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Le Plessis- Marly was the estate of the Duplessis-Mornays,

the family which gave the statesman Philippe de Mornay to the Protestant cause in the troubled days of Henri IV. Le Plessis-Marly came into Philippe’s possession through his mother Francoise, daughter of Charles du Bec-Crespin, vice- admiral of France. Formerly owned by her maternal aunt Jeanne de Deauvilliers, the property was acquired by Francoise in June 1561.7

The church was chosen in 1601 by the royal commissioners Francois d’Angennes and Pierre Jeannin to serve the Calvinists of the Montfort- l’Amaury bailiwick, replacing an earlier place of worship at Garan- cieres-en-Beauce to the south-west.8 The Mornays made personal provision in 1606 for the salary of a minister and for the support of the poor. The church was included in the Beauce colloquy of the synodal province for the north-east of France and had close connections with the seigneurial church of La Norville in the Hurepoix, sharing the same pastor, Maurice de Lauberon de Montigny, for a number of years after 1626. The Paris temple had been sited in the Hurepoix before 1606, first at Grigny and later, in 1599, at Ablon-sur-Seine. both south of the capital, but with the removal to Charenton, Le Plessis-Marly and La Norville alone served the region.9

It was for Jansenism, rather than Calvinism, that the Hurepoix was noted in the seventeenth century. The Calvinist reform movement had made little headway there and was very much a minority cult. Jean Jacquart has put forward some tentative reasons: the ease with which repressive measures could be introduced to counter heresy in towns and villages close to the capital; few complaints of a material kind against the Catholic church and close family ties between many of the clergy and their parishioners; social stability in a region which remained relatively strong economically during the wars of religion. Here then was no fertile field for religious innovation and proximity to Paris strengthened the efforts of Catholic reform: mission priests, following in the footsteps of Vincent de Paul, were active; eucharistic devotions, a counterpoise to Calvinism, were encouraged. A number of landowners returned to the Catholic faith and those who remained members of the reformed church do not appear to have strongly influenced their tenants.10

The anti-Calvinist drive mounted by Louis XIV drove the pastor Jacques Rondeau of Le Plessis-Marly to England,11 while Charles Marais, his wife Catherine Taboureux and their children Claude, Charles, Isaac and Marie-Madeleine made their way to the United Provinces. Like so many other refugees of the period they had been compelled to accept Catholicism at the revocation, but returned to the reformed faith in their first country of refuge. Charles, his wife and the older children rejected their forced conversion at the Walloon church in The Hague on September 14, 1687.12

(M.Boucher. (1981). French speakers at the Cape: The European Background. Pretoria, UNISA p 105-7)

REFERENCES: CHAPTER FIVE

• 7. On the Mornay background see HAAG and HAAG, France protestante, VII, pp. 512-542. Le Plessis-Marly is discussed in M. BOUCHER. ‘Cape and company in the early eighteenth century’, Kleio, IX, 1 and 2, June 1977, pp. 67-68.
• 8. 5642, Collection Auziere, Ile-de-France, Eglises, L-Z: Le Plessis-Marly, Pays chartrain, p. 23 (Bibl. Prot., SHPF).
• 9. JACQUART, Crise rurale, p. 582 and n.; J. PANNIER. ‘Notes sur l’eglise reformee de La Norville; les origines; un registre de 1671; la disparition’, BSHPF, L, April 15, 1901, p. 175.
• 10. Crise rurale, pp. 168-169; 583.
• 11. MOURS, 'Pasteurs’, BSHPF, CXIV, Jan.-March 1968, p. 81.
• 12. AB ZH Gra dtb, ’s-Gravenhage, Lidmaatschap, ens., 1621-1893 (copy): 1225-1227, p. 78, where the names are given as Marets and Taboureur (CBG).

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