England’s Early Imperial Interests: Ireland and Virginia

Abstract

The origin of the establishment of England’s first colony in the western hemisphere at Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607 is intimately linked to the nation’s long historical interest and extra-territorial venture in Ireland. For nearly a thousand years before the reigns of the first two Tudors, Henry VII and Henry VIII, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Ireland had been a land of notice for English monarchs. It was an attraction that began about 684 A.D. when an expeditionary force under the ealdorman Berht was sent to the Celtic Isle by the Northumbrian King Ecgfrith. England’s early historian Bede recorded that Berht ‘wretchedly devastated a harmless race that had always been most friendly to the English and his hostile bands spared neither churches nor monasteries. The islanders resisted force by force so far as they were able, imploring the merciful aid of God and invoking His vengeance with unceasing imprecations’.¹ Five hundred years later, in 1155, Henry II requested authorization from the newly elected Pope Adrian IV to invade Ireland.²Henry II acknowledged that the kingdom of Ireland belonged to the dominion of the church and could not, therefore, be subjected to any new ruler without the pope’s approval.