Early Modern England and the Wider World

Tom Lengt.leng@Sheffield.ac.uk

Late Elizabethan/early Stuart international ventures: the

beginnings of empire?

• The ‘Armada Portrat’, c.1588• https://

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armada_Portrait

Francis Drake’s landing on California, engravedby Theodore de Bry, 1590

A Victorian fantasy of the beginnings of empire: JA Froude’s ‘England’s Forgotten Worthies’, 1852

John Everett Millais, The Boyhood of Raleigh (1871)

‘the seamen from the banks of the Thames and the Avon, the Plym and the Dart, self-taught and self-directed, with no impulse but what was beating in their own royal hearts, went out across the unknown seas fighting, discovering, colonizing, and graved out the channels, and at last paved them with their bones, through which the commerce and enterprise of England has flowed out all over the world’.

The Spanish ‘Black Legend’: Bartolomé de las Casas, Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias (Seville, 1552)- Brief account of the destruction of the Indies (engraving by Theodore de Bry)

‘But the stories of the dealings of the Spaniards with the conquered Indians, which were widely known in England, seem to have affected all classes of people, not with pious passive horror, but with a genuine human indignation.’ ‘the armed soldiers of the

Reformation, and as the avengers of humanity’ …‘high heroic energy, as has never been overmatched; the more remarkable, as it was the fruit of no drill or discipline, no tradition, no system, no organized training, but was the free native growth of a noble virgin soil.’

‘the expansive energies of our people in action’

Charles Andrews, The Colonial Period of American History, 4 vols, 1912

Colonies were not looked upon as the stuff out of which an empire was to be made, but rather as the source of raw materials that could not be obtained in England and were needed there either for consumption or for manufacturing purposes

Ireland as ‘laboratory for empire’ (David Quinn, Nicholas Canny)

… enemies’ heads displayed ‘on the ground by eche side of the waie ledying into his owne tente so that none could come into his tente for any cause but commonly he muste passe through a lane of heddes which he used ad terrorem’