Mullins – Anti-Popery, the Protestant Interest, and the Radicalization of New England Dissenters in the First Bishop Controversy

J.
Patrick Mullins
Visiting Assistant Professor
Saginaw Valley State University

Anti-Popery,
the Protestant Interest, and the Radicalization of
New England Dissenters in the First Bishop Controversy

The
Contested Roots of American Liberty
Regional Meeting of the Philadelphia Society
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
October 14, 2006

In his 1977 study, The
Sacred Cause of Liberty, historian Nathan O. Hatch contended that the
imperial wars between Britain and France—climaxing with the French and Indian
War—made New England’s Congregationalist and Presbyterian ministers
politically conscious by combining the religious evil of Roman Catholicism with
the political evil of French despotism. At least by 1760, such pastors had come
to identify Puritan values with Whig values and religious liberty with civil
liberty. They remained loyal to Great Britain until 1765, when the Stamp Act
struck directly at New England’s civil liberty. Thereafter, dissenting
clergymen began increasingly to see British tyranny, rather than Catholic
heresy, as the primary instrument of Antichrist in his persecution of God’s
chosen people.[i]

The weakest link in
Hatch’s brilliant analysis of clerical political commitment is his answer to
the question of just when and why Yankee clergymen began to view Britain as the
antichristian threat to their religious and civil liberties. Despite their lack
of full civil rights in England under the Test and Corporation Acts, dissenters
on both sides of the British Atlantic were fiercely loyal to the Hanoverian
monarchy as the defender of “the Protestant interest” against Catholicism
and “the dissenting interest” against high-church Anglicanism. The
dissenters’ loyalty to the Crown waned rather quickly once they saw evidence
that the British state had come under the sway of high-church Anglicans
sympathetic to Catholicism and hostile to nonconformity. The political
radicalization of New England’s dissenting clergy began during the First
Bishop Controversy, over the two years preceding the Stamp Act Crisis. As we
will see, the primary agent of their radicalization was Rev. Dr. Jonathan
Mayhew, pastor of the Congregationalist meeting-house in Boston’s West End
from 1747 to 1766.[ii]

In
1758, George II invested Thomas Secker with the Archbishopric of Canterbury.
Secker was born into a Presbyterian family, and he brought all the zeal of the
convert to his primacy over the Church of England. The great goal of his
ecclesiastical career was to reform and advance the fortunes of the Church in
Britain’s American colonies by establishing episcopates there. He assured his
American ally Dr. Samuel Johnson, a missionary for the Society for the
Propagation of the Gospel (or SPG), that they should prudently withhold any
public call for a colonial bishop until the end of the Seven Years War, at which
time Parliament would begin debating a new colonial policy. On February 10,
1763, Britain signed the Peace of Paris with Spain. On March 30, Secker wrote
Johnson that, with the next Parliament, the time to push for an American bishop
would finally be at hand.[iii]
[iv]

For
years, Jonathan Mayhew took every opportunity to criticize the SPG publicly and
angrily. Like many of his fellow dissenters, he thought the nominally
non-sectarian missionary group should convert Indians and slaves to Christianity
rather than convert Congregationalists and Presbyterians to Episcopalianism. The
objective of the SPG seemed nothing short of producing an Anglican majority in
New England. By the time the archbishop set in motion his campaign for a
colonial episcopate, Mayhew had already unleashed a literary broadside against
the SPG in the public press. His 1763 book, Observations
on the Charter and Conduct of the Society, accused the SPG of waging a
“spiritual siege of our churches, with the hope that they will one day submit
to an episcopal sovereign.” Its goal was nothing less than “to dissolve and
root out all our New-England churches.” If the Church of England succeeded in
“episcopizing” New England, the
Church’s political hegemony would be sure to follow, with the franchise and
political office confined to Episcopalians by a Test Act in New England as they
were in Old England, followed by taxes levied on the people “for the support
of bishops and their
underlings.” In closing, Mayhew exhorted “the people of
New-England to stand fast in the liberty wherewith CHRIST made them free; and
not to return under that yoke of episcopal bondage, which so miserably galled
the necks of our Forefathers.” [v]
[vi]
[vii]
[viii]

Mayhew’s Observations was a call to arms, and he was eager to
carry the fight to the enemy’s home ground. A week after the pamphlet’s
publication, he sent a copy to his wealthy and influential friend, the English
Whig activist and antiquarian, Thomas Hollis, urging him to secure a London
reprint. His book agitated dissenters on both sides of the Atlantic against any
steps toward a colonial episcopate. Young John Adams bemusedly wrote a friend
that New England’s high-church Anglicans, dazed by the good doctor’s
onslaught, “have Christen’d the Observations, the
Devils Thunder Bolt.” Fearful that Mayhew had destroyed any hope of a
colonial episcopate, Archbishop Secker decided to withdraw the SPG from New
England and respond to Mayhew’s criticisms personally in print.
[ix]
[x]
[xi]

In
January 1764, Secker completed his Answer to Dr. Mayhew’s Observations,
aimed to calm America and reassure Parliament. Although he published the
fifty-nine-page pamphlet anonymously, the archbishop addressed church policy
with the authority and assurance of a leading prelate. Readers of the London and
Boston editions immediately guessed his authorship. Secker adopted a mild,
reasonable, and conciliatory tone. He denied any design to convert all
dissenters to the Church of England, maintaining that Episcopalians no more
wanted “to episcopize New-England” than dissenters wanted “to presbyterianize
England.” Secker insisted that the Church of England desired only two or three
American bishops for strictly pastoral and administrative purposes, without any
disciplinary power over the dissenting majority. Forgetting for a moment the
Test and Corporation Acts, mandatory tithing, ecclesiastical courts, and the
bishops’ bench in the House of Lords, Secker maintained that prelacy had
imposed no “bondage” in England and so would not oppress America.
“Therefore the Doctor would not need to be at all anxious for the Liberty of
his dear Country,” Secker assured Mayhew.[xii]
[xiii]

Unpersuaded,
Thomas Hollis wrote Mayhew that he had been friends with Secker for twenty
years, but the primate’s determination to impose bishops on America convinced
him, “pass me the boldness of the expression, to drop him wholly.” In a
second April letter, Hollis reported to Mayhew that the archbishop’s Answer
had not swayed many minds in London. He urged Mayhew, as he had the preceding
December, to hammer Secker for going soft on Catholicism, whose rapid growth in
England in the early 1760s gravely alarmed many British dissenters.[xiv]

The Boston pastor responded to the archbishop in June 1764 with his Remarks
on an Anonymous Tract. While complimenting his adversary for his liberality
and fairness, Mayhew wrote that Secker’s contentions had not altered his
opinion of the Anglican Church and its ambitions for America. Historical
experience made clear that bishops have “commonly been the most useful
members, or instruments, that the crown or court had, in establishing
tyranny over the bodies and souls of men.” If Parliament introduced bishops to
America, Mayhew did not expect that they would impose religious despotism
immediately. “People are not usually deprived of their liberties all at once,
but gradually, by one encroachment after another, as it is found they are
disposed to bear them,” Mayhew sagely observed, “and things of the most
fatal tendency are often introduced at first, under a comparatively plausible
and harmless appearance.” Applying a central tenet of Country Whig political
thought, he wrote that the best way to stop tyranny lay in “opposing the
first attempts.” “
Obsta principiis, was never thought an ill maxim by wise men,” he
taught, and “[a]ll prudent men act upon the same principle.”
As for a bishop, American dissenters were “desirous to keep the
apprehended evil at as great a distance as may be.” Mayhew insisted that
colonial opposition to an episcopate was due not to paranoia but to prudence.[xv]
[xvi]
[xvii]
[xviii]

In
his Answer, Secker had noted in
passing that the presence of Anglican bishops in New England should not be so
offensive to Congregationalists, since Catholic bishops exercised their pastoral
functions in England without offending Episcopalians. Both Hollis and Mayhew
found this casual remark highly alarming. By way of preface to his response,
Mayhew reaffirmed that he was “a warm friend to religious liberty in the
largest sense,” favoring tolerance of sectarian differences, “where the
differences are merely of a religious nature, or such as do not
affect the liberty, safety and natural rights of mankind.” The Roman Catholic
Church could not be tolerated, though, because of its radical hostility to
constitutional government and individual rights, particularly liberty of
conscience.[xix]

Applying
evidence provided by Thomas Hollis, Mayhew claimed that Catholicism flourished
in London because magistrates no longer enforced the penal laws prohibiting
public Catholic worship—a claim that the archbishop’s remark confirmed.
Following France’s defeat in Canada and the end of the Jacobite threat, the
British state did increasingly indulge open worship by English and foreign
Catholics. Like Hollis, Rev. Caleb Fleming, and other Protestant dissenters in
England, Mayhew was disturbed by the growth of Catholicism in Britain over the
last few years. He reminded his readers of the atrocities committed by Catholics
against Protestants in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as well as the
civil and religious usurpations by Britain’s Catholic monarchs. The Boston
minister growled:

Are
all their diabolical treacheries and cruelties buried in oblivion? Can they who
believe the Pope’s supremacy over all Kings, and consequently deny the
independency of the British crown and empire, possibly be good loyal subjects to
King GEORGE, or any other protestant King? Are there no laws now in force
against papists? or is there no-body to execute them? Is the sword of the law
rusted in the hands of the magistrates, as well as that of the Spirit, where it
is said so rarely to come, in the
mouths of the prelates?[xx]

Having
accused the Church of England of negligence in arresting the spread of
Catholicism, Mayhew further reminded his readers of those times in Britain when
“the pernicious practices of papists, and the increase of popery there, have
been winked at.” Collusion between the British state and the Catholic Church
was obvious during the Stuart dynasty. Mayhew added that there have also been
“other times” when British ministers of state turned a blind eye to Catholic
worship in return for support in Parliament from “the wealthier papists.”
Under such corrupted ministries, magistrates accordingly became lax in enforcing
the penal laws. Meanwhile, the Anglican clergy, “especially those of superior
rank, and who aimed at riches or higher preferment, or both, observing the
conduct of the ministry. . . , wholly connived also at the practices of papists,
and the progress of popery.” Thanks to such corruption of government
ministers, members of Parliament, magistrates, and bishops, “cruel,
blood-thirsty and rebel-hearted roman-catholics, had hardly any opposition made
to them, or anything to fear in England, either from law or gospel.” Mayhew
was careful not to specify in what “times” such corruption of the British
state had occurred.[xxi]

Deftly
integrating Protestant dissent with Country Whiggism, Mayhew argued that the
toleration of Catholicism by Britain’s Church and state would lead to their
corruption, which would in turn produce civil and religious tyranny, as it had
during the Stuart era. “By such-like means has the
Scarlet Whore,” Mayhew declaimed, “with whom the Kings and great
men of the earth have committed fornication,
at certain seasons got fairly mounted on her
horned beast, and rode, with the cup of
abominations in her hand, almost triumphant thro’ England.”
Stepping back from this apocalyptic climax, the Boston pastor added unconvincingly,
“Such has heretofore been the state of things in England. How it is at
present, I pretend not particularly to know.” Mayhew might well have evaded a
sedition charge by this hedge, but he maintained that “popery was fast gaining
ground” in England in 1764. His implication was clear that Catholic corruption
of Britain’s Church, Parliament, ministry, and perhaps even king had already
begun. Archbishop Secker declined to respond to Mayhew’s pamphlet, and the
First Bishop Controversy ended with this thinly veiled allegation that
Hanoverian Britain might soon join Bourbon France and Spain among the nations in
thrall to the Papacy.[xxii]

New
England’s dissenters—and particularly its Congregationalist and Presbyterian
clergy—premised their allegiance to Britain to a great degree on the
protection their churches received from the Crown against persecution by Roman
Catholics and high-church Anglicans. Mayhew’s claim that the Church of England
and even Britain’s civil government were increasingly friendly to
Catholics—and hostile to dissenters—had explosive implications for New
England’s allegiance to the Crown. If Britain, admired by dissenters as the
scourge of popery, were to become its instrument, then Britain would become New
England’s enemy rather than its defender. The First Bishop Controversy
prompted dissenting clergy to consider whether Britain—under George III and
such Tory advisors as the Earl of Bute and George Grenville—had finally
succumbed to the temptations of Rome.

New
England clergymen had—from the first settlement of Plymouth,
Massachusetts-Bay, and Connecticut—abominated the Pope as the Antichrist
described in the Book of Revelations. In his Sacred Cause of Liberty,
Nathan O. Hatch argued that the threat of Catholic expansionism during the
French and Indian War politicized the Yankee clergy, making them more sensitive
in the 1760s to British threats to civil and religious liberty. According to
Hatch, in the wake of the Stamp Act Crisis, “New England ministers decided
that the Pope of Rome no longer served as the primary embodiment of Antichrist
and that Satan had redirected this evil power through another agency, that of
oppressive and arbitrary civil governments.” New England’s fury at the
Quebec Act of 1774, by which Parliament legalized Catholicism in Canada,
suggests otherwise. So does the 1776 sermon by Connecticut minister Samuel
Sherwood, in which he exhorts his congregation to rise up against, in Hatch’s
own paraphrase, “the ‘antichristian tyranny’ which the British government
represented; because the king’s chief ministers had sipped the golden cup of
fornication with ‘the old mother of harlots’.” New England’s dissenting
clergymen feared and hated popery quite as much at the beginning of the
Revolutionary War as they did at the end of the French and Indian War.[xxiii]

These
pastors redirected the main thrust of their millenarian rhetoric from France to
Britain, but not because they thought the Pope was no longer the principal agent
of evil in the world. Jonathan Mayhew persuaded them during the First Bishop
Controversy that popery had begun to corrupt the British state itself, as it
previously had the French and Spanish states. Mayhew thereby gave the dissenting
clergy—even normally apolitical evangelicals and politically conservative
Calvinists—urgent cause to shift the focus of their dread of Antichrist from
France to Britain. In April 1764, George Whitefield, English father of the Great
Awakening, warned two New Hampshire pastors, “There is a deep laid plot
against both your civil and religious liberties, and they will be lost.” Rev.
Francis Allison, vice-provost of the College of Philadelphia, wrote Mayhew’s
admirer Ezra Stiles that he feared Episcopalians were scheming to “induce the
English Parliament to produce a test; or at least confine all offices in the
army and Revenue to members of the Episcopal Church.” In August 1764, Rev.
William Gordon of New Hampshire wrote Dr. Joseph Bellamy of Connecticut about
dissenters’ widespread concern “that the government will send over some
Bishops to settle in America,” adding, “once Episcopacy has got a footing,
there’s no knowing where it will stop.” Beginning
in 1763 and 1764, fear of episcopacy and popery united nonconformist
clergymen—Congregationalist and Presbyterian, Calvinist and Liberal, New Light
and Old Light—as they had not been since the Great Awakening. By unifying them
in defense of their churches, and mobilizing them against royal authority, the
Bishop Controversy transformed the New England clergy into the “black
regiment” of the Patriot movement. [xxiv]

Jonathan
Mayhew’s Whiggish association of religious tyranny with civil
tyranny—combined with his dissenting association of high-church Anglicans with
Catholicism—spurred Yankee divines to oppose British aggression after 1763 as
ardently as they had opposed French aggression before 1763. Before the rise of
the stamp-tax spectre, Mayhew’s works on the First Bishop Controversy helped
convince American and British dissenters that American and British churchmen
conspired to crush the colonies’ religious and political self-government. By
the time Parliament passed statutes striking directly at the colonies’
political autonomy, the West Church divine had already mobilized New Englanders
for the defense of their rights. With passage of the Stamp Act in 1765,
Parliament stuck its nose into a hornet’s nest too recently stirred by Thomas
Secker’s prelatical crook. [xxv]

[ii]
For New England dissenters’ attachment to Britain as defender of the
“Protestant interest,” see Thomas S. Kidd, The
Protestant Interest: New England after Puritanism (New Haven and London:
Yale University Press, 2004); Kidd’s otherwise fine study does not
distinguish the Protestant interest from “the dissenting interest” and
therefore does not detect the highly conditional nature of the dissenters’
attachment to Hanoverian Britain, in which lay their shift of allegiance
during the Revolution.

[iii]
Bridenbaugh, Mitre and Sceptre, pp. 215-217.

[iv]
Knollenberg, “Hollis and Mayhew,” p. 131; Bridenbaugh, Mitre and
Sceptre, p. 220.

[v]
Jonathan Mayhew, Observations on the Charter and Conduct of the Society
for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts: Designed to Shew Their
Non-Conformity to Each Other (Boston: Richard and Samuel Draper, Edes
and Gill, Thomas and John Fleet, 1763), pp. 6-7.

[vi]
Mayhew, Observations, pp. 53-57, 107.

[vii]
Mayhew, Observations, p. 155.

[viii]
Mayhew, Observations, p. 157, 175.

[ix]
Knollenberg, “Hollis and Mayhew,” p. 138; Harrison Gray to Jasper
Mauduit, Boston, May 3, 1763, Mauduit Papers; Mayhew Papers, Folder No. 70.

[x]
Mayhew Papers, Folder No. 72.

[xii]
[Thomas Secker], An Answer to Dr. Mayhew’s Observations on the Charter
and Conduct of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign
Parts (Boston: Reprinted by R. and S. Draper, Edes and Gill, T. and J.
Fleet, 1764 [London, 1764]), pp. 5-7, 9, 29, 47, 54.

[xiii]
Secker, Answer to Observations, pp. 51-57.

[xiv]
Mayhew Papers, Folder No. 74; Lyman Butterfield, ed., Adams Family Papers,
Vol. I (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1963), p. 20; Knollenberg,
“Hollis and Mayhew,” pp. 143-148; Thomas Hollis, The Memoirs of
Thomas Hollis, ed. Francis Blackburne
(London, 1780), pp. 96, 227-228, 490.

[xv]
Jonathan Mayhew, Remarks on an Anonymous Tract, Entitled An Answer to Dr.
Mayhew’s Observations on the Charter and Conduct of the Society for the
Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, Being a Second Defence of the
said Observations (Boston: R. and S. Draper, Edes and Gill, and T and J.
Fleet, 1764), pp. 3-4, 83, 12; for American Patriots’ use of the Whig
interpretation of history, see H. Trevor Colbourn, The Lamp of
Experience: Whig History and the Intellectual Origins of the American
Revolution (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1998).

[xvi]
Mayhew, Remarks, pp. 57-61.

[xvii]
Mayhew, Remarks, pp. 59-67.

[xviii]
Mayhew, Remarks, p. 62-63.

[xix]
Mayhew, Remarks, pp. 70-71.

[xx]
Mayhew, Remarks, p. 73.

[xxii]
Mayhew, Remarks, p. 75.

[xxiii]
Hatch, Sacred Cause of Liberty, pp. 17, 87, 21.

[xxiv]
Ruth H. Bloch, Visionary Republic: Millennial Themes in American Thought,
1756-1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 57-58;
Francis D. Cogliano, No King, No Popery: Anti-Catholicism in
Revolutionary New England (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press,
1995), pp. 43-45, 49-51, 55.

[xxv]
Bridenbaugh, Mitre and Sceptre, pp. 244-245.