OTHER COLONIES AND SETTLEMENTS IN NORTH AMERICA.

These too went on very much at their own will, though not quite unnoticed.

_Virginia_, dating from 1608, and _Maryland_, dating from 1634, continued to be the favourite colonies for Royalist settlers, Anglican or Roman Catholic; but there had been recent additions of English Puritans, and of transported Scottish prisoners of war, to the population of Virginia, and the connexions with the mother-country had remained unbroken.

There were commercial regulations about both Colonies by the English Council, and grants of passes to them.

Canada and the other regions about the St.Lawrence, the possession of which had been contested by the English and the French in the reign of Charles I, had lapsed long ago into the hands of the French; but Major Sedgwick had wrested back for Cromwell, in 1654, the peninsula then called _Acadie_, but now _Nova Scotia_, being part of the territory that had been granted under that name by Charles to his Scottish Secretary, the Earl of Stirling, and had been colonised by Scots, to some extent, from 1625 onwards.