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By far the largest group of immigrants in Early Modern England were Protestant refugees fleeing persecution in European countries. They came in four main waves:

1. In the 1560s Walloons from what is now Belgium were suffering under the Spanish Catholic rule of the Duke of Alba.
2. After the Massacre of St Bartholomew’s Day in Paris in 1572 when over 10,000 Huguenot Protestants were murdered, many fled to England.
3. A second, larger, wave of Huguenots fled from France in the 1680s when King Louis XIV revoked a previous royal edict protecting Protestants and they were again attacked. Many Huguenots had difficult and dangerous journeys, escaping France and crossing to England by sea.
4. The final wave of Protestant refugees were the Palatines from the Middle Rhine, part of which is now Germany. They were suffering under French Catholic landlords and very poor harvests. They came because of a 1709 law, the Foreign Protestants Naturalisation Act, which invited European Protestants to come and settle in Britain. Some Palatines also migrated because they hoped to travel from England to a new life in North America.

After the execution of King Charles I, during the Protectorate, a small number of Jews were allowed to return, nearly 400 years after they were expelled from England. In 1655, Oliver Cromwell submitted a petition to the Council of State calling for Jews to be allowed to return to Britain. He met with resistance at the Whitehall Conference in December that year. Ultimately it was decided that as England’s Jews had been expelled in 1290 by a king, and there were no longer kings ruling England, the previous expulsion had no legal basis.

Cromwell accepted Jews for several reasons. He thought they might be a source of revenue and help him fight against his Catholic enemies. He was also persuaded by Dutch rabbi Menasseh Ben Israel to help Jews fleeing persecution in many parts of Europe. Cromwell shared a widely-held view that the end of the world was coming. In keeping with Bible teaching, he believed that Jews would be recalled from the four corners of the world at the time of the Last Judgement.

During the late medieval and Tudor period, nomadic Gypsies began arriving in England. Over the centuries they had migrated from northern India through Central Europe.