The Empire Reformed. Owen Stanwood
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a common Catholic enemy that, according to the “Black Legend” of Spanish cruelty, had victimized both groups. In time, however, Protestants began to redefine natives as violent enemies who were particularly susceptible to the temptations of priestcraft. In making these arguments, colonists drew on another form of anti-Catholic rhetoric perfected in Ireland, where the “wild Irish” had proven impervious to Protestantism, and outsiders explained this religious intransigence by pointing to a lack of civility among Irish Catholics.4
By the time Andros faced his troubles in 1688, the identification of Indians and Catholics had become widespread. This development marked the Americanization of antipopery, the adaptation of a set of European fears to explain conditions on the colonial frontier. The results were dramatic and long lasting. On one hand, the wave of fear endangered the program for imperial reforms, giving a new opening to those Protestant radicals who believed that centralization was merely another branch in a popish plot. But at the same time, the common fears of a Catholic-Indian design gave colonists across the colonies a common political language, one that combined their desire for security, their Protestant heritage, and their nascent sense of racial privilege. Fear could tear the empire apart, but it could also put it back together again. The results of the crisis depended a great deal on how Andros and other imperial officials responded to popular fear.
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The first reference to a Catholic-Indian conspiracy appeared, ironically enough, in the private correspondence of colonial America’s most prominent Catholic. Cecil Calvert, the second Lord Baltimore, founded the colony of Maryland in 1634: a bold experiment intended to demonstrate, among other things, that Roman Catholics could be loyal English subjects and work for the king’s interest. His plans for religious neutrality inspired opposition, however, and not just from Protestants. Members of the Society of Jesus, who had provided spiritual support for the first colonists and endeavored to convert local Indians, resent Baltimore’s refusal to grant them preferred status in what they considered a Catholic colony, even threatening at one point to have the proprietor excommunicated. This dispute led Calvert to suspect the Jesuits of more sinister designs, confiding in a letter to his resident governor that the priests intended to employ local Indians to destroy anyone who stood in the society’s way, including the Catholic proprietor. In Baltimore’s mind, the Jesuits used religion as a pretense to further their political goals—and they were not afraid to encourage violence if it brought them to power.5
It is a testament to the power of anti-Catholicism in seventeenth-century English thought that even a prominent Roman Catholic used antipopery to criticize his rivals. Indeed, it demonstrates the extent to which “popery” as a construction was detached from actual relations between Catholics and Protestants, or even among groups of Catholics and Protestants. Perhaps unconsciously, Baltimore drew on two strands of anti-Catholic thought, each of which became important in the colonies over the next half-century. First, he painted the Jesuits—hated agents of the counter-Reformation—as devious papal agents who would stop at nothing to accomplish their worldly ends. Second, he argued that the priests would employ impressionable, weak-minded foreigners—in this case Indians—to accomplish their goals. This aspect of antipopery also had a history in Europe, but it soon became even more important in the colonies, where foreigners were particularly strange and the Jesuits made great efforts to convert them.
In Protestant propaganda, Jesuits were the very worst of the papists. Founded by Ignatius Loyola in the 1520s, the order had gained a reputation as the strictest defender of Catholic orthodoxy during the counter-Reformation. Polemical Protestant diatribes against the society abounded in northern Europe during the 1600s, stressing several different sides of the Jesuit character. First and foremost, the Jesuits were defenders of papal authority and the foes of Protestant princes, and they would do anything to serve their master’s cause, even if they had to murder recalcitrant monarchs—as they did French king Henri IV in 1610. Beyond their ill intentions, the Jesuits were also master tricksters. They blended into their surroundings by dressing in disguises, speaking numerous languages, and using personal charms to insinuate themselves into Protestant society in order to undermine it. Both of these fears appeared in an English newspaper report from 1679, just after the revelations of the popish plot. The paper reported that a man in a London coffeehouse revealed himself to be a Jesuit in disguise, and when asked whether he endorsed “the Doctrine of Killing of Kings,” responded “That their Doctrine was to Kill every one that stood in their way.”6
Beyond being violent tricksters, Jesuits were also known for their skill in converting people to Catholicism. The priests themselves encouraged this reputation by publishing reports of their missionary successes in the Far East and America, and while these Relations served primarily to encourage support for the Jesuits in the Catholic world, they had the additional effect of confirming Protestant fears. Enemies of the order explained its success in much the same way modern historians do, by arguing that the Jesuits encouraged pagans to become Catholics by drawing on similarities between Christianity and paganism. In a fictional dialogue among three Jesuits published in 1689, for instance, a missionary to Siam bragged that he stressed the common points between Catholicism and the local religion, especially “Worship of Images” and “a blind tame submission to the Doctrines, Worship and Ceremonies of their false Religion, [which] makes them resemble our People absolutely.” If this tactic did not work, the missionary advocated changing the principles of Catholicism to suit local circumstances; for instance, he believed that by deifying the saints he could convince adherents of polytheistic eastern religions to embrace the faith. To Protestants, these reports—fabricated though they were—reinforced the Jesuits’ reputations as dissemblers and casuists who would lie without shame to advance their cause, and who had particular success with impressionable pagans. It also proved that their true goals were not religious, but worldly: they wanted power above all else, and would not let principles stand in their way.7
The picture of Jesuits in propaganda was exaggerated and in some respects entirely false, but it did bear at least a superficial resemblance to reality. Many Jesuits did pride themselves on their ability to win back “heretics” to the true faith, and especially in the English dominions the priests considered the reestablishment of Catholicism as a primary goal. The behavior of Maryland Jesuits helps to demonstrate why Protestants were afraid. Even without the establishment they desired, Maryland provided the priests a degree of freedom unknown in England or other colonies: they no longer needed to travel in disguise, and they could openly conduct worship services. As one prospective priest put it in a letter asking to be assigned to the new colony, “Where I live, I am abriged of liberty in doing the good I could wish, wch maks me more earnest to be els where imployed.” Besides ministering to Maryland’s small but influential Catholic population, the priests set out to create as many new Catholics as they could. This goal appeared clearly in a catechism from the mid-1670s that survives in the archives of the Maryland Province of the Society of Jesus. Probably intended as a guide to young priests in proper doctrine, it attempted to combat the most fundamental Protestant teachings. It stated that the Church received its imprimatur from Christ himself, and therefore “we cannot call in question the truth of any one thing the Catholick Church teaches without making Christ a Lyar.” It also argued that scripture only contained part of the truth, and “we cannot tell wch is the true scripture from the false” without help from the church. In short, Maryland Jesuits traveled the countryside extolling with great zeal a message that directly refuted the most basic tenets of Protestantism. It is not surprising that many people took offense.8
Another story from the Jesuits’ own writings helps to illustrate the threat the order posed to Protestantism. From its earliest days, and especially after the 1640s, Maryland welcomed a large number of Reformed Protestants, many of whom migrated from the less tolerant Anglican colony of Virginia and settled near the Severn River in a community called, in typical Puritan fashion, Providence. These settlers saw the Jesuits as devious rivals who would do anything to convert heretics, as one episode made clear. In the late 1630s, according to a Jesuit report, a Protestant man fell ill from a snakebite. A local Jesuit endeavored to see the sick man, partly to treat him, but mainly to win his soul for the Church before he died. These deathbed conversions were particularly offensive to Protestants, who believed that Catholics took advantage of the mental and physical weakness preceding death to poach