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Introduction: Popery and Politics in the British Atlantic World

ON 4 JUNE 1702, a crowd of worshippers gathered in Boston to pay homage to their departed monarch. William III had died the previous March, and as the Reverend Benjamin Wadsworth noted, seldom had there been a more heroic leader. William had been “A Good King,” Wadsworth preached, because he “Imploy[ed] his Power and Authority for the good of his People.” The king’s greatest moment had been the manner in which he had come to the throne fourteen years earlier. At that time, England and its dominions were in “languishing circumstances,” ruled by a Catholic monarch, James II, whose policies alienated many of his subjects. They were “quite depriv’d of Liberty and Property,” Wadsworth remembered, “having their Religion, Laws, and Lives in utmost hazard; sinking under Arbitrary Power and Tyranny; almost overwhelm’d with Popery and Slavery.” William, then the Prince of Orange, bravely “came over the sea to help them,” engineering the coup that became known as the Glorious Revolution and establishing the Protestant faith and limited monarchy in Great Britain for good.¹

In its time, Wadsworth’s paean to William was an utterly uncontroversial statement—one probably recreated by dozens of ministers around the king’s dominions. In this case, however, an ordinary event gave testimony to great political changes that had occurred on the far reaches of the empire. In the years before William’s accession, colonial Americans had reputations as refractory subjects. None were worse than New Englanders, and in that region, Congregational ministers had particular reputations for disloyalty. The first royal governor in the region, Edward Cranfield of New Hampshire, believed there would be no peace in the colonies until the king “remove[d] all such their Preachers who oppose & indeavour to disturb the peace of this Government.” However bad the ministers were, they were only a step removed from colonial subjects as a collective group, who engaged in open rebellion with an alarming frequency during the late 1600s. The problem was that rulers and subjects often had different ideas about how politics and governance should work, about how the empire should be constituted. These rifts combined self-interest and ideology, with religion lying just below the surface. People like Cranfield believed that the king had wide latitude to decide how he ruled his foreign plantations, and that subjects had the responsibility to obey him—a duty they cast in religious terms. Colonial subjects, on the other hand, had become used to some degree of autonomy. Some of them, especially Reformed Protestants like Wadsworth, believed that people had no duty to obey an ungodly or tyrannical ruler. The general disobedience of Americans led many imperial administrators to believe that only a show of brute force could make the empire work.²

Figure 1. The British Atlantic world in the late seventeenth century.

Figure 2. The West Indies in the late seventeenth century.

After 1689, however, a new political culture developed in the American plantations. While they never lost their rebellious streak, colonial Americans came together, in the words of one New Yorker, as “true protestants subjects” of the English monarch. The reconstituted empire combined the centralization favored by royal agents like Cranfield with the militant Protestantism espoused by Wadsworth. This new kind of politics worked because ordinary people believed in it, and they did so, overwhelmingly, out of fear. From the 1670s through the beginning of the eighteenth century, colonial Americans lived in almost constant anxiety: of attacks by French and Indian enemies; of tyrannical exactions from their rulers; of subversion from within by dissident religious groups or by African slaves. In many cases, colonists described these threats using the language of conspiracies common in early modern Europe, especially the Protestant rhetoric of Catholic plots. Indeed, the language of antipopery provided a constant backdrop for political intrigue around the colonies. This fear had the potential to tear the empire apart, to cause rebellions against authority and subvert royal government. In some circumstances, however, fear could bring the empire together, as long as royal officials learned how to harness it. This book tells the story of how that happened, of how popular fear allowed the English, and after the Act of Union of 1707 the British, to build an empire.³

The story of the making of empire must necessarily be both intensely local and transatlantic in scope. Imperial leaders had to deal with dozens of local contexts: colonial societies that had developed, in some cases over decades, in relative isolation both from each other and from the metropole. What worked politically in a Puritan outpost like New Hampshire necessarily failed in a plantation society like Barbados. At the same time, colonial subjects of the crown, no matter where they lived, shared certain assumptions about politics. They can be boiled down into four basic rules. First, Anglo-Americans believed in the sovereignty of the king, that he enjoyed theoretical power in the plantations. Second, and somewhat contradictorily, they believed that local people, and the institutions of local governance, should have broad latitude in actually running things. Third, the vast majority felt that governments at whatever level should be Protestant, and defend subjects’ “Protestant liberties.” Finally, rulers had the obligation to keep people safe, to defeat whatever enemies threatened from within or without. These four rules, needless to say, contradicted each other in numerous respects. What was the line, for instance, between royal sovereignty and local autonomy? And what to do if a king, like the Catholic James II, seemed likely to subvert Protestantism? Finally, how much should people sacrifice the first three principles in the name of the fourth, a desire for security? English people struggled for most of the seventeenth century to answer these questions, and colonial subjects had their own answers.

The crisis that eventually produced this imperial consensus emerged from a particular moment in English and British politics. Inhabitants of the colonies, in many cases, came from England or Europe themselves; their political understanding depended on both the peculiar heritage of England and Britain, and a constant communication of ideas from one side of the Atlantic to the other. Of course, colonial subjects lived hundreds of miles from the center, and they never simply replicated English political culture. Nonetheless, the imperial transformation emerged from the complicated political and religious divisions of Restoration England and its British and European neighbors. During the late 1600s, England experienced a “crisis of popery and arbitrary government,” an upsurge in fear that divided the nation into two rival parties, created new religious animosities, and eventually pushed England toward a new role in European power politics. Only by beginning in England can we understand how and why the empire changed.⁴

• • •

In 1678 rumors of a terrible plot surfaced in the city of London. According to a former Jesuit novice named Titus Oates, foreign and domestic papists were on the verge of carrying out a grand design to reduce the kingdom to “popery and tyranny.” The undertaking would begin with the murder of King Charles II, which would pave the way for the burning of the city and the forcible conversion of the nation’s Protestants, aided if necessary by French and Irish armies. The plot turned out to be a fiction, but it struck a nerve with English Protestants nervous that global Catholicism, led by the French king Louis XIV, was newly resurgent. The result was a political crisis that paralyzed the government, leading to a series of show trials and the hanging of nineteen Roman Catholics for alleged complicity in the plot. But even after the immediate crisis ended, the ramifications of the popish plot lived on. Not only in London but all around Protestant Europe, people remained fearful that Catholic enemies threatened them at every turn.⁵

Fear of Catholicism, of course, was not a new phenomenon in late seventeenth-century England. To one degree or another, every Protestant defined his or her faith against the Roman Catholic Church, and England had a particularly dramatic history of confrontation between Catholics and Protestants, from “Bloody” Mary’s persecutions of Protestants during the 1550s through Elizabeth I’s feuds with Spain during the late 1500s and the infamous “gunpowder plot” of 1605 in which Catholic radicals attempted to blow up Parliament and assassinate England’s political elite. But if antipopery was ubiquitous among early modern Protestants, it was historically contingent, dictated by local conditions and a changing global context. In addition, antipopery rarely functioned as a rallying cry for English Protestants, bringing them together against a common popish enemy. On the contrary, it often was a language of division: a rhetoric some Protestants used against others within the fold whom they viewed as insufficiently godly. The best example of this came during the 1630s and 1640s, when Puritans directed anti-Catholic rhetoric against King Charles I, claiming that his attempts to reintroduce ceremonies into the Church of England marked him as a closet papist. After parliamentarians executed Charles I in 1649, moreover, the king’s defenders turned this anti-Catholicism right back at the Puritans, claiming that by killing a rightful Protestant monarch the Puritans imitated the “king-killing doctrine” of the Jesuits. Thus English anti-Catholicism was not a coherent ideology, but a rhetoric that could be applied to any number of political situations.⁶

Despite its diversity, though, English antipopery usually rested on a number of beliefs. It began with a view of history as a constant struggle between good, exemplified in the true church of Christ, and evil, represented by the church’s enemies. These enemies, the forces of Antichrist, designed to replace Christ at the head of the church and thus monopolize wealth and power in their own hands. From the mid-1500s onward, most Protestant theologians confidently identified the pope as Antichrist, and they found plenty of evidence in scripture, from the Old Testament prophecies to the Revelation of St. John, that seemed to foreshadow the struggles between good and evil that were playing out in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In these ministers’ minds, “popery” was not a religion at all; it was an anti-religion, and in the typical words of one Cambridge theologian, papists were “Pseudochristians, or rather the Synagogue of Antichrist, who under pretence of professing Christ do most wickedly oppose him, by nulling his Laws, and barbarously murthering his true and faithfull Subjects.” As a result, Protestants could identify the characteristics of true religion by examining popery—its binary opposition—and doing the exact opposite. Thus the impulse to view the difference between popery and Protestantism in terms of oppositions: light and darkness, liberty and slavery, reason and superstition.⁷

Aside from the identification of the pope as Antichrist, most English Protestants agreed that the papists’ program was political in nature. Unlike godly people, who focused their energies on the world to come, papists obsessed over worldly goals: the acquisition of money and power. Writing in particular about the Jesuits, one Englishman observed that “Riches, Dominion, Pomp and Glory, are the Butts they shoot at; and if ever they appear Heavenly, by tampering with Affairs of State, they mix Heaven and Earth together, to bring all into Confusion.” Their most storied tactic was to subvert and undermine Protestant princes, either by infiltrating royal councils, by encouraging subjects to rebel, or in extreme cases by assassinating the monarch—as in the case of the French king Henri IV, murdered by a Catholic zealot in 1610 partly as punishment for issuing the Edict of Nantes, a law that guaranteed limited rights to French Protestants. With governments in their hands, papists would be free to beggar, harass, and persecute the people—and the result was almost always poverty and hardship, as was proven by the relative prosperity of Protestant countries in comparison to their Catholic neighbors.⁸

Finally, English antipopery rested on the belief that Catholics were unnaturally violent and cruel. The most famous English works of antipopish propaganda, beginning with John Foxe’s sixteenth-century landmark Acts and Monuments, known to most readers as the Book of Martyrs, chronicled popish violence in the most graphic detail. The carnage took on two forms. First, there was the institutionalized cruelty of the Catholic Church, its tribunals like the Spanish and Roman Inquisitions, and popish monarchs like England’s Mary I, who came to power in 1553 and attempted to turn back England’s Reformation. The queen presided over the burning of dozens of Protestant martyrs at Smithfield, a time when “England was become such a Theatre of Fire and Faggot, as if Rome had design’d to have chang’d her imaginary, into a real Purgatory over all this Land.” The second form of popish violence implicated ordinary people who, usually at the encouragement of scheming priests, set out to massacre Protestants, as in Paris on St. Bartholomew’s Day in 1572, when “every Man seem’d a Fury; and as if they had bin transformed into Wolves and Tigres, out did the cruelty of Beasts.” The most frightening of all these massacres and persecutions, however, was the Irish Rebellion of 1641, in which Irish Catholics—inspired, it was said, by priests who claimed it was not a sin to spill Protestant blood—rose up against their neighbors, depopulating much of the country and killing thousands. Protestant propagandists exaggerated both the numbers and the nature of casualties, turning the Rebellion into one of the signal acts in the annals of popish cruelty—and one acted by near neighbors against English and Scottish people.⁹

Figure 3. This 1681 broadside provided graphic illustrations of what some English Protestants feared would come to pass under a Catholic king, including the burning of London, destruction of churches, and cruel abuse and execution of Protestant men, women, and children. A Scheme of Popish Cruelties (London, 1681).

The anti-Catholic panic of 1678 drew from these traditions, but its key inspiration came from a tense geopolitical situation. The key factor was the rise of Catholic France as a major European and global power. In 1672 the Sun King’s armies overran the Netherlands, long the center of international Protestantism, and threatened to expand his influence in Protestant Germany as well. In addition to his foreign adventures, Louis relentlessly persecuted his own nation’s Protestant minority, giving an indication of how he would treat the inhabitants of conquered Protestant territories. “His Designs are so vast,” wrote one English critic, “that in some short time all Europe will not be Elbow-room for his Ambition.” The only way to bring him to heel, in the estimation of many English and Dutch Protestants, was a general alliance of all the Reformed people of Europe, who might be able to use their combined force to thwart his designs.¹⁰

While Louis XIV ran roughshod over the liberties of Europe, England’s king Charles II proved reluctant to do his part for the Protestant cause. Indeed, the “merry monarch” seemed at times to be moving England closer to the French orbit, imitating Louis XIV’s methods of governing and joining the French in a war against the Netherlands that was wildly unpopular in England. (In fact, Charles II signed a secret treaty with the French at Dover in 1670, so many of his subjects’ fears were justified.) Even more ominously, the king’s brother and heir to the throne, James, duke of York, revealed in 1674 that he had converted to Catholicism, meaning that—barring the birth of a male heir or a change in succession—the next king of England, Scotland, and Ireland would be a papist. All these circumstances lay behind the popish plot, when it appeared that the papists intended to bring their designs to fruition. And the people “who ought to stand by us in the day of Battel”—public servants—“have been the Persons in the World most likely to betray us, and lead us like Sheep to the Slaughter.”¹¹

The revelations of the plot, aided by the lapse of the licensing act that had allowed government ministers to police printing in the kingdom, resulted in an enormous outpouring of anti-Catholic propaganda. These tracts, books, and newspapers detailed the imminent popish threat to the English church and state, the Protestant religion in the world, and, indeed, the lives, liberties, and property of godly people everywhere. One of the most alarming publications, an anonymous tract entitled An Appeal from the Country to the City, detailed exactly what would happen if Catholics succeeded in their designs. First, the papists would set London on fire: “the whole Town in a flame, occasioned this second time, by the same Popish malice which set it on fire before.” Then, a military invasion: “Troops of Papists, ravishing your wives and your Daughters, dashing your little Childrens brains out against the walls, plundering your houses, and cutting your own throats, by the name of Heretick Dogs.” For the survivors, then, torture and fire: “your Father, or your Mother, or some of your nearest and dearest Relations, tyed to a Stake in the midst of flames, when with hands and eyes lifted up to Heaven, they scream and cry out to God for whose Cause they die; which was a frequent spectacle the last time Popery reign’d amongst us.” And if all this was not bad enough—your wives and daughters raped, your house in ruins, your parents burned at the stake, your own throat cut—business would also suffer: “Your Trading’s bad, and in a manner lost already, but then the only commodity will be Fire and Sword; the only object women running with their hair about their ears, Men cover’d with blood, Children sprawling under Horses feet, and only the walls of Houses left standing.”¹²

The only proper response to this danger, claimed the author and likeminded English people, was to change the line of succession to prevent the duke of York from becoming king. It was the interest, and indeed the duty of all good Protestants to ensure that a papist did not come to the throne; the Appeal’s author even suggested an alternative, Charles II’s illegitimate son James, duke of Monmouth. “If the Papists make such plottings and designes to subvert our religion under a protestant prince,” one advocate of exclusion noted, “how much more will they designe against us under a popish successour?” Contemporary circumstances in France seemed to provide the answer. In the early 1680s Louis was determined to sweep away the “Edicts and Arrests, Priviledges and Immunities, Liberties and Laws” that protected Protestant worship, and Huguenot refugees began an exodus to England where they advertised the Sun King’s cruelty. As one leading radical Protestant wrote, “the severities exercised against those of the Reformed Religion in that Kingdom, are but a Copy of what we in these Nations are to look for, in case we should come under a Popish Prince.”¹³

This so-called “exclusion crisis” marked the practical beginning of party politics in England. Advocates of the exclusion of the duke of York from the throne soon became known as the Whigs, and their program combined a fanatical and paranoid antipopery, a general tolerance for Protestant dissent, and a fierce advocacy of the independence of Parliament and local magistrates—the “country interest”—from the king and his royal court. As one Scottish Presbyterian noted around the same time, it was a goal of popish, arbitrary governments to bring about “a general or gradual unhinging of Legal Constitutions, made for security of our Religion and Liberty.” As a result, Whigs held fast to those “English liberties” that served as the greatest bulwarks to prevent a monarch or his “evil counselors” from pushing the kingdom toward “popery and slavery.”¹⁴

While the Whig cause gained many adherents in the panic surrounding the popish plot, it was far from a unanimous movement among English men and women. Indeed, the exclusion campaign inspired the creation of a countermovement—which developed into the Tory party—that defended the king’s prerogative in the face of rebellious subjects. The Tories were just as conspiratorial as their Whig counterparts, and also drew from the anti-Catholic tradition, but their emphases differed from those of the Whigs. Rather than look to France or Ireland, the Tories found their most potent example north of the border in Scotland, where radical Presbyterians, known as Covenanters, waged a sometimes violent struggle against the king’s efforts to promote what they labeled “prelacy and tyranny”—the rule of the church by bishops and kings rather than Presbyterian synods. Some Covenanters were quite willing to kill and die to make sure the Scottish kirk remained sufficiently reformed. The most dramatic episode in the struggle occurred in 1679, when a gang of Covenanters murdered one of their leading opponents, Archbishop James Sharp of St. Andrews, and then faced off against the king’s forces at Bothwell Bridge. The episode initiated what Presbyterians later labeled the “killing times,” in which royal forces—led by the duke of York, who resided in Edinburgh during the early 1680s—rooted out the remnants of the Covenanting movement. Tory propaganda, whether targeting the Covenanters, English nonconformists, or the Dutch, drew from traditions of anti-Calvinism, forged during the years when Charles I had faced off against Puritans and stoked by memories of Britain’s bloody civil wars.¹⁵

The Tories used the Covenanters to demonstrate the dangers of radical Protestantism and the need for royal authority. These radicals were the real plotters, Tories argued, and indeed their methods suggested affinities and probably even connections with the Jesuits. “Their Principles are incompatible with Government,” asserted one Tory writer, “and the common Security that every man ou[gh]t to have in Human Societies.” The chief goal of the Jesuits, after all, was to kill Protestant monarchs, and this is exactly what radical Protestants aimed to do; in 1683 royal officials uncovered the Rye House Conspiracy, a plot by leading English Whigs, aided by their counterparts in Scotland, to kill both Charles II and the duke of York, paving the way for the duke of Monmouth or, even worse, a “republic” in the fashion of the old Puritan revolutionary Oliver Cromwell. Even those Whigs who did not advocate regicide encouraged the enemy by sowing divisions in both church and state. In the view of the Tories, therefore, the only way to defeat the papists and preserve England was to strengthen the royal prerogative and the Church of England, and to persecute dissent and eschew toleration of minority sects. Toleration would only “reduce Religion in England, and in other Heretical Kingdoms into so many Atoms, that nothing may unite them in a solid Body to oppose [Catholic] designs.”¹⁶

In the early 1680s the king and his Tory allies conducted a vicious campaign against their Whig opponents and dissenters from the Church of England. In particular, they targeted dissenting preachers and the radical printers and booksellers who distributed Whig propaganda. One early example was the Baptist bookseller Benjamin Harris, who allegedly printed and sold The Appeal from the Country to the City. Authorities charged Harris with selling a libelous book. At his trial the notorious judge Sir William Scroggs called the Appeal “as base a piece as ever was contrived in hell, either by papists, or the blackest rebel that ever was.” People like Harris, who “rail against the church and the government,” revealed themselves to be “no Protestants.” The jury found the bookseller guilty and Scroggs sentenced Harris to the pillory and fined him £500, an enormous sum that practically amounted to a prison sentence. Throughout the 1680s Whigs and dissenters faced threats to their lives and livelihoods. Mobs of ruffians ranged London, closing dissenting meeting-houses and imprisoning ministers, while the courts enforced the penal laws against dissent with exact precision. The campaign was largely successful: by 1685, when Charles II died, the exclusion campaign had failed, and most English subjects both supported the new king and believed that radical dissenters posed the greatest threat to the kingdom. The minority who continued to espouse the radical Whig cause found itself embattled and driven underground; many radicals chose exile, removing to the Netherlands or, like Harris himself, to the American colonies, where he later became a leading advocate for the Williamite Revolution.¹⁷

The years after the duke of York’s accession to the throne as James II were dark ones for the Protestant interest in Britain and abroad. While most subjects supported the Catholic monarch, a minority decided on violent resistance. In the spring of 1685 James, duke of Monmouth, then living in Dutch exile, attempted an invasion of England’s West Country, while the duke of Argyll mounted a similar expedition in the Scottish Highlands. The goal, as expressed by one of Argyll’s supporters, was the “delivery of our native land from being again drowned in popish idolatry and slavery,” and the rebels believed that “the standing or falling of the Protestant interest in Europe depended in a great measure upon the event of this undertaking in Britain.” Both campaigns failed miserably, the two rebel leaders met their respective ends on scaffolds in London and Edinburgh, and royal officials executed or transported hundreds of rebels. Then a few months later matters became even worse when Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes, that had guaranteed limited rights to France’s Protestant minority, and forced his Protestant subjects to convert to Catholicism. By the dawn of 1686 the Reformed interest languished; about the only comfort came from the Huguenot theologian Pierre Jurieu, who argued that the wave of persecution suggested that Christ’s return was imminent. If earthly leaders could not protect the godly, then the savior himself was the only hope.¹⁸

Thus in the mid-1680s James II’s three kingdoms remained in ferment, with two groups of paranoid partisans facing off in what each saw as a critical struggle for the future of Britain and Protestantism. The battle was global in nature, stretching to the Netherlands and France, the free cities of Germany, the valleys of the Piedmont, and, indeed, the remote plantations of North America and the West Indies. The struggles between Whigs and Tories that convulsed England had the potential to have a great impact in the colonies, for a number of reasons. First, these overseas extensions of England had long provided refuge for those parts of the English nation most susceptible to Whig ideology. Second, the Stuart kings used the colonies as a kind of political laboratory during the Restoration, trying out political reforms that were not yet possible in England. Finally, the colonies were surrounded by French papists and their Native American converts and allies, thus making the danger of popery look less like an abstraction and more like a clear and present danger.

• • •

The colonies, like the three kingdoms, had a particular anti-Catholic heritage. The first English settlements functioned as challenges to Spanish pretensions in the continent, and each colony defined itself to one extent or another as a bastion of true religion amid popish and pagan darkness. The Puritan founders of Massachusetts Bay went the farthest in rhetorical terms, defining themselves not only against the Spanish but also as a corrective to “the Baits of Popery yet left in the Church [of England],” but they were not alone. The island of Jamaica, for instance, was a former Spanish colony captured during Oliver Cromwell’s Western Design during the 1650s—a vast, millennial plan to capture the remnants of the world’s great Catholic empire. Even after the Restoration of Charles II, when the Stuart monarchs usually viewed the Netherlands as a more potent rival than Spain, South Carolina was intended in part as a haven for persecuted Protestants right under the nose of Spanish Florida. In addition, the colonies abounded with non-English Protestants who had their own anti-Catholic histories: most notably the Dutch in New York, but also a smattering of Germans and French Huguenots.¹⁹

The Protestant settlement of North America began with a shocking incident that reverberated for decades. During the sixteenth century Spain and Portugal had monopolized the Americas, and had combined this expansionist spirit with a militant Catholicism. As a result, European Protestants had particular reasons to challenge Iberian pretensions in America, and France’s small but powerful Huguenot minority took the lead during the mid-sixteenth century. In the 1560s, after the failure of a colonial project in Brazil, the French founded a colony called La Caroline, located on the St. John’s River in present-day Florida. Hearing about the colony, Spain’s king sent an expedition under Pedro Menéndez de Aviles to deal with the interlopers. Landing on the feast day of Saint Augustine, Menéndez made quick work of the people he called “luteranos,” claiming the country for both Spain and the Catholic Church. In doing so, the founder of Florida killed hundreds of Protestants, “because they were Lutherans and enemies of our Holy Catholic faith.”²⁰

The destruction of La Caroline proved a galvanizing event for Protestants of several different nationalities. Several witnesses of the carnage, including La Caroline’s leader René Goulaine de Laudonnière, escaped to Europe where they published tracts that emphasized Spanish cruelty. During the rest of the sixteenth century both English and Dutch privateers worked to undermine the Spanish in the Caribbean and along the North American coast—a strategic area because the Spanish “treasure fleet” passed up the eastern seaboard in its annual voyage from Havana to Seville. Early English endeavors in the Americas were steeped in this global Protestant context. For instance, when Sir Francis Drake sacked St. Augustine in 1584, Drake’s fleet learned they had captured the town when a French prisoner rowed out to the ship playing “the tune of the Prince of Orange his song” on a fife. Even thousands of miles across the ocean, the standard of Europe’s Protestant hero, the Dutch prince whose challenge to Spanish rule in the Low Countries ended with his assassination that very year, bound coreligionists of different nationalities together against a common Catholic enemy.²¹

The first permanent English and Dutch settlements in the Americas, despite their obvious differences, all shared this common Protestant heritage. Advocates of the English colonial project during the Elizabethan era, like Richard Hakluyt and Humphrey Gilbert, promoted colonization as a way to “annoy the king of Spain.” According to Hakluyt, the English could establish a different kind of colonial empire, one that instead of conquering and killing Indians, saved their souls and offered them the freedom of the gospel. The Spanish empire, Hakluyt claimed, pretended to be for the benefit of Christ, but that was just pretense; like the Roman Church, the Spanish aimed at “filthy lucre,” and they used a combination of trickery and abject cruelty to keep the people of the Americas in “greate tyrannie.” Following the Spanish Dominican friar Bartolomé de Las Casas, whose denunciations of the Spanish colonial project helped to create the “black legend” of Spanish cruelty, Hakluyt focused on cruelty toward the Indians. The Spaniards “teare them in peces,” Hakluyt wrote, “kill them, martir them, afflicte them, tormente them and destroye them by straunge sortes of cruelties.” The hypothetical Reformed empire, on the other hand, would possess the highest of motives. Its chief aim would be “the gayninge of the soules of millions of those wretched people, the reducinge of them from darkness to lighte, from falshoodde to truthe, from dombe Idolls to the lyvinge god, from the depe pitt of hell to the highest heavens.” Moreover, Protestants could expect to be greeted as liberators by the grateful natives; after all, the two peoples were partners in suffering, as Spanish cruelties in America perfectly matched those used by Catholics during the Marian persecutions in England and the Dutch Revolt. The “western discoverie” would help to spread the “gospele of Christe.” If it also served to enrich the Queen of England and her subjects, and provide employment for the poor, that was all the better.²²

It was not until the seventeenth century that colonial founders actually made good on this inflated rhetoric. Sir Walter Raleigh’s first attempts to found a colony in Virginia were famous failures, and only after years of struggle did Jamestown become a viable settlement. While most historians have stressed the worldly aspects of early Virginia, the colony’s founders intended the colony in part as a challenge to Spanish, popish pretensions. While England and Spain were at peace during the reign of James I, official justifications of the early settlement of North America abounded in apocalyptic, anti-Catholic language, which was newly resurgent after the Gunpowder Plot by Catholics to kill the king and blow up Parliament in 1605. As one historian has noted, a “militant internationalist Protestant ideology” served to justify colonial expansion in Virginia as well as New England and the Caribbean. According to one minister preaching to a group of Virginia Company investors in 1610, for instance, the purpose of the colony was not “present profit,” which was likely to be scant anyway, but “the destruction of the devils kingdom, and the propagation of the gospel.”²³

From this perspective, the militant Protestantism of the founders of New England was merely a continuation of earlier endeavors. True to form, the Puritans who settled the region justified their mission partly as a challenge to Spain. Some of their coreligionists aimed closer to the heart of the Spanish enterprise, establishing a plantation colony on Providence Island in the western Caribbean. While the Puritans continued the anti-Catholic colonization efforts of their Huguenot, Virginian, and Dutch forebears, however, the English state abandoned the mission, adopting a new style of Protestant worship under Archbishop William Laud that took a much softer line against the Roman church. As a result, from the 1630s through the execution of Charles I in 1649, the most militant anti-Catholics, in England as well as the colonies, were often dissidents, using the language of antipopery against a church and king that seemed insufficiently Protestant. Indeed, Charles I even granted one of his most prominent Catholic subjects, George Calvert, Lord Baltimore, the right to colonize the northern part of Chesapeake Bay, which became the colony of Maryland.²⁴

While the English state shied away from directly confronting Catholics in the New World, the Dutch Republic began to assemble a colonial empire that also had strong religious connotations. From the beginning of their own struggle for independence from the Spanish Habsburgs, the Dutch had viewed the inhabitants of the Americas as fellow victims of Spanish tyranny. The eventual formation of the Dutch West India Company (WIC)—an American counterpart to the powerful Dutch East India Company or VOC—reflected a careful amalgamation of commercial and religious goals. Willem Usselincx, one of the company’s early champions, hoped that it would function to liberate the Western Hemisphere from Spanish Catholic tyranny by promoting the Reformed religion, free trade, and the liberation of the natives. While the eventual Dutch colonies in the Caribbean and New Netherland did not live up to these high ideals, they did define themselves as Protestant havens. Some of the first settlers of New Netherland were French-speaking Protestant refugees from Wallonia, and throughout the seventeenth century many settlers in the colony called for a faith more pure and militant than that promoted by the States General and the WIC.²⁵

The victory of the Parliamentary side in England’s Civil Wars saw the temporary return of England to the vanguard of international Protestantism. One of Oliver Cromwell’s boldest endeavors, the Western Design, aimed to conquer the Spanish empire. It represented the culmination of a hundred years of Protestant militancy in the Americas, beginning after the slaughter in Florida and continuing through the Elizabethan privateers, Dutch merchant companies, and Puritan colonization efforts in both New England and the Caribbean. As one New Englander later reported, Cromwell believed that the conquest of Spanish America “would be to dry up Euphrates”—a reference to apocalyptic prophecies—and that the Lord Protector would not stop “till He came to the Gates of Rome.” Despite the successful conquest of Jamaica, the design ultimately failed. Even in New England Puritans showed little enthusiasm for leaving their homes and relocating to Jamaica. Cromwell’s Western Design, much like his attempt to remake England into a Commonwealth, seemed to indicate the limits of radical Protestantism as a governing philosophy on either a national or an imperial level.²⁶

By the time Charles II regained the throne in the Restoration of 1660, all the parts of his nascent empire shared a deep anti-Catholic heritage. Nonetheless, only in Maryland, where a Catholic proprietor ruled over an overwhelmingly Protestant colony, did antipopery routinely intersect with everyday politics. In the 1670s, however, this situation began to change. A number of factors, reflecting both a changing global dynamic and shifts in power relationships on the North American continent, combined to make antipopery a powerful political tool on the imperial peripheries.

On one hand, English subjects in the colonies simply reacted to the same fears that circulated in Great Britain and Europe. Within months of Titus Oates’s revelations of popish plotting in 1678, ministers in New England knew about the conspiracy. The Reverend Increase Mather—probably the most connected member of Boston’s clerical elite—first learned of the “deep & generall design amongst the papists to involve us in confusion & blood” from his brother Nathaniel, a dissenting minister in Dublin, in December 1678. Within months he received more details from English correspondents, along with numerous other reports of the languishing of the global Protestant interest. Mather and others like him efficiently passed the news on to their captive audiences on Sundays, and they received help from magistrates as well. During the late 1670s and early 1680s provincial and town officials around New England ordered frequent public fasts to pray for the “darke clouds … impending over the English nation” and the “deep consultations of the Antichristian party, who have been complotting the subversion of the true Christian Protestant Religion … in England, Scotland, & Ireland.” In short, there could hardly be a person in the region unaware that something dramatic was occurring on the other side of the ocean.²⁷

Beyond the news passed on in letters, colonial readers also consumed an array of books and printed matter from England. Once again, Increase Mather provides a vivid example of the circulation of books, since he noted his reading habits in his diary. In October 1682, for example, he read the trial records of Oliver Plunkett and Fitzharris, two of the popish plotters, along with the classic polemic No Protestant Plot. The following year he turned to “2d part of growth of popery,” a reference to another leading Whig tract. Increase’s son Cotton, meanwhile, provided some clues as to how such books traveled to the colonies. In a 1683 letter, the young minister requested that an English contact send him Henry Care’s Weekly Pacquet of Advice from Rome, along with other Whig literature. Even in remote Henrico County, Virginia, the planter William Byrd knew enough of the volatile situation in Europe that he requested an associate to send him a copy of Pierre Jurieu’s Accomplishment of the Scripture Prophecies, a book arguing that Europe’s religious turmoil presaged an imminent Apocalypse. All these books served to underscore the same conclusion: that the Protestant world was facing a crisis unlike any other.²⁸

Along with news and books came refugees—English dissenters, Scottish Covenanters, and French Huguenots forced out of Europe by persecuting kings and bishops. Some of these newcomers were simple fugitives from justice, like William Kelso, a Scottish surgeon who arrived in Boston on the Anne and Hester in the summer of 1680. Kelso had lent his services to the Covenanting army around the time of the Battle of Bothwell Bridge, and his flight took him around the British world—to Belfast, Dublin, London, and finally to New England, where he was received as a hero once magistrates there identified him as “a Scotch gentleman & Covenanter.” They dutifully ignored a royal order to apprehend the fugitive. Many other similar migrants ended up in American ports during the 1680s—enough to populate new colonies like Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and South Carolina. Moreover, these newcomers brought harrowing stories of their ill treatment at the hands of their enemies in Europe, enemies that seemed to have designs on America as well.²⁹

Of all the newcomers, perhaps the most important were the boatloads of French Protestants who settled in English colonies from St. Christopher to Massachusetts. The migration started early, in the 1670s, when significant numbers of Huguenots began seeking refuge in England, and a smaller number sought assistance from Parliament to move to places like South Carolina, which could serve as a “retreat for an infinity of people oppressed for their conscience in French colonies in the Antilles as well as Hispaniola and in Canada where they groan under the Cross.” The proprietors of that young colony embraced this search for “forreigne Protestants” as something that would both bring revenue and security and solve a demographic problem in Europe, where refugees and undesirable radicals were filling up communities and taxing resources. Part of the plan involved settling a number of Covenanters in a village south of Charles Town, and the proprietors also proposed bringing in Protestants from the German Palatinate.³⁰

The year 1686 marked the high point in this migration, as the combined suppression of Monmouth and Argyll’s rebellions and the revocation of the Edict of Nantes increased the flow of dissenters of many nationalities. The Whig bookseller John Dunton, who came to New England to recover his debts that year, reported that Boston was the “common refuge” for “Monmouth’s forlorn Fugitives.” Farther south in the West Indies, meanwhile, nearly a thousand even more forlorn fugitives worked as indentured servants on plantations, sentenced to ten years of labor for their advocacy of Monmouth’s cause. The effect of all these arrivals was to make almost everyone aware of the upsurge in persecution back home, and to assign the colonies a specific place in the Protestant world. If there was a place where godly people could continue to worship God, perhaps it was in these remote plantations, where the state did not possess as much coercive power.³¹

The rise in antipopery was therefore partly a result of the integration of the colonies into European confessional politics. But at the same time local circumstances in America served to reinforce these fears and make colonial subjects even more nervous. During the mid-1670s relations between Europeans and Native Americans took a particularly violent turn. First, in 1675, New England Wampanoags under the leadership of King Philip rose up against the English in Plymouth and Massachusetts, leading to a bloody war that threatened the annihilation of the New England colonies and eventually concluded in the removal of much of the region’s native population. The following year, to the south in Virginia, conflicts between Indians and English settlers in the Potomac Valley led to an argument over Indian policy that culminated in civil war, as the planter Nathaniel Bacon led a movement that burned Jamestown to the ground and forced the governor to seek refuge on the Eastern Shore. Along with these two regional crises came a third in Barbados, which experienced its first major slave insurrection in 1675.³²

As these events occurred few observers thought to relate them to each other, let alone to the alarms over “popery and arbitrary government” across the Atlantic. As time passed, however, and the rumors traveling through the Protestant world became more extreme, many people began to view these various disturbances as more than coincidences. When new arrivals warned of tyrannical designs in Europe, colonists started to fear that they too would fall to a global Catholic plot. This was the political and religious context of the unprecedented expansion of the empire under the later Stuarts, a design that succeeded in changing the way that crown and colonies related to one another—though not necessarily in the way that imperial officials envisioned.

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The political circumstances in Britain itself combined with the crisis in the colonies to create the possibility of real political change in English America. However, this change was far from straightforward or inevitable. Stuart officials acted first, attempting to reform the empire by fiat in the late 1670s and 1680s, mainly through the revocation of various colonial charters. This program excited enormous opposition that eventually became subsumed in the empire-wide contest between Whigs and Tories after the popish plot. After some setbacks, however, James II managed to construct the Dominion of New England, a monument to enlightened, imperial absolutism that served as the cornerstone for a new empire.

This empire ultimately could not survive the crisis that forced James himself from the throne. The Glorious Revolution in England led to a period of profound fear and chaos in the colonies, and opened the door to a new form of imperialism, as anti-Catholic firebrands attempted to construct a decentralized union of colonies brought together by their common zeal for Protestantism. While these radicals gained control in several colonies, their dreams for remaking America collapsed in a sea of paranoia and fear—which allowed advocates of centralization to reemerge during the 1690s. In the midst of an actual war with France, imperial leaders used the promise of security, couched in the language of centralization and fear of popery, to build a popular movement for empire. By the eighteenth century, as Benjamin Wadsworth’s sermon suggested, Anglo-Americans embraced their identity as subjects of a powerful English monarch.

While this study uses England’s American empire as its canvas, I have not tried to give equal coverage to every part of it. In particular, a disproportionate amount of the action centers on the northeastern settlements from New York to Nova Scotia. I do not intend to argue that these colonies were more important than others, but at the same time the imperial transition did mean a bit more in this region for two reasons. First, imperial planners paid a lot of attention to these colonies, partly because of New England’s reputation for independence, and partly because the duke of York centered his own ambitions on the region. Second, the colonies’ proximity to New France made the fear of “popish plots” more intense and relevant than in some other parts of the empire. Nonetheless, while I pay a lot of attention to New York and New England, my purpose is to fit these peculiar places into a continental and global context. Despite their distinctive characteristics, all the various parts of the empire experienced these decades of change in broadly similar ways.

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This book is based on extensive readings in official records, published tracts, and private correspondence. In the event that a single document has appeared in different forms, I have tried to cite the most easily accessible version. The one exception is for documents from the Colonial Office Papers housed at the National Archives in Kew. While many of these documents have appeared in the Calendar of State Papers, Colonial Series, my citations refer to the originals, since the versions in the CSPC are often incomplete. All dates are in the Old Style, with the year beginning on January 1. I have quoted the sources as they appear, but have modernized spelling and punctuation in some cases.