Of equal merit with this miserable prose were some verses stuck up upon the wall of the Dutch Church-yard on Thursday night, 5th May 1593:—
“You strangers that inhabit in this land!
Note this same writing, do it understand;
Conceive it well, for safety of your lives,
Your goods, your children, and your dearest wives.”
&c., &c., &c., &c.
By order of the Government, the Lord-Mayor and Aldermen of London quietly arranged with some merchants and master-tradesmen to act as special constables. And some apprentices and servants who were found behaving riotously “were put into the stocks, carted, and whipt.” — (See Annals of Elizabeth, vol. iv., pp. 167-8.)
In 1598 the refugees’ patron at court, Lord Burghley, died. And in the following year we find the Lord Mayor of London forbidding the strangers, both Dutch and French, to exercise their trades in the city. But it soon appeared that the Christian hospitality of our Queen and of the Government had not died. By an order in council, dated Greenwich, 29th April 1599, the Queen required the Lord Mayor to “forbear to go forward.” The order was signed by the Archbishop of Canterbury (Whitgift), the Lord Keeper (Egerton), the Lord Admiral (Lord Howard of Effingham), by Lords North and Buckhurst, by the Controller of the Household (Sir William Knollys), by the Secretary of State (Sir Robert Cecil, younger son of Lord Burghley, and heir of his abilities), and by the Chancellor of the Exchequer (Sir John Fortescue).
Another petty persecution was similarly stopped in 1601. Sir Noel de Caron memorialized the Queen on behalf of several refugee tradesmen whose cases had been brought up by informers. Lord Buckhurst, who had succeeded to the office of Lord High Treasurer, wrote from Sackville House 31st October 1601, directing the Attorney-General (Coke) to quash all actions at law against the strangers, the matter being under investigation by the Privy Council. (The documents described in this and the preceding paragraph are printed in Strype’s Annals of Elizabeth, vol. iv., pp. 352-3).
Strype gives a quotation from Lambard’s Perambulation of Kent, denouncing “the inveterate fierceness and cankered malice of the English nation against foreigners and strangers.” Lambard begins by recalling “what great tragedies have been stirred in this realm by this our natural inhospitality and disdain of strangers, both in the time of King John, Henry his son. King Edward H., King Henry VI., and in the days of later memory.” He then declares his hope, “whatsoever note of infamy we have heretofore contracted among foreign writers by this our ferocity against aliens, that now at the last, having the light of the Gospel before our eyes, and the persecuted parts [members?] of the afflicted church as guests and strangers in our country, we shall so behave ourselves towards thein as we may utterly rub out the old blemish.”
Died on the 24th March 1603 (n.s.). Queen Elizabeth, who, having at her coming to the crown, promised to maintain the truth of God and to deface superstition, with this beginning with uniformity continued, yielding her land, as a sanctuary to all the world groaning for liberty of their religion, flourishing in wealth, honour, estimation every way (I borrow the language of Archbishop Abbot, quoted in Strype’s Annals, vol. iv., page 359).
(Page 11.) This section concludes with a short reference to King James I. Professor Weiss gives a sentence of his friendly letter to the London French Church. The King obtained an equivalent in 1606 from some French ministers, who wrote a letter of remonstrance to the imprisoned Presbyterian ministers in Scotland. The signatures in the Latin language were Robertus Masso Fontanus, Aaron Cappel, Nathanael Marius. — [Burn’s History supplies the undisguised names, Robert Le Maçon, styled De la Fontaine; Aaron Cappel; Nathaniel Marie.]
