For a long time the history of the Huguenots in Britain received curiously little attention from scholars. Those who did take an interest focused mostly on the Elizabethan period, such as the French historian Bernard Cottret, and before him the Baron de Schickler. Yet historians have long recognised that the size and impact of Huguenot immigration was considerably larger in the later seventeenth century, when an estimated 50,000 French Protestants arrived in the British Isles to escape persecution in Louis xiv's kingdom. Robin Gwynn has devoted his long career to studying this period, and has now published the first volume in what will be a trilogy on the Huguenots in later Stuart Britain, charting their fate and fortunes from the Civil War until the Peace of Utrecht. Gwynn's aim is not only to bring together his own research and that of others, but also to demonstrate that the Huguenots are more than just an interesting minority, as he argues that ‘they critically influenced the course of events in mainline English and European history’ (p. 1).

If the current volume does not entirely live up to this promise, it is because Gwynn has reserved his treatment of the refugee experience and the Huguenots’ political impact for volumes ii and iii. In this book, he instead offers an institutional history of the French-speaking churches and their ministers, aptly showing how they constantly had to adapt to the ever-shifting religious landscape of early modern England. The first French church was founded in London by letters-patent of King Edward vi in 1550, followed by other churches across England during the Elizabethan period. These exile communities held an exceptional position: not obliged to conform to the Church of England, they were allowed to maintain the Calvinist presbyterian model as found on the continent, including lay participation through a consistory, a Reformed liturgy and no episcopal oversight. Yet, as Gwynn shows, this position also made them vulnerable to attacks from those who sought to bring them in line with the Anglican Church, most notably Archbishop Laud and Charles ii. During the Civil Wars most French communities also supported Cromwell and Parliament, which provoked a backlash after the Restoration: while Charles ii tolerated all existing non-conforming French churches, any new churches had to adopt the Anglican liturgy, and French ministers to accept ordination in the Church of England.

This institutional background is important for understanding Gwynn's main argument, laid out in chapters iv and vi. He reminds us that refugee ministers in particular faced a dilemma when arriving in England: should they find a new pulpit in one of the non-conforming churches, or accept the Anglican liturgy and re-ordination in the Church of England? Gwynn convincingly argues, however, that the dilemma over conformity was not as black-and-white as scholars have often made it out to be. Besides the non-conforming presbyterian French churches founded in Elizabethan times, he discerns two models of conformity. The first, dubbed by Gwynn the ‘Jersey model’, presented a ‘halfway house’. Although French churches founded after 1660 nominally had to conform to Anglicanism, in practice they were allowed to retain some Calvinist features: ministers did not have to wear the surplice or make the sign of the cross at baptism, the consistory was maintained and people did not have to kneel at communion. This model was adopted most clearly in the new church of the Savoy, founded by the Jersey-born minister John Durel in Westminster. The second, so-called ‘Lambeth model’, came into effect during the rule of James ii. As a Catholic, James was more reluctant to welcome Huguenot refugees into his realm, ordering Archbishop Sancroft to create a new London church that fully conformed to Anglican liturgy. This resulted in the Jewin Street congregation, led by the re-ordained Huguenot minister Pierre Allix.

The second half of Gwynn's book focuses more specifically on the French ministry. Tapping never-used primary sources as well as existing literature, Gwynn has compiled an impressive biographical dictionary of 737 men serving the French churches between 1640 and 1713, either as minister, proposant (student) or lecteur (reader). Gwynn lists whatever is known about their background, family and career, including the churches that they served and whether they accepted Anglican ordination upon arrival in England. The dictionary almost doubles the number of refugee ministers previously known to have served the French churches: Gwynn counted over 250 of them between 1680 and 1695. Ordination also proved surprisingly popular, even though most of their flock avoided the conformist French churches (either Jersey or Lambeth-style). Gwynn found that at least 60 per cent of all refugee ministers arriving after 1670 accepted re-ordination in the Church of England, often to advance their careers in what was rapidly becoming a very crowded clerical job market. Gwynn's dictionary will be an invaluable aid for future research, though one could have wished that the entries had been directly integrated into the ODNB so as to make this wealth of data more accessible to non-Huguenot scholars. Overall, though, this book is a useful companion for those interested in the history of the Huguenot churches and their ministry in later Stuart Britain.