The Empire Reformed. Owen Stanwood
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destruction of La Caroline proved a galvanizing event for Protestants of several different nationalities. Several witnesses of the carnage, including La Caroline’s leader René Goulaine de Laudonnière, escaped to Europe where they published tracts that emphasized Spanish cruelty. During the rest of the sixteenth century both English and Dutch privateers worked to undermine the Spanish in the Caribbean and along the North American coast—a strategic area because the Spanish “treasure fleet” passed up the eastern seaboard in its annual voyage from Havana to Seville. Early English endeavors in the Americas were steeped in this global Protestant context. For instance, when Sir Francis Drake sacked St. Augustine in 1584, Drake’s fleet learned they had captured the town when a French prisoner rowed out to the ship playing “the tune of the Prince of Orange his song” on a fife. Even thousands of miles across the ocean, the standard of Europe’s Protestant hero, the Dutch prince whose challenge to Spanish rule in the Low Countries ended with his assassination that very year, bound coreligionists of different nationalities together against a common Catholic enemy.21
The first permanent English and Dutch settlements in the Americas, despite their obvious differences, all shared this common Protestant heritage. Advocates of the English colonial project during the Elizabethan era, like Richard Hakluyt and Humphrey Gilbert, promoted colonization as a way to “annoy the king of Spain.” According to Hakluyt, the English could establish a different kind of colonial empire, one that instead of conquering and killing Indians, saved their souls and offered them the freedom of the gospel. The Spanish empire, Hakluyt claimed, pretended to be for the benefit of Christ, but that was just pretense; like the Roman Church, the Spanish aimed at “filthy lucre,” and they used a combination of trickery and abject cruelty to keep the people of the Americas in “greate tyrannie.” Following the Spanish Dominican friar Bartolomé de Las Casas, whose denunciations of the Spanish colonial project helped to create the “black legend” of Spanish cruelty, Hakluyt focused on cruelty toward the Indians. The Spaniards “teare them in peces,” Hakluyt wrote, “kill them, martir them, afflicte them, tormente them and destroye them by straunge sortes of cruelties.” The hypothetical Reformed empire, on the other hand, would possess the highest of motives. Its chief aim would be “the gayninge of the soules of millions of those wretched people, the reducinge of them from darkness to lighte, from falshoodde to truthe, from dombe Idolls to the lyvinge god, from the depe pitt of hell to the highest heavens.” Moreover, Protestants could expect to be greeted as liberators by the grateful natives; after all, the two peoples were partners in suffering, as Spanish cruelties in America perfectly matched those used by Catholics during the Marian persecutions in England and the Dutch Revolt. The “western discoverie” would help to spread the “gospele of Christe.” If it also served to enrich the Queen of England and her subjects, and provide employment for the poor, that was all the better.22
It was not until the seventeenth century that colonial founders actually made good on this inflated rhetoric. Sir Walter Raleigh’s first attempts to found a colony in Virginia were famous failures, and only after years of struggle did Jamestown become a viable settlement. While most historians have stressed the worldly aspects of early Virginia, the colony’s founders intended the colony in part as a challenge to Spanish, popish pretensions. While England and Spain were at peace during the reign of James I, official justifications of the early settlement of North America abounded in apocalyptic, anti-Catholic language, which was newly resurgent after the Gunpowder Plot by Catholics to kill the king and blow up Parliament in 1605. As one historian has noted, a “militant internationalist Protestant ideology” served to justify colonial expansion in Virginia as well as New England and the Caribbean. According to one minister preaching to a group of Virginia Company investors in 1610, for instance, the purpose of the colony was not “present profit,” which was likely to be scant anyway, but “the destruction of the devils kingdom, and the propagation of the gospel.”23
From this perspective, the militant Protestantism of the founders of New England was merely a continuation of earlier endeavors. True to form, the Puritans who settled the region justified their mission partly as a challenge to Spain. Some of their coreligionists aimed closer to the heart of the Spanish enterprise, establishing a plantation colony on Providence Island in the western Caribbean. While the Puritans continued the anti-Catholic colonization efforts of their Huguenot, Virginian, and Dutch forebears, however, the English state abandoned the mission, adopting a new style of Protestant worship under Archbishop William Laud that took a much softer line against the Roman church. As a result, from the 1630s through the execution of Charles I in 1649, the most militant anti-Catholics, in England as well as the colonies, were often dissidents, using the language of antipopery against a church and king that seemed insufficiently Protestant. Indeed, Charles I even granted one of his most prominent Catholic subjects, George Calvert, Lord Baltimore, the right to colonize the northern part of Chesapeake Bay, which became the colony of Maryland.24
While the English state shied away from directly confronting Catholics in the New World, the Dutch Republic began to assemble a colonial empire that also had strong religious connotations. From the beginning of their own struggle for independence from the Spanish Habsburgs, the Dutch had viewed the inhabitants of the Americas as fellow victims of Spanish tyranny. The eventual formation of the Dutch West India Company (WIC)—an American counterpart to the powerful Dutch East India Company or VOC—reflected a careful amalgamation of commercial and religious goals. Willem Usselincx, one of the company’s early champions, hoped that it would function to liberate the Western Hemisphere from Spanish Catholic tyranny by promoting the Reformed religion, free trade, and the liberation of the natives. While the eventual Dutch colonies in the Caribbean and New Netherland did not live up to these high ideals, they did define themselves as Protestant havens. Some of the first settlers of New Netherland were French-speaking Protestant refugees from Wallonia, and throughout the seventeenth century many settlers in the colony called for a faith more pure and militant than that promoted by the States General and the WIC.25
The victory of the Parliamentary side in England’s Civil Wars saw the temporary return of England to the vanguard of international Protestantism. One of Oliver Cromwell’s boldest endeavors, the Western Design, aimed to conquer the Spanish empire. It represented the culmination of a hundred years of Protestant militancy in the Americas, beginning after the slaughter in Florida and continuing through the Elizabethan privateers, Dutch merchant companies, and Puritan colonization efforts in both New England and the Caribbean. As one New Englander later reported, Cromwell believed that the conquest of Spanish America “would be to dry up Euphrates”—a reference to apocalyptic prophecies—and that the Lord Protector would not stop “till He came to the Gates of Rome.” Despite the successful conquest of Jamaica, the design ultimately failed. Even in New England Puritans showed little enthusiasm for leaving their homes and relocating to Jamaica. Cromwell’s Western Design, much like his attempt to remake England into a Commonwealth, seemed to indicate the limits of radical Protestantism as a governing philosophy on either a national or an imperial level.26
By the time Charles II regained the throne in the Restoration of 1660, all the parts of his nascent empire shared a deep anti-Catholic heritage. Nonetheless, only in Maryland, where a Catholic proprietor ruled over an overwhelmingly Protestant colony, did antipopery routinely intersect with everyday politics. In the 1670s, however, this situation began to change. A number of factors, reflecting both a changing global dynamic and shifts in power relationships on the North American continent, combined to make antipopery a powerful political tool on the imperial peripheries.
On one hand, English subjects in the colonies simply reacted to the same fears that circulated in Great Britain and Europe. Within months of Titus Oates’s revelations of popish plotting in 1678, ministers in New England knew about the conspiracy. The Reverend Increase Mather—probably the most connected member of Boston’s clerical elite—first learned of the “deep & generall design amongst the papists to involve us in confusion & blood” from his brother Nathaniel, a dissenting minister in Dublin, in December 1678. Within months he received more details from English correspondents, along with numerous other reports of the languishing of the global Protestant interest. Mather and others like him efficiently passed the news on to their captive audiences on Sundays, and they received help from magistrates as well. During the late 1670s and early