They came on a small, crowded, leaky boat from Calais towards Dover in seas that could turn from placid to treacherous in an instant, around 30 people seeking sanctuary from persecution, unsure of the welcome they would receive. ‘We were seized by horrible vomitings and most of the party became so dreadfully ill they thought they were dying,’ one of the group, a young mother accompanied by her two children, wrote later.
The year was 1620 and quite possibly among the refugees might have been a forebear of Nigel Farage. This small boat, one of many hundreds that crossed the Channel in the late 16th and early 17th centuries, was full of Huguenot asylum seekers fleeing Catholic France and the Lowlands.
The reaction to refugees is always the same: first the welcome mat, then some politician voicing the ‘people’s concerns’
By the American academic Matthew Lockwood’s calculation in this vividly told, panoramic history of 1,000 years of Britain as the ‘asylum capital of the world’ (an early 19th-century soundbite, intended at the time as a great compliment), there was an ‘invasion’ of more than 115,000 Huguenot refugees, when Britain’s population was around 4.5
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