Legacy of the Sacred Harp

Chapter 16. The Huguenots of Saintonge

169 Chapter 16 The Huguenots of Saintonge With an eye on the clock before leaving to pick up Mother at the airport, I sat down to read the summary of Huguenot history that Barbara had sent. It was a small booklet prepared by the National Huguenot Society and meant to serve as preparation for the Huguenot Society lecture and luncheon on Saturday. I scanned the beginning pages searching for names or dates that could establish a benchmark. I saw references to Calvin, the Reformation, the Renaissance, Catherine de Medici, Henry IV, and Louis XIV. A few evocative facts flashed across my mind: the Medici family, bankers to all of Europe, was said to have funded the Renaissance, and Louis XIV built the Palace of Versailles to house ten thousand people. The summary said Renaissance ideas came across the Alps and found fertile ground at the University of Paris where Calvin was studying. Margaret of Navarre, sister of king Francis I of France, supported the movement and was in sympathy with the views of Martin Luther at the time his writings were condemned by the French Parliament. All other books and writings that Parliament thought contained heresy were forbidden, and they subsequently gave orders that all heretical material must be sought out and destroyed. The Bible was one of the outlawed books. The same fears that obsessed the king and the clergy in england equally disturbed the court and the church in France. When it was translated into French, even the bourgeoisie could read the scriptures in their spoken language. For the first time, the Bible was understood as the instruction book to form a personal relationship with God. An anti-Catholic pamphlet printed in Switzerland and distributed in France alarmed the king to the point that he felt the reform movement had to be crushed. Many of the reformers, derisively called Huguenots (from a German word eidgenossen, or eidgenots, meaning rebels or confederates) were executed. Others were exiled from France. Despite persecution and political rulings against the Protestant Huguenots, the reform movement grew. Parliament then passed an edict Legacy of the Sacred Harp 170 decreeing that anyone who gave solace, support, or refuge to a member of the Reformed religion was guilty of high treason. The booklet from Barbara continued with Catherine de Medici and the Massacre of Saint Bartholomew’s Day to the coming to the throne of Henry of Navarre, who, as Henry IV of France, issued the edict of Nantes, which gave the Protestants protection from persecution. Times of peace and prosperity blossomed under Henry IV and continued into the reigns of the Bourbon kings. It was Henry’s grandson, Louis XIV, who revoked the edict of Nantes on the crucial day of October 22, 1685. At that point on the page, Barbara had placed a yellow stick-on note that said, “Read to the date 1685.” According to John Wilson’s and Carine’s Dumas genealogy book, it was in the autumn of 1685 that our Dumas ancestor had escaped France; the stage was set to hear the rest of the story at the lecture on Saturday. Mother and I waited to meet Barbara at our assigned table. On the customary name tags, the guests were asked to write the surname of his or her ancestry. I looked in vain for another Dumas descendant and noticed that some had written two or more names. A middle-aged couple seated at our table explained that when they found records of marriages and baptisms, they’d established kinship to several families. “I ran into someone I know, a neighbor with Huguenot roots.” Barbara said as she sat down at our filling table. “She said her mother’s name had been Dabney. It originally had a French spelling, D-apostrophe-a-u-something or other… the Americans made some changes.” “That’s happened to all of us,” said a woman seated next to her. “The english mangled the French pronunciations, spelling the names on legal documents as they sounded in english. We had a speaker a number of years ago who handed out a lengthy list of name derivations. The list is probably still available. You might find you have more French connections than you would imagine, and you’d have to add an extra name tag.” “We should add the name Faure along with Dumas,” Mother said. “Our Dumas family genealogy says that Faure was the maiden name of the mother of our first Huguenot ancestor in America...