On 9 May 1645, weeks before the English Parliament defeated King Charles I’s royalists at the battle of Naseby, the House of Commons issued an ordinance accusing “divers lewd Persons” of “go[ing] up and down the City of London, and elsewhere, and in a most barbarous and wicked Manner steal[ing] away many little Children” to be shipped to the American colonies overseas. Parliament tasked the capital’s “Officers and Ministers of Justice” with “apprehending” the offenders and ordered a “strict and diligent Search in all Ships” for kidnapped children stowed away for transport. More intriguingly, the Commons promised to investigate “if there be any Order or Ordinance of Parliament, by which, by any malicious Misinterpretation, they may pretend to draw any Colour or Pretence for so great a Wickedness.”Footnote 1 Clearly, some contemporaries believed that Parliament was somehow implicated in the kidnappers’ scheme. This mistaken impression that the House had licensed these child-snatching “spirits” was apparently too much for the legislators to bear; and, indeed, the Parliament-men expressed horror that hostile writers had “maliciously slandered the Parliament” by suggesting that “this were done by any Order, Connivence, or Permission, of theirs.” That same week, to hammer the point home, several friendly newswriters indicted “the licentiousnesse of some rude tongues”—including those of “our Heathenish Malignants,” meaning Charles’s royalist press corps—who claimed that the Commons “connived at the barbarous stealing away of little Children.”Footnote 2 It was therefore not only the fate of the kidnapped youngsters, but also the ways in which their travails had been mobilized by its critics in print, that the Commons found so alarming.
This parliamentary pronouncement, and the royalist barbs to which it was responding, invite us to consider the way in which stories about early modern children were imbricated in the political culture of civil war England. This question has inspired a small but significant historiography in recent years, including work on the royal offspring as well as broader accounts of how royalists and parliamentarians alike invoked young people in their polemics.Footnote 3 In particular, Ismini Pells has argued that partisan stories, both real and imagined, of children who were negatively impacted by the outbreak of civil war are “revealing of contemporary adults’ own anxieties about the conflict.”Footnote 4 Some of those anxieties (those relating, for instance, to the 1641 Irish Rebellion) were specific to the revolutionary period, while others—variously spiritual, political, and educational—had vexed English parents and politicians alike for decades prior to the outbreak of war and re-emerged in this heated climate. The royalist publications that accused the parliamentarian regime, falsely but not without cause, of kidnapping English children and forcibly transporting them overseas to Massachusetts were part of wider polemical debates over religion, transatlantic transportation, and civil war politics that prompted Parliament’s anti-child-snatching ordinance of 1645. They reveal an important and hitherto-unappreciated element of royalist print culture: a serious concern with the puritan education, or rather miseducation, of English young people.
The politics of religious instruction, especially as they applied to young children, are familiar to historians, who have written at length about the spaces and tools through which education was pursued in post-Reformation England.Footnote 5 Particular attention has been paid to this issue by scholars of early modern Catholicism, the adherents of which suffered throughout the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries from Protestant anxieties about the dangers posed to English young people from papist parents, schoolmasters, and priests who ostensibly wished to keep them, or turn them, from the English church back to Rome.Footnote 6 Catholic fears about the corruptive power of Protestant doctrine on young minds has been equally well documented, as have the schools established at home and abroad by British and Irish Catholics in response to these concerns.Footnote 7 Yet the development of an English Protestant conformist conspiracy theory about the malignant power exerted by godly educators over their young charges is a similarly important storyline in the history of seventeenth-century English political culture. This is especially true of the 1640s, when contemporary worries about both papist and puritan pedagogy reached new heights amid the turmoil of civil war.
Jason Peacey’s recent account of a lengthy legal battle over the spiritual direction of a Gloucestershire grammar school has revealed the existence of significant contemporary suspicion regarding the ability of godly schoolmasters to “breed traitors” among vulnerable young people during the 1640s.Footnote 8 Generally, however, while scholars have written extensively on the history of education in revolutionary England, they have devoted relatively little attention to the attitudes of anti-puritan royalists. Those who have taken up the issue have tended to focus on the parodic figure of the unlearned, ignorant sectarian rather than on loyalist critiques of Parliament’s actual efforts to reform English educational practice.Footnote 9 Yet, as Alex Beeton observes, “education was an issue which touched on some of the most pressing questions” of the period, including both contemporary debates regarding “the role of the civil magistrate in spiritual matters” as well as fundamental ideological and spiritual divisions.Footnote 10 Excavating the royalist conspiracy theories that helped to inspire the appearance of Parliament’s 1645 ordinance reveals this anti-puritan politics of instruction hiding in plain sight amid more familiar mid-century debates about labor, economics, and the significance of godly New England to old English politics and religion.
Paradoxically, but unsurprisingly given the paucity of extant source material, the real-life children at the heart of this story played a very small role in the partisan narratives that ballooned around them during the early-to-mid 1640s. Just as English Protestants who fretted about the dangers posed by Catholic clergymen to naïve children were chiefly concerned with the health of the national church, royalists who denounced puritan educators at home and abroad primarily imagined malignant spiritual instruction as a catalyst for perpetuating Parliament’s war against the king. The result was therefore less of a moral panic over the fate of the children themselves than a political fear of the danger that corrupted young people might pose to the commonwealth. Indeed, royalists continued to worry about the baleful influence of puritan spiritual education long after 1660, when late Stuart leaders set out to “sever the potentially destructive ties between letters and revolution” first attributed to parliamentarian reformers by their loyalist predecessors two decades prior.Footnote 11
Contextualizing Childhood at Mid-century
Childhood—a life-stage that was generally identified by contemporaries as comprising the ages between seven and fourteen—took a unique form in the premodern European imagination.Footnote 12 Early modern children were viewed as insufficiently human, capable of both primal innocence and utter savagery. Scripture offered a host of telling comparisons, from wild beasts to “fools and lunatics.”Footnote 13 Tellingly, Anna French has asserted that the meaning of the term “child” in this period could just as easily refer to “a lack of knowing, both physical and spiritual, as well as age and appearance.”Footnote 14 Ignorance meant vulnerability to all sorts of potential threats, and it was widely asserted that only rigorous instruction and harsh discipline would guarantee that the young would eventually attain the self-mastery synonymous with adulthood. Consequently, the belief in children’s intrinsic moral weakness was the basis of much contemporary advice literature that identified schooling as a linchpin of the social order while simultaneously endorsing physical correction as legitimate parenting practice: if children could be led into sin as easily as into salvation, the rod was preferable to damnation.Footnote 15
In England, as in the rest of Europe, religion lay at the heart of these concerns. Long before the Reformation, English Christians paid close attention to the spiritual development of their children, and scrutiny tightened even further after Henry VIII’s break with Rome.Footnote 16 As Alexandra Walsham has described, the long Reformation that ensued was shaped by a “politics of age” that persistently equated evangelicalism and youth.Footnote 17 (For English Catholics, the association was a deeply negative one, as embodied by Sir Thomas More’s belief that the Protestant heresy had spread in part through the corruption of ingenuous young people by a cabal of upstart “lewde laddys.”)Footnote 18 Protestants and Catholics alike both soon seized on “the necessity of winning tomorrow’s men and women” as they settled into a decades-long struggle over the shape of the English church.Footnote 19 Education was one obvious tool for this purpose, but more forceful methods were occasionally employed. In particular, kidnapping—especially for the purpose of forced conversion—remained a frightening prospect for parents, children, and clergy alike even into the “enlightened” eighteenth century.Footnote 20
While concerns about their spiritual well-being were nigh universal, attitudes toward early modern English children could vary wildly in other respects. Gender was one key determinant; another was socioeconomic position. On one end of that spectrum, the offspring of the nobility—including, at the very top, the heirs to the throne—enjoyed the best upbringing, education, and experiences that their guardians could afford.Footnote 21 On the other extreme sat the orphaned poor, whose lack of one or both parents translated all too often into a subsequent lack of resources, prospects, and/or means of subsistence.Footnote 22 In the latter case, penurious circumstances were aggravated further by the judgments of contemporaries who, well-aware of children’s fundamentally untamed nature and resentful that the obligation for feeding and housing such orphans usually fell on their home parish, feared that parentless children would invariably turn to begging or crime without the state’s intervention. Whether that intercession took the form of the Court of Wards (which placed wealthy orphans in the hands of state-appointed guardians in exchange for temporary possession of their estates) or London’s more ecumenical royal hospital system, in every case, the authorities took seriously the relationship between English children and society writ large.Footnote 23
The civil wars of the 1640s deepened anxieties over England’s youth, as children’s potential to become both victims of and collaborators in the period’s mounting political crises transformed them into useful propaganda tools. Sometimes, the subject under discussion was education itself: prior to the outbreak of war in Ireland, for example, Catholic remonstrants complained that their children had been “debarred from education and learning” in the old faith by English authorities.Footnote 24 More often, it was violence. Children also appeared in English accounts of the Irish Catholic uprising that followed, both as innocent targets of violence (if Protestant) and as bestial perpetrators of it (if Catholic).Footnote 25 In the former instance, child victims were invoked to represent the depravity of Irish rebels, while in the latter, hostile accounts of Catholic youths slaughtering Protestant children alongside their parents validated the English conviction that even the smallest of papists could commit atrocities.Footnote 26 In both cases, contemporary perceptions about the treatment and welfare of British and Irish children enriched already potent stories about the religious violence that swept across the archipelago during the early 1640s.
Clearly, partisan accounts of injured children could amplify defamatory attacks on the legitimacy, honor, and morality of one’s political opponents. But even more striking to English Protestants reading these accounts of the Irish rising, perhaps, were those Catholic young people who had ostensibly imbibed the lessons of their elders so thoroughly that they participated willfully in the bloodshed. A similar kind of anxiety informed the royalist allegations of puritan-parliamentarian kidnapping, forced transatlantic migration, and malignant spiritual instruction that preceded the parliamentary child-snatching ordinance of 1645.
Hugh Peter and the Orphans
In March 1643, a short pamphlet entitled XIV articles of treason appeared in print. This tract was a typical royalist satire that attacked the king’s parliamentarian enemies as seditious, immoral, and heterodox rebels. Among its many familiar complaints, however, there featured one novel charge. On page three, the anonymous author accused a New England minister named Hugh Peter of taking “indefatigable pains in every parish in London to find out those our many Babes borne out of the estate & covenant of Grace (though by this Malignant called Bastards) and convayed dilligently to New-England,” so that those “objects of our owne vilednesse” could be “taken away from our perpetuall remembrance.”Footnote 27 This libelous line thus framed a routine royalist caricature—the hypocritical, lustful puritan—around a much more interesting allegation of forced transatlantic migration.
Hugh Peter is well known to historians. Ordained in the Church of England during the early 1620s, royal pressure resulting from his budding reputation as a puritan malcontent eventually forced him abroad: first to the Netherlands, and then to Massachusetts, where he was later invested as the pastor of Salem’s congregationalist church.Footnote 28 Peter stayed in New England for several years until, upon hearing of Britain’s cascading unrest, he returned to London as a Bay Colony ambassador in 1641. His task there was twofold: first, to raise money for the North American puritan colonies; second, to “furthe[r] the work of reformation of the churches” recently begun by Parliament.Footnote 29 These twin mandates soon rendered the returned New Englander a favorite target of royalist polemicists, who ridiculed him as a godly zealot, an adulterer, and a demagogue. Hostile coverage of Peter remained a routine feature of English print throughout the mid-seventeenth-century upheavals and beyond. Nevertheless, while several scholars have discussed Peter’s libelous history in print, none has yet explored the charge of transatlantic child-snatching alluded to in the XIV articles.Footnote 30
The rumor that Peter was involved in smuggling illegitimate puritan children abroad was based, albeit obliquely, in truth. On 31 January 1643, the New Englander approached Parliament with a proposal: supported by the donations of sympathetic godly Londoners, Peter would gather up local orphans, including some children recently arrived from war-torn Ireland, and transport them to Massachusetts, where they would be welcomed into New England’s puritan church in return for serving the colony as “usefull [indentured] servants.”Footnote 31 This was a familiar colonial scheme that had been employed to Virginia’s benefit during the 1610s, and similar proposals about New England had been mooted as recently as 1635.Footnote 32 Indeed, even before the founding of the English American colonies, London orphans had often been shipped to the suburbs for apprenticeships or foster care by institutions like Christ’s Hospital. In this sense, at least, Peter’s proposal was entirely conventional, and the capital’s rising numbers of poor and parentless children—a natural consequence of civil war—made it a timely one, too.Footnote 33
Public opinion was apparently on Peter’s side. The same day that he stood before Parliament, the London bookseller George Thomason acquired a pamphlet entitled New Englands first fruits, which called for the “stirring up [of] some well-minded [donors] to cloath and transport over poore children Boyes and Girles, which may be a great mercy to their bodies and soules and a help to us … we wanting hands to carry on our trades, manufacture and husbandry there.”Footnote 34 The suggestive timing of this tract’s appearance indicates that its anonymous authors—clearly sympathetic to Peter’s pitch—possessed a more-than-passing familiarity with the period’s developing arts of parliamentary lobbying.Footnote 35 Moreover, it spoke truly about New England’s needs: Bay Colony Governor John Winthrop later complained that “the wars in England kept servants from coming to us” throughout the 1640s and well into the 1650s.Footnote 36
Ultimately, the Parliament-men did not require much convincing. Altruistic arguments aside, they understood the financial burden and social anxiety that orphaned young people placed on London’s parishes, which were already under fiscal pressure to support the burgeoning parliamentary war effort. They were no doubt wary that these fatherless children would turn in time to begging or crime. After approving Peter’s proposal, they invited him to begin collecting donations immediately; and, once the New Englander set to work, godly Londoners proved exceedingly willing to support “the poore Orphanes business.”Footnote 37 As Peter and his co-organizer, the returned New Englander Thomas Weld, later attested, this fundraising effort yielded more than £800.Footnote 38 That was more than enough to set the scheme in motion, and later that summer the first group of children, a mixed-gender set of twenty, arrived in Boston as planned. According to Winthrop, “many more” were meant to follow in later years, although no other extant evidence suggests that subsequent groups of children ever materialized in New England under the auspices of Peter’s program.Footnote 39
Here lay the inspiration for that libelous aside in the XIV articles. Yet even when considered alongside Peter’s 1643 proposal, the line might be read as just another royalist cheap shot against puritan chastity in which the reference to transported children served a merely ornamental purpose. Again, taken on its own merits, the orphan transportation project could hardly have seemed objectionable to contemporaries who were long accustomed to similar state-sponsored transatlantic expeditions and probably happy to see fewer parentless children on London’s streets.Footnote 40 Unfortunately for Peter and his parliamentary collaborators, however, the ongoing civil war meant that it could not be evaluated in a vacuum. Unpacking the various ways in which royalists leveraged both the assumed vulnerability of Peter’s young charges as well as their undeniable status as victims of civil war through a partisan print culture makes visible an anti-puritan “politics of instruction.”
Condemning Peter’s Project
Three different contexts provided critics of Peter’s project with ample opportunity for further ridicule, ensuring that the brief mention it received in the XIV articles soon blossomed into a more concentrated critique. The first context was fiscal. By mid-1642, Parliament and the king alike had begun mobilizing money and men in preparation for war.Footnote 41 This was a complicated and contested process, since they were competing for the same limited resources. But it was especially tricky for the Parliament-men, who had to devise novel legislative tools to justify their fundraising efforts in the absence of Charles’s legitimating royal seal. Although they ultimately did so quite successfully, Parliament’s fiscal ingenuity left it open in turn to accusations of corruption, rapacity, and theft. In this light, Peter’s transportation proposal made an excellent target.
Royalists leveraged this financial angle to suggest that the funds raised by Peter and Weld for the children would instead be put toward Parliament’s war chest. In fact, even the venture’s sympathetic London backers eventually came to question Peter’s fiscal probity, albeit for different reasons. Peter’s initial proposal stipulated that the Londoners’ donations would be repaid by the grateful New Englanders who would soon benefit from the children’s labor. By June 1644, however, no repayments had yet been posted, as evidenced by the angry messages that the scheme’s English investors sent to Massachusetts.Footnote 42 Moreover, there was in fact more trouble than their London correspondents knew. For, rather than using the orphan funding for its intended purpose, Bay Colony magistrates instead drew on it to subsidize other colony business, including, in one particularly egregious instance, the construction of a new presidential home for Harvard College.Footnote 43 The fact that some of the donations were pilfered by several of Peter’s affiliates en route to Boston only worsened the potential scandal.Footnote 44
And a scandal it became. When the news broke in England in 1648, Weld and Peter—both of whom had long since left the colony’s employ—were forced to compile an exculpatory account of the whole affair that Weld entitled “Innocency Cleared.”Footnote 45 Weld authored this rebuttal in large part to reassure potential investors in another burgeoning New England fundraising project—John Eliot’s proselytization mission to North American Indigenous peoples—but there were more personal reasons, too.Footnote 46 As the tract’s subtitle made clear, Weld hoped that “Innocency Cleared” would finally “silence the malitious” tongues that had dogged him and his partner since the beginning of the 1643 transportation project.Footnote 47 Given that the debate over the orphan funding continued to rage for years on both sides of the Atlantic, those hopes were clearly in vain.
Meanwhile, there was a second, more troubling, context in play that rendered Peter’s proposal—and, through it, Parliament itself—even more vulnerable to criticism. Since 1641, English port cities, and especially London, had been plagued by a new class of criminals who, amid the wartime chaos, had begun coercing (and sometimes forthrightly kidnapping) young people from England’s streets and shipping them to the burgeoning plantation colonies of Barbados and Virginia, where they were put to work harvesting tobacco and sugar. These unscrupulous traders soon became known as “spirits” in recognition of their ability to confound and mislead vulnerable young minds. Social and economic historians have written much about the spirits’ exploitative work, linking it variously with the history of forced labor, the rise of Anglo-American abolitionism, and the politics of consent.Footnote 48 As they have shown, plenty of evidence for the spirits’ existence survives in contemporary records, including accounts of formerly spirited children themselves.Footnote 49
To be sure, Peter’s orphan transportation scheme was entirely unrelated to the illegal labor of these criminals. Not only were Peter’s wards destined for New England rather than the Caribbean or the Chesapeake, but they were at least ostensibly going of their own free will (or with the acquiescence of their adult minders, anyway). Even so, hostile writers found it all too easy to conflate the two phenomena. This was a particularly enticing strategy for royalist scribblers because the Parliament-men were deeply concerned about the spiriting trade, which was booming right under their noses in London.
That returns us to the Parliament’s anti-kidnapping ordinance of May 1645.Footnote 50 It is unsurprising to find parliamentarians on the defensive against critics who accused them of conspiring with the spirits. Radical militants and grieving parents alike protested the forced transportation of English children to the Americas throughout the 1640s in precisely those terms. The future Leveller Richard Overton, for one, accused the Westminster regime in 1645 of sending English “Husband[s] and Fathers” to die on the battlefield before “subject[ing] the innocent Babes to be led by the Spirit into Indian Deserts and Wildernesses” rather than providing them with charitable relief.Footnote 51 Charles’s press corps repeated similar allegations about kidnapped children as well as royalist women, “whom they [i.e., Parliament] send beyond seas, and sell for ready money.”Footnote 52 There may well have been concrete evidence for this assumed connection: as David Harris Sacks has discussed, the Parliament-men who authored the 1645 ordinance expressed suspicion about the activities of one Edward Peade, a commissioner for the Somers Island Company, who reportedly moved in the same circles as some godly Parliament-men and who was later imprisoned for engaging in child-stealing on behalf of his associates in Bermuda.Footnote 53 Intersections like these, whether genuine or merely incidental, made it all too easy for critics to implicate Parliament in the work of London’s child-snatching spirits.
This second context has received the most attention from historians to date, although rarely in connection with either Peter’s transportation proposal or the related royalist polemics. But there is one more framework to consider, and it is arguably the most crucial for understanding why the orphan scheme became such a fruitful target for loyalist malcontents: puritanism. Many royalist sympathizers held their enemies’ godly religion to be depraved, even diabolical, and they frequently blamed it for igniting civil war in the first place. During the early 1640s, moreover, hyper-puritan New England played an important role in this argument.Footnote 54 Consider a leading question posed by the XIV articles: who had authored the puritans’ “new Gospell, which teacheth us … to rebell and resist the King,” its royalist author asked? None other, it answered, than “the ministers”—like Hugh Peter himself—“that brought it over from New-England.”Footnote 55 Crucially, the reference to teaching reflected a fundamental element of this anti-puritan critique: the focus on godly (mis)education as a source of puritan rebelliousness. Through such language, the notion that “new England … theologues” like Peter hoped to turn “old England into New England spiritually” came to serve as a crucial third lens through which royalist writers indicted his transportation project.Footnote 56
The Politics of Education
Post-Reformation English authorities took education seriously. From the reign of Henry VIII, wealthy and socially privileged Tudor children were subjected to a basic schooling regimen in which classical learning, instruction in Protestant orthodoxy, and simplistic political indoctrination intermingled promiscuously. This was generally bolstered by in-home tutoring and the growing accessibility of specific educational and religious texts for young people.Footnote 57 Later royal regimes campaigned for the creation of a standardized educational curriculum at the parochial level; however, not much had come of those efforts by the early 1640s. Instead, excepting for a few very wealthy universities (Oxford and Cambridge) and grammar schools (Eton, Winchester, St Paul’s), the pedagogical landscape remained variegated and informal, organized primarily around individual teachers and ambitious parish ministers.Footnote 58 Education in early modern England was therefore much less of an institutional matter than it was a product of local circumstances, although some corners of the kingdom—especially London, home to several prominent grammar schools as well as a host of additional pedagogical and professional institutions that a 1615 commentator dubbed “the Third Universitie in England”—were much better served than others.Footnote 59
For this reason, contemporaries scrutinized schoolmasters and teaching clergymen closely, since in the absence of a formal curriculum, educators held enormous power to mold the minds of their young charges. Apart from the period 1646–60, when the dissolution of the episcopal hierarchy put a temporary end to the official licensing system long employed for this purpose, early modern England’s church and state kept a close eye on potential educators.Footnote 60 The stakes were high: failure to sufficiently vet prospective teachers, as Thomas Elyot observed in 1531, risked much, lest “by any unclean example the tender mind of the child may be infected.”Footnote 61
The overarching concern of commentators like Elyot was confessional. English Protestants had long feared that popish schoolmasters and priests might steer their young charges into heresy, and as a result, raise up a new generation of domestic papists to challenge the true church. Elizabethan and early Stuart parliaments took several steps to head off this frightening possibility, such as barring recusants from serving as schoolmasters and disqualifying them from taking on grants of wardship. They also contemplated even more severe measures: Lucy Underwood has shown that the Commons attempted to pass bills for the “removal of Catholic children from their parents at the age of seven, to be educated as Protestants,” at least seven times between 1593 and 1625. All of those efforts eventually failed, but that did not prevent the development of a “Catholic mythology” centered on “the Catholic child taken from his/her parents and re-educated.”Footnote 62 A particular focus of puritan concern, especially after Charles I’s marriage to the Catholic princess Henrietta Maria in 1625, was the potential corruption of the royal children at their mother’s hand.Footnote 63 Hugh Peter, who had been imprisoned during the 1620s for preaching against the queen’s “popish, sinful” influence at court, surely sympathized with this current of thought.Footnote 64
More evidence of these anxieties and the measures that they provoked comes from seventeenth-century Ireland, where the English authorities implemented an aggressive Protestantization agenda against that kingdom’s Catholic majority. From Dublin, successive early Stuart administrations employed numerous strategies to secure the conversion of Irish young people by taking early control of their education, including manipulating grants of wardship over the children of Catholic peers to place them in Protestant hands.Footnote 65 As Jane Ohlmeyer writes, “from the mid-sixteenth century the Crown recognized the significance of state-controlled schooling as a means of promoting anglicization and Protestantism”; indeed, Trinity College was founded by Elizabeth I precisely to save Irish children from being sent to Catholic foreign schools abroad.Footnote 66 From the Crown’s perspective, then, grammar schools were a critical battlefield in the war against papistry both in England and beyond its shores. Here were the “politics of education” in a nutshell.
Yet Catholicism was not the only threat detected by many English Protestants in this sphere. Elizabeth I herself was also concerned with the possibility that puritan schoolmasters might entice the young into what she deemed “radical religion.” This anxiety about the potentially harmful influence of too-godly teachers was shared by many anti-puritan commentators—one Laudian university president opined, during the mid-1630s, that “there was ‘no so obnoxious a pestilence to Church and Kingdom as a Puritan schoolmaster’”— and it was bolstered by the fact that the English godly devoted great resources to the construction and endowment of educational institutions throughout the period.Footnote 67 Although these puritan benefactors shared the conformists’ worries about the dangers of Catholic instructors, and while they seemed to harbor no grand plans for an educational revolution of their own, many non-puritans continued to doubt their good intentions.Footnote 68
Such antagonism naturally led the godly to distrust the Protestant bona fides of conformist Protestant schoolmasters in turn, and the religious frictions of the 1620s and 1630s (most obviously, the rise of the Laudians and the resulting puritan exodus to faraway New England) only provided more ammunition for both parties. By 1637, according to Peter Heylyn, Laud himself was watching the islands of Guernsey and Jersey closely, since “the Islanders did use to breed such of their Sons as they designed for the Ministry either at Saumur or Geneva, from whence they returned well-seasoned with the Leaven of Calvinism.” There was “no better way,” the archbishop purportedly thought, “to purge that old Leaven out of the Islands than to allure the people to send their Children to Oxon or Cambridge; nor any better expedient to effect the same than to provide some preferments for them in our Universities.” At the same time, he already had his eyes on New England, which rivaled “old Rome” as a “Sanctuar[y]” for English Christians who “longed for Novelties and Innovations both in Church and State” and thus represented another potential haven for the unchecked proliferation of radical Calvinism.Footnote 69
The 1640s brought English concerns about malevolent religious instruction, both puritan and popish, to a new level of intensity. During the early days of the Long Parliament, the puritan minister Cornelius Burges once again advocated for the “taking away of [Catholics’] children, and training them up … so there may not still be new generations of Papists,” setting the tone for many years of similar parliamentary pronouncements.Footnote 70 Both the 1640 Root and Branch petition against episcopacy and the Grand Remonstrance that followed it stressed the lamentable ignorance of English subjects and suggested that educational reform, including the purging of insufficiently godly schoolmasters and lecturers, might solve the problem.Footnote 71 The Commons made repeated references to the upbringing of English youth, from fears expressed in June 1641 about the threat of foreign Catholics “seducing the Children of Protestants … to Popery”—shades, here, of the English conversion system imposed on Ireland earlier in the century—to concerns about the education of the king’s children.Footnote 72 The celebrated puritan lawyer William Prynne was one of several parliamentary propagandists who worried publicly that Charles’s Catholic “Queen and popish Counsellors” might seduce the “heires apparent [sic] to his Crownes” away from Protestantism entirely.Footnote 73 The Nineteen Propositions presented to Charles by Parliament in 1642 articulated these worries about the royal offspring directly to the king while also calling for a “Bill … for the Education of Children of Papists by Protestants in the Protestant Religion.”Footnote 74 This was a telling intervention, not least because several of Charles’s youngest children were currently in Parliament’s hands, and it was finally put into motion on 3 January 1643, just weeks before Peter made his own pitch to the Commons.Footnote 75
Royalists did not take these suggestions well. Of course, on one level, parliamentary concern about the spiritual and ideological credentials of English educators was simply an extension of long-standing post-Reformation concerns about popish schoolteachers. But the religious politics of the period lent an immediacy to those debates that had been absent before the outbreak of civil war. Consider the words of the puritan clergyman Herbert Palmer, who urged a sympathetic audience in 1643 to “secure youth in the Universities, and Schools, with the utmost of care … [since] the young ones are the hopes or the bane of the Church and State in the next 20, or 10. or 7. years.”Footnote 76 Two decades prior, few English listeners would have seriously objected to this thesis, at least in its most general sense. But when filtered through the partisan perspectives that were blossoming in print by the time of Palmer’s pronouncement, it took on a far more politicized tone. And Charles’s royalists—who, paradoxically, had spent significant energy denigrating English sectarians as unlearned, bumbling sectarians earlier in the decade—were paying attention.Footnote 77
An early example of this rhetoric appeared in a satirical petition of March 1643, just weeks after Hugh Peter’s orphan transportation scheme received its first public airing. The piece, ostensibly authored by “the Schollers Of the severall Gramer-Schooles, in and about the City of London,” pleaded with Parliament for permission to join the capital’s apprentices in forsaking their duties to go serve in its armies instead, “in this yeer of Jubile[e], when all manner of people are suffered to doe what they please.”Footnote 78 The piece ridiculed these faux-petitioners for their credulousness, but the subtext was more interesting: these young people, the unknown authors appeared to be arguing, had been taken in by the “Principles of necessary and wholsome Rebellion” that had first unleashed civil war six months prior, and London’s grammar schools had played a role in that process. The petitioners concluded with a promise to “grow up and conforme themselves” to those same rebellious principles once the war had been won.Footnote 79
Similarly caustic royalist rhetoric emerged in response to a more advanced iteration of these politics of instruction: namely, Parliament’s attempted reforms of the universities. In December 1640, the Commons convened a committee to “consider of the Abuses in Matters of Religion and Civil Government, either done or suffered by the Universities,” and by the spring of 1643 a parliamentary newswriter was crowing that many of Cambridge’s “Schollers” had recently been “sent away from thence, because they shew themselves exceedingly disaffected to the Parliaments Proceedings in those parts.”Footnote 80 This parliamentary purge of Cambridge’s loyalist elements culminated in a full-blown “Bill for the Regulating of the Universities” later that fall.Footnote 81 Oxford, the king’s new capital, came under even greater scrutiny in London, and parliamentarian pamphleteers soon recast the university town as a hotbed of “Catholic influence and misguided counsel directed towards the destruction of English Protestantism.”Footnote 82 Thus did Parliament broadcast its intention to crack down on heterodox and dissident educators at all levels of the educational establishment; and royalists increasingly responded in kind.
The tenor of the royalist reaction is evidenced by a mid-1643 tract entitled The Cambridge royallist imprisoned, which accused a parliamentary committee of firing “Volley[s] of Curses’ gainst the [loyalist] Schollers” before preemptively locking them up “to keepe us, till we should some Crime commit.”Footnote 83 Charles’s partisans likely also balked when, later that year, the House of Lords heard arguments favoring the establishment of a new college in London, to be staffed by (presumably puritan) faculty fleeing from now-royalist Oxford. The proposed institution was intended “to provide for the godly and scholastic Education of…younger Students” to ensure “a continued Succession and Supply of deserving Members serviceable both in Church and State.”Footnote 84 It is easy to see how such plans, considered in tandem with Parliament’s proposed university reforms, might lead royalists to look askance at “godly education” more broadly.
Parliament’s efforts to regulate the lives of the royal children also fit into this burgeoning metanarrative. Notably, Charles made no public objection to any of the Nineteen Propositions’ requests regarding his offspring’s upbringing.Footnote 85 Even so, he could not have been happy to learn that the well-known puritan minister Stephen Marshall was delivering monthly lectures to those of his children still in parliamentary captivity (a fact reported with alarm by Mercurius aulicus in 1644), or to discover that their servants had been forced to swear an oath promising not to “endeavour to work or cause any Misunderstanding or Disaffection between any of the King’s Children and either House of Parliament.”Footnote 86 He probably was not surprised, at least. Earlier that year, in May, Aulicus had run a story about a “well-disposed” (i.e., loyalist) London apprentice who, after enduring days of haranguing by three puritan “Lecturers” who sought to “worke [him] into Rebellion,” finally “hang’d himselfe” instead of giving in. Then, weeks later, a parliamentary ordinance for Gloucestershire mandated the ejection and replacement of “all Ministers and Schoole-masters … scandalous in their lives, or ill affected to the Parliament,” suggesting that a fatal choice similar to that faced by Aulicus’s poor apprentice might soon await every young schoolchild in the county.Footnote 87 (And beyond: Parliament granted its Committee for Plundered Ministers the “Power to enquire after malignant School-masters” all over England in October 1643, suggesting that ejections of loyalist schoolmasters might follow suit wherever Parliament held sway.)Footnote 88 Here, that is to say, lay the crux of some royalists’ fears about what “godly education” might entail for English children: spiritual coercion, alienation, or death.
A Royalist Conspiracy Theory
Each of these contexts shaped the royalist response to Peter’s transatlantic transportation proposal of January 1643. Most of the resulting critiques appeared in cheaply printed texts published either underground in London or more safely from Oxford between 1643 and 1645. As with much royalist polemic, the attacks emerged piecemeal, sprinkled throughout the mélange of anti-parliamentarian newssheets, pamphlets, and broadsides that flew from loyalist presses in these years. Still, most turned on a single, fundamental point: placing vulnerable young people into the hands of certified puritan rebels like Hugh Peter, for any reason, posed great risks to both the children themselves and to England more broadly.
The economic angle surfaced repeatedly. For instance, some Oxford publicists denounced the money ostensibly gathered by Peter for the orphans’ benefit as just another parliamentary trick to milk London of its resources while leaving the children themselves in penury. Royalist pamphleteers thus glossed the “Collections made at the Church-doores under pretence of furnishing and clothing children to goe for New-England” as a paradigmatic example of the “new Arts invented for extorting money” by Charles’s enemies to “uphold the Warre.”Footnote 89 Alternatively, in October 1643, a royalist newspaper claimed to have identified a London vessel that was bound for New England “laden” with “at least a Million” English gold—some of it, presumably, collected on the false pretense of subsidizing the children’s journey westward.Footnote 90 On this reading, parliamentarians cared more about the funding elicited by Peter’s transportation racket than the children he claimed to be helping.
More interesting were those royalist critics who framed Peter’s orphan proposal through the connected lenses of spiriting and anti-puritanism. This approach is most evident from a recently discovered document held by the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas Austin: a manuscript sermon purportedly preached by Peter himself in London in April 1643, several months after his presentation to Parliament. Taking the biblical text Isaiah 25:6, which foretells that God will deliver a bounteous feast to his faithful followers, Peter scolded his listeners for rejecting that promise of spiritual sustenance in favor of sinful earthly delights. One sign of their faithlessness, the diatribe made clear, was their foot-dragging in funding Peter’s orphan scheme. “What adoe was here the last weeke to gather a few 1000l amongst you,” Peter reprimanded his audience; it was a bad sign, for with “noe more money to be parted with … then what followes; noe God.”Footnote 91 Then, later in the piece, he addressed the “foolish … talke that I have gathered up a number of Children to carry over with me into New England, and there to sell them into bondage and slavery.” “Lett me tell you,” he claimed, “I am ashamed there should be soe much talke about nothing … doe you but p[ro]vide for theire bodies, and lett me alone for theire Soules.”Footnote 92 Here was proof, not only of real contemporary skepticism about Peter’s intentions, but also of the proposal’s direct linkage, by angry Londoners, with the infamous spiriting trade, which the sermon aptly identified with “slavery.”
However, there is more than one way to read the document. In fact, it seems possible that the text is not a genuine record of Peter’s words at all, but instead a clever fake: a royalist forgery that mimicked the language of puritan piety just well enough to paint the New Englander as a raving zealot. This tactic was a staple of Charles’s press corps, which published several similarly forged pamphlets during the early 1640s, and there are numerous other signs that the Ransom Center document may also a piece of royalist misinformation.Footnote 93 Consequently, this has repercussions for how we read the text—and, therefore, what it tells us about contemporary reactions to the orphan proposal.
Consider Peter’s plea to “but p[ro]vide for theire bodies, and lett me alone for theire Soules.”Footnote 94 On the surface, this line seems to herald the rich spiritual upbringing that awaited the children as future members of New England’s godly church. But when read as royalist satire, it instead promises something darker: that is, the children’s impending corruption by heterodox puritan educators. On this reading, Peter’s care for the children’s “Soules” suggested that malevolent spiritual instruction, as much or more so than conventional “Slavery,” was the real danger posed by a transatlantic visit to New England. And, given the commonplace early modern assumptions about the vulnerability of young children to evil influences, that was a very frightening proposition.
In addition to the broader royalist narrative of malicious godly instruction outlined above, Peter’s opponents had good reason to associate him in particular with both slavery and puritan (mis)education. Both topics had surfaced repeatedly in New Englands first fruits, the anonymous pamphlet that appeared at the precise moment of Peter’s initial pitch to Parliament and which had proposed essentially the same project to its readers. In fact, Peter and Weld themselves had authored large portions of this tract, and astute contemporaries may also have linked its two central themes—the conversion the region’s Indigenous population to Christianity (tellingly, via their “Children”) and the impressive “progresse in Learning and godlinesse” being made at the new “Colledge” of Harvard—to Peter’s proposal.Footnote 95 For such readers, New Englands first fruits made very clear what Bay Colony “learning” entailed for both Indigenous and English children living in Massachusetts, even praising individual New England schoolmasters for their “painlessness in teaching and education of the youth.”Footnote 96 Royalists in particular may have reacted ambivalently to its stories of Indigenous converts whose Christianization was so complete that they would “weep and cry when detained … from the Sermon.”Footnote 97 In short, even after accounting for London’s plague of kidnapping spirits and the burgeoning New England trade in enslaved Indigenous people that had sprung up following the recent Pequot War (a trade in which Peter himself took part), the evidence presented in New Englands first fruits might well have convinced skeptical contemporaries that godly miseducation, rather than straightforward forced labor, was the true threat awaiting Peter’s transported young people overseas.Footnote 98
There were plenty of other reasons beyond New Englands first fruits for Peter’s critics to connect Parliament’s alarming fixation on education with the American puritan colonies. By mid-1643 New Englanders had peppered England’s print marketplace with arguments about the efficacy of their congregational model, some centered on the role of children within the church polity.Footnote 99 The Bay Colony’s own records from this period reflect the same concern with young people’s “Christian education.” In June 1642, for example, the colonial leadership ordered that local magistrates redouble their efforts to teach New England children “to read & understand the principles of religion.” Most of those towns subsequently hired godly men to serve as schoolmasters: all told, seven of the eleven schoolmasters who taught in seventeenth-century Dedham eventually went on to become ministers.Footnote 100 And all of them, as royalist satirists made clear, had since the 1630s operated far beyond the regulatory reach of the English episcopate.
Thus well-informed royalists may have easily imagined puritan colonists working to convert transported English children to their radical godly ecclesiology, especially considering the efforts of “learned Colledges” like Harvard (for which Peter served as an early overseer) to tutor both Indigenous Americans and adolescent colonists in the faith.Footnote 101 Certainly the appearance of all three themes—education, puritan piety, and transported young people—in texts like New Englands first fruits would have done nothing to assuage royalists’ fears, even if they did not suspect that Peter was responsible for that pamphlet’s publication.Footnote 102 All told, it seems plausible that these arguments encouraged royalists to imagine the transatlantic transportation of English orphans as a precursor to their slide into puritan heterodoxy—and from there, as the royalist John Taylor put it, to help “new Englands Sects Strive Impiously, / to turne old England to an Anarchy”—and, consequently, to read it as a particularly alarming iteration of the anti-puritan politics of instruction coming into vogue elsewhere in royalist polemic.Footnote 103
We have already spotted this implication in several 1643 royalist commentaries on the orphan scheme. Consider one last tract published that spring that mentioned Peter’s proposal “for poore children to be sent over to get good breeding in New-England.” Like some of his compatriots, the author argued that any donations resulting from this “pretence” of a “collection” would be used to enrich the parliamentary leadership rather than to aid London orphans.Footnote 104 But here, the jibe at puritan “good breeding” was the more telling language, for it reflected the fundamental skepticism about godly education that Laud had invoked against Guernsey and Jersey in 1637 and that had surfaced repeatedly in royalist polemical print by the time that Parliament issued its exculpatory ordinance of May 1645.
That pronouncement, which protested the “barbarous … steal[ing] away [of] many little Children” and the “malicious Misinterpretation[s]” of its critics in equal measure, proved that the Parliament-men were listening. Moreover, the Commons’ reference to any “Order or Ordinance of Parliament, by which … they may pretend to draw any Colour or Pretence for so great a Wickedness,” almost certainly meant Peter’s 1643 proposal.Footnote 105 The London newssheet Perfect occurrences drew the same connection more publicly. While simultaneously vindicating the “New England men” from the charge of hijacking “the monies collected, about two yeares since, for the transportation of poor children to New England,” the editor bemoaned that those same New Englanders had been blamed for the acts of “a generation of base and sordid Spirits … that gather up children to send them for slaves to Barbadoes, Virginia, [and] Turkie,” all to “spit venome in the faces of the Saints.”Footnote 106 Yet another parliamentary newsbook responded even more heatedly:
This day there was published a Declaration against those that take up Children, or steale Children to send beyond Seas. Something hath been attempted that way, its believed; Hanging’s too good for them that did it: the Childe is better than the Horse or Cow. But that so much should be done as the Malignants in London (of whom there is no want) have reported, insomuch that if all the tales that have been told were printed, they would make as great a volume as Esops Fables, Guy of Warwick, Bevis of Southampton, and St. George for England; And all this to make a tumult or insurrection in the City, and all fathered upon the Parliament as the author, and upon Mr. Peters as the chiefe agent or actor.Footnote 107
Here, the royalists’ libelous effort to link Peter’s transportation scheme with London’s malignant spirits was rendered perfectly clear by their aggrieved parliamentarian opponents.
That effort did not cease with the ordinance’s appearance, either. Two days later, Aulicus doubled down. “The Members [of Parliament],” its editors began, “now … are gathering up as many boyes and children as they can find in the streets, to be shipt away beyond the Seas.” The newsbook proceeded to offer accounts from onlookers who had witnessed these “children-takers” in action before claiming that dozens of “little children” had already been “snatcht up.” Like earlier royalist commentary, the newsbook offered a conflicted reading. Although “the Members pretence was to seize only upon Papists and Malignants children, whom they would ship away for their better education in the Protestant Religion,” Aulicus announced in pointed language, “the truth is, they have designed a New Plantation”—meaning, presumably, the American puritan colonies—“for their own personall service; to which place these Children must be dispatched.” Still, their ultimate purpose remained murky. “Whether therefore they designed for ready money to sell these Children beyond the Seas,” Aulicus wrote, “or put their parents here to compound for their Redemption…we cannot determine.”Footnote 108 As a later issue confirmed, only the fact that “Children were stolen to be shipt away to their foraigne plantations” was certain.Footnote 109 But given the royalists’ general attitude toward godly “education,” it seems possible that the assimilation of vulnerable English youths had something to do with it, too.
Restoration Resonances
It is unknown whether or not the twenty-odd children who arrived in Boston from London in the summer of 1643 eventually were subjected to the Bay Colony’s burgeoning instructional curriculum. Although we can identify several of the transported youths by name from Weld’s exculpatory “Innocency Cleared,” there is very little other distinguishing information in that document, and none of the transported young people has yet resurfaced in the relevant colonial records. Of course, it is possible that the transplants not only failed to assimilate to Massachusetts’ pious curriculum, but instead rebelled against it.Footnote 110 Back in London, meanwhile, civil war, and the debate over transatlantic deportation, still raged.
But not for much longer. After Oxford’s 1646 surrender, royalist apologists rarely identified godly miseducation as a concern even as bipartisan outcries against the “diabolical practise” of those “Spirits of Devils” continued to echo in print.Footnote 111 In 1652, for instance, one critic repeated the accusation that Peter had served as the “chief Agent, Actor or Procurer” of “the Spirits that took Children in England.” But here, while the abductions remained “set awork first by the Parliament,” the New England colonies went unmentioned. Other postwar commentary, like the loyalist clergyman Edward Symmons’s 1647 denunciation of Parliament-men who “suffered those theeves (their Brethren) to steal away Christian Children, from these our Coasts,” followed the same pattern.Footnote 112 According to some later royalist writers, in fact, Parliament had in fact expanded the trade to adults: “the Parliament Spirits,” one newsbook wrote in July 1648, “such as took up little Children two years agoe, now are grown so impudent that that they take up men.” Again, there was no mention of the puritan colonies.Footnote 113
This is an interesting shift that possibly reflected Parliament’s continued attempts to distance itself from the early 1640s kidnapping scandal: efforts that may, in royalist eyes, have rendered the original charge ineffective.Footnote 114 It may, too, have come about because of the fallout over finances that prompted Weld to write “Innocency Cleared” and that, consequently, ensured that no more children were shipped under Weld and Peter’s auspices after the mid-1640s. It certainly was not because the spirits had stopped operating. As Sacks observes, the practice continued into the 1650s, largely unhampered by Parliament’s endeavors to prevent it, as demand for bonded laborers skyrocketed across the Atlantic world.Footnote 115 Nevertheless, royalist polemicists apparently moved on from this line of argument after the fall of Oxford.Footnote 116 Perhaps Charles’s subsequent surrender to the Scots convinced his partisans that they had more pressing worries at hand than the spiritual subversion of English young people.
At least until the Restoration, that is. Anti-puritan anxieties about the impact of malignant godly teaching on the outbreak of the English Revolution appeared repeatedly in loyalist discourse after 1660. Thomas Hobbes’s Behemoth famously branded the kingdom’s universities as the “core of rebellion”; but other late Stuart commentators pointed their fingers instead at the grammar schools.Footnote 117 In Ireland, even before Charles II’s return and probably after it, too, the royalist peer Mount Alexander required that “his own children attend ‘orthodox schools’, not tainted by Presbyterian, Puritan or Anabaptist doctrines.”Footnote 118 In England, the Gloucestershire royalist John Smyth junior went to court to save a Wotton grammar school from puritan schoolmasters on similar ideological grounds.Footnote 119 Even overseas, Virginia governor William Berkeley purportedly thanked God in 1671 that his colony possessed “no free schools nor printing,” since “learning has brought disobedience and heresy.”Footnote 120 Perhaps most poignantly, the Anglican priest Lancelot Addison, in his postwar reflections on the evils of civil war, bemoaned that during the 1640s, the people had been “possessed with strange whimsies in religion, and hurried on by the spirit of schism and sedition into all manner of villainies.” From this point of view, William Bulman notes, “the sad fate of religious instruction during the Civil Wars and Interregnum may have shaped the pastoral mission of the Restoration church more than any other single revolutionary legacy.”Footnote 121
Writing just before the Restoration, the Duke of Newcastle was bluntest of all. Pressing the soon-to-be-king Charles II to ensure that English “Scoolemasters, from the petty Scooles, to the Gramer Scooles … bee orthodoxe according to the Church of England,” he wrote:
were a Childe Educated In Turkey, hee would bee a turke, & give god thankes for itt … So this Godly Educated man, Sees white presently hee thinkes, white as a Sirplis, that Sirplis upon A preacher, that preacher in a pulpett, preaching on the Passion, presently hee strickes his breste, & is at his prayers, with holly Ejachulations,—this is custome.Footnote 122
As such, he advised that because “wee are bred of that Religion or opinion wee are of…therefore no teaching of scooles … but such as the Bishops shall alow of & thinke Fitt.”Footnote 123 The passage of the 1662 Act of Uniformity, which reimposed stringent oaths of political loyalty and religious orthodoxy onto all who “instruct or teach any Youth as Tutor or Schoolmaster,” suggested that the young king and his advisors were paying attention to the well-established royalist politics of education that had emerged during the civil wars, even as England’s nascent empire profited from the very systems of coerced labor that Charles I’s pamphleteering partisans had protested so vigorously during the mid-1640s.Footnote 124
In those discussions, neither Peter’s transportation scheme nor his later efforts toward the “reformation of learning,” which resurfaced during his 1660 treason trial, emerged.Footnote 125 Nevertheless, it seems plausible that the same anti-puritan fear of malignant spiritual instruction so clearly articulated in Newcastle’s advice letter also motivated, at least in part, the libels of the XIV articles nearly twenty years prior. It was certainly evident, decades later, in the periodic outbursts of imperial administrators against the rebellious godly teachings of the “Wooden Colledge” of Harvard, stocked with “many English bookes of the late non-conformist writers” and subsequently partially blamed for the anti-Stuart uprisings that would rock the English Atlantic during the 1680s.Footnote 126 In this sense, the transatlantic anti-puritan politics of education that underwrote royalists’ attacks on Peter in 1643 arguably percolated in loyalist thought until at least the Williamite Revolution.
Conclusion
The attacks on Peter and his orphan transportation scheme were, by any measure of civil war politics, a minor affair. Yet when properly contextualized, they illuminate a rich seam of mid-century loyalist polemic rooted in anti-puritan conspiracy theories about the spiritual miseducation of English youth. Moreover, that discourse persisted for decades to follow, as evidenced by the experience of the godly merchant John Wilmore. Wilmore’s support for the Whig position during the Popish Plot crisis led him to be prosecuted by vengeful Stuart proxies on false charges of spiriting, illustrating the persistent connection between anti-puritan politicking and accusations of transatlantic kidnapping in later royalist rhetoric. “I had hereby exposed my self to all the Rage and Malice of the Popish Party,” he wrote in 1692, “that they would never leave pursuing me, until by one way or other they had my Blood, or ruined or removed me out of the way.”Footnote 127 Religion, partisanship, and the “spiriting” of young children thus continued to intermingle in the imagination late into the seventeenth century even as an alternative politics of labor, consent, and migration reared its head ever more aggressively.Footnote 128
To be sure, Wilmot’s example proves that royalist anxieties about godly miseducation in particular did not always factor into that equation after 1660. But elsewhere they remained an important theme of royalist political discourse well into the Restoration, twinning—and, for some particularly vociferous anti-puritans, surpassing—English Protestants’ well-established anxiety about the Catholic indoctrination of young people abroad. Occasionally, contemporaries made this connection themselves: in 1662, for example, Bishop Matthew Wren drew a direct parallel between the dangers of malignant puritan and Catholic schoolmasters when he asked, during an episcopal visitation, “doth your schoolmaster teach any Papists’ or Sectaries’ children, that come not to church? Doth he bring his scholars to church and duly instruct them all to learn the catechism in the Book of Common Prayer, at the least once every week; or what other catechism doth he teach?”Footnote 129 Thanks to a small set of ostensibly trivial libels and the charitable efforts of Hugh Peter to secure a better life for some London orphans, historians can now appreciate Wren’s claim more fully.
Samuel Fullerton is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of North Texas. He wishes to thank Alex Beeton, Sonia Tycko, and the journal’s readers and editorial team for their helpful feedback on earlier drafts of this article. Please address any correspondence to: samuel.fullerton@unt.edu
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