Huguenot hope

The Renaissance was the seedbed of the ferment that defined the 16th and 17th centuries. Prior to it, society was stable and hierarchical. Humanism fractured the medieval worldview, unleashing forces that would erupt in the Reformation. Emphasising individual thought and critical reading, humanism gave Martin Luther the tools to rethink salvation. A professor at Wittenberg, he wrestled with the Book of Romans, inspired by Erasmus’ call to return ad fontes. In 1521, at the Diet of Worms, he declared: “Here I stand. I can do no other.” Medieval scholasticism gave way to confessional absolutism. With salvation by faith alone, what you believed became destiny. French Protestantism emerged rooted in predestination. These Calvinist Huguenots clashed with Catholics during the French Wars of Religion (1562–1598). On St Bartholomew’s Day in 1572 thousands of Huguenots were massacred. The Edict of Nantes (1598) offered fragile peace, but Huguenots held ideas that made them alien in their native land. The Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648) spanned the Holy Roman Empire, sacrificing millions on the altar of confessional absolutism. In France, Richelieu’s 1627–28 siege of the Huguenot stronghold of La Rochelle was brutal, starving 22,000 inhabitants. They died for what they believed, for ideas. Mid century, France emerged from war united and centralised under a Catholic banner. Louis XIV shed the veil of tolerance and revoked the Edict of Nantes (1685). Four hundred thousand Huguenots fled to England, the Netherlands, Germany, North America, and the Cape of Good Hope. They bore the memory of St Bartholomew and La Rochelle. Those who remained were mercilessly persecuted. At the Cape, the VOC promised Huguenots land, ultimately founding viticulture in Franschhoek. The voyage to the Cape was arduous, the ships disease-ridden and dangerous. As a Somali-British poet wrote: “You must understand that no one puts their children in a boat unless the water is safer than the land.”