In sixteenth Century Western Europe the traditional grip of the Roman
Catholic Church was beginning to falter. The general interest in popular
education which resulted in the Renaissance of the previous century,
combined with the invention in Germany of the printing press, laid the
groundwork for new thinking and the spread of new ideas.
In Germany, the Protestant movement, led by Martin Luther, was trying
to move away from the medieval abuses of the Catholic Church and to
embrace a reinterpretation of the teachings of the Bible, particularly the
New Testament. Luther began his movement in 1517 and was soon declared a
heretic by the Papacy. However, Frederick III of Saxony and other German princes
supported Luther, and in 1555 Lutheranism became a legitimate
religious option. In Switzerland, much the same process was taking place
under the guidance of Ulrich Zwingli.
When the doctrines of the Protestant Movement spread into France, laws
were quickly passed which made the profession of the doctrines a crime of
heresy, punishable by death. One convert, John Calvin, left France in 1536
and went to Switzerland where he helped organize the second surge of
Protestantism.
In the meantime in France, The Huguenots, as the Protestants were
known, embraced the doctrines despite persecution by the Catholics. In
1551 the Edict of Chateaubriand called upon the civil and ecclesiastical
courts to detect and punish all heretics (Huguenots). In 1559, despite the
pressure, the Huguenots convened the First Synod of the Reformed Churches
of France. In 1561, an edict was issued making it a crime to attend an
"heretical service of worship", either public or private.
Nevertheless, the Huguenot movement continued to gain strength, and civil
war seemed inevitable.
The Edict of January, 1562, sought to avoid civil war by declaring that
over two thousand French Protestant churches were legal, and previous
restrictive laws were provisionally repealed. Six weeks later, an armed
mob led by the unrelenting Duke of Guise massacred an assembly of
Huguenots in Vassy, Champagne. France was immediately plunged into the
first of a series of civil wars which were to last until 1598.
During this time France lost much of its intellectual resource as the
Huguenots were either massacred or fled to less restrictive countries.
Tradition says that the Fuqua family in America is descended from the
French Huguenot Marquis de Fouquet, who was killed, along with tens of
thousands of other protestants in the Massacre of Saint Bartholomew Day,
24 August 1572. The wife of the Marquis is said to have fled from France
to England with her three small sons, crossing the English Channel in an
open boat with the help of servants. If this tradition is correct (there
are other versions of the story), it is probable that there were at least
three generations between one of the small sons and the first known Fuqua
ancestor in America. Whoever our Huguenot ancestor may have been, if he
left France as a result of religious persecution in the 1500s, and was
living in Colonial Virginia in the 1600s, it is very unlikely that he was
the father of the Virginia "Fuquas." A significant amount of
time spent somewhere in Europe, and some additional generations are much
more likely.
=O=
