Invading America. David Childs

      Frobisher at Bloody Point. From the beginning native opposition to English landings was strong enough to dismay but never powerful enough to deter. (British Museum)

      Spain was a military nation with a professional, ruthless army that had been at war for generations. This brutal tradition its conquistadors took to New Spain where, it has been estimated, between 1519 and 1600, they reduced the population of that region from 25 million to 1.5 million. Even allowing for the fact that they were operating in a far less densely populated area, the English did not cause such commensurate devastation. They were different. For one thing, they did not possess a professional army and it showed. It was not so much that few English troops could be spared to spearhead an invasion of America but that so few such practitioners of the profession of arms existed in England that none was available for what was, essentially, a sideshow. Only Ralph Lane, who was summoned from Ireland, was a professional soldier: John Smith and Miles Standish had been schooled as mercenaries. Neither would any experienced or senior soldiers have felt honoured by being offered the command of such petty numbers as were deployed.

      Spain also possessed, in the Jesuits, a priesthood that was as much an arm of the state as the army. Together this holy alliance slaughtered and subdued all of that part of southern America with which they came into contact. The English did not possess a proselytizing organized priesthood. Whereas Spain held to one true and exportable faith, the English struggled to know what to believe and on whom to impose that belief. One result of this was a reduction in the number of people in holy orders who could be spared to accompany settlers heading for America. Those that did were, for the most part, fully occupied with the bodily and spiritual survival of their own flock.

      It is not only in comparison with Spain that England’s slow advance across America seems sluggardly. The nation had had its own experience of invasion recorded in the shadowy tattered texts of its distant historic past, each with its own significant impact on the indigenous inhabitants. Yet, whereas the Romans, Saxons and Normans had flowed tidally across England in successive and successful waves, the English assault on Virginia was splattered across the shoreline like spray breaking on impermeable and impregnable cliffs which, for all its initial force, is dissipated well before it trickles inland.

      The Claudian invasion of England took place in AD 43: Hadrian’s Wall, which marked the final frontier between Roman England and Pictish Scotland, was built between AD 122 and 133. The Germanic tribal chiefs Hengist and Horsa landed in Kent in AD 429; the Battle of Catterick, which confirmed Saxon suzerainty over England, was fought in AD 590. William the Conqueror arrived at Pevensey in 1066 and could claim he controlled all of England by 1070. By contrast, although Cabot arrived off America on his mission of conquest in 1497, it was not until the Crown took control of southern Virginia in 1625 and Winthrop’s Massachusetts Bay settlers arrived in 1630 that it could be said with any certainty that the English occupation of a small part of America was even reasonably secure.

      Although different in many ways, those three ancient invasions shared an ingredient of success – numbers. The Romans had landed in Britain with four legions, about 25,000 men; the Saxons brought a whole people over in successive tides, most of whom were strong enough to overcome local resistance; William took a gamble with numbers but still brought 3,000 followers with him to Pevensey to conquer an island kingdom. Yet, although Sir Humphrey Gilbert suggested a figure of 5,000 troops would be needed to challenge Spanish domination of the new world, Sir Walter Ralegh dispatched a company of 107 men, to conquer a continent, and a village to settle Virginia. It is not surprising, therefore, that failure rather than success was the reward for these efforts and that few inroads were made away from the shore.

      This lack of penetration has meant that, while historians talk readily enough about the Age of Invasion that followed on from the Roman withdrawal from Britain, few apply the same term to the period of English settlement in America following the grant of a Charter to John Cabot. Yet both involved landings from the sea, the seizing of land and the subjugation of the native population who were driven eventually either to extinction or into wilder unwanted lands.

      The only difference, apart from the fact that one invasion took place in the dark abysm of time, is that whereas the Saxons arrived as kindred groups wishing to farm and achieve self-sufficiency, the English initially arrived in America to provide profit for absentee landlords, who were almost disastrously incompetent in the planning, execution and support of their operations. Only when the Mayflower settlers arrived in 1620, with a similar mindset to their Anglo-Saxon forebears, determined to establish a close-knit domestic community and not return home, did a successful, permanent and self-sufficient settlement in America seem likely. Up until then the English had established beachheads which they always struggled to hold and were often forced to evacuate.

      Thus, from the start the English planned an approach to settlement that differed hugely from that being pursued by Spain in South and Central America. There the strategic plan was to exploit, extract and export, for the benefit of the Crown whose servants the settlers were. This had the great advantage that neither soldiery nor money were to in short supply, and that an identifiable and understood political and military hierarchy ordered and governed each settlement, town, city, mine and enterprise that Spain undertook. It also meant that the native population, who had little to offer the enterprise once their wealth had been seized, could be treated with ruthlessness, their extermination being compensated for by the importing of slaves from Africa. Most of all, New Spain succeeded because it was rich in highly sought-after commodities, especially gold and silver. This was far from the case in North America.