by Hugh Brogan
But from the beginning, and even at the height of her power, imperial Spain faced competition, especially in the North. To understand why requires an awareness of many factors.
First must be mentioned the new European state system, with its built-in tendency to conflict.
The Renaissance state resulted from the complex interplay of many powerful forces, the relative strength of which varied from one country to another. Nevertheless it is clear that it existed primarily to protect its members from violence, above all from foreign and civil war, as was demonstrated in the brilliant writings of Niccolô Machiavelli and Thomas Hobbes. So long as the threat of war was real and pressing, and so long as a state could do its job by averting that threat, so long could it count on its subjects’ support, although that support was severely qualified by a dislike of taxation so intense as to lead, frequently, to rebellion. But if the threat of war receded too completely the necessity of the state, at least in the highly centralized, oppressive, hierarchical form that it wore in the sixteenth century, would be questioned. Consequently, all those who had a stake in its continuance – kings, military aristocracies, bureaucrats and mercenary soldiers – had a vested interest, whether they admitted it or not, in perpetuating the evil that the state existed to correct. This paradox could only be resolved by an ethos which made permanent inter-state competition acceptable, if not to the poor peasants of Europe, at least to the consciences of their masters. That ethos was not lacking.
The history of each of the European states had been, during the period of its rise, a history of territorial extension. There seemed to be no reason why, in the Age of Monarchy, in the time of its maturity, a state should abandon the policy of aggrandizement. Reigning dynasties found it necessary to claim outlying provinces, ostensibly in order to maintain their legal rights and to increase the power, wealth and security of their states. Individual kings welcomed battles for new possessions, since they felt it was inglorious not to have fought valiantly in war. The aristocracy had for centuries been imbued with the idea of honour, and identified it with military virtues, which of course needed war for their display. Inferiors, ever prone to take their fashions from above, approved, or at least for the most part accepted, all these attitudes. It would have been difficult not to do so, since they were of very long standing and permeated the whole social structure. War thus seemed easy and natural to everybody.
So when Spain rose to her height as a result of the Columbian discoveries and the matrimonial expansionism of the Habsburg dynasty, all the other Old World states combined against her. In a world of inevitable war, her strength was too great to be tolerated safely. Nor did Spain do anything to conceal it, or to make it acceptable, for she too lived by the rules of the Renaissance game. And since men strike at their enemies wherever a blow is effective, Spain was challenged as much in the New World as in the Old. Her rivals hoped to win the treasure and trade of the Americas for themselves.
The English, led by another Italian, John Cabot, made the first anti-Spanish probes: they landed in Newfoundland in 1497 and discovered the great cod-fisheries, a treasure almost as precious as gold for medieval Europe, which suffered from a shortage of protein and, being Roman Catholic, needed fish to eat on Fridays and in Lent.
England laid claim to Newfoundland, but was at first too weak to make her claim good. French and Portuguese fishermen predominated on the Grand Bank.2 The French made the first effective challenge to Spain. The pirates of François I were let loose in the Caribbean half a century before Hawkins and Drake. In 1524 François employed yet another Italian, Giovanni Verrazano, to explore the Atlantic coasts of North America: this led to the discovery of Manhattan Island and the great harbour at the mouth of the Hudson river. The French had resumed the quest for the route to the Indies, and although the voyages of Verrazano and Cartier failed to find it, or to establish a French colony in the New World (attempts to wrest Florida from Spain also failed), they did lead to the thorough exploration of the north-east coast, especially of the Gulf of St Lawrence. Then the religious wars broke out, and French initiatives largely ceased.
The English returned to North America as sea-dogs, in the reign of Elizabeth I, as soon as that Queen felt it safe to challenge Spain. Their leader was Walter Ralegh. From his half-brother, Humphrey Gilbert, Ralegh had taken the notion that the region was one of the ‘rich and unknown lands, fatally and it seemeth by God’s providence, reserved for England’. Besides, the rich commerce and cities of New Spain were tempting prizes for piratical Englishmen: hence the exploits of Francis Drake in the Caribbean. On their side, the Spaniards planned to injure England by stirring up rebellion in Ireland. In revenge, Ralegh decided to establish a colony in what, in honour of the Virgin Queen, he called ‘Virginia’: that is, most of the eastern seaboard north of Florida and south of ‘Norumbega’ (the future New England). Such a colony, lying on the flank of Spain’s communications with Europe, could with luck prey successfully on the Spanish treasure-fleets as they made their way home. He did not go to Virginia himself, but with the support of his Queen he placed settlers on Roanoke Island, on the coast of what is now North Carolina, in 1585; but at their own request Sir Francis Drake carried them home in the following year. The next attempt, in 1587, was even less successful. Neglected by the home government because of the Armada crisis, the little colony, or rather the colonists, had vanished by the time that Ralegh’s ships next visited Roanoke. The only legacy of these efforts was the name, Virginia; some remarkable paintings of the natives and their villages; and a residual English interest in the area which bore fruit twenty years later.
Spain at first resisted the attempts on her American monopoly with considerable success. Time and the church eventually abated the savagery of the conquistadores; by gentler methods her devoted friars converted and pacified the Indians, so that her forts and missions could spread up the coast from Florida into what are now Georgia and the Carolinas; defences were strengthened in the Caribbean, so that Drake, in spite of all the damage he had inflicted, died at last broken-hearted after a final failure to capture and keep Panama. In time Spain weakened; but this merely increased conflict, for, as the power of the European states became more equal, one with another (as it did, on the whole, throughout the seventeenth century), so did their capacity and will to make trouble for each other. In turn, New France, New England, New Netherland, even tentative New Swedens and New Denmarks, imitated New Spain. Settlements in North America were fought and haggled over as if they were provinces in Europe: for example, the English took Quebec from the French, restoring it on payment of Queen Henrietta Maria’s dowry in 1633; New Netherland changed hands twice before becoming New York for good. The unfortunate Indians – above all, French-backed Hurons and English-backed Iroquois – found themselves and their quarrels drawn into European disputes in which they had no interest.
It must not be supposed, however, that the inter-state conflicts, important though they were, were the only causes of North American colonization, or that they were innocent of religious or popular content, or that monarchical policy was always clear-headed and ruthless. None of these things was true. Furthermore, we have seen already how strong an influence was economic greed, and this affected peoples as well as rulers. The English and the Dutch alike dragged their governments behind them as they pressed into every corner of the world looking for profit. The Newfoundland fishing led to trade with the Indians. Fur, especially that of the beaver, was as valuable a product as cod, and the Indians were willing to barter it for such European goods as ironware and bales of cloth. Trading-posts were established, and by the beginning of the seventeenth century the returning French, led by Samuel de Champlain, were pressing further and further up the St Lawrence river and securing Canada for France. Quebec was founded in 1608, Montreal in 1642. The Dutch traded and settled up the river Hudson. The beginnings of English activities are discussed in the next chapter.
To another chapter may also be left an account of the effects of t
he ferocious religious disputes that tormented Europe between 1517 and 1689. Here it is enough to remark that these effects were dramatic. Along with hunger for trade and treasure, the political competition and the everimproving knowledge of the Western seas, religion forced on the opening-up of North America.
And it was so easy. The riches that the continent contained were free, it seemed, for the taking. A few years of physical suffering were all that any part of it exacted as the price of conquest. The Indians were too few to do much more than fight a rearguard action. Modern scholarship cannot yet provide agreed estimates of the size of the population of North America before the Europeans came: guesses vary from two million to eighteen million. But whatever the truth, white diseases, to which the natives had at first no immunity, eventually reduced their numbers as inexorably as they had those of Mexico and Peru. Even so late as 1838 a smallpox epidemic would clear the way for white settlers across the Great Plains. So into the comparatively empty seven million square miles of the continent the densely settled Europe could pour its surplus sons and daughters in ever-swelling numbers.
The Indians were losers, but not the only ones, nor perhaps the worst. There were others, much more numerous, who made the country a happy hunting-ground. For them it had been paradise. Beaver, buffalo, Carolina parakeets, duckhawks, elk, great auks, grizzly bears, mountain-lions, passenger pigeons, sea-minks, sea-otters, whooping cranes and many other species that have since been either nearly or quite exterminated abounded in numbers that now seem literally unbelievable. According to a distinguished modern historian, at the time of the first settlement of Virginia there were
turkeys that weighed seventy pounds or more, and ducks so numerous that flocks seven miles long shut out the sunlight as they passed overhead. Streams swarmed with fish so large that ordinary nets would not hold them and so plentiful that a horse could not wade across a river when they were running.3
Until the sixteenth century men had been too few and too weak in weapons to diminish the abundance.4 It was so enormous that for more than two centuries the Europeans were continually amazed by the beauty, numbers and novelty of the North American birds, beasts and fishes that they were destroying. Similarly, they proclaimed their admiration for the beautiful forests that they felled, the plains, rivers and mountains they despoiled. Nowadays their descendants lament a poisoned land and fear a silent spring.
2 The Roots of English Colonization
This royal throne of kings, this scept’red isle,
This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,
This other Eden, demi-paradise,
This fortress built by Nature for herself
Against infection and the hand of war,
This happy breed of men, this little world,
This precious stone set in the silver sea,
Which serves it in the office of a wall,
Or as a moat defensive to a house,
Against the envy of less happier lands…
William Shakespeare
Why then should we stand striving here for places of habitation (where many are spending as much labour and cost to recover or keep sometimes an acre or two of Land, as would produce them many and as good or better in another Country) and in the mean time suffer a whole Continent as fruitful and convenient for the use of men to be waste without any improvement?
John Winthrop
From the heights of Olympus the English conquest of North America, protracted though it was through a century and a half, must have seemed merely an incident in the movement which carried European power and European culture to every corner of the world. But those who try to understand the origins of the United States have to decide precisely what it was that so differentiated England from her competitors within the general European movement that she was able to outstrip them all. What were the special factors in Tudor and Stuart England that augmented the general outward tendency of the Europeans?
‘Gold, trade, tillage represent the three stages in the history of colonization, and the greatest of these, because fundamentally essential to permanence, is tillage,’ says the leading historian of the American colonies.1 He is right; but it is important to notice that the Europeans did not discover this truth for over a century. Even Ralegh, most intelligent of the first English colonizers, thought of Roanoke primarily as an instrument for securing a large and early profit, either by gold-mining, plundering the Spanish, or by trade. As for the Iberian nations, they were at first content to hold Southern and Central America by force, living at ease off the labour of slaves imported from Africa (for Indians made bad slaves, dying more rapidly than they could be replaced). Yet the wealth of North America had to be worked for by Europeans, not only as traders or trappers, but as farmers and artisans also. This, as much as any of Columbus’s, was a discovery that, once made, would change the history of the world. It was not enough to mine gold, to haul fish from the waters and to take beaver from the forest by baiter with the natives.
This fact implied four things about the European advance. It meant that the country would succeed most completely which could most easily export the largest number of people; which could most easily keep them supplied – in other words, which was strongest at sea over the longest period; which had colonists who brought with them the most appropriate skills; and, lastly, which had the most adaptable culture, in the widest sense of that word.
That country turned out to be England. Inferior at various times and in various respects to her rivals, she possessed, overall, a stronger hand than any of them.
Her victory was ultimately due to the fact that she was the dominant entity in an island. She was thus spared the perils and temptations that afflicted the continental powers. Ireland, so near, so alien, so vulnerable to foreign fleets, was her weak point, but the Royal Navy guarded it successfully, on the whole, against foreign attack, and the Battle of the Boyne was merely the last of many victories which in the long run put an end to any danger from the inhabitants. Unlike one of her chief rivals, Holland, England was almost impossible to invade successfully while her fleet was in being. Unlike another, France, she would not succumb to the lure of continental hegemony, because her gentry, for their own reasons, kept the King in check, as they could not have done if a long land frontier, by making a large standing army necessary, had made him their master. In some respects Spain, isolated from Europe by the sea and the Pyrenees almost as effectively as England was by the Channel, shared the insular advantage; but this was neutralized by internal particularism and by the crushing, if spectacular, inheritance of the Habsburgs in the Low Countries, Germany, Italy, Hungary and Bohemia. Unlike this ancient enemy, England had no territorial or dynastic entanglements of a kind certain to involve her in continental land war. Calais had gone under Mary Tudor, Hanover would not come until the death of Queen Anne. The result of all this good fortune was a steady husbanding of vigour and capital. Compared to the Thirty Years War, or the Swedish wars, or the wars of Louis XTV, England’s Civil Wars were mere episodes; and since their result, in the not-too-long run, was the remoulding and reinvigorating of English political institutions, which further increased the country’s strength in all forms of international competition, they are not episodes to be regretted by Englishmen or English-speaking Americans. Lying across the sea communications of half Europe with the outside world, in a period when, as has been said, European culture was coming to overpower all other groups whatever, the scept’red isle needed only the will to use its various resources to take to itself whatever it wanted – sovereignty, loot or the world’s commerce. Nor was the will lacking. On the contrary, many things fostered it.
More perils confronted England during the sixteenth century than in any other between the eleventh and the twentieth. In 1500 she did not seem well equipped to meet them. She was the weakest, militarily, politically and economically, of the leading Western states. Her trade was largely in the hands of foreigners. Her polity was still endangered by the rivalries of York and Lancaster. He
r feudal institutions were in decay, her capital resources and geographical knowledge were small, Spain and Portugal were dominant in every ocean. Nor did things at once improve. Rather, the wool-trade declined, and after 1550 the cloth-trade did so too. Henry VIII involved the country in futile foreign wars to which he soon added a religious revolution. A disputed Crown and an even more bitterly disputed church settlement explain almost all the politics of Elizabeth I’s reign. Imports of American bullion helped to produce a European inflation which, in turn, generated social conflict and tension.
