LA ROCHELLE AND ITS STORY.

Otago Witness, Issue 2509, 16 April 1902, Page 66

LA ROCHELLE AND ITS STORY.

(Sunday at Home.) From the d:ite of the siege, in 1628. to the middle of the eighteenth century. La Rojhelle w is t>he scene of the defiant policy r,f Richelieu, the Uniting designs, of Charles I and lii« Minister, Buckingham, and the continuous cruelties which lasted so late as 1720, when several of the old watchtowers of this city were \ised as- Royal prisons or loathsome dungeons. From La Rochtlle many a Huguenot, captive for conscience"** sake, embarked by order of Louis XIV in the galley ships to endure a lifelong toil, often ending in happy release by death, or to have his faith conBtantly put to the rack, as Roman Catholic chaplains weie appointed to these vessels in order to make conveits. The last galley slave wa.-, discharged about 1770. at the age of 80, having passed 27 years in this servitude, to which he had been condemned for his religious views. In the north transept of Winchester Cathedral a tablet is placed to Jean Serres a freed galley slave, -who was liberated through the influence of Queen !Anne. Neither age nor rank made any difference in the victims ; the child of 12 years and the veteran of 70 winters were equally the subjects of this cruelty. A brighter pictuie dawn* when we think of those vrho escaped these tortures, and from the Roohelle district several came and', nettled in Bristol oi the West of England. In the mayoi's chapel on College Green memories of the ' strangers " come vividly before us, as, they once worshipped here, and we can also recall the sympathy of good Bishop Ken and of Tielawny in their cause, the latter name long perpetuated in the famous lines of family tradition : And shall Trelawny die > Twenty thousand Cornish men "Will see the reason why' Of Bishop Ken, of Bath and WelK it is said that when £4000 fell to his Sec he gave great part of it to the French Protestants then under persecution, and it is known he caused collections to be made for the refugees in many parts of his diocese. His early travels m France just before the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes had made him acquainted with the coming struggle, and his compassion for what he saw there failed not when lie rose to exalted rank, but was extended ti> all fugitives to England. So. from th;>t -Citadel of Protestantism " in distant France, a large and important colony ha-, mingled with our own race, and their descendants, aie siill to be found in the nooks and corners' of the West, those who could recall by tradition the days of their ancestors, and those teinble times of danger and want. . . . Among a legion of names that could be traced around Rochelle are some of special interest. Paul Colonuez, a noted preacher, passed into England, and was appointed to • post oi honour by Archbishop Sancroft In 1686. Dcsaquliev. son c»f a pastor, became the friend of Newton, the astronomer, and was also a member of the Royal Society Bouhereau, intimately connected with the refuge settlement in Dublin, is associated with the grand series of manuscripts on .La Rochelle, once preserved in Ireland, and replaced amoju^ their own aicbiv-eo m this old

French city. From thence, memories of the times of Louis XTV and its direful results have been carried across to the New World, where the descendants of those who underwent many a hard trial live to remember the traditions of that eventful past.