So continental europeans had neither budget nor reason to develop long range cruising, whereas Britain, out on the very end of the existing trade chain and maintaining a large navy against invasion, had both.
That leaves Spain, Portugal, and Ireland. Spain is well known for having succumbed to the resource-curse from New World metals; Portugal had (due to the papal agreement) to go the other way, and I was under the impression they were very successful doing that until something (what? possibly british pressure?[0]) cut them off[1].
That leaves Ireland. (who may not have been so worried about specifically catholic invasions, but...) I don't know about that case; will poke into why Ireland has never popped up as a naval power!
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portuguese_Empire#British_Ulti...
[1] and of course, using scurvy prevention and accurate longitude determination to go directly to the other end of the traditional trade routes meant that London cut those off as well; by water to London and then to Rotterdam or other ports was in a sense "shorter" than the slow overland trip to the Med from Asia that had been traditional.
Edit: aha, the dutch did the portuguese in: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portuguese_Empire#Iberian_Unio...
(and the dutch/english rivalry is well attested by all the pejoratives left in the language: dutch oven, dutch treat, dutch uncle, etc.)
The use of sailing ships also wasn't a British-only thing; a reason the British Navy could sail unusually far is suggested in the article I linked - an understanding of scurvy prevention which other countries didn't have.