"The Pains I Took to Save My/His Family": Escape Accounts by a Huguenot Mother and Daughter after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes

Abstract

Before dawn on an April day in 1687, six children of the Protestant noble family Robillard de Champagne slipped among the wine casks belowdecks of an English eighteen-tonner and made their escape from La Rochelle to Devon. Their mother and eldest brother traced the same route to exile in July. Ten months later the father fled overland to Holland. The baby sister was left behind. The pattern of the Champagne family's escape was, for all its drama and complexity, unexceptional. Protestant fugitives in the era of the revocation of the Edict of Nantes commonly emigrated in family fragments, children preceding parents, women acting independently of their fathers and husbands, over multiple routes, creating permanent separations because some family members fled while others did not. Perhaps as many as 150,000 Huguenots left France during the 1680s in every imaginable configuration of kin and nonkin, grouped and solitary. The escape permutations were sketched, in microcosm, on board the ships that carried as contrabandJacques Fontaine, a ministry student from Saintonge, and Jean Migault, a schoolmaster from