The Anglo-French Entente In The Seventeenth Century Part 1

The Anglo-French Entente in the Seventeenth Century.

by Charles Bastide.

INTRODUCTION

Of late there have appeared on the literary relations of England and France some excellent books, foremost of which may be mentioned, besides the now cla.s.sical works of M. Jusserand, Dr. A. H. Upham's _French Influence in English Literature_ and Sir Sidney Lee's _French Renaissance in England_.

The drift of the main argument set forth in those several volumes may be pointed out in a few words. Up to the death of Louis XIV., France gave more than she received; but, in the eighteenth century, England paid back her debt in full. France, intended by her geographical position to be the medium through which Mediterranean civilisation spread northwards, continued by her contributions to the English Renaissance and the influence of her literary models on the Restoration writers, a work that historians trace back to Caesar's landing in Britain, Ethelbert's conversion to Christianity, and the triumph of the Normans at Hastings. But ere long the native genius of the people a.s.serted itself. Thanks to a series of lucky revolutions, England reached political maturity before the other Western nations, and, in her turn, she taught them toleration and self-government.

The French were among the first to copy English broad-mindedness in philosophy and politics; to admire Locke and Newton; and to practise parliamentary government.

To books that lead up to conclusions so general may succeed monographs on minor points. .h.i.therto partly, if not altogether, overlooked. In the following essays will be found some information on the life that Frenchmen led in England in the seventeenth century and at the same time answers to a few not wholly uninteresting queries. For instance: was it easy to journey from Paris to London, and what men cared to run the risk? Did the French learn and, when they settled in England, did they endeavour to write, English correctly? Though the two nations were often at war, many Englishmen admired France and a few Frenchmen appreciated certain aspects of English life; how was contemporary opinion affected by these men? Though England taught France rationalism in the eighteenth century, must it be conceded that rationalism sprang into existence in England? when English divines proved overbold and English royalists disrespectful, they might allege for an excuse that Frenchmen had set the bad example. Hence the importance of noticing the impression made by the Huguenots on English thought.

Since nothing gives a stronger illusion of real life than the grouping of actual facts, extracts and quotations are abundant. They do not only concern governors and generals, Cromwell and Charles II., but men of the people, an Aldersgate wig-maker, a Covent Garden tailor, a private tutor like Coste, and poor Themiseul, bohemian and Grub Street hack.

The danger of the method lies in possible confusion, resulting from the crowding together of details. But the anecdotes, letters, extracts from old forgotten pamphlets, help to build up a conviction in which the one purpose of the book should be sought.

The history of the relations of France and England in the past is the record of the painful endeavours of two nations to come to an understanding. Though replete with tragical episodes brought about by the ambition of kings, and the prejudices and pa.s.sive acquiescence of subjects, the narrative yields food for helpful reflections. In spite of mutual jealousy and hatred, the two nations are irresistibly drawn together, because, having reached the same degree of civilisation, they have need of each other; whereas the causes that keep them apart are accidental, being royal policy, temporary commercial rivalry, some estrangement too often ending in war through the selfishness of party leaders; yet the chances of agreement seem to grow more numerous as the years roll by; and the unavoidable happy conclusion makes the narrative of past disunion less melancholy.

The fantastic dream of one generation may come true for the next succeeding ones. Did Louis XIV. and William III. think that while their armies were endeavouring to destroy each other in Flanders, and their fleets on the Channel, some second-rate men of letters, a few divines who wrote indifferent grammar, a handful of merchants and skilled workmen were paving the way for peace more surely than diplomatists? The work of those cosmopolites was quite instinctive: they helped their several nations to exchange ideas as insects carry anther dust from one flower to another.

Voltaire was probably the first deliberately to use the example of a foreign nation as an argument in the controversy which he carried on against tradition and authority, and, in that respect, he proved superior to his more obscure predecessors.

It is a pleasure to acknowledge the help I have received while collecting material. My thanks are due above all to M. Mortreuil of the Bibliotheque Nationale, to whose unfailing kindness I owe much; and to M. Weiss, the courteous and learned librarian of the Bibliotheque de la Societe pour l'histoire du protestantisme francais. Nor shall I omit the authorities of the Bodleian Library and the British Museum. I desire also to express my thanks to Mr. W. M. Fullerton, Dr. F. A. Hedgc.o.c.k, Mr. Frederic Cobb, MM.

Lambin and Cherel.

I must add that the chapters on the political influence of the Huguenots, that appeared some years ago in the _Journal of Comparative Literature_, of New York, have been rewritten.

To the readers of _Anglais et Francais du dix-septieme Siecle_ an explanation is owing. If the original t.i.tle is retained only in the headlines, it is because, on the eve of publication, a book appeared bearing almost the same t.i.tle. They will, it is hoped, hail in the short-lived Anglo-French _entente_ of Charles II.'s time, the forerunner of the present "cordial understanding."

CHAPTER I

FROM PARIS TO LONDON UNDER THE MERRY MONARCH

"The French," wrote Jean-Jacques Rousseau, "are the most travelled people.

The English n.o.bility travel, the French n.o.bility do not; the French people travel, the English people do not." Strange as the fact appears, our forefathers in the seventeenth century, even as in the eighteenth, wandered over England as well as Spain or Italy, but they drew up their wills before setting out.

The n.o.bility travelled little; only a royal injunction would cause a gentleman to forsake Versailles; the amba.s.sadors left with reluctance. But there followed a suite of attaches, secretaries, and valets. One day, Secretary Hughes de Lionne had a mind to send his son to London. The young marquis was entrusted to the charge of three grave amba.s.sadors; good advice therefore he did not lack, and we must believe his journey was not altogether distasteful as he was seen to weep when the day came for him to return.[1]

Next to official envoys stood unofficial agents, gentlemen who preferred exile to a more rigorous punishment; lastly, mere adventurers.

Not a few Frenchmen came over to England on business purposes. The Bordeaux wine merchant, the Rouen printer, the Paris glovemaker, could not always trust their English agents when some difficult question arose. Cardinal Mazarin's envoy mentions in his dispatches the "numerous Bordeaux merchants in London, some of whom are Catholics."[2] At the Restoration there existed a kind of French Chamber of Commerce, and, as early as 1663, the amba.s.sadors extol the adroitness of one Dumas, who appears to have played the part of an unofficial consul-general.[3]

But there were travellers by taste as well as by necessity. Long before the word _globe-trotter_ was added to the English language, not a few Frenchmen spent their lives wandering about the world, to satisfy a natural craving for adventure. Men of letters had been known to travel before Voltaire or Regnard. Shall we name Voiture, Boisrobert, Saint-Amant, the author of _Moses_, an epic ridiculed by Boileau? Saint-Amant celebrated his journey in an amusing poetical skit in which he complains of the climate, the splenetic character of the people, the rudeness of the drama. But most of the travellers preferred to note their impressions in ordinary prose. Some published guides. Those narratives enable us to find out how a Frenchman could journey from Paris to London under the Grand Monarch.

Then, as now, the travellers had the choice between the Calais and Dieppe routes. According to their social status, they would set out in a private coach, on horseback, or in the stage coach. The latter was not yet the diligence, it was a heavy c.u.mbersome vehicle "neither decent nor comfortable," through the canvas cover of which the rain would pour.[4] It took five days to go from Paris to Calais. As travelling by night was out of the question, the traveller would put up at Beaumont-sur-Oise, Poix, Abbeville, Montreuil.

As soon as the traveller had pa.s.sed the gates of the capital, his adventures began. When the Swiss servant fell off his horse, every one laughed because he received no more consideration than a "stout portmanteau."[5] Then the roads were bad: the coach might upset or stick fast in the mud. Dangers had to be taken into account as well as inconveniences: in November 1662, Amba.s.sador Cominges quaintly congratulated himself upon avoiding "two or three s.h.i.+pwrecks on land,"

meaning that there were floods between Montreuil and Boulogne.[6] Another danger arose from the highwaymen who infested the country, and, in time of war, no one dreamed of leaving the shelter of a fortress such as Abbeville or Montreuil without getting previous information on the movements of the enemy in Flanders or Artois.[7]

A traveller will always complain of the inns; in the seventeenth century they seem to have been of more than Spartan simplicity: "We were no sooner got into our chambers," writes a distinguished traveller, "but we thought we were come there too soon, as the highway seemed the cleaner and more desirable place.... After supper, we retreated to the place that usually gives relief to all moderate calamities, but our beds were antidotes to sleep: I do not complain of the hardness, but the tangible quality of what was next me, and the savour of all about made me quite forget my supper."[8]

The ill.u.s.tration "On the road to Calais," taken from a contemporary print, gives a good idea of what an inn, the "Tin Pot" at Boulogne or the "Pet.i.t Saint-Jean" at Calais, then looked like. The scene is dreary enough, in spite of the picturesque bare-legged turnspit by the roaring wood-fire, the furniture is scanty, there are draughts, and the litter lying about spells slovenliness and discomfort.

In such a place, one must be as wary of one's fellow-travellers as of the rascally innkeepers. "One of the Frenchmen," Locke goes on to say, "who had disbursed for our troop, was, by the natural quickness of his temper, carried beyond the mark, and demanded for our shares more than we thought due, whereupon one of the English desired an account of particulars, not that the whole was so considerable, but to keep a certain custom we had in England not to pay money without knowing for what. Monsieur answered briskly, he would give no account; the other as briskly, that he would have it: this produced a reckoning of the several disburs.e.m.e.nts, and an abatement of one-fourth of the demand, and a great demonstration of good nature. Monsieur Steward showed afterwards more civility and good nature, after the little contest, than he had done all the journey before."

Those were minor difficulties next to what the traveller had to expect who was bold enough to cross the Channel. In 1609, Beaumont and Fletcher mention not without horror "Dover's dreadful cliffe and the dangers of the merciless Channel 'twixt that and Callis."[9] The pa.s.sengers crossed on what would appear now a ridiculously small bark, which belonged to the English Post Office. The boat, pompously named "a packet-boat," attempted the pa.s.sage twice a week, but did not always effect it. Even when the sea was calm the skipper had to wait for the tide before weighing anchor. If the tide turned in the night, the pa.s.sengers would set up in an inn outside the walls of Calais because the gates closed at sunset, and, as about the same time a huge chain was stretched across the harbour's mouth, they were compelled to reach by means of a small c.o.c.k-boat the bark anch.o.r.ed in the roads.

At last, the pa.s.sengers being safely on board, the sails are set. Hardly has the wind carried the packet-boat beyond Cape Grisnez when the swell becomes uncomfortably perceptible. Nowadays we cross the Channel on fast steamers, but progress which has given us speed has not done away with the chief discomfort. Even as we do, so our forefathers dreaded sea-sickness.

Locke, good sailor as he was, rather coa.r.s.ely jests at his fellow-traveller, the astronomer Romer: "I believe he will sacrifice to Neptune from the depths of his heart or stomach."[10] Those who have experienced the sufferings of a bad pa.s.sage will sympathise with the Frenchman Gourville. "I went on board the packet-boat," he writes, "to go to Dover; at two or three leagues out at sea, we were beset by a dead calm; as I was very ill, I compelled the sailors to let down a small skiff not ten feet long; and two of them having got into it with their oars, I had trouble enough to find room; hardly had we rowed two leagues, when a gale arose that scared my two sailors. I got to land nevertheless and, no sooner had I drained a gla.s.s of canary, than I felt well again."[11] On coming back, Fortune did not favour him. The North Sea that he had thus braved, took her revenge. "I travelled post to Dover where I went on board the packet-boat. The winds being against us, I felt worse than the first time, and it took me three weeks to recover."

The time of crossing varied considerably. "The Strait of Dover," wrote Coulon, "is only seven leagues wide, so that with a fair wind one can cross from one kingdom to the other in three hours."[12] But then the wind was seldom fair. Generally it took twelve or fourteen hours to sail from Calais to Dover. The pa.s.sengers always had to take the unexpected into account.

"At 6 in the evening," Evelyn records in his _Diary_, "set saile for Calais, the wind not favourable. I was very sea sicke. Coming to an anker about one o'clock; about five in the morning we had a long boate to carry us to land tho' at a good distance; this we willingly enter'd, because two vessells were chasing us, but being now almost at the harbour's mouth, thro' inadvertency there brake in upon us two such heavy seas as had almost sunk the boate, I being neere the middle up in water. Our steeresman, it seems, apprehensive of the danger, was preparing to leape into the sea and trust to swimming, but seeing the vessell emerge, he put her into the pier, and so, G.o.d be thanked, we got to Calais, tho' wett."[13] Thus delays were frequent enough; for which fogs, contrary winds, and storms were chiefly responsible. No one appears to have grumbled much at the loss of time: the age was not one of quick travelling, and worse might befall a pa.s.senger than tossing about the Channel on a cold night. Many a seventeenth-century packet-boat met with the fate of the _White s.h.i.+p_, when it did not fall into the hands of unscrupulous privateers. Under the Protectorate, the packet-boat was escorted by "a pinnace of eight guns";[14] but the improvident Government of Charles II. left the merchants to guard their s.h.i.+ps as well as they might.

Happy the pa.s.senger whose t.i.tle, fortune, family connections or mere impudence secured him a place on one of the royal yachts! He had nothing to fear from the insolence or greed of the seamen, and instead of setting foot on a filthy tar-bespattered deck, he found, according to the Duc de Verneuil, "rooms which were admirably clean with foot carpets and velvet beds."[15]

But the traveller lands on English sh.o.r.es. Hardly has he left the boat when the Custom-House officers are upon him. The alert and courteous officials one meets with nowadays at Dover or Newhaven have little in common with their predecessors of the Restoration. The latter were coa.r.s.e, ill-clad wretches bent on extorting from the travellers a pay that a needy Government held back. Useless to add, that they readily succ.u.mbed to the offer of a bribe. Even the Puritan Custom-House officers had been known for a consideration to wink at a forged pa.s.s. "Money to the searchers,"

observed Evelyn, "was as authentiq as the hand and seale of Bradshaw himselfe."[16]

When the Frenchman has got rid of these, he is confronted by the harbour-master, who demands the payment of a licence to pa.s.s over seas. Nor are his troubles at end: he needs must get the governor of the castle to affix his seal to the pa.s.s. If that exalted personage is out with the hounds, there is nothing to do but to await his return. There is not even the expedient of visiting the town to while away the time. Dover, in the seventeenth century, far from resembling the picturesque port we know closely nestling in a hollow of the white cliffs, held altogether "in one ill-paved street about a mile long" and lined with "tumbledown houses."[17]

What about the castle? "Built upon a chalky rock, very lofty and looking out to sea. It was formerly called the key to England, and, before cannon came into use, was considered impregnable; but at the present time it is used solely as a prison. It is placed too high for it to endanger any vessel, and by land it could not withstand half a day's regular siege."[18]

The hara.s.sed traveller must needs bend his steps to an inn, probably the French inn, kept by one Lefort and his capable wife.[19]

Travellers never landed at Folkestone: it was then "a small poor-looking town, inhabited by fishermen."[20] Skippers seldom preferred Rye to Dover, which greatly puzzled Frenchmen. "Rye is built on a hill at the foot of which is a pretty good harbour which might accommodate all kinds of s.h.i.+ps; but I cannot imagine why the haven is so neglected. I am sure the French or the Dutch would make it a very convenient haven, being at the mouth of a fine river. The port is blocked up by sandbanks, through the carelessness and idleness of the inhabitants and the selfish disposition of some of their neighbours, who have reclaimed from the sea a great part of the port and turned it into enclosed lands. But that is the people's business and not mine."[21]

At last the Frenchman, all formalities being disposed of, is free to pursue his journey. He may choose between a saddle horse or a coach. According to Chamberlayne, the charge for a horse was threepence a mile, besides fourpence a stage for the guide. The coach cost less: one s.h.i.+lling for five miles.[22] In a few hours the traveller would reach Gravesend and there he would take boat up to London Bridge.

Coulon gives a slightly different route: Dover to Gravesend via Canterbury, Sittingbourne, and Rochester; Gravesend to London via Dartford (spelt by Coulon Datford). By the way, he copies a sixteenth-century guide-book, Jean Bernard's _Traite de la Guide des Chemins d'Angleterre_ (1579).[23]

Travelling is both easier and quicker than in France, but there are dangers to look out for. "Take heed," cautions Jean Bernard, "of a wood called Shuttershyll (Shooter's Hill) or the Archers' Hill, very perilous for travellers and pa.s.sers-by on account of the thieves and robbers, who would formerly take refuge there." Even under the Merry Monarch, marauders lurked about every main road.

One of the guide-book writers, the Lyonnese Payen, has handed down to us a very curious computation, which it is worth while to transcribe:--

"TABLE OF THE ROADS, OF THE INNS AND THE EXPENSE TO BE INCURRED"

"FROM PARIS TO ENGLAND"

"_Dieppe_: 30 leagues.

Lodge at Place Royale and pay per meal, 20 sous.

_Rye_: 30 leagues.

Pay for the Channel crossing, 3 livres.