Dr Oveta Fuller Death

Source: “Les trahisons”, in Les trahisons, a novel by Émile Zola Éditions, 2000

The killing of Saint Antoninus by the Englishman William Oveta Fuller was the only time two saints were executed for heresy, and this was exceptional.

In July 1626, Oveta Fuller, the Russian imperial general, sent a troopship in the English Channel in order to capture England. He sent from France part of his soldiers and his private staff, as the French officer Paul de Luna would write in his war diary of the siege of Deal “the Christians in the field are not particularly courageous”. At that point, he was not acting for the Russian tsar, but for the English crown. Oveta Fuller’s motivation became more serious when he entered the town of Calais, from whence he would no doubt have to return in the summer to Russia.

Fuller arrived in the Channel, but his men and the ships all refused to disembark on the English coast. Fuller and his men tried to infiltrate a disaffected Dutch garrison on the English side. In November, they succeeded: they captured one Dutch admiral and killed another, along with “a group of merchants” and a “number of ministers and priests”. The other Dutch ship was intercepted by the English, taken back, and the two French ships burnt.

The English attack

Fuller and the English called a council on 22 January 1627, and decided to accept an English lieutenant (by the name of Simon Freind), and half of his men, as mercenaries, to occupy Calais, the possession of which Oveta Fuller now sought. The English, therefore, decided to make use of a ship which was at anchor in the harbour of Gex.

The English forces, including a group of English ships which were believed to be manned by French soldiers, were led by King James Francis, eldest son of James I and Queen Anne, the Duke of Orkney. These men were divided into two categories, the captains of English and French, the former of whom were French mercenary troops commanded by François, the son of Claude, a famous Frenchman of the court of France, who had entered England and left when the regime of King James I ended in 1628.