About My Father's Business. Archer Thomas

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СКАЧАТЬ they attended churches and chapels where the pastors still spoke their native tongue, and where they had established schools for their children; but they had settled down to a quiet, though a busy life, in the heart of the great workshop of the world, and only a few of them – principally the gentry, some of whom had regained a portion of their property – felt frequent or urgent impulses to return. More than a hundred and twenty years had elapsed since the "Royal Bounty" had been expended in the relief of the 27,000 émigrés who yet were without any permanent refuge for the destitute, the sick, the aged, and the insane among their number. This was in 1688, and it was not till nearly twenty-eight years afterwards that any regular institution was organized. The earlier refugees had become aged or had died, after having obtained such temporary help as could be afforded by subscriptions or the large benefactions of their more wealthy fellow-countrymen. Still, the later emigrations increased the number of applicants for permanent relief. At last, in 1718, a great concourse of French refugees assembled in a chapel which formed a special portion of a building only just completed, but which had already received the dignity of forming the subject of a Royal charter granted by His Majesty King George I. to his "right trusty and right well-beloved" cousin, Henry de Massue, Marquis de Ruvigny, Earl of Galloway, and a number of trusty and well-beloved gentlemen, all naturalized refugees, who made the first governor and directors of the "Hospital for Poor French Protestants and their descendants residing in Great Britain;" otherwise known as the French Hospital, but soon to be spoken of with simple pathetic brevity as "La Providence."

      The idea of founding such a charity was due to a distinguished refugee in Holland – no less a personage than M. de Gastigny, Master of the Hounds to Prince William of Orange; a ruddy, jovial-looking gentleman withal, whose portrait, should you go to see it, will set you wondering whether he could ever have been classed among the "sour sectaries" to whom it was the fashion to attribute a disregard of social pleasures. A bequest of a thousand pounds sterling from the bluff keeper of the kennels was to be divided into equal sums – £500 for the building, and the interest of the remaining £500 to be spent on its maintenance.

      Not a very adequate provision, truly, for any such purpose; but sufficiently suggestive to set the more prosperous members of the great Anglo-French colony to increase the amount. The astute Master of the Hounds must surely have foreseen this result when he left this legacy to the management of the trustees of the already existing relief fund, still miscalled "the Royal Bounty." They exhibited that prudence in money matters which is a French characteristic, and let the thousand pounds accumulate for eight years, after which a general subscription was invited from successful merchants and traders, while with a just appreciation of the benefits which had been conferred by these good citizens on the land of their adoption, some wealthy Englishmen added their contributions to the general fund.

      Thus it came about, that a piece of land was purchased in the Golden Acre – a queer old half-countrified precinct of St. Giles, Cripplegate – that a building was erected for the reception of eighty poor persons, that a charter was granted, and that the new charitable association was consecrated in the new chapel by Philippe Menard, the minister of the French Church of St. James's and secretary of the enterprise.

      This was, indeed, something worth working for. The aged or afflicted poor among the refugees were no longer mere mendicants living on precarious alms. Out of their abundance the more prosperous gave cheerfully. In 1736 another adjoining site was purchased, and another side of the great open quadrangle of garden ground was built upon, so that by 1760 the "Providence" numbered 230 inmates. This, however, was its culminating point of usefulness. Religious persecution had diminished, and at length may be said to have ceased altogether. Even as early as 1720 only 5000 persons required relief from the "Bounty," so that eventually the trustees were enabled to devote part of it to the assistance of those who fled from the Revolution – many of whom were the descendants of those who had been the persecutors of the Protestants. The great industrial colony, prudent, temperate, and industrious, had almost grown beyond its earlier needs – and all that it required was that some adequate provision should be made for infirm or aged men and women, who being widowed or unmarried, and without means of support, required a refuge in which they might peacefully end their days. The same causes which had diminished the number of applicants had also reduced the amount of current subscriptions, so that some portion of the building was removed, as being no longer necessary, and in order to secure a sufficient endowment an Act of Parliament was obtained, empowering the directors to let their land on building leases. By that time the neighbourhood was known not as "the Golden Acre," but as St. Luke's, and on the ground once purchased by the Marquis de Ruvigny and his trusty and well-beloved companions, grew Radnor Street, Galway Street, Gastigny Place, and part of Bath Street, while the number of inmates was reduced to sixty – that is to say, about twenty men and forty women, all of whom were to be above sixty years of age, of French extraction, and professing the Protestant religion. It was a queer old range of building, that retreat; pleasant enough, perhaps, when as a rather blank series of red brick houses, it looked across its own formal walled garden to the pleasant fields and open country, but strangely silent, and with a crumbling, dreary look about it, when the lunatic asylum of St. Luke's dominated all the surrounding tenements of a crowded, sordid neighbourhood. Only the initiated could easily find the little low black door that opened in the bare wall, and led to the large irregular space, which was laid out in weedy beds and stony borders, distinguished by an air of decay rather than of production – especially where in certain dank corners a tangle of sapless stalks and tendrils indicated some faintly hopeful attempt to rear an arbour, in which persons of robust imagination might fancy they were sheltered from impending blacks that issued from the manufactory chimneys close by. The visitor to this out-of-the-way corner of the great city, seeing the old people walking up and down the paved causeway in front of the row of crooked-paned lower windows, or airing themselves at the doorsteps, might be excused for the fancy that they had the imaginative faculty of children; and were expected to "make believe" a good deal before they could quite reconcile themselves to the notion that this dingy area of quadrilateral plots and paths, in which the wet stood in small puddles, was ever a "pleasaunce" gay with garden blooms, and smelling of knotted marjoram and fragrant thyme. Yet there were still evidences of the invincible cheerfulness of the old French nature, among the old creatures with faces streaked like winter apples, and hands which, even though they trembled, were swift of gesture and of emphasis.

      There were old fellows there who had still about them indications of true comeliness and grace that distinguished them from all vulgar surroundings; – ancient gentlemen, who would go out on wet days to sweep away any rainpools that might lie before the doors of the old ladies, and so besmirch an otherwise immaculate shoe. It should be remembered, too, that there was no livery there. Those who had some one to help them to the garb of gentility wore what pleased them; those who were dependent on the charity for clothing, were neither bound in one pattern, nor condemned to the uniform of poverty. Neat or lively cotton prints, or warm stuff gowns, with proper hose and caps and kerchiefs, for the women; plain Oxford mixture, black, steel grey, or brown, for the men, and each one measured for his suit. Those who entered there were not the recipients of a dole grudgingly conceded. It was no poorhouse, but the "Providence." Only eleven years ago there were some evidences of the old meaning of the place in the remnants of the antique furniture which adorned the queer rooms. They were not wards or dormitories, but veritable bedrooms; and each one had its own peculiarities, even in the bedsteads with spindle posts and dimity hangings, the boxes and cupboards, and special chairs which distinguished it from the rest. Some of these things had evidently been heirlooms either of the institution or of the individual; and, indeed, the preservation of individuality was a cheerful feature of the place, despite its dim and somewhat dreary surroundings.

      The Board Room was, in its way, one of the most extraordinary apartments in London: with its tables supported by a tangled puzzle of legs, its high-backed, polished chairs with leather seats, worn till they reminded one of the cover of an antique ledger bound in unfinished calf; its wonderful old black-framed prints representing the meetings of the Huguenots in the Clerk's field in the times when men and women carried their lives in their hands, and dragoons rode congregations down and slashed them with sabres as they fell. Its dimly-seen portraits of the noble, broad-browed, dark-eyed Ruvigny (the first governor), СКАЧАТЬ