nothing.”[1] It was hardly probable that the English government would recede from this position after the destruction of the Invincible Armada and the attack upon Cadiz,[2] nor was it likely that the Spanish Power could forget those events when it came to consider seriously the advisability of removing the English from Virginia by force, a policy the mere suggestion of which was soon abandoned. The spy and the time server took the place of the soldier and the prompter to vigorous action Molinas and Gondomars were substituted for men like Menendez and Velasco, but the difference had no influence whatever upon the fate of the Colony in Virginia, which continued to grow in wealth and population, forming an insuperable obstacle to the advance of the Spanish dominion on the Atlantic coast of North America. It is quite certain that but for this barrier the Spanish settlements would have spread as far to the north on this coast as they gradually did on the Pacific. Florida would have been the starting-point in the east as Mexico had been in the west.
Such in brief detail were the practical reasons entering into the formation of the London Company. If we omit from consideration the early delusions as to the existence of gold in Virginia in large quantities, delusions arising principally from the spirit of the times, which had been
- ↑ Reply of the English government to the demand of the Spanish ambassador that the treasure brought back to England by Drake in September, 1580, should be delivered to Spain.
- ↑ See the account which Digby gives in a letter to Carleton from Madrid, under date of November, 1613, of his interview with the Spanish Secretary of State, who claimed that “Virginia and the Islandes of the Bermudas were of the Conquest of Castile”; “I could no way yield unto him,” wrote Digby, “that eyther Virginia or ye Bermudas were parts of the Conquest of Castile, but that they (English) themselves were the first Possidents.” Brown’s Genesis of the United States, p. 668.
