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.