Sir Alexander of Mentrie, a courtier of James VI who persuaded the monarch to establish a ‘New Scotland’ in the Canadian Maritimes
When James VI became king of England as James I in 1603, he inherited a kingdom that was beginning to carve out a transatlantic empire, a trend that would only accelerate during his reign. But in James’s original realm of Scotland, deficiencies in capital, expertise, manpower and political will ensured that empirebuilding remained a distant dream. Many Scots responded enthusiastically to James’s plantations in Ulster after 1609, but it would not be until the 1620s that the first serious effort was made to establish Scottish colonies in the New World.