Anglo-Dutch Dissent: British Dissenters in the Netherlands, 1662--1688

Changing the landscape of the history of English nonconformity, this dissertation is about a community of British exiles in the Netherlands from the Restoration of the Stuart monarchy in 1660 to the Dutch invasion of England in 1688. Stretching traditional historiography both temporally and spatially, Anglo-Dutch Dissent: British Dissenters in the Netherlands (1662--88), contributes to the ever-expanding field of Anglo-Dutch history by exposing the shortsightedness of the classical English canon: its Englishness. Focusing on the British exile community in the Low Countries -- and area roughly embracing the present-day Netherlands and Belgium -- this wide-angled, cross-cultural and multi-disciplinary dissertation blurs nationalistic and geographical boundaries. Framed around the English Reformed Church at the Dutch city of Leiden, this dissertation places the exiled ministers Mathew Newcomen at the center of the 1660s, Dr. Edward Richardson (the "doctor of plotters") at the focus of the 1670s, and Henry Hickman's ministerial colleague, the Scots Presbyterian William Carstares (the "chaplain of conspiracy"), in the center of the 1680s -- a well-connected community of preachers, plotter and physicians, at home and abroad. Drawing on a wealth of little-known and rarely used archival sources, this dissertation shows the interconnectedness of Anglo-Dutch dissent from the Restoration to the Revolution, including their intellectual networks, with whom they lived and corresponded.