Protestant Exiles from France/Volume 2 - Book Third - Chapter 23 - Rev. James Rouquet

by David Carnegie Andrew Agnew

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Rev. James Rouquet, whose ancestors enjoyed the station of gentlemen in France, and whose grandfather was condemned to the galleys for his constancy to Protestant faith, was born in London on 15th July 1730. He was baptised on the 30th in the French Church of St. Martin-Orgars as Jaques, fils d’Antoine Rouquet et Elisabeth. (The first of the name among the refugees was John Rouquet, naturalised in 1700, see List xxiv.) James’s natural talents were good, and he was a creditable scholar of Merchant Tailors’ Schools, London, and St. John’s College, Oxford. The preaching of Whitefield led to his dedication to the Christian ministry. Though always a member of the Established Church he for a time superintended Wesley’s celebrated School at Kingswood, near Bristol. He was ordained as deacon by Dr. Johnson, Bishop of Gloucester, and as priest by Dr. Willes, Bishop of Bath and Wells. His favourite occupation was to preach in Bristol gaol, and to go with the Gospel to the most abandoned of the population. His relations with Whitefield and Wesley exposed him to prejudice; and he was dismissed from his first curacy for preaching from house to house and within the Bristol gaol. But the Lord Chancellor having presented him to the vicarage of West Harptree, Bishop Willes proved a steadfast friend, declaring how much pleased he was with his examination, and appointing him to preach at his next ordination. The good prelate sent to him for the manuscript of the sermon which had been spoken against, and having perused it, he returned it, expressed his entire approbation of the sermon, and assured Mr. Rouquet of his friendship and affection. The text of the sermon was, Feed my Sheep. The good parson’s predilection for instructing and reclaiming outcasts made him resign his vicarage, and accept the curacy of St. Werburgh, in Bristol. This was in 1768. One motive may have been to console himself in beneficent labours for the loss of his wife, Sarah, daughter of Honourable E. Fenwicke of Charles-Town, South Carolina (and sister of the Countess of Deloraine), whom he had married on 22nd September 1756, and who died on 28th April 1762, Owing to that relationship he had the honorary office of the Earl of Deloraine’s chaplain; he held the chaplaincy of St Peter’s Hospital, and the lectureship of St. Nicholas, Bristol. On the 13th March 1773 he married his second wife, Mary, relict of John Cannon, Esq. of Greenwich, Kent. The great Rowland Hill preached his first sermon in Mr. Rouquet’s church, on Tuesday, 8th June 1773. Mr. Rouquet continued his intimacy with the Wesleyans, and others called Methodists. He was a delightful person, as well as a most admirable and faithful man in every duty and relationship, and in society. He was noted for his pleasantry and jocularity, as well as for his more solid and serious qualities. He preached at the opening of the Tabernacle at Trowbridge on the 19th November 1771, and on each anniversary of its opening until his death. He died on the 16th November 1776, aged forty-six; his death was unexpected, and it grieved and startled many.^[1] He left several children, a daughter, Jane Anne, who was married in 1782 to John Jordan Palmer, and a second Rev. James Rouquet, Vicar of West Harptree from 1789 to 1837.

Mr. Hill preached three funeral sermons on Mr. Rouquet — the first on Sunday forenoon, the 23rd November, in St. Werburgh, on the text, “Well done! good and faithful servant;” the second on the same evening, at the Trowbridge Tabernacle, on the text, “I heard a voice from heaven saying unto me, Write, Blessed are the dead which die in the Lord;” the third in St. Nicholas’s, on Tuesday, on the text, “I have finished my course.” The first was published, “Dedicated to the Poor among whom he so diligently laboured, and who followed in weeping multitudes his coffin to the tomb;” its title was, “A Tribute of Respect to the Memory of the Rev. James Rouquet, being the substance of a Sermon preached in the Parish Church of St. Werburgh’s, Bristol, on Sunday, 24th November 1776, by the Rev. Rowland Hill, A.M., late of St. John’s College, Cambridge, and Chaplain to the Countess of Chesterfield.” The following notes are appended by Mr. Hill:— “A large concourse of people went before, singing funeral hymns, to the church door.” “Mr. Rouquet was the son of persecuted parents who fled from France to England for the sake of enjoying the inestimable privileges of civil and religious liberty. I mention this as an apology for his conduct in appearing so strenuous, with other great and good men, against those principles which he conceived to be in their end destructive to the liberties of mankind.” “Mr. Rouquet for many years of his life seldom used to preach less than seven times in a week.” I have room for only one extract from the sermon:—

“As a friend, from a very intimate acquaintance with him, give me leave to bear my testimony that one more constant and sincere I never found. To have equalled him would have been difficult; to have excelled him, impossible. And no wonder; an experimental knowledge of the friend of sinners is the only true basis upon which real disinterested friendship can be built. From the best of motives, therefore, he was of a more generous turn than to love in prosperity alone; in adversity he was the same — his conduct was invariable throughout. It frequently also happens that the method in which kind actions are performed adds a double lustre to the action itself. In this respect our dear friend was peculiarly happy; his free and affable disposition would never permit him to disgrace the cause of God by a sullen moroseness, too much adopted by some. That heavenly cheerfulness which true grace must ever inspire, united to the natural sweetness of his temper, gave him an opportunity to prove that it never was the end of the Gospel of Christ to make men melancholy and severe. But amidst all these amiable endowments is it to be wondered at, since there is not a just man upon earth that liveth and sinneth not, if one hears a distant hint that now and then my dearly-loved friend might have been supposed to have made somewhat of a small elopement from that cheerfulness, which is truly Christian, towards a disposition too much bordering upon a turn of pleasantry, which might have needed a little more the spirit of solemnity? With the greatest delicacy I drop the hint, and am glad to cover it with the mantle of love by lamenting, before you all, the same weakness in myself.”^[2]

1. Perhaps Mr. Fletcher was shocked at Mr. Rouquet’s jocularity, and it may have been to him that he alluded when he wrote, “R__q__t dead and buried! the jolly man, who last summer shook his head at me as at a dying man! How frail are we! God help us to live to-day! To-morrow is the fool’s day.” This letter is in the Rev. John Fletcher’s posthumous pieces, dated 24th August 1776; and if the date be not a mistake on the part of the editor of the volume, the allusion cannot be to the Rev. J. Rouquet.
2. Mr Rouquet inherited gaiety of tone from his French ancestors. In 1755 a Monsieur Rouquet (probably a near relation), Member of the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture in Paris, stated that he had resided thirty years in England, as his justification for publishing an Essay, entitled, “The State of the Arts in England.” He also was a humorist; for in that Essay he says that English physicians usually cultivate some art or science which has no relation to medicine, and adds, such pursuits are “sometimes of great service to their patients, because nature takes occasion, from the inattention of the doctor, to effect the cure in her own way.”