Loyal Protestants and Dangerous Papists: Maryland and the Politics of Religion in the English Atlantic, 1630–1690 by Antoinette Sutto (review)

Dr. Antoinette Sutto offers an English Atlantic history of seventeenth-century Maryland. She surveys the complicated relations between Maryland politics and religion and the English state. Sutto uses religion as a means “to integrate the disjointed events” of the seventeenth century. This is the story of the long, awkward negotiations between the needs of the expanding English state, early modern confessional politics, and the peculiarities of the little Maryland colony. The Calverts, who imposed no religious tests to vote and did not establish a state church, made a “profoundly political and profoundly controversial move.” This overturned an entire edifice of English assumptions about loyalty, law, royal power, and political order (pp. 2, 3, 6–7).

The Calvert charter created an anomaly within the emerging seventeenth-century English empire. The charter was less problematic than the Catholic religion of the proprietors. Charles Calvert, the third Lord Baltimore was too far out of step with developments transpiring in England since the Restoration of Charles II in 1660. His allegiance to Catholicism and his lack of political wisdom led to the loss of many of his charter rights. Catholic-dominated, Protestant-inhabited Maryland did not fit the prevailing norms of the empire. In the end, the English government restored the family’s proprietary rights only after they abandoned their religion.

Loyalist Protestants & Dangerous Papists does not celebrate Maryland’s religious toleration/freedom. Rather, it was a concept that entangled Maryland in a long argument about religion, loyalty, and the state. Sutto assumes that this toleration in the early 1600s was not a principled withdrawal from a long and bloody confessional struggle but an expedient move designed to further other motives (primarily family fortunes).

Protestants, “increasingly brittle,” saw Catholics as papists and servants of the Pope; their first loyalty was not to the crown. Their ultimate goal was the destruction of Protestantism. The papists, greedy, wicked, and deluded, put the interests of their religion first. They threatened the English government and the established church (pp. 27-28). In England, Protestants feared James II’s Catholicism and his strong ties to European powers; in Maryland, Protestants feared possible proprietary alliances with hostile Indian nations.

To what degree were papists “Dangerous” and to whom? How much credibility should the malicious and paranoid fears of “Loyal Protestants” be given? From the 1630s to the 1690s, but increasingly after 1670, Maryland Protestants took up their poisoned pens to attack the proprietors, their religion, and their charter. After noting that anti-Catholicism was a powerful destabilizing force, Sutto offers a compendium of the rumors and innuendos circulated by the Baltimores’ confessional and political enemies. She does not verify the veracity of rumors that thrived on a lack of information and the need to see evil human agents at work. These rumors do not merely describe events; they also create them. The overthrow of the Catholic Calvert “regime” (the term most frequently used for Maryland government) was less the fault of what the leaders did, and more from what they did not do.

The third Lord Baltimore does not seem to fit the role of a dangerous papist. Selfish, inept, and insensitive to the needs of the increasing numbers of Protestants in Maryland, he played his cards badly. Charles seemed oblivious to the changes swirling around him. He stood on his charter privileges when that was dangerous position. This, more than other factors, opened the proprietorship to attack.

Charles Calvert lacked the political skills his father had demonstrated. Charles’ interventions in Maryland politics fueled the already high tensions within his colony and frustrated imperial leaders. Most likely, the loss of his colony came as a surprise to the third and last Catholic Lord Baltimore.