I have read in God's Traitors:Terror in Faith in Elizabethan England by Jessie Childs, that in 1582 a colony for English Catholics was proposed. Sir William Catesby (the father of Robert Catesby, one of the gunpowder plotters) was a backer. 'In return for putting up a hundred pounds and ten men for the first voyage (forty for the next), associates like Catesby would benefit from the lordship of ten thousand acres of virgin turf and election to the chief offices of government. They would set up a legal system as near as they can to that in England and extend special privileges to encourage women to go on the voyage.'
Childs writes that the scheme 'had some momentum in the summer of 1582. The Spanish killed it.' Bernardino de Mendoza, the Spanish Ambassador in London, conveyed the threat to the would-be settlers via their priests, that 'they would immediately have their throats cut as happened to the French.' [1]
But if the proposed colony had been established, could it have succeeded? I assume it was on the eastern seaboard of what is now the United States. Also Childs claims that if the Catesbys had settled in the colony, there would have been no Gunpowder Plot in 1605. Is that true?
[1] Quotations taken from God's Traitors.