The beginnings of English expansion overseas coincided with the consolidation of England as a Protestant nation in the reign of Elizabeth I. English patriotism became particularly associated with the struggle against Spain and the preservation of the Protestant faith. As for the Dutch, whose war of liberation against Spain England strongly supported, the guidance and preservation of the nation and its place in the world became bound up with being Protestant. Sailors often espoused a militant Protestantism (frequently with a sympathy for its more radical, Puritan tendencies). To fight the King of Spain on the high seas was a religious and patriotic duty. This struggle brought the English into contact with the New World. The initial encounter with the native peoples of America was to be one of mutual benefit. The seal of the Massachusetts Bay Company incorporated the figure of an American Indian appealing ‘Come over and help us.’ This appropriation of a biblical phrase was not only a Puritan conceit. It expressed the ideal of the Anglican settlers on the Chesapeake also.

Despite the English hostility to the Spanish, Iberians did have an experience of Christian mission which could serve as a model for England: making treaties with native people, in which baptism symbolised a process of assimilation by which ‘barbarians’ adopted ‘civilisation’. The cultural and religious forms of civilisation were not differentiated. For the English it meant an English Protestant civilisation. At Roanoke Island, Sir Walter Raleigh attempted the first English plantation in the 1580s.