The Empire Reformed - Owen Stanwood Early American Studies

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unanimous movement among English men and women. Indeed, the exclusion campaign inspired the creation of a countermovement—which developed into the Tory party—that defended the king’s prerogative in the face of rebellious subjects. The Tories were just as conspiratorial as their Whig counterparts, and also drew from the anti-Catholic tradition, but their emphases differed from those of the Whigs. Rather than look to France or Ireland, the Tories found their most potent example north of the border in Scotland, where radical Presbyterians, known as Covenanters, waged a sometimes violent struggle against the king’s efforts to promote what they labeled “prelacy and tyranny”—the rule of the church by bishops and kings rather than Presbyterian synods. Some Covenanters were quite willing to kill and die to make sure the Scottish kirk remained sufficiently reformed. The most dramatic episode in the struggle occurred in 1679, when a gang of Covenanters murdered one of their leading opponents, Archbishop James Sharp of St. Andrews, and then faced off against the king’s forces at Bothwell Bridge. The episode initiated what Presbyterians later labeled the “killing times,” in which royal forces—led by the duke of York, who resided in Edinburgh during the early 1680s—rooted out the remnants of the Covenanting movement. Tory propaganda, whether targeting the Covenanters, English nonconformists, or the Dutch, drew from traditions of anti-Calvinism, forged during the years when Charles I had faced off against Puritans and stoked by memories of Britain’s bloody civil wars.15

      The Tories used the Covenanters to demonstrate the dangers of radical Protestantism and the need for royal authority. These radicals were the real plotters, Tories argued, and indeed their methods suggested affinities and probably even connections with the Jesuits. “Their Principles are incompatible with Government,” asserted one Tory writer, “and the common Security that every man ou[gh]t to have in Human Societies.” The chief goal of the Jesuits, after all, was to kill Protestant monarchs, and this is exactly what radical Protestants aimed to do; in 1683 royal officials uncovered the Rye House Conspiracy, a plot by leading English Whigs, aided by their counterparts in Scotland, to kill both Charles II and the duke of York, paving the way for the duke of Monmouth or, even worse, a “republic” in the fashion of the old Puritan revolutionary Oliver Cromwell. Even those Whigs who did not advocate regicide encouraged the enemy by sowing divisions in both church and state. In the view of the Tories, therefore, the only way to defeat the papists and preserve England was to strengthen the royal prerogative and the Church of England, and to persecute dissent and eschew toleration of minority sects. Toleration would only “reduce Religion in England, and in other Heretical Kingdoms into so many Atoms, that nothing may unite them in a solid Body to oppose [Catholic] designs.”16

      In the early 1680s the king and his Tory allies conducted a vicious campaign against their Whig opponents and dissenters from the Church of England. In particular, they targeted dissenting preachers and the radical printers and booksellers who distributed Whig propaganda. One early example was the Baptist bookseller Benjamin Harris, who allegedly printed and sold The Appeal from the Country to the City. Authorities charged Harris with selling a libelous book. At his trial the notorious judge Sir William Scroggs called the Appeal “as base a piece as ever was contrived in hell, either by papists, or the blackest rebel that ever was.” People like Harris, who “rail against the church and the government,” revealed themselves to be “no Protestants.” The jury found the bookseller guilty and Scroggs sentenced Harris to the pillory and fined him £500, an enormous sum that practically amounted to a prison sentence. Throughout the 1680s Whigs and dissenters faced threats to their lives and livelihoods. Mobs of ruffians ranged London, closing dissenting meeting-houses and imprisoning ministers, while the courts enforced the penal laws against dissent with exact precision. The campaign was largely successful: by 1685, when Charles II died, the exclusion campaign had failed, and most English subjects both supported the new king and believed that radical dissenters posed the greatest threat to the kingdom. The minority who continued to espouse the radical Whig cause found itself embattled and driven underground; many radicals chose exile, removing to the Netherlands or, like Harris himself, to the American colonies, where he later became a leading advocate for the Williamite Revolution.17

      The years after the duke of York’s accession to the throne as James II were dark ones for the Protestant interest in Britain and abroad. While most subjects supported the Catholic monarch, a minority decided on violent resistance. In the spring of 1685 James, duke of Monmouth, then living in Dutch exile, attempted an invasion of England’s West Country, while the duke of Argyll mounted a similar expedition in the Scottish Highlands. The goal, as expressed by one of Argyll’s supporters, was the “delivery of our native land from being again drowned in popish idolatry and slavery,” and the rebels believed that “the standing or falling of the Protestant interest in Europe depended in a great measure upon the event of this undertaking in Britain.” Both campaigns failed miserably, the two rebel leaders met their respective ends on scaffolds in London and Edinburgh, and royal officials executed or transported hundreds of rebels. Then a few months later matters became even worse when Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes, that had guaranteed limited rights to France’s Protestant minority, and forced his Protestant subjects to convert to Catholicism. By the dawn of 1686 the Reformed interest languished; about the only comfort came from the Huguenot theologian Pierre Jurieu, who argued that the wave of persecution suggested that Christ’s return was imminent. If earthly leaders could not protect the godly, then the savior himself was the only hope.18

      Thus in the mid-1680s James II’s three kingdoms remained in ferment, with two groups of paranoid partisans facing off in what each saw as a critical struggle for the future of Britain and Protestantism. The battle was global in nature, stretching to the Netherlands and France, the free cities of Germany, the valleys of the Piedmont, and, indeed, the remote plantations of North America and the West Indies. The struggles between Whigs and Tories that convulsed England had the potential to have a great impact in the colonies, for a number of reasons. First, these overseas extensions of England had long provided refuge for those parts of the English nation most susceptible to Whig ideology. Second, the Stuart kings used the colonies as a kind of political laboratory during the Restoration, trying out political reforms that were not yet possible in England. Finally, the colonies were surrounded by French papists and their Native American converts and allies, thus making the danger of popery look less like an abstraction and more like a clear and present danger.

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      The colonies, like the three kingdoms, had a particular anti-Catholic heritage. The first English settlements functioned as challenges to Spanish pretensions in the continent, and each colony defined itself to one extent or another as a bastion of true religion amid popish and pagan darkness. The Puritan founders of Massachusetts Bay went the farthest in rhetorical terms, defining themselves not only against the Spanish but also as a corrective to “the Baits of Popery yet left in the Church [of England],” but they were not alone. The island of Jamaica, for instance, was a former Spanish colony captured during Oliver Cromwell’s Western Design during the 1650s—a vast, millennial plan to capture the remnants of the world’s great Catholic empire. Even after the Restoration of Charles II, when the Stuart monarchs usually viewed the Netherlands as a more potent rival than Spain, South Carolina was intended in part as a haven for persecuted Protestants right under the nose of Spanish Florida. In addition, the colonies abounded with non-English Protestants who had their own anti-Catholic histories: most notably the Dutch in New York, but also a smattering of Germans and French Huguenots.19

      The Protestant settlement of North America began with a shocking incident that reverberated for decades. During the sixteenth century Spain and Portugal had monopolized the Americas, and had combined this expansionist spirit with a militant Catholicism. As a result, European Protestants had particular reasons to challenge Iberian pretensions in America, and France’s small but powerful Huguenot minority took the lead during the mid-sixteenth century. In the 1560s, after the failure of a colonial project in Brazil, the French founded a colony called La Caroline, located on the St. John’s River in present-day Florida. Hearing about the colony, Spain’s king sent an expedition under Pedro Menéndez de Aviles to deal with the interlopers. Landing on the feast day of Saint Augustine, Menéndez made quick work of the people he called “luteranos,” claiming the country for both Spain and the Catholic Church. In doing so, the founder of Florida killed hundreds

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