Free Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America 1492-1830 by John H. Elliott

continuing attention to the affairs of the Indies, and into a set of policies and practices in which fiscal considerations inevitably tended to have the upper hand. In the Europe of the sixteenth century, silver meant power; and Cortes and Pizarro, by unlocking the treasures of the Indies, had shown how the conquest and settlement of overseas empire could add immeasurably to the power of European states.
    In the circumstances, it was not surprising that the England of Elizabeth should have expressed its own imperial aspirations, nicely symbolized by the `Armada portrait' of Queen Elizabeth, with her hand on the globe and an imperial crown at her side.93 Empire calls forth empire, and although Elizabeth's `empire' was essentially an empire of `Great Britain' embracing all the British Isles, the notion of imperium was flexible enough to be capable of extension to English plantations not only in Ireland but on the farther shores of the Atlantic.94 It was important, too, for Hakluyt and other promoters of overseas colonization to refute any Spanish claims to possession of the New World based on papal donation by the Alexandrine bulls. In his Historie of Travell into Virginia of 1612, William Strachey roundly asserted that the King of Spain `hath no more title, nor colour of title, to this place (which our industry and expenses have only made ours ... than hath any Christian prince'.95
    While Spain served as stimulus, exemplar, and sometimes as warning, English empire-builders could equally well look to precedents in their own backyard. Ireland, like the reconquered kingdom of Granada, was both kingdom and colony, and, like Andalusia, constituted a useful testing-ground of empire. 16 For example, the English had for centuries been seeking to enmesh Irish kings and chieftains in a network of allegiance, and the model of Montezuma's submission was hardly a necessary prerequisite for the Virginia Company to come up with the farce of Powhatan's `coronation'.
    It is therefore no accident that the Elizabethans most active in devising the first American projects - Sir Humphrey Gilbert, Sir Walter Raleigh, Ralph Lane, Thomas White - were deeply involved in the schemes for Irish plantation. It was not until he went to Ireland in 1566 as a soldier and planter that Gilbert began to appreciate how colonization could bring to its promoters territorial wealth and power.97 In the early years of Elizabeth, growing hostility to Spain, and the burning desire of the English to get their hands on the riches of the Spanish Indies, made it natural that strategic and privateering interests should predominate over any enterprise of a less ephemeral character. But in his abortive voyage of 1578 Gilbert seems to have been moving beyond piracy towards some sort of colonizing scheme.98 The failure of the voyage pushed him still further in the same direction, and in 1582 he devised a project for the settlement of 8.5 million acres of North American mainland in the region known as Norumbega.99
    Sir Humphrey Gilbert belonged to that West Country connection - Raleighs, Carews, Gilberts, Grenvilles - with its trading, privateering and colonizing interests, initially in Ireland, which can be seen as an English counterpart to the Extremadura connection that produced Nicolas de Ovando, Hernan Cortes, Francisco Pizarro, and many other Spanish conquerors and settlers of America." His plans were designed to provide landed estates for that same class of rural gentry and younger sons which had looked to land and vassals in Ireland as a means of realizing its aspirations. The Irish experience was of a kind to encourage gentlemen adventurers - men imbued with similar values and ideals to those to be found among the Spanish conquistadores, for there was nothing exclusively Spanish about the conquistador ideal. It inspired Sir Walter Raleigh with his wild schemes for wealth and glory through the conquest of the `large, rich, and bewti- ful empyre of Guiana', and it filled the