Alpha Book

The best
account of _Sir Robert Walpole_ is the biography by John (Viscount)
Morley (1889).


CHAPTER IX
THE WORLD CONFLICT OF FRANCE AND GREAT BRITAIN

FRENCH AND ENGLISH COLONIES IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY
In the sixteenth century, while Spain and Portugal were carving out
vast empires beyond the seas, the sovereigns of France and England,
distracted by religious dissensions or absorbed in European politics,
did little more than to send out a few privateers and explorers. But in
the seventeenth century the England of the Stuarts and the France of
the Bourbons found in colonies a refuge for their discontented or
venturesome subjects, a source of profit for their merchants, a field
for the exercise of religious zeal, or gratification for national
pride. Everywhere were commerce and colonization growing apace, and
especially were they beginning to play a large part in the national
life of England and of France. We have already noticed how the Dutch,
themselves the despoilers of Portugal [Footnote: See above, pp.


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