Did you know that one in six of us has a drop of Huguenot blood in our veins?
Do you have Huguenot ancestors? Well, the Huguenot Museum in Rochester, Kent, can help you discover your Huguenot family history.
It’s the only museum of Huguenot history in the UK. The displays celebrate the contribution of generations of skilled Protestant refugees to Britain from l’ancien régime France.
The first French Protestant church was established in Threadneedle Street, London, in 1550.
A century and a half later, members of that Huguenot community dominated the Bank of England, founded by Huguenot Sir John Houblon in 1694 to raise funds for the war effort against France. Huguenot soldiers supported William III at the Battle of the Boyne and fought under the Duke of Marlborough at Blenheim.
The Rochester Museum cares for the collections of the French Hospital, established in 1708 to provide shelter for Huguenots who could not earn a living.
It catered for those with mental illness, often resulting from abuse suffered during the persecution of Protestants in Louis XIV’s France.
This Huguenot charity moved to Victoria Park, Hackney, in the 1860s, where its spectacular purpose-built ‘hospital’, resembling the Château de Chambord in the Loire Valley, catered for 40 women and 20 men. The male day room contained a loom where dress silk was woven for Queen Victoria.
In the 1950s, the French Hospital moved into its present home, a converted Regency square in Rochester, where 62 apartments accommodate 47 single residents and nine married couples.
Established by the French Hospital in 2013, with a substantial grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund, the museum was opened by Princess Alexandra in July 2015. The current exhibition, of Sarah Lethieullier’s 1730s doll’s house, is on loan from the National Trust’s Uppark, West Sussex. It shows how a Huguenot family, established as London merchants from the early-17th century, were by the mid-18th century assimilated into the English landed gentry.
The doll’s house (pictured) was given to teenage Sarah by her father, Christopher Lethieullier, a director of the Bank of England.
This Neo-Palladian ‘baby house’ is a miniature of the homes Sarah would create in London and Sussex, after her marriage in 1746 to wealthy Sir Matthew Fetherstonhaugh.
With 700 fixtures and fittings, the house shows the contrast between the below-stairs life led by wooden dolls, representing the cook, footmen, housekeeper and wet nurse, and the gracious living enjoyed by the family of wax dolls – including the lady of the house lying in bed after childbirth, her healthy son in a wicker cradle at her feet.
The rich textiles that furnish the doll’s house reflect the Huguenot contribution to the design, manufacture and marketing of silks. Weavers were particularly associated with Canterbury and Spitalfields, where Huguenots settled from the late 17th century.
Designs by James Leman – whose family settled first in Canterbury – and the Lincolnshire-born Anna Maria Garthwaite, are in the V&A. The Huguenot Museum has Spitalfields silk on display.
2025 marked the 340th anniversary anniversary of the 1685 Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, when Louis XIV outlawed Protestantism in France. It reversed the Edict of Nantes in 1598, when Henry IV of France granted civil and religious rights to the Huguenots.
As a result of the Revocation, descendants of 50,000 Huguenot refugees settled in the British Isles, including talented Huguenot women.
Among them were the goldsmiths Anne Tanqueray (whose great-grandson invented Tanqueray gin) and Eliza Godfrey, both daughters of first- generation Huguenot goldsmiths. They carried on their husbands’ workshops as widows, registering their own maker’s marks at Goldsmiths’ Hall.
The recently acquired miniature sculpture Susanna and the Elders exemplifies the work of David Le Marchand (1674-1726), a refugee from Dieppe, who moved to London and later died in the French Hospital.
Although Huguenot refugees were supported by Royal Bounty and charitable giving particularly from the Dukes of Bedford and Montagu, they established their own schools and friendly societies.
Sixty years after the Revocation, clockmaker David Hubert, whose family was from Rouen, established the Westminster French Protestant Charity School, providing education for orphans.
This flourished as a girls’ school until 1924; a 19th-century doll in the school uniform greets visitors to the museum.
The Huguenots introduced the word ‘refugee’ to the English language. Their resilience, perseverance and assimilation are particularly relevant today.
Tessa Murdoch is Chair of Trustees at the Huguenot Museum, Rochester
The Huguenot Museum is hosting a show with Terry Face, maker of miniature furniture, on May 14
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/making-minatures-tickets-1986077335775
