What became of the Manahoacs? Did their pursuit of the game they hunted gradually draw them westward or were they, more probably, driven from the Piedmont country by their terrible foes the northern Iroquois, aided perhaps by the Susquehannocks who next appear upon the scene? But before taking up the story of the Iroquois and Susquehannock influence in Loudoun, we must turn to the English Kings and their grants of Virginia and particularly its Northern Neck, that spacious territory lying between the Rappahannock and Potomac, extending from the Chesapeake to a disputed western boundary.
Mighty in her military strength and with an all but inexhaustible wealth pouring into her coffers from her American conquests, Spain stood as a very colossus over the Europe of the sixteenth century; and England, watching and fearing her hostile growth, grimly determined that she too, should have her share of that fabulous new world and its treasure. So deeply planted and so greatly grew this determination that it eventually became a part of England's public policy and in June, 1578, the great Elizabeth, with her eyes on the American coast, issued letters patent to Sir Humphrey Gilbert, and after Gilbert's death reissued them on the 25th March, 1584, to his half-brother Sir Walter Raleigh, to discover, have, hold and occupy forever, such "remote heathern and barbarous lands, countries and territories not actually possessed by any Christian prince, nor inhabited by Christian people." As by its terms the new grant was to continue but for "the space of six yeares and no more," it was clear that advantage of its provisions should be taken with promptness; and Raleigh was not a man given to delay or indecision. He had been making his preparations; hardly more than a month elapsed before an expedition of two ships captained by Philip Amidas and Arthur Barlow set sail from England, bound for America. On the 4th of the following July, having landed on an island off the coast of the present Carolinas, these men raised the English flag and formally declared the sovereignty of England and its Queen. They brought home with them such glowing accounts of their discovery that Elizabeth was moved to bestow upon all the coast the name of Virginia--the land of the Virgin Queen. Two more attempts were made to establish permanent settlements in the neighborhood and although both failed, enough had been done to found a claim of English ownership and dominion, a claim which covered the entire coast from the French settlements in the north to the Spanish settlements upon the Florida peninsula, and thus the original Virginia became coextensive with England's pretensions on the North American continent. It is true that Spain then claimed the entire coast under a Papal Bull but Papal Bulls meant very little to Elizabeth or to her pugnacious sea-rovers. One of the many curiosities of history is that neither Raleigh nor his captains ever saw the soil of that part of America which was to become the Virginia we know, nor did the Queen who named it ever have knowledge of its physical characteristics, its resources or its inhabitants. In short, Virginia proper was neither to be discovered nor have its first precarious settlement until after Elizabeth's death.