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The Huguenots were members of the Protestant Reform
Church of France during the 16
th
and 17
th
centuries who
had been inspired by the writings of John Calvin in the
1530s. Nobody really knows why they were called the
Huguenots but it certainly began as an insult for their
beliefs were not welcome in Catholic France. The impact
of the Protestant Reformation and in particular the
writings of Martin Luther and John Calvin was felt
throughout Europe in the early 16th Century. In France
Calvinism reached all ranks of society but it was mostly
urban literate craftsmen and the nobility who took it up in
earnest and they became known as the Huguenots.
Strife between Catholics and Protestants led to eight civil
wars in France in the 30 years from 1560 - the Wars of
Religion. The name Huguenot was first used during these
Wars of Religion, generally as a derogative term for the
Calvinists. The troubles came to end in 1598 when Henry
IV of France signed a decree called the
Edict of Nantes
which guaranteed the French Protestant Huguenots that
their rights to worship would be respected. However it
wasn’t to last and the
Edict of Nantes
was revoked by
Louis XIV in 1685. Protestant Huguenots could avoid
persecution if they agreed to attend Roman Catholic
church services and sign a piece of paper to acknowledge
that Calvin was wrong but over 200,000 French
Protestants, fled France to protect their beliefs and escape
persecution. 50,000 came to England of which 10,000
moved on to settle in Ireland. Some of the remainder
settled in Canterbury and small numbers in English
market towns but most came to London and of these
25,000 settled in Spitalfields.
It was the arrival of the Huguenots that introduced the word
refugee to the English language. This was a massive
movement of people. The arrival of 25,000 Huguenots into
a London of about 350,000 souls means that today up to
90% of people in the South East have some Huguenot
blood! By and large the French Protestants were welcomed
as allies by a public increasingly suspicious of the motives
of Louis XIV but the refugees didn’t entirely escape the
accusations levelled at immigrants since time immemorial.
Pamphlets were published by opponents of the refugees
claiming that they threatened everything from jobs to
standards and access to housing, morality, public hygiene
and public order. These were skilled people, clockmakers,
bankers and weavers. As foreigners many City Guilds or
Livery Companies prevented them from settling or carry out
their trade within the walls of the City of London so
Spitalfields, where there was already an established
weaving community, was about as close as many could get
to the people who would buy their wares.
The best known French church in London at that time was
L’ Eglise Protestant in Threadneedle Street near the Bank
of England and the leaders of this church built a large
annexe in Brick Lane to join nine busy Huguenot Chapels
that had sprung up in Spitalfields. Later the Brick Lane Hu-
guenot Chapel would become a synagogue for the Jewish
arrivals and today it is a mosque for the folk who started
arriving in the East End from Bangladesh in the 1970s.
Once settled the highly skilled Huguenot silk weavers
began to prosper and in the late 17th and 18th centuries
an estate of well-appointed terraced houses, built to
accommodate the master weavers controlling the silk
Huguenots - The Original Refugees