Unlike southern European sailors, men from the North Sea basin were Britain’s cultural and geographic neighbours: their linguistic integration was smoother, and the stereotypes surrounding them more positive. In 1800, four ships entirely manned and officered by exiled Dutchmen were even allowed wholesale into the British service. This was a rare experiment: if the Army often segregated foreigners in special regiments, the Royal Navy usually operated as a ‘melting pot’. Presenting a microhistory of this episode, Chapter 6 shows how similar institutional cultures facilitated this kind of integration and administrative translation. The Admiralty also highly valued sailors from Denmark and Norway, as reliable and skilled manpower. At the same time, these very qualities made them potentially formidable rivals and enemies, meaning that their recruitment provoked diffidence and concerns among British elites and seafarers. The problems with which the Navy had to grapple when recruiting southern and northern European men were specular to each other: prejudice held the former as poor workforce, and thus of little use, and the latter as exceptional workforce, and therefore dangerous. In neither case did the negative implications ultimately carry much weight for an institution that was only concerned with sustaining a strenuous war effort.

Chapter 4 focuses on the ideas and activities of republican underground networks in England and Europe. It addresses the ways in which various groups of republicans conceptualised their cause and their visions for a restoration of the Commonwealth government in England. The Northern Rising in 1663, which saw Neville arrested and led to his banishment from the country, was among the more prominent attempts of the underground community in England to restore republican rule. Sidney meanwhile was driving an agenda for change from the Continent, gathering allies and money to invade England with the help of foreign troops. Ludlow, however, hesitated to join any conspiracies, both out of distrust for the republicans’ European allies and out of fear of jeopardising his position in Switzerland. The conspirators’ activities culminated in the aborted Sidney Plot of 1665, which on the one hand exposed the fractures in the exile community and, on the other, changed the exiles’ longer-term prospects by dashing their hopes for an imminent return to republican rule at home.

Chapter 2 focuses on the local support the three exiles found in their newly adopted communities on the Continent and in particular on the complex religious dimension of their European networks. Ludlow was moving mainly in Reformed Protestant circles, as might be expected from an English Puritan refugee, and Sidney too would seek his associates mainly among Dutch protestants and French Huguenots and former Frondeurs. Yet both Sidney and Neville also spent significant time in Italy, especially in Rome as the centre of the Catholic world. Their networks show that political allegiance could not always be related one-to-one to a specific religious creed and that personal friendships often cut across supposed political and religious divides. However, both Sidney and Neville also pursued a political agenda while in Rome, moving in circles that would allow them to gain insights into the future relations between the Stuart monarchy and the Catholic Church, while also shaping their own journey towards religious toleration.