as proper to the general historical connection of our subject, although
not absolutely necessary to its investigation.

At the commencement of the seventeenth century, England, on her own
behalf, took up the generous plans of Coligny. Possessing twelve
colonies in America, when the edict of Nantes was revoked, that nation
resolved here to offer peaceful homes to persecuted Huguenots from
France. This mercy she had extended to them in England and Ireland; now
her inviting American colonies were thrown open for the same generous
purpose. Even before that insane and fatal measure of Louis XIV., the
Revocation, and especially after the fall of brave La Rochelle, numerous
Protestant fugitives, mostly from the western provinces of France, had
already emigrated, for safety, to British America. In 1662 the French
government made it a crime for the ship-owners of Rochelle to convey
emigrants to any country or dependency of Great Britain. The fine for
such an offence was ten livres to the king, nine hundred for charitable
objects, three hundred to the palace chapel, one hundred for prisoners,
and five hundred to the mendicant monks. One sea-captain, Brunet, was
accused of having favored the escape of thirty-six young men, and
condemned to return them within a year, or to furnish a legal
certificate of their death, on pain of one thousand livres, with
exemplary punishment.[G] It is imagined that these young voluntary
Huguenot exiles emigrated to Massachusetts, from the fact that the same
year when this strange cause was tried in France, Jean Touton, a French
doctor, requested from the authorities of that colony the privilege of
sojourning there. This favor was immediately granted; and from that
period _Boston_ possessed establishments formed by Huguenots, which
attracted new emigrants.

In 1679, Elie Nean, the head of an eminent family from the principality