A study of anti-French feeling in broadside balladry of the seventeenth century and 'the problem' of French Protestantism - an oxymoronic impossibility for the English balladeer. This paper was inspired when the editor happened to ask about the depiction of Huguenots in broadside ballads. Printed on a single sheet of cheap paper, and amongst the first really disposable commodities, nearly four hundred years later about 10,000 sixteenth and seventeenth-century ballad broadsides still survive. Of this remarkably large number of extant sheets, mostly from the latter part of the century, about a third dealt with 'affairs of state' and we might well have expected a rich vein of references. However, despite the obvious importance of the Huguenot experience to English politics and trade experience in London (where almost all ballads were published), until the 1690s, only a tiny number of ballads so much as mentioned the existence of French Protestants (there was no use at all of the word Huguenot). This is a mystery. Why would English balladeers, usually so willing to promote the interests of Protestantism and to castigate popery have fallen silent over such an important issue? Since broadside ballads are a source that both reflected and perhaps influenced popular political consciousness in early modern England, this interesting silence seemed to call for further investigation and explanation.

Offprint from: Proceedings of the Huguenot Society, 28(5).