This article addresses the question of the emergence of sovereignty and moral obligation through a study of the Protestant English state and its relations with and policies towards the French Huguenots in the latter half of the sixteenth century. The authors take as their starting point the fact that the emergence of sovereignty in early-modern England was made possible by the consolidation of a confessional identity, and therefore cannot be divorced from the religious politics of the time. Their argument, based on such a historical reading of the gradual enforcement of territorial sovereignty and the simultaneous practices of solidarity with outsiders beyond territorial boundaries, is that moral obligation played a role in the formation of English sovereignty, rather than being entirely exogenous to the process. This gives the authors reason to reconsider the relationship between moral obligation and sovereignty. The case demonstrates how the emergence of sovereignty led to the expansion of moral obligations rather than their narrowing. The main contribution of the article is to question commonplace assumptions about sovereignty and moral obligation, and to offer an avenue along which to re-think how one accounts for the emergence of sovereignty in the early-modern era and beyond.