ABSTRACT
Despite the guarantee of the liberties of French Protestants, the Huguenots, by the Edict of Nantes (1598), during the course of the seventeenth century they were progressively whittled away and finally revoked by Louis XIV under Jesuit influence in 1685. Both before and in the years immediately following that date, Huguenots spread to other parts of northern and western Europe and to the North American colonies—to New England, the Middle Colonies and South Carolina. Ezechiel Carré was the minister of one such refugee settlement in the Narragansett country of Rhode Island who, on occasion, also preached at the French Church in Boston. At a time of hostile relations between Britain and France, the French settlers, though professedly Protestant, were under some suspicion. Carré's published sermon was in part designed to put the Huguenots in a favourable light and to reassert a customary group practice of alms-giving.
