Antoinette Sutto - Loyal Protestants and Dangerous Papists: Maryland and the Politics of Religion in the English Atlantic, 1630-1690

EARLY AMERICAN

HISTORIES

Douglas Bradburn, John C. Coombs,

and S. Max Edelson, Editors

University of Virginia Press

2015 by the Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

First published 2015

ISBN 978-0-8139-3747-2 (cloth)

ISBN 978-0-8139-3748-9 (e-book)

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book would not be what it is without the support of numerous colleagues and friends. Peter Lake, Peter Silver, and John Murrin read interminable early drafts of the project and offered a wealth of criticism and insight. Sara Brooks, Rupali Mishra, and a long list of other Princeton friends and acquaintances provided moral support. The book in its current form was created during my fellowship at Vanderbilt University and my first years at the University of Mississippi, where the friendship and historical expertise of my colleagues were invaluable.

INTRODUCTION

A characteristic early Stuart colonial projectwhich, uncharacteristically, survivedseventeenth-century Maryland is both familiar and foreign. Seen, as it often has been, through the lens of its land, workers, and staple commodity, Marylands seventeenth century appears as an uneasy coalescence of social, economic, and political structures that by the early 1700s brought wealth and status to a few, a modest competency to others, and far more limited prospects to many more. The colony grew from a scattering of farms and trading posts in the 1630s to a land of modest opportunity for free migrants by the 1650s. For the Piscataways, Susquehannocks and other Native residents of the area, the English in Maryland brought new goods and occasionally military or political support, but they also brought disease, violence, and dispossession.

From this perspective, Maryland was an English colony like many others. It shared a tobacco economy and much of its social structure with Virginia; the two Chesapeake colonies, in turn, shared the challenges of warfare, trade, diplomacy, religious conflict, and political order with other colonies, nations, and empires of early America, even as the specific circumstances of their histories and geographies rendered each of them distinct. But Maryland was peculiar. Its anomalous politics of religion, specifically the Catholic proprietors policy of toleration and the colonys lack of an established church, have drawn the attention of generations of American historians. It was a colony of a Protestant kingdom, governed by Catholics and populated mainly by Protestants, including those who did not conform to the Church of Englandin the eyes of many seventeenth-century people, its church affairs were dangerously unmoored from its official structures of authority. Over and over again, colonists, polemicists, and administrators commented on this disquieting state of affairs. Maryland was repeatedly wracked by political disorder in the seventeenth century, never without reference to the subversive qualities of papists, the malice of Protestant nonconformists, or the danger posed by religious diversity in general. That toleration in Maryland proved controversial is surprising only if one sees it through modern eyes: in the seventeenth century, what this sort of confessional arrangement meant and what (if anything) to do about it were questions central to conflicts over authority, legitimacy, and allegiance that brought revolution to the seventeenth-century Anglophone world twice over. The long, awkward negotiation between the needs of an expanding English state, early modern confessional politics, and the peculiarities of a little Chesapeake colony are the core of the story this book tells. It is a story about the violent and colorful political world of early Maryland, but it is also a story about the English state, and ultimately about the British empire.

Maryland offered its Catholic proprietors, the Calvert family, the prospect of New World wealth; it also offered them an opportunity to revise the uneasy relationship between English Catholics and the state. Such a revision was not merely of interest to Catholics. The Maryland proprietors Catholicism led them to avoid a religious establishment in their colony. All Trinitarian Christians might worship as they chose. and the state, and it remained entangled in that argument until the final years of the century.

This argument about religion and the state was in turn embedded in related questions about English expansion abroad and the Anglophone Atlantica history of Maryland is necessarily also a history of the seventeenth-century English empire. Voyages to the Americas, Africa, and Asia in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries presented a dizzying array of ways in which the English might engage with the wider world.

How all this transatlantic, cosmopolitan activity was formally connected to the state posed an additional puzzle. Familiar legal structures such as trading monopolies, letters patent, or, in the case of Maryland, the Durham palatinate offered jumping-off points.

This expanding state was nominally Protestant, yet the connection between the crown and the Church of England, too, was less straightforward than it seemed. Was uniformity of religion the tie that bound subjects to the king, or that held the polity togetherand did Protestant uniformity require complete conformity to the Church of England? If the tie was via the Church of England alone, of which the king was supreme head, Protestant nonconformists could be both Protestant and disloyal. But if it was more important simply not to be Catholic, was there a space within the polity for Catholics at all? Could the crown grant a colonial charter to such persons? By the 1680s, some inhabitants of Maryland arguedpersuasively, in the endthat it could not. The process of extending English authority across the Atlantic was necessarily bound up in arguments about law, loyalty, and confessional difference, and placed stress on some of the most tender points of the English political system.

The slipperiness of the connection between confessional identity and political allegiance in the seventeenth century produced both conflict and opportunity in the English Atlantic. Charles Is views on religion and loyalty made it an eminently reasonable move to grant a colonial proprietorship to a Catholic in 1632. Catholic Calverts reign in Maryland because the possibilities opened up for Catholics by Charles I and his heirs were tied to a style of monarchy that the English ultimately rejected.

The internal politics of the English state were not the only force shaping the ideological landscape of the English Atlantic. The relationship between crown and colonies changed dramatically over the course of the seventeenth century. As the empire grew in wealth, population, and importance, specially appointed commissions and committees of the Privy Council were no longer sufficient to meet its administrative needs. The English had always needed to assert their claims to New World land and people against competing claims by other European powers.

As the state grew, however, two problems became ever more difficult to avoid. Part of the process by which early modern states and their overseas empires were created involved negotiation with localities. Local sources of authority were recognized or created as a way of drawing new people or new territory into the orbit of the state, but in the process, new privileges and potential claims on the state were created. States later had to reckon with their own creationssometimes successfully, sometimes not.