Antoinette Sutto's book is a painstakingly researched exploration of how the confessional politics of early modern England shaped some of the uniquely “American” economic and diplomatic challenges that European colonists faced in the seventeenth-century Chesapeake. More specifically, Sutto provokes readers to understand the brief period of religious toleration that characterized colonial Maryland not merely as an element in “the long troubled history of religious liberty in the United States,” but also as an extension of the religious and political climate in early-modern England (177). “To argue for toleration in the early 1600s was not a principled withdrawal from the long and bloody confessional fray” in England, she reminds us. Certainly toleration was a “profoundly controversial move,” but it was also part of a “long argument about religion, loyalty, and the state” that animated the political and religious discourse in England throughout the tenure of the Stuart kings (2). Maryland's experiment with religious toleration, then, both reflected and resisted the changing ideas in seventeenth-century England about the purpose of government and the sources through which government gained its legitimacy.

The book covers Maryland's first six decades—which also happen to be the period during which the colony was in the hands of a Catholic proprietor. Sutto breaks her analysis up into three parts. Part one reminds readers that Maryland was one of the earliest examples of the British government's expansion into North America. This expansion raised unprecedented questions about the nature and extent of the king's prerogative: Were the colonies his by conquest? Or did Parliament have some jurisdiction in North America? Sutto explores how these questions colored the debate already being waged in England by dissenting Protestants about the nature and extent of the Church of England's authority—and how that debate, then, actually benefited Catholics (and particularly Catholics like Cecilius Calvert, who received a proprietary grant to Maryland in 1632, thanks to the loyalty his father had shown to James I).

Sutto pays particular attention to the “popular” character of the debates about the king's prerogative and the ways in which James I and Charles I “feared and resented ‘popularity’” (21). These kings, Sutto tells us, valued loyalty to the monarchy and “reverence for the king's person” above all else (28). Puritan appeals to the Common Law and to individuals’ capacity for reason challenged the monarch's authority—more so than even the pope's efforts to undermine the legitimacy of any Protestant leader or church. “Increasingly, Charles believed the greatest threat to his authority came not from Catholics in England or popery abroad,” Sutto tells us, “but from ‘factious spirits’ or hard-line Protestants in Parliament itself, who were courting ‘popularity’ in order to gain power for themselves” (27). This reality helps to explain why Charles I gave Cecilius Calvert such a sweeping and liberal proprietary charter, one that gave Calvert enough autonomy to avoid establishing the Church of England in Maryland.

Part two examines the economic and diplomatic challenges that Calvert and Maryland's settlers faced as they attempted to turn a profit in the colony for themselves, the proprietor, and the crown. Several issues complicated their efforts—among them, the fact that Virginia's economy was based on the same crop (tobacco) that Maryland's economy was based on, and the fact that the Chesapeake was already home to several mostly Algonquin-speaking (but some Iroquois-speaking) Native American tribes. Sutto explores how the politics of religion in England during the Interregum and the Restoration shaped the way Maryland's Catholic proprietor and the colony's mostly Protestant lawmakers responded to these challenges. She notes that Maryland's lawmakers became increasingly frustrated throughout the 1660s and 1670s with their non-resident proprietor's willingness to veto legislation that was meant to address Indian attacks or gluts in the tobacco market. This frustration, in turn, fueled the development of a “specifically American anti-popery narrative” in Maryland (92).

Part three, then, explores the contours of this narrative and the implications that the narrative ultimately had for the proprietary tenure of the Catholic Calverts in Maryland. “Anti-proprietary writers added a New World dimension” to the traditional English narrative of anti-popery, Sutto tells us. They “connected Lord Baltimore's ‘nursery for Jesuits’ with economic manipulation that caused foreign traders to provide weapons to Native Americans” (129). In this way, men who opposed the authority of Cecilius Calvert and his son, Charles (who became Maryland's proprietor in 1675), were able to wed traditional English animosity toward Catholicism to a set of economic and security concerns that were unique to Maryland.

This marriage, then, prompted Maryland's Protestant residents to actively rebel against their Catholic proprietor's authority in the wake of the Glorious Revolution in England. Sutto is careful to explain, however, that officials in London were unmoved by the anti-Catholic undertones of the Protestant Associators’ rebellion. Nevertheless, they were convinced that the authority Charles Calvert claimed to have in Maryland by virtue of his charter failed to sufficiently recognize the authority of “the crown”—meaning the king and Parliament. “The Catholic Lords Baltimore had become a hindrance to the execution of the crown's power rather than a means of demonstrating it,” Sutto tells us (174). The result was that Maryland was made a royal colony.

Loyal Protestants and Dangerous Papists is a work of considerable research, and Antoinette Sutto is to be commended for the extensive primary-source material that she brings to her argument. The book could have benefited from some close editing, however, and its sub-title is a bit puzzling. This book is almost as much about Virginia as it is about Maryland, and Sutto focuses almost as much on the politics of tobacco and Indian relations as she does on the politics of religion. This is not to suggest that her decision to bring Virginia, tobacco, or Native Americans into her narrative was needless or unwise; it is merely to suggest that the story she tells is broader than what her subtitle suggests.