Francis Nicholson, on a good will tour of the New England backcountry. He assured the people, both English and Indian, that they were safe “under the protection of a greate King, who protects all his Subjects both in their lives and fortunes.” In the eyes of Andros and Nicholson, New Englanders’ hysterics made little sense. The Dominion of New England—a potent union of all the colonies from Maine to New Jersey under the command of an experienced officer—provided the best defense against external enemies that the region had ever possessed. The king and his redcoats, not a motley local militia, would keep the plantations safe.1
The crisis in the Dominion represented the first major setback in what had been a fairly successful example of imperial state building. The key to the Dominion was protection, represented perfectly in the new union’s official seal. The design featured James II, “Robed in His Royall Vestments and Crowned, with a Scepter in the Left hand, the Right hand being extended towards an English Man and an Indian both kneeling, the one presenting the Fruits of the Country and other a Scrole.” Above them a flying angel held a banner with the Dominion’s motto, “Nunquam libertas gratior extat,” “never does liberty appear in a more gracious form [than under a pious king].” The monarch received allegiance and tribute and provided protection, which was the key to political stability. Andros and his allies knew that the Dominion’s programs would excite opposition from New Englanders who defined both “liberty” and “piety” in very different ways from James II’s allies. However, they believed that they could keep control as long as they upheld their promise to provide protection—and they were mostly right. Despite some opposition, the Dominion did not fall until subjects began to believe that their leaders were not protecting them at all, and in fact aimed to subvert and destroy the country. The opposition to the Dominion grew as a result of its failed Indian policy; as native enemies attacked the borders, New Englanders turned against their leaders.2
Figure 4. Seal of the Dominion of New England, 1686. William Cullen Bryant and Sydney Howard Gay, A Popular History of the United States (New York, 1879), 3: 9.
The wave of fear that threatened the Dominion combined several different varieties of popular anxiety. Aside from the popish plot alarms that periodically struck both England and its colonies, settlers in North America also obsessively feared Indian attacks. Europeans and natives had experienced tensions since the newcomers arrived on the continent, but the violence increased during the 1670s. First, in 1675, a coalition of Indians under the Wampanoag sachem Metacom (King Philip) attacked English settlements in New England in response to land disputes and religious tensions, dramatically revealing the region’s vulnerability. The following year Indian attacks on the frontier of Virginia inspired a massive popular revolt against Governor William Berkeley by subjects, led by the upstart Nathaniel Bacon, who believed the governor was not protecting the colony from Indian enemies. While peace had returned to both places by 1677, the legacy of this unrest remained. As a result, the fears of popish plots that crossed the Atlantic after 1678 arrived in places already primed to expect the worst.3
Popular panics of the 1680s proved particularly powerful because they combined the tropes of antipopery with homegrown racial fears. Increasingly, people became apprehensive of a massive plot that combined papists and Indians into a gigantic, diabolical coalition that aimed to push English Protestants off the continent. This belief did not come naturally; indeed, during the first period of colonization many English settlers had expected that Indians would be natural allies against 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.
• • •
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
