ABSTRACT
Under Elizabeth, England had been an embattled kingdom, and except for those who went to the Low Countries to À ght against the Spanish enemy in the Protestant cause, travel for Englishmen within Western Europe, largely dominated by the two Catholic powers of Habsburg Spain and Valois France, had been not impossible but distinctly risky and uncertain; a desire for travel, with its attendant risks of being suborned by the Spanish or converted to Popery, tended to be automatically suspect. Now, in the early decades of the seventeenth century, there was a remarkable Á owering of British visitors to Western Europe, above all to France and Italy but also to the Low Countries and to the Rhineland and Switzerland, and – on a much smaller scale, for obvious religious reasons – to the Iberian peninsula. This was, of course, only part of a general spirit of adventurousness and discovery, a widening of intellectual horizons, that had since the last decades of Queen Elizabeth’s reign been taking Englishmen across the Atlantic to the New World in one direction and, as we shall see, in the opposite direction eastwards to the Islamic Near East, the lands of the Ottoman Empire, and beyond there to Safavid Persia and Mughal India. Similarly, political and religious upheavals within other parts of the British Isles whose fortunes were now bound up with those of England, that is, Scotland and Ireland, now in the seventeenth century sent lively elements among the Scots and Irish to seek their fortunes as mercenary soldiers; there was for them À ghting across large tracts of Western and Central Europe, from the time of the Revolt of the Netherlands in 1568 to the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 and beyond, especially as Louis XIV’s expansionist ambitions grew. In the case of the Scots, these new emigrants merely swelled the
ranks of their compatriots who had been trading with the lands around the Baltic shores and within the interior of Eastern Europe for at least two centuries previously (see below, pp. 148-49).
