12 August, 2015
The history of Boughton House – which this summer opens its doors to the public as part of the Huguenot Summer – offers a fascinating glimpse into the religious confusions of the 17th century, and an intriguing account of the employment of Huguenot craftsmen (and craftswomen), which cannot have been welcomed by the silversmiths and other workers of the time.
The North Front of Boughton House is directly influenced by Daniel Marot, one of the key Huguenot architects/designers (see below for more on Marot).
The north front of Boughton House, one of the most impressive stately homes in England, is modelled on the French Palais de Versailles (indeed, it’s known as the ‘English Versailles’), Louis XIV of France’s vast palace, the construction of which Ralph Montagu, the first Duke of Montagu, would have observed when an ambassador to the French court. On inheriting Boughton House on the death of his father, Montagu set about rebuilding and refurnishing it, enlisting the cream of Huguenot expertise to populate it with silverware, woodwork, painting, frames …
A detail of a screen by Mark Anthony Hauduroy after a design by Daniel Marot, 1720.
There are a couple of delicious ironies in that last paragraph.
Louis XIV, as one of our previous blogs recounted, was the monarch responsible for revoking the Edict of Nantes and for the subsequent departure of hundreds of thousands of French Protestants (the Huguenots) from France: a huge brain drain of which Britain was a principal beneficiary. And Ralph Montagu, while not a Huguenot, was a Protestant who had the ear of the (secretly) Catholic Charles II and his wife, Catherine.
But, whatever your religious persuasion, if you are looking for people to work on your big project, you want the best you can get, ideally without having to pay the world for it. Ralph Montagu inherited Boughton House in 1684 and threw himself with immense enthusiasm into the conversion of the property that his father had started. So how convenient that his inheritance of Boughton came the year before the revocation of the Edict of Nantes and the start of the arrival on our shores of so many skilled French craftsmen. Already immersed in French culture and style from his days as ambassador, Ralph set about commissioning, among others, Daniel Marot, the architect, furniture designer and engraver famous for his work at Hampton Court Palace; the artist Louis Chéron, who is responsible for the ceilings painted throughout the State Rooms; Peter Rieusset, the joiner who laid 271 yards of innovative parquet de Versailles at Boughton; the carver and gilder Jean Pelletier; the silversmiths Pierre Platel and Louis Mettayer; and Louis XIV’s favourite artist, Jacques Rousseau. Many of these people were employed to furnish the Duke’s house in Bloomsbury, London (Montagu House, the site of the now British Museum), but many of their works are on display this summer at Boughton, along with the first A–Z of London (by Huguenot Jean Rocque), miniature portraits by Isaac Oliver and some superb weaponry by Lewis Barbar.
The title page of John Rocque’s Plan of London and Westminster. Rocque was the most sophisticated cartographer of the century and made an enormous contribution to the re-mapping of England (see below for more on John Rocque).
Silver sugar caster, the work of Paul de Lamerie (London, 1736). Paul de Lamerie qualified as a silversmith after the death of Ralph Montagu but is acknowledged as one of the great Huguenot craftsmen.
Details of the Huguenot exhibition at Boughton, which the Institut Français is supporting, can be found on the Boughton House website, where there is also an instructive interview with the exhibition’s curator, Paul Boucher. The Migration Museum Project has supplied two of the ‘contextualising’ panels to the exhibition, in an attempt to put the arrival of the Huguenots in the framework of migration to this country across the ages. The Independent has run a feature on the exhibition, which gives a detailed account of what there is to see.1
Nowadays people tend to speak in glowing terms about the influence of the Huguenots on British life and the extent to which they expanded the nation’s skill-set, increased its competitiveness, prepared the ground for the Industrial Revolution and generally wove their way (pun intended) into the fabric of the country. But in the clamour to celebrate the contribution of the Huguenots and their lasting legacy, it is worth sparing a thought for the people plying their trade in the 17th century – the silversmiths, weavers, goldsmiths and cabinet makers – who suddenly found themselves less in demand with the arrival of such skilled labour from Catholic France. Relatively little is known about the reaction of the indigenous workforce to the arrival of this European talent, but there are accounts of attempts to restrict the trading of Huguenot craftsmen. In 1711, for example, a petition was made to the Goldsmiths’ Company by ‘severall working goldsmiths, freemen of this Company’ complaining:
THAT partly by the generall decay of trade, and other ways by the intrusion of foreigners, severall of the workmen of the said Company have for the supports of their familys been put under the force of underworking each other, to the perfect beggary of the trade, and at length under the necessity of loading their worke with unnecessary quantitys of sother, to the wrong and pre-judice of the buyer, and the great discredit of the English workmen.
That by the admittance of the necessitous strangers, whose desperate fortunes obliged them to worke at miserable rates, the representing members have been forced to bestow much more time and labour in working up their plate than hath been the practice of former times, when prices of workmanship were much greater.
One outcome of these attempts to restrict trade may well be that a lot of Huguenot work was hidden, because the craftsmen, having no official entitlement to trade, sold their work to those who did – and these third parties then went on to pass the Huguenot work off as their own.
A pair of ‘over and under’ flintlock pistols by Lewis Barbar (active c1704–1741 – these are likely to be c1730), with turn-over barrels and safety catches. Each escutcheon is engraved with the Montagu crest (see below for more on Lewis Barbar).
It’s a shame that more isn’t known of the way in which Huguenot craftspeople in particular were received by the resident working population. In the absence of any clear information, the suggestion has to be that the two populations ended up accommodating themselves to each other in that ‘muddling along’ fashion that is often the British way. What seems to be clear is that, though there were riots against ‘the French’ in parts of England, there was generally less hostility shown to the Huguenot migrants than had (or has since) been shown to other groups. And the people who might understandably have been voicing complaints along the lines of ‘Those Huguenots … coming over here with their fancy ways and nicking our jobs’ would appear to have not been too damaged by their arrival in the longer term. It is abundantly clear that the country as a whole – on every conceivable level: economic, military, industrial, financial, cultural – benefitted dramatically from what has been dubbed ‘the quiet conquest’ of the Huguenots.
Further notes on Daniel Marot, John Rocque and Lewis Barbar
Daniel Marot had been working at the Gobelins tapestry workshops in Paris but fled France in 1684, arriving first in Holland, where he brought Louis XIVs’ court style to The Hague and Het Loo palaces. He arrived in England in 1694, a welcome addition to the network of Huguenot craftsmen. Highly influential in every area of design, he introduced to England the idea of the architect as interior designer, a notion followed later by William Kent and Robert Adam. Marot created significant designs for the royal palaces and gardens at Hampton Court and Kensington, and he created lavish interiors in the grand French manner for Montagu House. A significant amount of his Montagu panelling survives today at Boughton, where his influence can also be detected in the North façade. Marot’s designs heavily influenced furniture makers and were used by generations of the Pelletier family who worked extensively at Boughton and who played an important part in the development of rococo carving and frame making.
John Rocque: The Rocque family fled the Languedoc in Southern France and arrived in London in 1709 via Geneva, where John was born in 1705. John described himself as ‘dessinateur de jardins’, and his first publications in 1734 were meticulous plans of the royal gardens and parks at Richmond and Kew. He followed these with plans of Chiswick House, Hampton Court, Windsor Castle, Kensington Palace and Drumlanrig Castle, recording garden style before the advent of Capability Brown and the new natural landscape. Working in Huguenot Soho, he published his new map of London in 1746, attracting 246 subscribers, among them the Prince of Wales and the Duke of Montagu, to whom the overview page was dedicated. Its 24 sheets were extravagantly engraved in the latest French rococo style on large copper plates to the scale of 200 feet to the inch. The publication came with a separate A–Z street index (the first ever), which detailed 5,500 separate locations including squares, coal wharves, orchards, theatres, inns, distilleries, hospitals, prisons, asylums, schools and much more, including all 13 French churches. Rocque’s plans of English towns and their gardens remain some of the finest ever published and his pioneering UK road guides were used by many travellers. He died in London in 1762.
Lewis Barbar: Lewis (Louis) Barbar, a Huguenot from Poitou, came to London in 1688 and was naturalised in 1700. He became Gentleman Armourer to both George I and to George II. He died in 1741 and was succeeded by his son James. The best gunsmiths were Huguenots and they brought with them a hitherto unknown level of refinement, technical skill and workmanship, making London-French-made guns the best in the world. There was a huge market for pocket size pistols for personal protection and a large black market in French counterfeits grew up.
1 Boughton House is worth visiting in any case, of course. Much of the original structure and many of its 17th-century features have been preserved, largely as the result of the House ‘sleeping’ through two centuries, in the course of which there were no male heirs and it passed through the female line to families who had their main homes elsewhere (imagine having Boughton House as your second home!). An unintended benefit of this hereditary sexism is the unaltered state of many of the key features of the House.
Huge thanks to Paul Boucher, curator of the exhibition at Boughton House, for supplying images and captions for the photographs featured here, and also to Tessa Murdoch, deputy keeper at the Victoria & Albert Museum, for correcting errors in an earlier draft of this blog and for directing me to the petition about ‘necessitous strangers’.
26 March, 2019
This picture is part of a bigger project, developed in collaboration with Hackney Museum, about Cazenove Road, its community and its surroundings.
For me, Cazenove Road sums up the diversity of London: in this one road there is a mosque, a synagogue, a queer bar, a typical charity shop, second-hand shops, an art gallery, the organic shop, etc.
3 August, 2015
When the Huguenots started arriving in England, following the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, London – where they mostly gathered – had a population of less than 500,000. The arrival of 25,000 migrants in the capital was the equivalent of more than 400,000 migrants arriving there nowadays. And yet London, and the broader country (where a further 25,000 dispersed), absorbed these migrants – or, to give them the name that they brought to our language, these réfugiés, refugees – with little difficulty and hostility.
In part this was down to a shared religion. The Huguenots were French (or French-speaking) Protestants, followers of John Calvin and Martin Luther, and the dominant Catholic aristocracy and establishment suspected them of plotting to take control of the country. For the second half of the 16th century, France witnessed a series of civil wars – the French Wars of Religion – and massacres (Mérindol in 1545, Vassy in 1562 and St Bartholomew’s Day in 1572, among many others), which seem horribly familiar to a current sensibility.
Catherine de Medici outside the Louvre on the morning after the St Bartholomew massacre – painting by Édouard Débat-Ponsan
The Edict of Nantes in 1598 was an attempt to draw a line under these ugly episodes, and to give the Huguenots the freedom to practise their religion – but in the years that followed it was a law that was honoured more in the breech than in the observance. When the fiercely anti-Protestant Louis XIV, the ‘Sun King’, took to the throne in 1643, persecution of the Huguenots became more widespread and systematic; if you’re in any doubt, just read up about the dragonnades! This persecution became enshrined in law in 1685, when Louis revoked the Edict of Nantes in an attempt to force all Protestants to convert to Catholicism. Over the next ten years or so hundreds of thousands of Protestants left France.
The French king, Louis XIV, whose anti-Protestantism led to the revocation of the Edict of Nantes and the exile of hundreds of thousands of French-speaking Protestants. Louis’ death in 1715 is an anniversary that is being ‘celebrated’ in this year’s Huguenot Summer.
Leaving the country was, for most, not easy: the law made it a crime to flee France, and refugees went to extreme (and ingenious) lengths to do so, hiding in casks of wine, bales of straw and piles of coal to make the perilous journey to England (others left for the Netherlands, the Americas, South Africa – any Protestant-friendly country). They brought with them hardly anything in terms of wealth (the current Home Secretary would not approve!) but a richness of talent and skills that would transform the British economy and, some have said, lay the groundworks for the Industrial Revolution. For France it represented a drainage of talent similar to that of Nazi Germany in the 20th century (when ‘Hitler’s Gift’, in the form of the expulsion of Jews, scientists and academics, was a factor in his ultimate downfall), and one from which it, arguably, never fully recovered.
Huguenots fleeing France – an engraving by Jan Luyken, 1696.
The contribution of the Huguenots to the economy and culture of this country has been immense, and it is being celebrated this year in the Huguenot Summer, which we are now almost halfway through. This series of national events goes on until September, with activities in Canterbury, Winchester, Norwich and London – where the Huguenots of Spitalfields have been holding summer-long events now for the past three years.
The Huguenot Summer is presented as an anniversary, but the tag is slightly spurious – or maybe just a bit macabre. Centenaries and the like normally celebrate the birth of a famous person or movement, but this year marks the tercentenary of the death of Louis XIV. But the Summer could equally stand as the 320th anniversary of the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, a celebration of the first national heritage collection (in the form of the recently opened Huguenot Museum in Rochester) or just an opportunity to reflect on the enduring legacy of these migrants, whose story of persecution, forced emigration and eventual assimilation has so many parallels today.
Boughton House, frequently referred to as the ‘English Versailles, which this summer hosts an exhibition on the influence of the Huguenots, to which the Migration Museum Project has contributed.
As part of the Huguenot Summer, Boughton House (the home of the dukes of Buccleuch and Queensberry) will be open to the public in August and, by arrangement, September, displaying an exhibition in which the Migration Museum Project is proud to have been involved. A future blog will focus on the story of this remarkable building – the ‘English Versailles’ – for which Ralph Montagu, the 1st Duke of Montagu, enlisted the services of the cream of Huguenot artisans and craftsmen.
17 June, 2015
This blog on the subject of boat people, written by Migration Museum Project trustee Jill Rutter, is timely for a number of reasons. First, it is published in Refugee Week, when the UK’s attention is focused on the predicament of refugees. This year, Refugee Week is celebrating the contribution of refugees to the UK. (For an inspiring story on the current Mediterranean refugee situation, listen to Regina Catrambone – an Italian millionaire who set up Migrants Offshore Aid Station (MOAS) – talking on Tuesday 16 June’s Today programme – she is interviewed at 7.50am, 1 hour 52 minutes and 58 seconds in. MOAS’s ship, MY Phoenix, last year rescued 3,000 people in a three-month period alone.) Another reason this blog is so timely is that it coincides with a new venture which we are involved in at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, London, and for which the International Maritime Organization (see below in Jill’s blog) has created three short films, focusing on the migrants’ view, the captain’s view and the law of the sea. Each film – in the form of vox pops with a range of people visiting the museum, followed by facts and footage shot by IMO – is between two and three minutes long.
Over the last month or so the world’s media have highlighted the plight of boat people risking their lives in an attempt to reach safety in Europe and South-East Asia. We have seen pitiful images of Rohingya Muslims fleeing Burma, and of migrants rescued from the Mediterranean.
Since the late 1990s, migrants from the Middle East, South Asia, the Maghreb and sub-Saharan Africa have been using people smugglers to transport them across the Mediterranean. Ten years ago, Spain was a popular destination for these people, with over-crowded boats setting off in its direction from Senegal and Morocco. Today, migration flows have moved east, with boats now leaving Turkey, Egypt and Libya, and making for Greece and Italy. But the factors that drive people to entrust their lives to people smugglers remain the same: persecution and threats to life, worklessness and the belief that Europe offers a route out of poverty.
Gateway to Lampedusa – Gateway to Europe, a memorial by the Italian artist Mimmo Paladino
Antigua cemetery in Fuenteventura, Canary Islands with named and unnamed memorial tablets for migrants who have drowned. The image is by the acclaimed Juan Medina who has been photographing migrants for nearly 20 years.
Nobody knows how many migrants have drowned in the Mediterranean. The International Organisation for Migration estimates 1,700 people have lost their lives this year and as many as 14,600 since 1993. This is almost certainly an underestimate, as the tally is based on retrieved bodies. We will never know the real number of deaths and many of the sea victims remain nameless, as is evident from the memorials to them in Spain and Italy.
Many people in Britain have been shocked by recent events, but the plight of the Mediterranean boat migrants can seem distant. Save for small numbers of Afghans, relatively few Mediterranean boat migrants now make it to Britain. Migration by sea may have been the usual route for most migrants coming to or leaving the UK until relatively recently, but almost all of them used the services of passenger shipping companies, rather than people smugglers.
One exception was Vietnamese refugees, most of whom arrived in Britain by way of camps in Hong Kong. Between 1979 and 1992 the British government admitted about 24,500 Vietnamese refugees, most of whom had left Vietnam in a sea-borne exodus of over 800,000 people. Setting off in small boats, they made for other South-East Asian countries, including Hong Kong. In journeys that could take many weeks, the boat people had to contend with thirst, storms and piracy. Estimates of the numbers who died at sea can only be guessed at, but the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees suggests that between 200,000 and 400,000 Vietnamese lost their lives at sea. South London and East London are now hubs for this community. The testimony of those who survived these journeys has been collected in a number of oral history projects.
Vietnamese refugees, 1979
Looking back further into British history, there are two other noteworthy arrivals of boat migrants. About 60,000 Protestant Huguenots and Walloons arrived by boat between 1550 and 1720 – a highly skilled group whose numbers included silversmiths, silk weavers and bankers.
A rescue is mounted for the ‘Poor Palatine’ boats
Between May and November 1709 about 13,000 impoverished ‘Poor Palatines’ crossed the North Sea in overloaded boats. The Nine Years War (1688–97) and the War of Spanish Succession (1701–14), followed by a series of harsh winters and poor harvests, had created severe hardship in much of south-west Germany. Setting sail from Rotterdam in overladen boats, the migrants were, on arrival in Britain, initially sheltered in army tents on Blackheath and Camberwell in London. The Poor Palatines were mostly unskilled labourers and the failure to integrate them proved politically controversial. Most were eventually resettled in Ireland and North America, where their descendants included the Rockefeller family.
There is another and less well-known connection this country has with boat migrants: Britain has been at the forefront in developing international humanitarian law about the safety of life at sea. It was the first state to join the UN’s Inter-Governmental Maritime Consultative Organization, the previous name of today’s International Maritime Organization (IMO). Set up in 1949, the IMO has had its headquarters in London since 1959, first of all in Chancery Lane and then, since 1982, on the Albert Embankment. The IMO sees that international treaties and regulations on shipping are observed, including those relating to rescue at sea. The International Convention on Maritime Search and Rescue, signed in 1979, requires that ‘Parties shall ensure that assistance be provided to any person in distress at sea … regardless of the nationality or status of such a person or the circumstances in which that person is found.’ In the same document, ‘rescue’ is defined as ‘An operation to retrieve persons in distress, provide for their initial medical or other needs, and deliver them to a place of safety.’
The IMO’s first headquarters in Chancery Lane, London.
Although treaties on shipping pre-date the founding of the United Nations (UN), the IMO is part of the UN family. Two of its former secretary-generals have been British, and much of the IMO’s work on maritime search and rescue was taken forward by British staff.
Today in the Mediterranean, the Royal Navy’s HMS Bulwark is part of Europe’s search-and-rescue mission. But, as the migrants are brought to safety, we should remember that boat people are not a new phenomenon – either as far as Britain is concerned or for the world as a whole.
Jill Rutter is a trustee of the Migration Museum Project.
