Note 57 — Chapter XXXIV

It is singular that Bassompierre omits to mention where he lived during his stay in London. It might be supposed that it was at the house of the permanent Ambassador, the Marquis de Blainville, were it not that he states elsewhere that it was in a maison de louage. There was in those days no French Embassy in London, that is to say, a house purchased by the French Government for the accommodation of its representative, and the Ambassadors made their own arrangements. We do not know where Blainville lived, but his predecessor, Bassompierre’s brother-in-law, the Comte de Tillières, rented for a time Hunsdon House, in the Blackfriars. It was during his tenancy of this house, in October, 1623, that a most terrible accident occurred. Some three hundred Catholics had assembled there one evening to hear Mass, when the floor of the room in which the service was being held gave way, with the result that a great number of them were killed or severely injured. The bodies of nearly fifty are said to have been afterwards buried in the garden. This disaster was called the Fatal Vespers. “The Protestants,” observes Croker, “considered it as a judgment of Heaven; the Roman Catholics as a treachery of the Protestants, both sides overlooking in the blindness of bigotry the weakness of an old floor and the weight of the inordinate number of persons crowding upon it.”