The result of over fifty years’ archival research, the book demonstrates the fundamental importance of the Huguenot refugees to the 1688 Glorious Revolution, victory in Ireland, the foundation of the Bank of England, and the subsequent defeat of Louis XIV and the rise of British power in the eighteenth century.

Director of the 1985 Huguenot Heritage tercentenary commemoration, Gwynn surveys the contributions to Britain and Ireland by the French-speaking Calvinist refugees who crossed the Channel between the 16th and 18th centuries. Among the topics are the situation in France, settlements in England, government reaction, crafts and trades, churches, opposition, the impact of Louis XIV's defeat, and assimilation. The first edition was published by Routledge in 1985; the second incorporates literature published and artefacts discovered since then, and is more comprehensively footnoted. All referencing material has been updated tin the light of new findings. And the plate section has been expanded to take into account recently available pictures of Huguenot artefacts and scenes.

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).