Catholic Interests and the Politics of English Overseas Expansion 1660–1689

Abstract

Throughout the reign of Charles II, a growing number of Catholics entered into the civil and military infrastructure of the overseas colonies. While Maryland was consolidated as a center of settlement, a new crop of English and Irish officeholders shaped the political development of Tangier, New York and the Leeward Islands. Their careers highlighted the opportunities of overseas expansion as a route into the public domain: a chance for Catholics to sidestep the penal restrictions of the three kingdoms and construct an alternative relationship with the crown. This article examines the emergence of Catholic authority within the plantations, and situates the experiment within larger shifts in strategic and ideological debate over English colonization. I suggest that experiences in the colonies invigorated economic and political strategies that became central to the advancement of Catholic interests in the domestic realm. While colonial trade bolstered Catholic estates against penal pressures, the new settlements provided the training ground for attempts to demonstrate the compatibility of confessional pluralism with commercial flourishing and civil allegiance. The effect, however, was to raise conflict in colonial politics and heighten anxieties in the domestic realm over the effects of overseas plantation. I argue that by uncovering a neglected sphere of “recusant history” we gain new insights into the ideological fragilities that disrupted the pursuit of territories overseas. Catholic promotions exposed a growing tension between the “Protestant interest” and the principles and practices that informed the expansion of the Stuart realm.

The Politics of Protestant Missions in the English Overseas Territories, 1660–1700

“…Religious liberties in America provided not merely a useful way of defusing domestic discontents, but an essential inducement to "increase the number of his Majesty's subjects" in the dominions, according to the Jamaica governor Thomas Modyford.68 These policies denoted especially the influence of the Catholic duke of York, as one of the courtiers most actively involved in colonial development. 69 The more ambitious plans of the bishops were frustrated, and their allies fretted that great swathes of the colonial population knew "not what ye nature & dignity of ye Clergy is," in the words of one Barbados minister. 70 The looming reality of the duke's succession to the throne, as James II, made the status of the Church even more uncertain.…”