The Empire Reformed - Owen Stanwood Early American Studies

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report stated, “the priest kept on the watch for every opportunity of approach; and going at the dead of night, when he supposed the guard would be especially overcome by sleep, he contrived, without disturbing him, to pass in to the sick man; and, at his own desire, received him into the Church.” Despite appearing in a Jesuit letter, this story could have served as a potent piece of anti-Catholic propaganda, as it reinforced the belief that Jesuits used trickery and artifice to advance their cause.9

      The Jesuits’ penchant for trickery made it critical for Protestants to resist the order in any way they could. Some colonies banned the presence of Jesuits, and even in places like Maryland where the priests could legally reside Protestants prided themselves on the ability to resist their advances. But even if all Protestants stayed true to the faith, the Jesuits posed a problem. As one tract explained, resistance to their designs only made the Jesuits more devious: “where they cannot convince,” it explained, “they labour to destroy.” They could succeed because of a network of foreign allies whose main ambition was to “massacre the whole Protestant Party” and clear the way “to build a corrupt Church.” In England opponents of the Jesuits believed that the order intended to invite the French or Spanish to invade the kingdom, but another tactic was to target inhabitants of foreign nations who did not have the training or intellect to resist Jesuit advances. This had particular relevance in America, where a large population of natives lived among the colonists, and where Jesuits had already begun to establish missions.10

      In the 1640s, particularly in Maryland, English colonists began to worry about what would happen if the Jesuits insinuated themselves into Indian communities. They had a useful precedent from Ireland, another part of the empire where Jesuits and other popish priests had labored, with astonishing success, to infiltrate a population of common people most English considered impressionable and uncivilized. The lessons from Ireland could not have been encouraging. Despite the expectations of reformers in the sixteenth century, the “wild Irish” clung tenaciously to the Catholic faith, and Protestant observers tended to blame two factors: the depraved state of the populace and the underhanded methods of the clerics. Moreover, the priests’ successes had dire consequences for Ireland’s Protestant minority, as the Irish peasantry became willing shock troops for the Catholic cause.11

      The Irish Rebellion of 1641 was an epochal event in the history of British anti-Catholicism. Before this time, antipopery had been a less potent force in Ireland than elsewhere, mainly because the vast numbers and diversity of the Catholic population forced Protestants to accept that the true face of Catholicism was more complex than their conspiratorial logic suggested. The events of October 1641, when Irish Catholics rose up in a bloody rebellion against English Protestant rule, immediately prompted Irish Protestants to place their own struggles within a global context. More important, the reports of “popish” atrocities in the rebellion quickly spread to England and beyond, becoming an important source of propaganda as the nation moved toward civil war.12

      This propaganda—as popular in the 1680s as in the 1640s—provided a salient example of how uncivilized people could aid the popish cause. Protestant writers targeted the usual shibboleths of antipopery: Jesuit priests; infiltrators from foreign countries, especially Spain and France; and unscrupulous “evil counselors” who pretended to be Protestants but really promoted popery. None of these masterminds could have succeeded without “the blind, ignorant, and superstitious people,” who “rise up and execute whatever they command.” In addition, the wild Irish served as the agents of popish cruelty: according to one propagandist, “they acted with that brutish fury, as if the wild Beasts of the Deserts, Wolves, Bears and Tigres, nay Fiends and Furies had been let loose from Hell upon the Land.” Not even unborn children were safe, as “their Hellish Rage and Fury extended also to the Babes unborn, ripping them out of their Mothers Womb, and destroying those Innocent Creatures, to glut their Savage Inhumanity.” In this reading of the rebellion, the Jesuits were the masterminds, but the wild Irish provided the savage violence that brought the rebellion to its terrible conclusion. It would not be difficult to imagine a similar scenario in America, and in time colonial witnesses would describe native attacks using almost identical language.13

      Nonetheless, there was no reason to assume that Indians would naturally fall into the role of the Irish. Early colonization tracts usually expressed optimism that the Indians would gravitate toward alliance with the English, especially when they recognized the contrast between good Protestants and cruel, rapacious Spaniards. In the logic of antipopery, moreover, pagans usually occupied a step above papists. The English poet and politician Andrew Marvell wrote that “The Pagans are excusable by their natural darkness, without revelation,” while “the Pope avowing Christianity by profession, doth in doctrine and practice renonce it.” From the 1640s, therefore, a few colonists had good evidence to suspect that Indians could be auxiliaries in a Catholic cause, but such beliefs were not widespread.14

      Not surprisingly, Maryland’s political situation provided the most fertile ground for fear that Indians could fall to the temptations of popery. Founded by Catholics, the colony nonetheless welcomed a large number of Protestant dissenters, drawn to the colony by Lord Baltimore’s generous policy of religious toleration. Proprietary authorities understood that they ruled over a powder keg, where religious passions could explode into violence at any time; they attempted to avoid such a scenario by restricting religious speech. Accordingly, the 1649 “Act concerning toleration” including a long list of outlawed religious slurs: calling your neighbor a “Jesuited Papist” or a “schismatick” could result in a ten-shilling fine.15

      On the whole, these attempts to promote religious understanding failed. During the turbulent Civil War years of the 1640s and 1650s, when rumors of Catholic plotting reached fever pitch in Britain, Protestants in Maryland rejected Lord Baltimore’s authority in large numbers, mounting two successful rebellions. Only through impressive maneuvering in London—and an improbable alliance with Oliver Cromwell—did Baltimore manage to hold onto his colony.16

      In the meantime, the proprietor’s opponents barraged him with a number of charges. One tract claimed that Baltimore’s intention was to create a “receptacle for Papists, and Priests, and Jesuits,” and that he even intended to bring 2000 Irish to the colony who “would not leave a Bible in Maryland”—surely an alarming prospect only a decade after the 1641 rebellion. Colonial agent Leonard Strong was even more blunt when he described the series of events that led a cadre of Protestants to throw off the lord’s authority, claiming that Baltimore required subjects in Maryland to “countenance and uphold Antichrist,” meaning the Catholic church, and he was willing to use tyrannical force to ensure submission. This force extended even to employing Indians. When proprietary forces faced off against Protestant dissidents in the “Battle of the Severn” in 1655, according to Strong, “the Indians were resolved in themselves, or set on by the popish faction, or rather both together to fall upon us: as indeed after the fight they did, besetting houses, killing one man, and taking another prisoner.” Baltimore’s enemies had no direct proof, but they could only assume that the natives were under his authority, especially since his government maintained such close alliances with local tribes, and even employed Jesuits to work among the Indians.17

      The decade after 1660 represented a period of relative calm in the colony, but by 1676 discord returned. In the wake of Bacon’s Rebellion in neighboring Virginia, opponents of the new Lord Baltimore, Charles Calvert, sent an appeal to England that expressed many of the fears that would become commonplace around the colonies in the next decade. The “Complaint from Heaven” represented Baltimore as a partner in a global Catholic design: “the platt form is, Pope Jesuit determined to over terne Engl[an]d with feyer, sword and distractions within themselves, and by the Maryland Papists, to drive us Protestants to Purgatory … with the help of French spirits from Canada.” The petition used the Catholic plot to explain recent attacks by Susquehanna Indians, as well as the unwillingness of Baltimore and Virginia governor Sir William Berkeley to meet the Indian threat. The “Huy and crye” also described a plan by Jesuits to infiltrate the colonies by sending priests in disguise. “These blake spirits disperse themselves all over the Country in America,” the writers claimed, and held secret correspondence with French Jesuits, plotting destruction for American Protestants. The petitioners used this argument

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