Seventeenth-century England was a Protestant kingdom, and for contemporary commentators, it was logical to assume that its subjects would export the Protestant religion when they ventured across the Atlantic. Samuel Purchas viewed the New World as an arena for ‘apostolicall conquests’.Footnote 1 Richard Hakluyt had believed that to ‘enlarge and advance’ the faith should be ‘the principal and chief’ consideration for English monarchs contemplating the expansion of the realm.Footnote 2 The rectitude of English colonists was proclaimed in opposition to the cruelties that had followed Iberian conquests in Mexico and Peru.Footnote 3 If the papal grant of America to the Spanish crown had come with the sanction of protecting and evangelizing among the native inhabitants, then ‘it naturally follows’, according to the Scottish clergyman and polemicist Robert Ferguson in 1698, that ‘having acted so directly contrary to all this…in massacring above forty millions of the Indians…all their Conquests are to be accounted Unjust, Tyrannical and Null’.Footnote 4 Yet a century after the planting of incipient settlements, the limited bonds forged between Protestant colonists and the peoples of the New World appeared equally troubling to authors reflecting on the Americas. ‘What a supine neglect doth attend us?’ complained one survey, in 1699: ‘That those very Indians who border upon the English Pale…should still continue in most wretched Ignorance?’Footnote 5 For Robert Ferguson, it was, ‘no small disgrace unto Protestant Kingdoms, States and Churches, that while they of the Romish Church…have been at such vast expences, to send and maintain Missioners in those parts…none of those stiled Reformed, have concerned themselves therein to any purpose’.Footnote 6 While the English abdicated their spiritual obligations, he contended, their territories lacked safe moral foundations, and the Catholic church had been presented with a polemical weapon to be deployed against Protestant congregations.
Robert Ferguson addressed English readers as a Presbyterian champion of the Scottish expedition to Darien, but his rebukes represented more than just a convenient rhetorical sideswipe. Twenty-five years earlier, as a dissenting preacher in the City of London, he had been part of a circle that sought to place an evangelical Protestant enterprise at the heart of English overseas expansion.Footnote 7 The New England Company, sanctioned by royal charter in 1662, had established a funded mission that aimed to take the gospel beyond the plantations and incorporate newly converted peoples as subjects of the English crown. Enduring through to the War of Independence, the Company established a string of Christianized Indian settlements in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, produced the first publication of the Bible in any North American language and fell briefly within the orbit of Restoration policy-making, with a profile that rested on the energy of its first governor, the natural philosopher Robert Boyle.Footnote 8 Its architects believed that the European trident of printing, navigation, and ‘thundring artilery’ could prove the instrument of a ‘great blessing to Christendome’, and the means to ‘add many thousands of new English Subjects to the English Empire’.Footnote 9 Positing the propagation of the gospel as an agent in the armature of English overseas expansion, they argued that the colonial enterprise would gain glory as the protective guard of the international Protestant cause. This article will look at how the New England Company was mobilized, organized, defended, and debated within the British Isles: in regal councils, among its own circles of correspondents and across the wider public domain. Examining its initiatives and, as lamented by Ferguson, its failures, sheds new light on the connection between the development of the North American colonies and the shaping of Protestant institutions within the three kingdoms.
Events in America have occupied, hitherto, a marginal position in the religious history of later Stuart Britain. While the emergence of an English Protestant mission and the creation of English colonies coincided in time and place, ‘the relevance of one to the other has not been considered’, as one recent scholar has lamented.Footnote 10 British historians have, accordingly, ‘been able to avoid including encounters with colonized peoples within their domestic history’, as another study comments.Footnote 11 This neglect draws attention to a similar gap within the scholarship centred on early English imperialism. While confessional circumstances have been studied as a factor behind westward migration, the connection between Protestantism and domestic debates over the enlargement of the kingdom has been subject to sparser coverage. Recent Atlantic historiography, shaped by the works of J. H. Elliott and David Armitage, has framed contrasts between the religious ideas attending on Spanish dominion and the alternative secular influences – drawn from Renaissance humanism and precepts of political economy – that governed English approaches towards the New World.Footnote 12 The shortcomings of the Protestant mission have been seen to exemplify this disjuncture. The volatility of the Anglo-Indian frontiers, brought to a state of conflagration with King Philip's War in 1675, provided the primary obstacle to a stable mission. However, even where alliances were forged and tribute exacted, it has been suggested that conversions were impeded by constraints intrinsic to the culture of English America. Calvinist scepticism towards the idea of conversion by human agency – voiced even by a theologian as familiar with Indian society as Roger Williams – struck a contrast to the proselytizing enthusiasm of Jesuits and Franciscans.Footnote 13 These inhibitions were compounded by the historic weight of English experiences in Ireland, which presupposed the construction of social and legal barriers against indigenous communities.Footnote 14 English settlers, according to one contemporary critic, ‘took more Pains to make the Land turn Protestant than the People’.Footnote 15
Yet recent works of colonial history have rediscovered the seriousness and extent of English attempts to incorporate Amerindians within a universal Protestant community. Mark Peterson and David Silverman have shown how engagement with indigenous peoples produced shifts in the ‘spiritual economy’ of the New England polities.Footnote 16 Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra has highlighted parallels between visions of Christian reconquista developed on the English and Spanish halves of the continent.Footnote 17 The foundation of the New England Company reflected, moreover, a time of growing confidence among European Protestants in their own capacity to proselytize, emboldened by the example of Dutch missionaries on the Asian subcontinent and across the frontiers of the old New Netherlands.Footnote 18 Anxieties over the limitations of the English mission in comparison with Spanish and, increasingly, Dutch achievements had risen intermittently through the century in Protestant devotional literature.Footnote 19 However, this article will suggest that the debate over Indian conversions possessed greater political salience after 1660, due to a conjunction of factors arising in England and the colonial world. First, the praying towns established by the clergyman John Eliot in Massachusetts could be held up as a viable model for the Christianization of native peoples: with Indians allowed considerable agency over the terms of their own conversion, an estimated 20 per cent of the native dwellers of New England had been baptized by 1700.Footnote 20 Secondly, missionary possibilities corresponded with the growing interest of the Stuart crown in the expansion and utilization of territories outside Europe. Finally, Company initiatives fell within a context of controversy over the renovation and restructuring of the post-Restoration Church of England. Boyle and his associates pitched their work as an intervention in domestic disputes over questions of toleration and comprehension, promising to heal the splits between Protestant congregations by reframing the church for the purpose of evangelical projects overseas.
The first half of this article will show how Robert Boyle's initiative developed by drawing in broad streams of Protestant opinion. Company proponents promoted their work simultaneously as an agenda for Stuart foreign policy and a priority for the re-established Church of England. Invoking Spanish and Jesuit precedents, they challenged ideas laid down during the first half century of English colonization, identifying the conversion and incorporation of native peoples not merely as an instrument of territorial outgrowth, but a source of moral legitimation. The article will then examine the problems that beset the project. I will show how the domestic reputation and resources of the Company were undermined by the religious discontents that destabilized later Stuart politics: the collapse of hopes for Protestant comprehension and the sealing of the schism between the clerical establishment and its dissenters on either side of the Atlantic. These divisions, refracted onto the colonial world, destroyed the Company's hopes for collaboration between different congregations, and prevented the conversion programme from emerging as a crown policy for the New World. Animosities between congregations should be seen, accordingly, as posing a substantial obstacle to the growth of the mission in North America and the development of an ecclesiastical policy for English colonization.
By the middle of the eighteenth century, the linkage between the Protestant religion and the emergence of the British empire appeared tautological: as Linda Colley and Kathleen Wilson have shown, conquests overseas would be retailed, and received, as evidence of the country's place among the Elect.Footnote 21 The final part of the article will suggest that, for seventeenth-century commentators, the connection was more problematic. The concept of ‘empire’ itself possessed elasticity in Restoration discourse, alluding principally to the establishment of independent authority or territorial autonomy rather than spatial enlargement.Footnote 22 The ‘plantations’ and ‘dominions’ outside Europe did feature increasingly in strategic and diplomatic calculations, but contemporary authors were sceptical as to whether an assemblage of ‘colonies for trade’ could be feasibly situated within the ‘empire’ of the Stuart monarchs.Footnote 23 The environment formed by English settlers in the New World perturbed more than it excited clerical authors in the three kingdoms: figuring not as a testament to the triumphs of a Protestant realm, but a new and disorderly outlet for religious divisions that threatened the authority of church and crown. The debate over the New England Company awakened old ideological tensions over the relationship between Christian conversion and territorial expansion, and stirred uncertainties in English debate as to how far the westward outgrowth of the realm could be positioned within the greater ‘Protestant interest’. The article will show finally how the project of the New England Company was overtaken by changes in international politics, when the decline of the Spanish enemy, the rise in the power of France, and the crisis of Protestant congregations on the continent challenged the idea that advancement in the New World constituted the primary claim upon the English godly conscience.
I
The questions stirred by Anglo-Indian encounters fell within a long-established arena of moral and theological discussion, opened up by the movement of Europeans beyond Christian frontiers. Racial identity was, as Colin Kidd has argued, ‘not a central organizing concept of intellectual life or political culture’ in early modern Europe. The shock of the unknown was contained by the influence of a monogenist theology that traced all human genealogies back to the sons of Noah; the mystery of the Indians linked more commonly to their paganism than their ethnic ‘otherness’.Footnote 24 If the practice of European expansion often undermined the brotherhood of man, sustaining the principle of consanguinity was vital nonetheless to upholding the scriptural narrative: the universality of original sin and the gospel promise of redemption.Footnote 25 English approaches towards native peoples took shape in the shadow of ideas that had accompanied and justified Spanish colonial practices in the first phase of New World settlement. The 1493 Bulls of Donation, widely identified by Protestant commentators as the fountainhead of Iberian claims over America, provided in reality a moral rather than a legal sanction: revised and modified through a century of Spanish political and theological debate.Footnote 26 Nonetheless, the missionizing logic of the papal exhortation had informed the close incorporation of Amerindians into Spanish colonial society, and the promise to vindicate spiritual obligations though an organized programme of conversion.Footnote 27 If Protestant commentators believed that the Christian content of these expeditions had been corrupted by errors and oppression, authors spanning the confessional spectrum from the Presbyterian Patrick Copeland to the Anglican royalist Peter Heylin were awed nevertheless by the evangelical self-confidence emerging from the Spanish colonies, and roused into apprehension that the great Christian conflict could be lost on the other side of the Atlantic.Footnote 28
Protestant clergymen in old and New England sketched the providential connection between the discovery of America and the beginnings of the Reformation, and hopes for evangelical triumphs were embedded in the literature that proclaimed colonial expeditions, from the foundation of the Virginia Company to the Cromwellian Western Design.Footnote 29 But if puritan migrants had imbibed the lesson of Matthew 10:13: ‘when they shall persecute you in this city flee to another’; they proved more taciturn in response to the biblical injunction that ‘This gospel of the kingdom shall be preached in all the world.’Footnote 30 Anglo-Indian connections increased steadily through the first half-century of colonization, in response to commercial opportunities, the settlers' need for territorial knowledge and military intelligence, and the flux that descended on indigenous communities beset by disease and loss of land.Footnote 31 However, missionary interests ran up against the scale of the pedagogic operation required to introduce speakers of un-codified languages to a religion centred on the written word: thinner in symbol and ritual than its Catholic rival, and averse to using local customs as building blocks towards conversion. Daunted by the variety of cultures and customs encountered in America, most of the first generation of New England divines concentrated upon the purification of settler society, and invoked an alternative scriptural architecture for colonization. Obedience to ‘the Grand Charter of Genesis’, with its command to make the earth fruitful, identified godly duty with the clearing, planting, and harvesting of vacant wastes: a claim over land rather than the souls of people.Footnote 32 A bleaker reading of the divine will emerged from one New York settler, who adduced providential motions ‘removing or cutting off the Indians, either by Wars, or by some raging mortal Disease’.Footnote 33 Political and commercial concerns gave sanction to the idea of separation between peoples. In England, the colonial projector Benjamin Worsley believed that Iberian methods were incompatible with stable plantations. The early settlers, he suggested in 1669, were ‘to be honoured for preserving their marriages free from mixture with Indians, soe that Their is noe Creolian seed’.Footnote 34 When John Eliot preached his first sermon in the Algonquian language in 1646, he confronted theological, political, and psychological reservations deeply ingrained in English colonial practices.Footnote 35
The ideological origins of the New England Company lay therefore in a debate that moved across the Atlantic world, over the viability of creating a Protestant mirror of the proselytizing Spanish dominions. The prospect was explored in a series of meditations voiced through the 1650s within the epistolary circle created by the natural philosophers Samuel Hartlib and Robert Boyle, and the Scottish clergyman John Dury. Apocalyptic speculations had been awakened within this group by the Protestant resurgence seen to spring from the power of England and Sweden.Footnote 36 Hartlib's correspondents looked simultaneously to fasten their engagement with natural philosophy onto a framework of Christian belief, seeking to capture the discovery of the uncharted world as the opening-up of God's revealed book.Footnote 37 By the point of the Restoration, these ideas had been complicated by anxiety over the abrasions in English religious life, and the centrality of Protestant divisions to the violent upheavals within the political nation. In an ‘Essay on the Holy Scriptures’, Robert Boyle sought to place ‘new learning’ within the contours of an irenicist religious revival. Natural philosophy, he believed, flourished in a Christian setting free of persecution – the way to establish this foundation was to redirect the energies of European Protestants, ‘to have the propagation of the gospel attempted, not by making an Independent a Presbyter, or Presbyter an Independent, but by converting those to Christianity that are either enemies or strangers to it’.Footnote 38 Boyle's evangelical hopes fixed initially upon Gaelic societies within the Stuart kingdoms; Turks and Lithuanians too fell within his vision of a universal Christian community created through translation and dissemination of the Bible.Footnote 39 Increasingly, however, the search for patronage encouraged him and others within his coterie to place their work within a context created by Restoration foreign policy.
Boyle and his correspondents re-engaged with an older set of concerns raised over the way in which the English could outmatch their Catholic rivals in the struggle for international supremacy. From Walter Raleigh's Discovery of Guiana to Robert Johnson's Nova Britannia, leaders of Atlantic expeditions had argued that successful enlargement rested upon attaining a state of grandezza that military power alone could not provide.Footnote 40 By 1660, the imperative was all the more urgent for a kingdom hauling itself out of the traumas of Civil War. For the clergyman John Beale, the principles of natural philosophy offered one route towards territorial mastery: ‘Wee can’, he argued to Boyle, ‘give man dominion over the Winds, Ayre, Water & Lands.’Footnote 41 But Beale contended that the Stuarts would find greatness only if they mobilized these resources to a higher purpose, and linked trading ventures, explorations, and discoveries not merely to the interests of a temporal crown but the welfare of the reformed religion. New instruments of navigation offered the chance to ‘take some lustre for our English Church’; by neglecting this opportunity, colonists risked allowing ‘the French, Italians, and Jesuits themselves’ to ‘preoccupate our glory, and turn our best artilery against ourselves’.Footnote 42 Beale lamented that English movement overseas had been fuelled disproportionately by the lust for exotic imports, for ‘extravagant Apparell and effeminate toyes’, ignoring all the warnings from the ancient world that ‘Pride, & Luxury…& abounding commerce have been the ruine, and precipitancy of all the Greatest Monarchys, that have ever-yet been’.Footnote 43 He impressed upon Robert Boyle the need for a cultural reframing of the English dominions, through heavier mercantile laws to constrain the spread of luxury, and the incorporation of Protestant Scots, whose ‘plain and hardy breeding’ could counterpoise the ‘excesses of London & Dublin’.Footnote 44 At the centre of his thoughts, however, was the call to establish dominion by bearing the banners of the reformed religion into America.Footnote 45
II
By 1660, therefore, voices among the English virtuosi were seeking to entrench the missionizing ideal within the organization and justification of colonial experiments. Acting upon these ideas, Robert Boyle began to cultivate links with the small circle of clergy and laymen who had attempted hitherto to export Protestant religion beyond the colonial borders. The missionary agenda had been foreshadowed in 1641 with a parliamentary petition issued by seventy-six English and Scottish ministers.Footnote 46 Their efforts brought the formation in 1649 of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in New England, centred on thirty clergymen and merchants bound by business connections to Massachusetts.Footnote 47 Staffed by a mixed body of Presbyterians and Independents, the Society rose within the Protestant ferment awakened by the Civil Wars, supported by legislation in the Rump Parliament, and backed by a stream of pamphlets that laid bare the millennial expectation behind the project.Footnote 48 However, in common with parallel blueprints issued for Wales and Ireland, the programme struggled to achieve political and financial security.Footnote 49 Its endurance was cast into doubt when the collapse of the Republic rendered the prospects for all Protestant schemes and hopes unleashed in the previous decade distinctly unpropitious.
The challenges posed with the Restoration paved the way for contact between New England missionaries and the networks that would evolve into the Royal Society: in particular with Robert Boyle, whose political connections offered obvious protective appeal. Daniel Gookin, superintendent of John Eliot's fledgling Indian congregation at Natick, came from a line of Boyle family clients and leaseholders in Cork. His cousin, the MP Vincent Gookin, had pleaded for the conversion of the Irish Gaels by pastoral suasion, as an alternative to Cromwellian transformation by the sword.Footnote 50 In October 1660, Boyle was approached by another correspondent, the puritan theologian Richard Baxter, who appealed to him to lodge a defence of the Society at court. Two months later, he joined the king's council for foreign plantations, placed on sub-committees to enquire into New England and Jamaica.Footnote 51 From this position, he lobbied for the mission, impressing upon Lord Chancellor Clarendon that the conversion project ‘could not be for any Faction, or Evil end, but honourable to the King and Land’.Footnote 52 Boyle's efforts were eased when the Society elected him governor, and resolved that any members who had held office under Cromwell should ‘quietly recede’ from its committee.Footnote 53 In February 1662, he claimed triumph, with the bestowal of a charter of incorporation as a royal company, and the affirmation from Charles II that the crown sought not merely ‘the outward prosperity of those colonies’, but aspired towards the ‘salvation’ of the Indians, ‘and the publishing of the most glorious Gospel of Christ among them’.Footnote 54 Eight privy councillors were installed as directors: the roll-call showed how Boyle had recast the public identity of the Society, bringing it back from the Cromwellian margins.Footnote 55
The New England Company capitalized on the political turn that had raised possessions outside Europe as a focal point of Restoration foreign policy, in the wake of new acquisitions in Bombay and Tangiers, and the decision to retain the Cromwellian conquest in Jamaica. Successive attempts had been made prior to the Civil Wars to bring Indian allies into a condition of subjecthood. In 1664, royal commissioners renewed the project by sealing off Narragansett lands in Rhode Island as a ‘king's province’ separate from the control of colonial councils.Footnote 56 The establishment of the Company was presented similarly as a means to tighten bonds between the different peoples of the plantations and the supervisory committees in London. Meeting at East India House, it stood at the heart of mercantile networks central to the process of English global expansion. In the City, the Company mobilized charitable bequests, printed promotional literature, and released funds through its investments. In New England, the United Commissioners representing the provincial councils acted as points of contact with clergymen selected to enter into Indian communities.Footnote 57 Protestant missionaries spoke in the language of the expanding regal domain. By ‘civilising’ as well as converting Indian pupils, John Eliot assured correspondents in England, he accomplished their ‘submission to ye Kings government’.Footnote 58 By bringing the propagation of the gospel into line with the extension of royal authority, the clergy offered, in Richard Baxter's words, ‘such a Work and Fruit of a Plantation, as was never before presented to a King’.Footnote 59
If the Company aimed to change the colonial strategies of the crown, its members submitted an equivalent challenge to the New England clergy: a call to remodel the political and devotional culture of the plantations by extending the Christian ‘garden’ into the wilderness. Missionary proponents cast the natives of America as a people with Christian capability: striking at the older puritan idea that the conversion of the Indians was a task unachievable before the coming of the Last Days, and encroaching on intellectual terrain associated hitherto with the Catholic clergy.Footnote 60 John Eliot acknowledged that his apprehension of the Indian language as a system suited to reception of the scriptures stemmed in part from conversations with a ‘French friar, sent Ambassador from Canada to our Massachusetts’.Footnote 61 John Scott, the Long Islander appointed Royal Geographer to Charles II drew upon Jesuit writings to speak of fugitive glimpses of the kinship connecting Indians and Europeans: arguing that native visions of the cosmos proved sufficient ‘affinity with the Hebrew’ to pinpoint the tribal peoples as ‘children of Israel’.Footnote 62 The project pushed towards a reform of colonial practices as well as puritan ideas. The Company charter encouraged the ‘placing out’ of Christianized ‘natives or their children…in English families and with English masters’.Footnote 63 John Scott argued that, as a consequence of conversion, the ‘trade and manufacture’ of Indian villages could be controlled ‘to the very great advantage of this Nation’.Footnote 64 Underpinning these hopes was a prolific exercise in theological production. Eliot's translation of the New Testament into Algonquian appeared, dedicated to Charles II, in 1663: within twelve months, 1,000 Indian bibles and psalters had entered publication in England, accompanied by linguistic instructions.Footnote 65 The logic of the mission was pointing the English dominions in an altered direction, towards the incorporating model of settler–native relations associated hitherto with the Spanish half of the continent.
III
For twenty-seven years, Robert Boyle held office as governor of the New England Company and ‘nursing father’ of the praying Indians, investing personal sums into the provision of preachers and devotional works.Footnote 66 The number of praying towns rose to fourteen: burgeoning after a series of tribal conflicts devastated the territorial holdings of the Massachusett Indians and flooded the Bay Colony with uprooted indigenous labourers.Footnote 67 By 1674, a reported 2,000 Indians had been brought within the arc of English authority.Footnote 68 The immediate hope of Company supporters rested on projecting a network of missionary foundations southward through the English colonies. In 1663, the proprietors of the incipient settlements in Carolina pledged to honour the king in ‘his pious & good Intention for ye Propogacon of ye Christian faith amongst ye Barbarous & Ignorant Indians’.Footnote 69 The Virginia clergyman Morgan Godwyn took up Boyle's early interest in extending the programme to the enslaved Africans of the Chesapeake and the Caribbean.Footnote 70 However, the praying towns also stirred ambitions for ‘holy experiments’ across a wider world. Thomas Hyde, the Oxford translator of the Malayan gospel in 1677, read and admired the reports from Massachusetts.Footnote 71 Boyle himself took the case for enlarging the mission to the directors in East India Company, approaching the Oxford colleges to solicit the names of Orientalist scholars who could venture into forts and towns on the subcontinent, and work towards the production of a vernacular Bible.Footnote 72
Yet the successes trumpeted in print sat at odds with the despondent mood increasingly voiced in private correspondence. The Boston merchant Edward Winslow lamented that, in England and America, ‘no work of God mett with more opposition’.Footnote 73 Boyle too became disconsolate over waning enthusiasm on the Council of Trade, regretting that corrupting ‘private interests’ had brought a ‘great defect’ into the operation.Footnote 74 By 1680, the momentum for the project had certainly slackened: there were never more than ten missionaries operating simultaneously, while clergymen complained of receiving only half the payment pledged for their labour.Footnote 75 The most immediate problems were localized. If they had berated Spanish impositions upon the Indians, the territorial encroachments of English settlers proved just as liable to create conflict.Footnote 76 The eruption of King Philip's War in 1675 claimed the lives of 600 settlers and 3,000 natives: the reputation of the missionary project suffered amid the spiritual and political tremors coursing subsequently through New England, while the number of praying towns contracted from fourteen to four.Footnote 77 Yet to characterize the initiative as a product of distant idealism assailed by local realities would offer an inaccurate picture. After the conclusion of the conflict, cohorts of Boston church leaders pronounced a defence of the new converts: Increase Mather's History of King Philip's War posited Indian attacks as a divine scourge against the godly for ‘our too great neglect’ of evangelical duties.Footnote 78 The United Commissioners insisted on the continuing efficacy of the conversion programme, lobbying Company directors into production of a second New Testament edition, followed in 1683 with the release of £400 for John Eliot's rendering of the Old Testament.Footnote 79
If King Philip's War narrowed the scope of the mission among the Indian population, the problem of insufficient political and clerical will was linked by Company correspondents to another source. The most serious burden on the project was identified not with hostile Indians or reluctant Calvinists, but religious tensions originating in the British Isles and sweeping across the Atlantic, when, in the words of one Massachusetts clergyman in 1673, ‘it hath often afflicted my spirit, that ye Churches…of ye Reformation are so estranged from one another’.Footnote 80 The comment exposed tensions deep-seated in the construction of the conversion programme. Robert Boyle's vision of binding old and New England in a shared evangelical operation sat uncomfortably with the limited authority of the crown in America, and the weakness of its own preferred variant of the Protestant religion. The character of New World Protestantism recalled the decentralized, multi-credal nature of the early colonizing ventures. After the outbreak of Civil War, the movement of sectaries, soldiers, preachers, and prisoners through the Atlantic had refigured the colonial world in a form manifestly not of the Stuarts' own making.Footnote 81 By 1677, the presence of only ten Church of England clergymen even in royalist Virginia, among a population of 30,000 Europeans, highlighted the difficulty of embedding the apparatus of establishment.Footnote 82 In much of New England, the confessional framework was fashioned by voluntarist association and private initiative: ‘a chaos of all Religions & like material prima susceptible to all formes’, as reported by one correspondent to Richard Baxter.Footnote 83 Only in Massachusetts did a strong establishment prevail, and it did so through a conception of Protestant orthodoxy that diverged from the church in England.Footnote 84 While Boyle's Boston correspondents traced their spiritual lineage back to ‘those old reformers’ in ‘King Edward the 6th & Queen Elizabeth's time’, their congregational model of worship, hostile to episcopal authority, contributed to a transatlantic splinter that caused intense mutual suspicion.Footnote 85 As late as 1698, the economist Charles Davenant listed the concern that the provinces afforded ‘a retreat to Men of Notions opposite to the Religion of their Country’, among the ‘material objections’ to the notion of maintaining settlements overseas.Footnote 86
For Robert Boyle, the objective behind evangelical ventures had been not simply that a pagan people would embrace the gospel, but that the bishops, the pastors, and the congregational clergy that made up the many stripes and strands of English Protestantism would fall as one behind a common interest, and foster an example of Christian reunion before the world. To the original Presbyterian and Independent committee members, he added subscribers closer to the mainstream of English prayerbook Protestantism, including his kinsman, Michael Boyle, made archbishop of Dublin in 1663.Footnote 87 Boyle's political antennae encouraged him to implant the cause within a moment of ecclesiastical debate arising concurrently on both sides of the Atlantic. In Massachusetts, members of the newly formed Boston Third Church had raised the Halfway Covenant as a means to widen the eligibility standards for church baptism, and extend Christian ministry beyond the visible Elect.Footnote 88 In England, successive conferences between 1660 and 1662 explored competing models for the reconstruction of the established church, probing the ‘comprehension’ of Presbyterian and puritan-minded congregations as one route out of the divisions wrought by Civil War.Footnote 89 In both continents, the development of the Company articulated a challenge to the more exclusive definitions of church membership.Footnote 90 In London, all of the measures taken to promote the mission drew in people associated with the debates over ‘comprehension’: Baxter and his fellow clergyman Edmund Calamy, who would receive specially bound copies of Eliot's New Testament, the earls of Manchester and Anglesey, both moderate Presbyterians, and Lord Chancellor Clarendon, who had been drafted onto the Company committee.Footnote 91 Boyle coaxed the United Commissioners with hopes springing from this dialogue, promising that Indian conversions could serve to correct the ‘easily evitable want of a right understanding’ between the crown and the colonists.Footnote 92 His judgement appeared vindicated when the crown confirmed that it would not seek uniformity within America, endorsing tolerationist ‘indulgences and dispensations’ in its 1662 charter for Rhode Island and Providence, on the grounds that though ‘some of them cannot conform to the liturgy, ceremonies, and articles of the Church of England’, their ‘serious intentions…may win the Indians to the knowledge of the only true God and Saviour of mankind’.Footnote 93
For over thirty years, the defence of the New England mission was yoked to the language of comprehension.Footnote 94 If the church was to advance and share in the glory of the expanding realm, John Beale believed, it needed to rise above ecclesiastical things indifferent.Footnote 95 Morgan Godwyn, as another minister of the established church, contended that ‘those whom we bespeak as Schismaticks and Idolaters’ should be cherished as ‘the only Witnesses’ of Christian truth ‘in those parts’.Footnote 96 From the Company committee, the earl of Manchester endeavoured to put ‘comprehension’ into practice, seeking places for Independent or Presbyterian ministers on an evangelical mandate in Carolina and the Caribbean.Footnote 97 These hopes were not completely quixotic. The appeal of new conversions pushed even some trenchant churchmen into enunciating a more irenic idea of the English Protestant tradition. Peter Heylin's Cosmographie declared a cautious acceptance of the ‘co-ordination of New England’ as a legitimate home for new proselytes, in view of the absence from America of the ‘Primitive Government of the Church of Christ’.Footnote 98 The Welsh Trust, formed in 1673 to renew the domestic mission, brought ministers of the established church together with a network of London Presbyterians.Footnote 99 Conversion projects fell within larger visions for revitalizing English Protestantism on ‘comprehensive’ principles. For Godwyn and Beale, the mission focused the church as a morally reforming institution, forbearing descent into intramural controversies, and recovering the proselytizing traditions within ancient British Christianity.Footnote 100 With accounts of the praying towns published in French and Latin, and funding attracted from Calvinist circles in France and Utrecht, Boyle legitimized comprehension through an international frame of reference. The Indian mission was made part of the common interest of ‘Churches of Christ’ whose spiritual unity rose above congregational differences. The reawakening of ‘the glory of the Reformation’ in America encompassed but transcended the historic claims of the Church of England.Footnote 101
IV
Missionizing projects provided the most durable vestiges of the attempt after 1660 to widen the space of the English established church, to reintegrate ‘tender consciences’ stirred in the years of Civil War. The problem was that such enterprises rested on slender political foundations. The passing of the Act of Uniformity in May 1662, and the abrupt termination of correspondence between the different ecclesiastical parties, provided a peremptory blow to the designs of the Company's founders. The renewed, exclusive, and uncompromising definition of the Church of England turned the missionaries in Massachusetts into the camp of the excluded and the ejected, preserving legally and ideologically the association of the puritan tradition with seditious and anti-monarchical principles. With the act followed by a new code of penal legislation, the development of the missionary project ran contrary to the religious enmities that echoed around the Stuarts' dominions.Footnote 102 Hostility to dissent, Richard Baxter recorded, led to the refusal of ministers of the established church to raise parish collections for the New England Company.Footnote 103 Feuds between Anglican and dissenting chaplains weakened the mission field established in the East Indies: the governor of Fort St George bemoaned in 1678 that the consequence was to ‘give advantage to the Romish churches’, specifically Portuguese friars, who ‘draw away many who would have been bred up by the English’.Footnote 104 The same cleft bisected the London committees of the Company, separating the privy councillors on the board of directors from the clerical and mercantile membership, who leant overwhelmingly towards dissent. The treasurer, Henry Ashurst, financed ejected Presbyterian ministers in Lancashire; William Pennoyer funded Independent meeting houses in London. Thomas Papillon, William Thompson, and Robert Clayton enunciated the case for dissenting liberties in the parliamentary chamber.Footnote 105 In 1679, the signatories gathered for whig petitions clamouring against ‘popery and arbitrary government’ confirmed the centrality of Company networks in the evolution of London dissent into the beating heart of radical opposition towards the court of Charles II.Footnote 106
Animosities within the three kingdoms intensified the potential for conflict between the crown and puritan authorities in America. Court concern over the state of the colonies developed through fears that Massachusetts was providing a wellspring for political opposition from dissenters in the British Isles. Royal agents returned to New England in 1676, and within four years, missionary operations were being overshadowed by a conflict that paralleled the parliamentary battles between the court and its whig opponents, as the crown abandoned the compromises of chartered government, and attempted to impose direct authority over the provinces.Footnote 107 The belief, reported in Boston in 1676, that ‘his Majesty intends to alter the Government’ and bring bishops into New England, was ‘a thing more dreaded than the Indian war’.Footnote 108 The New England Company was drawn relentlessly into this confrontation. John Eliot stood accused of managing his Indian communities according to ‘fanatick’ precepts.Footnote 109 For Edward Randolph, representative of the crown in Boston, the ‘whole design tends more to ye encouragement of ill ministers than beneficiall to ye poor Indians’.Footnote 110 Edward Cranfield, governor of New Hampshire, urged Archbishop Sancroft to ensure that only ‘learned and orthodox ministers’ were sent out to preach; on the privy council, the earl of Nottingham demanded an investigation into the handling of Company funds.Footnote 111
Political pressures struck at the friendships that had underpinned the development of the New England Company. The Boston magistrates implored Boyle and the earl of Anglesey to speak out for the liberties of Massachusetts, threatening to abandon New England and pull up the foundations of the Stuarts' dominions should their refuge be disturbed.Footnote 112 Anglesey shifted uneasily in his attitude towards crown policy at home, but he attacked the magistrates of the Bay Colony through their own confessional language, berating Massachusetts for evincing a pride at odds not merely with the ‘dutiful application which subjects ought to make to sovereigns’, but the ‘spirit that carried you into the wilderness, building and planting for yourselves and God’.Footnote 113 Boyle fulminated to his American correspondents against an ‘unreasonable’ intransigence towards royal authority.Footnote 114 He intervened in the devotional literature funded by the mission, striking out the works of dissenting authors in favour of catechisms produced by more irenic members of the established church: his preference settled especially on the theologians Edward Fowler and John Worthington. In 1677, he ordered colleagues to excise a laudatory reference to the Massachusetts authorities from translations prepared for India.Footnote 115 Boyle's coldness increased on hearing of the strengthening of laws in Massachusetts against Quakers: ‘the more strange & the less defensible’ in those who ‘crossd the vast Ocean…that they may there enjoy the liberty of worshipping God to their own Consciences’. The practices pursued in New England were, Boyle warned, likely to be of ‘very bad consequence’ for dissenters at home.Footnote 116
If the hostilities that frustrated American missionary work originated in the political turbulence of Restoration England, supporters of the Company believed that they denoted a deeper malaise in the condition of the Protestant religion. By 1667, the clergyman John Dury, who had disseminated ideals of Protestant reunion within the Hartlib circle, had ventured out of the British Isles, to articulate his ideas within the German states. ‘Few regarded him’, Richard Baxter reported, ‘and now he is glad to escape from us into other Countries’.Footnote 117 The language of international Protestantism was certainly a waning presence in the spiritual vernacular of the Restoration episcopate. The purging of the old puritan contingent had depleted too the militant Calvinist tradition of Richard Hakluyt and Samuel Purchas, whose works had offered at least a rhetoric, if not an ecclesiology, to preserve connections between the Church of England and the émigrés in Massachusetts.Footnote 118 But Baxter held the obduracy of the New Englanders no less culpable. ‘We are not of such large and publick Minds’, he lamented, ‘every one looks to his own Concernment…all seek their own things.’Footnote 119 In England and America, as across Europe, he contended, preoccupation with the defence of particular congregational forms had thwarted the awakening of the pastoral, inward understanding of the Protestant faith deemed essential to capturing the minds of the unconverted. Ceaseless internal controversies were, he argued, incompatible with the expansion of any religion through the globe: ‘Merchandizing, travaile, persecution, want of Pastors, many things hinder us from particular Church-membership. And must we be all that while no Christians?’ This narrowness of spirit, Baxter believed, remained the reason why ‘The Industry of the Jesuits and Fryars…shames us all.’Footnote 120
V
Deteriorating relations between the court and the provincial authorities struck at the practical and ideological case for a crown-sponsored mission in America. Royal agents within the colonies had repeatedly dismissed the claims of the praying towns as at best a symptom of puritan vainglory, if not a means of inducting Indians into dangerous principles.Footnote 121 Edward Randolph identified failed missionary projects as a contributing factor in King Philip's War. The ‘gathered church of praying Indians’ at Natick had, he claimed, gained military expertise from its exposures, and so proven ‘the most barbarous and cruel enimies to the English’.Footnote 122 Increasingly, the crown appeared to heed these warnings. Missionizing interests receded from colonial directives, while the policies adopted for the regulation of settlers denoted reluctance towards developing any ecclesiastical framework for America. The court did not try to crush the Massachusetts congregations, as English laws attacked dissenters. But neither did the toleration endorsed by Charles II advance the goal of Protestant unity: the policy was construed in hard-headed form as a means to break apart local oligarchies, and promote men of any religious stripe more supportive of regal authority. William Petty, a political economist in favour at court, suggested that a king tasked with filling up ‘a greater share of the unpeopled Earth…than most other Princes’ could ill-afford to ground his policy on ‘those gibberish denominacons and uncertain phrases…Papist, Protestant…Annabaptist, fanatic’.Footnote 123 Instructions from England tended concurrently after 1676 to dilute the religious identity of the plantations, encouraging Quaker and Jewish settlement, and promoting Catholic governors in New York and the Caribbean.Footnote 124 Singularly absent was the funded clerical establishment seen by most evangelicals as the prerequisite for an Indian mission.
While the crown shifted in its approach, the loss of consensus over the mission was opening up wider critiques, from secular and clerical voices, levelled against the notion that religious conversion could be a safe or justifiable means to sanction territorial enlargement. The Catholic governor of New York, Sir Thomas Dongan, locked horns in 1686 with French commanders in Canada, in an exchange that crackled with ideological tension, after Louis XIV had invoked Jesuit missionizing among the Iroquois as a basis for expansion further south.Footnote 125 Dongan mocked the idea – its logic, he believed, entitled Portuguese princes to a claim over Japan ‘because some of their priests have resided among them’. If Christian intent afforded a ‘very charitable act’, he believed, it offered ‘no just title to the government of a country’.Footnote 126 The governor expressed an equal aversion to the ambitions of English and Dutch Protestant ministers. To the Lords of Trade, Dongan promoted the potential of the Iroquois as trading partners, as ‘a bulwark between us and other tribes’, and as ‘the awe and dread of all other Indians…a better protection to us than the same number of Christians’. He assured the crown ‘I suffer no Christians to converse with them’, outside a single settlement at Albany that had submitted to English authority – ‘and then only with my leave’.Footnote 127 The gifts he proposed for native peoples were not bibles, but guns, and the suggestion current among Jesuits and puritans that Christian duties obliged Europeans to limit the sale of alcohol to the tribes, was ‘a little hard and very Turkish’.Footnote 128 Dongan and his court supporters were reacting no less vigorously than members of the New England Company against the ambitions of Catholic missionaries. Their alternative, however, was not a rival Protestant manifesto, but a dominion that eschewed religious obligations altogether, centred purely upon common service to a temporal monarch.
By the middle of the 1670s, as the struggle over the Massachusetts charter gathered pace, the scepticism voiced by Dongan had appeared from a different perspective, within the dissenting and Congregationalist ranks of the New England Company. The Boston magistrate Samuel Sewall feared that the early royal enthusiasm for the conversion programme represented a self-serving adoption of the ‘Popish Principle’, traced back to the Bulls of Donation, which allocated to Christians ‘a right to the Lands of Heathen’. The claim, he reflected later, in 1689, violated the sacred truth that God had granted the earth to ‘the Sons of Adam, and not the Children of Israel only’. Moreover, the Iberian precedent posed a threat not merely to Amerindians, but migrant settlers, by granting authority over ‘a Countrey inhabited by Infidels’ to the Christian prince ‘in whose service and employment the discoverers were sent’. The idea, Sewall argued, placed at stake the precept cherished in Massachusetts that the lands of New England ‘were not the Kings’, but belonged to ‘the Kings Subjects, who had for more than Sixty years had the possession and use of them’. It was therefore vital for their own liberties that, whatever missionary endeavours they undertook, the colonists resist the notion that they held their lands by virtue of Christian duty.Footnote 129 Sewall's concern over the political ramifications of the mission spread through the transatlantic networks of the Company. In London, the whig merchant Henry Ashurst affirmed repeatedly, over a twenty-year stint as Company treasurer after 1682, that he supported the conversion of ‘pagans’ not to advance but to resist the growth of royal government: to fortify the ‘primitive piety’ of Massachusetts, and so strengthen the New Englanders against royal designs to reduce them to ‘worse slaves than they in Turkey’.Footnote 130 These reactions exposed the fragility of the central assumption behind Robert Boyle's blueprint for the Company. Enthusiasm for the mission, with its puritan prehistory, by no means amounted to support for an imperial crown taking root within North America. By 1685, when the crown carried out its threat to dissolve the Massachusetts charter, the estrangement was made complete.
Disquiet over the ideological positioning of the mission drew upon a wide well of religious and political thought. The objections voiced by Dongan and Sewall recalled a lineage of attacks upon the idea that territorial dominion could be conferred by ‘grace’. The critique had originated within the Spanish world, in Francisco di Vitoria's reinterpretation of the legal status of the Bulls of Donation. It had, however, been snatched upon by puritan authors from John Winthrop in Boston to Joseph Hall in England, writing earlier in the seventeenth century against tendencies in royal policy that appeared to gesture towards the Roman-Iberian model of territorial expansion.Footnote 131 These warnings carried civic humanist as well as Protestant inflection.Footnote 132 Philip Sidney had questioned how ‘these wind-blown conquests of ours’ advanced liberty and true religion.Footnote 133 By the later 1670s, the same concerns were being resuscitated by authors critical of colonization as a priority for the crown. The clergyman Edward Stillingfleet suggested that the nations that ‘most fear God and work righteousness’ were those that rejected the ‘ways of rapine and oppression’, through which ‘the great and mighty Empires of the world have been raised and maintained’.Footnote 134 For the whig scholar William Petyt, the duty to disseminate the gospel sat uneasily with expansionist monarchical ambitions, for ‘God never planted or propagated his Truth by Temporal Power…he was in the small Voice, not in the Thunder, or the Whirl-wind.’Footnote 135 Old confessional misgivings, rekindled by strains in Restoration politics, rendered it harder to sustain the idea of a common interest connecting the growth of the reformed religion and the attainment of English dominion over the New World.
While crown supporters and opponents clashed over the political repercussions of the praying towns, shifts in international affairs were threatening to eclipse the project as a feature of the godly imagination. The vision of spiritual conquest in the New World had been justified by Boyle and his correspondents less by an exclusive conception of England as an elective actor in sacred history, than with reference to a greater cosmopolitan Protestantism, extended ‘to the ends of the earth’ through evangelism in the Indian subcontinent and across the Ottoman frontiers.Footnote 136 The manifesto for the Company rested on presenting Indian conversions as a vital component of a universal struggle for true religion. Yet when ‘Spain was already in a low condition, and under such necessities of a friendship’, as one English governor believed, older perceptions of the confessional significance of the American battleground risked appearing anachronistic.Footnote 137 By the later 1670s, the new menace on Protestant horizons emanated from France, and for all its advances in Canada, the power of Louis XIV was identified overwhelmingly with ambitions on the European continent.Footnote 138 When the meaning of the ‘Protestant interest’ was debated in parliament and the public domain, the dangers impinging upon Huguenot, Vaudois, and Palatinate congregations spoke louder than the plight of the Indians as a clarion call to Protestant unity.Footnote 139 By 1676, John Dury, one of the original advocates for the American mission, believed that Switzerland, not Massachusetts, held the key to the preservation of the faithful: ‘If England will not look abroad, to mind the Protestant interest here’, he insisted to the earl of Anglesey, ‘then…it is not possible yt religion can subsist long’.Footnote 140 In neglecting ‘the deplorable state of the Protestants abroad’, according to one MP in 1679, ‘we have not made ourselves fit for what God has appointed us’.Footnote 141 New confessional anxieties were opening up an alternative map of England's bonds and obligations, and Robert Boyle's dream of conversion and expansion in the New World was losing its centrality in the Protestant worldview.
VI
John Eliot, the so-called ‘Apostle to the Indians’, died in 1690, a solitary figure preaching without assistants at Roxbury. A year later, Robert Boyle too deceased, in a more sanguine mood, professing ‘great satisfaction’ with the progress of the mission.Footnote 142 The political climate that followed the 1688 Revolution, the enthronement of a Dutch Calvinist, and the passing of the Toleration Act had recuperated a broadly defined conception of the Protestant religion, as a counterblast to more exclusive conceptions of the established church.Footnote 143 Within a decade, the Church of England was developing its own American operation, and Boyle's brother Lord Burlington channelled part of his sibling's bequest towards the new Society for the Propagation of the Gospel as the missionizing arm of the Anglican communion.Footnote 144 As the war against France burst across transatlantic frontiers, members of the Board of Trade – including Boyle's Royal Society friends John Locke and Abraham Hill – revived an interest in Indian conversions: perturbed that while the English ‘neglected the propagation of the faith’, Jesuit agency was rendering their enemies ‘Masters of the consciences of the Heathen’.Footnote 145 Conflict against Catholic powers had wrenched the Americas back into the realm of international Protestantism. In 1698, the Scottish fleet bound for Darien was furnished with books for Indian instruction, and championed by godly circles in Massachusetts and the three kingdoms as an assault upon the ‘mitred and booted apostles’ of Spanish America.Footnote 146 Boston magistrates sensed the Protestant wind blowing into the New World, hailed William III as ‘Emperor’, and predicted ‘revolutions’ in Mexico and Peru. The Massachusetts clergyman Cotton Mather believed that the purging and regeneration of the Stuarts' domain heralded the creation of ‘glorious Churches in America’, as a saving remnant of true religion.Footnote 147
Missionary operations functioned into the eighteenth century as a vehicle for those who sought to see the churches nurtured, in the words of one dissenting minister, by ‘large and comprehensive souls’ and the religious establishment resettled upon wider Protestant foundations. The Boyle Lectures, established by Burlington through his brother's legacy, offered a platform for Anglicans and Presbyterians willing to raise the task of ‘proving the Christian religion against notorious infidels’ over ‘any controversies, that are among Christians themselves’.Footnote 148 Projects of conversion repeatedly drew English Protestants into a wider confessional world. The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel sent reports and appeals through Switzerland and the Netherlands; Boston divines traded strategies and ideas with Halle Pietists active in India, and linked the success of their own project, in Cotton Mather's judgement, to the health of ‘the European Waters that nourish it’.Footnote 149 Yet America challenged the new evangelists as intensely as it had tested earlier seekers of souls, and pan-Protestant commitments were continually tested in a competitive spiritual environment. Stunned by the denominational diversity they encountered, newly arriving Anglicans showed themselves conflicted over whether their primary duty was to awaken the minds of the indigenous peoples or restore ecclesiastical discipline over English settlers.Footnote 150 Books requested from England within the first decade of the Society's operations were more frequently concerned with anti-dissenting themes than material for new conversions: one clergyman professed it ‘preposterous’ to concentrate on native peoples, ‘for it is from the Behaviour of the Christians here, that they have…their Notions of Christianity’.Footnote 151 Such was the distraction provided by dissent that no New York Anglican was to venture into Iroquois territory before 1712.Footnote 152 Coldness from the established church was amply reciprocated by its rivals. Henry Ashurst rejected the request from the Board of Trade for the funds of New England Company to be diverted towards Anglicans in New York, and denounced the appearance in America of ‘that cursed vermin, High Church’.Footnote 153
VII
In 1686, John Dryden bemoaned the absence of pious foundations in the Stuarts' overseas dominions. ‘Thieves, Panders, Palliards, sins of every sort’, had proved ‘the only Missionaries our zeal has made’, for ‘with my country's pardon, be it said/ Religion is the least of all our Trade’.Footnote 154 Daniel Defoe fretted that English territorial interests had suffered in consequence. ‘How little have we gain'd upon the Natives of America…? How few of them are brought to live among us…All our Colonies seem to be carried on upon the meer Strength of our own People.’Footnote 155 These jeremiads were not wholly accurate. After King Philip's War, missionary foundations in New England began a slow process of recovery: by 1721, over twenty Indian congregations worshipped within Massachusetts. Yet these initiatives developed along local lines, increasingly detached from the London committee of the New England Company, and independent of the colonial directives issued by the crown.Footnote 156 The ‘Evangelical Church-State’ acclaimed by Eliot's disciples rested not in London, but in Boston.Footnote 157 In England, Protestantism provided a mobilizing rhetoric for conquest and warfare; it had not, in reality, driven the approach of regal authorities towards possessions overseas.
Examining the campaigns of the New England Company compels us to widen our view of the origins of English imperialism, to incorporate the moral and theological questions that served, no less than commercial or classical intuitions, as a storehouse for competing perspectives on overseas expansion. The insights of ‘Atlantic history’ have yet to make a pronounced impact on the study of religion in later Stuart Britain. Nonetheless, the question of how to raise and sustain a mission among the Indians highlighted the symbiotic relationship between the ideas and justifications that grew around English colonization and the forging of the church settlement within the three kingdoms. For missionaries, the challenge of America rested not merely on how to claim the souls of the unconverted, but how to navigate a landscape divided in its Christian cultures and confessions, reflecting and magnifying the splits between Protestants in the British Isles. These problems intruded upon the rebuilding of religious institutions in the wake of the Restoration, and bound the debate over the mission to domestic contention over the limits of the established church, the past and future of the English Reformation, and its place within a wider religious world.
The New England Company brought the viability of a Protestant mission in North America before courtly, clerical, and scholarly opinion. But domestic fissures served alongside the instability of Anglo-Indian relations to obstruct the scope and scale of the operation. The ambition of the Company was impeded because its proponents struggled to articulate the meaning of what it was to be an English Protestant, and proved unable to translate their syncretistic vision of the church beyond the realm of language and communication into a collaborative colonial project. Conflicts between congregations undermined the idea that exporting the reformed religion represented a prerequisite for successful expansion, or a means for the crown to achieve greatness abroad. The result was that the Company vision of conquering souls as well as territories, establishing subjecthood through baptism, and turning plantations into missionary kingdoms remained a road not taken in the trajectory of English colonization.
