A true and perfect Plot of Hatfield Chase in the Counties of York, Lincoln, and Nottingham, as surveyed by Josias Acerlebout. Wikimedia Commons.

In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, foreigners came to live in England because of employment opportunities as well as for the refuge it provided from religious persecution. Sometimes the motivations of individuals involved can be difficult to disentangle. Economic factors lay behind the arrival of foreigners in the Isle of Axholme in the late 1620s and 1630s, but then a majority who settled sought freedom to worship in the manner denied them in their homelands. Both economic and ecclesiastical factors combined to make the settlement controversial and the community’s situation precarious.

In May 1626, Charles I granted Cornelius Vermuyden (1590-1677) a contract to drain Hatfield Chase in the Isle of Axholme, low-lying land in south Yorkshire and north Lincolnshire which had served as a royal hunting ground, but which was frequently flooded. Vermuyden, an engineer from Zeeland, a Protestant province of the Dutch Republic, was not a religious refugee. He had arrived in England five years earlier to deploy his technical experience and had already been involved in drainage projects in the south. In favour at the royal court, he had also benefited from contacts at the Dutch Church, Austin Friars, but when he married a compatriot in 1623, he did so at the parish church of St Mary Rotherhithe, suggesting an inclination to conform to the ways of the English Church.

It was otherwise with many of the skilled workers imported from the Low Countries for his Axholme project. In December 1628, a contract between the king and Vermuyden authorised the latter (or persons appointed by him) ‘at anie tyme hereafter in any such convenient place’ of his choice, provided it was with the agreement of the bishop of Lincoln, ‘to erecte or build one or more Chapell or Chappells for the exercise of Religion and divine service to be used or read in the English or Dutch language’ [The National Archives, SP16/123, f. 40]. The contract appears ambiguous as to whether ‘divine service’ was to be conducted according to the Calvinist Genevan rites, as practised at Austin Friars and the French Church, Threadneedle Street, and at Protestant churches in France and in the Dutch Republic, or according to the Book of Common Prayer, already published in French but with Dutch and German translations still to appear. In the context of widening divisions within the Church of England, that ambiguity was to cause trouble.

By 1634 at the latest, a worshipping congregation had been established for the ‘stranger’ community, not in a purpose-built chapel, but apparently in a barn owned by one of Vermuyden’s partners, Sir Philibert Vernatti, at Sandtoft in the parish of Belton. A Dutchman named Peter or Pierre Bontemps presided over a Dutch service on Sunday mornings and a French service for a larger congregation in the afternoons; both followed the Genevan liturgy and adopted its structure of lay elders and deacons. It appears that the then bishop of Lincoln, John Williams, a theological Calvinist who was relatively sympathetic towards different expressions of mainstream Protestantism, was content to permit this. But the archbishop of York, Richard Neile, whose jurisdiction covered parts of the area and who was among those clergy in the Church who wished to assert episcopal authority and impose conformity and ceremonialism, was not happy. In a letter of 23 June 1636 to the like-minded archbishop of Canterbury, William Laud, Neile complained in no uncertain terms of religious and economic subversion.

Reporting with distaste the strangers’ practices of baptising ‘in a dishe’ rather than a font and of ‘adminster[ing] the sacrament after their own homely fashion of sitting’ instead of kneeling, Neile claimed that ‘it is indevored to bring the forme of a ffrench Church into England’, something ‘which I shall ever to the uttermost of my power oppose’. Furthermore, he had discovered that Dutch and – especially – French workers were coming ‘into the kingdom daily in great numbers and are already become a plantation of some two hundred families’; ‘shipfulls’ were expected or ready to disembark at Hull and Harwich. The community had already ‘burned bricks’ and accumulated materials to build a chapel to which all foreigners in south Yorkshire and north Lincolnshire would be invited, but Neile questioned whether the settlement should be permitted at all. The immigrants were:

'men of very mean condition, that upon advantage may become as vipers nourished in our bosomes, that take the bread out of the mouthes of English subjects, by overbidding them in the rents of the land, that they hould, & doeing more worke for a groat, then an Englishman can doe for six pence' [TNA, SP 16/327, ff. 84-5].

This perception was clearly shared by some members of the established local community. From the start of the drainage project, there had been rioting, petitioning, and lawsuits aimed at the foreigners, who were seen as having undue favour from the royal government. That favour continued, as did the protests.

Meanwhile, Neile and Laud attempted to coerce the strangers into religious compliance. Bontemps, who had started to officiate in a ‘new built wooden church’, was manoeuvred into departing ‘beyond the seas’, leaving his congregation without a minister for about two years. An agent of Archbishop Laud’s then installed Dr Etienne Cursol, having first made sure of his ‘Conformitie to the Church of England, by his taking the oaths of supremacie, Allegiance [to the crown], & Canonicall obediance to’ the archbishop of Canterbury and ‘after subscription to the Articles of religion of our Church’. According to the agent’s report, Cursol, using ‘our booke of Comon prayer in French, doth officiate amongst them very conformably in all things … & administer the sacraments to them’ not in the new chapel but in the parish churches of Belton or Epworth [TNA, SP 16/310, f. 1].

By the end of the decade, Cursol had been joined by another minister, Jean Despagne, who, judging by his later career at the French Church Westminster, may also have used the Prayer Book, but the two men fell out and left Sandtoft for London. When, following the advent of the Long Parliament in late 1640, the power of the English bishops was removed, the congregants at Sandtoft who had been so confidently expected to embrace English forms reverted to Genevan practices. But although the church flourished for a few years, local agitation against foreigners resulted in 1650 in the destruction of the settlement and the inundation of the drained areas. The stranger congregation struggled on for another decade, but many of the immigrants moved away to other settlements, notably at Whittlesey and at Thorney, where Francis Russell, 4th earl of Bedford, had initiated another drainage scheme and arranged for foreign workers to hold French-language worship in his parish church – an arrangement which endured into the eighteenth century.  In 1903, the register of the French Church of Thorney, the manuscript having survived intact within the collection of the Duke of Bedford, was published by the Huguenot Society of London as Quarto Series volume XVII.

Vivienne Larminie

Further reading

Joan Thirsk, 'Vermuyden, Sir Cornelius (1590-1677)', Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004-) 

A Calendar of the Letter Books of the French Church of London, ed. Robin D, Gwynn (Huguenot Society, Quarto Series 54, 1979), pp. 22-4.