ABSTRACT
By the beginning of the seventeenth century, the English, like their Dutch Protestant allies, had proved to be very effective mariners, adept at overseas trading and in pillaging on the margins of the Spanish empire. But they had not yet found a formula for conquering and settling new territories in the manner of the Spanish and Portuguese. Thus, when James VI of Scotland inherited Elizabeth’s throne in 1603, to become James I of England (1603–25), Elizabethan ambitions for creating a ‘New England’ in the Americas remained unfulfilled. Roanoke had vanished, Drake was dead, while Raleigh, the great promoter of colonial projects, was imprisoned in the Power of London. Moreover, the new King wanted peace with Spain, a prospect which dismayed those who thought that an English empire could be attained only by continuing aggression against the Catholic enemy.
