What is a British expat?
expatriate noun[ C ]UK /ekˈspæt.ri.ət/ US /ekˈspeɪ.tri.ət/(also informal expat, UK/ekˈspæt/ US/ekˈspæt/)
someone who does not live in their own country. A large community of expatriates has settled there.”
– from the Cambridge dictionary
An expatriate (often shortened to expat) is a person residing in a country other than their native country. However, the term ‘expatriate’ is also used for retirees and others who have chosen to live outside their native country. Historically, it has also referred to exiles.
What is the British Diaspora?
The British diaspora consists of people of British ancestry (and their descendants) who emigrated from the United Kingdom.
The largest proportional concentrations of people of self-identified British descent in the world outside of the United Kingdom and its Overseas Territories occur in New Zealand (59%), Australia (45%), Canada (30.6%), the United States (11%) and parts of the Caribbean.
Those who do claim British ancestry form a sub-set of those who could claim British ancestry; the British diaspora includes about 200 million people worldwide.
Additionally, countries with over 100,000 British expatriates include Spain, the Republic of Ireland, South Africa, France, Germany, and the United Arab Emirates.
What is the Difference Between an Expat and an Immigrant?
An expat is someone who lives in another country from their native country.
An immigrant is someone who has been given “immigrant status” by their country of residence, usually by becoming a legal resident of their new country of residence.
Remittance Men
In British history, a remittance man was an emigrant, often from Britain to a British colony, supported by regular payments from home on the expectation that he stay away.
In this sense, remittance means the opposite of what it does now, i.e. money that migrants send to their home countries.
“Remittance man” is defined in The Canadian Encyclopedia as “a term once widely used, especially in the West before WWI, for an immigrant living in Canada on funds remitted by his family in England, usually to ensure that he would not return home and become a source of embarrassment.”
The Oxford English Dictionary adds: “spec[ifically] one considered undesirable at home; also in extended use”. “Remittance man” is first attested in 1874, as a colonial term. One of the citations is of T. S. Eliot’s 1958 play The Elder Statesman, where the son of the title figure resists his father’s attempts to find him a job: “Some sort of place where everyone would sneer at the fellow from London. The limey remittance man for whom a job was made.” The OED gives “remittancer” as another form; this stretches back to 1750.
Famous Exiles
James II and VII (14 October 1633O.S. – 16 September 1701[a]) was King of England and King of Ireland as James II, and King of Scotland as James VII[4] from the death of his brother, Charles II, on 6 February 1685 until he was deposed in the Glorious Revolution of 1688. He was the last Catholic monarch of England, Scotland and Ireland. His reign is now remembered primarily for struggles over religious tolerance, however, it also involved struggles over the principles of absolutism and the divine right of kings. His deposition ended a century of political and civil strife by confirming the primacy of Parliament over the Crown.
The Marian exiles were English Protestants who fled to Continental Europe during the 1553–1558 reign of the Roman Catholic Queen Mary I and King Philip. They settled chiefly in Protestant countries such as the Netherlands, Switzerland and Germany, and also in France, Italy and Poland.
Sir Henry Goring, 4th Baronet (baptized 16 September 1679 – 12 November 1731), of Highden, Washington, Sussex, one of the Goring baronets of Highden, was an English politician who had a part in the Jacobite Atterbury Plot of 1721.
Goring, who stood (unsuccessfully as turned out) in the 1722 general election as MP for his old seat of Steyning, wrote to the Pretender James Francis Edward Stuart on 20 March 1721 a letter in which he put forward a plan for a restoration of the Stuart monarchy with the assistance of an invasion by Irish exile troops commanded by the Duke of Ormonde from Spain and Lieutenant-General Dillon from France.
The plot collapsed in England in the spring of 1722, at the time of the death of Charles Spencer, 3rd Earl of Sunderland, who a year before had been forced to resign as First Lord of the Treasury. He died on 19 April, when the Duke of Orleans, Regent of France, made it known to Carteret, Robert Walpole’s Secretary of State for the Southern Department, that the Jacobites had asked him to send 3,000 men in support of a coup d’état to take place early in May. The French said they had refused permission for the Duke of Ormonde to march a force across France to a channel port and they had also moved their Irish Brigade away from Dunkirk. Sunderland’s papers were seized, and a letter of thanks addressed to him by the Pretender came to light.[3]
In England, insufficient money had been collected by the Jacobites to provide enough arms to support a rising, leading the Jacobite exile leader the Earl of Mar (writing in March 1722) to comment on hearing this that Goring, “though a honest, stout, man, had not showed himself very fit for things of this kind.”
Walpole’s agents began the search for evidence against the leading suspects of Jacobitism, but they found little. Despite this, Walpole gave orders for several men to be arrested including Goring as well as Bishop Atterbury. The latter was imprisoned in the Tower of London. Goring, meanwhile, avoided arrest and had fled the country on 23 August; he remained in France until his death in 1731. In his absence, at a trial where he was considered one of the major managers of the plot, his agent stated Goring had attempted to enlist a gang of one thousand brandy smugglers to assist the projected invasion. This led to some government action against such smuggling.
Anthony Fortescue (d. 1570/71) was an English conspirator. It has generally been thought that he was the third son of sir Adrian Fortescue, but this Anthony Fortescue had already left England and was settled in Padua (a Venetian city) when the conspiracy was hatched in the autumn of 1562.
Fortescue is remembered for his part in the conspiracy of 1562, but Strype mentions an earlier stage in its conception, dating back to 1558. On 22 November, order was given by the Privy Council for the apprehension of Anthony Fortescue, and two conjurors, named Kele and Prestal. They were all set at liberty three days later. The main course of events leading up to the conspirators’ arrest at on 11 October 1562 is fully set out in the indictment found at Southwark on 19 February 1563.
Briefly, their plan was that Arthur Pole should be declared Duke of Clarence, a title to which he had some claim, and that under this pretence he should seek the assistance of the Guises in France to send him to Wales at the head of an army, where he would declare Mary Queen of Scots, to whom by now Edmund Pole was to have been married, as the rightful queen of England — and so march on London.
They were said to have conspired to this end on 1 September 1562. Besides the three men already mentioned, there were five others, all gentlemen residents of London : John Prestall (who was cautioned in 1558), Humphrey Barwyke, Edward Cosyn, Richard Byngham, and Antony Spencer. Only Fortescue lived outside the city, at Lambeth, and it was here that the conspiracy was hatched. On 10 September, at Southwark, Prestall and Cosyn conjured up an ‘evil spirit’ to help them.
On 16 September, Fortescue, with the help of Barwyke, informed the French and Spanish ambassadors of the conspirators’ designs, and asked for their help.
On 10 October, Prestall and Cosyn went over to the continent to further the plot, and on 11 October, Fortescue hired Henry Watson to bring his boat to St Olave’s Wharf in London. This would convey them to a ship from Flanders moored at Gravesend, which was then to take them over to the continent as well. But as they waited at a tavern called the Dolphin, they were discovered and arrested. Barwyke had been a spy all along.
The conspirators caught at St Olaves were locked up in the Tower of London over the winter, before being brought to trial on 26 February. All but Fortescue pleaded not guilty, but they were all found guilty by the court, and sentenced to execution at Tyburn.
However, they were all pardoned by the queen, and their sentence was commuted to one of life imprisonment. The Pole brothers were locked up in the Tower, where they were both still living in 1568, but seemed to have died shortly afterwards. Strype thought that Fortescue was released, but gives no evidence. At any rate, whether in prison or elsewhere, Anthony Fortescue, conspirator, died in 1570/71.