenote est-elle un paradoxe?,” BSHPF 151 (2005): 65–90.
33 Butler, The Huguenots in America, 41–67; the best estimates of the total number of transatlantic
migrants are in Bertrand Van Ruymbeke, “Le Refuge dans les marches atlantiques,” Diasporas: Histoire
et sociétés 18 (2011): 30– 48, here 31–32. However, these numbers are limited by the fact that many
migrants traveled in small groups and were not recorded in official records. For a great resource that
allows a partial reconstruction of the migration, see “Site de la Base de données du Refuge huguenot,”
Laboratoire de recherches historiques Rhône-Alpes (LARHRA), http://www.refuge-huguenot.fr/.
34 “Memoire sur qui concerne les François de la religion pretendue reformée,” HSP 7 (1901–1904):
160–162.
35 Molly McClain and Alessa Ellefson, “A Letter from Carolina, 1688: French Huguenots in the New
World,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 64, no. 2 (2007): 377–394, here 393–394.
36 On Colbert, see Jacob Soll, The Information Master: Jean-Baptiste Colbert’s Secret State Intelligence
System (Ann Arbor, Mich., 2009); on Petty, see Ted McCormick, William Petty and the Ambitions of
Political Arithmetic (Oxford, 2009). In general, see Steve C. A. Pincus, “A Revolution in Political Econ-
omy?,” in Maximillian E. Novak, ed., The Age of Projects (Toronto, 2008), 115–140. For a wonderful
exposition of how English leaders understood numbers, see William Deringer, “Calculated Values: The
Huguenot refugees fit into these plans because they were prospective new sub-
jects, and because they had special skills that European leaders believed could aug-
ment the power of the state. Especially in England, writers lauded the benefits of
a large population, and routinely lamented that their own numbers were too small.
More people could produce more things, thus improving the nation’s all-important
balance of trade. They could also serve in armies and settle territories that had emp-
tied due to war or natural disasters. Some writers advocated attracting and natu-
ralizing immigrants with particular skills, as in silk manufacturing, silversmithing, or
furniture making—all traditional Huguenot strengths.37 While their status as per-
secuted Protestants did not hurt, these tangible talents made Huguenots especially
attractive to European leaders.
While the European competition for subjects was nothing new, by the 1680s it
had acquired a global dimension as well. Both Colbert and his English rivals viewed
overseas colonies as important contributors to the good of the state. “Foreign plan-
tations” could provide commodities unavailable in Europe—especially raw materials
that could be manufactured in Europe by domestic laborers. Beyond that, colonial
subjects could consume manufactured goods from the home country, and overseas
trade ensured the development of a robust shipping industry that employed thou-
sands. The only problem was the loss of people; if the plantations drained too much
of the home kingdom’s population, the costs would outweigh the benefits.38
In this context, the creation of the Huguenot diaspora must have appeared to
some as a gift from God. As one political economist aptly stated, “The Numbers of
Refugees here, and in other Countreys near us, are Objects in this Case, both for
our Charity to them, and Advantage to our selves.”39 Many of the refugees had
important skills, but they also were extra people who could accomplish tasks that
others did not or could not do, such as establishing peripheral settlements thousands
of miles from Europe. Finally, the refugees seemed ideally suited to help with two
particular goals that animated English and (to a lesser extent) Dutch imperial plans.
For decades, English thinkers especially had aimed to make raw silk and wine on
American and other foreign plantations, hoping to develop a domestic supply of two
important commodities that came mostly from France or the Far East. Huguenots
Politics and Epistemology of Economic Numbers in Britain, 1688–1738” (Ph.D. diss., Princeton Uni-
versity, 2012).
37 For examples of this discourse, see Josiah Child, A New Discourse of Trade (London, 1693); Slings-
by Bethel, The Interest of the Princes and States of Europe (London, 1681); Carew Reynel, The True
English Interest; or, An Account of the Chief National Improvements: In Some Political Observations, Dem-
onstrating an Infallible Advance of This Nation to Infinite Wealth and Greatness, Trade and Populacy, with
Imployment, and Preferment for All Persons (London, 1674). On population engineering during this pe-
riod, see Steve Pincus, “From Holy Cause to Economic Interest: The Study of Population and the In-
vention of the State,” in Alan Houston and Steve Pincus, eds., A Nation Transformed: England after the
Restoration (Cambridge, 2001), 272–298; Daniel Statt, Foreigners and Englishmen: The Controversy over
Immigration and Population, 1660–1760 (Newark, Del., 1995). On Huguenots in silk and silver, see Hugh
Tait, “London Huguenot Silver,” in Irene Scouloudi, ed., Huguenots in Britain and Their French Back-
ground, 1550–1800 (London, 1987), 89–112; Natalie Rothstein, “Huguenots in the English Silk Industry
in the Eighteenth Century,” ibid., 125–140; and on furniture, see Kamil, Fortress of the Soul, pt. 3.
38 Josiah Child laid out the terms of the debate in A New Discourse on Trade, 164 –208. For the
orthodox view that overseas colonies depleted the state, see [William Petyt], Britannia Languens, or a
Discourse of Trade: Shewing the Grounds and Reasons of the Increase and Decay of Land-Rents, National
Wealth and Strength (London, 1680), 121.
39 Francis Brewster, Essays on Trade and Navigation (London, 1695), 18.
came from a country with a history of silk and wine production. They could easily
bring their expertise to the plantations and turn those ambitions into realities.40
These dreams of overseas silk and wine plantations predated the Huguenot ex-
odus by some decades. The first English and French explorers in North America
invariably noted the abundance of wild vines and mulberry trees (whose leaves pro-
vided sustenance to silkworms), and the two products usually appeared on early lists
of possible staples. Particularly in Virginia, authorities attempted to bring in foreign
experts to help with the projects. In 1629, for instance, a Huguenot nobleman, the
baron de Sancé, proposed to settle a colony of his countrymen in Virginia “to plant
vines and olives there and make silk.”41 In the 1650s, when a number of planters were
pushing agricultural diversification over a dependence on tobacco, another leading
Virginian brought in Armenian consultants to try and develop the colony’s silk in-
dustry.42 None of these schemes succeeded, but they inspired imitators. By the time
of the Revocation, many English projectors envisioned a new Mediterranean in the
American South, a place where foreign migrants and English people would collab-
orate to produce these difficult crops that had proved so lucrative in Europe.
By the time refugees began flooding into European cities, these agricultural am-
bitions had moved beyond Virginia to newer colonies such as Carolina and Penn-
sylvania. Colonial projectors sent the Lords of Trade numerous proposals for silk or
wine plantations peopled by French Protestants. During the 1670s, the Carolina pro-
prietor Anthony Ashley Cooper, the earl of Shaftesbury, sent his secretary, John
Locke, on a tour of France, where Locke educated himself on the proper methods
of production in the two industries—evidently in order to apply this expertise in
Carolina.43 Huguenots themselves understood that they could use their assumed
expertise in these critical endeavors to gain advantages. In one of the first petitions
for land and refuge in Carolina, for instance, two refugee leaders noted that the
combination of Carolina’s climate and the Huguenots’ expertise would create great
dividends for their patrons. The refugees, after all, were “accustomed to the culture
of vines, of grain, of cloth, and in many places the making of Silk.”44 This rhetoric
became ubiquitous: most refugees were quick to note their facility with the wine and
silk industries (even those people who, like merchants or artisans, had little expe-
40 These efforts have not received nearly enough attention from historians, but see Ben Marsh, “Silk
Hopes in Colonial South Carolina,” Journal of Southern History 78, no. 4 (2012): 807–854. Scholarship
on wine has tended to focus on colonial and domestic demand for foreign (especially French and Por-
tuguese) wines. See David Hancock, Oceans of Wine: Madeira and the Emergence of American Trade and
Taste (New Haven, Conn., 2009); Charles Ludington, The Politics of Wine in Britain: A New Cultural
History (Basingstoke, 2013).
41 Antoine de Ridouet, baron de Sancé, to [Sec. Dorchester], [June?] 14, 1629, CO 1/5, no. 14, TNA.
42 The Reformed Virginian Silk-Worm; or, A Rare and New Discovery of a Speedy Way, and Easie Means,
Found Out by a Young Lady in England, She Having Made a Full Proof Thereof in May, Anno 1652
(London, 1655), 38–39. For a similar example, see [Edward Williams], Virginia: More Especially the South
Part Thereof, Richly and Truly Valued (London, 1650).
43 Locke’s manuscript notes finally saw publication during a later period of intense silk and wine
speculation in the colonies; John Locke, Observations upon the Growth and Culture of Vines and Olives:
The Production of Silk, the Preservation of Fruits (London, 1766). On the context of this writing, see David
Armitage, “John Locke, Carolina, and the Two Treatises of Government,” Political Theory 32, no. 5 (2004):
602–627, here 611–612.
44 “Humble Proposition faite au Roy et à Son Parlement pour donner retraite aux Étrangers protes-
tans et au proselites dans ses Colonies de L’amerique et sur tout en la Carolina, March 1679,” in A. S.
Salley, ed., Records in the British Public Record Office Relating to South Carolina, 1663–1684 (Columbia,
S.C., 1928), 63–64.
rience with cultivation), while English officials seldom failed to note the benefits that
the refugees could bring to the colonial sector of the economy.
Perhaps the most ambitious plan appeared in the papers of Henry Compton, the
bishop of London and a Huguenot advocate. During the 1690s an anonymous pro-
jector penned a French-language proposal for a transatlantic community of Hugue-
nots. Responding to overcrowding of refugees in London, the author first suggested
that they be dispersed to the seaside town of Little Yarmouth in East Anglia, where
they would contribute to the expansion of manufacturing in a thinly inhabited part
of the kingdom. At the same time, the author recommended that another settlement
be founded in Carolina, consisting of “people who are not found proper for England,
like wine-growers and makers of silk, and men of Letters” who could teach Chris-
tianity to the Indians. These two refugee communities would be linked: the colonists
in Carolina would consume the goods manufactured in Little Yarmouth, and the
wine, silk, and other produce from Carolina would be transported back to East An-
glia.45
It was not only writers and officials in the center who championed such schemes.
In the colonies themselves, silk and wine projects abounded. The writings of one
Huguenot traveler, known only as Durand of Dauphiné, illustrate the popularity of
these designs. Durand escaped France in 1686, and even before he reached England
he had caught the “Carolina fever” so common to refugees who read promotional
pamphlets about the colony. With a female companion, he planned to set himself
up in the silk business, but bad weather and the death of his companion ended those
plans, and Durand ended up in Virginia instead. This was all for the best, the French-
man concluded when he saw the Piedmont, a salubrious country that reminded him
of southern France and, notably, abounded in wild vines. Numerous planters offered
to sell him tracts of their land for colonies of Huguenot vignerons. Exploring the hilly
country on the Rappahannock River, Durand noted that “fine vines could grow upon
these slopes & doubtless the wine would be excellent.” Durand himself never re-
turned, but a number of Frenchmen did receive aid from the French Committee to
establish themselves in Virginia shortly thereafter.46
Colonial projectors north and south of Virginia made similar plans to use Hu-
guenots to turn the colonies into wine- and silk-producing bastions. In Pennsylvania,
William Penn hired a French Protestant to experiment with winemaking in the col-
ony, which he assumed would succeed as long as there were “good vignerons” who
knew the proper techniques.47 Farther south in South Carolina, the gentleman and
eventual governor Sir Nathaniel Johnson took the lead in both silk and wine ex-
45 “Memoire touchant la maniere de recevoir & employer les proselites & protestans,” n.d., Raw-
Religion: With a Description of Virginia and Maryland, ed. Gilbert Chinard (New York, 1934), 126–127,
154. For Huguenot migrants to Virginia in the 1680s, see Royal Bounty Papers, MS 2/5; and Fairfax
Harrison, “Brent Town, Ravensworth and the Huguenots,” in Landmarks of Old Prince William: A Study
of Origins in Northern Virginia, 2 vols. (Richmond, 1924), 1: 177–196.
47 Recüeil de diverses pieces, concernant la Pensylvanie (The Hague, 1684), 59. William Penn had high
hopes that many Huguenots would choose Pennsylvania, but while the apothecary Moises Charas did
travel to Philadelphia, few others followed him. For Penn’s wooing of the refugees, see Richard S. Dunn
and Mary Maples Dunn, eds., The Papers of William Penn, 5 vols. (Philadelphia, 1981–1987), 2: 108,
285–286, 3: 34; for a theory on his lack of success, see Butler, The Huguenots in America, 52–53.
periments. “He makes yearly 3 or 400 l. in Silk only,” wrote an observer in the early
eighteenth century, and also had a “considerable vineyard.” Probably not coinci-
dentally, he also championed Huguenot immigration, both as governor of the Lee-
ward Islands in 1686 and later in South Carolina. His plantation, named “Silk Hope,”
ended up in the hands of a Huguenot planter named Gabriel Manigault, and hosted
efforts by refugees to make that elusive commodity as late as the 1760s.48
By the dawn of the eighteenth century, dozens, if not hundreds, of Huguenots
were growing grapes and raising silkworms from Pennsylvania to Carolina. Virtually
every piece of Huguenot correspondence from the colonies during the 1680s and
1690s mentioned the challenges, as well as the great promise, of turning America into
a new Mediterranean. In 1683 a Huguenot settler in South Carolina noted that he
had planted “vines which do wonderfully well,” and hoped to produce better wine
than in Europe with the right cuttings. Later reports were somewhat less sanguine:
a Swiss settler in 1690 admitted that most of his wine experiments had come to
naught, while silk had proved difficult because his mulberry trees were not big
enough.49 Despite so many false starts, these attempts to use Huguenots to make silk
and wine in British America continued, even to the eve of the American Revolution.
As a result, the largest numbers of refugees clustered in the southern mainland col-
onies—places that, in terms of latitude, matched the regions of southern France
where the desirable commodities originated.50
These schemes were not limited to either North America or the British Empire.
The most interesting wine-growing experiment occurred at the Dutch provisioning
station at the Cape of Good Hope, where leaders of the Dutch East India Company
had long encouraged agriculture to provide sustenance to the Company’s ships and
other sojourners on the voyage to Asia. As early as October 1685, just before the
Revocation, the Company’s leading “Assembly of the Seventeen” suggested that the
Cape be settled with “French Refugees of the reformed religion, especially those
understanding the cultivation of the vine.”51 The Dutch goals for their South African
outpost were somewhat less ambitious than English designs in America. Rather than
supply the world with wine, they merely hoped that a small settlement colony at the
Cape could help provision their ships with wine and grain. The Company advertised
for settlers through the established networks of Huguenot leaders—the letter that
48 John Oldmixon, The British Empire in America, Containing the History of the Discovery, Settlement,
Progress and Present State of All the British Colonies, on the Continent and Islands of America, 2 vols.
(London, 1708), 1: 379; John Archdale, A New Description of That Fertile and Pleasant Province of Car-
olina (London, 1707), 30. On Johnson’s efforts to bring Huguenots to the Leeward Islands, see Johnson
to the Committee on Trade and Plantations, October 22, 1688, CO 153/4, 75, TNA. Johnson sponsored
a naturalization law for Huguenots in South Carolina; see Van Ruymbeke, From New Babylon to Eden,
126–128. On Silk Hope plantation, see Marsh, “Silk Hopes in Colonial South Carolina.”
49 “Lettre de Louis Thibou,” September 20, 1683, South Caroliniana Library, Columbia (reprinted
Arlin C. Migliazzo, To Make This Land Our Own: Community, Identity, and Cultural Adaptation in Purrys-
burg Township, South Carolina, 1732–1865 (Columbia, S.C., 2007); and Bobby F. Edmonds, The Hu-
guenots of New Bordeaux (McCormick, S.C., 2005).
51 “Extract from the Resolutions of the Assembly of the Seventeen, Dated 3rd October, 1685,” in
C. Graham Botha, The French Refugees at the Cape, 3rd ed. (Cape Town, 1970), 126. My understanding
of the Cape during this period depends largely on Ward, Networks of Empire, 127–177.
Paul Reboulet sent to his colleague in Geneva provides one example of how word
of the colony spread—and they also published a proclamation offering free passage,
land, and assistance to any refugee willing to make the trek to the Cape and engage
in agriculture. Several hundred did so, and among other things they dedicated them-
selves to making wine and brandy in what proved to be a salubrious climate for
European grapes. By the late 1690s, “Cape wine” had become, along with grain and
tobacco, the colony’s biggest source of revenue. The Huguenot traveler François
Leguat found cultivated vineyards everywhere during the late 1690s, though he con-
tended that the wine was “none of the best.”52 In imitation of this design, the English
East India Company proposed a similar refugee wine-growing scheme in their out-
post of St. Helena in 1689, but most of the nine migrants abandoned their thankless
task and returned to Europe within a few years.53
Aside from making wine and silk, imperial officials had other ambitions for the
refugees that proved even more ironic given the Huguenots’ desire for peace and
stability. The last decade of the seventeenth century was wartime in Europe, as the
members of the League of Augsburg, led by England’s William III, the former prince
of Orange, attempted to check Louis XIV’s ambitions. Many Huguenots served in
the English, Dutch, and Prussian armies, driven by the desire for employment as well
as service to the larger Protestant cause. This pattern extended beyond Europe as
well, where refugees increasingly came to settle in war zones—places that were very
different from the peaceful retreats imagined by propagandists.54
One of these theaters of war and settlement lay in the backcountry between New
England and New France in North America. New England did not on its face re-
semble Eden; the country was less fertile and welcoming than locations farther south.
Nonetheless, at least one Huguenot visitor presented it as a place where simple
people could find peace and security. “If our poor refugee brethren who understand
farming should come here,” he wrote, “they could not fail to live very comfortably,
and gain property; for the English are very lazy, and are proficient only in raising
their Indian corn and cattle.” Hundreds settled not just in Boston, but in several
backcountry towns, including Oxford, Massachusetts, where they could farm and
produce naval stores such as tar and turpentine.55
52 Reboulet to Tronchin, October 4, 1687, Archives Tronchin, vol. 50, BGE; Reglement, De
l’assemblée des Dix-sept, qui representent la Compagnie des Indes Orientales des Paı̈s-Bas, suivant lequel
les Chambres de le ditte Compagnie auront pouvoir de transporter au Cap de Bonne Esperance des Personnes
de tout sexe de la Religion reformée, entre autres les refugies de France, & des Vallees de Piedmont (n.p.,
n.d.), Collection Court, 17U, fols. 207–208, BGE; François Leguat, The Voyage of François Leguat of
Bresse to Rodriguez, Mauritius, Java, and the Cape of Good Hope, 2 vols. (London, 1891), 2: 277. On the
profitability of Cape wine, see H. C. V. Liebbrandt, ed., Precis of the Archives of the Cape of Good Hope:
Letters Dispatched, 1696–1708 (Cape Town, 1896), 3, 22, 25, 48– 49, 69, 104, 136.
53 Hudson Ralph Janisch, ed., Extracts from the St. Helena Records (Jamestown, St. Helena, 1885),
44 – 45, 49; London to St. Helena, April 5, 1689, India Office Records, E/3/92, fol. 17v, British Library;
“Instructions for Mr Poirier Supervisor of All the Companyes Plantations Vineyards and Cattle in the
Island of St. Helena,” ibid., fol. 18v; Trevor W. Hearl, “St Helena’s Forgotten Frenchmen: The Huguenot
Wine Project,” in Hearl, St Helena Britannica: Studies in South Atlantic Island History, ed. A. H. Schu-
lenberg (Ramsbottom, 2013), chap. 3. I am indebted to Dr. Schulenberg for sharing this article with me.
54 On Huguenots in military service during this period, see Matthew Glozier, The Huguenot Soldiers
of William of Orange and the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688: The Lions of Judah (Brighton, 2008); and
Matthew Glozier and David Onnekink, eds., War, Religion and Service: Huguenot Soldiering, 1685–1713
(London, 2007). Evidence of Jurieu’s spy network can be found in SP 84/220, TNA.
55 “Narrative of a French Protestant Refugee in Boston,” in Baird, History of the Huguenot Emigration
Little did they know, but the refugees had settled in a war zone. Oxford lay near
the frontier between New England and New France, and this was in fact no coin-
cidence. Officials in the region frequently encouraged new settlers to populate fron-
tier areas where they could serve as a buffer in case of French or Indian attacks, but
English colonists proved reluctant to do so, and during the late 1680s many back-
country inhabitants deserted their settlements, leaving much of the region exposed.
Beyond being placeholders on the frontier, New Englanders also thought that French
Protestants could perform another special service: they could convert Indians to
Protestantism and therefore help to counteract some of the gains that the Jesuits had
made in New France. By turning the natives into Catholics, officials believed, the
French had managed to attract thousands of Indians to support their cause. To win
North America, the English would have to do the same—and who better to combat
the efforts of French Catholics than French Protestants? In 1688 the New England
Company, a network of Protestant ministers, granted funds to Oxford’s minister,
Daniel Bondet, to set up an Indian mission for “teaching the Indian children the
English Tongue and the principalls of the christian religion.” This would be a par-
ticularly fruitful plan, the Company’s president said, “among those Indians that con-
verse with the French,” since the Huguenots knew the language and “may be able
to convince them of the deceits of the Popish and necessity of heart Religion.”56
This part of New England soon became the center of spiritual as well as literal
warfare—with French combatants on both sides. The Protestants launched a rhe-
torical volley in 1690, in the form of a French-language tract written by Boston’s
Huguenot minister Ezechiel Carré. Titled Echantillon, de la doctrine que les Jésuites
ensegnent aus sauvages du nouveau monde, pour les converter (A Sample of the Doctrine
That Jesuits Teach to the Savages of the New World to Convert Them), the tract re-
printed Jesuit catechisms recovered in Albany, revealing the underhanded methods
the Catholics used in their missions. Prefaces by Carré and Boston minister Cotton
Mather laid out a rationale for a more honest Protestant missionary effort, one that
would end the Jesuits’ dominance and cement the English hold on the backcountry.
One of Carré’s purposes was to establish the imperial importance of the Hugue-
nots—this time as makers not of wine and silk, but of new Christians.57 This spiritual
design failed, however, in the face of actual volleys by the French and their Abenaki
Indian allies. In August 1696 a war party descended on Oxford, “burnt and Distroyed
severall of the people, and the rest [were] forced to fly, and leave their habitations,
to America, 2: 393.The New England Refuge has attracted somewhat less attention than other refugee
communities in North America, but see Butler, The Huguenots in America, 71–143; Lauric Henneton,
“L’autre refuge: Huguenots et puritains en Nouvelle-Angleterre,” in Augeron, Poton, and Van Ruym-
beke, Les huguenots et l’Atlantique, 2: 103–112; and Catherine Randall, From a Far Country: Camisards
and Huguenots in the Atlantic World (Athens, Ga., 2009).
56 Robert Boyle to Joseph Dudley and William Stoughton, 1688, Company for the Propagation of
the Gospel in New England, Letter Book, 1688–1761, 2, Alderman Library, University of Virginia; Rob-
ert Thompson to Stoughton, November 2, 1692, ibid., 12. For an introduction to the English and French
missionary efforts in the region, see James Axtell, The Invasion Within: The Contest of Cultures in Colonial
North America (New York, 1986).
57 The tract appeared in Boston in 1690. For a translation and analysis, see Evan Haefeli and Owen
Stanwood, “Jesuits, Huguenots, and the Apocalypse: The Origins of America’s First French Book,”
Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 116 (2006): 59–120.
and Improvements.”58 At the same time, Bondet proved to be less than a successful
missionary, and while another minister continued his work, most of the proselytes
had left by 1700, claiming that Catholicism was “more beautiful” than Protestantism,
and the Jesuits gave them “silver crosses to put around their necks.”59 So much for
the Huguenot missionary effort: utopian ambitions and imperial designs proved
equally untenable in the American backcountry.
Similar strategic considerations also affected the outcome of Henri Duquesne’s
expedition to the East. Despite his utopian goals, Duquesne depended on state pa-
tronage, and he attained it by playing up the ability of Huguenots to win or secure
territories claimed by the king of France. The Mascarene Islands, where Duquesne
found his Eden, lay in an important strategic location. The Dutch preferred to hold
on to the islands as provisioning stations for Dutch East India Company ships trav-
eling from the Cape of Good Hope to India, and whatever their own presence, they
wanted to make sure that the French did not obtain new territories in their midst.
Since the 1660s, the French had maintained small settlements at Île Bourbon, only
a few leagues from the Dutch post at Mauritius. On the eve of war in 1688, the
Company captured a cache of documents illustrating the French designs on the Mas-
carenes.60
This sense of alarm provided the backdrop for Duquesne’s entreaties to the
Dutch States General in early 1689. His printed tract claimed that the Isle of Eden
was uninhabited and that the emigrants intended only to find a peaceful retreat and
escape the conflicts of Europe. An early draft specifically contradicted the notion,
apparently circulated in France, that his real goal was to raise an army of refugees
to fight against the Sun King.61 However much he protested, Duquesne’s petition for
assistance to the States General revealed that French suspicions were correct. He
proposed to “arm several ships” and “seize a small island . . . that the French have
occupied for several years.” He claimed that as persecuted people, the Huguenots
could claim the islands based on the “right of reprisal”—essentially, winning the
island would help compensate the refugees for their property that had been “un-
justly” seized by Louis XIV and the dragonnades. The States General supported the
mission, seeing that in this case the Huguenot desire for revenge dovetailed with
Dutch plans for expansion. Over the first months of 1689, the Dutch East India
Company agreed to provide transportation, while Duquesne, his brother, and a few
agents worked to find inhabitants for the new colony.62
The tension between Duquesne’s utopian visions and his bellicose intentions ap-
peared clearly in the sad and dramatic denouement of the project. In early 1690, a
58 “Petition of Gabriell Bernon of Boston, lately arrived from thence, 18 Dec 1696,” CO 5/859, no.
49, TNA.
59 Mary de Witt Freeland, The Records of Oxford, Mass.: Including Chapters of Nipmuck, Huguenot
and English History from the Earliest Date, 1630 (Albany, N.Y., 1894), 157–158; Jacques Laborie to the
Earl of Bellomont, June 17, 1700, in James Phinney Baxter et al., eds., Documentary History of the State
of Maine, 24 vols. (Portland, Maine, 1889–1916), 10: 59–60.
60 These documents are in VOC 4026, Nationaal Archief, The Hague.
61 “Projet de M. le Marquis du Quesne touchant une nouvelle Colonie en l’Isle Eden,” Collection
equipagie om het eylant Bourbon ofte Mascarenhas op de franschon te ucuperen, met een advis van
de Oostinde compe. daer op, overgegeven in den jaere 1689” (French translation), Staten Generaal,
12581.40, Nationaal Archief.
scouting group of eight Frenchmen went out to fulfill the vision of their admiral and
their Dutch sponsors. According to the later published narrative of the group’s
leader, François Leguat, Duquesne’s utopian propaganda served as a major moti-
vator for the migrants; decades later, Leguat still quoted extended portions of
Duquesne’s treatise, and he claimed that hundreds of ordinary refugees gathered in
Amsterdam to set out for the colony, though Duquesne decided not to send them
until he knew that the location would be secure.63 For the ship’s captain, a Huguenot
from the Île de Ré named Antoine Valleau, however, the mission was more a re-
connaissance trip than the beginning of a plantation. After sailing near Île Bourbon,
Valleau decided not to take the colonists to the island, probably because the French
presence was larger than he had anticipated; instead, he dropped them off on the
nearby island of Rodrigues. Then he returned to Bourbon, where he kidnapped a
local African man named Arré and began to gather intelligence about the island.
After another stop in Cape Town, Valleau fell into the hands of the French. While
the captain himself revealed only a few details of the plan, his captured companion
was more forthcoming. Valleau had revealed to Arré that “Sr. Duquesne designed
to seize the said Isle bourbon, and that he had taken him to present him to the said
Sr. Duquesne in order to inform him about the state of the island.” After visiting
Duquesne, they intended to go to the Cape Colony, where “there are 400 French
refugees . . . who say that they await the said Sr. Duquesne to offer themselves to
go and conquer Île Bourbon.”64
Valleau’s capture effectively ended the design. The seven survivors on Rodrigues
languished there for two years before they built a boat, traveled to Mauritius, and
spent several more years in prison after getting into a conflict with a Dutch governor
who suspected the men of being agents of Louis XIV.65 Duquesne’s plan had failed:
he had not found a new Eden or expanded the Dutch Empire, and while scholars
have tended to blame Duquesne himself for the debacle, at least one contemporary
voice pointed the finger elsewhere. On the blank page that begins the sole surviving
copy of Duquesne’s tract, an unknown hand wrote that “everything was almost
ready” when “the States [General] revoked the donation and thus caused the failure
of the project, to the great prejudice of Mr. Duquesne.” Perhaps the Dutch realized
that they were unlikely to gain much from the endeavor, especially when Valleau
failed to return with intelligence. Whatever the reasons for the failure, Duquesne’s
career as a colonial projector was over. He returned to Switzerland and lived the rest
of his life in relative obscurity.66
63 Leguat, The Voyage of François Leguat of Bresse, 1: 40– 42. The most recent edition of Leguat’s
book is the French edition edited by Racault and Carile (Paris, 1995). The English edition is based on
the original eighteenth-century translation, but expertly edited by Samuel Pasfield Oliver.
64 “Interrogatoire du nommé Valleau de l’Isle de Rhé,” May 20, 1692, C31, fol. 186, Archives na-
Leguat of Bresse, vol. 2. For scholarly accounts see Rainer, L’utopie d’une république huguenote du mar-
quis Henri du Quesne ; and Alfred North-Coombes, The Vindication of François Leguat: First Resident and
Historian of Rodrigues (1691–1693), 2nd ed. (Rose-Hill, Mauritius, 1991). North-Coombes put to rest
the long suspicion, even now sometimes represented in scholarship, that Leguat’s account was a work
of fiction.
66 The manuscript note appears immediately after the title page in the copy of Duquesne, Recueil
de quelques mémoires servant d’instruction pour l’établissement de l’Ile d’Eden, in the Bibliothèque Na-
tionale de France, Paris. On Duquesne’s later life, see Rainer, L’utopie d’une république huguenote du
THE FINAL ACT OF THIS STORY played out in the time of the Huguenot senate’s most
important battle. As representatives of European powers met in the Dutch city of
Ryswick to negotiate an end to the War of the League of Augsburg in 1697, refugee
leaders sought to make sure that their cause endured. One petition reminded Wil-
liam III of “the deplorable state of the Reformed Protestants of France, chased from
their country, deprived of their property, transported by force to barbarous lands,
many placed in convents, prisons, or galleys, by a tyranny that has never been known
before.” The Protestant powers had a duty to these people, to use their position in
negotiations to help bring about the return of toleration in France, so that the ref-
ugees could finally return home. Despite so much lobbying, however, the negotiators
did little for the Huguenot cause, mostly because English authorities feared that the
French would demand they make similar concessions to English Catholics. In fact,
Louis XIV did invite the refugees to return and regain their property, but only if they
converted to Catholicism. For those who wanted to retain their faith, the doors to
the homeland remained closed, perhaps for good.67
The disappointment of Ryswick represented the end of the Huguenot senate’s
golden age. While individual refugees remained prominent, the Huguenot cause
retained little of the popularity it had enjoyed in the heady days around the Re-
vocation of the Edict of Nantes. Across the Refuge, Protestant neighbors tired of
the strangers in their midst. In Switzerland, the English ambassador noted, peasants
and the poor were “extremely inragd agt the fr[ench] Refugiéz, chiefly by reason of
the . . . present dearth” of grain.68 Matters were not much better in England itself,
where ordinary people resented what they believed to be exorbitant aid going to the
Protestant newcomers who competed with natives for jobs and charity. Partly as a
result, collections for the refugees in England nearly dried up in the late 1690s. One
published appeal claimed, “The Number of those that came over since the said Re-
vocation, is so great, and their Wants so extream, that all the Maintenance they can
afford them, bears no Proportion with the pressing Necessity they are groaning un-
der.” Without aid, the refugees would soon be reduced to begging in the streets.69
Many found themselves in the position of one Monsieur Sondreville, who told au-
thorities in Zurich that he had “wandered through all of Europe in search of bread”
but “could no longer find help in any place.”70
This meant, above all, that refugees such as Sondreville found themselves at the
mercy of states and empires that had less enthusiasm for their cause. No longer
lauded as Protestant heroes, and no longer supported by a powerful refugee network,
Huguenots had few opportunities left, and these tended to be in thankless places
where no one else would settle. While the refugees’ dreams of Eden remained, and
marquis Henri du Quesne, 33– 40. While he rarely took a leading role in the Refuge, he was occasionally
visible, both in lobbying during the peace negotiations in Ryswick in 1697 and in later campaigns for
Huguenots who labored in the Sun King’s galleys.
67 “Requête des réfugiés français au roi d’Angleterre avant la paix de Ryswick,” Collection Court,
17M, fol. 134, BGE. The refugees also presented a similar petition to Louis XIV himself; see TT 430,
fol. 124, Archives nationales de France, Paris.
68 Thomas Coxe to the Earl of Nottingham, February 23/13, 1692, SP 96/9, TNA.
69 The Case of the Poor French Refugees ([London], [1697?]), 2.
70 M. Sondreville to Zurich comité, n.d., E 1 25.18: Franz. Angelegenheiten, 1699 Dez.-1703,
their thoughts of returning home diminished, the realities of empire reduced their
options. Nowhere was this more apparent than in the last overseas settlement scheme
of the century, a collaboration between English, Huguenot, and Swiss interests that
ultimately transported several hundred refugees to an abandoned Native American
village on the Virginia frontier.71
This scheme originated in the visions of an English physician and colonial gov-
ernor named Daniel Coxe. Sometime during the 1680s, Coxe inherited the rights to
a half-century-old royal grant for a colony he called “Carolana.” The bounds of his
claim stretched across much of North America, and included territories that had
already been claimed by the French and Spanish, not to mention the English pro-
prietors of Carolina. Coxe’s vision combined the aspirations of all the previous ref-
ugee colonies in one package. He envisioned his colony as a vehicle to produce silk
and wine for the empire. The American interior was “naturally dispos’d to produce
admirable Vines,” he noted, while “an incredible quantity” of silk “may be raised in
this Country, wch abounds with mulberry trees both white and red.” In such a par-
adise, “those that understand the Silk trade, as many of the Refugees do, conclude
that in a short time great quantities may be made there.”72 In addition to its agri-
cultural promise, the colony would be a strategic asset against the French, who had
a clear design to surround the English colonies in North America by expanding from
the St. Lawrence River south to the Mississippi. Properly settled with good Prot-
estants, Coxe told the king, Carolana would act as “a Sort of Barrier between the
French and your Majesty’s Subjects in those parts.”73
In order to populate his colony, Coxe tapped into existing networks of Huguenot
gentlemen desperate to find new refuges in this time of crisis. One of his leading
partners was Charles de Sailly, a coordinator of Duquesne’s Isle of Eden project who
had since worked as an agent for refugees in Ireland. Along with a nobleman, the
marquis de la Muce, Sailly pledged to create a colony of “distressed Protestants
Refugees” who would become “very chargeable to his Majesty” in England, but in
America could work toward “enlarging the bound of his Empire.”74 Coxe and his
partners aimed to gather hundreds, if not thousands, of distressed refugees, and
fragmentary evidence suggests that they had no trouble finding willing migrants.
Sailly’s partner—a “M[onsieur] Reboulet,” perhaps the minister himself or a rel-
ative—found seventy-two Huguenots in Bern who were willing to migrate to “Flor-
ida,” though after a grueling trip to Rotterdam they found that Sailly had departed
for London without them, leaving them “in such a deplorable state, that they would
all perish of misery and hunger without the aid of some charitable people who had
71 For an overview, see David E. Lambert, The Protestant International and the Huguenot Migration
and by the French La Louisiane (London, 1722), 50, 74 –75; “An Account of the Commodities of the
Growth and Production of the Province of Carolana alias Florida,” CO 5/1259, no. 24, TNA; [Daniel
Coxe], Proposals for Settling a Colony in Florida ([London, 1698]).
73 “Opinion of the Board of Trade,” CO 5/1288, 139, TNA. On the larger context, see Verner W.
of Many Protestants Refugees, Come and Coming Every Day from beyond Sea,” CO 5/1259, no. 30,
TNA.
assisted them.”75 In the meantime, Huguenots in New York also expressed an in-
terest in removing to what they called “Meschasipi,” driven by a conflict with a gov-
ernor who did not give the refugees the respect they believed they deserved.76
The plan unraveled quickly. The migrants from Bern waited in vain for Sailly’s
return, and then, with aid from the Dutch States General, departed for Germany and
Ireland.77 A group of Huguenot gentlemen left in one of Coxe’s ships to find a spot
for a new colony, but instead found a French warship in the mouth of the Mississippi
River. After some saber-rattling, the two ships parted ways, but not without dem-
onstrating the possible dangers of relocating in a place already claimed by Louis
XIV.78 Even the English Board of Trade recognized that settling Huguenots in Caro-
lana could result in more dangers than benefits. Without the aid of a “constant mil-
itary force . . . for their protection,” the settlers “would be lyable to be molested or
attack’d by those of the different Religion, who bear no good will to them.”79 With
all these discouragements, Coxe and his refugees decided to depart instead for Vir-
ginia, to a smaller grant of land that Coxe also held on the border between that colony
and North Carolina in Lower Norfolk County. This design seemed to have some
chance of success. Supported by collections from the bishop of London, the refugees
gathered in London and, on several ships that left in late 1699 and early 1700, headed
at last for the New World.80
On their arrival in Virginia, however, the refugees faced another surprise. Gov-
ernor Francis Nicholson and his allies unilaterally declared that the land set out for
the migrants was not suitable for them. It was “low Swampy ground, unfit for planting
and Improvement,” they reported back to the Board of Trade, “so that to send
Frenchmen thither that came from a dry and Serene Clymate were to send ’em to
their Graves.”81 Instead, Nicholson decided to locate the newcomers in a remote
backcountry community called Manakin Town, located just beyond the fall line of
the James River. Given the previous imperial purposes of Huguenot settlements, the
location made sense. The refugees could defend the colony’s borders from Indians
75 Nathaniel Weiss, “Le mirage de la Floride (1698–1699),” BSHPF 39 (1890): 142–145, 329.
76 Gabriel Bernon to the Consistory of the French Church of New York, March 27, 1699, in Col-
lections of the Huguenot Society of America, Volume 1 (New York, 1886), 338–339.
77 Weiss, “Le mirage de la Floride,” 329.
78 On this voyage and the encounter on the Mississippi, see “Coxe’s Account of the Activities of the
English in the Mississippi Valley in the Seventeenth Century,” in Clarence Walworth Alvord and Lee
Bidgood, eds., The First Explorations of the Trans-Allegheny Region by the Virginians, 1650–1674 (Cleve-
land, 1912), 229–250, here 247; d’Iberville au ministre, February 26, 1700, C13A 1, fol. 225, Archives
nationales d’Outre-Mer; Bertrand Van Ruymbeke, “A Dominion of True Believers Not a Republic for
Heretics: French Colonial Religious Policy and the Settlement of Early Louisiana, 1695–1730,” in Brad-
ley G. Bond, ed., French Colonial Louisiana and the Atlantic World (Baton Rouge, 2005), 83–94.
79 “Opinion of the Board of Trade,” CO 5/1288, 142, TNA.
80 On the details of their departure, see R. A. Brock, ed., Documents, Chiefly Unpublished, Relating
to the Huguenot Emigration to Virginia and to the Settlement at Manakin-Town (Richmond, Va., 1886);
Privy Council to William III, March 7, 1699[/1700], Fulham Papers, 11, fol. 103, Lambeth Palace Library,
London.
81 “Proposalls Humbly Submitted to the L’ds of ye Councill of Trade and Plantations for Sending
Ye French Protestants to Virginia, 1698,” in Brock, Documents, Chiefly Unpublished, Relating to the
Huguenot Emigration to Virginia and to the Settlement at Manakin-Town, 6. See also Nicholson to the
Board of Trade, August 1, 1700, CO 5/1312, no. 1, TNA. For scholarly perspectives on Manakin Town,
see Lambert, The Protestant International and the Huguenot Migration to Virginia; and James L. Bugg,
Jr., “The French Huguenot Frontier Settlement of Manakin Town,” Virginia Magazine of History and
Biography 61, no. 4 (1953): 359–394.
and French, and they would also live under the patronage of Nicholson’s ally William
Byrd, the major landowner in those parts. In addition, the new colony lay at the heart
of prospective wine country, and indeed the Huguenots did soon produce “excellent
wine,” according to one report, “which will be very much to their own advantage,
and to the colony.”82 The colony existed, in other words, to satisfy the whims of
imperial officials far more than the needs of the refugees themselves.
One of these migrants had a particularly good view of this transition, the shift
from Eden to empire. The son of a merchant in Guyenne, Jacques de la Case spent
much of his life in transit. Before the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, he served,
like many young French Protestants, in the army of the elector of Brandenburg be-
fore signing up for Duquesne’s Isle of Eden expedition in 1689. After several years
on Rodrigues and several more in Dutch captivity in Mauritius and Batavia, he re-
turned to Amsterdam and signed up for a new expedition to Virginia, where he
arrived in 1701. Aside from a brief will, La Case left no testimony of his experiences,
but secondhand accounts suggest that he was a headstrong, fiercely independent
man. He feuded with the captain on the ship headed toward the East Indies, lam-
basting him for having abjured his faith in France, and he participated in a factional
struggle in the Manakin Town church that ended with part of the community re-
locating to North Carolina. Despite all his talents and experience, however, La Case
was a pawn; his foreign masters moved him around the world to realize goals that
had little to do with charity or the Protestant cause, and everything to do with the
development of the Dutch and English states.83
To be sure, many of La Case’s Huguenot neighbors survived and even thrived in
the global Refuge. They did so, however, by blending in. While Huguenots in English
and Dutch colonies remained French, speaking their language and maintaining their
faith in their own churches and homes, they soon abandoned the goals of worthies
such as Mirmand and Duquesne. These communities would exist not as French bas-
tions, remnants of the church in exile, but as small collections of French people
pursuing their own lives and interests. This was no surprise, as authorities frequently
encouraged or required the Huguenots to assimilate. When refugees in the Cape
Colony asked for their own magistrate in 1692, for instance, Governor Simon van
der Stel balked. Charging the refugees with being “lazy and indolent” and exploiting
their status as persecuted people, he reminded them of their oaths to the Company,
and cautioned them against making such appeals for independence.84 Some years
82 Oldmixon, The British Empire in America, 1: 306. See also Robert Beverley, The History and Present
State of Virginia, ed. Louis B. Wright (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1947), 134, 282.
83 On La Case, see Leguat, The Voyage of François Leguat of Bresse, 1: 6, 53; 2: 156, 194, 217–218;
Rainer, L’utopie d’une république huguenote du marquis Henri du Quesne, 52–53, 111–112, 115; Brock,
Documents, Chiefly Unpublished, Relating to the Huguenot Emigration to Virginia and to the Settlement at
Manakin-Town, 30, 37, 69–70. For his will, see Henrico County, Wills and Administrations (1662–1800),
92–93, Library of Virginia, Richmond. In some documents his name is spelled “La Caze.” I am grateful
to Dan Ludington for pointing me toward La Case’s will.
84 “Resolution, 28 November 1689,” reprinted in Botha, The French Refugees at the Cape, 151–152.
On the larger context, see also Pieter Coertzen, The Huguenots of South Africa, 1688–1988 (Cape Town,
1988), 93–95. Most scholarship on South African Huguenots has stressed their rapid assimilation under
a colonial policy that specifically discouraged the use of French. However, recent scholarship has dem-
onstrated some degree of cultural survival. For an interesting demographic analysis based on one family,
see Laura J. Mitchell, Belongings: Property, Family, and Identity in Colonial South Africa—An Exploration
of Frontiers, 1725–c. 1830 (New York, 2009), chap. 5. For a comparative analysis, see Thera Wijsenbeek,
later, the Virginia Council chastised the French because in petitions they “frequently
call themselves the French colony,” implying that “their said Settlem[en]t is to be
under a distinct Governm[en]t.” The governor ordered that they “not hereafter use
the title of a Colony” and present their petitions in English.85 Maintaining political
autonomy was too difficult in someone else’s empire, and many Huguenots were all
too happy to exchange independence for affluence. Some refugees remained em-
bedded in global networks, but these networks increasingly focused on trade rather
than politics. Writing to a family member in France on the death of Louis XIV in
1716, the New York merchant Thomas Bayeux admitted that he would never return
to his homeland, “so well established in this country and so attached here” were he
and his family. Success and comfort for merchants such as Bayeux undermined the
political goals that had animated the Refuge in earlier decades.86
While the Huguenot Eden never came to pass, the actual history of the global
Refuge had implications for future religious migrants in the Atlantic world. During
the eighteenth century, more persecuted and downtrodden people crossed the
oceans. Like the Huguenots, they used the language of political economy and na-
tional interest to win adherents to their causes; the “poor Palatines” of 1708–1709,
for instance, echoed earlier arguments that “the increase of People is a means of
advancing the wealth and Strength of a Nation.”87 As in earlier times, states de-
pended on transnational networks to manage the movement of these people, but the
migrants usually followed in the Huguenots’ footsteps, heading to the edges of col-
onies where they could labor to realize some longstanding strategic or economic goal.
Virginia governor Alexander Spotswood created his “Germanna” in the Piedmont,
where he hoped to produce wine and mine for silver, while Samuel Waldo’s failed
German settlement in Maine would have made pitch, turpentine, and other naval
stores. These designs lived on even to the eve of the American Revolution, from the
mixed Huguenot-German town of New Bordeaux, South Carolina—yet another at-
tempt to jumpstart the American wine industry—to the ill-fated colony of Greeks
and Minorcans in New Smyrna, Florida, or even the experiments involving Acadian
farmers from Saint-Domingue to Poitou.88 Contrary to Paul Reboulet’s vision, the
“Identity Lost: Huguenot Refugees in the Dutch Republic and Its Former Colonies in North America
and South Africa, 1650 to 1750—A Comparison,” South African Historical Journal 59 (2007): 79–102.
85 “A Collection of Several Matters Relating to the French Refugees from the 12th of March 1701/2,”
CO 5/1312, no. 40.lxi, TNA. Since Jon Butler’s The Huguenots in America put forth the paradigm of
Huguenot disappearance, other scholars have made persuasive cases that French culture and religion
lasted far longer than previously believed; see especially Carlo, Huguenot Refugees in Colonial America;
Kamil, Fortress of the Soul; and Van Ruymbeke, From New Babylon to Eden. Whatever the fate of families
and individuals, however, there is no doubt that Huguenot communities in colonial America lost their
distinctive character by the end of the eighteenth century, if not earlier.
86 Thomas Bayeux to Pierre du Buisson, March 10, 1715/16, 2 E 38, Archives départementales du
Calvados, Caen, France; and for the larger context, Luc Daireaux, “Un Normand à New York: Le Refuge
huguenot vu à travers la correspondance de Thomas Bayeux (1708–1719),” in Augeron, Poton, and Van
Ruymbeke, Les huguenots et l’Atlantique, 2: 135–146. For analysis of these Huguenot merchant networks,
see Bosher, “Huguenot Merchants and the Protestant International in the Seventeenth Century,” and
Lüthy, La banque protestante en France de la révocation de l’édit de Nantes à la Révolution.
87 London Gazette, March 31–April 4, 1709, quoted in Alison Olson, “The English Reception of the
Huguenots, Palatines and Salzburgers, 1680–1734: A Comparative Analysis,” in Vigne and Littleton,
From Strangers to Citizens, 481– 491, here 486.
88 For these various examples, see William J. Hinke, “The 1714 Colony of Germanna, Virginia,”
Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 40, no. 4 (1932): 317–327; Wokeck, Trade in Strangers, 20–21;
Huguenots did not spread the gospel to the ends of the earth. In the long run, they
did not even succeed in preserving their churches. They had, however, served as
unwitting evangelists of empire.
Robert L. Meriwether, The Expansion of South Carolina, 1729–1765 (Kingsport, Tenn., 1940), 252–254;
Bernard Bailyn, Voyagers to the West: A Passage in the Peopling of America on the Eve of the Revolution
(New York, 1986), 451– 461; and Christopher Hodson, The Acadian Diaspora: An Eighteenth-Century
History (New York, 2012).