Part of our Crossings: Community and refuge exhibition programme
Dan Rafiqi and Tessa Murdoch discussing the first hand accounts of Huguenot refugees Suzanna de Robillard and Issac Minet in an event inspired by the Crossings: community and refuge exhibition.
The presentation will focus on the accounts of Suzanne de Robillard and Isaac Minet
Susanne de Robillard, a Huguenot refugee from Saintonge who resettled first in the United Provinces and then Lower Saxony, wrote down her story in French of her escape from France two years after the 1685 Revocation of the Edict of Nantes. Her evocative account of her experience as a stowaway on a merchant ship at La Rochelle heading for Falmouth reflects on her own humility.
Written in English in 1737, probably in Dover, when the author was 77, Isaac Minet's 'Relation' records his daring escape with other members of his family from Dieppe in 1686. This evocative and emotional story describes his clandestine embarkation onto a ship bound for Dover on France’s northern seaboard. Minet wrote more than fifty years later, when ‘all that is past as now a dreame’.
Isaac Minet (1660-1745) was the son of a grocer in Calais. In 1674, he was sent to Dover to learn English. He stayed there nearly two years and returned to Calais to run the family business after his father's death.
In 1685, when the Protestant Church in Calais has been demolished and the dragoons were billetted on the Protestant population, Isaac Minet and his mother left their home and hid in the house of a Dutch shopkeeper for three days. Then disguised as a porter's wife and a carpenter, they attempted to leave the town. Unfortunately, Isaac's mother was recognised and imprisoned. Isaac was later caught and joined his mother in the same prison. They were taken to a Catholic chapel where they were compelled to sign a form of abjuration. When they returned home they found that their house was still occupied by three soldiers.
Isaac then arranged for his brother Stephen, who was already in England, to send a boat to collect them from a point two miles east of Calais at midnight on Sunday 31 July 1686. Despite a coast guard of 25 soldiers and patrol vessels from Dunkirk, Isaac, his mother, his brother Ambrose and his sister managed to board the vessel. They landed at Dover on Monday 1st August.
Isaac Minet settled initially in London, where he hired a house in Newport Street and set up a small grocer's shop. In 1690 he returned to Dover where his brother Stephen was dying. Isaac kept 1 August as a fast in memory of his escape until his death in April, 1745.
About the speakers
Dan Rafiqi has an Arts and Humanities Research Council Collaborative Doctoral
Award: ‘Dr Williams’s French Books’, King’s College London and Dr Williams’s Library
He studied History and French at University of Warwick and has a Masters in History from University of Oxford. He is currently working on a Ph.D. research project focused on exploring refugee experience in Huguenot autobiographical writings, 1681-1750.
Tessa Murdoch has forty years curatorial experience at the Museum of London and the Victoria and Albert Museum. She is Acting Chair of the Huguenot Museum, Rochester, which reopened in August 2022 and tells the story of Huguenot refugees in the United Kingdom through the historic collections of the French Hospital ‘La Providence’ founded in London in 1708 and located in Rochester since 1959.
Her book Europe Divided: Huguenot Refugee Art and Culture was published by the V&A, 2021
