Bejesuited

In the autumn​ of 2013, archaeologists digging beneath the chancel of a ruined church in Jamestown, Virginia, discovered four graves. They belonged to some of the earliest inhabitants of England’s first permanent colony in America. One was for Ferdinando Wainman, a member of the Virginia Governor’s Council; another for Robert Hunt, the church’s first minister and chaplain of the expedition that founded Jamestown. Hunt was an Anglican, naturally, given that the town was established in 1607 not just as a commercial plantation and trading post, but as a bulwark of Protestant Christianity against Catholic Spain. It was also a base from which to proselytise local Powhatans, pitied as benighted pagans. The other two graves were of military captains: William West, killed fighting the Powhatans, and Gabriel Archer, an enemy of Captain John Smith, a self-aggrandising swashbuckler and leader of the Virginia Colony. All four died between 1608 or 1610, years remembered as ‘the starving time’, when desperate colonists first ate snakes and frogs, then boots and belts, and finally one another.

Among the artefacts found at the site – the church was built inside the fort – was a small silver box, hexagonal in section, which had been placed on Archer’s coffin. The coffin itself had rotted away leaving just an outline of nails, but wooden fibres stuck to the silver box indicated its original position. It rattled, but had been sealed shut by corrosion. A conservator spent a hundred hours scraping off verdigris with a scalpel, exposing scratched markings that looked like ears of wheat – symbols of hunger, perhaps, but more likely fletched arrows, reminders of attacks on the Jamestown stockade or a nod to Archer’s name. A micro-CT scan revealed two fragments of a tiny lead flask inside and some bone splinters, which when 3D-printed appeared to be human. The flask was clearly an ampulla, which once would have contained holy water or oil, even blood. The silver box was a reliquary.

Had it been discovered on the other side of the Atlantic it would have attracted relatively little attention: a Catholic devotional object in a Catholic grave. Born in the parish of Mountnessing in Essex in 1575, Archer grew up in a time of intense religious unease, as Elizabeth I and her ministers strove to define Protestant orthodoxy and impose it on the English people. Far from unifying the nation, the 1558 Act of Uniformity hardened divisions between Catholic diehards and Calvinist reformers, who themselves split into compliant Anglicans and puritan critics of the Church of England’s liturgical fudges. Some parishioners morphed into willing Protestants; defiant Catholics – recusants – refused to attend services; other Catholics, so-called ‘church papists’, showed their faces while their thoughts remained elsewhere; and puritans either stayed home to dwell on prayer and scripture, or dutifully took their pews and harrumphed about it. Archer’s parents, Christopher and Mary, were recusants, fined for their obstinacy, but this wasn’t so heinous or uncommon in Reformation England. It’s easy to imagine some friend or relative of the old faith slipping a sacred token into one of their graves.

Their son Gabriel, however, died in America, where the entrenched assumption is that there weren’t any English Catholic settlers – or not outside Maryland, a colony founded in 1634 by a Catholic grandee and named after Charles I’s Catholic wife. Even British readers familiar with the legend of Pocahontas – baptised an Anglican in the church at Jamestown – and the puritan folklore of Thanksgiving might be surprised by the existence of colonists like Archer: colonial America just feels so Protestant, and Protestant tradition and identity so ingrained, down to the Founding Fathers and beyond. John Adams himself remarked in 1765 that Catholics and Jacobites in his land were ‘as rare as a Comet or an Earthquake’, an exaggeration of a widespread opinion that evolved into a historiographical fact. Hadn’t English puritans fled persecution by a weakly reformed state? Wasn’t the arrival of the Mayflower at Plymouth Rock in 1620 all about freedom of conscience, far from an established church sick with popish ceremonial? The 1630s saw the ‘great migration’ led by the Rome-hating John Winthrop, whose ‘city on the hill’ sermon has echoed through many inaugural presidential speeches. The God who blessed change in England and English colonisation in America was indisputably a Protestant God. By this prescription, strands of myth, memory and history were twisted together into a heroic, uncomplicated, misleading skein.

The assumption of Protestantism is built on another, even shakier notion: that early colonial ventures were coherent and uniform in intent and method. Elizabeth I had been a sceptical imperialist, keener on plundering Spanish bullion ships than on paying for soldiers to carve out a corner of a foreign field three thousand miles away in Chesapeake Bay. James I, king during the Jamestown experiment (the plantation was named in his honour), was similarly minded to give his blessing to overseas projects only if they didn’t cost him anything. Everything was done on a wing and a prayer. The joint stock companies on which transatlantic ventures depended never had enough time or money, and the first settlers were too aggressive and un-farmer-like, their replacements too young and feckless, and all of them too male. Calamity ensued. Before a vainglorious colonist was ready to learn from his mistakes he was dead. Men were suspicious of one another and quarrelled, partly because they came from different social classes and regions. Planting the flag of St George in that heathen swamp possibly galvanised a little patriotism, but being English wasn’t enough to bind them.

Even ten or twenty years later, the English still hadn’t cracked colonisation – forced compromise continued to cloud the visions that inspired them. The Pilgrims had made up the numbers on the Mayflower with ‘strangers’: graceless reprobates, in Calvinist eyes – flies in the ointment from day one. Among the Stour Valley saints in Winthrop’s fleets were scores of economic migrants of dubious religious probity or none. Not being pious Protestants wasn’t their only moral deficiency: many were steeped in sin. Even Rev. Hunt of Jamestown had been involved in sex scandals at home in Kent (his wife had an affair and he slept with a servant), not that you would guess it from the distinctly un-Protestant shrine where he is today revered in Jamestown.

The history of 17th-century England – its dreaming as well as its discord – is crucial to understanding the early colonies. It constitutes much more than backstory to what, from an exceptionalist standpoint, seems like the main event: the birth of modern America. Diversity in New England reflected that of the mother country, where, as Susan Juster suggests, we should see post-Reformation conformity as ‘an ambiguous terrain composed of multiple shades of grey’ rather than some ‘bright line’ of separation between Catholics and Protestants. The closer one gets to the mosaic of faith, the more intricate it appears.

To spot a Catholic, Juster writes, you need to know what to look for and yet should expect the definition to be fuzzy. It once seemed reasonable to state that England became a Protestant country in 1559, as if legislative fiat was all that mattered. The story of the grassroots Reformation in the shires and villages is very different, one of conformity hindered by resistance, bemusement and indifference. Historians such as Christopher Haigh, Alexandra Walsham and Peter Marshall have reconstructed a social world of coexistence between people of different faiths, who lived what Haigh once called ‘an ambidextrous religious life’. This inclination to ‘get along and get by’ was exported to the New World along with the fractions of English belief, where it thrived because the importance of co-operation was brutally existential. Men such as John Smith and Gabriel Archer had more than enough to argue about – chiefly, how to stay alive – without worrying about each other’s views on ecclesiastical vestments and altar rails.

Mingling with ‘the hotter sort of Protestants’ – as the Marian exile Perceval Wiburn termed puritans – were a ‘cooler sort of Catholics’, ordinary English folk quietly observing old religious customs, inoffensive, willing to adapt to doctrinal change. We tend not to notice them because, by not taking a stand, they weren’t censured and so left no trace in the archives. A Catholic who attended services held by Protestant clergy, and never doubted that the Eucharist was a sacramental miracle (truly transubstantial, not just a symbolic remembrance of Christ’s sacrifice), was to all outward appearances a Protestant. And Elizabeth I was fine with that: obedience to her command was what mattered.

Like most cultural historians of religion, Juster cares about interiority – the personal experience of faith – but her sources don’t say much about it. Instead she travels imaginatively beyond a taxonomy to see religion as it was performed in daily life: nuanced, shifting, workaday and open to interpretation. Archer might have owned the reliquary in his grave, or it might have belonged to someone else. It could have been brought to Jamestown by a Frenchman hired to direct, in vain, the production of wine or silk: the box’s relatively low silver content indicates a Continental rather than English origin. (The Virginia governor’s secretary later complained about a viticulturist, who was probably French and possibly a spy, trying ‘to worke myracles w[i]th his Crucyfixe’.) Perhaps Archer died with a heart more loyal to the fledgling Church of England in America than to Pope Paul V or the Virgin Mary. It’s even possible that his primary identity wasn’t religious, but that of an English adventurer and trusty servant of the king in Whitehall. Uniting these men in adversity, and for posterity, was their patriotic courage in confronting the dangers that sent them so wantonly to the common grave of Juster’s title.

Not only are the written records patchy and laconic, but transatlantic Catholics tried hard to conceal their beliefs. Jesuit missionaries went under assumed names and said Mass in locked, shuttered rooms (or, among Native Americans, in ‘wigwam chapels’). The clandestine nature of Catholic devotion explains why evidence of its material culture is so valuable. Happily, the visual and tangible mediation of worship – the believer’s involvement in the hallowed drama of the sacraments – has left more artefacts than Protestantism with its iconoclasm and faith-alone abstractions. There are rare texts, such as the directory of Jesuit aliases in Georgetown University Library and an inventory of altar vessels from early 19th-century Pennsylvania; there are also the vessels themselves, as well as hand bells and chalices, made from tin or pewter by missionaries in the field and easily stowed in saddlebags. As with all colonial things, improvisation was vital. Personal items such as saints’ medallions, crucifixes, amulets and rosaries also survive. Juster speculates that not all of the European beads discovered by archaeologists were used to trade with Native Americans.

Continuity between the Old World and the New was, in this respect, seamless. Mudlarks on the Thames foreshore often find medieval pilgrims’ badges, which were associated with specific shrines and siphoned off thaumaturgical power. These souvenirs included lead ampullae, like the one found at Jamestown. Driven to propitiate gods and spirits, worshippers burned, buried or immersed such votives – there was a chapel to St Thomas Becket on Old London Bridge. The lid of the box containing the Jamestown ampulla was inscribed with a capital ‘M’, which might have been the owner’s initial, or stood for ‘Mary’, akin to the apotropaic double-Vs, thought to stand for ‘Virgin of Virgins’, carved into English buildings.

Before the Reformation, priests might well have smiled on such markings; afterwards, ministers were more likely to condemn them as superstitious charms. And yet many in their flocks continued with the old thoughts and ways. Even puritans visited magic-dispensing cunning folk (publicly shamed as ‘witches’ by church courts), especially when a family member lay sick – belt and braces in case prayers went unanswered. After all, Calvinists were conflicted souls, as wretchedly self-doubting as they were bombastically self-righteous. Denied the comfort of sensory rituals, they remained just as emotionally needy as their unreformed ancestors and, indeed, their living friends and relatives. The age of divine miracles had passed, they insisted, but many craved physical, visible providences – omens in the sky, confirmed prophesies, uncanny deliverances – and personal engagement with God’s design. Sometimes, an inner voice whispered, it made more sense to be a Catholic. All of which is another reminder that Protestants and Catholics, in England and America, were positioned on a finely shaded spectrum, not separated into two defined camps glowering at each other across an ideological no-man’s-land.

By switching​ historical lenses, Juster reveals a panorama of colonial activity and expansion, a world teeming with Catholics. Relatively few of them were English, but colonisation was far from being a uniquely English enterprise, England’s hegemony on the eastern seaboard notwithstanding. North America was a European melting pot long before Ellis Island, and however much dynamism was injected by diversity, tensions were inevitable. Friction between Protestants and Catholics was most bitter where religion mapped onto nationality, a colonial extension of the principle of ‘cuius regio, eius religio’ (‘whoever governs the realm decides its religion’), cemented in the Holy Roman Empire by the Peace of Augsburg in 1555. And yet the abiding issue was not confessional chauvinism but xenophobic competition between trading nations. There was also a racial element to the antipathy. ‘Even Catholic historians,’ Juster observes, ‘slip into the habit of ignoring recusants who were neither white nor Anglo in their histories of the faith.’

French colonies, mostly situated in what is now Canada, were brought under the aegis of Louis XIV in 1663, a rival power bloc thumbing its nose at conceited Albion. New France was of course full of Catholics, many of whom migrated south in search of land and work. It’s hard to imagine that the average English colonist much cared, but those who governed him or her did: councils and congregations in America, the Crown and its ministers in London. French priests, puritans sneered, converted Native Americans with ease because their rituals were so similar. The devil bound them. Protestant missionaries, meanwhile, had to teach indigenous people to speak and read English, and even then couldn’t be sure that they had understood the gospels correctly.

Catholic conquerors in the Americas certainly did win allegiance from tribes and nations by exploiting the potential for religious syncretism. Wooden monuments – perhaps no more than sacred trees – were fashioned into giant crosses, and deistic trinities given a Christian makeover. So desperate were puritans to distance themselves from popish idolatry that settlers at Salem, Massachusetts, ripped the red cross of St George from their flag, which they despised as a ‘badge of the Whore of Babylon’. Shuddering to hear of a plantation called Hue’s Cross, John Winthrop renamed it Hue’s Folly. Some English rustics set up maypoles, which delighted their Indian neighbours but were cut down by the same puritans who had cut them down as pagan totems in Merrie England. During Anglo-French fighting in the 1690s, by contrast, Jesuits reputedly led Algonquian and Mohawk allies into battle, consecrated banners flying, censers swinging – all the old beguiling gubbins of a corrupted faith.

At the same time, the European proxy wars of the later 17th century were bad for business. English planters had to keep exporting raw materials and crops, such as tobacco, and they had to tolerate porous borders because they allowed exchange with merchants, many of whom were French, Spanish or Portuguese Catholics. Even so, puritans worried about religious contamination. In 1700 the godly paragon Cotton Mather, who had supported the revolt in New England against the Catholic James II’s governor, Edmund Andros, declared that the commonwealth was in danger of becoming ‘bejesuited’. Yet Mather, like all prosperous Englishmen in America, thrived on trade. It’s telling that although colonists did good business with the Dutch – on paper, staunch Protestant allies – they hated them too, especially after England and Holland went to war in 1652, 1665 and 1672. To complicate things further, the influx of English Quakers, whose habits were about as far from Catholicism as possible, also upset puritans, to whom they posed the same kind of existential threat as swarms of Catholics.

The demand for labour in English colonies also meant hordes of indentured servants arriving from the British Isles, including, after 1650, Catholic Irish men and women. On the island of Montserrat, known as ‘the Emerald Isle of the Caribbean’, the greater part of the white population was Irish. Barbados, too, was a busy hub of Anglo-Irish enterprise, which became problematic only after the Glorious Revolution, when Catholic worship was again seen as flaunting disloyalty to the Crown, now in the person of the Protestant William III, who had chased James II from the English throne. The dilemma for England was that the exploited people whose labour gave value to overseas territories – disaffected white servants, including transported felons, and African slaves – were indispensable yet feared as potential fifth columnists ready to assist a foreign invader, who, as it happened, was likely to come from a Catholic nation.

Into the 18th century, Anglicans in Virginia, Maryland, Massachusetts and elsewhere fretted about Irish immigrants, a moral panic adjacent to the ‘great replacement theory’ of modern times. The dread was intensified by the fact that slaves brought north from the West Indies and Florida had been baptised Catholic by Spanish and French missionaries, thus in the paranoid Protestant imagination doubling down on a latent subversiveness. England’s colonies were conceived as an outlier of the state, where, before permanent garrisons were established, imperial sovereignty could be defended only by sending a fleet of Redcoats, which took eight weeks if you were lucky. Less hysterically, Irish fishermen and stevedores in Newfoundland and Maine were associated with drunken disorder. One sea captain complained to the Council of Trade that Protestants in northern parts dreaded the winter months when ‘papists’ had nothing to do except paint the ports red. As in England, the demonisation of Catholics could be literal. In 1688 Goody Glover, an Irish-speaking housekeeper in Boston, was hanged for witchcraft after fluffing her recitation of the Lord’s Prayer. And at Salem a few years later, the domestic servant of a suspected witch, the interestingly named Margaret Thacher, was implicated in the theft of a Catholic book to use for a maleficent spell.

The confluence of beliefs and practices between Catholicism and Protestantism, in England and the Americas, and even between colonial Christianity and native polytheistic, animistic faiths, belies the existence of a distinct typology. Hard lines are polemical ideals, observed mainly in the breach because religion is more pragmatic than programmatic, a toolkit for life’s problems and a gateway to the sublime. ‘For this is man’s nature,’ the Tudor minister George Gifford lamented, ‘that where he is persuaded that there is the power to bring prosperity and adversity, there will he worship.’ In any early modern context, but above all in an adverse colonial one, reality made mincemeat of the theory. Cavaliers mocked Roundheads as hypocrites because puritans, whether in East Anglia or the Massachusetts Bay Colony, were always better at enforcing God’s laws than abiding by them. Despite this, successive Great Awakenings, between the early 18th and later 20th centuries, prove that good puritan genes have been passed down through generations of American culture, manifesting in a fondness for unabashed public piety and the invocation of divine providence.

Yet more proof surfaced this September at the memorial event for Charlie Kirk, conducted with much patriotic pageantry at a sports stadium in Glendale, Arizona. Donald Trump anointed Kirk as a blessed martyr to American liberty, and J.D. Vance prophesied a 21st-century Great Awakening, a revival that would celebrate Kirk’s life and appeal to the saviour he followed for guidance and protection. Today around a quarter of US citizens identify as Roman Catholic – a proportion that has remained constant for fifty years or more – but one suspects that their Christianity, however sincere and devout, wouldn’t fully qualify them to take part in Vance’s revival. Despite Vance’s own conversion to Catholicism, making America great again, as a corporate, self-assured, in-your-face campaign, seems like a Protestant crusade.