Papist Devils: Catholics in British America, 1574-1783

Preface

xi PREFACE In December 2010 Trevor Lipscombe, as director of the Catholic University of America Press, asked if I had any interest in putting together a proposal for a brief history of Catholics in British America, a subject that he found to be a fascinating one but little treated by historians. I immediately conveyed my distinct interest in such a project. Indeed, I proceeded to tell him, three decades earlier I had secured my initial sabbatical at Georgetown University to begin a study of the Maryland Catholic community during the so-called penal age (1689–1776). That research was still in its early stage when the president of the university asked me to write the history of the institution for its upcoming bicentennial. That had effectively ended my project on Maryland Catholics in the penal age, but, I assured the director, I still retained a keen interest in it and welcomed the opportunity to do something on a broader scale for Catholics in the colonial era. Little did I realize how much broader that scale of the Catholic experience in the British Atlantic empire would prove to be. My starting assumption was that Maryland was the heart and soul of any history of Catholics in British America. That, after all, had been the pattern set in earlier historical treatments: a central focus on Maryland , the locus of the vast majority of known Catholics in the thirteen colonies that became the United States of America, with side glimpses at the other two colonies, New York and Pennsylvania, that had some Catholic presence. More problematic to me was where to begin the story. It occurred to me early in the project that any context, to be truly illuminative , had to trace the Catholic experience in British America back to the place of origin for the vast majority of those Catholic settlers in xii preface America—that is, the British Isles. To understand the Catholic exodus from England, Ireland, and Scotland that took place over the nearly two centuries that constituted the colonial period meant a starting point of the English Reformation that had, in turn, so shaped the Catholic community that survived it and the colonies in the New World that England founded. Exploring the British roots of the American Catholic experience in time raised questions about the geographical framing of any comprehensive survey of that experience. English colonies in the Atlantic world included many more than the thirteen that eventually carried out the first successful colonial revolt in the Western world against an imperial power . In fact the colonies that became the United States of America made up but half of those that Great Britain ruled in the Atlantic world on the eve of the Revolution, from Quebec, St. John’s, and Nova Scotia in the north to the Floridas, Bermuda, and the West Indies in the south. Quebec and the Floridas were both recent acquisitions but the rest were not. Nova Scotia had a large settlement of French Catholics, the Acadians, who found themselves caught between the imperial powers of France and Great Britain for most of the first half of the eighteenth century. In certain islands of the West Indies (Barbados, St. Kitts, Montserrat, Jamaica ) Catholics were at least a significant minority of the population. In the seventeenth century, indeed, there were more Catholics in the British Caribbean than there were on the British North American mainland. The late development of institutional life in those islands has tended to render invisible the formidable Catholic presence there. Thanks to the path-breaking work of such historians as Donald H. Akenson, Hilary Beckles, Sally Schwartz, and Sonia Johnson, it is possible now to reconstruct a good deal of the Catholic experience in the West Indies and thus fill in that portion of the story of Catholics in British America that has been absent in previous tellings. As for the time span of the book, the dates in the subtitle, 1574–1783, mark the beginning of British Catholic colonization in the New World and the formal end of British rule over the North American colonies that became the United States of America, respectively. In selecting the latter preface xiii date I have carried it past the usual end point of the outbreak of colonial rebellion in 1775 to include a chapter on the American Revolution and an epilogue on the colonial legacy. The Revolution proved to be a culminating as...