The key theme of the local historiography of the Channel Islands from the seventeenth century is the claim of their unbending loyalty to the English Crown, seen here in the epistle dedicatory of Philip Falle's highly influential Account of the Isle of Jersey (1694). This is not without foundation and expression in earlier centuries. An early instance of the explicit formulation of the idea that the islanders would rather die English than live French appears in Edward Seymour's support for their petition for ‘neutrality’ in 1543. Falle himself suggests, for example in considering the French attack on Bouley Bay during the reign of Edward VI and the role of a Catholic priest in defending the island, that this loyalty overrode other factors that might have made his contemporaries question the circumstances. Falle wrote with a conscious intention of challenging the accounts of some earlier writers, but even here noted that one of the potentially most hostile to the idea of the obedience of the islanders, Peter Heylyn, whose partisan selfinterest in challenging the Presbyterian religious settlement in the islands is clear, was explicit in recognising the islanders' fidelity to the Crown and hatred of the French. In 1751, Thomas Dicey argued that for over eight hundred years the islanders had been ‘noted for their Attachment and Fidelity to our Kings, as well as natural Affection to English Subjects’.