y, and the abilities of their
Bradfords, Bradstreets, Winslows, Winthrops, Standishes, Endicotts,
Hayneses, Hopkinses, Newmans, Williamses, and other prominent
governors or assistant-governors, the Confederacy and the Plantations
went on prosperously towards their ultimate, though yet unforeseen,
destiny in the formation of the United States. Cromwell, indeed, had
a scheme which would have stopped that issue. He had a scheme for
fetching all the Puritans of New England back and planting them
splendidly in Ireland. Communications on the subject had passed as
early as 1651, when Ireland had been just reconquered; but naturally
without effect. The New Englanders were not then too numerous perhaps
to have been transported to Ireland bodily; but, as one of their
historians says, "they had taken root." Their increase, however, for
more than a century thenceforward was to be mainly within themselves,
for new arrivals from England had become scarce.[1] II. OTHER
COLONIES AND SETTLEMENTS IN NORTH AMERICA. These too went on very
much at their own will, though not quite unnoticed. _Virginia_,
dating from 1608, and _Maryland_, dating from 1634, continued to
be the favourite colonies for Royalist settlers, Anglican or Roman
Catholic; but there had been recent additions of English Puritans,
and of transported Scottish prisoners of war, to the population of
Virginia, and the connexions with the mother-country had remained
unbroken. There were commercial regulations about both Colonies by
the English Council, and grants of passes to them. Canada and the
other regions about the St. Lawrence, the possession of which had
been contested by the English and the French in the reign of Charles
I, had lapsed long ago into the hands of the French; but Major
Sedgwick had wrested back for Cromwell, in 1654, the peninsula then
called _Acadie_, but now _Nova Scotia_, being part of the
territory that had been granted under that name by Charles to his
Scottish Secretary, the Earl of Stirling, and had been colonised by
Scots, to some extent, from 1625 onwards. Off the mainland,
Newfoundland, which had contained an English fishing population for
at least twenty years, was not neglected; and, beyond the bounds of
any of the North-American Colonies or Plantations that were
definitely named and recognised, there may have been stragglers
knowing themselves to be subjects of the Protectorate.[2] III. THE
WEST INDIES. The _Bermudas_ or _Summer Islands_ had be