Huguenots in Later Stuart Britain Volume I - Crisis, Renewal, and the Ministers' Dilemma

The Huguenots in Later Stuart Britain is planned as one work to be published in three interlinking volumes (titles/publication dates detailed below). It examines the history of the French communities in Britain from the Civil War, which plunged them into turmoil, to the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713, after which there was no realistic possibility that the Huguenots would be readmitted to France. There is a particular focus on the decades of the 1680s and 1690s, at once the most complex, the most crucial, and the most challenging alike for the refugees themselves and for subsequent historians. The work opens with the Calvinist French-speaking communities in England caught up in the Civil War. They could not avoid it, with many of their members largely assimilated into English society by the 1640s. Generally they favoured the Parliamentarian side, but any victory was pyrrhic because the Interregnum supported the rights of Independent congregations which undermined their whole Calvinist structure. Weakened by in-fighting, in the 1660s the old-established French churches then had to reassert their right to exist in the face of a sometimes hostile restored monarchy and episcopacy, a newly licenced French church emphasizing its Anglicanism and its loyalty to the crown, and the challenges of the Plague and the Fire of London which burnt the largest French church in England to the ground. They were still staggering to find their feet when the first trickle and then the full flood of new Huguenot immigration overwhelmed them. As for the newly arriving Huguenot ministers, not prepared for the England to which they came, they found they had to resolve what was often an intense personal dilemma: should they stand fast for the worship they had led in France, or accept Anglican ways? - and if they did accept Anglicanism, to what extent? It is demonstrated that many ministers took the Anglican route, although Volume II will show that the French communities as a whole, old and new alike, voted with their feet not to do so. A substantial appendix provides a biographical account of over 600 ministers in the orbit of the French churches across this period. Volume II: Settlement, Churches, and the Role of London - 978-1-84519-619-6 (2017); Volume III: The Huguenots and the Defeat of Louis XIV's France - 978-1-84519-620-2 (2020).

Contents

List of Tables
List of Illustrations
Preface
Abbreviations
Chronological Table
Note on Dates
Glossary of Terms
Introduction

Prologue
I. French Communities in an English Snare
II. The Calvinist Ideal: the organization and discipline of the French Church of London
III. Fears, Challenges and Renewal: non-conformist survival under Charles II
IV. Conformist Models
V. Tracking the Ministers
VI. Jetsam of the Revocation: Huguenot refugee ministers and the dilemmas they faced
Biographical Dictionary of Huguenot Ministers, Lecteurs and others associated with
the Ministry of the French Protestant Churches in Britain, 1640–1713

Select Bibliography
Index