Page News & Courier
Heritage and Heraldry
The Dovel Family and an introduction to the terror experienced by the French Huguenots
Article of April 15, 1999
The Dovel Family is one of various families from Page to come forth from the religious controversy that spread over France during the 16th century. What caused the great exodus from France is not clearly known my many but tells of a dark and gruesome religious event in European and World history.
By definition, Huguenots were French Protestants of the 16th and 17th centuries. The phrase also has roots stemming from French, specifically - “influenced by the gate of Roi-Hugon, where the Protestants of Tours assembled at night.” However, the controversy that included this Protestant group of people stemmed from a power struggle for control of the French court. Not only had there been a distinct rivalry between France and Spain for the control of Flanders, but there had also been a bloody noblemen's war in existence between Catholics and persecuted Huguenots for ten years. On August 20, 1572, Catherine de Medicis, the pro-Spanish mother of France's Catholic King Charles IX, had engineered an attempt on the life of his powerful Protestant aide, admiral Gaspard de Coligny, who was advocating war on Spain. A badly wounded Coligny warned the king about his mother. King Henry of Navarre, a Protestant who had just married Charles' sister Margot and came in line for succession to the French throne, demanded that Coligny's attackers be punished. Catherine de Medicis then ordered a massacre of Protestants during which Coligny would be finished off. Her powerful allies, including the duke of Guise, stormed Coligny's home, slit his throat and dumped his body in the house's yard. Church bells pealed, calling Catholic militia to arms. The killings went out of control.
On the night of August 23, 1572, Roman Catholic militia wielding knives and swords fanned out through Paris, dragging Protestants from their homes and slitting their throats in an reign of terror. By the following morning thousands of bodies lay silent on the streets of the French capital. However, the exact final death toll of the notorious St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre still remains a mystery to this day and is estimated from between 1,000 to 10,000 in Paris, and 2,000 to 100,000 throughout all of France.
Twenty-two years later the "wars of religion'' flared again. Henry of Navarre, after besieging the French capital, declared in a famous quip: "Paris is well worth a mass.'' He converted to Catholicism and was crowned king of France. His Edict of Nantes in 1598 granted the Huguenots toleration and civil rights. He was assassinated 12 years later in an anti-Protestant plot. King Louis XIV, attempting to forcibly convert Protestants, revoked the Edict of Nantes almost a century later.
Many Huguenots went to hide in remote mountain villages of southern France. An estimated 400,000 went into exile, taking their industrial skills mainly to Britain, the Netherlands, Germany and Switzerland. Persecution of Protestants ended in 1764, and the 1789 French Revolution made them fully-fledged citizens, granting citizenship to the descendants of exiled Huguenots who returned.
Born ca. 1728, David Dovel, Sr. was a son of one of the Huguenot families that migrated to England following the revocation of the Edict of Nantes by Louis XIV. Later, with his brother William, the Dovel line made its way to the new world and arrived in North America in 1745. While David and his heirs settled in the area around Alma in Page County, it is not clearly known as to the disposition of William.
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