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

heads of the gentlemen adventurers of Jamestown with dreams of gold and Indians.101
    But if there were some suggestive similarities in English and Castilian plans for overseas expansion - plans which, although carried out under state sponsorship and subject to state control, were heavily dependent on private and collective initiatives for their realization - there were also some important differences. England under Elizabeth was moving, however reluctantly, in the direction of religious pluralism, and this was to be reflected in the new colonizing ventures. It was symptomatic, for instance, that one of the main proponents of Gilbert's colonization scheme was Sir George Peckham, a Roman Catholic, and the colony was at least partially envisaged as offering alternative space to the English Catholic commu- nity.102 In 1620, inspired by comparable urgings for an alternative space, a group of separatists under the leadership of William Bradford would land at Cape Cod and move across Massachusetts Bay to establish themselves in New Plymouth. The willingness of the English crown to sanction projects designed to provide refuge in America for a harassed minority contrasted strikingly with the determination of the Spanish crown to prevent the migration of Jews, Moors and heretics to the Indies.
    It was also a reflection of the changing times that England's transatlantic enterprise was sustained by a more coherent economic philosophy than that which attended Spain's first ventures overseas. Commercial considerations had admittedly been present from the beginning of the Spanish enterprise, and had been central to Columbus's presentation of his case at court. The colonization of Venezuela in the early 1530s was actually undertaken by a commercial organization, the Seville branch of the German merchant-banking firm of the Welsers, with results as disappointing as those that would later attend the efforts of the Virginia Company.103 But the discovery of silver in such vast quantities, and the overwhelming importance of precious metals in the cargoes for Seville, inevitably relegated other American commodities, however valuable, to a subordinate status in Spain's transatlantic trade. Although by the middle years of the sixteenth century some Spaniards were already expressing concern about the economic as well as the moral consequences of the constant influx of American silver into the Iberian peninsula'104 those who benefited from it - starting with the crown - had little inducement to listen to the theorists.
    In the England of Elizabeth, however, the promoters of overseas colonization were still having to look for arguments that would advance their cause. Although the younger Hakluyt's writings were suffused with anti-Spanish and patriotic sentiments, patriotism by itself was not enough. Colonization schemes required merchant capital, and it was essential to present them in terms that would appeal to the mercantile community, with which the Hakluyts themselves had close con- nections.105 At a time when the country was anxiously casting around for new export markets, this meant emphasizing the value of colonies as an outlet for domestic manufactures. Again, the example of Spain was uppermost in the younger Hakluyt's mind. Warning his compatriots of the likely consequences of Philip II's acquisition of Portugal and its overseas territories in 1580, he reminded them that `... whenever the rule and government of the East and West Indies ... shall be in one prince, they neither will receive English cloth nor yet any vent of their commodities to us, having then so many places of their own to make vent and interchange of their commodities. For all the West Indies is a sufficient vent of all their wines, and of all their wool indraped ...'106
    The case was further strengthened by the growing anxiety in Elizabethan England about the alarming social consequences of overpopulation. Spain and Portugal, wrote Hakluyt somewhat optimistically in his