Protestant Exiles from France/Volume 2 - Book Third - Chapter 13 - Section V
De La Musse.
This was a well-known surname among the Protestant Noblesse. One of the members of the National Synod, which sat at London from 10th November 1659 to 10th January 1660, was Pierre de la Musse, ecuyer, Seigneur des Roquettes, an elder of the church of Caen. To a later generation belonged the Marquis de la Musse, a young nobleman, who was arrested after the Revocation, and underwent a two years’ imprisonment. Benoist, in his vol. v. p. 1000 mentions a singular finale to their durance in France, which was accorded to some Huguenots. There was a large number of noblemen and gentlemen, not only patient and stedfast in prisons and galleys, but also glorying in their lot. Their cases were known to many of the public, and their death would have evoked sympathy for their religion, and indignation against their persecutors. Many other noblemen and gentlemen, who had made a formal abjuration, had openly resumed the Protestant profession, and notwithstanding the sanguinary law against relapsed heretics, they were determined that they would not abjure a second time. The government were not prepared to crowd their galleys and cells with these conspicuous witnesses to the truth. These persons were marched off under the escort of archers. An awful silence was maintained as to their destination. Fatiguing marches by land were continued from day to day, or they were put on board of some ship, the same mystery enshrouding the future. This ordeal in a few cases proved too severe, and prisoners who had braved some years of severity succumbed under it, and abjured the faith. They succumbed on the eve of deliverance. For the orders were to march them, perhaps from one end of France to the other, to the frontier, either of Holland, or of Germany, or of Switzerland, and there to set them at liberty, with a small sum of money for their journey to the nearest town. Or if they were sent off by sea, the captain of the ship was to land them on a foreign shore, having given them the money, and to obtain a certificate of their disembarkation from the nearest magistrate. In either case the exile was formally debarred from returning to France. The Marquis de la Musse, a young gentleman of solid piety, whose stedfastness during two years’ imprisonment had been admirable, was treated thus. He was embarked in a foreign vessel, and by no sign could he discover that there was anything but what was dark in his prospects. It was not until he was in full sail for England that the captain dared to inform him of the fact. Benoist adds, that the most of those thus exiled by sea were sent to England, where, at the date of 1688, the probability of the establishment of Popery in England was so great, that it seemed they were only to exchange one scene of persecution for another.
Happily this was not the refugees’ experience; they received hospitality from James II., and breathed freely under the friendly sceptre of William and Mary. In this condition the Marquis de la Musse appears on the last page of Quick’s “Synodicon,” published in 1692. He is then in London, “a faithful confessor for Christ, having forsaken his estate and embraced the cross rather than part with his religion and his God.”