King Philippe III is the fellow who started it off. When his father, Philippe II died in 1598 (along with a number of other European notables) that opened up the Americas to smart young people with advanced thinking ~ so Philippe III and his friends came up with the Treaty of London (1604) which crammed down the idea of American settlement according to an Hapsburg or Spanish division of the territory.
He gave his cousin James an area called Acadia. He gave his other cousin, the King of France, Canada. He then carved out a colony called Carolana (now North and South Carolina) ~ probably because they'd discovered gold there.
The rest, West of the Alleghenies was identified for future settlement as time, circumstance and energy would allow, and the part East of the Alleghenies was an experiment where Protestants from Europe, except "the Dutch", could settle.
Virginia was not all that big ~ it encompassed everything we now call Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Downstate New York, Long Island, Maryland, Delaware, Virginia and West Virginia.
By the standards of the time that was huge though.
Over the next couple of centuries Spain weakened, France weakened, England strengthened, and the custom of Protestants going to America to settle continued.
We date our family's arrival to as early as 1502 ~ with various other individuals coming here over the 1500s to work as surveyors, researchers, or just adventurers ~ one of their cousins was a noted Catholic dissenter in Spain who advocated opening the American missions up to all the various orders and brotherhoods and not just to one group of priests (as had been the case). Schism was avoided when even King Philippe II saw the wisdom of that action and convinced the Popes to go along with it (they still having civil authority over each and every priest in every order).
By 1598, as the news of the death of Philippe and Elizabeth spread there was an aggressive rush to carve chunks out of the Americas and tens of thousands of Europeans began history's greatest landrush.
By 1621 there were actually places with names around here, but it wasn't until the 1670s that it became necessary once again to be concerned with whether or not someone was Catholic or Protestant. Implicit in the Peace of Westphalia (which ended the Thirty Years War) was the concept of "the national church", so the freewheeling Americans were reined in. Charles II took the English throne as a quite tamed monarch.
In brief, Our America began as a Protestant "geto" protected by the Catholic King of Spain ~ which is something we've forgotten about. He was one of history's good guys and he loved to party hearty!
That is very interesting! Thank you! I have read that the individual, Squanto, who kept the Pilgrims from starving to death (half of them already gone) knew the "invaders'" language, because he had been to Europe. I had never learned that back in public school. And, of course, the Jamestown settlers must have been largely Protestants? And, also, I left out the Hugenots (when?) down at St. Augustine --