In 1798, Protestant British soldiers from Scotland were sent to Ireland to help suppress an Irish republican rebellion. These soldiers fought alongside Orange militiamen and, when they returned to Scotland, they founded Scotland's first Orange lodges. The Scottish Orange Order grew swiftly in the early 1800s, when there was an influx of working-class Ulster Protestant immigrants into the Scottish Lowlands. Many of these immigrants saw themselves as returning to the land of their forefathers.