occupied a step above papists. The English poet and politician Andrew Marvell wrote that “The Pagans are excusable by their natural darkness, without revelation,” while “the Pope avowing Christianity by profession, doth in doctrine and practice renonce it.” From the 1640s, therefore, a few colonists had good evidence to suspect that Indians could be auxiliaries in a Catholic cause, but such beliefs were not widespread.14
Not surprisingly, Maryland’s political situation provided the most fertile ground for fear that Indians could fall to the temptations of popery. Founded by Catholics, the colony nonetheless welcomed a large number of Protestant dissenters, drawn to the colony by Lord Baltimore’s generous policy of religious toleration. Proprietary authorities understood that they ruled over a powder keg, where religious passions could explode into violence at any time; they attempted to avoid such a scenario by restricting religious speech. Accordingly, the 1649 “Act concerning toleration” including a long list of outlawed religious slurs: calling your neighbor a “Jesuited Papist” or a “schismatick” could result in a ten-shilling fine.15
On the whole, these attempts to promote religious understanding failed. During the turbulent Civil War years of the 1640s and 1650s, when rumors of Catholic plotting reached fever pitch in Britain, Protestants in Maryland rejected Lord Baltimore’s authority in large numbers, mounting two successful rebellions. Only through impressive maneuvering in London—and an improbable alliance with Oliver Cromwell—did Baltimore manage to hold onto his colony.16
In the meantime, the proprietor’s opponents barraged him with a number of charges. One tract claimed that Baltimore’s intention was to create a “receptacle for Papists, and Priests, and Jesuits,” and that he even intended to bring 2000 Irish to the colony who “would not leave a Bible in Maryland”—surely an alarming prospect only a decade after the 1641 rebellion. Colonial agent Leonard Strong was even more blunt when he described the series of events that led a cadre of Protestants to throw off the lord’s authority, claiming that Baltimore required subjects in Maryland to “countenance and uphold Antichrist,” meaning the Catholic church, and he was willing to use tyrannical force to ensure submission. This force extended even to employing Indians. When proprietary forces faced off against Protestant dissidents in the “Battle of the Severn” in 1655, according to Strong, “the Indians were resolved in themselves, or set on by the popish faction, or rather both together to fall upon us: as indeed after the fight they did, besetting houses, killing one man, and taking another prisoner.” Baltimore’s enemies had no direct proof, but they could only assume that the natives were under his authority, especially since his government maintained such close alliances with local tribes, and even employed Jesuits to work among the Indians.17
The decade after 1660 represented a period of relative calm in the colony, but by 1676 discord returned. In the wake of Bacon’s Rebellion in neighboring Virginia, opponents of the new Lord Baltimore, Charles Calvert, sent an appeal to England that expressed many of the fears that would become commonplace around the colonies in the next decade. The “Complaint from Heaven” represented Baltimore as a partner in a global Catholic design: “the platt form is, Pope Jesuit determined to over terne Engl[an]d with feyer, sword and distractions within themselves, and by the Maryland Papists, to drive us Protestants to Purgatory … with the help of French spirits from Canada.” The petition used the Catholic plot to explain recent attacks by Susquehanna Indians, as well as the unwillingness of Baltimore and Virginia governor Sir William Berkeley to meet the Indian threat. The “Huy and crye” also described a plan by Jesuits to infiltrate the colonies by sending priests in disguise. “These blake spirits disperse themselves all over the Country in America,” the writers claimed, and held secret correspondence with French Jesuits, plotting destruction for American Protestants. The petitioners used this argument to plead for an end to Baltimore’s government and, in direct contrast to those in New England, for an increase in royal authority. In order to defend against French Catholics and their Indian allies, the writers suggested that the king send “a Vice Roye or Governor Generallissimo” to preserve the colonies from external enemies.18
In 1681 these fears of Catholics and Indians combined to create a crisis that foreshadowed later troubles in New England. The problems began in the summer, when some “heathen Rogues” attacked the borders of the colony, killing several settlers on the upper reaches of the Patuxent and Potomac Rivers. These Indian attacks, probably Iroquois or Susquehanna strikes against people they believed were harboring their enemies, caused massive panic in both Maryland and Virginia, where inhabitants became “greatly dissatisfied” that their governors could not protect them from the enemy. In this climate of fear, some eventually concluded “that it is the Senaco Indians” who had committed the depredations “by the Instigacon of the Jesuits in Canada and the Procuremt of the Lord Baltemore to cut of most off the Protestants of Maryland.” This identification reflected the tendency among colonists in the Chesapeake to describe all northern Indians as “Senecas,” in reference to the westernmost nation of the Iroquois Confederacy, and constituted the most elaborate theory to date of how Baltimore, French Catholics, and Indians had banded together. The proprietor blamed “some evile ill disposed spirits” for spreading these rumors, and he pointed to two men in particular: Josias Fendall and John Coode.19
The two ringleaders of the opposition in 1681 were among the most interesting and enigmatic figures in early Maryland history. Fendall had been a governor under Cecil Calvert, but the proprietor removed him from office for his role in fomenting a previous rebellion in 1660; since that time he had stayed out of politics but remained an irritant to the proprietary interest. Coode was a younger man and a more recent arrival to the colony. An ordained Anglican minister, he served in the colony’s lower house as a representative of Calvert County, and had not yet acquired the reputation as a “perennial rebel.” While the two men’s motivations are not entirely clear, they tapped into a deep undercurrent of fear and resentment that had the potential to topple the government.20
Coode allegedly began his plotting in May 1681 at the house of Nehemiah Blackiston, when he said in the company of many people that within four months no Catholic would own “a foote of land” in the province, and that Coode could “make it high water” whenever he pleased: meaning that he had the power to cause a popular insurrection. (Coode objected to that assertion, claiming he was only “alludeing to a bowle of Punch wch they were then drinking wch he could make ebb or flow at pleasure.”) He apparently put his plan into operation in July after the murder of one Thomas Potter and some other English people near Point Lookout. When a neighbor observed that Indians killed the colonists, Coode responded that they “were not murdered by Indians, but were Murdered by Christians,” a clear implication of Catholic authorities.21
Fendall harbored the same suspicions. One of his employees reported that around the time of the murders Fendall “did severall times say that he beleived in his Conscience the Papists and Indians joined together, and that … my Lord [Baltimore] did uphold them in what they did, and he beleived my Lord and they together had a mind to destroy all the Protestants.” The rumor may have originated with Daniel Mathena, a neighbor in Charles County who had received an Indian visitor en route to deliver a packet of letters to the “Senecas” several years earlier, containing, Mathena claimed, orders from Lord Baltimore “to come and cutt off the Protestants.” His evidence was not compelling, and showed the intellectual leaps that English people made when they feared a conspiracy was afoot. The Indian visitor mentioned that he carried letters from Baltimore to the Senecas, and when Mathena’s wife asked how the Indians could read the letters, “the Indian answered that the French were hard by and that they could read them.” After the murders, this rather obtuse report of French presence in the backcountry became solid evidence of a massive popish plot.22
Fendall and Coode decided to take action. They visited Nicholas Spencer, the secretary of Virginia, notifying him “that the Papists and Indians were joined together.” Spencer, for his part, discounted the rumors and advised them to “be quiett at home,” advice that prompted Coode to swear “God Damn all the Catholick Papist Doggs” and resolve to “be
