In 1645, the colony of Maryland was invaded by a band of privateers who, with the support of a number of Protestant settlers, overthrew the Catholic proprietary government of the second Lord Baltimore, Cecil Calvert (1605-1675) and subsequently plundered many Catholic estates including the Jesuits’ plantation of St. Inigoes.Footnote 1 The rebellion, later described as the ‘Plundering Time’ by contemporary Catholic Marylanders, was led by the staunch Protestant and Parliamentarian Richard Ingle, captain of the ship the Reformation.Footnote 2 The Lord Baltimore was a Royalist and Ingle attempted to justify his efforts with the authority of a Parliamentary Letter of Marque which was issued to him on 1 December 1643 for the purpose of seizing vessels trading to ports hostile to Parliament.Footnote 3 In 1646, Governor Leonard Calvert (c. 1606-1647), brother to Lord Baltimore, Cecil Calvert, returned with a force of exiled Marylanders and Virginian mercenaries and restored the proprietary government.Footnote 4 Ingle’s motivations in plundering Maryland were a combination of vengeance for his arrest in the colony a year earlier, personal anti-Catholicism, and an opportunistic attempt to exploit pre-existing religious conflict in the colony in order to increase his wealth through seizure of goods.Footnote 5 Upon his return to London, Ingle made an unsuccessful attempt to legitimize his assault on Catholic estates in Maryland by claiming that those inhabitants who adhered to the Roman Catholic faith were rendered traitors and their estates forfeit. As evidence for his case, Ingle captured and returned to England prominent Catholic planters Giles Brent (c. 1600-1671/72), John Lewgar (1602-1665), and Cuthbert Fenwick (1614-1655).Footnote 6 Ingle also captured two Jesuits, Thomas Copley (c.1596-1652) and Andrew White (c. 1579-1656).Footnote 7 Copley and White’s confreres were also captured but, as they were less valuable captives, are thought to have suffered more gruesome fates. Henry Stockton informed the High Court of Admiralty in August 1645 that Ingle’s men had been ordered to ‘…put them ashore upon some place or other among the heathens and there to leave them.’Footnote 8 The ‘heathens’ to whom Stockton referred were probably the Susquehannock tribe who had seized the effects of the English Civil War in the Chesapeake as an opportunity to assert their autonomy. On 17 April 1643 the acting governor, Giles Brent, commissioned Captain Thomas Cornwaleys (c. 1605-1675/6) to repel the Susquehannock tribe near their village on the Susquehanna River.Footnote 9 By the summer of 1643, the Susquehannock were still raiding along the Patuxent River on the eastern frontier where they looted the Jesuit plantation of Mattapany.Footnote 10 Whether the Jesuits abandoned in 1645 were killed by the Susquehannock tribe or whether they died of exposure is unknown, but they were never heard of again.
Ingle’s Rebellion is in and of itself a fascinating period in Maryland’s history and exemplifies that the uneasy and fragile prosperity of Catholics ultimately rested on Protestant acceptance of religious toleration in the colony. This article focuses on Thomas Copley’s subsequent efforts in London to escape prosecution and recover goods seized by Ingle. It seeks to restore the history of the Maryland mission within British Catholic studies, and, specifically, the position of Catholics in the legal and political landscape of post-Reformation Britain. I argue that English Catholics who migrated to Europe and America in this period exploited the legal ambiguities produced by English expansionism in order to resist the anti-Catholic legislation used to discriminate against them. By contrast, Ingle not only overestimated the power of that legislation but he also assumed that its jurisdiction extended unchanged to the high seas and colonies. However, his defeat in London’s courts by the Jesuit priest he had taken prisoner in Maryland reveals that legal definitions of loyalty did not always correlate with those held by the Protestant populace.
Timothy Riordan’s The Plundering Time (2004) is, to date, the most comprehensive study of Ingle’s Rebellion. Riordan argues that ‘[e]arly studies of the Plundering Time concentrated on Richard Ingle himself without attempting to understand the context in which he operated… the Plundering Time must be interpreted within the context of the English Civil War.’Footnote 11 However, although Riordan acknowledges the role that religious conflict played in Ingle’s Rebellion, he often separates the politics of the English Civil War from the religious identity and linguistic framework in which Ingle couched his justification for his actions in Maryland. As a result, the reader gains the impression that the anti-Catholicism espoused by Ingle and his supporters was incidental to his political and financial ambition, rather than illustrative of a mutually supportive ideological relationship between politics and religion in seventeenth-century England. The neglect of this relationship is most evident in Riordan’s account of the escape of the Jesuits Thomas Copley and Andrew White from execution for treason. In fact, Riordan dedicates only three paragraphs to the Jesuits’ trial under 27 Eliz.Footnote 12
This article re-examines the archives to highlight that the Catholic response to Ingle’s Rebellion is an example of resistance to legal and political limits placed on Catholic citizenship within post-Reformation England and her empire. The first section outlines the three areas of scholarship which help us to understand Thomas Copley’s success but which rarely overlap: British and Irish Catholic studies, early American studies, and the history of the British Empire. Specifically, it focuses on English jurisprudence as it relates to religious conformity and recusancy and the ideology of the English Empire which underpinned both domestic and colonial legal structures but which often failed to reconcile differences between the two. The second part of this article centres on documents found within the High Court of Admiralty and the Court of Chancery collections in the UK National Archives which relate to the plundering of Maryland during Ingle’s Rebellion (1645-1646). Specifically, it examines the litigation testimonies of Captain Richard Ingle and the Jesuit priest and superior of the Maryland mission, Thomas Copley. The dispute between Ingle and Copley reveals the various mechanisms employed by the Society of Jesus to operate a successful mission in Maryland whilst remaining within the confines of English law at home and on the colonial frontier. Importantly, their testimonies highlight the intersections between national allegiance and treason, civil rights and jurisdiction, and confessional adherence in Catholic and non-Catholic imaginations in both England and her empire.
The Reformation and English Subjecthood
The English Reformation inaugurated extensive political, religious, and cultural changes. For English Catholics, it introduced anti-Catholic prejudice, legal discrimination, and alienation from the Commonwealth.Footnote 13 The effects were felt beyond the borders of England. The Act of Supremacy (1534) announced England as a ‘Protestant Empire’ and forever changed the ideological foundations for English expansionism.Footnote 14 As Anna Suranyi writes:
The first parliamentary declaration of English imperium came with the English separation from the Church of Rome… In that period the term “empire” reflected the independence of England from any external or overseas power… Although it is from the reign of James I that the term “British” was attached to the empire, it was usually seen as an English dominion. But the term “empire” had another meaning aside from that of dominion, one which implied the existence of subject territories, and that implication was not lost on the English.Footnote 15
The Council of Trent (1545-1563) and the passage of Tudor religious reforms cemented antagonistic doctrinal positions. The reality of these divisions manifested in the lives of every English subject across the social spectrum. The Act of Uniformity (1559) effectively outlawed Catholic worship by commanding all subjects to adhere to the reformed liturgy outlined in the 1559 Prayer Book, to attend Sunday and holy day services, and to receive Protestant Communion at least three times a year. Physical sites of Catholic worship, including churches and cathedrals, were appropriated by Protestant ministers, whilst state and popular iconoclasm refurbished those sites into places appropriate for reformed worship.Footnote 16 Indeed, by the end of the sixteenth century the belief that English Catholics were traitors to the crown had become a national zeitgeist. In response, many English Catholics sought refuge in Europe where they established English Catholic institutions for the education and training of men for the priesthood and the English mission. They, like the Jesuits who began to arrive at the beginning of the 1580s, brought with them a new Tridentine Catholicism that helped to create a new post-Reformation Catholic community. After Queen Elizabeth’s excommunication by Pius V in 1570, the practice of the Catholic faith became an increasingly dangerous endeavour.Footnote 17 Punishments for recusancy threatened the livelihoods and lives of English Catholics. Once recusancy became an indictable offence in 1581, the fine levied against Catholics for non-attendance at service of the Established Church was raised from 12d to £20, whilst attendance at Catholic Mass could result in a fine of 100 marks.Footnote 18 A mark was 13 shillings, 4 pence which was two-thirds of a pound; equivalently the fine for attending Catholic Mass was approximately £66.Footnote 19 At the time of the passing of the 1581 Act, these were substantial fines. A tract published over fifteen years later itemizing causes of poverty listed £20 as a measure of substance, while the sum of 12d was commonly acknowledged as a marker of poverty.Footnote 20 This assault on English Catholicism forced communities to adapt traditional religious practice and beliefs as well as the demands of the Catholic Church in order to survive. In other words, English Catholic worship became a unique patchwork of beliefs derived from doctrine and theology disseminated by both the pre-Reformation and Tridentine church, combined with the material needs of a community exercising clandestine religious practice.
In 1649, the Act of Toleration codified in Maryland the promise of religious toleration included in Baltimore’s Conditions of Plantation (1632) and thus guaranteed migrating Catholics and other religious dissenters freedom from religious censure and financial, political, and corporal penalties.Footnote 21 However, incidental evidence of religious conflict in court-records found in the Maryland State Archives reveals that although Baltimore could deliver legal religious toleration, he could not overcome colonists’ prejudice learned at home in England.Footnote 22 Protestant discontent centred on a cultural fantasy of an English Protestant nation which was rooted in early modern beliefs about religious conformity and statehood. Alexandra Walsham has argued that early modern Christians accepted Augustinian teachings that the ‘truth’ was single and indivisible. Thus, dissidence from established doctrine was literally ‘soul-destroying,’ and so efforts to protect against heresy were believed to deflect damning providential judgments against both the individual and the community. For conforming Protestants, the Established Church was the embodiment of the divine truth and religious conformity was thus an ‘antidote to sedition and subversion and preservative against internal dissolution.’ Therefore persecution and intolerance of dissenters was ‘logical, rational, and legitimate,’ whilst toleration was a ‘loser’s creed.’Footnote 23 Religious toleration in Maryland cut against the grain of this fantasy. Thus, the anxiety and conflict which permeates the Maryland records in matters of religion and state reveals that religious conflict in the colony was in fact a quotidian phenomenon.Footnote 24 Nonetheless, the Lords Baltimore maintained religious toleration in the colony for almost fifty years before the Glorious Revolution (1688-1689) forced the removal of the Catholic proprietorship. The removal enabled Maryland legislators to introduce the Penal Codes to the colony when they passed An Act to prevent the Growth of Popery within this Province in 1704. Crucially, the wording of the act betrayed the legislators’ recognition that Maryland was subject to multiple jurisdictions: it stated that Catholic priests found guilty of attempting to educate English youth would be ‘transported out of this Province to the Kingdom of England together with his Conviction in order to his Suffering such pains and penaltys as are provided by the Statute [there].’Footnote 25 The composite legal structure of the English Empire acknowledged by the members of Maryland’s Assembly enabled the Lords Baltimore to exploit the imprecise boundaries of jurisdiction within an empire dominated by proprietary colonies which were ruled by the English monarch but governed by private citizens. Only under these circumstances could the Lords Baltimore maintain religious toleration in Maryland. The Maryland Charter (1632) designed by the first Lord Baltimore, George Calvert (c. 1580-1632) empowered the Lords Baltimore as ‘absolute proprietors’ to govern the province as an extension of royal privilege provided that their governance did not ‘contravene the Laws of England.’Footnote 26 The mechanisms by which the Lords Baltimore maintained religious toleration thus belong to a history of the constitutional foundations of the English Empire.
Imperial Jurisdictions and Proprietary Colonies
In spite of recognising that Protestantism ‘provided Englishness, Britishness and the British Empire with a common chronology and a history stretching from the English and Scottish Reformations,’ David Armitage has argued that
[T]he visceral anti-Catholicism to which a unifiying British identity has been attributed in the eighteenth century was mostly negative in content, and hence could hardly be a source of positive arguments in favour of a particular mission or foundation for the British Empire. Least of all could it, or post-Reformation theology more generally, provide a solution to the problem of defining, justifying or correlating claims both to sovereignty (imperium) and property (dominium) as the ideological basis for the Empire.Footnote 27
In 1645, the term ‘dominion’ was legally imprecise and entirely contextual; Derek Hirst and Michael Braddick have both documented in detail that in relation to the Three Kingdoms, dominion could imply mere control or possession or equally lordship and regality. Thus, in 1645 use of the term ‘dominion’ had far more brutal connotations in relation to the founding of the Ulster plantation in 1609 than to Scotland following the union of the crowns in 1603.Footnote 28 Furthermore, Armitage has emphasised that this slippage was a result of the early English Empire having been a post-Renaissance empire which engaged in classical scholarship to interrogate human nature and the religious, social, and political institutions which were defined by it. In England, for example, debates surrounding an Anglo-Scottish union from the 1540s until the passing of the Act of Union (1707) were couched in classical rhetoric in which opponents used ‘neo-Roman language of empire (imperium) and colony (colonia) to describe the territorial consolidation they envisaged or the jurisdictional subordination they feared.’ Footnote 29 In the context of the English Empire, Armitage has stressed that the genesis of the ideological and constitutional developments which made colonization practical is found in the Three Kingdoms rather than the Americas. In particular, English policy towards Ireland since the Tudors was a turning point in English imperial ideology. Despite Ireland having been a kingdom after 1541, the English treated it as a colony after the ‘New English’ period of settlement from the 1560s onwards. Under this policy, both the ‘barbaric’ Gaelic Irish and the Catholic ‘Old English’ descendants of Norman settlers required civilizing and Protestantising, in much the same way as the inhabitants of the Americas.Footnote 30 However, this policy intensified under the Cromwellian regime. As a composite state, English judges assumed a common heritage between England and Ireland that was crucial to the Cromwellian regime’s prosecution of Irish Catholics involved in the 1641 rebellion. English judges argued that:
[w]hile the king’s political body of Ireland may have been separate and distinct from his political body of England, it was rendered a political body by virtue of the same fundamental rule of law, the English common law. Accordingly, the subversion of the fundamental law of Ireland was as great an evil as the subversion of the fundamental law of England.Footnote 31
When the Irish High Court of Justice was established in 1652, it was done with the intention both to prosecute Irish rebels and to implement the Act for the Settlement of Ireland that had been passed by Westminster the same year.Footnote 32 The latter was a landmark piece of legislation that enabled the confiscation and redistribution of Irish Catholic lands to English Protestant settlers. Jennifer Wells has thus argued that these measures enabled the Cromwellian government to establish a ‘language of legitimation,’ grounded in law but motivated by prejudice.Footnote 33 Most importantly:
[T]he regime shrewdly embraced both long-standing domestic traditions and emerging legal principles to establish a sophisticated judicial apparatus that was possible as a result of the distinctive circumstances in Ireland [which] enabled the parliamentarians to use the law to move away from violence, legitimizing and enhancing English power there, in the archipelago and, ultimately abroad.Footnote 34
As a result, the Cromwellian government launched a campaign to violently subdue and Anglicize, in the political and religious sense, the conquered nation of Ireland. In its eagerness to establish legitimacy and cultural hegemony, the Cromwellian government published high-profile trials of Irish Catholics involved in the 1641 Rebellion to sanitize the English colonization of Ireland by appealing to a ‘common legal identity’ that it claimed was derived from the Saxon era.Footnote 35 Thus:
When violence materialized, it came from the axes and pikes of recalcitrant Irish Gaels, not the swords of English conquerors. Expunging force from invasion and immediately emphasizing England’s legal claims to Ireland served an important didactic purpose: power could be secured through the civilized, legitimating language of law; violence remained a weapon of the conquered barbarian.Footnote 36
Wilcomb Washburn argued, in 1959, that from the time of the Spanish encounter with the Americas in 1492, a ‘Law of Nations’ had developed within Europe in which Old World traditions were transformed so that, regardless of how colonizers justified their settlement of the New World, whether by discovery, conquest, royal or papal grant, they all demonstrate that the ‘principal ethico-legal concern in the period was about the claims of rival European powers, not about the rights of the Native Americans.’Footnote 37 Crucially, in the Americas the construction of the ‘savage’ and ‘barbarian’ Irish Catholic had a decisive impact on who the lawmakers defined as ‘English subjects’ in an increasingly expansive empire. The changes in law subsequently developed a ‘language of legitimation’ in colonial endeavours and in the English imagination. The colonial ideology of ‘difference’ between the English and the ‘other’ and the legal frameworks which codified it was developed in Tudor Ireland and traversed the Atlantic to the Caribbean and North America.Footnote 38
The boundaries of jurisdiction in England and her empire are central to Maryland’s history. The Maryland Charter (1632) was based upon the rights and privileges of the Palatinate of Durham. These rights and privileges were introduced by William the Conqueror who had provided quasi-independence to the Bishopric of Durham in matters of defence, finance and even law-making. As a result, Baltimore was able to maintain religious tolerance in the colony by arguing that his authority was an extension of royal privilege.Footnote 39 George Calvert’s decision to obtain a charter based on the Palatinate of Durham was crucial to the success of the colony not only because it provided a legal mechanism by which he could introduce religious toleration, and thus offer religious and economic freedom to Catholics, but because it enabled the entire enterprise to be legitimized by the English legal framework. This was a lesson hard learned by Calvert’s friend and co-religionist Sir Edmund Plowden (c. 1590-1659) who had attempted to establish a colony in present-day Delaware and New Jersey.Footnote 40 In an attempt to circumvent powerful opposition in London, Plowden obtained the patent for the New Albion colony from the Irish Privy Council on 24 July 1632.Footnote 41 Personal problems and the Swedish settlement of Delaware forced Plowden to wait until 1641 to accept his grant. When he did, legal concerns arose as to whether the Dublin government could issue patents to settle a colony in the English Empire and this led Plowden to petition the English Privy Council to ratify his charter. Although he was eventually successful in doing so, Plowden never established New Albion, and eventually his charter was subsumed into that of New York when the English captured the colony from the Dutch in 1664.Footnote 42 The delay caused by the legal challenges to Plowden’s Irish charter was compounded by financial difficulties that were, in part, the result of legal persecution of Catholics in England: as a Catholic and a Royalist many of Plowden’s assets were seized by the Committee for Compounding for the Estates of Royalists and Delinquents (est. 1643) for his actions during the English Civil War.Footnote 43 The failure of the New Albion venture thus demonstrates that the ambiguity of English imperial jurisdiction presented both pitfalls and opportunities for Catholics. Whereas Calvert and other Catholics involved in the Maryland venture exploited the ambiguity in order to obtain religious, political, and economic freedom, Plowden fell victim to his recusancy and the imprecision of England’s constitutional relationship with both Ireland and the Americas. Plowden’s story is one we might expect to recover from the archives but his misfortune brings into sharp relief the significance of Richard Ingle’s defeat by a Jesuit priest to our understanding of early modern English Catholicism.
Copley vs. Ingle
In June 1645, Richard Ingle delivered the Jesuits Thomas Copley and Andrew White to the authorities in London. Both were subsequently tried under the Act Against Jesuits, Seminary Priests and Such Other Like Disobedient Persons (1585).Footnote 44 The potential outcome of the trial was grave; under the same statute Father Henry Morse had been indicted and hanged at Tyburn in February of that year.Footnote 45 27 Eliz refuted the argument that Catholic priests residing in the realm were present for pastoral reasons; rather, it stated, they were agents of Rome who intended to ‘stir up and move sedition, rebellion, and open hostility.’Footnote 46 As a result, priests were given forty days to leave the realm, after which they risked arrest and execution for treason. Englishmen studying for the priesthood abroad were given six months to return to England after which point they too would be considered traitors if they entered the realm.Footnote 47 A layperson caught aiding a priest was judged to be a felon, but not necessarily a traitor—although the martyrdom of Margaret Clitherow in 1586, amongst others, demonstrates that during Elizabeth’s reign at least, this was more often a semantic distinction.Footnote 48 However, Alan Orr has argued that by the time of the English Civil War the statutory foundation of treason was unclear. Confusion lay, firstly, in the lack of clarity about which statues and which particular provisions therein were actually in force; and, secondly, for those statutes which (it was generally agreed) were in force, disputes arose over the meaning of the text. This was particularly true of medieval and Tudor statutes which were often the result of particular political circumstances which no longer applied—although early Stuart juries often appropriated them to serve their arguments. Lastly, exploitation of textual ambiguities could result in statutes being applied in a more generous form than their original framers had intended.Footnote 49 For example: treason was prescribed by the Treason Act of 1352 (much of which still remains in force), but by the sixteenth century lawyers were debating whether the 1352 statute was sufficiently exhaustive.Footnote 50 Subsequently, a system of ‘common-law treasons’ developed which, in turn, provided the legal basis for extra-statutory treasons and the growth of additional treason statutes under the Tudors—of which 27 Eliz. is an example.Footnote 51 The court documents which record the Jesuits’ trial and defence are lost, and so our knowledge of the proceedings is scant and based only on the record of the trial included in Henry More’s account of the martyrdom of Henry Morse in an earlier draft of the Historia Missionis Anglicanae Societatis Iesu (1660).Footnote 52 According to More’s narrative, White and Copley both successfully pleaded that although they were priests they were not guilty of treason because Ingle had returned them to England against their will; therefore they had not violated 27 Eliz. In other words, Copley and White argued that those who had drafted 27 Eliz. had not intended to pronounce the priesthood itself to be treasonous, but rather the act of entry of a priest into the kingdom of England and her dominions. Although Copley and White’s argument that they did not voluntarily return to London seems logical, it is nonetheless surprising that the court did not consider Maryland to be a dominion of the realm. Had the court done so, as presumably Ingle had expected it to, then White and Copley would have undoubtedly been found guilty of treason. The loss of the trial documents means that it is impossible to be certain that contemporary debates about empire and state-building had an impact on White and Copley’s trial yet it seems feasible that the priests were able to exploit these debates to argue that as a proprietary colony Maryland was subject to its own jurisdiction. Consequently, the Jesuits could argue that their entry into the colony was not a treasonous act, because they had neither entered the realm of England nor one of its dominions which were subject to the jurisdiction of 27 Eliz. This is an important point because if they accepted this argument then the judges presiding at White and Copley’s trial confirmed that Catholic priests could not be indicted for missionary work in the colonies unless 27 Eliz. had been adopted by colonial legislatures directly. If this was the prevailing legal opinion then it would explain why members of the Maryland legislature felt the need to pass the Act to Prevent the Growth of Popery in this Province (1704).
Following their trial Copley and White were released but ordered to leave the country—although neither appears to have done so immediately. Copley remained in London until 1648, apparently unmolested, while White was recaptured and imprisoned for three years under threat of execution for having disobeyed the directive.Footnote 53 That Copley was allowed to continue his business without trouble may have more than one explanation. Firstly, it cannot be underestimated that Copley belonged to a prestigious gentry family, the Copleys of Gatton, who, like the Lords Baltimore, were part of an influential network in London. However, the English and Maryland records suggest that having been born in Madrid, Copley had another hand to play. Prior to his departure to Maryland, Copley’s alias, Philip Fisher, appears more than once in reports related to the 1628 raid at the Jesuit Clerkenwell residence where he had worked as both a minister and procurator.Footnote 54 In order to gain greater freedom to administer his duties, he had petitioned the King for protection as an ‘alien born’ resident.Footnote 55 The petition was granted in December 1635, two years prior to his departure to Maryland. Upon his return to Maryland in 1648, Copley also registered this protection with the Maryland Assembly.Footnote 56 In doing so, Copley may have been able to claim special privileges and protections under the law. Certainly Benjamin Kaplan’s work on European early modern understandings of ‘extraterritoriality,’—on which modern claims to ambassadorial immunity are based—has shown that this was the case for the Stranger Churches and Roman Catholic chapels used by Catholic dignitaries at the Stuart court.Footnote 57 Although further research is required to confirm whether these privileges extended to England’s empire, it does seem clear that Copley at least believed that whilst ‘alien status’ by no means granted him immunity from anti-Catholic legislation, it certainly complicated their application.
Having escaped execution, Copley pursued the goods stolen by Ingle through the High Court of Admiralty. However, his ability to do so again highlights the inconsistency of legal censure of Roman Catholicism across the English Empire. In England, the suppression of landholding by the Roman Catholic Church since the Dissolution of the Monasteries (1536-1541), alongside the expulsion of priests and men and women religious, inaugurated the new social and political order. In practical terms, these measures attempted to force Catholics to convert to Protestantism lest they be cast adrift from any form of Christian ministry. The risk presented by the Society of Jesus’s ownership of land in Maryland was not lost on the proprietor. Prior to Ingle’s Rebellion, the Jesuits and the second Lord Baltimore had come into heated conflict about this Jesuit landownership, a conflict that had resulted, again, from the imprecise relationship between the colonial frontier and the imperial centre. The dispute was rooted in the contested interpretations of jurisdiction and, in this case, inflected with specifically English Catholic controversies surrounding national and religious allegiance.Footnote 58 During a dispute in which Thomas Copley demanded that the Society be granted manors under the patronage of the Lords Baltimore, Copley betrayed that he had little regard for the delicacy of Baltimore’s attempts to maintain an English colony in which religious toleration could flourish. Most likely referring to his experience of Spanish patronage of the English colleges in Habsburg territories, Copley reprimanded Baltimore, telling him
… there is not any care at all taken, to promote the conuersion of the Indians. to [sic] provide or to shew any fauor to Ecclesiasticall persons, or to preserue for the church the Immunitve and priueledges, wch she enioveth euery where else.Footnote 59
27 Eliz. declared that any English subject found supporting the clergy financially would ‘incur the danger and penalty of a Praemunire’ and thus be judged a traitor.Footnote 60 In Maryland, Baltimore refuted the Jesuits’ assertion that his colony was a Catholic kingdom and in doing so resisted their claims to ecclesiastical privilege. Baltimore even attempted to introduce the English Statutes of Mortmain (1279, 1290), which prevented the transfer of land to the possession of the Church to protect crown revenue; he argued that Maryland was an extension of the Kingdom of England by royal prerogative, as codified in his proprietary charter.Footnote 61 Following a protracted debate, in 1642 the Superior of the English Province, Henry More, compromised with Baltimore and agreed that Jesuits could hold property as individuals but not as a corporate body.Footnote 62 Three years later, the agreement reached by More and Baltimore benefitted the society in their case against Ingle. On behalf of the mission, Copley was able to petition the High Court of Admiralty as a ‘sober honest and peaceable man’ who sought reparations no differently to the layman Giles Brent with whom he submitted a petition.Footnote 63 Although the sheer wealth of the contested goods might have raised suspicions as to the true nature of ownership and their use —especially the fine jewels and cloth that were most likely used as altar vestments—by presenting his case as a gentleman planter Copley was operating entirely within the law.Footnote 64 Crucially, in all libel testimony submitted to the High Court of Admiralty by Catholic planters—including Copley—each planter emphasised his national allegiance rather than his religious allegiance.Footnote 65 When asked the nature of Thomas Copley’s politics by the High Court of Admiralty, Thomas Cornwaleys emphasised Copley’s assets, and thus gentleman status, before reaffirming Copley’s own declaration almost verbatim: ‘The said Copley was generally accounted, reputed and taken to be a sober, quiet and peaceable man and one that lived without… sedition and was no way opposed in hostility against the King and Parliament.’Footnote 66
The Legacy of Ingle’s Rebellion
The Jesuits were not alone in exploiting the imprecise boundaries of jurisdiction in England’s early empire. Following his defeat of Ingle in the High Court of Admiralty, the Catholic Thomas Cornwaleys pursued Richard Ingle in the Court of Chancery for damages incurred during the rebellion.Footnote 67 The Court of Chancery was a common law court and could, therefore, attach real property and Cornwaleys probably coveted Ingle’s English estate. Yet, because Ingle’s offence had been committed in Maryland and involved breaches of maritime and civil law the common law court had no jurisdiction. However, as a result of England’s ambitions abroad in the sixteenth century, common law lawyers had created the convenient fiction that such breaches occurred in a parish of London rather than the colonies, and this remained the practice in the early seventeenth century.Footnote 68 Thus, Ingle was forced to admit that he had committed the misdemeanor for which he was accused so that he could protest that it had occurred in Maryland and not the Parish of St. Christopher’s in London.Footnote 69 Richard Ingle’s ability to hold onto the plunder seized in Maryland rested on proving that his actions had been taken against enemies of the Parliamentarian cause. If Ingle was found to have operated beyond the terms of his Letter of Marque he could be tried for piracy.
The understanding that success or loss in the courts rested on proof of open opposition to Parliament was not lost on either party. Not only did Cornwaleys and Copley both assert that they remained loyal to the king and Parliament, Ingle repeatedly used similar language when he made accusations of disloyalty towards his Catholic captives. He declared that Cuthbert Fenwick was ‘in Armes & opposition & hostility against King and Parliament’ and in his petition to the House of Lords in response to Cornwaleys’ suit in the Court of Chancery, Ingle claimed that ‘the very Goods that were by Force of War justly and lawfully taken from these wicked Papists and Malignants in Maryland [original emphasis], and with which he [Ingle] relieved the poor distressed Protestants there, who otherwise must have starved and been rooted out.’Footnote 70 Ingle’s capture of Copley and White, alongside Lewgar, Brent, and Fenwick, was intended to prove that Baltimore’s colony harboured priests and allowed Catholics to flourish extra legally. Following Henry VIII’s break with Rome, boundaries of allegiance were drawn along national as much as confessional lines, and the Elizabethan Settlement and the Oath of Allegiance (1606) especially fixed onto the national memory the image of Catholics as anathema to the English state. Furthermore, in March 1643 Parliament reinforced this image of the disloyal Catholic by passing a sequestration ordinance which authorised the confiscation of royalist and ‘delinquent’ estates for the war effort.Footnote 71 For Ingle, and indeed many Protestant Englishmen and women, the Jesuit mission, the open practice of Roman Catholic worship, and the presence of Roman Catholics as members of the colonial government in Maryland was tantamount to treason simply by virtue that they appeared to operate in spite of those activities having been circumscribed by English statutes. John Lewgar and Thomas Cornwaleys testified to the Court of Chancery in autumn 1645 that for this reason, during the rebellion, Ingle distributed letters in Maryland which attempted to rally discontented Protestants to his cause.Footnote 72 Lewgar stated that he saw ‘in a Letter which the defendent [sic?] wrote unto… the Protestants of Maryland latt [sic?] his first coming upp with his Shipp, wherein [he had] a Comi[ss]ion… to plunder the Papists… and to plunder all them [who] would not take upp Armes with him… [under] the [s]ame Comi[ss]ion from Parliament.’Footnote 73 At least some Protestants in Maryland responded to Ingle’s invitation.
As a result of the legal proceedings in London, a treatise entitled A Petition of Diverse Inhabitants of Maryland was sent to the Committee for Foreign Plantations in November 1645 which complained of the ‘tyranicall rule’ of ‘papists’ and requested that a Protestant government be instituted, and that Ingle be granted immunity.Footnote 74 In addition, despite Copley having been found not guilty of treason under 27 Eliz., Ingle still pushed the disloyalty of the Jesuit’s Catholicism in his own libel filed against Copley. For example, Ingle reported that Copley’s usual residence was called ‘St. Ignatius Loyolas Colledges’ and that he lived there with Jesuits and papists. Most dangerously for Copley, Ingle accused him of attempting to rally the Native Americans at Portobacco ‘to cut the throats of the Protestants.’Footnote 75 However, around the same time as he submitted his libel against Copley, Ingle lost his suit against the Looking Glass (Der Spiegel), a Dutch merchant ship that Ingle had seized in St. Mary’s City harbour. The Looking Glass was owned by a number of merchants operating out of Rotterdam including Henry Brooks Jr. who had travelled with the Looking Glass to Maryland. Brooks was captured by Ingle but inexplicably he never reached London with the other captives.Footnote 76 If Brooks’ demise was a part of Ingle’s plan it was ill-conceived. Ingle’s claim to the Looking Glass as a prize relied upon the judges of the High Court of Admiralty and the Court of Chancery accepting that Ingle had operated within the limits of his Letter of Marque. The questions they thus posed to deponents during proceedings focused heavily on Ingle’s actions. On the 26th September 1645 they asked John Lewgar ‘do you know or have you audibly heard that the said deft… in a violent manner posess himself of the aforesaid Dutch ship… had frauded… off another yea or no by or under what pretent or authoritie [of Parliament?]’Footnote 77 To award Ingle the Looking Glass as a prize the judges needed to confirm that either Brooks was Royalist or that St. Mary’s City was a Royalist port. Without Brooks alive, Ingle could only rely on the latter argument. However, the court heard that although Leonard Calvert and Governor William Berkeley of Virginia (1605-1677) had on 26 January 1643/4 received a royal commission to seize in Virginia ships trading from London, because that city was in rebellion, the commission did not extend to Maryland.Footnote 78 Most importantly, upon Calvert’s return from England the Maryland Assembly had affirmed that it would thus enjoy free trade with all who visited the colony’s ports. Footnote 79
The Assembly’s actions probably ensured that the judges of the High Court of Admiralty rejected Ingle’s suit. Importantly, by passing this judgement the judges had declared by implication that the inhabitants of Maryland were not in opposition to Parliament and that Ingle had operated beyond the mandate of his Letter of Marque leaving him vulnerable to the charge of piracy. Ingle’s hope now rested on the Protestant petition from Maryland submitted to the Committee of Foreign Plantations finding favour with the House of Lords. If not for Lord Baltimore’s shrewd interventions to protect his charter in 1646-1647, it is likely that Ingle would have survived the affair with his plunder intact. On 28th November 1646 the House of Lords reached a third reading of an ordinance that, had it been passed in the House of Commons, would have removed the Catholic proprietary government and secured Ingle’s immunity.Footnote 80 Ingle lost, but the record is incomplete. We can only be certain that Cornwaleys was able to extract as a settlement the equivalent of about £300 sterling worth of debt owed to Ingle by several inhabitants of Maryland listed in an inventory dated 25th November 1646.Footnote 81
In 1648, Copley returned to Maryland and set about ensuring that the Jesuit mission would never again face near annihilation. He registered his status as ‘alien born’ in the Maryland legislature on 13 March 1648, launched a number of suits against those Protestants who had capitalised on the seizure of Jesuit property, and deeded property to lay Catholics for them to hold in trust on behalf of the society. For example, in January 1646, Governor Leonard Calvert authorised Lt. William Lewis to inventory the Jesuit property St. Inigoes that Calvert described as ‘Mr Copley’s Land’ but which was then occupied by Mrs. Baldridge who was a wife of one of the rebels.Footnote 82 Baltimore likewise made overtures to the new Parliamentarian government, and reshuffled his council to include a significantly higher number of Protestants.Footnote 83 Ultimately, whilst Copley exploited every legal loophole available to him, Ingle miscalculated that the cultural identity of ‘Englishness’ defined by Protestant anti-Catholicism would be enough to sway the judges of the High Court of Admiralty and the Court of Chancery to find in his favour. Ingle failed to understand or account for the complex constructions of the English realm, empire, and dominion in the legal framework which were not always congruent with cultural constructions of the same concepts.
Whilst the litigation found in the High Court of Admiralty and High Court of Chancery reveals that Catholics were able to navigate the ambiguities of the law and use those ambiguities to their advantage, Ingle discovered that his legal case was hollow and rooted only in what Clement Fatovic has described as xenophobic constructions of Protestant and British national identity, rather than concrete evidence of Maryland Catholics’ political opposition to Parliament. Footnote 84 Thus the litigation battle between Copley and Ingle suggests that ‘Englishness’ was ambiguous; it partly relied on the law, but it was also an ethnoreligious construction of identity. As a member of a prominent gentry family Copley could lay claim to an ethnic ‘Englishness’, but his Catholicism and his birth in exile complicated that belonging. To Richard Ingle, Thomas Copley was an English Jesuit priest operating in violation of 27 Eliz. in a dominion of England. In many ways, it is understandable that he would feel confident of success in London’s courts; but in reality, the rule of law protected Catholics from more vulgar and popular abuses of anti-Catholicism.
