Strangers in the House. Candace Savage
was born in the 1650s, near Poitiers, in west-central France, the fifth child and second son of a vintner. We also know that in 1683 he journeyed across the dark waters of the north Atlantic to live and work on the Island of Montréal, in the employ of a Roman Catholic missionary society called La Compagnie des Prêtres de Saint-Sulpice, or the Sulpicians.
The Compagnie had established itself in the Saint Lawrence Valley for the sole purpose of evangelizing the Indigenous people of the region and leading them from error and sin. The arrogance of this intrusion, which was territorial, spiritual, and economic, did not sit well with the people of the Iroquois Confederacy, and the conflict that ensued between the French and the Five Nations was protracted and bloody. It didn’t help that each side allied itself with the other’s worst enemy: the French with the Hurons and the Iroquois with the English. In 1687, not long after Hilaire’s arrival, the French military descended on a number of Iroquois villages, leaving ruin in their wake. Two years later, the Iroquois set fire to the French settlement of Lachine.
Hilaire was no stranger to lethal risk. Although he had grown up in a time of relative tranquility, France had been ravaged for decades by a grotesque civil war, and the region around Poitiers had been a flash point for violence. Christians had taken up arms against Christians. On one side, in fierce defense of the status quo, stood the Roman Catholics; on the other, in armed resistance, were the Huguenots, Protestant followers of the fiery French theologian Jehan Cauvin, better known to many of us as John Calvin. Among the Huguenots burned at the stake as heretics was a woman named Radegonde Sureau (a relative perhaps), one of the millions who lost their lives in the uproar. An uneasy peace was finally achieved early in the seventeenth century when the king’s army crushed the Protestant rebels, and their inevitable English allies, in the Siege of La Rochelle.
Although the overt warfare had ended, the soft violence of repression continued for decades afterward through les dragonnades, a policy that forced Huguenots to billet government soldiers in their homes. That directive came into effect in 1681, and it was just two years later when our Hilaire stepped aboard a sailing ship heading for the Saint Lawrence. No sooner had he settled in than, in 1685, King Louis XIV issued the Code Noir, which, in addition to regulating slavery in French colonies and ordering the expulsion of Jews, outlawed the observance of any dissenting Christian practices. Thus, although we cannot know what beliefs Hilaire Sureau held in his heart, we know what he would have said. There was no legal option except Catholicism.
THESE WERE NOT the kind of stories I’d expected my house to tell. And yet I wasn’t entirely surprised by what I was learning, because the terror of the European Wars of Religion had caused convulsions for my own ancestors. In 1711, my paternal great-great-great-great-great-great-grandparents Ulrich and Barbara Schürch were packed onto a ship and deported from their home in Canton Bern for the crime of being Mennonites, too radical for the leaders of the Swiss Reformed Church. Eventually, they found refuge in Pennsylvania and established themselves on a large plot of land (acquired through the displacement of the Lenape, or Delaware, people) near a village they named Schoeneck, in memory of the homeland they had been forced to leave.
That was my grandpa Sherk’s side of the story. Although he and my grandma had met and married in northern Alberta, it turns out that she had Pennsylvania roots as well. Her foundational North American ancestors, William and Nancy Jack, are said to have been born in Ireland and to have arrived in Mercer County, Pennsylvania, around 1800. According to an annotation in an old family Bible, William hailed from County Cork. But there are unsubstantiated rumors, kept alive in the Google-sphere, that his people were originally French and had been among the tens of thousands of Huguenots who were harried into exile.
Scholars tell us that, yes, it is true that some French Calvinists found their way to County Cork and, yes, the surname “Jack,” from Jacques, does appear in their midst. But then the record goes blank. Did one of these Huguenot descendants emigrate to Mercer County? The ocean looms between A and B, and there is no way to know for sure.
For “Jack” is also a British name, and the family might just as likely have numbered among the thousands of Scottish Protestants who were transplanted to Ireland by the English government in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in an attempt to outnumber and overrule the Irish Catholic majority. (The devices of power, it seems, are endless.) But whether French Huguenot or Scots Irish, there is no doubt which side the Jacks were on. That foundational ancestor, William Jack, was named for the Protestant standard-bearer King William of Orange, who famously defeated the Catholics at the Battle of the Boyne.
THERE’S A CURIOUS sideline to this story of Jacks and Jacques. It involves a nineteenth-century con man who gloried in the Frenchified handle of Gustav or Gustave Anjou. (His birth name had been tarnished by certain unfortunate convictions for fraud in his native Sweden.) After immigrating to New York in the 1890s, he established himself as genealogist to the rich and famous and to anyone else who could afford his fees. Suitably fortified with greenbacks, Monsieur Anjou provided the Jacks of Pennsylvania with a line of descent that went back, with nary a question mark, through an unbroken chain of twenty-two generations. Since Huguenots had earned a reputation for skilled craftsmanship and stubborn integrity, they were considered an ornament to any pedigree. And so, ever eager to please his clients, Anjou fabricated a paper trail that wound through the “archives” of seventeenth-century Eure-et-Loir (a département of France that wouldn’t actually be created for another hundred years) and endowed the family with a bevy of bogus French Protestant ancestors. His inventions continue to haunt dusty, ill-lit corners of the internet, giving hope to Jack descendants who yearn for a touch of l’élégance française.
FROM WHAT I’VE said so far, you may have formed the impression that Protestants were the only people to suffer during Europe’s religious wars. But when an entire continent was tearing itself apart over doctrinal differences, no one escaped untouched. Winners oppressed losers, and the virtues of Christian charity were forgotten. In England, for example, King Henry VIII was so outraged by the Pope’s refusal to annul his first marriage so he could wed again (and again) that he had himself appointed as head of the Church of England. Soon, Roman Catholicism was outlawed as a species of treason, an affront to the Crown. Monasteries were ransacked and looted; priests were tortured and killed. Ordinary adherents who declared their faith were sometimes imprisoned and, always, stripped of their liberties, leaving them unable to own land, receive bequests, graduate from university, or qualify for professions. In 1673, a new law required anyone who applied for governmental or military office to take an oath denying the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation, the belief that the Eucharistic bread and wine become the body and blood of Christ. Not, one would think, an obvious prerequisite for public service.
The next year, a man named Peter Curricoe stepped aboard an English vessel bound for Maryland, a colony created by Catholics for Catholics and dedicated to religious freedom. He arrived as an indentured servant (essentially a slave), put in the required seven years of work, and received title to fifty acres of land, acquired through the displacement of the Piscataway and Yaocomaco people, as his reward.
Five generations later, when my mother’s mother, Mary Catherine Carrico, was born, she remained as fiercely and irreducibly Catholic as her forebears. By choosing my grandfather Humphrey, she became the first member of her lineage to marry outside the faith, and together, they fed the flames of religious discord around their kitchen table on the Alberta plains.
BUT BACK TO Hilaire Sureau. When we left him, he was a young man of about thirty, engaged by the Sulpicians as a laborer in Montréal. It can’t be mere coincidence that his employers were just then embarking on a major construction project, the Séminaire de Saint-Sulpice, now one of the oldest surviving heritage buildings in the city. Built between 1684 and 1687, it stands as a tribute to the men, likely including Hilaire, who carted the stone and burned the lime and mixed the mortar. With his three-year contract completed, he could have returned to France but instead decided to leave Montréal and take his chances downriver, in the town of Québec. Less vulnerable than Montréal to attack by the Iroquois, Québec had nonetheless recently been forced to