Papists in a Protestant World: the Catholic Anglo-Atlantic in the Seventeenth Century

PAPISTS IN A PROTESTANT WORLD: THE CATHOLIC ANGLO-ATLANTIC IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY A dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences of Georgetown University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in History By Shona Helen Johnston, M.Phil. Washington, DC May 11, 2011 Copyright 2011 by Shona Helen Johnston All Rights Reserved ii PAPISTS IN A PROTESTANT WORLD: THE CATHOLIC ANGLO-ATLANTIC IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY Shona Helen Johnston, M.Phil. Thesis Advisor: Alison F. Games, Ph.D. ABSTRACT Scholars of English expansion have rightly located the roots of the English Atlantic world in the turmoil and transitions of the seventeenth century, but they have too often concentrated on the narrow and premature definition of early modern England as a Protestant nation and empire. While the seventeenth-century Anglo-Atlantic remained predominantly populated and ruled by Protestants, it was not a Protestant empire. This dissertation focuses on identifying individual Catholic inhabitants—broadly envisioned to encompass migrants from the British Isles, other European settlers, enslaved Africans, and American converts—to shed light on the diverse religious constitution of the English Atlantic world. It asks what happened to those migrants and settlers who contradicted the dominant religious and political identity of England and English global expansion and seeks to better understand how England and the English colonies became a Protestant world over the course of the seventeenth century. Five thematic chapters stitch together evidence from a range of interdisciplinary sources —from narrative accounts to colonial records and archaeological evidence—to recover and reconstruct the lived experience of Catholic inhabitants of the English colonies. Key topics include the demographic diversity of the Catholic Anglo-Atlantic; the religious missions and material culture that facilitated and sustained Catholic practice; the question of Catholic loyalty iii to a Protestant kingdom; and how changing ideas of religious tolerance affected the lives of Catholics in the colonies. This dissertation challenges how historians typically think and write about religious and political identity in the early modern Atlantic world. Rather than starkly divided into separate Protestant and Catholic spheres of influence, historians should instead understand the Atlantic as an intricate web of entangled empires and Atlantic worlds that crossed religious and political boundaries. Both Catholic and Protestant migrants contributed to the formation and growth of the English Atlantic world in the seventeenth century. Documenting the lives of Catholics and their interactions with Protestants in the early English Atlantic demonstrates that religious diversity underlay the formation of a Protestant empire and shows the inadequacy of using essentialized binaries—such as Catholic and Protestant—to understand early modern imperial expansion. iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This dissertation is, first and foremost, a product of the intellectual environment fostered by the staff, faculty, and graduate students in the Department of History at Georgetown. The department’s emphasis on global and transnational history inspired me to think beyond the traditional national, political, and cultural boundaries that frame early American history and to adopt an Atlantic approach to the study of early modern colonial expansion. Both the department and the Graduate School provided fellowship funding that allowed me to develop as a teacher, a researcher, and a scholar. Special thanks must go to the faculty members who I had the opportunity to work with both as a student and also as a teaching assistant. John Tutino taught me everything I know about Latin America and encouraged me to integrate both North and South America into my thinking on early modern colonization and Atlantic history. Jo Ann Moran Cruz offered initial guidance on situating my dissertation in the context of early modern England and events in Reformation Europe. David Collins introduced me to teaching European Civilization and kindly provided comments on early drafts of my chapters. My dissertation committee members Adam Rothman and Amy Leonard provided crucial help and support during the writing phase of the dissertation. Adam also served as a second advisor and taught me how to teach Atlantic history. But my most sincere thanks go to my advisor, Alison Games, who never doubted my ability to write this dissertation--even when I did--and whose own work served as an inspiration and a model as to how to approach the study of the early modern period from a global perspective. The broad geographical scope of my dissertation and the dispersed nature of my subjects, and their sources, necessitated research in a wide range of repositories and archives themselves v scattered across the English Atlantic. There is insufficient space to individually thank the staff at each of the many libraries and archives I have visited over the last five years of research and writing. Needless to say my dissertation has been immensely enriched by the knowledge and expertise of the archivists, librarians, and reading room staff I have encountered along the way as I attempted to hunt down and extract the tiniest scraps of information on otherwise forgotten colonial inhabitants. Several institutions provided crucial financial support, which granted me the luxury of time to spend digging through manuscript and book collections in New England, the Chesapeake, and the Caribbean in search of Catholics. My archival research started out in Boston searching through the rich seventeenth- century accounts of Puritan New England. A W. B. H. Dowse Fellowship supported a month of research in the collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society and allowed me to make use of resources at the Boston Public Library and the Massachusetts State Archives. In the Chesapeake, a Mellon Research Fellowship from the Virginia Historical Society in Richmond made possible a week spent digging through their collections for references to the Catholic Brent family. My thanks also to Ted Polk at the Library of Virginia, who helped me to interlibrary loan microfilm copies of Virginia county court records. An Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellowship funded a month of research in Philadelphia at the Library Company of Philadelphia and the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. Particular thanks must go to Jim Green at the Library Company who, in the space of a few minutes, miraculously located three surviving texts from the library of John Tatham. The reading room staff at the Historical Society also searched diligently for an alleged manuscript map of Tatham’s land in Burlington, but to no avail. A Research Travel Grant from the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at Georgetown funded several weeks of vi vital research at the National Archives in Kew, as well as shorter visits to Cambridge University Library and the British Library. The same funding also enabled a two-week research trip to Barbados to view seventeenth-century records preserved in the Barbados Department of Archives and Barbados Public Library. Sylvia Reynolds at the Barbados Public Library kindly arranged for me to view the Lucas Manuscripts at the Archives during the library’s closure. I concluded my archival research back in New England with two-months at the John Carter Brown Library, Providence, Rhode Island, supported by a Charles H. Watts Memorial Fellowship. In addition to receiving research support from a variety of institutions, I benefitted immensely from two year-long dissertation fellowships that allowed me to complete my research and begin the task of weaving my many archival scraps and fragments into a coherent argument. The E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Foundation supported a year-long fellowship in 2008-09 at the McNeil Center for Early American Studies, University of Pennsylvania. I am especially thankful to Dan Richter for the opportunity to be a part of the McNeil Center community. The McNeil Center would not be the place it is without Dan, who works tirelessly to bring together an amazing group of early American scholars. During my year at the McNeil Center, I forged friendships that will remain with me long after the term of my fellowship. From my fellowship cohort I thank Megan Walsh, Jeff Edwards, Laura Keenan Spero, Marie Basile McDaniel, Justin Pope, Jason Sharples, Brian Connolly, and Christina Snyder, each of whom offered advice, comments, and much needed distractions from the tasks of writing and thinking. I am especially grateful to Jeff who dragged me to yoga one evening and got me hooked for life! The McNeil Center is so much more than simply the community created by each year’s group of fellows. I also thank fellow early American travelers Jeff Kaja, Emily Pawley, Michelle and Roderick vii McDonald, and Zara Bernhardt for their comments, support, and friendship during my time in Philadelphia and since. As an international student, I carried with me some administrative burdens I could not solve alone. Amy Baxter-Bellamy at the McNeil Center and Kathy Gallagher at Georgetown deserve special credit for ironing out all the administrative wrinkles created by my relocation to Philadelphia for the year. Lastly, a Dissertation Completion Fellowship, part of the Andrew W. Mellon/American Council of Learned Societies Early Career Fellowship Program, supported an additional year of writing back in D.C. Over the last few years,

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