The Enduring Simond Legacy part 1: Early life and family background, 1691-1713
- Rachel Lang
- Aug 7
- 9 min read
Updated: Aug 9
Pierre Simond – later Anglicised to Peter – was born in 1691, the eldest son of Pierre Simond senior, a Huguenot minister, and his wife Anne de Bérault. The life of Pierre Simond senior is worth examining in some detail as such an able, complex and dominant man cannot have failed to make a major impression on his eldest son. Even allowing for the historical context of hardship and displacement, Simond senior lived a life of extraordinary contrasts.
Pierre Simond senior was a Huguenot minister in Ebrum, southeastern France, in 1685 when the Revocation of the Edit of Nantes formalised and intensified the mass persecution of Huguenots. Facing imprisonment and the confiscation of his property, Simond senior joined an exodus of some 200,000-300,000 people fleeing to Protestant safe havens. Coming from a comfortable, well-off family, Simond senior entered Amsterdam as a refugee and found a position ministering to fellow displaced Huguenots in Zierikzee, Zeeland. The following year he published his first work, La Discipline de Jésus-Christ, a sermon based on Matthew 24.16.[1]
Simond married Anne de Bérault, daughter of a minor landed Huguenot family from Normandy, also exiled in Zeeland, in February 1688 and a few days later, the couple boarded the ship Zuid Beveland and set sail for the Cape of Good Hope.[2] The Cape was a Dutch colony primarily used as a stop-off point on trading voyages to Batavia (modern-day Jakarta, Indonesia). The governing body of the Dutch East India Company was sponsoring the emigration of farmers to establish agricultural communities inland of the Cape. The idea was that these farmers would produce high-value goods such as wine and olive oil in the warm climate. Simond senior was appointed as minister to the 200 Huguenots who were to form part of the new enterprise. In addition, the communities centred around Drakenstein and Stellenbosch consisted of around 800 Dutch company workers and farmers as well as 400 enslaved people. Anne’s brother Louis de Bérault a former mariner, emigrated on the same voyage, the family connection likely providing reassurance to Simond senior in making such a major life change.[3]
In a 1689 letter to the Lords Seventeen, the governing body of the Dutch East India Company, Simond senior described the persecution faced by Huguenots in France and his pleasure at worshiping more freely in the Cape: “After having suffered under a domination where we were scarcely at liberty even to groan and to sigh in secret… there could be no greater advantage nor pleasure than to pasture my flock where I can render my account to God.”[4]
Religion was central to family life. Simond senior worked assiduously on a new French translation of the Psalms: “I gave my all to create a work as good as I possibly could, and to which God had called me. A work, in my opinion, that is of particular importance for glorifying God and for the welfare of his Church.” Simond senior and Anne de Bérault had five children born at the Cape: Catherine (1689), Pierre junior (1691, Anglicised to Peter), Jacques Cléopas (c. 1692, Anglicised to James), Marie-Elisabeth (c. 1694) and Lidie (1697). Simond senior supervised the children’s weekly programme of religious study.[5]
As the company-appointed minister, Simond benefitted from a company-built house, unlimited rights of freehold and a monthly salary of 90 guilders. He was the most prosperous and successful of the Huguenot farmers, establishing a share-cropping business and supplementing his workforce with the purchase of enslaved people. He drew his salary in Amsterdam and remitted his colonial profits there as well. Conditions for most of the Dutch emigrants in the Cape were hard and establishing a farm was a daily battle. Simond took on the role of advocating on their behalf, requesting greater assistance from Dutch officials.[6] Thus in 1691 Simond junior was born into a materially basic and often dangerous environment but within his own experience he was a fortunate member of the elite.
Simond junior’s experience of living with enslaved people in Cape Colony is particularly interesting given his later immersion in the slavery business. Deprived of their liberty, trafficked away from their families and in many cases fleeing in desperation, the experience of enslaved people in the Cape was arguably less brutal than that of enslaved people on sugar estates in the Caribbean. There was also less distance – physical and social – between enslaved people and enslavers on small farms. Simond senior purchased at least 13 enslaved people between 1690 and 1698, almost all boys and young men in their teens and early 20s.[7] One visitor in 1698 described Simond senior as “a very honest and sensible man” and noted the colonists were diligent “to instruct [enslaved people] in religion, and teach them to read and write, about which the French refugees above all employ themselves with a great deal of earnestness.”[8] Simond senior’s assessment of the local Khoikhoi people was ethnocentric and based on a civilizational hierarchy but more progressive than that of most of his peers: “They do not lack reason or docility, which is enough to make us hope that with a little care we could lead them to a more reasonable way of life… It is essential that we treat them with all possible humaneness and that we extend a loving hand to them, to the extent of their desire…”.[9]
Despite his sharp intellect, thoughtfulness and piety, Simond senior was not to find in Cape Colony the “plaisir” he claimed to seek. At least some of his difficulties can be attributed to his contentious and frequently contrary nature. A long-lasting and vicious quarrel with a fellow émigré, Jacques de Savoye, shook the whole community in the early 1690s. Simon van der Stel, the first Governor of the Cape, attempted to mediate: “We only wish that the Rev. Pierre Simond and Jacques de Savoye would bear themselves towards each other more peaceably and amicably, and had settled their differences without, by means of their quarrelsomeness, resulting from sheer obstinacy, causing so much annoyance to the community and such great trouble to us and the various husbandmen in the busiest season of work, to the injury of the general public.”[10] Simond denounced de Savoye from the pulpit and encouraged his parishioners to sign a petition taking Simond’s side in the dispute.
Relations with Dutch officials were increasingly tense as the French minority competed for recognition and resources with the Dutch company workers and burghers. In his role as advocate for the Huguenot community, Simond senior risked disapproval by not being able to achieve for them all they wanted: “In general I am the butt of their dissatisfaction. They imagine I do not speak up enough for them and that it is up to me to approach the Company for all they hope for in their settlement.” Simon van der Stel, the Dutch Governor, responded, “We would very much have liked to see that the French minister did not so much interfere with private affairs and those of the public in general…” Relations deteriorated further when van der Stel’s son Wilhem Adriaen took over as Governor in 1699.[11]
Simond senior’s beautiful rendition of the Psalms contrasts with de Savoye’s description of him as a “false pastor, unworthy minister, hypocrite, Tartuffe, priest, Jesuit, Judas, ‘Caffre’ [cafard = hypocrite]” and a Dutch company worker’s description of him as “a pop-eyed thieving blackguard.”[12] Simond senior’s financial dealings were connected to at least some of the disagreements he was involved in, and his regular pleas of poverty were at odds with the profits he was making on his farm. Worn down by multiple disagreements and keen to present his Psalms to the Walloon Church synod, Simond senior applied to the Lords Seventeen for permission to leave the Cape in November 1700. His application was rejected. Following subsequent petitions, he was told to wait until a successor could arrive to take his place. Despite having no firm plans, by late 1701 he had sold all his property in the Cape and claimed he would face destitution if forced to stay. The family finally set sail on the Abbekerk in May 1702.[13] Thus, at the age of eleven, old enough to be aware of adult frustrations and conflicts, Peter Simond junior arrived in Europe for the first time.
The Simond family’s fortunes over the next ten years were itinerant and uncertain. Simond senior found short-term contracts as a minister in Amsterdam at a time when the city was over-run with Huguenots in search of work. The Walloon Church did not accord his version of the Psalms the significance he felt it deserved. Instead he arranged for its publication independently in Amsterdam in 1704.[14] He held a longer-term position as minister in Haarlem from 1706-1708 (during which time he published another sermon, La Vraye Adoration er les Vrais Adorateurs[15]) but was in serious financial difficulties, and possibly bankrupt, in early 1709. His appointment as second pastor to the Huguenot congregation in Lille in October 1709 brought about an improvement in his situation but he was again forced to leave when Lille was ceded to Catholic France following the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713. Simond senior was appointed minister in the garrison town of Furnes in June of that year, but at this point he disappears from the records. He most likely died shortly after or possibly even prior to arriving in Furnes.[16]
Simond senior is commemorated in the hamlet of Simondium, the site of his first church in Cape Colony.[17] He was instrumental in the establishment of a Huguenot community in the colony, but its distinct French identity did not endure for long after his death. His Psalms faded into obscurity; the only known surviving copy is preserved at the National Library of Russia in St Petersburg. Despite his extraordinary abilities, Simond senior’s life was marked by struggle and frustration.
[1] Randolph Vigne, "South Africa's First Published Work of Literature and Its Author, Pierre Simond." Quarterly Bulletin of the National Library of South Africa 55, no. 3 (2001): 107–113 contains a detailed account of the life of Pierre senior. For more on the Huguenot Diaspora of the 1680s see Bryan A. Banks, Write to Return: Huguenot Refugees on the Frontiers of the French Enlightenment (2024).
[2] Index entry for his marriage, https://www.wiewaswie.nl/nl/detail/50103501; details of voyage of the Zuid Beveland from Wielingen to Batavia, https://resources.huygens.knaw.nl/das/detailVoyage/92621#sthash.DNJh8MU3.dpuf.
[3] Vigne, ‘Lost Leader’ pp. 1-21; Maurice Boucher. French Speakers at the Cape in the First Hundred Years of Dutch East India Company Rule: The European Background (1981) p. 346.
[4] Quoted in Vigne, ‘Lost Leader’ p. 16: “apres avoir vecu sous une domination ou nous avions à peine la liberté de gemir et de soûpirer en secret… n’ajant pas de plus grand interêt ni de plus grand plaisir que de paître le troupeau don’t je dois render conte à Dieu.”
[5] Pierre Simond, Les Veilles Afriquaines, ou les Pseaumes de Devid, mis en Vers Francois (1704). Quote from English version of the preface, p. 42 (held at the Huguenot Library, London); Boucher, French Speakers at the Cape p. 357.
[6] Ibid. pp. 356-7; Hendrik Carel Vos Leibbrandt, Rambles through the archives of the colony of the Cape of Good Hope, 1688-1700 (1887) pp. 38-40, 49-56.
[7] A. J. Boeseken, Slaves and Free Blacks at the Cape, 1658-1700 (1977) pp. 164, 166, 167, 172, 181, 182, 183; Boucher, French Speakers at the Cape pp. 378-9 fn 102.
[8] Francis Leguat, A New Voyage to the East-Indies (1708) p. 257 quoted in Vigne, ‘Lost Leader’ p. 17.
[9] Boucher, French Speakers at the Cape p. 380 fn 103 (“Ils ne manquent point de raison, ni de docilite, ce qui suffit pour nous faire esperer, qu’avec un peu de soin on pourroit les amener a une forme de via plus raisonnable”); Vigne ‘Lost Leader’ p. 26. Both quotes are from Simond’s letter to the Lords Seventeen, 15 June 1689.
[10] Quoted in Leibbrandt, Rambles, p. 52.
[11] Simond’s letter to the Lords Seventeen in 1691, quoted in Vigne, ‘South Africa’s First Published Work of Literature’ p. 7; Leibbrandt, Rambles pp. 49-55, 66-67 (quote from 52-53); Owen Stanwood, The Global Refuge: Huguenots in an Age of Empire (2019) chapter 5.
[12] Quotes from Vigne, ‘South Africa’s First Published Work of Literature’ p. 8 and Vigne, ‘Lost leader’ p. 22.
[13] Boucher, French Speakers at the Cape pp. 357-8
[14] Vigne, ‘South Africa’s First Work of Literature’ pp. 14-15.
[15] Pierre Simond, La Vraye Adoration er les Vrais Adorateurs (1707) available at https://books.google.com/books/about/La_vraye_adoration_et_les_vrais_adorateu.html?id=ofU8AAAAcAAJ
[16] Boucher, French Speakers at the Cape pp. 358-61.
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