be known for certain. Fendall in particular seems to have been attempting a return to political power, and understood that the Indian troubles provided an opportunity to undermine his old rival; one man reported that Fendall “hath been soliciting the people to choose him Delegate in the Assembly and hath told them that were he Commandr of the County Troope he would Destroy all the Indians.” Additionally, witnesses implied that both men hoped to increase their property holdings by confiscating land from Catholics. At the same time, Coode’s actions remain somewhat more difficult to interpret. He already possessed both a seat in the lower house and a militia commission. While most historians have branded him a self-interested demagogue, his anti-Catholicism appears to have been heartfelt, if not always internally consistent.23
Baltimore responded to these threats by throwing Fendall and Coode in prison. Motivated by memories of Bacon’s Rebellion in Virginia and the numerous insurrections his father had faced, the proprietor believed that only decisive action would demonstrate the consequences of rebellion. His approach backfired, however, because he underestimated the degree of popular support for the two men’s actions. For one thing, the lower house refused to remove Coode from its ranks or even discipline him. More ominously, a Charles County justice of the peace named George Godfrey hatched a plot to break Fendall out of prison, receiving commitments from forty men at church one Sunday. The design failed, and Godfrey joined the two other malcontents in jail. In November colonial authorities put the men on trial and convicted Fendall, who was banished from the colony, and Godfrey, whose death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. The jury acquitted Coode, leaving him free to get his revenge another day.24
The denouement of the episode represented only a partial victory for Baltimore. He remained in control of the colony, but did little to regain the trust of his people. According to authorities in Virginia, Maryland remained dangerously unstable throughout the 1680s. A letter from the end of 1681 suggested that the proprietor only retained control by “keeping forces in Armes” and imprisoning anyone who questioned his authority, leaving “the Common people in great dread and feare.” A report by Virginia governor Thomas Culpeper about the same time noted that “Maryland is now in Ferment, and not onely troubled with our disease, pouverty, but in very great danger of falling into peeces whether it be that the Old Lord Baltimores politick Maximes are not pursued and followed by the Sonne or that they will not doe in this Age.” In recognition of the precarious nature of imperial politics, Culpeper implored the Lords of Trade to take steps to stabilize Maryland, lest the disease spread to its neighbors.25
The governor’s warning proved to be prescient. While Baltimore’s political difficulties appeared to be peculiar to his own situation as a Catholic ruler in a Protestant colony, the same political language could apply throughout the English colonies. In essence, ordinary Marylanders were attempting to explain the inexplicable: why a distant, mysterious Indian nation had decided to attack them, seemingly without provocation. With reports of popish plots traveling around the English world at this time, many colonists easily molded the familiar language of antipopery to this unfamiliar situation, implicating both the French and local Catholic leaders whose loyalty seemed to be suspect. In a sense, however, Baltimore’s Catholicism was not the main issue. As future events would show, the same tactics could be used against Protestants as well.
• • •
If rumors of a Catholic-Indian conspiracy proved particularly potent in Maryland, by the 1670s they had begun to appear all over the colonies. The ubiquity of these fears came out clearly in the travel journal of two members of an obscure Dutch Calvinist sect, the Labadists, who ranged from Maryland to Boston in 1679 and 1680 looking for land for their communitarian settlement. The two men, Jasper Danckaerts and Peter Sluyter, heard talk of popish plots almost everywhere they went. In Maryland they learned that Jesuit priests “hold correspondence” with all the Indians between the English and French colonies, and related that “some people in Virginia and Maryland as well as in New Netherland, have been apprehensive lest there might be an outbreak, hearing what has happened in Europe, as well as among their neighbors at Boston.” Once they reached New England, meanwhile, popular anxiety began to have a deleterious effect on the men’s travels. As strangely dressed foreigners Danckaerts and Sluyter stood out, and many Bostoners feared they were papists in disguise. “Some declared we were French emissaries going through the land to spy it out,” Danckaerts noted, “others, that we were Jesuits travelling over the country for the same purpose; some that we were Recollets, designating the places where we had held mass and confession.” Only with some difficulty—and a lot of explanation—were the two men able to find lodging in the town.26
These fears came out of several recent incidents. The most distant was in 1673, when a similar European stranger appeared in Boston during a more innocent time. The man proved to be an astute scholar, and he charmed New England’s clerical elite with his wit and learning. In time he began to raise suspicions, however, because “although he was disguised,” New Englanders believed the man might be a Jesuit. In fact, he was a priest named Jean Pierron, a member of the Society of Jesus stationed in Acadia who had spent the winter exploring the English colonies. In particular, he had sought to create ties between French and Maryland Jesuits, perhaps inspiring the fears of coordination expressed by Marylanders in the 1676 “hue and crye.” Only after his departure from Boston did the townspeople realize that an inveterate enemy had been among them; Pierron boasted on his return he had converted several “heretics” to the Catholic faith.27
Several years after this unwelcome visit a major Indian war convulsed the region. The paramount Wampanoag sachem in the region, known to the English as King Philip, led a coalition of Algonquians who threatened the colony’s very existence in 1675 and 1676. The region’s leaders agonized over the causes of the war, and most came to blame sin and backsliding. God was angry, the ministers said, and they demanded a return to the zealousness of the colony’s founding years. For some people, however, there was another explanation: it was priests like Pierron who inspired the bloodshed. Just after his arrival in Boston the royal agent Edward Randolph heard that “vagrant and Jesuitical priests” had worked for years “to exasperate the Indians against the English, and to bring them into a confederacy, and that they were promised supplies from France, and other parts, to extirpate the English Nation out of the Continent of America.” This alternate explanation for the war seemed more persuasive after the General Court voiced its suspicions that the French had supplied arms to the enemy, several of whom had taken refuge in New France. Indeed, charges of French collusion became common both during and after the war, in spite of the lack of any real evidence.28
The next evidence of a plot against America came in 1679, when a fire raged through Boston, destroying much of the town’s North End. Such conflagrations were not uncommon in early modern towns and cities, but New Englanders naturally suspected that papists had a hand in the disaster, since they were known to favor such tactics: many people continued to believe that the London fire of 1666 was a Catholic affair. Suspicion came to rest on a Frenchman named Peter Lorphelin, and though investigators could find no sufficient evidence to tie him to the crime, word of the fire traveled through Protestant networks as far as Ireland and the Netherlands. It appeared to many that the papists were beginning to pay attention to America, and some people at least were inclined to think of Indians as partners in the design.29
In 1680, nonetheless, most American colonists continued to view Catholics and Indians as two distinct threats. When Indians captured a young New Englander named Quentin Stockwell in 1677 and carried him to Canada, for instance, he never made any connection between the two groups, and praised the French for providing food and care for him during a sickness. He even related an argument between the French and Indians regarding his treatment, after which the natives charged that the French “loved the English better than the Indians.” For Stockwell, the civility and Christianity of the French was enough to place them above the Indians, whom he perceived as cruel pagans. But if he could separate the two groups in 1677, other New Englanders began to view them as partners in the same cause. Two broad changes began to occur: first, the English saw Indians as turning French, especially in their increasing adherence
