The link between English Protestantism and early modern English imperialism was once self-evident—to modern scholars as to many contemporary authors. The New World figured as a holy land for Calvinists and evangelicals, from Richard Hakluyt to Oliver Cromwell. Colonial schemes from the Providence Island expedition of 1631 to the 1655 Western Design were proclaimed as strikes upon the Roman-Iberian Babylon in its garrisoned treasure house.Footnote 1 Until well into the eighteenth century, overseas conquests were retailed as the providential tokens of an elect nation—an expanding domain that considered itself, in David Armitage's words, to be “Protestant, commercial, maritime and free.”Footnote 2 This ideology formed, it has been suggested, when its champions defined the purpose and politics of the English overseas empire against a host of cultural and ethnic “others.” The emerging dominion, seen in this light, united Catholics, Gaels, indigenous Americans, and African slaves on a spectrum of subjugation reinforced through varying forms of legal and physical coercion.Footnote 3
The notion of English expansion serving to advance the interests of Catholic subjects sits at odds, therefore, with the received scholarly picture. Yet under the later Stuart monarchy, individuals from recusant enclaves in England, Ireland, and Scotland entered into high-ranking positions in the colonial infrastructure, flourishing in New York, Tangier, the Chesapeake, and the Caribbean in a manner unthinkable within the legal and political apparatus in the three kingdoms. For over two decades before the coronation of their coreligionist James II, the openings in the colonies fostered political ambitions among the Stuarts’ Catholic subjects, and habituated them to office-holding experiences that bypassed the penal laws laid down in parliament.
Recent scholarship has drawn attention to the political vitality of Catholicism under the Stuart monarchy, recasting the community as an active agent in disputes over domestic and foreign affairs.Footnote 4 Yet Catholic involvement with the global expansion of the English kingdom has been underplayed. While historians have placed increasing emphasis on the international hinterland behind recusant society, the lens has focused on the older diaspora established in continental Europe, dominated by its network of clerical and educational foundations.Footnote 5 Proper consideration has not been given to the financial and commercial undergirding of recusant life—the means by which penal pressures were alleviated, and religious institutions supported, and the way in which these concerns pushed Catholics beyond familiar European confines. The Catholic presence in the colonies has not gone undetected by Atlantic historians. Louis Cullen and Thomas Truxes have illustrated the agency of Irish merchants in the emergent colonial economy; Jenny Shaw, Kristen Block, and Donald Akenson have situated Gaelic and “Old English” emigres within the complex latticework of cultures and identities emerging in the Caribbean.Footnote 6 A separate tradition in colonial scholarship has highlighted the significance of Maryland as a pocket of Catholic liberty under the Calvert family proprietors.Footnote 7 Nonetheless, the colonial worlds created by English and Irish Catholics have yet to be integrated into the historiography of recusancy within the three kingdoms. Likewise, their role in the reception of empire by domestic audiences is yet to be appraised.
This article examines the connection between English overseas expansion and the development of Catholic political interests under the restored monarchy. I suggest that opportunities for Catholics multiplied after 1660, when the strategic focus of the crown centered not just on the Americas but equally upon the Mediterranean, where religious exiles from the three kingdoms possessed long-standing interests. The centrality of this region to the practices, debates, and ideologies behind the Stuart empire has been accentuated in recent studies by Tristan Stein, Alison Games, and Linda Colley.Footnote 8 Catholic merchants and soldiers were drawn into Stuart service within the Mediterranean environment: members of these communities advanced subsequently across the Atlantic in the pay of Charles II. The crown used the opportunities of territorial expansion to recover the services of subjects otherwise barred from the public realm, binding them back into the polity. In turn, the plantations gave Catholics access to worlds far removed from the dictates of parliamentary penal laws, where authority, as Jack Greene and Lauren Benton have shown, was “negotiated,” where religious opinions were harder to police, and individuals gained scope to interpret the terms of allegiance with some flexibility.Footnote 9 Catholics thrived within this landscape because they were accustomed to operating within an international space, adept at navigating shifting relations between rival states and kingdoms, and entering into complex negotiations of subjecthood.
By the later seventeenth century, the colonies constituted an increasingly important element within the ideological world of English and Irish Catholicism. Involvement in the overseas settlements brought tests of conscience that were debated through transnational Catholic networks, but also offered political opportunities extending beyond the creation of an overseas refuge. Repeatedly, experiments in Catholic governance outside Europe were linked to political interventions made in the cause of recusant liberty at home. Service in the plantations enabled recusants to demonstrate their capability as loyal subjects. Models of government from the colonies entered into the political arguments of pamphlets and manuscripts circulated around the recusant community, and gave material to authors seeking to reframe the terms of civil allegiance within the British Isles. The Stuarts’ project of empire was construed as an enterprise calling for large-scale mobilization and liberty of conscience.
The durability of Catholic power in the infant empire was determined not merely by local conditions, but larger, ideological shifts that influenced the outgrowth of the English realm. After 1660, the martial Protestantism that had legitimized successive colonial expeditions was challenged by the pursuit of new trading relationships with Iberian kingdoms. The multiconfessional character of the plantations emboldened voices in courtly and scholarly circles to question the merits of religious uniformity as a means to bind expanding territories. But these practices were thrown into crisis after 1678, in the political climate created by the Popish Plot and Exclusion Crisis, when the monarchy was destabilized by allegations of a creeping Catholic influence over state affairs. The final sections of the article will show how the Catholic presence in the plantations contributed to the polarization of public debate over English foreign and colonial policy. Studies by Steve Pincus, Abigail Swingen, and Owen Stanwood have linked the turbulence in the Stuart dominions under the later Stuart monarchs to the abrasions over “popery and arbitrary government” originating in England.Footnote 10 Between 1678 and 1681, colonial tensions threatened equally to unbalance the politics of the three kingdoms. Catholic promotions turned specific overseas ventures into subjects of controversy. They also fanned moral and religious anxieties over the very nature of the colonial enterprise, and its compatibility with the Protestant foundations of the Stuart realm.
The Roots of Catholic Colonization
Catholic involvement with the “westward enterprise” stretched back to the beginnings of English colonization, when a group of coreligionists entered into negotiations with Sir Humphrey Gilbert over founding a North American colony on royal patents.Footnote 11 After the passing of the recusancy laws, the colonial opportunity informed a succession of schemes intended simultaneously to provide a religious refuge and to advertise Catholic attachment to the interests of the crown. English and Irish traders and soldiers joined Roger North's Amazon venture of 1619; in 1643, Sir Edmund Plowden charted an expedition on the Delaware River.Footnote 12 With the endorsement of Charles I, the earl of Arundel sank resources into a similarly unsuccessful design for the seizure of Madagascar, and invested more fruitfully in landholdings south of Virginia.Footnote 13 For many Catholic colonists, the route into the New World ran through Ireland. Here, “Old English” landowners habitually pressed the case for Catholic liberty by representing their forebears as the original planters “who at the expence of their Blood, first Conquer'd the Kingdom, brought it under the Subjection of the Crown of England.”Footnote 14 By 1625, the new plantations in Ulster and Munster ushered in a fresh wave of English and Scottish Catholics, in a process that often deviated from official Protestant intentions.Footnote 15 The extent to which Ireland provided a template for American settlement has recently been questioned.Footnote 16 However, settlements within the kingdom provided revenue, manpower, and scope for experiments in land improvement to encourage the extension of Catholic interests farther west.Footnote 17 From an abandoned scheme at Newfoundland in 1627 to the successful foundation of Maryland, George Calvert, Lord Baltimore mined the resources of his Cork plantations to lay down a colony with a mixed English and Irish, Catholic and Protestant population.Footnote 18
By the point of the Restoration, an incipient Catholic colonialism had been established on the foundations of a Maryland gentry elite and a larger Irish laboring force.Footnote 19 As it outlasted the storms of civil war and interregnum, Baltimore's colony provided the secure base for Catholic dynasties to spread out across a wider terrain. Henry Hawley, governor of Barbados under Charles I, had entered the New World as a Maryland settler.Footnote 20 So too had the Virginia landowners Giles and George Brent, Gloucestershire squires pushed across the Atlantic by the pressures of civil war.Footnote 21 By 1686, when George Brent was appointed attorney-general of Virginia, the transnational networks of the family encompassed investment in London, education in France and the Low Countries, and a web of marriages knitting together Catholic landowners in their own province, Maryland, and Bermuda.Footnote 22 The Irish exodus turned toward the West Indies, where Montserrat, Antigua, Nevis, and St. Christopher's provided the highest concentrations of a population that, according to most modern estimates, encompassed 50,000 adults by 1700.Footnote 23 Relations between Irish indwellers and English colonial magnates were colored by mistrust, not least because a substantial proportion of the population had entered the Americas through Cromwellian transportations.Footnote 24 But after 1660, the attraction of Irish labor—free or indentured—increased among projectors running up against political discouragement of further English emigration.Footnote 25 In 1669, Sir George Carteret and Ashley Anthony Cooper appealed to Sir Robert Southwell to send the call of recruitment through his Kinsale estates, as they sought to fill the settlements in Carolina.Footnote 26 Simultaneously, as Jenny Shaw has argued, the transformation of the Caribbean by unfree African labor was changing the profile of other subject populations. As factors, overseers, and increasingly, planters, broad sections of Irish society stood out more clearly as upholders of the social and political order.Footnote 27
Catholic colonization was made feasible by an unresolved tension in the legal architecture of the overseas dominions. Whether ruled through companies and proprietors, or directly under the crown, the new territories frequently developed confessional arrangements that diverged from the statutory framework maintained within the three kingdoms. Baltimore's Maryland provided an emblematic example, with a colony raised on the twin principles of wide religious liberty and absolute proprietorial control. These arrangements were justified, the proprietor argued, because the dominions “were not annexed to the Crown of England,” whose laws passed through parliamentary fiat, but subsisted as private possessions of the monarch.Footnote 28 After the Restoration, this trend advanced with royal acquiescence. While the parliamentary legislation of the 1660s reestablished the principle of religious uniformity, the royal decrees issued for the colonies moved closer to the political model of Maryland. The 1663 charter for Rhode Island and Providence ordered that “no person … shall be any wise molested … for any differences of opinione in matters of religion, as do not actually disturb the civill peace.” Governors in Virginia and the Caribbean were enjoined “not to suffer any man to be molested, and disquieted in the exercise of religion.”Footnote 29 The limitations of regal power in the British Isles had compelled Charles II to accept a tightening of the religious establishment. Conversely, the absence of constitutional constraints in the dominions enabled him to act as a guardian of “tender consciences,” in line with the intentions he had expressed on taking the throne.
Mediterranean Merchants and the Reshaping of Colonial Policy
Catholic colonial involvement escalated conspicuously after 1660, as the result of a turn in the strategic focus of English expansion. For over a decade after the Restoration, the overseas ambitions of the court of Charles II were slanted in a new direction, following the acquisition of Tangier and Bombay through the royal marriage into the Portuguese house of Braganza. In embracing these possessions, the house of Stuart inherited not merely Portuguese cities, but a Portuguese strategic vision: the goal of an “empire of the seas,” anchored on a line of ports connecting the traffic of the Mediterranean to the commercial routes passing south toward the Indian Ocean and west into the New World. The ensuing twin strategy combined the acquisition of new territories with the pursuit of free trade within the Portuguese markets in Guinea, Goa, and Brazil, in exchange for protecting the newly independent kingdom from Spanish or Dutch assault.Footnote 30 The eventual failure of both acquisitions—Bombay was discharged to the East India Company in 1667, Tangier evacuated under Moroccan attack seventeen years later—should not blind us to the political importance they acquired in court circles. Lord Chancellor Clarendon believed Tangier offered “transcended advantages for the advancement of the trade and empire of this kingdom,” and it was soon absorbing an average of seventy-five thousand pounds every year, exceeding the sums spent by Charles II on all his other overseas outposts and home garrisons put together.Footnote 31
By following in Portuguese footprints, English colonists entered into a world alien to the Protestant imagination. In Tangier and Bombay, English officers took over Catholic populations, including contingents of Capuchin and Franciscan clergy, alongside resident merchants and indigenous converts. The new governors were instructed from Whitehall to “connive at the Roman Catholique Worship,” so that the switch in sovereignty “may be effected without any stir or danger.”Footnote 32 Civil authorities collaborated with the Portuguese Redemptorist clergy in the relief of English captives ransomed in Tunis and Algiers; in return, the crown provided naval convoys to support missionaries venturing back through pirate-infested waters from Brazil.Footnote 33 In developing Tangier, the crown was thrust into dependence on compatriots familiar with the Mediterranean commercial landscape. Since the 1604 Treaty of London, communities of merchants from England and Ireland had established factories, warehouses, and private residences in the principal Iberian ports. In view of the continual threat of being “apprehended and carried into the Inquisition,” as the English agent in Lisbon complained, these groups were disproportionately Catholic: a stipulation renewed by the Portuguese on all subjects of Charles II trading in Brazil.Footnote 34
As Nuala Zahedieh has shown, confessional communities were well suited to the management of long-distance trade, providing cohesive trust and credit relationships, and codes of good behavior to stabilize the links between agents in scattered locations.Footnote 35 Among English recusants, the Mediterranean had provided a lifeline for family wealth, and religious identities, imperiled under penal conditions. The Lisbon wine trade enriched an East Anglia kinship network centered on younger sons of the Mannock, Gage, and Huddleston families, who collaborated to proffer sizeable deposits for investment and apprenticeships.Footnote 36 The importance of these operations was even more apparent in Catholic Ireland, where loss of land through plantations and confiscations had compelled recusants into adopting more imaginative economic strategies. By 1660, a widening web of trade connected the ports of Galway and Waterford to the business of Malaga, Lisbon, and Cadiz.Footnote 37
By projecting its ambitions into the Mediterranean, and endorsing the build-up of a substantive military and diplomatic establishment, the English crown had opened up potential corridors for emigres into royal service. As ambassador to Madrid, Sir William Godolphin kept his own Catholic conversion concealed before 1678, but drew networks of the resident Irish into his employment. The advantage, he argued, was to bring “to the use of our National Interests … those whose abilities might have entitled them to profitable employments, if their Religion were not a barre to them at home.”Footnote 38 In 1661, negotiations over Bombay and Tangier were mediated by an exiled priest, Richard Russell, appointed secretary to Queen Catherine and later elevated, at the request of Charles II, into the Portuguese episcopate as bishop of Visieu.Footnote 39 Catholics dominated the lists of suppliers, contractors, and creditors employed for Tangier.Footnote 40 By 1677, according to one report, three of the six aldermen within the city were “professed papists.”Footnote 41 Concurrently, the increase of English naval activity in the region drew superiors of the exiled seminaries into informal royal service, as eyes and ears for officers anxious for information on Spanish maneuvers. Vice-Admiral Edward Spragg sent gifts of Malaga wine to Lisbon in 1671 to acknowledge the intelligence received from “the Father Rector and all those worthy ffriends of ours at the Irish Convent.”Footnote 42 Under Bishop Russell's aegis, money sent between London and Tangier was funneled through Lisbon's English College.Footnote 43
The expanding commercial and missionary activity of the Iberian kingdoms had opened the gateway for English and Irish Catholics into the Atlantic world. The original Maryland priesthood emerged from centers supplying the American mission: Jesuits from Seville and Madeira, and “secular clergymen” plucked out of the college at Lisbon.Footnote 44 The hopes outlined at the Restoration court, of tethering the Mediterranean trade to wider transoceanic networks, had been similarly foreshadowed inside the account books of Catholic merchants. The Gages of Hengrave drove commerce between Lisbon and the West Indies; members of the Mannock, Whetenhall, and Huddleston families secured entry into the East India Company.Footnote 45 By dint of legal silence or ambiguity, Irish merchants enjoyed considerable scope for colonial trade under the Navigation Acts of 1660 and 1663. Subsequent measures against direct traffic between America and Ireland abridged but did not eradicate this activity. Even where the law was not flouted, the acquisition of London warehouses enabled wealthier traders to retain their colonial foothold.Footnote 46 Members of the so-called Fourteen Tribes, a Catholic oligarchy that commanded the Galway corporation, continued to fill the local markets with ginger, sugar, and indigo from the plantations.Footnote 47 The Arthur, Blake, and Lynch families profited further by venting East Indian produce into the Caribbean, fostering the contraband activities that turned Port Royal, Jamaica into a center of Anglo-Spanish exchange.Footnote 48
English pamphlet literature promoted the renewal of overseas expansion in 1661 as an assault upon the “popish” Spanish enemy—not least after vociferous opposition from the court of Madrid towards Charles II's Braganza marriage.Footnote 49 Yet for Catholic commentators, the implications of the Portuguese alliance hinted at a turn in court thinking, away from the providential militarism that had sanctioned English plantations in the previous half-century. The clergyman Richard Russell argued that beneath the gauze of Protestant polemic, the real purpose of English expansion had been to prize open the riches of the Americas, locked hitherto under Spanish control. This objective would be more readily served, he believed, not by unleashing warfare upon the Catholic world, but by nurturing Portugal, as the “chiefest and the most necessary Allie:” a counterweight to the power of the Habsburgs, and the guardian of markets that stretched into “all the foure parts of the world.”Footnote 50 By 1667, William Godolphin was advancing a bolder manifesto. Stripped of its Portuguese territories and beleaguered by French advances on the continent, he asserted that the crown of Spain too would be ready to fall into a commercial alliance, settled with such “great and advantageous concessions and priviledges” as would render the court of Madrid subservient to the house of Stuart. Writing to the earl of Arlington, Godolphin proposed a dispatch of troops to support Spanish Flanders, in return for rights of access bestowed upon English and Irish traders in Central American markets. With Spanish naval and commercial resources waning, English fleets could extend protection for the treasure fleets moving back through the Atlantic, establishing themselves as the “bridge” of communication between Spain and its colonies. Accordingly, the court of Charles II would harness the wealth of the tottering empire to its own coffers. England, Godolphin concluded, “cannot get by all ye World besides so much as by this nation, if affaires were once putt on a right foot.”Footnote 51
The views of Russell and Godolphin did not stand in isolation. With Habsburg claims to “universal monarchy” attenuated by 1660, the idea was put forward increasingly—in London and the colonies—that English interests lay in the manipulation rather than the overturning of rival, Catholic empires.Footnote 52 Commercial relations were ratified between the two crowns in 1667, and extended three years later to cover American possessions. In Jamaica, as Leslie Theibert has shown, lobbying networks fronted by the Jamaica governor, Thomas Lynch, enunciated the vision of an “empire of commerce,” as an alternative to fading dreams of conquest in Panama and Hispaniola.Footnote 53 These strategists contended that by venting domestic manufactures into the Spanish markets and steering the riches of Mexico and Peru into Jamaica, the English could become masters of a changing diplomatic landscape.Footnote 54 Such arguments burgeoned in the decades following the Restoration, as the Dutch began to supersede the crown of Spain as the main commercial rival to England outside Europe, rendering it much harder to locate colonial wars within the “Protestant interest.” For the duke of Buckingham, “the undoubted Interest of England is Trade … it is that only which can make us either Rich or Safe,” and the corollary was a hard-headed application of the diplomatic calculus.Footnote 55 The goal of becoming “sharers in Trade” with Spain was an explicit crown objective by 1685.Footnote 56 The effect of these subtle strategic evolutions was to privilege the experience of Catholics who had prospered in the trading world of the Iberian kingdoms.
Catholic Officers and the Governance of the Overseas Dominions
Acquisitions in the Mediterranean provided the platform for another contingent of Catholics to enter into the colonizing experience. Seated in a region where rival powers collided, Tangier was vulnerable to assault by land and sea.Footnote 57 Within a year of its occupation, the city was heavily garrisoned, with three thousand troops raised from the royal coffers. To the alarm of Samuel Pepys, a conspicuous proportion of the commanding officers were Catholic.Footnote 58 The governance of Tangier was vested soon after its acquisition in the hands of veterans of the royalist diaspora that had swelled after the execution of Charles I: men who had earned their credentials in the pay of French or Spanish armies and remained on the continent after 1660, in an environment more conducive to their religion. Four governors of Tangier during the twenty-three years of Stuart rule were open or suspected Catholics, backed up by an officer corps filled with coreligionists from all three kingdoms, and presiding over regiments of Irishmen who had served under Spanish command against the Franco-Cromwellian alliance in 1658.Footnote 59 Hugh Cholmley, the Protestant surveyor-general and one of the most energetic lobbyists for Tangier, used the city openly as a recruiting ground to lure his own recusant kinsmen away from the armies of Bourbons, Habsburgs, and Braganzas and back into service of the English crown.Footnote 60
Studies by Stephen Saunders Webb have provoked debate over the extent to which English expansion was disrupted after 1660 by a centralizing and militaristic grand strategy, established in imitation of continental competitors and in opposition to a preceding ethos of commercial individualism.Footnote 61 The evidence of Catholic promotions suggests, however, a more limited rationale: an attempt to keep alive old royalist patronage networks and reclaim the service of officers whose religion had sent them into politically complicated positions in European armies. While foreign regiments offered an outlet for recusant swordsmen, the experience had been liable to bring frustration and discomfort. “You know I am not a man to be divided, neither can I serve two Masters,” bemoaned the Earl of Castlehaven, commander of a Spanish regiment in Flanders, in 1672: “I only lamented my owne misfortune, that in Englande I was taken for to be too much a Spaniarde, and here as much an Englishman.”Footnote 62 Their presence created diplomatic complexities that were magnified through the 1660s and 1670s, as shifting alliances disrupted English relations with France and Spain.Footnote 63 In the colonies, the principal pressures toward militarization flowed from external sources, after successive wars transformed the strategic profile of the Americas. In 1666, the English Caribbean reeled in the wake of intervention from Louis XIV on the side of United Provinces. French forces overran Antigua and Tobago, devastated Montserrat, and forced the evacuation of colonists from St. Christopher's. A year later, Dutch armies descended upon Surinam, casting out English settlers; in 1672, they secured the temporary surrender of New York. Weak English fortifications, inadequate funds, and military inexperience had all been opened up to the attentions of hostile powers; against these perils, the promise of battlefield expertise could eclipse any questions over an officer's private religion.
For a cohort of Catholic soldiers, service in the Mediterranean represented the staging post for advancement through the overseas dominions. In 1682, Thomas Dongan, lieutenant governor of Tangier, moved across the Atlantic to take up supreme office for the crown in New York.Footnote 64 James Bellings, brother to Queen Catherine's secretary, traveled in regimental colors from the Mediterranean to Barbados.Footnote 65 The instability of the West Indies hastened the professional ascent of another Catholic, the Tipperary landowner William Stapleton, who transferred from the French army to the English Caribbean.Footnote 66 In 1668, he was promoted governor of Montserrat; four years later, his authority was extended over the rest of the Leeward Islands, to encompass the principal bases of Irish settlement. Dongan, Stapleton, and their fellow veterans were rapidly brought into confrontation with old French paymasters, as Louis XIV endorsed a buildup of naval power in the Caribbean and a program of fortification on the frontiers separating Canada and New York.Footnote 67 Equally urgent was the need to cement loyalty among emigrant populations. In zones that bristled with international tension, the great spillage of Irish merchants, laborers, and adventurers had become a potential liability for the crown. According to Governor Willoughby of Barbados, William Stapleton's credentials grew not in spite, but because of his confessional origins: “he was born in Ireland, and understands the better to govern his countrymen.”Footnote 68 Delegating the creation of maps, the formation of militias, and the collation of a census to Stapleton's officers, the council of trade turned to the natural leaders of the Irish diaspora, to monitor, mobilize, and corral its members into the duties of allegiance.Footnote 69
The limited fiscal resources of the crown, compounded by the problems of transatlantic communication, conferred high levels of autonomy upon newly promoted governors. Thomas Dongan ruled New York through the aid of a cadre of Catholic officers, bringing together Tangier veterans with individuals who had preceded him as ducal appointments in the province.Footnote 70 Dongan urged the crown to draw more extensively upon the Irish population to install a fighting force on the northern frontiers, where “the French are encroaching as fast as they can.”Footnote 71 The Leeward Islands, severed from the jurisdiction of Barbados in 1670, developed a political identity that reflected the density of the Irish interest. William Stapleton imposed authority through the introduction of a new settler elite, forged out of his own kinsmen, fellow soldiers, and members of the merchant groupings that provisioned the islands through the export markets of Galway and Waterford.Footnote 72 The emerging fiefdom collapsed many of the cultural and national differences that had wedged themselves between Catholics under the Stuart monarchy. On the council and assembly at Montserrat, the Irish majority brought together “Old English” families like the Stapletons with magnates drawn from Gaelic-speaking regions.Footnote 73 The governor looked simultaneously to place long-term leases in the hands of mercantile Catholic families from England. The Gages of Hengrave, veterans of the Lisbon trade, acquired estates on Montserrat in 1675, developed plantations, and married into the Irish elites.Footnote 74 The creation of these Catholic footholds may not have been willed in Whitehall, but their emergence was demanded by local conditions when officeholders were obliged to build up civil and military establishments through recourse to their own private means.
Conscience, Loyalty, and Catholic Liberties
By 1680 the movement of Catholic soldiers and merchants through the Atlantic ensured that Maryland no longer stood out anomalously in the English overseas territories. The Catholic religion itself was a more mercurial presence. In Tangier, the provision of priestly functions remained dependent on the Portuguese chapels; in the Caribbean, French Capuchins seated on St. Christopher's ministered intermittently to the Irish population.Footnote 75 While it was common knowledge on the Privy Council that Stapleton sent his sons for education in Douai, he did not import clerical foundations into his domain.Footnote 76 Instead, Catholics benefited as individuals from an environment in which all ecclesiastical authority was weak, and confessional allegiances were erratically policed. The Church of England had not thrived within the colonial landscape. Schemes for bishoprics in the West Indies had come to nothing; by 1689, the presence of only ten Church of England clergymen even in royalist Virginia highlighted the difficulty of exporting the ecclesiastical apparatus.Footnote 77 The only religion holding together the Caribbean, as one observer reported, was “obedience to the lawfull Power.” Accordingly, it was not difficult for Stapleton to pass legislation, including a 1678 act permitting marriage to be conducted by civil magistrates, which subtly advanced the space available for Catholic settlers.Footnote 78 In more far-flung English operations, religious identity was even harder to pin down. The Catholicism of Henry Gary, crown governor of Bombay, was alleged, but unproven, and the city commanders did little to discourage such ambiguity, pitching broad appeals for the services of any “French, English, Jermans, Danes or other Christians” that “want Imployment” on the subcontinent.Footnote 79 Divisions between Christians narrowed when Englishmen ventured into regions dominated by non-European polities. “Although here be Protestants and Papists” reported the sea captain Robert Knox, from Ceylon, “there is no other Distinctions of Religion … but only Heathens and Christians.”Footnote 80
When the extension of English interests outside Europe was followed only erratically by the Oaths of Allegiance and Supremacy, the cost of public office fell less heavily upon personal convictions. In Tangier, Hugh Cholmley believed it sufficient for an individual to be “Protestant in interest.” There could, he insisted, be “no reason” for religious affinity to prohibit demonstrably loyal subjects from “building a Citty in Affrica.”Footnote 81 Elsewhere, private consciences would be tested less by state injunctions than the requirement for a certain fluency of equivocation. Interrogated in 1672, William Stapleton hoped that he had “enough religion to save his soul, but what little he has was learnt amidst the noises of drums and trumpets in his Majesty's service.” This faith alone would do him “no good,” if “he would not venture 1,000 lives … to defend his Sovereign's rights or to destroy all manner of emperors, kings, popes, or prelates, invading any part of his Majesty's territories.”Footnote 82 In Maryland, and, later, the Leewards, Catholic governors brought alternative oaths before the settler populations—with formulas of loyalty that pared confessional obligations down to a Christian minimum. New planters on St. Christopher's in 1672 were enjoined toward obedience to “God and the Holy Gospell”; assemblymen in Antigua in 1681 avowed simply “true faith and true Allegiance unto our Soveraigne Lord King Charles the Second.”Footnote 83
The disjuncture between the three kingdoms and the colonies became glaring after 1673, when the passing of the Test Acts brought a slew of Catholic ejections from public office in England, and Hugh Cholmley feared that Tangier was “like to loose many a good friend.”Footnote 84 Conversely, no official in the plantations was dismissed on grounds of Catholicism before 1689. Richard Langhorne, attorney for Lord Baltimore, declared that “in ye busyness of taking ye Oaths … ye are not concerned untill you come into Engld.” For “all who are upon or beyond ye Seas,” he opined, “there is no authority to administer ye Oaths wch can only be given by ye Kings Bench … or Quarter Sessions of a County.”Footnote 85 If the extent of the loophole was contested, local realities gave de facto substance to Langhorne's claim. From America to the Barbary Coast, Catholics could circumvent the restrictions, and offer up alternative qualifications to justify inclusion within the public domain.
For all of these opportunities, colonization nonetheless stirred moral and ideological tensions inherent in the practice of Catholic life under a Protestant monarchy. By 1700, the global mission remained a vital feature of the post-Tridentine church. “Dominion by grace” was still widely regarded as the fountainhead of Spanish and Portuguese claims over the New World, and the overriding duty to Christianize the Americas was drummed into the imagination of English, Irish, and Scottish students at seminaries in Europe.Footnote 86 Increasingly, papal attentions were transplanted toward New York, as French Jesuits moved through the Great Lakes, “alluring” the Indian Five Nations, “with their beads and crucifixes and little painted Images,” as one report warned in 1684.Footnote 87 English Benedictines served at the missionary outposts in New France, and the writings of Jesuits and Franciscans wreathed the colonial expeditions of Lord Baltimore with universal meaning, as a chance to “sow the sacred faith.”Footnote 88 Unlike most of their European coevals, Catholics had not entered the New World under the cloak of a conquering, missionizing empire. However, the question of whether their voyages carried attendant duties to the church created multiple snares for tender consciences. William Stapleton clashed in 1683 with the Spanish episcopate at Cuba, which demanded jurisdiction over all congregants in the Caribbean.Footnote 89 Concurrently, French claims over the Indians residing north and west of New York drew Thomas Dongan into tense exchanges with the military commander in Canada, who accused the English of fomenting Mohawk hostility toward the priests, and appealed to the conscience of the governor to provide protection for Jesuit activities.Footnote 90 Catholics in the English dominions were caught between conflicting visions of empire, which had drawn dividing lines between the church and crown they aspired to serve.
If they sought to open up a sphere of freedom for their coreligionists, most Catholic governors strove to distance the colonial venture from any confessional purpose. Sir George Calvert's adoption of the name “Avalon” for his Newfoundland possessions at once gestured towards the Christian significance of the undertaking and turned to a motif beloved of Protestant polemic by appropriating the foundation myth of the autonomous British church raised at Glastonbury.Footnote 91 The Maryland proprietors sustained a foundation for six missionaries, but placed restrictions upon clerical landholding rights and proselytizing activities among the neighboring Indians.Footnote 92 In New York, Thomas Dongan upheld freedom of worship for all Christian and Jewish congregations, and leant discreet sponsorship to a Jesuit foundation within the province, at Saratoga.Footnote 93 But he opposed the Christianization of indigenous people as a component of Stuart imperial strategy, and sought to block clergymen of all stripes from “meddling” in the Iroquois settlements on the Anglo-French frontiers. If the conversion of pagans constituted a “fine charitable act,” he believed, it could nonetheless elicit “no just title to the government of a country.” Jesuit activities granted the French crown “no greater claim … than they can make to Japan, that some of their priests have resided among them.”Footnote 94 Dongan aimed to usher the tribes into a form of subjecthood that rested on basic principles of obedience and protection. The Iroquois, “a bulwark between us and other tribes,” offered a better shield against France “than the same number of Christians.”Footnote 95 These arguments flowed from the pressures of presiding over a European population itself divided on confessional lines. Dongan's politique vision, of dominions fenced off from clerical pressures, provided a rationale for incorporating Irish Catholics and unconverted Iroquois, alongside Dutch and English Protestants, under the authority of the Stuart crown.
In managing the balance of allegiances, colonial Catholics quarried political arguments out of the body of loyalist writings that had grown among a generation of English and Irish recusants after the passing of the Jacobean Oath of Allegiance.Footnote 96 In 1642, the second Lord Baltimore recalled Venetian and Florentine resistance toward the territorial pretensions of Rome. He claimed warrant from “the law of nature” for maintaining distinctions between temporal and spiritual spheres, without which “laymen were the basest slaves and most wretched creatures upon the earth.”Footnote 97 On these old intellectual foundations, Catholics grafted arguments distinct to the colonial environment, linking confessional pluralism to economic flourishing and demographic expansion. Liberty of conscience, according to the third Lord Baltimore, supplied “a plentifull table for the land.”Footnote 98 It would, he informed the king's committee of trade in 1676, “endanger insurrections or a general dispeopling,” if subjects were obliged to “maintain Ministers of a contrary persuasion to themselves.”Footnote 99 In their conception of a commercial polity, preserving toleration under the absolute authority of the proprietor, the Calverts laid down a template for Catholic governors across the dominions. The 1649 Act Concerning Religion in Maryland, with its famous ban on terms of confessional invective—“heretic,” “idolater,” “Puritan,” “Papist”—was shadowed in the Leeward Islands, where William Stapleton launched an assault upon “opprobrious, scandalous and disgraceful words, leading to the breech of His Majesty's peace.” Proscribing insults such as “English dog,” “Irish dog,” “Tory,” “Roundhead,” and “Cavalier,” the governor's law of 1668 pushed for the elimination of national, ideological, and confessional antipathies, as a prerequisite for civility on Montserrat.Footnote 100
The Colonies and the Politics of the English Catholic Community
Colonizing ventures wrought an increasingly conspicuous impact over the culture of English and Irish recusancy. If nonclerical recusants were, as John Bossy has indicated, initially hesitant towards Maryland, Catholic involvement broadened after 1660, principally in the form of commerce and investment, after lobbying by Baltimore's agents.Footnote 101 The Calverts relied upon recusant associations in England and Ireland: appealing to the laity to put forward tenants and kinsmen as settlers, utilizing Catholic bankers and suppliers in London, and supporting indigent relations with revenue from the tobacco markets.Footnote 102 The Lisbon clergyman Richard Russell acquired a manorial grant in 1663.Footnote 103 Younger sons of the Blundell family of Lancashire entered into partnership with merchants in Waterford, to capitalize on the trade connecting Liverpool with Maryland and the West Indies. The rewards of these investments funded émigré colleges and convents at Rouen and St. Omer.Footnote 104 The effect of the colonies within parts of Catholic Ireland was more pronounced. On the council of trade, the Protestant Earl of Anglesey encouraged Irish Catholic entry into overseas trade, to safeguard “the peace of the kingdom,” against the discontents that flowed from “universal poverty.”Footnote 105 Accordingly, trade and plantation in Montserrat enabled many of Stapleton's investors to clear their debts, expand estates, and reverse the economic decline threatened by Cromwellian confiscations. Under the oligarchic grip of “Fourteen Tribes,” Galway was entrenched as an unusual locus of Irish Catholic power.Footnote 106
The westward enterprise enlarged the ideological as well as the economic world of Catholicism within the British Isles. Precedents from the colonies entered into the lexicon of printed and manuscript apologetics that marshaled a defense of the recusant community. For the Yorkshire recusant Thomas Cholmley, the “gentleness” of Catholic governance in Tangier vindicated claims to be “the kings most loyall subjects.”Footnote 107 The Jesuit Thomas Parker saw the “Founding Charter” of Maryland as evidence that “never people behaved with more moderation” than his coreligionists.Footnote 108 Fortified by these examples, a growing corpus of writings explored the potential of colonial ventures for creating new “bonds of fidelity,” between Catholics and “their Native Countrey,” as one 1646 pamphlet put it. As a Catholic refuge, the anonymous author believed, Maryland provided an alternative destination for religious exiles who had hitherto slipped into rival European kingdoms. Redirected across the Atlantic, these communities could be put to profitable service, when the New World contained “much more Land then all the Kings Protestant Subjects … would be able to possesse.”Footnote 109 This reasoning became more commonplace in Protestant reflections produced after the Civil War, against the background of a fractured religious landscape in England. The economist Charles Davenant envisaged colonial settlement as a way for the crown to retain the loyalties, “labour and Industry” of dissidents of all opinions, whose banishment would otherwise benefit foreign governments.Footnote 110 Yet the Maryland pamphlet of 1646 acknowledged that placing Catholics “under the protection of the English Crowne and State” created a precedent to unsettle Protestants. The Maryland charter brought tacit recognition, the author believed, that “reason of state” held primacy over religion in the calculations of English governments—consistent with the court's practices of maintaining relations with foreign Catholic powers, and tempering the enforcement of the penal laws in the interests of domestic tranquility.Footnote 111
For more ambitious authors, the achievements of Catholic governance spoke to conditions on both sides of the Atlantic. Developments in the colonies carried provocative meaning in political moments when recusant leaders in England pushed more visibly for civil comprehension, promoting alternative formulations of loyalty that rewrote the relationship between legal duties and the private conscience. Throughout the seventeenth century, the Calverts nurtured close associations with many of these circles. The creation of Maryland had been steered after 1629 by a network of pro-Catholic courtiers: Sir Francis Windebank, Lord Cottington, and the earl of Arundel, who were working concurrently for modification of the 1606 Oath of Allegiance.Footnote 112 The non-Protestant oath to the crown drawn up by Governor Leonard Calvert in 1633 fell within a continuum of attempts, acquiesced by the court, to provide a new way of testing Catholic attitudes toward the sovereign power.Footnote 113 Latterly, the Calverts developed a close patronal association with the English College, Lisbon—the incubus for a succession of oath designs, which included, most notoriously, the “Blacklowist” project of submission to Oliver Cromwell.Footnote 114 The keystone of this enterprise, the publication of the Grounds of Obedience and Government (1655) by the former college president Thomas White, sparked a burst of Catholic lobbying before the Cromwellian Council of State, creating the climate that enabled Baltimore to mount a successful defense of his proprietary rights.Footnote 115 The links between Maryland and the Blacklowists originated in the Calverts’ turn away from the Jesuits toward patronage of the English secular clergy—a group more inclined to cede authority to the civil magistrate in matters non-essential to Christian doctrine.Footnote 116 In 1642, the second Lord Baltimore had invited White and his acolytes, Henry Holden and Peter Fitton, to lay down new clerical foundations in the Chesapeake. Following the Restoration, two of White's nephews took up office-holding positions in Maryland.Footnote 117
The Blacklowist design cohered with the early Stuart oath projects, in challenging the notion that temporal loyalty consisted in observance of a single religion. But by promoting Catholic liberty within a framework of toleration that extended to all strands of Protestantism, Thomas White's coterie moved closer to the practices deployed in Maryland.Footnote 118 These ideas endured in certain circles after the Restoration. The recusant scholar John Belson continuously advocated a broad platform for toleration, and raised the “Mariland designe” as evidence that Catholics could be “sound as to governmt,” while holding to “their perswasion in matters of meer religion.”Footnote 119 For the pamphleteer George Alsop, writing under the patronage of the Calverts, Maryland occasioned “the miracle of this age,” where “the Roman Catholick, and the Protestant Episcopal … concur in an unanimous parallel of friendship,” driving “Inquisitions, Martyrdom, and Banishments” from the scene.Footnote 120 If Maryland carried symbolic significance, recusant authors after 1660 could look toward other parts of the colonial realm. The archbishop of Dublin proposed to Charles II that New England land grants would showcase the loyalty of Irish Catholics, installing a ballast against the “growing Independents” of Massachusetts.Footnote 121 The needs of the colonies offered to convert recusants from “half subjects,” in the unforgiving judgment of James I, into productive members of the commonwealth.
Beyond the precedents of particular colonies, a growing strain in Catholic commentary outlined the expansion of the realm in its totality as grounds for molding the state in new forms. The pursuit of maritime dominion, according to the Scottish clergyman William Leslie, incentivized the crown to lift the penal fetters, when Catholic merchants represented important agents in the Mediterranean and Atlantic. Unless they could “peaceably profit in England,” he believed, they would remain in foreign realms, and “deprive us of infinite sumes of money wch they would otherwise bring home wth ym & spend amongst us.”Footnote 122 Hugh Cressy, chaplain to Catherine of Braganza, suggested that the “advancement of the state abroad” obliged the king toward a general toleration, as the way to divert parliament from religious contention, toward the “publick temporall welfare,” bringing its rewards in a “very considerable encrease of riches and trade.”Footnote 123 Henry Neville Payne, a Catholic polemicist and former Jamaica merchant, agreed that the needs of an expanding domain demanded alternative tests for the civil magistrate in determining the worth of a subject. “The Roman Empire was ever August,” he contended in 1685, “when it Tolerated all sorts of Religions … and introduced all sorts of Gods of all Nations” into its dominions. Should persecutory “Jealousies” stifle such liberty in England, “our War-like Nation must be idle, and dream away the Glory it might gain.”Footnote 124 The overseas colonies figured in Catholic thought, therefore, not simply as protective spaces for the persecuted, but as arenas for the exhibition of civil virtue. English plantations became the training ground for alternative systems of allegiance, mapped out in exiled seminaries and courtly circles, to renegotiate the terms of civil loyalty.
Anti-popery and the Crisis of the Restoration Empire
Sheltered by the attitudes of crown councils, as well as colonial notables such as Hugh Cholmley, the English dominions under Charles II were allowed to diverge further from the political practices of the three kingdoms. This tendency, however, was far from universally welcomed. Within the New World, Catholic activity aggravated social and political distempers common to nascent colonies. Between 1676 and 1682, Maryland was destabilized by agitation from Protestant planters.Footnote 125 A slew of petitions brought Lord Baltimore before the Privy Council, forcing the Calverts to resort to public print to defend the management of their colony.Footnote 126 Claims of a creeping Catholic ascendancy erupted most damagingly in Tangier. In 1664, Samuel Pepys reported local disquiet that the duke of York, at the head of the city commission, “doth naturally love and affect the Irish above the English.”Footnote 127 By the following decade, when Tangier struggled to repel regional enemies and fulfil its commercial promise, dissident settlers began to inveigh against the Catholic influence, indicting a succession of governors who had, according to one former mayor, “made it their business to ruine the Protestant Interest.”Footnote 128 These conflicts would soon be channeled back into the British Isles, along the ideological pipelines connecting critics of crown policy in and outside Europe. It was in Tangier that Titus Oates claimed, in 1678, to have picked up whispers of a popish plot against the life of the king.Footnote 129
After 1675, the subterranean energies of anti-popery were brought into the open by a coordinated movement of opposition against the court of Charles II, driven forward in parliament and the public domain. Colonial discontents served as grist to the mill of “Country” and “Whig” factions beating the drum against the hidden Catholic agendas perceived to be running rife within Stuart counsels. In 1679, Tangier was brought to the center of the escalating Exclusion Crisis, when the Westminster Parliament refused to rescue the city with additional funds against its Moroccan assailants, unless Charles II assented to the elimination of the Catholic duke of York from the line of royal succession. “Giving money for support of Tangier is giving money for popery” the whig Lord Russell complained.Footnote 130 The Commons resolution passed in June 1680 concurred that the perils of bolstering “a nursery for popish soldiers,” and “a seminary for priests,” outweighed any disadvantage threatened by the city's collapse.Footnote 131 The political storm swept around colonies, embassies and trading bases. Charles Wheeler, governor of the Leeward Islands prior to William Stapleton, launched repeated attacks on his successor, as figurehead of a “popish interest” that had “interloped” into the English Caribbean. In 1679, the Privy Council interrogated Stapleton on religious grounds.Footnote 132 Whig protests secured the dismissal of Ambassador Godolphin, alleged patron of Catholic emigres in the Mediterranean, and brought the arrest of the secretary of state Sir Joseph Williamson in November 1678, with the promotion of “papists” into Tangier, New York, and the West Indies cited as evidence of his maladministration.Footnote 133 The empowerment of Catholics overseas gave substance to two driving concerns of the Whig campaign: the misuse of prerogative powers, and the tilt in Stuart foreign policy away from the Protestant interest.
The reaction against colonial “popery” recalled well-worn motifs of anti-Catholic polemic: claims of loyalty offered with “mental reservations,” and veiled allegiances towards foreign powers.Footnote 134 However, the crisis of the 1670s also laid bare the unsettled relationship between Old England and its outworks overseas, when colonial societies, beyond the writ of Westminster, were taking a shape very different to that of the mother kingdom. The needs of the plantations had harnessed Catholics alongside Indians, Huguenots, Dutchmen, and Jews into royal service, but these fluid, mobile populations stood at the outer edges of English authority, in the shadow of French or Spanish garrisons, where opportunities for treasonable conduct abounded.Footnote 135 Fears of runaways and renegades—an anxiety in English trading bases in the Mediterranean—were projected onto the Caribbean as commerce moved into the hands of the resident Irish.Footnote 136 Suspicion over Thomas Dongan's “popish commanders” became an increasing preoccupation of sermons and pamphlets in Boston.Footnote 137 Far from turning “half subjects” into loyal servants, critics argued, the colonial realm had enabled Catholics to create whole cities and provinces that stood in a tenuous state of allegiance. Tangier, one inhabitant contended, had fallen prey to “men who confessed they were better lovers of France than [of] their own king.”Footnote 138 The dangers resonated through the histories of fallen empires. “Let profane men believe what they will,” intoned one pamphlet in 1678; “there was never yet a Citie or a Nation that ever prosper'd since the beginning of the World that slighted the Religion of its Countrie.”Footnote 139
While parliamentary concerns focused on specific locations and individual promotions, the taint of Catholicism raised broader doubts within sections of the opposition over the essential rationale behind overseas colonization. The loyalist Hugh Cholmley warned that paranoia over “the dexterity our Roman ennimys” at court would threaten colonial ventures, “when I consider how fearfull [MPs] are of his Majtie's growing rich.”Footnote 140 Through the Exclusion Crisis, the belief, registered by one pamphleteer, that “our plantations do strengthen Popery,” reanimated an older strain of Protestant opposition toward expansionist adventures, and against colonial practices that threatened to redound into the mother kingdom.Footnote 141 “It is not improbable that those soldiers may be brought hither,” predicted the MP William Harbord in 1679, of Catholic troops posted in colonial garrisons. Harbord would part with “my Blood and my Money,” to support the crown, “but not with my Birthright.”Footnote 142 The whig Sir William Jones conceded that even when a colony proved a “place of great moment,” he held “the preservation of religion to be far greater.”Footnote 143
Seen through this lens, territorial enlargement risked jeopardizing Protestant foundations: directly, as a spur to Catholic ambitions, and more insidiously, by tempting princes towards the Roman-Iberian dream of universal monarchy. The Dissenting minister Henry Stubbe fretted that the allure of overseas riches encouraged scholars to “bend their Studies” to projects “which may be useful to the King,” so that “the Peoples Minds will be diverted from creating Papists any trouble.”Footnote 144 In a 1678 Commons sermon, Edward Stillingfleet saw the growth of popery proceeding from the ways by which “mighty Empires have been raised and maintained.” While he did not fear that “the Church of Rome should prevail among us by strength of Reason,” the danger endured that “if men be loose in their principles, and unconcerned about Religion in general, there will not be courage and constancy enough to keep it out.”Footnote 145 For these observers, the interests of the reformed religion and the pressures of plantation and colonization appeared to be pulling in dangerously different directions.
Catholics, the Crown, and Colonial Reform
Opposition campaigns did not, however, succeed in overturning the governance of the overseas dominions. As the politics of the Exclusion Crisis spilled into the colonial arena, Tories and loyalist defenders of the court threw their weight behind the crown appointments. The earl of Clarendon appraised William Stapleton as “one of the best Governors the King had in any of his Plantations,” and the earl of Rochester pledged to him and “to all your friends … not only justice, but favor.”Footnote 146 On the council of trade, the earls of Craven and Anglesey provided reliable support for the Calvert proprietary.Footnote 147 In defending the management of the dominions, Tories mustered a counterblast to every cardinal Whig assumption over the direction of colonial policy. For opposition MPs, Catholic plantations undermined the gathering struggle against French “universal monarchy,” and if unreformed, could be sacrificed. For loyalists, by contrast, the fragility of English power abroad required the strengthening of colonies under capable commanders: Catholic soldiers to control Catholic populations and repel Catholic enemies. “The French may seize your money now … and your Leeward Islands,” Sir John Ernle reproached the Commons in 1679. “Is your house on fire, and will you not quench it?”Footnote 148 From the court perspective, the obsession with Catholic-Protestant conflict misrepresented the colonial environment, when English interests stood as vulnerable to assault by the Calvinist Dutch or the Islamic kingdom of Morocco. In Tangier, the Tory surveyor-general Henry Sheres argued that the sole significant distinction lay between the religion of those within and outside the city walls. All soldiers in the garrison should be “cherish'd and consider'd,” he believed, as men who had “serv'd their King and Country, against the Enemies of our Religion, and of God himself.”Footnote 149
Partisan battles in Westminster mapped out the trajectory of colonial policy in the 1680s. Starved of funding, Tangier was evacuated in 1684. However, the defeat of the whig opposition secured Catholic interests in the Americas, and pushed them beyond the reach of parliament. When William Stapleton sought retirement in 1684, his London agents petitioned successfully for his replacement by Sir Nathaniel Johnson, as a candidate considered sympathetic to the Irish interest.Footnote 150 After Charles II had bludgeoned his way through the Exclusion Crisis, Catholic officeholders became vital agents in a royal program conceived to monitor, reorganize, and fortify the plantations against enemies within and without. Writs of quo warranto against proprietary colonies paved the way for the experimental Dominion of New England, constructed under James II according to the model of the Spanish viceroyalties.Footnote 151
In practice, Catholic notables were not unqualified champions of this new “Tory ascendancy.”Footnote 152 The revived French alliance raised the hackles of Dongan and Stapleton, who had come into confrontation with the power of Versailles.Footnote 153 Later, the prospect of bringing Maryland into the Dominion of New England elicited bitter opposition from the Calvert interest.Footnote 154 There were murmurings, too, of Catholic alarm that the new agenda would usher a monopolistic Church of England into the colonial realm. Edward Randolph, surveyor-general in New England, was perturbed in 1686 to discover a current of sympathy for the proprietary interests among prominent court Catholics, with the barrister Robert Brent—the cousin of landowners in Maryland—serving as “solicitor” for the Massachusetts Bay Colony.Footnote 155 Lobbying Whitehall in 1688, the Puritan divine Increase Mather acknowledged that he was treated “very courteously … extremely caressed,” by members of the same Catholic cohort, who pledged to defend Congregationalist foundations in Boston.Footnote 156 In reality, it was the religious freedoms, not the corporate privileges of colonial polities that animated Brent, an ally of the Quaker William Penn, and co-architect of James II's Declaration of Indulgence.Footnote 157 But the concern impelled him, alongside coreligionists at Whitehall, to seek constraints on the actions of new royal governors. Mather credited court Catholics with persuading the king to consider a “Magna Carta for liberty of conscience” in America.Footnote 158
Contrary to these fears, however, the principles of Tory ascendancy in the colonies diverged from the unbending church policies pursued in England between 1681 and 1685. Loyalist writings gravitated toward a nonconfessional ideology of colonization, moving to counter the anti-popish pressures of the opposition by appropriating the language of political economy and political arithmetic.Footnote 159 The economist John Houghton envisioned the colonies as “a wheel to set most of our Trades going,” shielded from “over-zealous divines.”Footnote 160 Thomas Sheridan, another writer in favor at court, believed that to attain “the dominion of the Seas,” Englishmen must “reconcile by Toleration, our Differences in point of Religion.”Footnote 161 These arguments were bolstered by political realities in America; by 1683, the committee of trade was endorsing liberty of conscience, rather than Anglican supremacy, as the weapon to break down Puritan oligarchies in New England.Footnote 162 But court authors also wrote with an eye to the succession of the Catholic duke of York. Highlighting the linkage between pluralism, profit, and power served to justify, or at least deemphasize, the significance of a king abiding by a religion at odds with his established church. For William Petty “no monarch” tasked with filling up so great “a share of the unpeopled Earth” as English America, could ground his policy on “those gibberish denominacons and uncertain phrases … Papist, Protestant … fanatic.” Only “a well grounded liberty of Religion” could provide the tools “for making the Crowne and State of England more powerfull than any other now in Europe.”Footnote 163 The legal scholar Peter Pett agreed that territorial expansion required the discovery of a civil interest that rose above theological “pedantry.” It was only “such a state of populacy” as could be attained by toleration, he averred, that would “make us Masters” overseas.Footnote 164 Loyalist scholars legitimized the succession of a Catholic prince through the vision of an expanding empire, united not in confessional conformity, but the productive bonds of commerce. These arguments gave intellectual anchorage to Catholic power in the dominions.
Catholicism beyond the Revolution
By 1688, critics and supporters of the court could agree that the Atlantic expansion of the realm was no longer being conducted in conformity with the “Protestant interest.” This divergence, however, would prove unsustainable. In 1689, as news of the downfall of James II ramified through the Atlantic, colonial agitators mobilized against Catholic authority. Protestant “Associators” stormed the Maryland state house and drove out the Calverts’ ruling council. Catholic officers were targeted and purged throughout the New York insurgency led by Jacob Leisler, while fears of popish “cabals” informed the wave of Boston tumults that brought down the Dominion of New England.Footnote 165 Numerical weaknesses on the American continent meant that officers loyal to James II were rapidly overwhelmed. The extent of the Irish interest left the odds more finely balanced in the West Indies. Flags were raised for James II on St Christopher's, Nevis, and Montserrat in June 1689, and for over a year the islands stood in the eye of the international storm, as French squadrons swarmed around the Caribbean, Irish privateers preyed upon English vessels, and merchants from the Waterford-Leeward networks acted as contractors for the exiled Jacobite court.Footnote 166 One of the senior Montserrat planters, Terence McDermott—“a very fair Dealer, but a Bigot to Popery,” in one Protestant estimation—assumed the mayoralty of Dublin, and contributed to the pro-Catholic agenda rolled out by the Jacobite parliament.Footnote 167 The resistance on Montserrat outlasted by three months the Jacobite defeat at the Boyne.
The dethroning of James II brought an end to the experiment in Catholic office-holding within the colonies. Over the following decade, English churchmen sought to wrench the overseas plantations into the realm of international Protestantism: through the settlement of Huguenot and Palatinate refugees, by exporting bibles, and by creating the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, whose mission centered as much upon confronting Catholics and Quakers as winning over Amerindian souls.Footnote 168 But if popish power had been uprooted, the Catholic presence was harder to eliminate. By 1698, the “Romish” clergy in Maryland still outnumbered their counterparts in the Church of England two to one. The estimated three thousand Catholics included “some of the richest Men in the Province,” according to one report submitted to the Archbishop of Canterbury, and their numbers had reputedly swelled with the arrival of Jacobite exiles from Ireland, “coming incognito amongst us, as having no better place of Refuge in ye King's Dominions.”Footnote 169 Tangier veterans of questionable religion, resettled in other parts of the dominions, aroused equal suspicion.Footnote 170 Into the eighteenth century, concerns over Catholicism became the mode of expression for wider official misgivings over colonies that languished “as sheep without a shepherd,” as one governor put it.Footnote 171 The English empire, in these estimations, needed to be purged, regenerated and riveted onto firmer Protestant foundations.
Yet English America did not develop, as Protestant clergymen feared, as the base for Jacobite subversion. Instead, the plantations conferred the space that enabled many Catholics to make a quiet accommodation to post-revolution conditions, and preserve a de facto toleration, even after their expulsion from office-holding ranks. Anthony Brockholes, the son of a former Catholic governor of New York, petitioned the crown successfully in 1696 “to continue my residence in this Colony,” and sought to make an alternative “bond to be faithful to King William,” in order to sidestep the anti-Jacobite Association of Loyalty.Footnote 172 In 1691, the West Indian planting interest was heavily represented within the roll-call of Irish Jacobites who availed themselves of the Articles of Limerick, as terms of peace with the new king. One of their number, the merchant Thomas Nugent was applauded by the Whig author John Oldmixon as “an Example to all wise and honest Papists, who live under a Protestant Constitution,” having moved into England, “purchas'd a very pleasant Retirement,” and secured his Caribbean estates.Footnote 173 In Suffolk, the Gages of Hengrave did not embrace the Jacobite cause. Instead, their West Indies plantations flourished for a century under Hanoverian sovereignty, proving, as the family factor held it, that “merchandising” served “rather as a feather in great men's caps,” allowing recusants to “shine wthout limitt” against the privations of a Protestant realm.Footnote 174
By the middle of the eighteenth century, the colonial environment had been more closely integrated into the ecclesiastical order that underpinned the religious lives of English recusants. Mirroring Anglican practices, Catholic congregants in the colonies were placed under the jurisdiction of the Vicar Apostolic of the London district. Funds from England nurtured schools and charitable foundations and, in 1763, provided for a census of Catholics in Maryland and Pennsylvania.Footnote 175 This growing familiarity revived the profile of the colonies in the economic and political strategies that Catholics pursued in the British Isles. “It is well known,” wrote the Dublin priest Cornelius Nary in 1724, “that the Roman Catholick Merchants and Dealers carry on more than half the Trade of the Kingdom, and pay more Custom and Duty for Imported Goods, than all the Protestants in it.”Footnote 176 Representatives of the Montserrat planting families—the Blakes, Trants, and Lynches—maintained a presence within the City of London, acquired country houses, and lobbied successfully in 1731 for a loosening of the Navigation Acts, to allow non-enumerated colonial goods to pass into Ireland directly from the Americas.Footnote 177 Commercial activity, even without political opportunities, gave recusants a stake within the altered political order. Moreover, when the Portuguese alliance remained an anchor of English maritime ambitions, a route stayed open for royal service overseas. After the Methuen Treaty in 1703, Thomas Dongan emerged from his Leinster estates and “kissed her majesty's hand,” to embark upon a last campaign with the Portuguese army, at the head of 1,200 Irish troops.Footnote 178 The wider the web of empire extended, the greater the space it created for groups otherwise constrained inside the metropole.
Conclusion
The “Catholic Atlantic” as anatomized in modern scholarship has been almost exclusively Franco-Iberian. By contrast, early modern Catholicism in England and Ireland is still overwhelmingly associated with a “world we have lost,” as one historian has observed—cut adrift from the cultural, political, and economic changes of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.Footnote 179 However, under the later Stuart monarchy, Catholic ambitions exacerbated the troubled birth pangs of the English colonial experiment and added to the competing formulas for making new territories stable, loyal, and prosperous. Rediscovering the Catholic influence over English expansion widens our understanding of the social, economic, and imaginative influences on recusant life, and calls for the study of the community to move beyond the familiar contours of the manorial estate and the European diaspora. It casts new light on the political agency of Catholics within a Protestant realm, their ability to construct relationships with the crown and undercut the penalties levied for religious disobedience.
Recent scholarship has shown how the politics of “Catholic loyalty” represented more than simply quiescence or inertia, but became expressed in a series of highly contentious interventions by recusants in the making of English domestic and foreign policy.Footnote 180 Colonial projects were closely tied to these wider public ventures. For seventeenth-century Catholic campaigners, overseas settlements invigorated alternative blueprints for the organization of a polity, stripped of the divisions forged by confessional oaths, tests, and bars. Experiments in Tangier, Montserrat, and Maryland provided a route towards the rehabilitation of recusant communities within the British Isles. These ideas grew within the context of a kingdom unsettled by overseas expansion, when foundations of law and authority in the New World were fragile, and contemporaries struggled to define the appropriate bond between the plantations and the fledgling metropole. Fears over the cosmopolitan character of the colonies gave voice to the inner volatilities at the heart of the empire. In moments of domestic crisis, these anxieties ruptured the brittle consensus over the expansion of the realm.Footnote 181
Questions over the relationship between Protestantism and colonization endured beyond the 1688 Revolution, when the needs of an expanding domain placed pressure on the legal and political framework at home. The limits of the reformed religion within a Mediterranean empire were illustrated in 1713, when the Treaty of Utrecht conferred British sovereignty upon multi-confessional societies in Gibraltar and Minorca, forcing de facto recognition of a Catholic ministry and exciting new missionary activities among the English Jesuits.Footnote 182 By 1756, an estimated 7,000 Scottish Catholics were reported serving with the British army in America, while the state recruited continually within Gaelic regions of Ireland.Footnote 183 After the coronation of George III, an appeal to the needs of empire entered into the rhetoric and rationale of the new campaign for Catholic Relief.Footnote 184 Colonial designs among Catholic subjects may have taken shape on the geographical margins of crown territory, but they occupied more than a peripheral place in the politics of the British Isles. The lives of recusants within the three kingdoms, the ambitions they professed, and the controversies they raised, were played out across a global arena.
