England’s oldest joint stock company received its charter on 26 February 1555 from Queen Mary I, England’s first reigning queen, and her husband Philip, then King of Naples. What they both thought of this new enterprise at the time is a matter of considerable interest, for Philip was already wary of English sailors and merchants, and had warned off at least one proposed expedition there. But the world in the mid-16th century was in a state of flux, and many new movements and developments had not yet settled or resolved themselves.
Dividing the ocean
It had been an act of arbitration, the Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494, by the Spanish Borgia Pope, Alexander VI, that divided the Atlantic Ocean, newly explored by Columbus, between the Catholic states of Spain and Portugal. The dividing line was the meridian 370 leagues west of the Cape Verde islands.
Everything to the west came under the sphere of Spain, and everything
