Migrants In & Out: Huguenots, Highland Clearances & Ulster
Three Movements, Three Motives
Between roughly 1600 and 1850, three very different migrations reshaped Britain and Ireland: French Protestant Huguenot refugees fleeing Catholic France, Lowland Scots and English settlers planted into Ulster, and Highland Scots driven off their land by their own clan chiefs. Each was driven by a different mix of religion, government policy and economic resources. Together they show that British migration history before Windrush is not a single story — people moved in, out and within Britain for very different reasons.
In 1685 Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes, which had protected French Protestants. Around 50,000 Huguenots fled to Britain in the years that followed, settling mainly in Spitalfields, London, Canterbury and Norwich.
Huguenots: Religion as Push, Skills as Pull
Huguenots had been a tolerated Protestant minority in France since the Edict of Nantes of 1598. When Louis XIV revoked it in 1685, Huguenots faced forced conversion, the destruction of their churches and the kidnapping of their children. Around 200,000 left France in total — roughly 50,000 came to Britain. Charles II and James II issued royal proclamations promising shelter, and Parliament later passed a general naturalisation act for foreign Protestants in 1709.
The reception was unusually warm because Huguenots brought useful skills. They settled in Spitalfields in east London and turned it into the centre of British silk weaving. Others built up Canterbury’s and Norwich’s textile trades. Goldsmiths, watchmakers, gunsmiths and bankers (the founders of the Bank of England in 1694 included several Huguenot families) added economic weight. The word ‘refugee’ entered English from this moment — from French réfugié, applied first to the Huguenots.
In 1290 Edward I had expelled the Jewish population of England; in 1597 Elizabeth I expelled the Hanseatic merchants from the London Steelyard. Yet Huguenots in 1685 were welcomed. The difference was a mix of religion and economics: Huguenots were Protestant, like most of the English political class, and were arriving in a kingdom that had just lived through anti-Catholic panics. Their skills also matched a national strategy — English textile manufacturers were trying to compete with French silk and Dutch fine cloth, and the Huguenots brought exactly the techniques needed.
The Ulster Plantation: Government Migration
A century earlier, in 1609, James I had launched the Ulster Plantation: confiscated Catholic Irish land in six counties (Armagh, Cavan, Coleraine — later Londonderry — Donegal, Fermanagh and Tyrone) was redistributed to Lowland Scots and English Protestant settlers. Around 80,000 had arrived by the 1630s, and roughly 100,000 more crossed between 1650 and 1700. The aim was political, not economic — the Crown wanted a loyal Protestant population in Ireland to prevent rebellion and Spanish intervention. Settlers received land cheaply on condition that they bring tenants, build defended towns and exclude Catholic Irish from the best holdings.
The plantation succeeded as a population transfer but at the cost of long-term sectarian division. Catholic Irish populations were pushed onto poorer land. The 1641 rising killed thousands of settlers; Cromwell’s 1649-50 reconquest then dispossessed the Catholic Irish even further. By 1700 Ulster had a Protestant Scots-Irish majority that has continued to shape Northern Irish politics ever since.
The Highland Clearances: Forced Out at Home
In the Scottish Highlands between roughly 1750 and 1860, clan chiefs replaced their tenants with sheep. The Highland Clearances were a private, profit-driven migration: the chiefs had become landlords in the British legal sense after the failure of the 1745 Jacobite rising, and Cheviot sheep produced higher rents than Gaelic-speaking smallholders. Tenants were given short notice, their cottages were sometimes burnt down behind them (the Sutherland clearances of 1814 are notorious), and they were pushed to coastal ‘crofting’ townships, to Lowland cities, or onto emigrant ships to North America and Australia.
In May 1814 Patrick Sellar, factor (estate manager) for the Countess of Sutherland, evicted around 1,500 tenants from Strathnaver. Houses were torn down and sometimes burnt while their occupants were still inside; one elderly woman, Margaret McKay, died days later from her injuries. Sellar was tried for culpable homicide in 1816 and acquitted. The case became a touchstone of clearance memory: those who survived it carried Gaelic-language ballads and stories with them to Cape Breton, North Carolina and the Glasgow tenements, keeping the trauma alive across the Atlantic.
Three Migrations, Compared
For the 8-mark ‘two ways similar or different’ question, these three movements give you ready-made comparisons. Religion drove Huguenot flight and shaped the Ulster plantation, but had no role in the clearances — they were economic. Government directed the Ulster plantation explicitly and welcomed the Huguenots through naturalisation, but stayed out of the clearances. Economic resources attracted Huguenots to Spitalfields silk and pushed Highlanders onto emigrant ships, while shaping landlord behaviour in both Ulster and the Highlands. The reception of incomers also differed: Huguenots were welcomed for their skills, planted Ulster Scots were imposed on a hostile native population, and Highland evictees were strangers in their own country.
Huguenot migration was driven mainly by religion (push) and economic resources (pull). The Ulster Plantation was driven mainly by government policy. The Highland Clearances were driven mainly by economic resources — landlord profit from sheep farming.