of descriptions of native life culled from authors like Thomas Hariot and John Smith, while the chapters on the Caribbean Islands focused on sea monsters. But for all its eccentricities, Crouch’s book teaches historians a very important lesson. Even among London’s humbler classes, the American empire had begun to acquire a reputation. People knew about it, and wanted to know more. The colonies had entered the popular consciousness.6
It is hardly coincidental that Crouch’s book appeared in 1685, the last year of Charles II’s reign. Arguably no monarch in English history had presided over such a profound expansion of England’s overseas empire. During the twenty-five years following the king’s restoration in 1660 the plantations grew in both number and importance. Charles created five new colonies on the North American mainland by granting charters to royal favorites, while also expanding the scope of royal authority in existing colonies and handing more power to chartered trading monopolies like the East India Company or the new Royal African Company. At the time of the king’s death his empire stretched from London to Newfoundland, Barbados, and India. Tens of thousands of his subjects lived overseas, along with many people of other nationalities who dwelled in his dominions, often against their will.7
But if Charles II’s empire was mighty on paper, it was also diverse and diffuse. Not only in geography, but in economic livelihood, political form, and ethnic composition, each of the king’s plantations was a world apart. Certainly it was a major goal of the king’s ministers to impose some kind of order on the chaotic system he inherited from his father and grandfather, and he did preside over an unprecedented expansion of the imperial administration, but the farther one went from Whitehall the less this bureaucracy seemed to matter. Part of the king’s irrelevance stemmed from his own inconsistency: just as he sought to eliminate the chartered corporations in New England and Bermuda that made the colonies so hard to govern, he also created new proprieties as late as 1681, when he granted Pennsylvania to the Quaker William Penn. This waffling has led many historians to downplay the significance of the Restoration empire and consider the eighteenth century as the true beginning of British imperialism.8
Despite its diversity, there was one thing that united the various parts of the Restoration empire, and that was fear. The expansionist push of the late 1600s did not stem, as one might think, from national self-confidence, but from the very opposite feeling, an anxiety that England was in danger of being subverted and undermined, or even destroyed, by its rivals. The identity of this eternal foe was a matter of some dispute, and English political writers engaged in a constant debate concerning which of the nation’s chief rivals, France or the Netherlands, was more dangerous or cunning. But whoever the enemy was, most English people agreed that the proper response was an expansion of England’s global influence. Thus, the empire that Crouch chronicled was in part a national attempt to save England and its interests from subversion.9
The champions of imperial consolidation came from a cadre of Stuart loyalists who shaped colonial policy on both sides of the Atlantic. The most ubiquitous was William Blathwayt, a political chameleon who never visited the colonies, but became England’s most influential American expert, and a tireless advocate of a more centralized empire. While he rarely engaged in overt political sermonizing, Blathwayt left little doubt that he favored tighter controls over the colonies, and he also suggested why: without centralization, the king’s rivals—especially France—would gain more power and resources in North America. In 1688 Blathwayt defended the proposed Dominion of New England by stating, “it will be terrible to the French and make them proceed with more caution than they have lately done.” But if Blathwayt and other Stuart officials feared the French, they combined this anxiety with a great deal of admiration. Indeed, they proposed that the best way to defeat the French in America, as in Europe, was to emulate them.10
Two brief examples can serve to illustrate this anti-French imperialism. In the Leeward Islands of the West Indies, perhaps the most exposed of England’s colonial possessions, the crypto-Catholic Tory Governor Sir William Stapleton complained throughout the 1670s and 1680s of the attention the French king lavished on his island colonies, implying that if the Lords of Trade and Plantations did not imitate the Sun King and send a well-provisioned naval brigade, England’s rivals could easily overrun the islands. In the meantime, another Irish Catholic, Thomas Dongan of New York, worked against French pretensions in the north by adopting French tactics. England’s rivals had built a potent empire despite the perennial lack of migrants by cultivating Indian alliances that united the French, at least in theory, with natives stretching from Montreal to the Illinois Country. Dongan consciously imitated this alliance system by renewing the “covenant chain” alliance with the powerful Iroquois Confederacy dwelling north of the colony, which had been inaugurated by his predecessor Edmund Andros. At the same time, Dongan understood the role of Jesuit priests in expanding French trade and influence, and he proposed that the English expel the priests and replace them with English Jesuits—a tacit admission of the importance of missions in strengthening the imperial state. Indeed, the Jesuits had become leading vanguards of French expansionism, and Dongan understood their power.11
These Stuart planners perceived a hemispheric design by the French to dominate the continent both politically and economically. The Sun King and his minions would use every tool at their disposal—including military power and the more subtle efforts of the Jesuits—to win over the trade of the Americas for themselves, and with it land and power as well. The design was secular at its core, but had a strong religious component, since the French masked their true intentions under a religious veneer. Thus the Stuart vision of empire was based on a widespread fear of the French that was at least implicitly, and sometimes explicitly anti-Catholic.
At the same time, they perceived another enemy that aided the French in their designs: radical dissenters. Along with the king’s foreign rivals, these internal foes were the most dangerous enemies of the national interest. It was Puritans, after all, who had taken up arms against King Charles I and plunged the nation into civil war during the 1640s, and forty years later their heirs—usually labeled dissenters or nonconformists—appeared to be doing the same thing. By fomenting quarrels between English subjects and challenging royal authority, these subversives provided aid to the king’s Catholic rivals. Stuart officials often made toleration a feature of their religious policy, but they accompanied this apparent moderation with a vitriolic condemnation of dissent, which often crossed the line from being a matter of conscience to a marker of treasonous inclinations. In addition, imperial planners used the lack of religious toleration in New England, especially toward conforming Anglicans, as another reason to reform the colonies.12
The New England colonies provided the clearest indication of the dangers of an empire run by dissenters. Edward Randolph, a royal officer sent to investigate the region in 1676, portrayed Massachusetts as an “arbitrary government” in the truest sense, as leaders claimed authority with no real mandate. They flouted English economic regulations, passed laws that were “repugnant” to the English constitution, and even harbored “regicides” who had signed Charles I’s death warrant in 1649. Reform was necessary, Randolph argued, not just for economic reasons but for geopolitical ones as well. These perverse “Independents” threatened to betray the colonies to a foreign power because they fomented divisions among Protestants and rejected the king’s authority, and they occupied a vulnerable corner of the English dominions adjacent to New France. “There are dangerous principles among them,” Randolph complained, and if the crown did not exert some control, “the French will certainly by degrees swallow up that great Countrey … & so at length become masters of all his Maj[es]ties West Indian Plantations.” Some Tories even went so far as to suggest that an alliance existed between papists and dissenters, claiming that Jesuits lurked in bastions of dissent like New England, where they encouraged heresy against the Church of England in order to weaken their rivals.13
Luckily for the crown, Randolph thought that reforming this system would be fairly easy. Most New Englanders, the agent claimed, did not hate the monarch, and indeed would welcome greater imperial regulation, especially if it would provide safety against external enemies like the Indians who had almost
