57
the time of Henry VIII. Nonetheless, the country had its dreams of glory,
and those dreams were associated with the notion of expansion. The single
form of expansion the English could imagine, however, was conquering
some of the only world they knew--Europe. The British vainly bumped their
heads against a brick wall, attempting to saw off pieces of France in the futile
bloodbath known as the Hundred Years War. They had their share of
victories, suffered humiliations at the hands of folks like Joan of Arc, and
were utterly thwarted in their efforts, eventually losing even the one scrap of
territory they'd managed to cut out for themselves--Calais. Meanwhile, they
mauled five generations of French peasants innocently trying to plant the
next year's crops.153
Historian A. L. Rowse, a leading British expert on the Elizabethan age,
considers Henry VIII's final failure to conquer the French one of the luckiest
embarrassments England ever endured.154 It forced the English to turn their
attentions away from the Continent and made them focus on a sphere in
which England would eventually make a fortune--the New World.
The Old World England reluctantly turned its back on was a land of
little opportunity. Hungry Italians were reduced to eating songbirds off the
trees. (Tourists in southern Europe 200 years later would be puzzled by the
eerie silence of the countryside. Melodious warblers like robins, titmice and
wrens had disappeared into the cooking pots of the area's humbler
citizens.)155 Meanwhile, the average French peasant was living so close to
starvation that in the fairy tales he recited to his children, the hero was
rewarded--not with a pot of gold, but with a decent meal.156
At first, the New World looked equally unrewarding. Christopher
Columbus was bitterly disappointed by this hulking mass of landscape. He
had set off to find the riches of China and ended up in a territory no one ever
heard of. The poor sailor insisted for years that this had to be some previous-
ly unreported part of the Chinese Empire.157
But Columbus' disappointment became England's New Frontier. The
British missed out on the easy pickings. The Spanish beat them to the Aztec
and Inca lands, where a few hundred Europeans armed with steel swords,
<< < GO > >>