Feeble indeed were England's efforts in the 1500s to compete with the sprawling Spanish Empire. As Spain's ally in the first half of the century, England took little interest in establishing its own overseas colonies.
Religious conflict also disrupted England in mid-century, after King Henry VIII broke with the Roman Catholic Church in the 1530s, launching the English Protestant Reformation.
Catholics battled Protestants for decades, and the religious balance of power seesawed.
But after the Protestant Elizabeth ascended to the English throne in 1558, Protestant ism became dominant in England, and rivalry with Catholic Spain intensified.
Ireland, which nominally had been under English rule since the twelfth century, became an early scene of that rivalry.
The Catholic Irish sought help from Catholic Spain to throw off the yoke of the new Protestant English queen. But Spanish aid never amounted to much; in the 1570s and 1580s, Elizabeth's troops crushed the Irish uprising with terrible ferocity, inflicting unspeakable atrocities upon the native Irish people.
The English crown confiscated Catholic Irish lands and "planted" them with new Protestant land lords from Scotland and England.
This policy also planted the seeds of the centuries-old religious conflicts that persist in Ireland to the present day.
Many English soldiers developed in Ireland a sneering contempt for the "savage" natives, an attitude that they brought with them to the New World.