Protestant Exiles from France/Volume 2 - Book Third - Chapter 10 - Section IV
IV. Rev. Benjamin Daillon.
The Rev. Benjamin Daillon, or De Daillon, is said to have been a scion of the noble house of Le Lude, which at a subsequent date became a ducal family (see Anselme). The Right Hon. James Daillon, Count Du Lude, who has the doubtful honour of having been kept before the eye of posterity by an engraved portrait, was probably the younger brother. This possible brother, or probable cousin espoused the Jacobite side of British politics, and put himself forward in an irritating style when the good Queen Mary was at the head of affairs, and when the fortunes of her absent lord had assumed a rather cloudy aspect. On the 20th August 1693, he preached a sermon in St. Matthew’s Church, London, on the text, “My kingdom is not of this world,” which offended the royal and munificent benefactress of the Huguenot refugees, a feeling in which the king seems to have shared. In Anthony Wood’s diary, there is this entry, — “1694, Feb. 20, Mr. Daillon, a French minister, who had been committed prisoner for preaching treason in St. Matthew’s Church in Friday Street, was found by the jury not guilty, and so acquitted.” He had perhaps saved himself by an enigmatical style, and his imprisonment had been a more than sufficient punishment. In 1724 he accomplished the more respectable achievement of completing the ninetieth year of his age, in memory of which his portrait (painted by J. Fry, and engraved by P. Pelham) was published, the substratum of engraved description calling him “a confessor,” which he may have been in France, but in Fngland certainly was not, if he claimed the honour of martyrdom only as one “who was tried for high treason for preaching an orthodox sermon in ye city of London on ye 36th verse of the 18th Chap, of St. John’s gospel on ye 20th day of August 1693.” It would appear that James Daillon was born in 1634.
Benjamin De Daillon, escuyer, sieur de la Levrice, was born in 1630. His epitaph seems to point to Brittany as the native province of the noble family from which he sprang. He was pasteur of the Church of La Rochefoucauld in Angoumois. He was also an author. Three small publications of his were printed[1] (Amsterdam, 1687), one of which is a sermon entitled, “La Revolte de la Foi, ou les Doctrines des Demons,” a sermon preached before a Provincial Synod on the 1st September 1668; another is a letter to the Faithful in the provinces of Angoumois, Xaintonge, and Aunix; and the other tractate is an Examination of the oppression inflicted upon Protestants in France. On the last topic, he could speak and write feelingly, because he had been a sufferer from French lawyers and in French prisons.
The Curé and Carmelite Monks of the country town of La Rochefoucauld made several attempts to suppress the Huguenot Temple. At length they appealed to the criminal courts, and produced title-deeds, either forged altogether, or fraudulently interpolated, setting forth that the site of the temple was the property of the monastery. They then swore that the clock had been taken from their chapel, and that Daillon had placed it above the cross. They also complained that the building was too near them, and occasioned distraction to the Catholic worshippers. Daillon met the charges and refuted them, both by vocal pleading and in a written remonstrance; but in vain. Le Lieutenant Criminel ordered him to discontinue the ministerial office, suppressed the consistory of La Rochefoucauld, and interdicted for ever the exercise of the Pretended Reformed Religion in that town. He commanded that the temple be demolished within one month, by the members of the congregation, or, in case of their failing to give obedience, to be pulled down at their expense. Further, he sentenced Benjamin de Daillon to be banished from the Province of Angoumois for nine years, and fined him and his elders 3000 livres (£120). Being probably unable to pay the fine, or for conscientiously disregarding some other parts of the sentence, Daillon was for a long time shut up in various prisons. In April 1685 he was a prisoner in the Conciergerie of Paris. Before the end of the reign of James II., he, with his wife, née Pauline Nicolas, was a refugee in London.
By letters patent under the Great Seal 4 James II. (1688) Benjamin de Daillon, John Louis Malide, Samuel Mettayer, Simon Canole, Henry Gervais, Timothy Baignoux, Charles Peter Souchet, William Bardon, John Forent, and Barthelemy Balaguier, and their successors, ministers of the French congregation of Protestant strangers, were formed into a corporation with permanent succession and liberty to exercise the functions of the ministry according to their manner accustomed, with power to purchase land, to build churches, and, in case of death or removal of any of the ministers, to choose other persons to succeed in the office of ministers. The Anglican Liturgy had formerly been urgently prescribed to refugee ministers. By this Patent, King James gave a royal license to “their manner accustomed,” called by Burnet the Charenton system. To le rite Calviniste, Daillon conscientiously and firmly adhered. Only one church, and that in Soho, was built under this Patent, and went by the name of La Patente. After the Revolution, churches sprang up as they were required, without requiring any such legal formality to justify their erection. One of these was called La Nouvelle Patente.
In 1691 a reprint seems to have been published in Holland of his book, Examen de l’oppression des reformés en France, ou l’on justifie l’innocence de leur religion. It had a sermon prefixed, which the Assemblée Pastorale at the Hague was petitioned to censure, as containing some peculiar views about the Devil. Fortunately Jurieu addressed a Letter to the Assembly, proving that the accusation arose from a misunderstanding; and so the petition was dismissed. Rou informed Jurieu of this result in a letter dated 21st January 1692, which intimated the mind of the assembly that Daillon had neglected to guard his readers against some consequences of his Thesis, and that he had been spared on account of his varied merits, accompanied with docility and modesty, and even with submission.
The thoughts of Daillon, in the course of a very few years, were turned to Ireland. The Nicolas family, to which Madame de Daillon belonged, were high in Lord Galway’s favourable estimation. Daillon himself was an able and learned man; and Luttrell’s “Historical Relation” points to him (spelling the name, Dallions) as designed by the noble chief of the refugees to be the head of a Protestant College at Kilkenny. Lord Galway, as already stated, built and endowed both an English and a French Church at Portarlington — the latter was opened in 1694 according to the Charenton model. The first ministers were Messieurs J. Gillet and Balaguier. In 1698, Daillon was appointed to that charge, and entered upon its duties on the 26th of June. From the old French Church Register we learn that he had two daughters, Pauline and Anne. Pauline was the wife of Jean Posquet, escuyer, Sieur de la Boissière; Anne was the wife of Cornet John Grosvenor.
The chequered fortunes of the noble Earl of Galway influenced Daillon’s future career. The Portarlington estates having been resumed by the English Parliament, his Lordship’s churches and schools were at the disposal of the Earl of Rochester and the High Church party. One of Lord Galway’s faults in their eyes was that he was an unbeliever in the virtue of the episcopal consecration of churches. Believers in that ceremony might have thought the churches sufficiently consecrated by seven years’ religious use, and at least might have confined their ritualistic programme to the English Church (St Michael’s). What took place is thus recorded by Sir Erasmus Borrowes:— “In the first year of Queen Anne’s reign, an Act of Parliament was passed confirming the leases made by Lord Galway, which had been shaken by the Act of Resumption, and vesting the churches, school-houses, and endowments, in the Bishop of Kildare [Dr William Moreton], in trust for the purposes specified by the noble founder. The Bishop issued an address to the French inhabitants of Portarlington, setting forth his intention of consecrating the two churches, transmitting a copy of the Consecration Service, inviting them to conform to the discipline of Episcopacy, and complaining of Daillon for holding tenaciously to his consistorial authority, being unwilling to part with it on any terms.”
The “terms” which the bishop proposed to M. de Daillon were liberal as to money; if his stipend was not included in the new Irish budget, the bishop would pay him out of his own pocket an annuity of the same amount, and even more, if he would be tractable. But there were other terms. The French pasteur was to regard himself, and each of his predecessors in the pastorate, not as a minister of Christ, but as a “teacher” set up contrary to the Apostolical injunction (implied in 2 Timothy iv. 3, which text the bishop supposed to be a prophecy that the Portarlington refugees would “after their own lusts heap to themselves teachers”) — so that Divine Service could never be duly celebrated by him or by any similar outcast from Apostolicity.
As to the French congregation we are told that, soon after, it “acceded to the wishes of the Bishop.” But this triumph was obtained at the expense of the union between pastor and people. On the 3d October 1702, the Rev. Antoine Ligonier de Bonneval succeeded Monsieur De Daillon, who, about this time, seems to have removed to Carlow. There Pauline, his wife, died on the 31st December 1709, and he himself followed her, four days after, on the 3d January 1710 (n.s.), aged seventy-nine. Every kind of church register in Carlow, prior to the year 1744, has unfortunately been lost. There is, therefore, no vestige of a French church there. There is, however, sufficient evidence that there was a congregation of French worshippers. In the estimates, then called the “establishment,” for Ireland, there was this item:— To a French Minister at Catherlogh, £30 per Annum.
The fact that Monsieur and Madame De Daillon spent their last years in Carlow is preserved by their tombstone. A correspondent, to whom I am largely indebted, informs me that the stone lies in a neglected corner of the Old Parish Churchyard, a slab of black limestone, having the letters of the epitaph incised:—
Hic situs est
Benjaminus Daillon Gallus Britanu generosâ familiâ ortus, ecclesiæ reformatæ presbyter eruditus, diu ob religionem incarceratus et demum relegatus.
Qui post LXXIX annos
studio pietate et labore evangelico magnâ ex parte dimensos quatriduo post obitum Paulinæ uxoris hic inhumatæ animam puram exhalavit.
Accipe, Docte Cinis, musarum pignus amoris,
Accipe, si famam morte perire vetent,
Si Christi castris pugnans captivus et exul
Urbem hanc funeribus condecorare velit.
Cur tegerentur humo simul omnia?—et inclyta virtus,
Et genus, ac artes, et pietate honos?
Immemor urbs fuerit, tamen haud marcescet Olympo,
Clamabitque lapis, vivet hic arte meâ.
Obiit ille vir Jan. III. An. Dom. MDCCIX.
See the Bishop of Kildare’s Letter to the French Protestant Refugees living at Portarlington, which was printed both in French and English, and prefixed to the Form of Consecration and Dedication of Churches and Chapels according to the use of the Church of Ireland. [Formulaire de la Consecration et Dedicace des Eglises et Chapelles, selon l’Usage de l’Eglise d’Irlande. Traduit de l’Anglois par l’Ordre de My Lord Evêque de Kildare et en faveur des Protestans Francois Réfugiés habitans à Portarlington, Comté de la Reine. A Dublin, Chez André Crook, Imprimeur de la Reine, demeurant sur le Blind-key, proche Copper Alley, 1702.]
- ↑ Baynes’s “Witnesses in Sackcloth,” p. 223.