niards.[66]

The first two Stuart Kings, like the great Queen who preceded them, and
in spite of the presence of a powerful Spanish faction at the English
Court, looked upon the Indies with envious eyes, as a source of
perennial wealth to whichever nation could secure them. James I., to be
sure, was a man of peace, and soon after his accession patched up a
treaty with the Spaniards; but he had no intention of giving up any
English claims, however shadowy they might be, to America. Cornwallis,
the new ambassador at Madrid, from a vantage ground where he could
easily see the financial and administrative confusion into which Spain,
in spite of her colonial wealth, had fallen, was most dissatisfied with
the treaty. In a letter to Cranborne, dated 2nd July 1605, he suggested
that England never lost so great an opportunity of winning honour and
wealth as by relinquishing the war with Spain, and that Philip and his
kingdom "were reduced to such a state as they could not in all
likelihood have endured for the space of two years more."[67] This
opinion we find repeated in his letters in the following years, with
covert hints that an attack upon the Indies might after all be the most
profitable and politic thing to do. When, in October 1607, Zuniga, the
Spanish ambassador in London, complained to James of the establishment
of the new colony in Virginia, James replied that Virginia was land
discovered by the English and therefore not within the jurisdiction of
Philip; and a week later Salisbury, while confiding to Zuniga that he
thought the English might not justly go to Virginia, still refused to
prohibit their going or command their return, for it would be an
acknowledgment, he said, that the King of Spain was lord of all the
Indies.[68] In 1609, in the truce concluded between Spain and the
Netherlands, one of the stipulations provided that for nine years the
Dutch were to be free to trade in all places in the East and West Indies
except those in actual possession of the Spaniards on the date of
cessation of hostilities; and thereafter the English and French
governments endeavoured with all the more persistence to obtain a
similar privilege. Attorney-General Heath, in 1625, presented a memorial
to the Crown on the advantages derived by the Spaniards and Dutch in the
West Indies, maintaining that it was neither safe nor profitable for
them to be absolute lords of those regions; and he suggested that his
Majesty openly interpose o