USA > New York > New York County > Harlem > Revised History of Harlem (City of New York): Its Origin and Early Annals. : Prefaced by Home Scenes in the Fatherlands; Or Notices of Its Founders Before Emigration. Also, Sketches of Numerous Families, and the Recovered History of the Land-titles > Part 7
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One of the three districts forming the great Norman meadows, whose fine horses and cattle were so celebrated, was the Bessin, from a forest leargely converted into tillable lands and orchards by the patient industry of its peculiar people,-French indeed, but, unlike their neighbors and more like the English, being descendants of the Otlings (or Osterlings), a Saxon tribe which overran this district in the fourth century. Their small town, St. Lo, occupied a rocky eminence, girt on three sides by a ravine through which ran the river Vire, parting the low- lying Bessin from the mountainous Cotentin. Its streets, lined with antiquated houses, ascended steeply to the crown, whereon stood its old sombre cathedral. Fully a century earlier it had its Huguenot church, which sent delegates to the first synod at Paris, in 1559. From this secluded Norman town,-strange tran- sition, truly !- a worthy refugee, "Letelier," as with some claim to rank he signs himself, found his way to Harlem, to woo and wed a Picard's daughter.
Beyond the Seine, in Upper Normandy, we next find traces of our refugees. Dieppe, capital of the high and mainly level region called the Land of Caux,* the land of grain and grass, of
. Pronounced Ko. It is highly probable that our well-known family of Coe derive their name from Caux.
.
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cider and perry, embracing the coast country from the Seine to the Bresle, was seated at the foot of hills through which flowed the river Arques, passing under the great stone bridge that united the town to its suburb, Le Pollet, the fishermen's quarter, where under the Edict of Nantes the Huguenots had their church and enjoyed the ministrations of Montdenis and others. Dieppe also had an immense commerce, its mariners famous of old for distant voyages. Hence sailed D'Enambus, in 1625, to St. Christopher, paving the way for French colonies in the West Indies, in which, as before intimated, Harlem settlers first tried their fortunes. And from this port many of the refugees took ship for other countries, as, we presume, did Francois Le Sueur and Robert Le Maire, who came thence to Harlem. How it was with these we know not, but may conclude that some left Dieppe and other French ports, destined for New Netherland, since its invitations to such colonists had already reached these ports through intercourse with Holland. Le Sueur was born at Challe- Mesnil or Colmenil, a small borough or market town three miles south of Dieppe. His name,-taking such forms with his descendants as Leseur, Lesier, Lazear and Lozier,-was well es- tablished in Caux, and a century previous had figured among the cloth makers of Rouen.
Very interesting is Picardy, whence came so many of the French exiles who made their homes at Harlem, for longer or shorter periods ; in all some thirty families, of which a full third were Picards or of Picard descent. Of this class were our Tour- neur, Cresson, Demarest, Casier and Disosway, all of whom, except the last, served as magistrates.
But who were the Picards? A quite superior people to the average French; being of mixed origin, descendants of both Belgæ and Celtæ, and occupying the border between these two ancient nations, or rather the district which parted the Celta from the Nervii, the most invincible of the Belgic tribes. Thus, sanguine and choleric like the Celts, they approached the Belga in their moral and physical stamina. . In stature above the medium, with usually a well-developed frame, they betrayed their affinity to the Walloons, whose patois, rough and disagree- able, theirs resembled; yet, proud and spirited, they held those neighbors, and all others, in secret disdain. The love of inde- pendence was not so strong within them as the love of equality; it was here their vanity showed itself, but it tempered the popular homage to wealth or titles. Though hasty, blunt, and obstinate, yet without the effrontery of the Normans or the superstition
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·
of the Champenois,-and more religious than either,-the Picards were withal lively, generous, honest and discreet. Their con- versation sparkled with wit, wirth and sarcasm. Necessity, rather than inclination, made them industrious, yet they yielded their full share of workers and proficients in the arts and sciences; as also of able physicians and divines,-some of the latter as much distinguished in the controversial history of the Reformation as others had been who were its earliest champions. With intelligence, and a manly aim to excel in what they under- took, even though it were but agriculture,-in which by far the. greater number were engaged,-the Picards could not but add a valuable element to any society so fortunate as to attract them .*
The narrow strip of the seaboard, in breadth twenty miles or less, which stretched southerly from Calais to the Canche, embraced the districts of Guines and Boulonnais, two subdi- visions of Picardy. Of its larger part, lying on either side of the Somme, but extending a hundred miles inland to the borders of Champagne, the coast section called Ponthieu reached some thirty miles up the Somme, Abbeville being the chief town. Easterly lay, in succession, the Amienois, Santerre, Vermandois, and Thierache, their southerly sides forming a line sufficiently winding, but, in general, east and west. These seven districts composed modern Picardy; but five others lying southerly of these,-to wit, the Beauvoisis, Noyonnois, Soissonnois, Laonnois, and Valois,-were equally Picard territory, as proven by the characteristics of the people, although these districts had been · annexed to the Isle of France.
These several sections of Picardy, save Guines and Boulon- nais, were watered by one or more of its three principal rivers, the Somme, the Oise and the Aisne; and seated on these were most of those fine old cities with strange histories, for which Picardy was noted. Two streamlets, engrossing many little rills from Champagne and Hainault, united in the centre of Thier- ache to form the Oise, which now stretched westward to Guise in the same district, but soon took its course, in general south- westerly, nearly parallel with the coast, till it entered the Seine
· Picard, though a term of disputed origin, is admitted to have been first local and restricted to the people of the Amienois, the district in which Amiens, the pro- vincial capital, is seated; but it early spread to the whole supplanting all the tribal designations. It probably came from the pique, an ancient war weapon, with the Ger- man affix ard, meaning species or race; adhering to this people as inventors of that weapon, or from the renown they had acquired in handling it. So they became known as the Picards, or pike-men. Gibbon, who dates the name not earlier than the year 1200, says, "It was an academical joke, an epithet first applied to the quarrelsome humor of those students in the University of Paris who came from the frontier of France and Flanders." But its occurence early in the eleventh century refutes this statement.
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at Fin d'Oise, below Paris, distant from Guise ninety odd miles. Scattered along its charming banks from Guise downward, at intervals of some ten miles, lay, in delightful seclusion, other antiquated towns, as Ribemont, La Fere, Chauny, Noyon, Com- piegne, Verberie, Creil, Beaumont and Pontois; the last six adorned with royal palaces, exclusive of Noyon, a pretty town and a bishop's seat, but of more interest to the Huguenots as the great Calvin's birthplace. Just above Compiegne, the Aisne, a large tributary, entered the Oise from the eastward, and on it lay the stately city of Soissons. Below Creil a smaller branch, the Therain, entered from the westward, on its upper waters seated, within a cordon of charming hills, the venerable town of Beauvais. The Somme, rising near the borders of. Thierache, on passing St. Quentin in Vermandois curved southward to Ham, then again to the north to Peronne, when it resumed its course westerly past Corbie to Amiens, and thence northwest through the Amienois and Panthieu plains to its outlet. The region around its head-waters about Vermandois was rendered very picturesque by the wooded hills which here crossed Picardy ; the broad plains below, just referred to, were less attractive to the eye, though varied by a succession of pretty intervals which bordered the tributary streams, and whose green pastures, trees and shrubbery agreeably relieved the general nakedness of the country and the apparent hardness of the whitish soil, the lat- ter composed one third of chalk, but productive. and yielding fine crops of wheat. The sub-district of Ponthieu, called the Marquenterre, embracing extensive pastures adjoining the coast, on the north of the Somme, had been recovered from the wash of the sea by a line of downs and dykes; to the south of the river's mouth the land had a gentle rise toward Normandy, till it formed the table-lands of Caux and the chain of cliffs that there bound the coast.
Picardy was originally composed of many small countries, or earldoms, instead of forming but one under a single count. Never so united and ruled, it was in this respect an anomaly among the French provinces. Its ancient tribal divisions deter- mined mainly its modern districts, and eight of the dozen com- posing it took name from their chief city. Its history, says Michelet, "seems to embrace the whole of the ancient history of France." Its plains and hills had been trodden by the great Cæsar and his legions, and it was on the banks of the Sambre, near Maubeuge, that he encountered the warlike Nervii, whose intrepidity almost wrested victory out of that fatal defeat which
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broke their power and gave Gaul to the conqueror. Near Sois- sons, five centuries later, the warrior Clovis, in an equally decisive battle, extinguished the Roman power and established that of the Franks. Here also had the Austrasian and Neustrian fac- tions found a battle ground, till the defeat of the latter, in 687, at Testry, in Vermandois, initiated the varied fortunes of the race of Charlemagne. Up the Somme had often rolled that fearful tide of Vandal and Norman invasion, which left no river unvisited from the Meuse to the Loire, desolating their banks and sacking towns, churches and monasteries, and at last contribu- ting, with other causes, to the fall of the monarchical power in the ninth century and the disintegration of the kingdom. Picardy, or rather its several sections, had come within the grasp of haughty chieftains, mostly of the family of the defunct Charlemagne, and who, as refractory as their compeers ruling the larger provinces and equally greedy of dominion, played a no less conspicuous part in the turbulent drama of the times. The early annals of these small earldoms superabound with deeds of rapine and blood. Not content with the conquest of neigh- boring towns or territory, they made kings, or humbled them at will; and, in fact, these imperious Picard lords for a long time ruled the destinies of the kingdom. But what strange freaks had fortune played with these old titled dynasties! Once scarcely recognizing any sovereign, and with all the advantage of a hereditary entail, yet, one by one they had shared the fate of the great provinces, Champagne, Normandy, and others: the old counts, with all the dazzling splendor of their houses, had passed away, and their possessions, by a studied policy of the kings, had been mostly engrossed as crown domains. True, it had taken from the twelfth century to the sixteenth to consummate these changes. More favored, however, were some of these districts which took the form of bishoprics. Descending by the elective process from one prelate to another in regular succession, these had withstood the feudal powers of the Middle Ages and the civil convulsions of many centuries. Not restricted to the. exer- cise of spiritual power in their bishoprics, some of these bishops had come to enjoy great temporal dignity, even the high position of peers of the realm, as were those of Laon, Noyon and Beau- vais; to the first of whom also pertained the title of duke, and to the other two that of count. Herein may be seen the. suDe- rior advantages of the existing hierarchy ic hold and transmit, or even to augment, its power. All this while the sturdy burgh. ery, their rights ever being trampled on, figure in many a sharp
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struggle with their tyrannical rulers; but appealing for help to royalty only to be ultimately betrayed, vanquished and de- spoiled of their choicest franchises, as the power ecclesiastic and kingly came to acquire that supreme ascendancy which it held in the reigns of Louis XIII. and Louis XIV.,-the times of our refugees.
Of the chief dignitaries then ruling parts of Picardy was the Duke De Chaulnes, in whom was the temporal, and Bishop Le Fevre, who held the spiritual, power in the Amienois; but more of these presently. Augustine Potier was supreme in the Beau- voisis, which was the most wealthy bishopric in Picardy. Hold- ing the fee of the soil, as had his predecessors, since the year 1015, when Bishop Roger got the county by deed from his brother Eudes, the Count of Champagne, Potier gloried in the titles of "Bishop and Count of Beauvais, Peer of France and Vidame of Gerberoy." He was also Grand Chaplain to the Queen, and intensely zealous for the church and monarchy, though it was hinted that his capacity did not equal his ambi- tion. The Noyonnois was under the rule of Henri De Barradat, to whose titles of Bishop and Count of Noyon was added that of Peer of France. The Marquise De Hocquincourt, Charles De Monchy, had succeeded his father as royal governor in Santerre, for which he was held fitted by his valor and his devotion to Louis XIII. This district had been taken from the ancient Ver- mandois, in 1215, by King Philip Augustus, who had annexed Vermandois to the crown, after that the old counts,-the most affluent and potent in Picardy, and whose sway had lasted over three centuries,-had become extinct. It included the cities of Peronne, Montdidier, and Roye, the first, the old seat and strong- hold of the counts, being now the residence of the governor, and deemed the key of France on these frontiers. De Monchy distin- guished himself in the war in the Low Countries, etc., and in 1651 was made a Marshal of France : but, taking offense at Louis XIV., he joined the Spanish cause, and was killed at Dunkirk in 1658. Vermandois proper now formed a baliwick, subject to the Bishop and Duke of Laon, Philibert De Brichanteau. Thierache was mainly engrossed by the Duchy of Guise,-of which the town and castle so called was the seat,-being still the domain of the House of Guise, those infamous and deadly foes of the Hugue- nots, ainl cre of whose ancestors, a Duke of Lorraine, had gotten this estate by marriage with a grandchild of the great crusader, Jacques d'Avesnes. But retributive justice seems to have visited the later Duke of Guise, Charles Le Lorraine, who, as admiral
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of a fleet, had served against the Huguenots at La Rochelle in 1622 .· Ambitious and intriguing like his predecessors, he quar- 'reled with Richelieu, and, retiring in 1631 with his family to Florence, died in exile in 1640. Ponthieu, much to the dis- gust of its people, and in violation of pledges given them by Henry IV., had been conferred by Louis XIII. upon one who had little merit, unless it consisted in his two plots to dethrone Henry IV., for which he lay long in the Bastile; this was Charles De Valois, natural son of Charles IX., of St. Bartholomew in- famy. But as he was a good soldier and zealous for the king, he ruled till his death, in 1650. Boulonnais and Guines, held directly by the crown, had long been ruled by royal governors. Louis XI., on recovering the former from the House of Bur- gundy, in 1477, had ceded it to the Virgin Mary, by an act of homage in the church at Boulogne, and consented to hold it of her as a fief; by which curious stroke of policy he thought to preserve it to France. Now, what enemy would dare touch it; what inhabitant would not die in its defense? And it had succeeded admirably !
The Amienois, as the seat of the provincial capital, was the most important division of Picardy. Spreading across the fer- tile valley of the Somme in the form of a not very regular quad- rangle, it was ten leagues broad and twenty in length north and south, reaching from the bounds of Artois, and in part the earl- dom of St. Paul, to the hills anticlinal of the basins of the Somme and Oise, which separated it from the Beauvoisis, It took name from its ancient possessors, the Ambiani, whose juris- diction, extending west to the Channel, included Ponthieu, which even now was within the diocese of the Bishop of Amiens. Many thrifty villages, with broad, well-tilled fields, irrigated by brooks and streams, which from distant hill sources gently coursed their way to the Somme, gave it the aspect of a rich country. From a peculiar feature of its government it was styled the Vidamate of Amiens. The office of vidame, once common, was now al- most peculiar to this district of Picardy. From some powerful chieftain, called in ancient times by the bishop to aid him in protecting his domains against the invasions of the Normans and the rapacity of native seigniors, had originated the office of vice dominus, or vidame. And from the reluctance of the proud baron to yield the advantage thus gained, and the inability of the bishop to dispense with his services, the office became fixed and hereditary. It was now one of chief dignity and in- fluence in the Amienois, the present vidame, Honore d'Albert,
--- -
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being a duke and peer of France. As brother to the prime minister, Duke De Luynes, he also had ingratiated himself with the king, and through his favor obtained, in 1619, the hand of the daughter and heiress of Philip-Emanuel, Lord De Picquigny, the last of the vidames of the House d'Ailly; and with her, beside the vidamate, the seigniory and castle of Picquigny, on the Somme, with an annuity in rents of £9,000. The king, at the same time, made him his lieutenant-general in the Govern- ment of Picardy ;* the next year he was dubbed a knight of the King's Orders, and raised to the dignity of Duke De Chaul- nes and Peer of France. The important post of Governor of Picardy, Henry IV. had conferred, with his name, upon Henry of Orleans, Duke De Longueville, at his baptism in 1595, his uncle, the Count of St. Paul, acting during his minority. Longue- ville's father and his father had held the same post. But in 1619 the Duke De Luynes aforesaid superceded De Longueville, and to him was also given the government of the city and citadel of Amiens. But he being killed in 1621, while absent, prosecuting the war against the Huguenots, the particular government of the city and citadel was transferred to his brother, the vidame. The Government of Picardy in the next few years passed through several hands, including the Dukes of Elbœuf and Chevreuse, both of the noted House of Guise and knights of the King's Orders; but Chevreuse retiring in 1633, this position also was conferred on the Duke De Chaulness, and to it was soon after added the powers of Royal Intendent, an office, as before said, created to keep a watch over the Huguenots, and which could not have been better bestowed than on the duke, bound as he was by every obligation to the king. and also true to the mandates of the church.t
The Bishops of Amiens claimed a succession from St. Firmin, -first on the prelatical roll, and held to have suffered martyrdom . in 287, with many of his flock, by order of the Roman magis- trate. The present bishop, Francois Le Fevre,-son of Sieur De Caumartin, of Ponthieu,-having become coadjutor to Bishop La Marthonie in 1617, the next year succeeded him in the See, and though some of the people violently resisted his induction, he
* The Government of Picardy, as distinguished from the old province, embraced only the Amienois, Santerre, Ponthieu, Boulonnais and Guines; the latter also called "Calais and Pais-reconquis." because it had been recovered from the English in 1558. + The Duke De Chaulnes died October 31, 1640, in his 69th year. and was suc- ceeded in his titles by his son Henry Louis, born 1621; but he dying May 21, 1653. without issue, the vidamate passed to a collateral branch of the family. In naming this son after the king and his late father. the duke showed his attachment to his royal patron; and at his baptism by the bishop. June 15. 1625, during a festive season at Amiens, hereafter noticed, the widow of Henry IV. and the king, represented by the Duke of Chevreuse. stood as god-parents.
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sustained the character of an amiable and good man,-meas- ured by a standard which then and there was not the highest. Upon 30,000 livres of income, yielded by his eight hundred par- ishes, he lived elegantly in his palace at Amiens. This city, described in former pages, with allusions to its early and heroic history, was the capital of the Amienois, as, indeed, of all Picardy. It had a brave 50,000 people, more or less. Abbeville, twenty- five miles down the Somme, its nearest rival in population, then boasted 35,000 or upward; but after Boulogne-sur-mer and St. Quentin, each about half the size of Amiens, the Picard cities rapidly dwindled to a paltry three thousand, or less. The chief spiritual and ecclesiastical authority thus reposing in the bishop, and the secular in the duke,-with his numerous functions and dignities,-while the provosts and other officials of the king came in for a share in the local jurisdiction, it is obvious the people of the Amienois had quite enough of rule. Without need to fur- ther define their respective powers, we know they made a unit against the Huguenots and their interests .*
Picardy's part in the great moral struggle of the sixteenth century was peculiar. Etaples, a little seaport on the Canche, sent its Le Fevre to herald the Reformation; Noyon, a Calvin, to vindicate it by voice and pen, and give a system of faith to the Huguenot churches; and Cuthe, in Vermandois, the no less excellent Ramus, slain in the St. Bartholomew,-worthy repre- sentative of its noble martyrs. And humble peasants, back from their harvest labors at Meaux, had borne to Thierache a richer · harvest of precious truth, and planted at Landuzy-la-ville one of the earliest of the Reformed churches. Thus nowhere had arisen stronger moral forces in support of the religion. On the other hand, does not Guise, in Thierache, recall its hereditary foes, those sanguinary dukes; and Peronne one of their foulest plots, the "Holy League," impiously so called,-which, sworn to extirpate the Huguenots, soon plunged the country into the bloodiest of its civil wars? But, mark a fact: among the two hundred "subjects and inhabitants of the country of Picardy,"- embracing "princes, lords, gentlemen and others, as well of the state ecclesiastic as of the noblesse and third state,"-who sub- scribed this infamous League and took the oath in the town hall at Peronne, February 13th, 1577, we find but one of the family names afterwards appearing at Harlem; so nicely drawn were the family lines between the friends and foes of the religion.
* Bishop Le Fevre died of apoplexy, November 17, 1652, probably after all our refugees had left Picardy.
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Zealously did the League pursue its nefarious object of "crush- ing out heresy"; till, at the close of the ensuing civil wars,-in which Picardy, while not often the scene of actual hostilities, had helped to swell the ranks of the respective armies (its regiment being a fixed part of the royal forces),-the Huguenot churches within its bounds, once numerous and flourishing, were reduced to a few scattered and timid flocks.
Dark pictures of the times preceding loomed up to the Huguenot mind at Amiens, where the Reformed opinions had early been received with great favor: of Louis De Berguin, a Walloon from Artois, who, first to maintain those doctrines here in 1527, was burnt for it at Paris; of mob violence; of fines and imprisonments for refusing to decorate their houses at Cor- pus Christ; of that fell day in 1568, when one hundred and twenty Huguenots were slain in the streets of Amiens; and the terror caused by the Paris St. Bartholomew, which was only averted here by strict orders from the Duke De Longueville, Governor of Picardy. And of the dismal era of the League, in which plot were implicated some of the most powerful lords of the Amienois; the vidame, Louis d'Ailly, a noble exception, having, with his family, embraced the religion. He encouraged the faithful, who for a time met at his house for worship; though his successor, Philip Emanuel, last vidame of that house, was forced in 1588, by the violence of the people, to pronounce for the League. Only when Henry IV. turned Catholic did the citizens of Amiens acknowledge him as king, and expel their late governor, Count d'Aumale, who was a Guise. But they care- fully "stipulated in making their submission that the Huguenot preaching should be prohibited in their precincts and suburbs." This was on August 10th, 1594. Not long after occurred the Spanish occupation of the city,-which they entered by an ingen- ious sacrifice,-and its deliverance by the armies of Henry IV. Peace with Spain soon followed, with another event more felici- tous,-the passage of the Edict of Nantes,-arresting the civil wars and restoring order to the realm. Then for the rest of that happy reign, Amiens, especially, became the mart of a flourishing trade and commerce, of which its looms furnished the staples; but a half century later the Huguenot emigrations had re- duced these industries to the verge of ruin, so alarming in 1665 as to lead the general government to interpose a remedy. In no wise exempt from the grievances common to the Reformed, under the Edict, those at Amiens and vicinity also had their own.
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