Supplicants and advocates: the Huguenots and the Church of England, 1600–1681

Huguenot clergy in the seventeenth century occupied a curious role as potential cultural brokers between England and continental Reformed Protestantism. While they could profit from royal patronage, they could also provide testimonials of foreign Reformed support for (or criticism of) royal ecclesiastical policies that might be under fire domestically as insufficiently Protestant. This article analyses several examples of this phenomenon. A distinctive angle is provided by Scottish events in the early Stuart period, where royal policies such as the restoration of episcopacy and the Articles of Perth provided provocations to exiled Scottish clergy in France but also potential opportunities for their promotion. The changing fortunes and strategies of one such minister – Gilbert Primerose – are traced here. The eldest son (Peter) of the distinguished Huguenot theologian Pierre du Moulin invites more detailed consideration of how even somebody who had accepted ordination in the Church of England could play the card of foreign advocate through the upheavals of the civil war, Interregnum and Restoration periods. Two attempts to orchestrate Huguenot testimonials in defence of the restored episcopal government and liturgy in the 1660s and 1680s also demonstrate the continuing appeal and complications of this polemical strategy.