itable business. In 1665, a merchant in Edinburgh—one of many who
made such a request—petitioned to be allowed to abduct “strong and idle
beggars, Egyptians [Gypsies], common and notorious whores and thieves
and other dissolute and louse persons” for shipment to America. His peti-
tion was granted. To earn bounties, press gangs, “spirits,” or crimps often
kidnapped men and women who could not defend themselves. Women
became particularly attractive, since “by their breeding they should replen-
ish the white population” in the colonies, as a Venetian ambassador wrote
in 1655.
Government after British government, royal and republican, Catholic
and Protestant, was insensitive to the humane, moral, and legal condition
of poorer Englishmen. And not only England was affected. From late
medieval times, the English government sporadically pushed outward
toward the “natural” boundaries of Great Britain; to do so, it had to over-
come the neighboring Irish and Scots. Centuries of English attempts to
subdue, exterminate, or exile them had a major impact upon the flow of
migrants to America.
Border wars with Scotland, which had been fought since the time
of William the Conqueror, became genocidal under Henry VIII. He
instructed his generals to “put all to fire and sword.” Unsubdued, the
fiercely independent Scots time after time fought English armies. The last
great rebellion, the “Forty-Five,” which was ended by the battle and subse-
quent massacre at Culloden in 1745, released a flood of Scottish migrants
to the New World.
Ireland had been suppressed and partly colonized in the twelfth century,
but Henry VIII was the first English king to make a serious effort to extend
the “Englysshe Pale” (the already subdued area enclosed in a palisade) over
the whole of the “Great Irishry.” When Henry’s daughter Elizabeth became
queen, she was advised that Ireland was too dangerous to be left to the Irish.
Its very geography invited intervention of fellow Catholic Spain. Like many
strategic assessments, this one led to self-fulfilling policies: when the English
drove the Irish out of their more productive lands, the Irish tried to resist.
Their resistance justified a campaign of brutal search-and-destroy opera-
tions. These operations were harbingers of campaigns the British army and
the colonial militias later mounted against Native Americans: razing houses,
Society and Wars in the Old Countries 73