in 1741, Mary, daughter of Captain Isaac Gignoux, of Nismes, but did not leave posterity. Another son, Maurice (born 1705, died 1745), left a son, Charles William, who died at Jamaica in 1758, aged twenty-seven, and without heirs. The thirteenth child, Major James Louis Vignoles, of the 31st regiment, founded a British family. He was born in Dublin in 1702, and married at Portarlington, 17th March 1737, Anne Marie de Bonneval, sister of the deceased refugee pasteur of that town, Rev. Anthoine Ligonier de Bonneval. [I have seen no evidence that this Monsieur De Bonneval was a brother of Earl Ligonier; no such title in connection with the Earl’s ancestors is on record.] The son and heir of Major Vignoles was John (born in 1740); he also rose to be a Major in the 39th Foot. After the death of his father (which took place 21st February 1779), he entered the ministry of the Irish Church, and was minister of the French Church of Portarlington from 1793 to 1817. The Rev. John Vignoles married an heiress, Anna Honora Low of Cornahir, County Westmeath. On his resignation in 1817, his son succeeded him in the French Church. This venerable divine was Charles Augustus Vignoles, D.D., Dean of Ossory (born 1789, died 1877). The heir-apparent of Cornahir was the Dean’s grandson, Charles Howard Vignoles, the present proprietor. Dean Vignoles was the proprietor of Dumont de Bostaquet’s precious manuscript; the writer’s heirs had probably deposited it with their pastor, Monsieur De Bonneval, among whose heirlooms it had been preserved and transmitted; [or, as I have already suggested. Monsieur De Bonneval may have been the second husband of Judith Julie, De Bostaquet’s daughter].
Chapter XXI.
THE ROMILLY GROUP OF FAMILIES.
The head of the English family of Romilly came to England in 1701. In the old Church-Book of the French Protestant Church of La Quarré, in London, there is an entry dated 14th December 1701, “Reconnoisance de Estienne Romilly de Montpellier.” The great Sir Samuel Romilly left a narrative of his ancestor’s refugee life, which is printed in his Memoirs, and of which the following paragraph is an abridgement:— “I have not the means of speaking of many of my ancestors. The first of them that I ever heard of, is my great-grandfather. He had a pretty good estate at Montpellier, in the South of France, where he resided. He was a Protestant, but living under the religious tyranny of Louis XIV., and in a part of France where persecution raged with the greatest fury, he found it prudent to dissemble his faith, and it was only in the privacy of his own family that he ventured to worship God in the way which he judged would find favour in His sight. His only son, Stephen Romilly (born 1684), my grandfather, he educated in his own religious principles, and so deeply did the young man imbibe them, that when he was about seventeen years of age he made a journey to Geneva for the sole purpose of receiving the sacrament. At Geneva he met the celebrated Saurin, who happened to be on a visit there. The reputation of that extraordinary man was then at the highest. He was revered as an apostle; and his eloquence and his authority could not fail to make a forcible impression on a young mind deeply tinctured with that religious fervour which persecution generally inspires. The result of a few conversations was a fixed determination in my grandfather to abandon for ever his native country, his connections, his friends, his affectionate parents, and the inheritance which awaited him, and to trust to his own industry for a subsistence amidst strangers, and in a foreign land, but in the enjoyment of civil and religious liberty. Instead of returning to Montpellier, he set out for London; and it was not till he had landed in England that he apprized his father of the irrevocable resolution that he had formed. He at first met with much more prosperity than he could have expected. His father remitted him money, and after a few years he set up with a tolerable capital at Hoxton, in the neighbourhood of London, in the business of a wax-bleacher. He soon afterwards married Judith de Monsallier, the daughter of another French refugee, and he became the father of a very numerous family. His generosity, his piety, his affection for his wife, his tenderness towards his children, and their reciprocal fondness and veneration for him, are topics on which I have often heard my father and my aunts enlarge
