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 1680s provincial and town officials around New England ordered frequent public fasts to pray for the “darke clouds … impending over the English nation” and the “deep consultations of the Antichristian party, who have been complotting the subversion of the true Christian Protestant Religion … in England, Scotland, & Ireland.” In short, there could hardly be a person in the region unaware that something dramatic was occurring on the other side of the ocean.27
Beyond the news passed on in letters, colonial readers also consumed an array of books and printed matter from England. Once again, Increase Mather provides a vivid example of the circulation of books, since he noted his reading habits in his diary. In October 1682, for example, he read the trial records of Oliver Plunkett and Fitzharris, two of the popish plotters, along with the classic polemic No Protestant Plot. The following year he turned to “2d part of growth of popery,” a reference to another leading Whig tract. Increase’s son Cotton, meanwhile, provided some clues as to how such books traveled to the colonies. In a 1683 letter, the young minister requested that an English contact send him Henry Care’s Weekly Pacquet of Advice from Rome, along with other Whig literature. Even in remote Henrico County, Virginia, the planter William Byrd knew enough of the volatile situation in Europe that he requested an associate to send him a copy of Pierre Jurieu’s Accomplishment of the Scripture Prophecies, a book arguing that Europe’s religious turmoil presaged an imminent Apocalypse. All these books served to underscore the same conclusion: that the Protestant world was facing a crisis unlike any other.28
Along with news and books came refugees—English dissenters, Scottish Covenanters, and French Huguenots forced out of Europe by persecuting kings and bishops. Some of these newcomers were simple fugitives from justice, like William Kelso, a Scottish surgeon who arrived in Boston on the Anne and Hester in the summer of 1680. Kelso had lent his services to the Covenanting army around the time of the Battle of Bothwell Bridge, and his flight took him around the British world—to Belfast, Dublin, London, and finally to New England, where he was received as a hero once magistrates there identified him as “a Scotch gentleman & Covenanter.” They dutifully ignored a royal order to apprehend the fugitive. Many other similar migrants ended up in American ports during the 1680s—enough to populate new colonies like Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and South Carolina. Moreover, these newcomers brought harrowing stories of their ill treatment at the hands of their enemies in Europe, enemies that seemed to have designs on America as well.29
Of all the newcomers, perhaps the most important were the boatloads of French Protestants who settled in English colonies from St. Christopher to Massachusetts. The migration started early, in the 1670s, when significant numbers of Huguenots began seeking refuge in England, and a smaller number sought assistance from Parliament to move to places like South Carolina, which could serve as a “retreat for an infinity of people oppressed for their conscience in French colonies in the Antilles as well as Hispaniola and in Canada where they groan under the Cross.” The proprietors of that young colony embraced this search for “forreigne Protestants” as something that would both bring revenue and security and solve a demographic problem in Europe, where refugees and undesirable radicals were filling up communities and taxing resources. Part of the plan involved settling a number of Covenanters in a village south of Charles Town, and the proprietors also proposed bringing in Protestants from the German Palatinate.30
The year 1686 marked the high point in this migration, as the combined suppression of Monmouth and Argyll’s rebellions and the revocation of the Edict of Nantes increased the flow of dissenters of many nationalities. The Whig bookseller John Dunton, who came to New England to recover his debts that year, reported that Boston was the “common refuge” for “Monmouth’s forlorn Fugitives.” Farther south in the West Indies, meanwhile, nearly a thousand even more forlorn fugitives worked as indentured servants on plantations, sentenced to ten years of labor for their advocacy of Monmouth’s cause. The effect of all these arrivals was to make almost everyone aware of the upsurge in persecution back home, and to assign the colonies a specific place in the Protestant world. If there was a place where godly people could continue to worship God, perhaps it was in these remote plantations, where the state did not possess as much coercive power.31
The rise in antipopery was therefore partly a result of the integration of the colonies into European confessional politics. But at the same time local circumstances in America served to reinforce these fears and make colonial subjects even more nervous. During the mid-1670s relations between Europeans and Native Americans took a particularly violent turn. First, in 1675, New England Wampanoags under the leadership of King Philip rose up against the English in Plymouth and Massachusetts, leading to a bloody war that threatened the annihilation of the New England colonies and eventually concluded in the removal of much of the region’s native population. The following year, to the south in Virginia, conflicts between Indians and English settlers in the Potomac Valley led to an argument over Indian policy that culminated in civil war, as the planter Nathaniel Bacon led a movement that burned Jamestown to the ground and forced the governor to seek refuge on the Eastern Shore. Along with these two regional crises came a third in Barbados, which experienced its first major slave insurrection in 1675.32
As these events occurred few observers thought to relate them to each other, let alone to the alarms over “popery and arbitrary government” across the Atlantic. As time passed, however, and the rumors traveling through the Protestant world became more extreme, many people began to view these various disturbances as more than coincidences. When new arrivals warned of tyrannical designs in Europe, colonists started to fear that they too would fall to a global Catholic plot. This was the political and religious context of the unprecedented expansion of the empire under the later Stuarts, a design that succeeded in changing the way that crown and colonies related to one another—though not necessarily in the way that imperial officials envisioned.
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The political circumstances in Britain itself combined with the crisis in the colonies to create the possibility of real political change in English America. However, this change was far from straightforward or inevitable. Stuart officials acted first, attempting to reform the empire by fiat in the late 1670s and 1680s, mainly through the revocation of various colonial charters. This program excited enormous opposition that eventually became subsumed in the empire-wide contest between Whigs and Tories after the popish plot. After some setbacks, however, James II managed to construct the Dominion of New England,
