On 26 May 1687, John Aylward and his ‘sweet consort’, Helena, arrived at their country house in St Malo – marking the start of what was to be a decade of great prosperity for the newlywed couple. More than ten years in the south of Spain had allowed the Aylwards and their associates to flourish as traders, and by the late 1680s business was thriving. In Cadiz, as part of its British mercantile community, the Aylwards had reaped the profits of the Anglo-Spanish trade, in providing supplies to the transatlantic fleets and to England. There had likely been multiple personal and economic reasons for this move to France, and religious ties and past loyalties ensured that vital contacts with the Iberian ports would not be severed. The Aylwards stayed in St Malo for eleven years, eventually settling in another community of Catholic expatriates and beginning a period which would not only introduce new players into their correspondence, but reinforce already well-established partnerships.

But things would not always run smoothly for the couple. It was after less than a year in France, in the summer of 1688, that John Aylward received a letter from long-term London associate, Walter Ryan, fearing a Dutch invasion as soon as the wind proved favourable. He warned that every merchant was in great consternation due to ‘these juncture of times … making money very skarse’. In his view, trade would be greatly disrupted ‘and there was nothing to be done’. […] ‘Wee trust in God will not last long. But that wee are with God's grace in a capacity to oppose them.’ The international scene had become bleak, as had the prospects for European commerce, and there was no way that Aylward as a Catholic merchant could have predicted what the year of 1688 would come to mean for British history.

The year marked the beginning of a turbulent decade – to say the least – in the British Isles. After James II was overthrown, the country was forced to rethink its political and religious identity while continuing to assert its commercial power against continental forces.