On 18 April 1689 two rival conceptions of empire faced off on the streets of Boston. The royal governor of the Dominion of New England, Sir Edmund Andros, represented one vision. He dreamed of a centralized empire in America: an institution that would project the king's power throughout the world and bring riches and glory to the imperial center. But between Andros and his vision stood thousands of angry New Englanders, armed with swords and clubs and represented by a group of local elites who demanded that the governor relinquish his command. These people advocated another kind of empire centered on religious ideology: a loose combination of territories defined by their common Protestantism and allegiance to an English, Protestant monarch and united in their opposition to Catholic France—a diabolical enemy whom they believed to be plotting against them. Leaders of this movement, like Congregational minister Cotton Mather, wanted English imperialism to be a tool for spreading true religion across the world, perhaps in anticipation of Christ's return. On this day, Mather's side won the battle. Governor Andros surrendered to the newly formed “Committee of Safety,” initiating the first in a series of rebellions that eventually removed four colonial governors from power and inaugurated a new debate over the nature of empire.Footnote 1

It was through the clash of these two visions that an English imperial order came into being in North America during the late seventeenth century. Before that time England's overseas presence consisted of a collection of trading posts and scattered settlements, possessing neither the political coordination nor the ideological coherence to be called an empire. By the eighteenth century, however, Britons on both sides of the Atlantic considered themselves to be subjects of a global polity, ruled by a single monarch and united by common religious, political, and economic beliefs.Footnote 2

More than anything else, the events of 1688–89 brought about this imperial transformation. Preoccupied with the later dissolution of the empire and the development of a distinctive American “identity,” most historians have viewed the rebellions as simple conflicts between imperial authorities and local elites and thus as markers on the road to the more important revolution a century later.Footnote 3 Moreover, scholars of the revolts that took place in different parts of North America have resisted examining them in combination, preferring to privilege local explanations, like the collapse of the old Puritan oligarchy in New England, Anglo-Dutch tensions in New York, or Protestant opposition to the Catholic proprietor in Maryland.Footnote 4 This tendency to look for local and North American causes for the rebellions has essentially split apart the empire a century too early, imagining the Atlantic as an impassable barrier that somehow changed Europeans into Americans.

When placed in a wider context, the conflict that peaked in 1689 was far more than a contest between imperial overlords and local elites. Rather, it represented a struggle between two different visions of empire, both in reaction to the perceived resurgence of global Catholicism under the banner of the French king, Louis XIV. When the Sun King began his program to reform the French state and expand his influence in Europe during the 1670s, he inspired various responses from his neighbors. Some monarchs, like the Stuart kings of England, wanted to emulate parts of the French monarch's program, building an absolutist state that could compete with France on its own terms. In England's American colonies as well as in the home islands, administrators in Whitehall looked to the French model as they attempted to build a more efficient imperial state.Footnote 5 In both Europe and America, however, members of the radical Protestant fringe viewed Louis not as another secular ruler but as an agent of the Antichrist who needed to be resisted at all costs. While these radicals often found themselves on the margins of European political debate, they enjoyed positions of prominence in the North American plantations, thanks to the Calvinist heritage of places like Massachusetts and New York. The rebellions of 1689 thus represented peculiar variations of the Atlantic political and religious rifts of the time, as imperial rulers and colonial subjects attempted to sort out their places in a changing world system.Footnote 6

This approach to the origins of empire differs from past scholarship in two important respects. First, I adopt a broadly comparative approach that not only attends to the close links between England and the colonies but also places imperial politics in a global context, recognizing that events in France and the Netherlands often had just as much impact on American attitudes as happenings in the British Isles.Footnote 7 Second, I pay particular attention to the importance of religious networks in the seventeenth-century Atlantic, viewing the making of an imperial system as a chapter not just in political history but in the history of Christianity as well. Colonists saw themselves not simply as English subjects but as partners in an international Protestant brotherhood, fighting against a resurgent Catholic enemy.Footnote 8 By understanding the importance of confessional networks in the creation of political communities, we come closer to realizing one of the key ambitions of the paradigm of “Atlantic history,” which is to break free of the nation-state as an organizing unit in historical study.Footnote 9

When New England's revolutionaries of 1689 reflected on the crisis that pushed them toward rebellion, they placed its origins over a decade earlier, in 1678. In that year, revelations of a “horrid Popish Plot” circulated around the English world.Footnote 10 According to reports from a former Jesuit novice named Titus Oates, “the bloody Devotoes of Rome” intended to destroy the Protestant faith by infiltrating the English state. Before they were done, Oates warned, papists would kill the king, burn the city of London, and monopolize political power, on the way brutalizing any Protestants who refused to abjure their faith. The plot initiated a period of judicial terror in which many English Catholics lost their lives and also inspired a period of political strife in the kingdom as the political nation divided on the question of how best to deal with the popish threat.Footnote 11

As several scholars have observed, the Popish Plot was a domestic manifestation of a panic that was international in scope. During the 1670s, Protestants became increasingly fearful that Louis XIV intended to build a Catholic “universal monarchy.” In 1672, the Sun King nearly overran the Netherlands, and Protestants worried that he possessed an unnatural degree of influence in the English court, especially over King Charles II's Catholic brother James, the duke of York. By the eve of the plot, Francophobia easily surpassed the anti-Dutch sentiment that had predominated the previous decade, and anti-French polemicists combined religious, political, and economic arguments to present Louis XIV as a threat to both English national interests and the global Protestant cause. Doing this required some intellectual sleight of hand, since the Sun King's actual position in the Catholic world was more complicated than most Protestants realized, but as the world's most powerful Catholic, Louis easily filled the role that English and Dutch pamphleteers created for him.Footnote 12

A brief glance at the anti-Catholic press reveals the international context of English political disputes. In the early 1680s, as Whig activists clamored for the exclusion of the duke of York from the throne, they printed several newspapers that functioned above all as chronicles of popish intrigue around the world. The vast majority of the dispatches concerned the misdeeds of the French king. In Benjamin Harris's Domestick Intelligence, for example, readers learned of Louis XIV's domination of the German city of Bremen, where French invaders levied exorbitant taxes and threatened to fire the town.Footnote 13 Richard Janeway's Impartial Protestant Mercury, meanwhile, focused on French pretensions in the Low Countries and the Sun King's persecution of his Protestant subjects, which grew very intense in the early 1680s. In September 1681 Janeway noted that “every Post brings us in fresh accounts of the Persecution of the Protestants,” and many of the refugees arrived in London, where they reported enduring cruelties “which seem almost Incredible, had we not seen and Examined these poor Soules just upon their Landing, not being then Cured of some of the Wounds occasioned by their Tortures.”Footnote 14

While most reports came from the European continent, Whig publishers also recognized that the plot stretched across the ocean. Harris reported on a suspicious fire in Boston in 1679 that destroyed several hundred houses and ships in the harbor. Naturally, the fire was no accident but “was done by Treachery and Design, and there is a Frenchman in Prison upon the same account.”Footnote 15 In 1681 Janeway reported on alarms in Maryland, where neighboring Indians made “great preparations for War.” Because they declined to grow any corn, witnesses believed that the natives enjoyed the assistance of “some Ill Neighbours, especially some that are Papists not far off, which supposition is encreased for that the said Indians already take the Boldness to Kill the Cattle of the Protestant Planters before their faces, and threaten every day to fall upon their persons, whereas they offer no such outrages to any Plantations of the Papists.”Footnote 16

The purpose of Whig propaganda was to shame the Stuart court—who many believed to be secret partisans of the French—into action against Louis's perceived plans for universal monarchy. Charles II and his brother did forge periodic alliances with France to obtain needed revenue, but many of their royalist advisers actually agreed with their Whig rivals about the necessity of challenging French pretensions. Unlike the opposition, however, royalists believed that the best way to match the French was to emulate them by building a centralized state that more easily conformed to the royal will. While they rarely made explicit connections between their own program and that of Louis XIV, the overall goal was the same: to strengthen the central government and limit local prerogatives. In the management of overseas territories, Stuart officials proved especially eager to imitate the French example, which they often praised in glowing terms.Footnote 17

Circumstances in the Leeward Islands in the Caribbean serve to illustrate how this fear and admiration of the French influenced governance in the colonies. In 1679 the French fleet began ranging around the Antilles, threatening European neighbors in the region, even earning mention in Harris's Domestick Intelligence.Footnote 18 Not only zealous Protestants worried about French attack: the Leewards’ Catholic Tory governor, Sir William Stapleton, watched his French neighbors become more powerful during the 1670s and warned that they had “the strength to conquer all” and become masters of the islands and the entire sugar trade. In order to save the colonies Stapleton advised the king to devote the same attention that the Sun King gave his overseas possessions, especially by providing ammunition for the poorly provisioned regiments stationed there, sending “A good Squadron of Warr Ships,” and making a “resolution to aggress and attack first if a Warr be designed.”Footnote 19

Stapleton believed that only a strong military establishment would preserve the king's sovereignty in the Leeward Islands, but he hinted that his policy reflected public opinion on the islands as well. As they watched the French fleet travel around the region, islanders became positively terrified by the prospect of an invasion by the French and the few Carib Indians who remained on the nearby island of St. Vincent, and they demanded action on the part of their governor to deal with the threat. In one desperate missive, Stapleton suggested that the king should turn more attention to the islands “not only to preserve Your Ma[jes]ty's Sovereignty, but to quiet the minds of Your Subjects, who ought to live in beleefe that they are in a state of security.” When such aid did not prove forthcoming, Stapleton advocated signing a peace treaty with the French, pledging that any war in Europe would not spill over to the Leeward Islands, but he presented the treaty as a matter of necessity rather than as a positive outcome. His preference was for an English empire that matched the French in troop strength and aggression, one that could conquer the French islands and master the sugar trade.Footnote 20

The same anti-French orientation appeared in the policies of another Irish Catholic governor, Thomas Dongan of New York. While he shared the political and religious predilections of his employer, the duke of York, Dongan proved to be the most determined opponent of the French in North America during the 1680s. His main goal was to preserve and expand New York's hold on the backcountry because he believed that the French were trying to hurt English interests by establishing trade connections and missions among the Indians of the Iroquois Confederation, longtime allies of the Dutch and English. His response to the crisis, like Stapleton's in the Leeward Islands, was to propose that the English build a backcountry empire that would more closely resemble that of their French rivals.Footnote 21

Dongan's plan had three major components. First, he proposed building a series of forts in Iroquois country in order to assert English claims to the region and show native subjects that the king would provide protection against their enemies. Second, he advocated that more English youths be trained in the beaver trade, claiming it to be “very necessary for us to encourage our young Men to goe a Beaver hunting as the French doe” and become better acquainted with the backcountry. Finally, he accepted the claims of Dutch merchants in Albany that the French had used the “pretence of propogating the Christian faith among the Indians” to gain advantages in trade, especially by tempting hundreds of Mohawks to settle in mission towns near New France. To counter these measures, Dongan insisted that all French Jesuits leave Iroquois country, proposing to replace them with English priests. In a speech to Iroquois sachems, Dongan promised to send “one of our Fathers” to learn the language, and several English Jesuits did visit Albany during his tenure.Footnote 22

Despite the official peace between the crowns, Dongan did not shy away from confrontation. He welcomed several arrivals from New France, both Catholic and Protestant—discontented soldiers who Canadian governor Jacques Brisay de Denonville denounced as “rogues” who “boast of sharing [Dongan’s] table.”Footnote 23 In addition to welcoming these fugitives, Dongan also authorized trading expeditions into territories that the French claimed as their own, including one into Ottawa country in the fall of 1686. French authorities captured and imprisoned the group, which included one of the “rogues” Denonville mentioned—a man named Abell Marion who had relocated from New France to New England years earlier without leave from authorities. The governor executed Marion “because hee was a Frenchman born, altho a subject of his Majesty of England and having a passe from his Excell[en]cy with the rest of the troop.” Probably Denonville intended to send a message to other deserters, but he may have sent a very different kind of message to New Yorkers. Marion had likely become a Protestant either before or after his desertion, since he reportedly received a “welcome reception” in New England, a jurisdiction that never allowed Catholics to become naturalized subjects. Accordingly, the episode demonstrated how the French threatened not just English economic and political interests but Protestant liberties as well.Footnote 24

The imperial program espoused by Stapleton and Dongan found its fullest expression in New England. From the mid-1670s onward, Massachusetts and its neighbors became embroiled in controversy as imperial administrators—led by the irascible royal agent Edward Randolph—waged a legal campaign against the old charter and laid the foundations for royal government in the region. The end result was the revocation of the charter and the establishment of the Dominion of New England, a union of all the colonies from Maine to New Jersey under a single governor and council, appointed by the king and ruling without an assembly. Historians have rightly seen the dominion as a milestone in the history of New England and the empire, representing a bolder exercise in imperial absolutism than any before or after in the region.Footnote 25 What they have not recognized is the role that the neighboring French presence played in providing both an impetus and a model for centralization.

When Stuart officials looked at English America in the late 1600s, they saw disorder and confusion. In one observation from the 1690s—allegedly taken from Mohawk Indians—an English observer claimed that the many separate governments in the region made the English weaker than their numbers, being “divided into so many petit, and separate governments; who minding themselvs so much, let the publiq. Interest sink.” New France, on the other hand, was much less populous but more efficiently run. Despite living in “a Cold, & Desert Country, where they canot subsist, without anuall supplys from france,” the king's viceroy kept his few subjects “in due order, & obedience,” and therefore made the region an economic and military powerhouse. The framers of the dominion hoped to build a similar system across the woods in New England. When William Blathwayt described the proposed union of colonies, he noted it “will be terrible to the French and make them proceed with more caution than they have lately done.”Footnote 26 Edward Randolph concurred with this vision and connected it with a hemispheric struggle against the French. Knowing that the French fleet had taken aim at the Spanish West Indies, he believed that Louis XIV might also “engage the Indians on the backside of New Eng[lan]d to make another incursion,” thus monopolizing the fur trade in the north as he had sugar production in the south. A strong, coordinated colony in New England would serve to foil this plan, as Randolph did not doubt that subjects there would be zealous opponents of the French interest if properly governed.Footnote 27

So the push for empire came specifically out of a fear of the French, a fear that many colonists shared with their brethren in England. But the imperial program did not progress as smoothly as Randolph believed it would, because devoted Protestants in the colonies viewed the French threat in very different terms. For all their talk of divine right, English Tories espoused a global political vision that was essentially secular: they feared the French not because they were Catholic but because they were accumulating power and riches that could belong to England. Religion mattered, to be sure, in that rival monarchs could use faith to strengthen their authority, but the Tories did not believe that theology was at the heart of the dispute.Footnote 28 At the same time, many Protestants interpreted the French threat as a new manifestation of the popish Antichrist that had been battling the true church for centuries. For militant Protestants the fight with France was not just a competition for resources—though they thought the expansion of trade could benefit their cause—but a continuation of the cosmic struggle between good and evil that would end with Christ's return. Emulating the enemy was not an option; rather, true Protestants had to strive to be as unlike their popish rivals as possible, whether in forms of worship or politics. Both sides had the same goal, namely, vanquishing the French and building a strong English empire, but their outlooks and methods could not have been more different.Footnote 29

The religious interpretation enjoyed particular prominence in the plantations thanks to a network of radical Calvinist refugees. Since the founding of New England by Puritan dissidents in the 1630s, America had attracted more than its share of displaced Protestants from around Europe, and the restrictions on dissent by Stuart authorities in the 1670s and 1680s increased the flow. As Edward Randolph noted, “persons of dangerous principles from England, Ireland, and other Places, are here received and highly encouraged.”Footnote 30 One example was the Scottish Presbyterian Francis Borland, a theologically inclined young man who found few opportunities at home for those who would not “conform to Prelacy & take the Test.” He followed his merchant brother to New England in 1682—a clear indication of how commerce and religion could become intertwined—where he made the acquaintance of the Reverend Increase Mather and found employment as a schoolmaster in Barnstable and Boston for several years before moving to the Dutch colony of Suriname in 1685.Footnote 31 Borland was just one of many migrants encouraged to cross the Atlantic by the restrictions on dissent at home. When the Whig bookseller John Dunton traveled to Boston in 1686, he met a number of people who “fled hither on the account of conscience,” including “two Divines” from Limerick, the brothers John and Thomas Bailey, the latter of whom became minister in Watertown. Some time later the printer Benjamin Harris himself traveled to Boston, where he opened a coffeehouse and became one of the leading publicists of the Williamite revolution.Footnote 32

Ministers like Borland and the Baileys and printers like Harris helped to establish New England, and America more generally, as a Protestant refuge during dark times. The most famous statements of America's place in Protestant history came from the Boston minister Cotton Mather, who observed of New England, “tho it be in the same Latitude with Italy, [it] is yet amongst the sincerest of its Antipodes.”Footnote 33 While most historians have read Mather's statements as evidence of a “New England way” that separated the region from the larger world, he intended to forge closer ties with Protestants outside of North America. By claiming a special role for their remote homeland, Reformed leaders in Massachusetts and other plantations attempted to become full partners in an imperial struggle for true religion against the forces of global Catholicism.Footnote 34

This contest intensified in the years after 1685. Two events of that year sent shock waves through the Protestant world and proved particularly distressing to radicals in English territories. First, in February the Catholic duke of York became King James II, and, while most subjects accepted his accession with little objection, Cotton Mather experienced great distress. He spent the day “in Humiliations, and Supplications … to deprecate the Confusions with which the Protestant Religion and Interest, were threatned by the Accession of that Prince unto the Throne.”Footnote 35 Months later, in October, an even more ominous event occurred. After years of increasing persecution, Louis XIV repealed the Edict of Nantes that had guaranteed limited toleration to French Protestants, causing an exodus of Huguenot refugees. Protestant leaders in America had long paid attention to the persecutions in France, fearing that such a fate could await them if they fell into the hands of a popish monarch. Now they opened their ports to boatloads of refugees. In 1686, for instance, two small barks arrived in Boston from Ireland carrying French Protestant newcomers, who formed towns in central Massachusetts and on Narragansett Bay. Larger numbers came to the new proprietary colony of South Carolina, while the New York merchant Jacob Leisler—himself the son of a former pastor to Frankfurt's French Reformed congregation—purchased land in Westchester County and founded the settlement of New Rochelle.Footnote 36 These refugees, while few in number, provided a human face to French persecution. As Cotton Mather preached in 1686, “the furnace of persecution” had “heated seven times hotter,” and “The cup is going round the world: Tis come into America.”Footnote 37 No longer could North American Protestants remain complacent in their isolation; they had to join the international struggle against Louis XIV and popery.

Seen in this international context, it is not surprising that the creation of the dominion of New England led to a showdown between imperial officials and radical Calvinist elites. Dominion leaders aimed at New England's religious establishment as well as its political autonomy, even forcing one of Boston's Congregational churches to provide space and time for Anglican services.Footnote 38 But despite scattered acts of resistance, the region did not erupt into civil strife when Andros, the new governor, arrived in 1686. Indeed, “a great Concoarse of People” honored the new governor on his arrival and “Expressed themselves as satisfied & well disposed for His Maj[es]t[ie]s service.”Footnote 39 Even the new Anglican worship services, while they scandalized some, proved attractive to others; John Dunton noted that the Anglican service was “so great a Novelty to the Bostonians” that it attracted “a very large Audience.” Indeed, when the Mathers published a blistering attack on common prayer worship, equating it with popery, they did so in part to dissuade their flock from trying out the new religion, which tempted many New Englanders.Footnote 40

At the start of 1688, therefore, two rival factions attempted to pursue their own visions of empire. Stuart officials wanted an imperial system that rivaled the French in wealth and power, while Calvinists sought to make America a bastion of the Protestant cause. For all the bluster on both sides, however, the vast majority of American subjects seemed unmoved by the debate—unmoved, that is, until settlers began to turn up dead on New England's frontier and the French Catholic menace became more than an abstraction.

The crisis that ultimately destroyed royal government in New England began as a dispute over external policy, specifically regarding neighboring Indians. Fears of native attack were not new, but the rise of France as a regional threat in the 1680s led Americans to view Indians in a new way. English leaders and ordinary colonists both feared that the natives could become auxiliaries in a French Catholic invasion, but competing interpretations of the French threat led to various Indian policies, and it was this dispute over what to do about the Indians that prompted ordinary colonists to join what had been an elite debate over the nature of empire.

The first widespread fears of a Catholic-Indian conspiracy appeared in Maryland in the 1640s. Ironically, the first purveyor of such paranoia was the Catholic proprietor Cecil Calvert, Lord Baltimore, who believed that Jesuits who resented his neutral policy regarding Maryland's religious establishment might arm Indian converts and use them as a kind of popish army.Footnote 41 In later years discontented Protestants used identical language against the proprietor himself, charging Baltimore with hiring Indians to cut off the colony's Protestant population. This language was remarkably effective in building opposition to the proprietary government, as it connected colonists’ everyday fears of Indians with their inherited fears of Catholicism, and it worked especially well in the colony ruled by a Catholic minority who had unusually tranquil relations with local natives.Footnote 42

Tensions between Indians and Europeans in the 1670s led to renewed and widespread fears of Catholic-Indian conspiracies. While Nathaniel Bacon's rebels in Virginia avoided religious rhetoric in their denunciations of Governor Sir William Berkeley's Indian policy, neighbors in Maryland were not so cautious. In one petition to the king, a group of Marylanders outlined a vast conspiracy that included Baltimore, Berkeley, the Susquehanna Indians, and roaming Jesuits who intended “to over terne Engl[an]d with feyer, sword, and distractions … with the help of French spirits from Canada.”Footnote 43 Around the same time in New England, after a union of natives under the Wampanoag leader King Philip devastated the colonies, some colonists used similar language to explain their own Indian troubles. While most of the region's religious leaders blamed backsliding and sin for the assault, a minority claimed that “vagrant and Jesuitical Priests” had worked for years “to exasperate the Indians against the English, and to bring them into a confederacy, and that they were promised supplies from France, and other parts, to extirpate the English Nation out of the Continent of America.”Footnote 44 When two Dutch travelers circulated through the colonies at the end of the decade, they found such fears of a popish-Indian design not just in Maryland but in Boston as well, where frightened townspeople believed the strange newcomers to be Jesuits in disguise and proved reluctant to provide them lodging.Footnote 45

During the 1680s these fears of a Catholic-Indian design became most acute in the borderlands between New England and New France. Refugees of King Philip's War settled just beyond the bounds of English settlement, both in the Saint Lawrence Valley and among the nations of the Abenaki Confederacy north of the Maine and New Hampshire settlements. Colonists feared these malcontents could cause a new Indian war, this time with French assistance, and a number of incidents seemed to confirm these fears. In 1688, just after James II added New York to the dominion, Indians conducted several small-scale raids in western Massachusetts and the province of Maine. The attacks disturbed colonists because, even though England and France were officially at peace, the Indians showed clear indications that they had received French assistance. A friendly Indian who spoke to the raiders reported that they had come by order of “the Governour of Canida who told us the Maquaes [Mohawks] had done great mischiefe in Canada, therefore gow yow revenge the same, either on Christians or Indians.” Another report claimed that the raiding party traveled with a French priest.Footnote 46

The escalating violence convinced almost everyone that the French Catholic plot had finally arrived in America. Even dominion officials were not immune to fears of popery. When Edward Randolph, now the dominion secretary, described the violence to an English correspondent, he blamed the French for seducing away the Indians from their allegiance “by their Jesuites [who] strangely allure them with their beads crucifixes and little painted images, gaining many new converts.”Footnote 47 Clearly something had to be done to meet the threat, and Governor Andros was not one to shy away from a fight. His response to the crisis, however, was far different from what many New Englanders expected and brought about a new conversation about how to best protect the colonies from external enemies.

Like his predecessor Dongan, Andros adopted a pragmatic approach toward native and French enemies that combined threats with offers of aid and protection. His primary goal was to increase the king's wealth and power, and he understood that by winning erstwhile enemies to the English side he could expand his master's dominions with little effort. Accordingly, he responded to the attacks by conducting a raid on the trading post of Jean-Vincent d’Abbadie, baron of Saint-Castin, an eccentric trader who lived in the contested region between New England and Acadia. Andros and his men confiscated the baron's trading goods but were careful to pay him no personal insult—they even carefully preserved the small Catholic chapel at his post—and they offered him the protection of the English crown if he would change sides.Footnote 48 The governor behaved similarly when subordinates in Maine imprisoned several Abenaki chiefs and sent them to Boston in irons in retaliation for native incursions. Andros believed that such rash actions would alienate the Abenaki, who could be valuable allies, and bring about a needless Indian war. He ordered their release—a sensible piece of Indian policy but one that rankled many New Englanders.Footnote 49

By the end of the summer, the level of fear in the northeastern colonies had reached new heights, and it had begun to undermine Andros's imperial mission. The governor sent his lieutenant Francis Nicholson on a mission through Massachusetts to assure inhabitants that they lived “under the protection of a greate King, who protects all his Subjects both in their lives and fortunes.” But frightened settlers could not be dissuaded from taking refuge in garrison houses.Footnote 50 In August of 1688 a New Englander underscored just how ineffective the governor's public relations campaign had been. In an anonymous letter, an excerpt of which was sent to the Lords of Trade in a bundle of miscellaneous material from New England, he lamented “the alarum of war & Garments rolled in blood” since God had “brought the sword of the Indians againe upon us.” After recounting the litany of Indian attacks, the author pointed his finger toward dominion officials. “I do heartily wish,” he wrote, “that some of our own Gent[leme]n have not had too much of a hand in this evil designe, For I have been informed by Credible p[er]sons that some in power have said that it is not for the King's Interest that this people should injoy [New England], & if another people had it would be more for the King's Interest.”Footnote 51 Before they heard anything about the impending troubles in England itself, some colonists were already beginning to suspect that their purported imperial protectors were actually enemies.

When Andros finally began a focused military campaign against the Abenaki, he became even less popular. In the fall of 1688, he impressed hundreds of young men from Massachusetts towns and sent them to Maine, where they endured a tough winter under the command of strangers with foreign ideas about military discipline. Soon some of these men began sending reports back to Massachusetts of strange incidents in the camp. One soldier witnessed the governor selling ammunition to the wife of the baron of Saint-Castin himself, despite his status as “an enemy to the Interest of the Kings subjects.” Others reported on cruel treatment and untoward comments by Andros's officers, some of whom were Catholics. When one Massachusetts soldier expressed hope that they would soon find some of the enemy, who eluded them all winter, an officer responded “that he had rather there were a thousand or Two Indians on Roxbury neck to [fight] against the Boston Bores.”Footnote 52 By April 1689, according to a militia commander in Newbury, “The great cry among the people” in his town was “concerning the Sick and week Souldiers to the Eastward.” The commander advised the governor to bring the men home “to Quiet thease tumults.”Footnote 53

During the first months of 1689, “Ill Spirrits” in New England were “Scattering & publishing Seditious & Rebellious Libells” that blamed the governor for the region's Indian troubles.Footnote 54 While none of these libels survive, one appeared in a February 1689 court case, after Joseph Bayley of Newbury found a “paper” by the side of the highway warning New England to “rise and be armed” and “let not Papist you charme.” The anonymous author claimed the war against the Abenaki was a ruse to drain New England towns of their young men, leaving them vulnerable to an attack by “Indians french and papist[s].” When a magistrate named Caleb Moodey brought the tract to the attention of authorities, they promptly imprisoned Moodey for “publishing a Scandelous & Seditious Lybell,” thus reinforcing the belief that dominion officials did not have the country's best interests at heart.Footnote 55

An Indian's testimony added new details to the plot. In January 1689 a Christian Indian from Natick named Solomon Thomas visited some neighbors in Sudbury and detailed a recent encounter with Governor Andros. Thomas claimed that the governor visited the praying Indians of Natick and told them of a plan for a Catholic and Indian force to overtake New England. If the English army proved victorious against the Abenakis, the governor claimed, “in the spring french and Irish would Com to Boston” with a large number of Indians. After destroying the capital the popish army would continue to “the Countery townes.” To remove any doubt of his motives, Andros gave the Indian “a booke that was better than the bible” that contained pictures of the Virgin Mary and the twelve apostles, and claimed that “all that would not turn to the governor[’s] reledgon and owne that booke should be destroyed.” According to this Indian informer, the governor was a confirmed Catholic, and his impending plan to invade New England reflected his religious goals. Another Indian in Sudbury claimed that Andros distributed gifts to Abenaki leaders as “commissions” to fight the colonists.Footnote 56

These rumors took on new meaning once colonists began learning about the momentous changes in Europe. In January dominion officials knew that William of Orange—the Dutch stadholder and champion of the Protestant cause—was planning an expedition against England, where James II had become increasingly unpopular. Not until 11 February did New Yorkers receive “a flying reporte from Virginia; that the Prince of Orange was landed in Tarrbay”—an event that had occurred on 5 November. By the end of March several reliable reports confirmed that William and Mary had forced James II to flee the throne, but still no official word came from Whitehall instructing officials to declare the new monarchs. As a result, Andros and his counterparts remained cautious; they attempted to suppress unofficial reports of William's victory, even imprisoning a man who spread Orangist propaganda in Boston. Andros was merely being careful, lest the early reports of William's victory turned out to be untrue, but his actions fed the growing anxiety, especially after colonists heard the “surprizing news of K. James his being retired into France,” where he enjoyed the protection of Louis XIV himself.Footnote 57

In the early months of 1689, the crisis moved beyond New England. In New York, for instance, settlers circulated reports that resembled those of their northern neighbors in both general inspiration and particular charges against the governor. A local sachem in Westchester County told a Dutch colonist named Barent Witt that Andros “did promise him a brib of twelf pounds to be ready with a Company of Indians so many as he could get at Manhatans Island in the month of April.” In addition, Witt also spoke to some Frenchmen who passed though the region and confirmed that “some ships were arrived” in Canada that would soon set out to conquer New York. When Witt brought his concerns to the leading landowner in the region, a prominent merchant and member of the dominion's council named Frederick Philipse, the councilor laughed and said “it was foolish to be afraid,” which led Witt and his neighbors to suspect Philipse as well. They also connected their anxieties with the larger Protestant resistance to popery. Witt's wife believed that “she would be the first which should be burnt in case the French should take the place,” probably because she was a French Protestant. New York had a significant Huguenot population, and these recent refugees from Louis XIV's regime feared that the Sun King would deal with them cruelly if he gained control of the colony. New Yorkers had shown little resistance to imperial reforms in the years immediately before 1689, but revelations of a popish plot caused some of them to develop new suspicions about their leaders.Footnote 58

Then in March the rumors of a Catholic-Indian design traveled back to the Potomac River Valley, the crucible of Catholic-Indian intrigue in North America. Residents of Stafford County, Virginia, began to hear “some discourse that was talked by the Indians” regarding a plot hatched by Maryland Catholics and Seneca Indians to “kill the protestants” before definite word of William of Orange's victory arrived from England. Two Virginians, including the local Anglican minister in Stafford County, spread the rumors both north and south, and within weeks residents of both Maryland and Virginia clamored for action.Footnote 59 In Charles and Calvert Counties, colonists “Assembled in Armes” under the militia commander Henry Jowles, becoming the first colonists to take the law into their own hands during the crisis. In Maryland, they demanded that Lord Baltimore's government do more to defend the country against papists and Indians, while angry crowds in Virginia attempted to plunder the house of a leading Catholic planter, believing him to be hiding a cache of weapons. Officials viewed the rebels as “ill minded persons” of “the meanest quality” looking for an excuse to plunder their betters, but they met most of the crowd's demands. Virginia officials calmed the people by becoming the first to declare William and Mary on 27 April, while proprietary rulers in Maryland proved the groundlessness of the plot and increased patrols in the backcountry.Footnote 60

Despite the temporary respite in the Chesapeake, the rumors of 1689 did irreparable damage to the imperial mission in North America. Andros and his allies believed that only a centralized empire could protect the colonies from the French, but by April 1689 few subjects agreed. They viewed Andros as an arbitrary ruler who could not protect the people from attack and insisted on serving a monarch that had probably defected to the enemy. At best, the governor was ineffectual; at worst, he was conspiring against his own people. To some in New England and New York, the governor's program was primarily a religious threat; others resented his economic policies, while others still simply wanted security from Indian attack. Whatever their motivations, these opponents of the regime formed a powerful front that threatened to turn back most of the late Stuart imperial program.

Fear flowered into open rebellion in Boston on 18 April. The events of that day are difficult to recover due to the partisan nature of most reports, but the crisis probably began when a group of deserting soldiers began to march from Maine to Boston. Worried that the troops would “make a great Stir and produce a bloody Revolution,” a group of Boston's leading citizens decided to “appear in the Head of what Action should be done; and a Declaration was prepared accordingly.” A disgruntled carpenter on the royal frigate Rose determined the exact timing of the revolt when he spread a rumor that his captain and the governor “intended to fire the Towne” and then escape “in the smoake, designeing for France.” By noon on the 18th, hundreds of people had assembled in arms, demanding that Andros and other dominion officials be put in prison. By the end of the day, power rested in the hands of a “Committee of Safety” that included officials of the last charter government, some members of Andros's council, and leading merchants.Footnote 61

Within weeks, the “seed of sedition” blew from Boston to outlying counties of New York. Residents of Long Island and Westchester County turned out officials of the dominion government, and some of the Long Island militia marched toward New York City to demand that Lieutenant Governor Nicholson strengthen fortifications. Over the next month, rumors circulated that questioned Nicholson's commitment to Protestantism and warned of new Catholic plots against the city. Then on 31 May, facing shrill demands from militia commanders, Nicholson shouted that if the militia did not become more obedient, he would turn the fort's guns on New York and “set the town a fire.” The fort soon filled with burghers, “armed and inraged,” who declared that they were “sold, betrayed and to be murdered, [and] it was time to look for themselves.” Nicholson and his council decided to hand power to the militia “to prevent bloodshed,” and soon the German-born merchant Jacob Leisler emerged as a leader of the movement.Footnote 62

The final act of rebellion occurred in Maryland in August 1689.Footnote 63 While no evidence suggests that Protestants in Maryland had knowledge of events to the north, the rebellion played out in familiar fashion. First, rumors of a Catholic-Indian design circulated around the colony suggesting “that the Papists had invited the Northern Indians to come down and cutt off the Protestants and that their descent was to be about the latter end of August.” To save the colony from this plot, the Charles County militia under John Coode marched to the capital at St. Mary's to place local government in Protestant hands and to search the colony's records for evidence of plotting. Proprietary officials could find few people willing to fight to defend St. Mary’s, and they retreated to the proprietor's house at Mattapany. Soon the rebels surrounded them there as well, and they handed over power on 1 August, agreeing in their capitulation that “noe papist in this Province” would occupy “any Office Military or Civil.”Footnote 64

Advocates of a centralized empire viewed these rebellions as major setbacks for the imperial cause. One disgruntled merchant declared “Now Each Tub stands upon his own Bottome,” meaning that “each Colony or Governm[en]t” looked out for its own affairs without considering the welfare of the mother country or its empire.Footnote 65 But what royal officials—and many subsequent historians—failed to realize was that the rebels of 1689 did not merely intend to dismantle the empire. They had an imperial plan of their own, but one that would have taken North America in a fundamentally different direction. And with the Stuart imperialists temporarily out of power, they had a chance to test their vision. These were no reluctant revolutionaries: the events of 1688–89 presented an opportunity to remake North America and the empire.Footnote 66

The Revolution of 1688–89 has long been understood as a critical event in the making of the British Empire. If nothing else, the massive expansion of the English state after the accession of William and Mary had profound consequences for colonial affairs, assuring in the long term that the imperial plans of the later Stuarts would continue under the new monarchs.Footnote 67 In terms of ideology, the revolution enshrined the Whig political language that would predominate in eighteenth-century America: the celebration of English liberties, property rights, and local control within an imperial system.Footnote 68 But in the short term, the implications of the revolution in the colonies were far more radical. To the people who seized control of New England, New York, and Maryland in 1689, the change of government in England provided an opportunity to reimagine English imperialism as a tool for expanding and propagating the Protestant faith.

At first glance the rebellions appeared to have little to do with religion. True, hysterical fears of Catholics provided an impetus for revolt, but the written justifications of the colonists’ actions tended to downplay religious factors, using the same secular language that defined the revolution in England. In New England, the place where one would expect religious rhetoric, justifications of the rebellion focused instead on dominion officials’ lack of respect for colonial subjects’ “English liberties,” with special attention to violations of property rights. New England propagandists billed their rebellion as a mirror to the English one and called only for a “Share in that Universal Restoration of Charters, and English Liberties” that all good subjects expected after William and Mary's accession. “Under the Shadow of Your Imperial Crown,” wrote the minister and colonial agent Increase Mather in a characteristic passage, “We may again be made to flourish in the Enjoyment of our former Rights and Privileges.”Footnote 69 In other words, New Englanders used innovative rhetoric to seek a restoration of the old charter government, thus dividing historians over whether the rebellion was the final chapter of Puritan rule or the first stirrings of secularization and modernization. But whatever they were fighting for, scholars have agreed that the colonists fought against the pretensions of an overbearing empire.Footnote 70

A look beyond the pamphlet literature, however, reveals a very different picture of the revolution in North America. Cotton Mather, for example, penned several pamphlets justifying the rebellion to outsiders, but his fullest treatment appeared in a thanksgiving sermon preached to Massachusetts leaders in December 1689 and later printed.Footnote 71 The sermon contradicts the secular interpretation favored by many scholars; Mather viewed the revolution as an act of providence. But it also counters the vision of New Englanders as isolated actors trying to rid themselves of worldly pollution. Indeed, most of the sermon related New England's struggles to events in the larger world. In line with apocalyptic scholarship in Europe at the time, Mather interpreted recent political disturbances as signs that the tide was turning in the longtime struggle between Christ (the true church) and the Antichrist (the pope). While the papists had enjoyed a surge of power in recent years, “The Late Revolutions in England” promised “to begin the Deliverance of the Church of God.”Footnote 72

Mather's exhortation to his countrymen ranged far beyond the bounds of New England. While he offered praise to the colony's founders, he focused most of his discourse on events on the other side of the Atlantic. It was there that the greatest battles between good and evil raged, but American Protestants needed to understand that their own struggles against the Antichrist belonged to this larger context. In Hungary and Germany, for instance, the Protestant interest languished, while French Protestantism had been all but exterminated, and Irish Protestants feared “having sharp Skeins ready for throats” and “lay at the mercy of a Wild Irish Rabble.” Mather was careful to note that New Englanders had only narrowly avoided such a fate. Certainly, the “Swarm of Lew’d Souldiers” that forced French Protestants to abjure their faith was not dissimilar to Andros's hated redcoats. “Imagine them Hanging of You by the Hair of your Heads and then half Choaking of you with Smoke,” Mather appealed, “or half Roasting of you with Fire.” But if much of the sermon dwelt on European events, the minister also called on New Englanders to act as partners in the common cause, mostly by staying true to their God. “I beseech you by the Mercies of God,” he thundered near the sermon's conclusion, “that as we profess the Protestant Religion with the most exalted Purity, so we may practice it in such an Exemplary manner, that A New-England man, may be a Term of Honour in the world.”Footnote 73

Mather's vision of America within a larger Protestant world responded to an upsurge in apocalyptic speculation on both sides of the Atlantic. During much of the 1680s, leading Reformed theologians believed that the rising level of persecution presaged the second coming of Christ. Calvinists in New England followed this news with both anticipation and worry, because the leading authority on the millennium, the early seventeenth-century Cambridge scholar Joseph Mede, theorized that after the second coming America would become the resting place of Gog and Magog and the army of the Antichrist. Mather believed that New England's service to the global Protestant cause—in welcoming Huguenot refugees, in converting Indians, and especially in saving the continent from Louis XIV—meant that his country folk would share in the benefits of Christ's thousand-year reign on earth.Footnote 74 His friend and fellow scholar Samuel Sewall went even further. Noting that Christianity was nearly extinct in Africa and Asia and was “choaked with Thorns of worldy Hypocritical Interests” in Europe, Sewall wondered if “possibly this place that was lately none at all; and is still last of all, may in time, be made the first.”Footnote 75 The role of such rhetoric in late-seventeenth-century politics has been hotly contested. According to some scholars, defenders of the revolution in England viewed national interests as more important than religious causes, while others believe that the apocalyptic language used to talk about politics was more metaphorical than real. This may have been the case in England, but there is no doubt that a powerful minority on the other side of the Atlantic saw things differently. For them, the transatlantic revolution was part of a cosmic drama that would end with Christ's return.Footnote 76

The apocalyptic worldview of these Reformed leaders was overtly imperialistic, but in a very different way from the Stuart elites that had ruled the colonies. The Reformed leaders shared the goal of expanding the king's dominions to the farthest reaches of the world, but they did so primarily because William and Mary served as agents of true religion. Indeed, even before becoming king, William had promoted himself as the continent's foremost defender of Protestantism, and his rise to royal status only reinforced this reputation. Mather described William as “A KING, whose unparallel’d zeal for the Church of the Lord Jesus at the Lowest Ebb, hath made him the Phenix of this Age.” The minister expressed his imperial goals by posing the question “Whether the Day is not at Hand, when the Kingdoms of the World, shall be the Kingdoms of our Lord, and of his Christ!” With a godly monarch on the “British Throne,” English state power could now serve as a vehicle to promote true religion against the papists. The main end would be “that the Chains with which the Tyrannous and Treacherous Grand Seigniour of France had Fetter’d Europe” would be broken, “and that the most monstrous Tygre in the world, having the forces of Three Kingdoms let loose upon him … must quickly either perish, or proclaim Liberty for that Religion which he has out done all that ever Liv’d, for the Persecution of.”Footnote 77

For Reformed leaders, this Protestant empire, unlike its French counterpart, would guarantee the liberties and property rights of its subjects. This in turn would ensure its success in defeating France and preserving Protestantism. Defenders of the rebellion in Massachusetts argued that people who had their property protected by a benevolent monarch would willingly act to preserve the king's interests, but if they lost the advantages that had been guaranteed in their old charter, “the discouragement of the People will be so great and General, as that they will be in danger of becoming a Prey to the French, and to be utterly ruined.” Increase Mather bragged in William's court of the bravery of New England's militia, who would allow the king “to enlarge his Dominions, and to bring the French Neighbours into an intire Subjection to the Crown of England.” Mather told William “Hee might by the Assistance of New England become Emperor of America when Hee pleased”—but only if he restored his subjects’ charter rights.Footnote 78

This was a peculiar kind of empire, more like a union of semiautonomous territories sharing the same ruler and interests than a centralized state. In its broad contours, the Calvinist empire looked very much like the “empire of liberty” later imagined by Thomas Jefferson, in which industrious farmers, rather than an overbearing state, ensured the expansion of American values. This comparison cannot be taken very far, however, because the Calvinist vision rested on religious concerns. These radicals favored a decentralized empire because they felt that local control would best preserve the true church, while still understanding the necessity of unity in the face of such danger. Essentially they attempted to translate their approach to church governance to the state, calling for godly people to adopt the role that lay leaders played in the Reformed churches, with the king as a distant figurehead. Rather than Jefferson, the best synopsis of this vision came from the Roxbury minister and missionary John Eliot, who in a letter to the English Presbyterian divine Richard Baxter advocated “to advance the Kingdom of Jesus Christ, which shall be extended over all the Kingdoms and Nations of the Earth … Not by the personal Presence of Christ, but by putting Power and Rule into the Hands of the Godly, [and] Learned in all Nations.”Footnote 79

Revolutionaries beyond New England shared the same imperial goals and expressed them in very similar rhetoric. In New York, for instance, leaders of the rebellion did not use the language of “English liberties” to the same extent as most of them were not even English, but they called on the same aspects of Calvinist resistance theory to advocate an imperial system that reserved power for local magistrates and militia officers. Jacob Leisler, the militia captain who came to personify the rebellion, took cues from contemporary Dutch political culture as well as older French Huguenot philosophies, arguing that New Yorkers had the right and indeed a duty to seize power from a corrupt oligarchy that was threatening to bring in the forces of popery.Footnote 80

The radical possibilities of this philosophy appeared most prominently in Leisler's confrontation with the merchants who ran the outpost of Albany. Leisler sent his lieutenant, Jacob Milborne, to the town in early 1690 to break the economic and political monopoly of a group of leading fur traders, many of whom had been appointed by Stuart officials and refused to acknowledge Leisler's authority. On arriving in Albany, Milborne declared that since the people had overthrown their old rulers, the old city charter was invalid and “now the Power was in the People to choose both new Civill and Military officers as they Pleased.”Footnote 81 Like their brethren in New England, New Yorkers were not interested in breaking free of England. Instead, they believed that only by preserving “their Laws and Religion, their Properties and their Souls” could they preserve the country for its rightful, Protestant monarchs. Leisler's battle with Albany's leaders lasted several months before they surrendered to his authority out of a need for protection from the common enemy. It was a curious revolution—an outsider imposing his authority on an independent corporation but justifying his conduct with the rhetoric of local liberties.Footnote 82

The final rebellion in Maryland appears as something of an outlier, since the rebels overthrew an independent proprietor and requested a royal government, but there too colonists used the language of local autonomy to challenge arbitrary power. Most of the rebels were lesser magistrates excluded from the highest rungs of government, and their grievances included the same charges of tyranny and “arbitrary” practices lodged against leaders of the Dominion of New England.Footnote 83 What's more, Maryland's rebels adopted some of the most radical imagery from the recent struggle against popery. The group that seized power in early August called itself the “Protestant Association,” a name that beckoned back to Elizabethan times when members of Parliament pledged to avenge themselves on Catholics if the queen should happen to meet a violent end. In the wake of the Popish Plot, opponents of the duke of York's succession to the throne renewed calls for a Protestant association that would have effectively altered the succession and handed power to a group of Protestant magistrates if papists succeeded in killing Charles II. The association called on local officials and even ordinary subjects to take responsibility to preserve the country from foreign intrusion, and it also prompted charges of treason from Tories who believed that the association usurped the crown's God-given authority.Footnote 84

The radical Protestants who seized power in 1689 understood how their actions fit into the global struggle against popery. As a result, they quickly began forging ties with one another to better combat a popish conspiracy they knew to be global in scope. Maryland's John Coode saw the continental implications of the rebellions as well as anyone; in an early letter to Jacob Leisler he asserted that “we have still the same reasonable & just aprehensions with yors & the N. England governmt of a great designe that was on foot to betray and ruine their Maties & the Protestant interest through all these northern parts.”Footnote 85 Leisler and his allies agreed, referring to the late Stuart conspiracy ominously as “the Combinations of the Forces of hell itselfe.”Footnote 86 Both men imagined the empire as a network of godly magistrates who helped each other by sending word on the whereabouts of popish plotters. So when Leisler captured two Irish “rogues” who expressed sympathy for the deposed king, he contacted the governor of Barbados, where the two men had originated, to warn him of their machinations.Footnote 87

The need to coordinate became even more pressing when England and France went to war in the fall of 1689. Even before the official start of the war, Indian allies of the French struck northern New England, and on 9 February 1690 the French and Indians devastated the Dutch village of Schenectady, a few miles from Albany. As fear of attack spread from the front lines in the north as far south as Maryland and Virginia, colonial leaders began to understand that they could only hold onto power if they concocted some plan to defeat the enemy. One approach was to lobby the king for assistance. Massachusetts agents in William and Mary's court spoke of “the utter Inconsistence that there is between the very being of this Plantation and the mischievous aims and practices of the French King.”Footnote 88 But they also knew that they had to take some action on their own, if only to prove to detractors like Edward Randolph that a decentralized empire really could defend the king's interest in the New World.

Revolutionary leaders in the colonies attempted to prove their mettle by planning an ambitious assault on the center of French power in Quebec. One of the first promoters of the assault was the Albany merchant and magistrate Robert Livingston, who traveled around New England in the spring of 1690 seeking support for a coordinated plan against French Canada, arguing that the “French worse than Heathens will be disturbers of our peace” but that once they were conquered “all Indians in America must submitt and pay homage to the English Crowne.” Despite being a moderate Protestant himself, Livingston couched his appeal in the language of militant anti-Catholicism, claiming that “all true protestant subjects” had an obligation to fight the enemy and even noting that “there are diverse good omens that God Almighty has determined the downfall of Anti-Christ, in our days this is the only meanes in all probability to effect itt in America.”Footnote 89 The idea proved popular in both New England and New York, though in the end it was Livingston's rival Jacob Leisler who took the lead in organizing the assault. On 1 May representatives from several colonies met in New York City, where they planned a massive expedition against the enemy, with New Englanders taking Quebec by sea while a land force drawn from New York, Connecticut, and the Iroquois attacked Montreal by land.Footnote 90

In the summer of 1690 it appeared that Cotton Mather's and Jacob Leisler's dreams of a Protestant American empire could come true. An expedition led by Sir William Phips easily conquered the Acadian capital of Port Royal, striking a small victory for Protestantism and King William, and Phips departed for Quebec in August with great fanfare, while Fitz John Winthrop, scion of New England's leading family, took charge of the land expedition.Footnote 91 As one optimistic pamphleteer predicted, “the wheel of Divine Vengeance is now Turning apace, upon the French Papists for their late Bloody and Matchless Persecutions,” and it seemed that New Englanders would be “the Executioners of Gods wrath upon them.”Footnote 92 Unfortunately it was not to be. Smallpox devastated the land forces, and Iroquois allies failed to come through, while Phips's fleet took so long to reach Quebec that the French governor had ample time to prepare a defense. In 1690 French Catholics consecrated a new church, Notre Dame de la Victoire, while New England Protestants returned home in disgrace.Footnote 93

The failed assault on French Canada ended any hopes of a decentralized, Protestant empire in America. The disaster demonstrated that Calvinist leaders, for all their bluster, could not defend the colonies from enemy attacks. Public support for revolutionary governments in both New England and New York declined, as angry returning soldiers demanded pay and ordinary people protested paying taxes to support a war effort that was not making them any safer. By the end of 1691, Massachusetts accepted a new royal charter that, while not as bad as the old dominion government, reduced many of the colonists’ cherished liberties.Footnote 94 In New York, meanwhile, the new royal governor tried Jacob Leisler for treason and ultimately executed him, condemning as a traitor the man who had most zealously advanced the Orangist Revolution in the province.Footnote 95

The Calvinists failed because they espoused an outdated brand of anti-Catholicism that viewed the world in terms of the ongoing, apocalyptic struggle between papists and Protestants. In Jacob Leisler's world, there were only two types of people: orthodox Protestants who battled popery in all its forms and members of the “popish party” in league with the devil. Leisler proved unwilling to cooperate with Robert Livingston and other Albany merchants, even though they shared his anti-French goals, because they had held commissions from James II's Catholic government and opposed some aspects of Leisler's political program. After the failure of the Canada expedition, he turned on Fitz John Winthrop as well, calling him a traitor for holding correspondence with Livingston and throwing him in jail. When Connecticut's leaders protested Leisler's treatment of Winthrop, he branded them as traitors to the cause as well, claiming that their actions “astonishe[d] all the protestant world.”Footnote 96 After alienating his allies, Leisler turned his ire against a retinue of royal troops who arrived just ahead of the new royal governor but lacked a proper commission. Leisler viewed them as enemies to the king because their commander sympathized with Leisler's political rivals, and he refused to surrender the fort. Several men died in the ensuing confrontation, and by the time the new governor arrived Leisler's fate was sealed. On his execution, he insisted he acted only “to maintaine against popery or any schism or heresy whatever the interest of our Sovereign Lord & Lady … and the reformed Protestant Churches.”Footnote 97

As the war unfolded it became clear that most inhabitants of English America simply did not see the Catholic threat in the same terms as Leisler and Cotton Mather. For such radicals, religious goals predominated, and the imperial state properly served as the guardian of the Protestant interest. The vast majority of Protestants in the colonies shared this anti-Catholic outlook, but there is little evidence that they spent much time theorizing about the coming apocalypse—indeed, millennialism seems to have been a pursuit of the educated classes. For ordinary colonists, the Catholic menace was the one portrayed in John Foxe's Book of Martyrs and other propaganda: a violent enemy that endeavored to burn towns and butcher children. The imperial state did have a role in guarding against Catholics, but not by encouraging a “further Reformation” or doctrinal purity. Rather, it needed to provide guns or soldiers to keep the papists at bay. In 1689 most ordinary people in the colonies turned against Andros when they believed he could no longer protect them from the enemy. The following year they reacted in a similar fashion when revolutionary leaders failed in the Canada expedition. It was not that the colonists lacked political beliefs or religious convictions; they merely put personal safety ahead of principle. Fear of death or captivity at the hands of “Popish Indians” proved the most powerful motivator.Footnote 98

In the years after 1690, officials got another chance to build a streamlined imperial system that would challenge French pretensions in America. The task was not easy, and colonists never stopped arguing with their governors over the proper scope of royal power. But compared with the earlier period, the years between 1690 and 1765 marked a golden age for the British American empire, which expanded in power and riches and enjoyed broad support from the colonial public. This success reflected lessons learned in 1689. Never again, for instance, would imperial officials attempt to rule without an assembly. But the empire also worked because its rulers learned to use religious rhetoric to support state power. Governor Richard Coote, Lord Bellomont, who ruled Massachusetts and New York in the late 1690s, promoted William III as the savior of Protestant America, the scourge of “Popery and Tyranny.”Footnote 99 On the king's death, a Congregational minister in Boston agreed. When the colonies were “quite depriv’d of Liberty and Property,” and “sinking under Arbitrary Power and Tyranny; almost overwhelmed with Popery and Slavery,” the Reverend Benjamin Wadsworth preached, “This Illustrious and Noble Prince … did venture his person for their relief, and came over the sea to help them.”Footnote 100

This combination of patriotism and religious zeal remained through much of the eighteenth century. By the outbreak of the next imperial war with France in 1702, American subjects had solidified their contention that the British monarch was the primary defender of global Protestantism, a sentiment only strengthened by the Hanoverian succession in 1714. At the same time, Americans never lost their zeal for the international Protestant cause. The first Boston newspapers allowed readers to follow events throughout the Protestant world, while popular celebrations like Pope's Day adapted anti-Catholic traditions to the new imperial environment. Overall, the eighteenth century brought no signs of declension or relaxing of religious zeal but rather a new kind of faith, tailored to the imperial age.Footnote 101

It has become fashionable in recent years to view empires as “negotiated systems,” created as much on the peripheries as in the metropole.Footnote 102 This study confirms that perspective but suggests that the process of negotiation was far more complex than previous historians have realized. Far from a simple dispute between periphery and center, the struggle for authority in late seventeenth-century America represented a clash between two anti-French visions, both transatlantic in scope, divided on the proper relationship between church and state, religion and politics, in a changing world. Only after considerable debate, and some bloodshed, did the two interest groups unite to build an empire that combined Protestant zeal with expansion of English national interests.

This reinterpretation of the origins of empire has enormous consequences for the study of both Britain and America in the early modern era. The main lesson is that historians must place their subjects in the broadest possible context and resist drawing artificial boundaries that constrict understanding of the past. For colonial America, this means following the networks that linked North American settlements to the rest of the world—whether the Caribbean Islands, Britain, continental Europe, or beyond. Reconstructing these connections not only allows us to see the world as early modern people did but also shows how American settlements played central roles in some of the most important dramas of the early modern era, from the building of the modern state to the development of religious radicalism. The colonies mattered, but not as exemplars of liberty. Rather, they represented peculiar variations on European patterns, revealing both the persistence and the adaptability of the early modern Christian worldview.Footnote 103

This broad perspective has the potential to “revolutionize” the study of late seventeenth-century Britain and its world. By understanding the close relationship between the political upheaval of the later Stuart era and the development of a Protestant empire, we see a different kind of revolution in 1688–89, one that appears much less rational and secular, much less “sensible” than it once did.Footnote 104 At the same time, the empire itself takes on a different hue: less colored by commerce, and more by common fears of the Catholic enemy, with commercial aspirations serving a cause that many people understood in religious terms. Most of the actors in 1688–89 saw their struggle not as English, Dutch, or British but as global and universal, a key moment in the age-old struggle between Protestantism and popery. It is time for historians to do the same.