The English dragonnades

The Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 marked a watershed in French history. For nearly a century after the Edict's promulgation by Henri IV in 1598, Protestant Huguenots had been tolerated, the fruit of social and ideological exhaustion after the Wars of Religion. With the Revocation the full force of persecution was unleashed. Tens of thousands of Huguenots were killed, forced to convert to Catholicism, or fled abroad. The Revocation, and the long wars waged by William III and the duke of Marlborough against French domination of Europe, firmly fixed in the minds of eighteenth-century English people the notion that France exemplified popery and despotism, and that England was a beacon of Protestantism and liberty. It is true that some years before the Revocation this attitude was already taking shape, as anxieties about the international and domestic ambitions of Louis XIV grew. The French invasion of the Spanish Netherlands in 1667; the impact of William of Orange's propaganda during the Third Dutch War of 1672–3; the placing of a wooden shoe, signifying French popery, oppression, and poverty, under the chair of the Speaker of the House of Commons in 1673; and the news of the first dragonnades in the early 1680s; these were all markers in the growth of English hostility to French tyranny.

And yet there was a tradition of thought that was more favourable to the reputation of France, which survived until a remarkably late stage. The profoundest ambiguity interrupting what, to English Protestant minds, should have been a simple moral contrasts between popish persecution abroad and Protestant liberty at home, was the repression, within England, of Puritan nonconformity under the Clarendon Code. In England Protestant Dissent was outlawed and punished, while the France of the Edict of Nantes could still be offered as a model of religious peace across the divide even of the Reformation itself. It is true that repression in England varied according to the exigencies of national policy and the inclinations of local magistrates and bishops, but it is no less true that it peaked in the first half of the 1680s, in the aftermath of the failure of the Whig movement. By 1683 the leaders of the Dissenters were convinced that nothing less was aimed at than their outright obliteration.