1558 - England in America
The prodigious wealth flowing into Spain from its colonies and crown efforts to monopolize colonial trade prompted international smuggling and piracy. As a seafaring nation with few continental distractions and only one border to defend, England was a natural leader in both enterprises.
Shortly after her accession to the English throne in 1558, Queen Elizabeth disestablished Roman Catholicism once and for all. She further widened the breech with Catholic Spain by rejecting Philip's proposals of marriage, and by overlooking her subjects unofficial trade with Spanish colonies and attacks on Spanish shipping. John Hawkins' first voyage to the Caribbean with African slaves (1562-1563) had been so profitable that the queen herself invested in the second and third.
When Hawkins anchored at the Mexican port of San Juan de Ullua on his third voyage in 1568, however, the Spanish retaliated with great force and skill. Only two English ships escaped. The incident poisoned Anglo-Spanish relations for the rest of the century. As a consequence, English depredations increased in frequency. From 1577 to 1580 Sir Francis Drake, who had been with Hawkins, humiliated Spain by circumnavigating the globe, much of which Spain considered its own, plundering as he went. Despite vehement Spanish protests, Elizabeth knighted him.
The passage of time did little to abate English outrage over San Juan de Ullua, nor did it reduce English covetousness of Spanish treasure and trade. In 1578 Elizabeth I revived Cabot's eighty-year-old territorial claim and permitted Humphrey Gilbert to explore and settle any part of North America not then occupied by Christians, that is, nearly all of it. Gilbert disappeared returning from Newfoundland in 1583, but his half-brother, Walter Ralegh, carried on under a slightly different patent of discovery. Ralegh and his associates developed a plan to build a base well north of St. Augustine, from which to attack Spanish shipping in the western Atlantic and exploit the mineral resources of the region. To this end, Amadas and Barlowe reconnoitered the coast in 1584, and the Grenville expedition of 1585 left 108 men on Roanoke Island under Ralph Lane.
But Grenville was tardy in resupplying the colonists, and Drake, sailing homeward from victories over the Spanish at Cartagena and St. Augustine, removed them in 1586. Neither the Lane colony nor the 1587 "lost colony" had any noticeable effect on Spanish shipping. However, Spanish colonial expansion and seemingly unending sources of wealth in the New World profoundly affected English colonial policies. Drake pillaged the Caribbean in 1585-1586, broke the Bank of Spain; nearly broke the Bank of Venice, to which Spain was heavily indebted; and ruined Spanish credit.
English military intervention in the Netherlands (1584) persuaded Philip to build the Armada; Drake's subsequent affront moved him to launch it. Although Drake's brazen attack on Cadiz in 1587 set Spanish plans back a year, the Armada finally sailed, and when it did, it was largely responsible for preventing timely relief of the 1587 colony on Roanoke Island. Even after the Armada suffered mortifying defeat, and Spanish attempts to find and destroy the Roanoke colony had been indolent and inept, the threat of Spanish reprisal partly dictated the site of Jamestown. Hostility left over from Spanish activities on the Chesapeake in the 1570s may have affected the Virginia colonists' early dealings with the Powhatan Confederation.
At the beginning of the 1580s, the balance of power at home and abroad was against England's Queen Elizabeth. By its end, she ruled the seas. She had also expanded her realm and reached the zenith of her personal popularity at home and abroad. Notwithstanding the religious conflicts and invasion threats that punctuated the era and colored its life and thought, English merchants expanded their trade and increased their wealth. Many of them invested heavily in the schemes of adventurers attempting to extend the dominion of England beyond the seas.
With an increase in the knowledge of navigation and the availability of trained pilots and masters, an interest in overseas trade and expansion began to flourish. By the time of the first voyage to Roanoke in 1584, Drake had already circumnavigated the globe, Frobisher had explored the barren Arctic, and Queen Elizabeth's Sea Dogs roamed the shipping lanes with impunity. In this climate, Walter Ralegh petitioned the crown for the right to explore and claim lands in the New World not yet inhabited by any other Europeans.
The Roanoke voyages of 1584 — 1590 were part of the great Elizabethan expansion. Had these enterprises not been started simultaneously with two escalating crises that affected the whole of England, the probability of their immediate success would have been much higher. While the Roanoke colonies were being planted, plots to place the Catholic Mary Queen of Scots on the English throne were uncovered. Within months of her execution in February 1587 - an event that added fuel to the simmering religious problem — Ralegh's final colony sailed for the new world. Before the colony could be reinforced and resupplied, the Spanish Armada attacked England. By the time Elizabeth stabilized her position at home and abroad, the Roanoke colony had been deserted. Eclipsed by the naval victory over the Armada, the colonists and their New World nonetheless made cameo appearances in the music, theatre, and literature of the day.
|
NEWSLETTER
|
| Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list |
|
|
|
