The Huguenots in Later Stuart Britain: Volume III: The Huguenots and the Defeat of Louis XIV’s France

The Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 was enacted within France, but shook all Europe. This was especially true in Britain, by 1700 the home of the largest concentration of Huguenot refugees. Recent historians have dismissed religious persecution as irrelevant to French economic and political decline from the 1680s. This volume, though, shows the refugees played a central role in France’s economic woes and Louis XIV’s eventual defeat as they helped pave the way for William III’s initial success in England in 1688, then assisted in the consolidation of his power.

Using markedly different sets of primary sources, the book establishes three key conclusions. First, the importance of the refugees in relation to the Glorious Revolution in England. Second, the vital contribution of Huguenot soldiers in Ireland, especially at the bloodiest battle of the Irish wars at Aughrim in 1691, which was definitive in a way the better-known battle of the Boyne was not. Third, the significance of the close connections between the French Church of London at Threadneedle Street and the foundation of the Bank of England in 1694 and its survival through its troubled early years.

Without the persecutions in France, William would not have succeeded in his near-bloodless invasion of England, which for the first time enabled a coalition that the French king could not simply browbeat and dominate. Nor could William have thereafter secured his position militarily and financially in time to check Louis and establish the foundations for later English successes. Louis XIV’s treatment of the Huguenots was fundamental both to his eventual defeat, and to Britain’s rising power in the early eighteenth century.

Robin Gwynn is a historian of Early Modern England, formerly Reader in History at Massey University, New Zealand. His speciality has long been the study of Huguenot refugees and the French communities in Britain, and in 1985 he was Director of the Huguenot Heritage tercentenary commemoration under the patronage of H.M. The Queen. His books include the widely acclaimed Huguenot Heritage (2nd edn, Sussex Academic Press, 2001), and editions of later seventeenth century letters and consistory minutes of the largest of the many French churches in England.