The Empire Reformed. Owen Stanwood

that was fear. The expansionist push of the late 1600s did not stem, as one might think, from national self-confidence, but from the very opposite feeling, an anxiety that England was in danger of being subverted and undermined, or even destroyed, by its rivals. The identity of this eternal foe was a matter of some dispute, and English political writers engaged in a constant debate concerning which of the nation’s chief rivals, France or the Netherlands, was more dangerous or cunning. But whoever the enemy was, most English people agreed that the proper response was an expansion of England’s global influence. Thus, the empire that Crouch chronicled was in part a national attempt to save England and its interests from subversion.⁹

      The champions of imperial consolidation came from a cadre of Stuart loyalists who shaped colonial policy on both sides of the Atlantic. The most ubiquitous was William Blathwayt, a political chameleon who never visited the colonies, but became England’s most influential American expert, and a tireless advocate of a more centralized empire. While he rarely engaged in overt political sermonizing, Blathwayt left little doubt that he favored tighter controls over the colonies, and he also suggested why: without centralization, the king’s rivals—especially France—would gain more power and resources in North America. In 1688 Blathwayt defended the proposed Dominion of New England by stating, “it will be terrible to the French and make them proceed with more caution than they have lately done.” But if Blathwayt and other Stuart officials feared the French, they combined this anxiety with a great deal of admiration. Indeed, they proposed that the best way to defeat the French in America, as in Europe, was to emulate them.¹⁰

      Two brief examples can serve to illustrate this anti-French imperialism. In the Leeward Islands of the West Indies, perhaps the most exposed of England’s colonial possessions, the crypto-Catholic Tory Governor Sir William Stapleton complained throughout the 1670s and 1680s of the attention the French king lavished on his island colonies, implying that if the Lords of Trade and Plantations did not imitate the Sun King and send a well-provisioned naval brigade, England’s rivals could easily overrun the islands. In the meantime, another Irish Catholic, Thomas Dongan of New York, worked against French pretensions in the north by adopting French tactics. England’s rivals had built a potent empire despite the perennial lack of migrants by cultivating Indian alliances that united the French, at least in theory, with natives stretching from Montreal to the Illinois Country. Dongan consciously imitated this alliance system by renewing the “covenant chain” alliance with the powerful Iroquois Confederacy dwelling north of the colony, which had been inaugurated by his predecessor Edmund Andros. At the same time, Dongan understood the role of Jesuit priests in expanding French trade and influence, and he proposed that the English expel the priests and replace them with English Jesuits—a tacit admission of the importance of missions in strengthening the imperial state. Indeed, the Jesuits had become leading vanguards of French expansionism, and Dongan understood their power.¹¹

      These Stuart planners perceived a hemispheric design by the French to dominate the continent both politically and economically. The Sun King and his minions would use every tool at their disposal—including military power and the more subtle efforts of the Jesuits—to win over the trade of the Americas for themselves, and with it land and power as well. The design was secular at its core, but had a strong religious component, since the French masked their true intentions under a religious veneer. Thus the Stuart vision of empire was based on a widespread fear of the French that was at least implicitly, and sometimes explicitly anti-Catholic.

      At the same time, they perceived another enemy that aided the French in their designs: radical dissenters. Along with the king’s foreign rivals, these internal foes were the most dangerous enemies of the national interest. It was Puritans, after all, who had taken up arms against King Charles I and plunged the nation into civil war during the 1640s, and forty years later their heirs—usually labeled dissenters or nonconformists—appeared to be doing the same thing. By fomenting quarrels between English subjects and challenging royal authority, these subversives provided aid to the king’s Catholic rivals. Stuart officials often made toleration a feature of their religious policy, but they accompanied this apparent moderation with a vitriolic condemnation of dissent, which often crossed the line from being a matter of conscience to a marker of treasonous inclinations. In addition, imperial planners used the lack of religious toleration in New England, especially toward conforming Anglicans, as another reason to reform the colonies.¹²

      The New England colonies provided the clearest indication of the dangers of an empire run by dissenters. Edward Randolph, a royal officer sent to investigate the region in 1676, portrayed Massachusetts as an “arbitrary government” in the truest sense, as leaders claimed authority with no real mandate. They flouted English economic regulations, passed laws that were “repugnant” to the English constitution, and even harbored “regicides” who had signed Charles I’s death warrant in 1649. Reform was necessary, Randolph argued, not just for economic reasons but for geopolitical ones as well. These perverse “Independents” threatened to betray the colonies to a foreign power because they fomented divisions among Protestants and rejected the king’s authority, and they occupied a vulnerable corner of the English dominions adjacent to New France. “There are dangerous principles among them,” Randolph complained, and if the crown did not exert some control, “the French will certainly by degrees swallow up that great Countrey … & so at length become masters of all his Maj[es]ties West Indian Plantations.” Some Tories even went so far as to suggest that an alliance existed between papists and dissenters, claiming that Jesuits lurked in bastions of dissent like New England, where they encouraged heresy against the Church of England in order to weaken their rivals.¹³

      Luckily for the crown, Randolph thought that reforming this system would be fairly easy. Most New Englanders, the agent claimed, did not hate the monarch, and indeed would welcome greater imperial regulation, especially if it would provide safety against external enemies like the Indians who had almost destroyed the colonies in King Philip’s War. Randolph also noted that New Englanders hated the French to an unusual degree, a factor that could work in the crown’s favor in the contest against its chief rival. It appeared to be obvious to all that a centralized empire, rather than a set of separate colonies that had trouble cooperating with each other, would best defend America against the French. As bureaucrats like Randolph allied with military men like Thomas Dongan to remake the colonies, therefore, they had high hopes for success. These hopes proved short-lived, however, once they actually attempted to implement their imperial policies.

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      The first experiment in Stuart imperialism was the remote colony of New Hampshire. There were few places in the English Atlantic of less strategic importance, but the province provided an opportunity for the crown to begin to restructure the political culture of the plantations. New Hampshire would not have attracted any attention in Whitehall but for the many petitions of Robert Mason, who claimed a title to New Hampshire based on a grant his grandfather had received from James I. Though he proved to be a poor politician in America, he played the game of court politics extremely well. His claim to New Hampshire was shaky, but he knew that if he agreed to share the spoils with the crown, he could succeed. So he presented his campaign for New Hampshire not as a design for personal profit, which it was, but as a means to buttress the king’s authority, especially against Massachusetts Congregationalists, who had administered New Hampshire since the 1650s. “Mischiefe and miseries … have befallen those Colonies by reason of a divided and disjointed government,” he wrote in one of his many petitions, and without “One General Governor,” New England was “liable to become an easie prey to every Invader.” In other words, both Mason and the crown viewed New Hampshire as a first step to the royalization of New England and, eventually, all America.¹⁴

      The first royal government in New Hampshire, therefore, was a classic public-private partnership, combining aspects of the older model of chartered or proprietary colonies with a new, royal vision. Mason received title to all the province’s land, meaning that he could legally charge quitrents from the inhabitants, provided that he could convince them to take out new patents acknowledging him as their landlord. The crown took on the right of government, which would be managed by a governor appointed by the king along with an appointed council and elected assembly. In an apparent act of magnanimity that may have been the price of doing business with