The French Huguenots

By W. F. Twyman, Jr.

“I don’t understand why the Catholics and Protestants would fight each other. It doesn’t make any sense” — Younger son in Henrico County, Virginia

I grew up with the word “Huguenot” as familiar as an old shoe. There was Huguenot High School up near Midlothian. Huguenot Road was a well-traveled thoroughfare. There was the tinge of excitement when crossing the James River over the Huguenot Bridge. The name was there in the ether but we never studied the French Huguenots in grade school. And that is a shame since Chesterfield County, Virginia was a place of refuge for this persecuted people.

Who were the Huguenots?

The Huguenots were a religious minority of Protestants who lived in Catholic France beginning around the 1550s. Constituting only 10% of the French people, the Huguenots were a courageous people of faith despite social pressures to conform. That strength of conviction right away appeals to me. Any minority of belief constitutes a threat to the majority. And so it was that the Catholics went medieval on the French Huguenots in the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre. In 1572, Catholic mobs went on a killing spree two days after the attempted assassination of the leader of the Huguenots. Many influential Huguenots had assembled in Paris to witness the unifying wedding of the Protestant King Henry III of Navarre to King Charles IX’s Catholic sister Margaret. Imagine a wave, a flood of joyful Huguenots flooding into the Catholic city of Paris.

Hard and ruthless in his anti-Huguenot sentiment, King Charles IX ordered the slaughter of Huguenot leaders. The killings carried out by Catholic mobs grew into mayhem throughout Paris. One was marked for death if one were a Huguenot in the city streets. The mob violence reached out into the surrounding countryside. Before the murders stopped, 5,000 to 30,000 Huguenots were dead.

Protestant Huguenots were The Other in Catholic France. Is there Catholic Guilt today in France for the massacre of innocent Huguenots? I wonder.

The St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre broke the back of the French Huguenot community. The leadership ranks were decimated. Others who survived converted to Catholicism rather than face risk of oppression and death. Some of the survivors became radicalized under the blanket of Catholic supremacy. “Though by no means unique, the bloodletting "was the worst of the century's religious massacres". Throughout Europe, it "printed on Protestant minds the indelible conviction that Catholicism was a bloody and treacherous religion". — Source: Wikipedia

What did the surviving French Huguenots do? They fled France.

King Louis XIV claimed that the French Huguenots were reduced from about 900,000 to 1,000 in France. I don’t trust that figure but there is no question Catholic France executed the religious equivalent of genocide on their Huguenot brethren. Is there Catholic Guilt in the hearts and minds of French Catholics? I don’t know.

Some French Huguenots immigrated to Kent, England, the ancestral home of the Twymans. History of the Huguenots in Kent, England Do you know where the word “refugee” came from? It was first used to describe the fleeing Huguenots welcomed by the British people.

HERE REST MANY HUGUENOTS WHO ON THE REVOCATION OF THE EDICT OF NANTES IN 1685 LEFT THEIR NATIVE LAND FOR CONSCIENCE SAKE AND FOUND IN WANDSWORTH FREEDOM TO WORSHIP GOD AFTER THEIR OWN MANNER THEY ESTABLISHED IMPORTANT INDUSTRIES AND ADDED TO THE CREDIT AND PROSPERITY OF THER TOWN OF THEIR ADOPTION — landmark to Huguenot refugee community in England

From England, Huguenots would migrate across the Atlanta Ocean for a better life in America, particularly parts of Virginia. In places like Chesterfield County, the Huguenots had the freedom to worship as they pleased. There were no roving mobs of Catholics in Midlothian.

In 1700, French Huguenots began settling in Chesterfield and worshipping God as Protestants. The Huguenots became central to the county and French names continue to be found in the county. The Huguenot DNA lives on in us to this day. The Buford family, for example, “originated in France, belonging to the French Huguenots, and on account of their religious belief, left France and found refuge in England.” Agatha Buford (1705 - 1744) is my 5x great-grandmother. Richard Buford (1617 - 1677), my 9x great grandfather, was born in Essex, England, left aboard the ship “Elizabeth” in Kent and arrived in Lancaster County, Virginia about two months later.

We are the descendants of men, and women, of religious conviction. I explained all of this history to my younger son.

After we bade farewell to a Virginia cousin, we traveled across the Huguenot Bridge towards the land of our ancestors.

St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre