A portrait of Andrew Coltée Ducarel by Andrea Soldi, which is reproduced as the front of this book’s dustwrapper (as well as inside), sets the tone for the book as a whole: its subject is an eyecatching display of opulence, as displayed in the sitter’s costly silk clothes, combined with a seriousness of purpose that is evidenced by the worn-looking coin which he holds in one hand and the tatty book which he delicately clutches in the other.
Andrew and James were the sons of a French Huguenot banker. After his death in 1718, his widow fled to England with the two, then mere infants. His money provided them with a very comfortable start in life, but, alas, not quite the means to which each may have aspired. Andrew (1713–85) sensibly made his way as a professional ecclesiastical lawyer, practising in Doctors’ Commons, and in addition he acted for thirty years as the librarian for successive archbishops of Canterbury at Lambeth Palace. James (1715–88) preferred to move in grander society, until, unable to pay his debts, he fled back to France.
Andrew is celebrated as an antiquary, and even though it is James’s letters to Andrew that form the substance of this book, these show how he spent much of his time trying – with considerable success – to help Andrew on two projected books on Norman antiquities. Andrew was an extremely hard-working scholar, and just as he used his position at Lambeth to calendar the medieval archiepiscopal registers, and also as a base from which to track down the medieval settlements about tithe payments that might help the present-day clergy of Canterbury diocese, so he saw that James’s presence in Normandy offered a wonderful opportunity to secure images and other material for the second of these books, Anglo-Norman Antiquities. This was published in 1767; and many of the letters published by de Lisle and Myers are really James’s reports to Andrew about his preparatory labours on Andrew’s behalf. He took enormous care to gather high-quality illustrative materials, and his success helps explain the resultant book’s high reputation. It is frustrating that the skilled architectural draughtsman whom he engaged is known only by his surname, Noel; he was a member of the Bureau de Finances at Caen.
James also sought out old prints of cathedrals and other churches: these were not wasted, as some were re-engraved for the two-volume Account of the Alien Priories jointly written by Andrew and Richard Gough (1779). Ingeniously, too, the good offices of the French ambassador to England, the Duc de Nivernois, were used to secure 400 new prints of the Bayeux Tapestry, taken from Montfaucon’s plates.
But James’s letters have a further interest, and a two-fold one at that. On the one hand they present a picture of ancien régime landed society in provincial France from the inside, in almost its last generation before the Revolution, and at the same time they vividly remind us, on almost every day, of the perils that beset the Huguenot community and those who helped it. James established good relations with a few of the local Roman Catholic clergy, even arranging for one of them, Dom Jean Bourget, to be elected an Honorary FSA in 1765. However, such an action carried with it the risk that Bourget might be stigmatised and even prosecuted as a heretic: there was always such a fear to be borne in mind by those who engaged in inter-faith relations. In that context it was irrelevant that the established monastic houses were already facing internal dissent, as we learn from one of James’s letters (p 164).
The editors of these 113 letters have carried out their task with exemplary skill and elegance; rather like Soldi’s portrait of Andrew, they have combined scholarly precision and a helpful apparatus of family trees, biographical gazetteer and timeline with an exceptionally splendid dress. At a mere £85, this most handsome of books is an absolute snip.
