CHAPTER 1I 
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY DOWN TO 1660 
IN his history of © The English in America,” Mr. Doyle 
wrote that in the beginning English colonisation of 
America was urged on by three motives working 
together, that the Elizabethans, such as Raleigh, 
Gilbert and Peckham had a vision of a great colonial 
empire, which was to have three functions. It was 
to be an outlet for the paupers of England ; it was to 
balance and control the transatlantic empire of Spain ; 
and it was to be peopled by colonists who would be 
missionaries, spreading the light of the Gospel among 
the heathen natives of Notth America. ‘The actual 
course of English colonisation,” he continued, © dealt 
with lower motives and contented itself with more 
commonplace successes. Its aims, its methods and 
its results had nothing in common with those imagined 
by Gilbert and his fellows.’ No doubt, with the 
actual beginnings of English colonisation, small and 
usually squalid as they were, and with the merging 
more or less of individuals in companies, dreams 
vanished away, and the glamour and romance of the 
sixteenth century were wanting to the seventeenth. 
* Doyle, The English in America: The Colonies under the House of 
Hanover (1907), chap. viii, pp. 411-12.