Part V: The Exigencies of War

See Part IV here.

Beyond 1776, it became more difficult for disgruntled colonists to sustain the rhetoric of anti-Catholicism in their claims for emancipation. The reaction to the act of 1774 found an uneasy place in the context of war, especially as Congress sought to woo Catholic Quebec and Catholic France. But centuries of anti-popery were not suddenly swept away: the mistrust of all things Catholic were rechanneled or silenced in the interest of victory, especially in the upper organs of the revolutionary movement. Among loyalists, that anti-Catholicism was re-appropriated thanks to the alliance with France and the possible restoration of Canada to France. Tories turned the tables on their opponents and tarred them with the broad brush of papist sentiments. New York’s Royal Gazette noted, “Congress are very willing to make us the instruments of weakening the best friends, and of strengthening the most powerful and ambitious enemies of the reformation.” The Gazette held out the prospect of a new “Saint Barthelmi [sic] massacre.” Americans ought to seek the protection of the Glorious Revolution’s royal heir. The Gazette then asked: “Is America unacquainted with the tenets of Popery? Is there a Popish country in the world, where the Protestant religion is tolerated?” Its editors remarked on the hypocrisy in Congress’s about-face. Evidently, religious discourse was malleable and varied according to the flow of circumstance, as did the images of the British monarchy and the traditional enemy, France. Loyal subjects on both sides of the Atlantic could now legitimately appeal to the memory of 1689.[1]

In Britain, subjects did so when the King assented to the Catholic Relief Bill, the very year of the French alliance. The measure, which removed some legal impediments on Catholics, was introduced to draw the Irish into the army, presumably for service in America. Protest was immediately organized in Britain and the circumstances of the Quebec Act recurred. When Lord North refused a petition for repeal of the Relief Act, Lord George Gordon appealed directly to the sovereign. Expressing interest in toleration, the King would not commit to the petition. As prorogation again loomed, Londoners rioted. On 18 June 1780, American-born Edmund Jenings, now in England, related to his friend John Adams the tumults over the Relief Act. The King, it seems, hoped to use Catholics for his “Arbitrary purposes.” “James, the second, who did from Principle and Conscience was a better Man,” Jenings wrote. “If George is actuated by the same Motives . . . He is unfit for the Throne of England. He is either a bad protestant, or bad King.” Public religion, the source of frustration in Britain and its colonies over the course of six years, does not alone explain the break with the Crown, then. Among the merchants of Montreal and radicals in London, outrage over the place of Catholicism in the public realm matched that of American insurgents. Yet in Quebec and at home George III “could still be king.” Anti-Catholic rhetoric, ever flexible, served as a valuable arm of revolutionary mobilization, but receded when the constitutional conversation was expanded to include other interests.[2]

Conclusion

In depicting revolutionary anti-Catholicism as constitutional, continental, and contingent, this study seeks to broaden the conversation about American independence beyond its conventional bounds. It also brings much-needed nuance to recent works on the emergence of a tolerant spirit in the revolutionary period. Neither the defeat of New France nor the Enlightenment struck a definitive blow to anti-Catholic sentiments. Responses to the Quebec Act are clear evidence of this and further highlight the importance of the religious factor in the early days of the American Revolution. George III was warned that he might meet the Stuarts’ fate on account not of taxation, but of religious policy. The Act radicalized colonial Protestants. Paradoxically, it also led them to appeal to a Hanoverian King as they had in times past. In this, the Glorious Revolution offered colonists both the prospect of redress and grounds for protest. When appeals failed, subjects again resorted to revolution. Of course, colonists could construct a case for separation from the Crown on purely secular grounds, and ultimately did. In Quebec, loyal Protestant subjects continued to object to the dispositions of the act of 1774, but separated this grievance from the larger struggle at hand. Among those who remained after the retreat of the American force, there was little question as to their loyalty once the Franco-American alliance was concluded and the menace of a French takeover became reality.[3]

Consideration of the invasion of Quebec – rather than exclusive focus on the Thirteen Colonies – likewise adds nuance to standard narratives of eighteenth-century anti-Catholicism and revolutionary strategy alike. Religious discourse pertaining to Catholicism was generally framed in political or constitutional terms. The band of New England Patriot soldiers who marched against Quebec did not abuse the local population on religious grounds. They saw the local population to be very much like them, aspiring in their hearts to liberty, but held back by the double arm of ecclesiastical and political tyranny. The institution of Catholicism was at fault, certainly the profound piety of Canadians was not the issue. These views, likely quite sincere, were reinforced at the top of the chain of command as Arnold and General Richard Montgomery sought to conciliate the population. In Quebec and at the time of the French alliance, the rhetoric of anti-popery would be rechanneled so that political and military objectives might be met.[4]

That this rhetoric was, at best, temporarily hushed, is seen in the subsequent history of the Anglo-American world. While a new myth supplanted the Glorious Revolution as a reference point in the interconnectedness of religion, public institutions, and liberty, Catholics’ relationship to the Protestant mainstream would change little under Americans’ new constitution. And, as some American states placed restrictions on Catholic office-holding following independence, the era of the Test Act continued in Britain. Only with the Emancipation Act of 1829 would Catholic office-holding become possible in Britain and in the colonies that are now Atlantic Canada. As for the Canadians, where the Quebec Act came as a political necessity, they too would in time face intransigence on the part of colonial authorities and Westminster, though not on religious grounds. The themes of the American Revolution would return as radicalized French-Canadian reformers, the Patriotes, sought to democratize structures against the aristocratic and mercantile interests of “Tories.” Again, the upper Catholic clergy, fearful of American ideals, would support the British establishment. And though those ideals would be loudly echoed by the Patriotes, there would be no Montgomery, no Arnold to fly to Montreal and Quebec City as rebellion erupted. Americans had had their revolution and would now leave it to the Catholics on their northern border to fight for their own rights and their own political emancipation from Britain.[5]

 

Thank you for reading this five-part series on the Quebec Act and the religious encounters spurred by the American bid for independence. The original article is available on the website of the Canadian Society of Church History. Full citation: Patrick Lacroix, “‘Popery and Tyranny’: King George III as a Late Stuart,” Historical Papers, Canadian Society of Church History (2015), 27-45. For a synopsis of my research on this subject, see my contributions to Borealia: A Group Blog on Early Canadian History. In this first post, I introduced the framework with which I approached Revolutionary Era Catholicism; in the second, I explored Patriot soldiers’ experience of Catholicism in Quebec.

 

[1] Ellis, Catholics in Colonial America, 408-9; Stanley, Canada Invaded, 145-46. See also The Royal Gazette, no. 178 (13 June 1778): 3; The Royal Gazette, no. 213 (14 October 1778): 2; “A New York Exile,” “To Mr. Rivington,” The Royal Gazette, no. 237 (6 January 1779): 2, all in Historical Newspapers.

[2] Christopher Hibbert, King Mob: The Story of Lord George Gordon and the London Riots of 1780 (Cleveland: World Publishing Company, 1958), 34-37, 47, 50, 72; Edmund Jenings to John Adams, 18 June 1780, in Taylor, Adams Family Correspondence, Vol. 9; Jenings to Adams, 5 March 1780, Id., Correspondence, Vol. 9; York, “George III, Tyrant,” 460.

[3] See, on the alternative claims about tolerance, Michael Meyerson, Endowed by Our Creator: The Birth of Religious Freedom in America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), 43-93; Chris Beneke, “The ‘Catholic Spirit Prevailing in Our Country’: America’s Moderate Religious Revolution,” in Beneke and Grenda, The First Prejudice, 265-85.

[4] This undoubted influence of religion in eighteenth-century constitutional struggles provides grounds for a reinterpretation of the age of revolution first presented by Robert R. Palmer and Jacques Godechot and recently re-conceptualized with attention to Canada in Michel Ducharme, The Idea of Liberty in Canada During the Age of Atlantic Revolutions, 1776-1838 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2014).

[5] Faragher, Great and Noble Scheme, 454.