14. =Colonisation of Virginia and New England. 1607-1620.=--Gradually Englishmen learned to prefer peaceable commerce and colonisation to piratical enterprises. In =1585= Raleigh had sent out colonists to a region in North America to which he gave the name of Virginia, in honour of Elizabeth, but the colonists either returned to England or were destroyed by the Indians. In =1607= a fresh attempt was made, and, after passing through terrible hardships, the Colony of Virginia grew into a tobacco-planting, well-to-do community. In =1608= a congregation of Separatists emigrated from England to Holland, and, after a while, settled at Leyden, where, anxious to escape from the temptations of the world, many of them resolved to emigrate to America, where they might lead an ideally religious life. In =1620= the emigrants, a hundred in all, 'lifting up their eyes to heaven, their dearest country,' crossed the Atlantic in the 'Mayflower,' and found a new home which they named Plymouth. These first emigrants, the Pilgrim Fathers, as their descendants fondly called them, lost half their number by cold and disease in the first winter, but the remainder held on to form a nucleus for the Puritan New England of the future. 15. =The Beginning of the Thirty Years' War. 1618-1620.=--As yet, however, these small beginnings of a colonial empire attracted little attention in England. Men's thoughts ran far more on a great war--the Thirty Years' War--which, in =1618=, began to desolate Germany. In that year a revolution took place in Bohemia, where the Protestant nobility rose against their king, Matthias, a Catholic, who was at the same time Emperor, and, in =1619=, after the death of Matthias, they deposed his successor, Ferdinand, and chose Frederick, the Elector Palatine, James's Calvinist son-in-law, as king in his place. Almost at the same time Ferdinand became by election the Emperor Ferdinand II. James was urged to interfere on behalf of Frederick, but he could not make up his mind that the cause of his son-in-law was righteous, and he therefore left him to his fate. Frederick's cause was, however, popular in England, and in =1620=, when there were rumours that a Spanish force was about to occupy the Palatinate in order to compel Frederick to abandon Bohemia, James--drawing a distinction between helping his son-in-law to keep his own and supporting him in taking the land of another--went so far as to allow English volunteers, under Sir Horace Vere, to garrison the fortresses of the Palatinate. In the summer of that year, a Spanish army, under Spinola, actually occupied the Western Palatinate, and James, angry at the news, summoned Parliament in order to obtain a vote of supplies for war. Before Parliament could meet, Frederick had been crushingly defeated on the White Hill, near Prague, and driven out of Bohemia. [Illustration: King James I.: from a painting by P. van Somer, dated 1621, in the National Portrait Gallery.]