Part I: Introduction

This paper was presented at the University of Ottawa on May 30, 2015. It appeared in print in the next issue of the Canadian Society of Church History’s Historical Papers.

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The Glorious Revolution cast a long shadow. Through the eighteenth century, English subjects found in it evidence of a commitment to long-standing constitutional principles: parliamentary supremacy, due process of the law, protection of civil and property rights, and Protestant rule. This understanding of liberty had a life of its own in the colonies as American insurgents cited the same principles in the course of their own revolution. Theirs, after all, was a case built on precedent, and few precedents were then as significant as the expulsion of the Catholic Stuarts. For two crucial years, from the Quebec Act of 1774 to the summer of 1776, the issue of Protestant rule in particular would play a key part in the march towards independence. “Popery,” in language inherited from the wars of religion, remained the foremost threat to the rights and well-being of Englishmen. Accordingly, the constitutional and religious discourses of the early revolutionary period were entwined. As one of the central planks of the British Constitution, religion was never wholly depoliticized. This paper details how anti-Catholic discourse evolved through the revolutionary period and, through the invasion of the Province of Quebec, presents Catholicism as a political problem that insurgents could in turn utilize as a political lever.

American colonists found, in 1774, a failure to protect their rights on the part of British authorities and expected that despotism in politics and in religion would ensue. Central to that debate were the role of executive power in the British system of governance as well as the place to which Catholicism ought to be relegated in public matters. From the moment that word of the Quebec Act reached American shores, through the invasion of Quebec, to the fateful summer of 1776, responses arose which successively indicted different institutions for their pro-Catholic sentiments. New Englanders in particular, true to their Puritan mythology, were troubled by the establishment of Catholicism on their borders. While revolt failed to materialize in that neighbouring province, anti-monarchical rhetoric developed in full in the Thirteen Colonies. By then, however, the Quebec Act was overshadowed by the more urgent issue of military defence.

This paper begins to answer historian George A. Rawlyk’s call for better integration of Canadian and American events during the revolutionary period, which, several generations later, remains insufficiently explored. This also represents an effort to “de-centre” Maryland in the story of colonial Catholicism. For most colonists in British North America, Catholicism was as powerful a threat as it was generally unseen. Its incarnations in the popular mind were not drawn from Maryland, but from conflict in Europe and from encounters with France and Spain in the New World. To colonists of the revolutionary period, the threat was external, likely not to grow from their midst but rather to come from the metropole or from a neighbouring colony, Quebec. In this sense, this paper adds to the recent work of Robert Emmett Curran, who, though attentive to colonial wars and to the constitutional issue, offers little consideration of British-led Canada after 1760 and only briefly surveys the events of 1774-1778.[1]

Enlightenment, Empire, and the British Monarchy

Often identified as anti-popery or anti-papistry in its political manifestations, anti-Catholicism was, in the eighteenth century, part and parcel of the English identity. This was more than a purely religious identity: “enlightened” Protestantism, in contrast to the despotic Church of Rome, informed British political culture as a central tenet of the British Constitution. In consequence of the Glorious Revolution, Crown and Parliament would be jointly responsible for the maintenance of Britain’s Protestant character. Drawing on memories of the Gunpowder Plot and the Stuarts’ attempts to reclaim the throne, the English came to imagine their polity as one engaged in a perpetual struggle with the forces of religious despotism. Catholicism was “a consistently hostile, foreign, and anti-national threat.” The connection between Protestantism and one’s condition as a free Briton persisted in British America, where fears of Catholic power were fuelled by imperial rivalries. Religious bigotry had lost little of its edge in this supposedly enlightened age, on either side of the Atlantic.[2]

The chief concern regarding Catholicism, however, was not its foreignness, but rather the connection of priests with secular authority, which seemed to invite both religious and political tyranny. The tolerant spirit among Protestants had its limits on this very point. Dissenters were quick to depict Anglicanism as a vestige of Catholicism partly for its ties to civil authority. The language of anti-popery targeted the Church of Rome, but also became code for British and American opposition to episcopal authority and to the “Anglo-Catholic ‘high flyers’ of the Church of England.” Nonconformists feared that Anglican bishops and the Crown might combine to undermine their denominations and their autonomy. Too easily could priests suppress religious freedom and become the agents of a despotic prince.[3]

Continued hostility to foreign, despotic Catholicism reveals the practical and intellectual limits of the Enlightenment. In the English world, religious toleration generally had a caveat: all individuals were to have their freedom of conscience and worship protected – all except Catholics. In a single breath, Thomas Paine could both defend “the free exercise of religion” and arouse his readers’ anti-Catholic views. In denouncing political abuses, Paine wrote, “the phrase Parent or Mother Country hath been jesuitically adopted by the King and his parasites, with a low papistical design of gaining an unfair bias on the credulous weakness of our minds.” In his “utterly conventional Enlightenment sentiments,” Thomas Jefferson could, similarly, defend toleration and despise Catholicism. Samuel Adams argued that no state should tolerate this subversive religious system that threatened “life, liberty, and property” and foreshadowed “the worst anarchy and confusion, civil discord, war, and bloodshed.” The Enlightenment, after all, not only valued religious freedom and equality, but also sought to destroy the evils flowing from despotism and entrenched dogma. Among colonists, there was no inconsistency in toleration and continued anti-Catholicism. Paine, in fact, would go on to pen The Age of Reason, denouncing all that smelled of superstition and authoritarianism in religion. In the meantime, American subjects, like those in England, were concerned with the political manifestations of Catholicism.[4]

To be continued.

In the next installment: The Quebec Act

[1] George A. Rawlyk, Revolution Rejected 1775-1776 (Scarborough: Prentice-Hall, 1968), 9-10; Robert Emmett Curran, Papist Devils: Catholics in British America, 1574-1783 (Washington: Catholic University of America Press, 2014). The present paper echoes in many respects Charles H. Metzger’s classic survey, but substitutes for Metzger’s attention to the Middle Colonies the bastion of North American Catholicism that was Quebec. See Metzger Catholics and the American Revolution: A Study in Religious Climate (Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1962).

[2] Joseph J. Casino, “Anti-Popery in Colonial Pennsylvania,” The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 105, no. 3 (1981): 279. This paper rejoins Francis D. Cogliano on New England’s “anti-papal persuasion.” See Cogliano, No King, No Popery: Anti-Catholicism in Revolutionary New England (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1995).

[3] Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1992), 95, 97-99; Patricia U. Bonomi, Under the Cope of Heaven: Religion, Society, and Politics in Colonial America (New York City: Oxford University Press, 2003), 191, 199. See also, on the Anglican bishop controversy, Ned Landsman, “The Episcopate, the British Union, and the Failure of Religious Settlement in Colonial British America,” in The First Prejudice: Religious Tolerance and Intolerance in Early America, ed. by Chris Beneke and Christopher S. Grenda (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 75-97.

[4] Thomas Paine, Common Sense (1776), and Samuel Adams, “The Rights of the Colonists: Report of the Committee of Correspondence to the Boston Town Meeting, Nov. 20, 1772,” both in The Essential Documents of American History, ed. by Norman P. Desmarais and James H. McGovern (On-line: Ebsco – Academic Search Premier); Peter S. Onuf, The Mind of Thomas Jefferson (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2007), 145; Philip Lawson, The Imperial Challenge: Quebec and Britain in the Age of the American Revolution (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1990), 122-24, 127.