BASNAGE, Jacques, pastor of the Walloon Church at the Hague, was born at Rouen in Normandy on the Sth of August 1653. He was the son of Henri Basnage, one of the ablest advocates in the parliament of Normandy. At the age of seventeen, having acquired a good knowledge of the Greek and Latin authors, as well as of the English, Spanish, and Italian languages, he went to Geneva, where he began his theological studies under Mestrezat, Turretin, and Tronchin; he completed them at Sedan, under the professors Jurieu and Leblanc de Beaulieu. He then returned to Rouen, where he was received as pastor in September 1676; and in this capacity he remained till the year 1685, when, the exercise of the Protestant religion being suppressed at Rouen, he obtained leave of the king to retire to Holland. He settled at Rotterdam, and continued a minister pensionary there till 1691, when he was chosen pastor of the Walloon Church of that city. In 1709, the pensionary Heinsius secured his election as one of the pastors of the Walloon Church at the Hague, intending to employ him not only in religious but also in civil affairs. Accordingly he was engaged in a secret negotiation with Marshal d’Uxelles, plenipotentiary of France at the congress of Utrecht,—a service which he executed with so much success, that he was afterwards intrusted with several important commissions, all of which he discharged with such ability and address that Voltaire said of him that he was fitter to be a minister of state than the minister of a parish. The Abbé Dubois, who represented France at the Hague in 1716, in negotiating a defensive alliance between France, England, and the States-General, received instructions to consult with Basnage; they accordingly acted in concert, and the alliance was concluded in ...