In 1645, the Scottish minister John Dury translated a proposal from two French Protestants, Hugh L' Amy and Peter Le Pruvost, and redrafted it for the consideration of the English Parliament. The proposal called for an expansive, state-sponsored maritime expedition to establish and fortify a new plantation in the West Indies. L'Amy argued that it would strengthen England commercially and militarily for the purpose of confronting Spanish power in both Europe and the New World. Some of the profits would be directed toward “the Conversion of the Indies unto the Christian Religion.” Dury sketched a map of the coastline for the proposed plantation, situating it somewhere in present-day South Carolina. The proposal drew his special praise for its “Public spirit zealous for the Protestant Religion as now it is in agitation to be maintained against Popery.” Dury saw this as a chance for English and foreign Protestants to work together and strengthen their position in a fight against Spanish Catholicism. The intended plantations, Dury wrote to Walter Strickland, were “not alone to benefit us as wee are a state by ourselves, but to make us beneficiall to all the Protestants of Christendome, and to put in our hand the strength of their Cause against there enemies the Papists.”Footnote 1
Dury (c. 1596–1680) is not usually associated with religious militancy or colonial expansion. He is primarily known as a Protestant irenicist—“a peacemaker without partiality or hypocrisie,” in his own words—who repudiated the destructive doctrinal conflicts of his age. The language of peace dominated his petitions, treatises, and correspondence for the half-century from 1628 until his death. Dury corresponded with Reformed and Lutheran clergymen and statesmen from across northern and western Europe, trying to negotiate the spiritual and ecclesiastical reconciliation of the Protestant churches. In his extensive travels, he met with many of these figures in England, the Netherlands, Sweden, Denmark, Switzerland, and Germany. He proclaimed to serve only God and not the private aims of particular men or parties. “My constant suit to all Protestants,” he wrote in 1641, “is that they would live in the Communion of Saints one towards another.”Footnote 2
Dury's career has provoked considerable interest from religious and intellectual historians. Recent studies have sharpened our understanding of the early modern practice of irenicism by shedding light on his vision of ecclesiastical polity, his emphasis on pedagogical reform, his deep reverence for magisterial authority, his subtle rhetorical shifts in appealing to different audiences, and his need to secure influential patrons even as he professed his impartiality.Footnote 3 In a different vein, other scholarship has established Dury as a Protestant “philo-semite” in the 1640s and 1650s. This work has explored his interest in Christian Hebraism and millenarian eschatology, his identification of American Indians with the Lost Tribes of Israel, and his advocacy for the readmission of Jews to England.
The extant scholarship on Dury as an irenicist or philo-semite has thus retained a long-standing focus on the language of peace and reconciliation while attributing the dynamism and radicalism of his vision to a millenarian perfectionism. As a result, some of the fundamental and pressing political problems that he confronted have tended to recede into the background. Dury was anxious about the need to challenge Spanish and Austrian Catholic power. Protestantism, as he saw it, was in a fight for its very survival in Counter-Reformation Europe. This assessment was neither uncommon nor unfounded, as Jonathan Scott has forcefully argued.Footnote 4 “The utter ruine of their Churches” was inevitable, Dury claimed, if Protestants did not heed his prophetic admonitions to recover their spiritual unity.Footnote 5 Dury especially revered Protestant secular and military leaders, such as Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden and Oliver Cromwell of England. He regarded these champions as instruments of God's providence, invested with both the power and the duty to challenge a menacing Counter-Reformation Catholicism led by the Austrian and Spanish Habsburgs.Footnote 6 While he insisted that ministers must not meddle in worldly affairs, Dury routinely framed his own project for Protestant unification as the necessary spiritual complement to their conquests and victories.
This article presents Dury's irenicism and philo-semitism as interrelated aspects of an expansive, expansionist, and international Protestant cause that was founded upon a deep antipathy to Roman Catholicism. Amid the turmoil of the Thirty Years’ War and the English Revolution, Dury identified “papists” as agents of Satan dedicated to the destruction of true Christianity. His vision for the Protestant churches was intended to counter what he perceived to be the principal strengths of early modern Catholicism: confessional unity, imperial expansion, and the coordination of missionary efforts to propagate the faith across the world. He thus pressed his fellow ministers to collaborate with one another and to support the evangelization of non-Christians. This was to be the “spiritual” aspect of a larger design for the unification and expansion of Protestantism based on its own dynamic of conquest and colonization in continental Europe, Ireland, and the Atlantic world.
A renewed focus on Dury's vision of the Protestant cause and on his persistent preoccupation with Catholicism demands a reinterpretation of several aspects of Dury's career that have previously been treated as discrete or overlooked altogether. First, Dury was closely associated with an Anglo-Irish Protestant lobby in London in the 1640s, and this personal interest coincided with his growing conviction that a transnational Protestant effort to possess and improve Ireland would play a significant role in the larger struggle against Habsburg Catholicism. Second, Dury's philo-semitic writings were persistently anti-Catholic, reaching an apocalyptic crescendo in his vision of oppressed Jews rising to overcome the Spanish Monarchy and abolish the Inquisition. At the same time, his cautious support for the toleration of Jews in England was not only deeply conversionist; it echoed concerns about insularity or self-seeking in Christian fellowship that were typical of his irenic project. Finally, as the main publicist in 1649–1650 for the so-called Jewish Indian theory, Dury helped to present both Jews and American Indians to English readers as victims of Spanish Catholic cruelty, idolatry, and superstition. His call for expanded missionizing and his support for John Eliot's civilizing mission in New England were thus defined against the alleged ill effects of Spanish colonialism. By this time, the scope of his vision for advancing the Protestant interest had grown to encompass colonial expansion in Ireland and America, where he hoped to see English and continental Protestants working together to fortify their position against Spain and its growing Catholic empire.
The Thirty Years’ War and Theological Diplomacy
Dury was drawing on Scottish military and diplomatic connections when he presented his first petition for “Ecclesiasticall Peace” to Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden in 1628. The king of Sweden's army, encamped at Elbing, was a multinational Protestant force and included a disproportionately large number of Scottish soldiers. The chief recruiter for Scots troops was Sir James Spens, a seasoned Scottish diplomat and professional soldier who had become a trusted advisor to Gustavus Adolphus. Spens had spent much of the 1620s working to build a broad military alliance for the relief of Protestantism in the Palatinate. By 1628, Dury was in Elbing acting as Spens's personal secretary. He may have obtained this post through his cousin, Colonel James Ramsay (called “the Black”), Spens's son-in-law and one of the leading Scottish commanders in the Swedish army.Footnote 7 Owing largely to these connections with Spens and Ramsay, Dury would later gain an audience with Gustavus Adolphus shortly after the Swedish victory against the Catholic League at Breitenfeld in September 1631. The Scottish contribution at Breitenfeld was especially critical: Scottish soldiers recruited by Spens outnumbered Swedes in Gustavus Adolphus's army, and Colonel Ramsay played a crucial role in the victory.Footnote 8
In the 1628 petition, and in subsequent correspondence during the 1630s, Dury was explicit in linking his negotiations—what Steve Murdoch has called “theological diplomacy”—with the progress of the war in Germany. The petition warns the Swedish king that military victories depend on his humility and fear before God and his commitment to doing God's work. Victory alone cannot achieve peace; instead, victory will follow from the pursuit of spiritual peace. “Remember that your victories were then greatest,” Dury declares, “when you [were] weakest.” Divine providence will intervene only on behalf of those who acknowledge their own powerlessness and dedicate themselves to the performance of God's will. This includes the duty to work toward “the quenching of the fire of Ecclesiasticall Controversies.” The king, as a God-fearing magistrate, has a special obligation to use his office toward this work. “I am crying fire, fire, fire,” Dury writes, “and I repair to your majesty for help and succour, for Ladders and Vessels.”Footnote 9 After the death of the Swedish king in 1632, a dejected Dury wrote from Frankfurt to his chief patron, the English diplomat Sir Thomas Roe, that Gustavus Adolphus was a Samson that “hath pulled downe the house of Austria upon himself.”Footnote 10 During his travels through Germany in the early 1630s, Dury wrote at least thirty-four separate letters to Roe, in which extensive discussions of his pan-Protestant negotiations often figured side by side with updates on the progress of the war.Footnote 11
This first proposal for Protestant unity was thus presented as a spiritual complement to an ambitious plan of Protestant military conquest against Austrian Habsburg Catholicism. While Dury's use of language throughout his career constantly stressed spiritual regeneration, mutual edification, meekness, charity, and peace, his proposals for unity continued thereafter to be founded upon the need to counter the perceived threat of a militant and united Roman Catholic Church. This was summarized in his 1642 pamphlet Certaine Considerations:
Now seeing the Papists, though many waies amongst themselves divided, yet, as common adversaries to Protestants, concurre and joyne fully with indefatigable paines and diligence, both to undermine the fundamentall Constitutions of the Churches inwardly, and to assault them outwardly to disturbe their peace; and both waies to worke out correspondently, not without great cost and expenses, their most dangerous plots and attempts, which infallibly will bring Protestantism to ruine, if no common course be thought upon, and concurrently followed to prevent the same.Footnote 12
Throughout his travels in the 1630s, Dury attempted to negotiate a reconciliation of the Lutheran and Reformed Churches of Europe by meeting with statesmen and leading clergymen throughout Germany, Sweden, Denmark, and Holland. But this irenic project was consistently underwritten by anxiety regarding an alleged Catholic conspiracy, led by the papacy and its allies, which aimed at the total destruction of Protestantism through a combination of open warfare and subtle efforts to undermine the Protestant churches from within.
Dury repeatedly made it clear that the House of Habsburg, alongside the papacy, was Protestantism's deadliest foe because of its designs for a universal monarchy. “It is evidently knowne,” he wrote in a 1639 pamphlet, “that the house of Austria, doth settle a forme of governement in the Empire conformable to the Spanish Maximes of state.” This was an attempt to establish “a most absolute and unlimited power of the Emperour over all the free states and Princes in Germanie” and then to conquer the rest of Europe. The Austrian Habsburgs, he wrote, recognized that “the publique profession of the Protestant religion” was the greatest hindrance to their domination of Europe, and “therefore they have concluded a totall extirpation thereof, together with the impoverishing and desolation of the Protestant states.” This was the true cause of the Thirty Years’ War, according to Dury's 1641 letter to a leading Scottish divine.Footnote 13
As the political winds in the Stuart kingdoms changed dramatically in the years around 1640, Dury's political center of gravity shifted to London, around what we might call a Netherlands-England-Ireland nexus. Dury was no stranger to London. His closest friend and intellectual collaborator, Samuel Hartlib, had been there since 1628, working especially to relieve and assist continental Protestant exiles. Dury's previous visits to London, primarily intended to secure support for his project from Archbishop William Laud, had yielded little success. But in 1641, with Laud imprisoned and Parliament recalled, Dury joined Hartlib and the Moravian intellectual reformer Jan Amos Comenius in London, where they jointly published a flurry of pamphlets calling on Parliament to sponsor their programs for intellectual and social reform.Footnote 14 When the onset of the English Civil War interrupted their plans, Dury left for the Netherlands, where he served as tutor to the king's daughter at the Stuart court in The Hague and then as pastor to the Merchant Adventurers at Rotterdam. In 1645, he was invited back to London by the Westminster Assembly of Divines. This would inaugurate the longest period of relative stability in Dury's life. He remained in England until 1654.
Ireland, Providence, and International Protestantism
The place of Ireland on Dury's mental map during the English Revolutionary period has been consistently overlooked by historians. This is surprising for two reasons. First, the importance of Ireland for the Hartlib circle is well known. Several of Hartlib's associates, including Robert Boyle and Benjamin Worsley, developed a series of social, economic, and scientific reforms for Ireland and worked to implement these after the Cromwellian conquest.Footnote 15 It is also surprising because of Dury's relationship with Scottish professional soldiers in the Swedish army. Many of these Scots returned home in the late 1630s to join the Covenanters against Charles I and then moved on to Ireland in the early 1640s to suppress the Catholic rebellion. Dury's friend and supporter Lord Alexander Forbes was one such figure.Footnote 16 In 1642, Forbes commanded the Sea Adventure, a thousand-man privateering force given extensive license by the English Parliament to maraud and pillage along the coast of Ireland. A former lieutenant-general in the army of Gustavus Adolphus, Forbes had since 1637 offered Dury financial support and assistance for his mission of “Ecclesiasticall Pacification.” Dury visited Forbes when both men were in London in 1641–1642, and Forbes continued to assist Dury financially and to deliver messages to the Swedish court on his behalf as late as 1645.Footnote 17 The Sea Adventure was largely spent burning Irish villages, spoiling crops, and stealing livestock near Kinsale and Galway. Forbes attributed the strength of the Irish rebellion to the English Civil War and to “the policy of their priests,” who claimed to serve Charles I and who encouraged their flocks to “enter into a bond, for killing all his majesties British subjects, and protestant professours.”Footnote 18
If it were not for the Irish Catholic uprising that occurred late in 1641, it probably would have been Dury, not Forbes, who departed for Ireland in 1642. In the summer of 1641, Dury accepted an offer to serve as household chaplain to Robert Sidney, the earl of Leicester, newly appointed as Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. Like many in his family, Leicester had briefly commanded an English Protestant regiment in the Netherlands and was an experienced diplomat dedicated to a militant anti-Spanish foreign policy. In a letter to Hartlib, Dury explained his reasons for accepting this “call into Ireland.” He was eager to gain the support of Leicester, “a learned, eminent & religiously well affected patron” for his work of Protestant reconciliation, and he suggested that “there may be speciall providence” in bringing his work to Ireland, given the recent turmoil in England and Scotland. He thought that the Irish church might prove a better setting in which to conduct a trial run for his “work of Peace.”Footnote 19 The outbreak of rebellion only months later must have quickly dissuaded him of that notion. When Leicester resigned his Irish commission two years later, neither he nor Dury had set foot in Ireland.
But even as the once-promising Leicester position evaporated, Dury was growing closer to the Irish Protestant cause on a more personal level. In 1645, after years of close friendship, he married a displaced Irish Protestant widow, Dorothy Moore, who had inherited 1,000 acres in County Armagh from her first husband. Dorothy's father, Sir John King, was the recipient of an extensive 1619 land grant in Counties Roscommon and Sligo and had served as muster-master general. Both Dorothy's father and her first husband sat as MPs in the Irish Parliament of 1634. For her part, Dorothy's relationship with Dury had brought her closer to the cause of continental Protestantism. She frequented the Stuart court in The Hague in the early 1640s, repeatedly asking Hartlib to urge his friends in the English Parliament to provide support to Elizabeth Stuart, the long-deposed queen of Bohemia and electress Palatine. Dorothy was an exponent of universal woman's education and a gifted language scholar, especially noted as a Hebraist. She corresponded extensively with Dury about English church politics, and he relied on her in 1644 to discover what scruples the Independent church leaders in London had against a Presbyterian form of government.Footnote 20
The marriage to Dorothy meant that Dury himself became associated with a financial interest that supported the suppression of the rebellion and the restoration of Anglo-Irish Protestant estates. Frequently struggling to remain financially solvent, Dury complained in 1650 that his wife's Irish estate had not generated any income since the rebellion had broken out in 1641.Footnote 21 In this he echoed the complaints of prominent Irish Protestant planters like Richard Boyle, the earl of Cork, one of the wealthiest New English planters of Ireland during the early Stuart period. For decades, Cork had worked tirelessly to Protestantize, “civilize,” and improve Ireland.Footnote 22 After the rebellion of 1641, an embittered Cork wrote to the earl of Warwick that the rebellion might provide an opportunity “to root the popish party of the natives out of the kingdom, and to plant it with English Protestants.”Footnote 23 Cork's daughter, Katherine Jones, Lady Ranelagh, was in fact Dorothy Dury's niece, closest friend, and most frequent correspondent. Once established in London from 1643, Lady Ranelagh became a close associate of Dury and Hartlib through Dorothy's introduction. Historians have recognized her formidable presence at the center of a group of dislocated Anglo-Irish Protestants that met at her home and that lobbied the English government throughout the 1640s.Footnote 24
In 1645, around the same time he and Dorothy were married, Dury endorsed a proposal to send “zealously inclined” members of the Independent churches to Ireland to “suppresse poperie by force.” “The Spanyard,” he wrote to Hartlib, was planning “to Land a sufficient armie in Ireland & to provide the natives there with armes & Amunition,” threatening to disrupt trade and “Invade England at his pleasure.” The suppression of the Irish rebels was thus of paramount importance for the survival of the Protestant cause not only in Ireland but in England and Scotland as well. Dury called the plan “both rationall & seasonable” but was skeptical about the willingness of the English Independents to march into a war with the Irish. If they could be persuaded, however, it would be “profitable to the advancement of Gods Kingdome” because of “their antipathie to Poperie, by which God may make them instruments to propagate the light of Truth to such as are in darknes.”Footnote 25
Later that year, Dury subscribed to the Solemn League and Covenant, an agreement between the English Parliament and the Scottish Covenanters, dedicated to the “the extirpation of Poperie, Prelacie … Superstition, Heresie, Schisme,” and anything contrary to godliness in the three kingdoms. The Covenant was prompted by Parliamentary anxiety over the king's truce with the Irish rebels in 1643 and the fear that an invasion force of Irish Catholics, under the royalist banner, would soon fall upon England. Subscribers to the Covenant promised to pursue religious unity among the three kingdoms in matters of “Doctrine, Worship, Discipline & Government” and to collaborate against their common enemies in England and Ireland who sought to hinder the process of true reformation.Footnote 26
In fact, the leading Scottish negotiators of the Covenant had even grander plans. Their agent to the United Provinces invited Dutch statesmen and clergymen to “to joyne with us in the Covenant,” arguing that the war in Ireland was an extension of the ongoing conflicts between Protestant and papist in the Netherlands, Bohemia, and the Palatinate.Footnote 27 Dury shared this broader vision for the Covenant. He told the English Parliament in 1645 that he hoped to see the Covenant lead the way for the perfect reformation of all Protestants. England and Scotland, he declared, were the two nations nearest to God and had been jointly entrusted with a providential mission. He called on the British churches to reject the Babylonian mode of government, exemplified by “the great Romish whore of Babylon,” which uses “policie” and deceit to secure worldly glory and absolute power over others.Footnote 28
Despite the repeated pleas of Irish Protestant lobbyists, the English Long Parliament of the 1640s was confronted with a depleted treasury and a political leadership divided by civil war. However, after the execution of Charles I in 1649, the army under Oliver Cromwell devoted its resources to the suppression of the Irish rebellion. One of Cromwell's advisors regarding the invasion of 1649 was Sir Robert King, Dorothy Dury's brother and one of many landed Irish Protestants who had frequented Lady Ranelagh's London home in the 1640s.Footnote 29 Appointed in June as governor general of Ireland, and heavily financed by Parliament, Cromwell led an invasion force that grew to 30,000 men and laid siege to the country one town at a time. To each besieged town he offered the opportunity to surrender according to his terms. Refusal to agree would leave a town at his mercy. The massacres of civilians by troops under his command at the sieges of Drogheda and Wexford have for centuries established Cromwell's reputation as one of the most hated villains in Irish history.Footnote 30
In the aftermath of this searing conquest of Ireland, Dury legitimized both the conquest and the regicide as guided by God's providence. Dury's dramatic dedicatory epistle to Irelands naturall history (1652) praised the conquerors Cromwell and Fleetwood as “Leading Men” in bringing about the rule of the Kingdom of God, who has made them his “very eminent Instruments.” They have been charged with “the breaking of our yokes” as part of the “great and mighty Changes, which God is making in the Earth.”Footnote 31 Historians have treated Irelands naturall history as both a major development in Baconian economic geography and as a manifesto for the Anglo-Irish Protestant lobby in London. The author, Gerard Boate, relied heavily on information from displaced Anglo-Irish Protestants and on the recollections of his brother Arnold, who had resided in Dublin from 1636 to 1644 in the service of Archbishop James Ussher and as physician-general to the army in Leinster. Arnold and Gerard were Dutch physicians educated at Leiden with close connections to both Dury and his wife. The text appealed especially to the many social, intellectual, and scientific reformers in the Hartlib circle, centered in London, who regarded Ireland as a country to be remade.Footnote 32
What is most remarkable about Dury's dedication to Irelands naturall history is his transnational Protestant vision for the remaking of Ireland. This sets it apart from a more typical English-Irish binary employed by his English friends and contemporaries.Footnote 33 Boate's text itself relied on such a binary, reflecting a debt to his English sources, especially Sir William Parsons. Boate praised the historical efforts of the English to cultivate the island and dismissed the Irish as a barbarous and wild people whose carelessness has hindered the proper “improvement” of the country. Dury, by contrast, had nothing to say about the history of Ireland. Instead, he looked forward to “the hopefull appearance of Replanting Ireland shortly, not only by the Adventurers, but happily by the calling in of exiled Bohemians and other Protestants also, and happily by the invitation of some well affected out of the Low Countries.” Dury would reiterate this in a 1653 memorandum, speculating that great numbers of Protestants recently expelled from the Emperor's heritable dominions “might bee brought to plant themselues in Ireland if the Parliament would giue them a friendly invitation to that effect.” Such a proposal for the transplantation of foreign Protestants to Ireland is indicative of a worldview that linked together the struggles in Ireland and Germany as part of the same Protestant cause. It would be taken up by Oliver Cromwell and his son Henry in the following years.Footnote 34
Ireland, for Dury, was part of the wider battleground against Habsburg Catholicism. The threat of Spanish invasion required that popery on the island be suppressed forcefully, while the Emperor's prohibition of Protestantism in central Europe provided a source of refugee planters for the newly expropriated land. Dury's vision for Ireland in the early 1650s was a new aspect of his long-standing efforts to break down the walls that divided the Protestant states and churches and to encourage them to combine their efforts toward the improvement of learning, husbandry, industry, and trade, all moving inexorably toward the advancement of Christ's Kingdom. There was no apparent place in this vision for “papists.” Dury's discussion of Ireland in the early 1650s did not address the need to convert or otherwise manage Ireland's majority Catholic population. This stands in contrast to his 1641 letter to Hartlib that followed his acceptance of the offer to serve Leicester in Ireland. At that earlier moment, Dury had written that he must determine “how to deale with Papists, to winn them to the knowledg of God.”Footnote 35 In 1652, as he proposed an idealized vision of Ireland as a harmonious and international Protestant plantation, the presence of Roman Catholics was simply erased from Ireland's future.
Shortly after the publication of Irelands naturall history, the Cromwellian regime began to “replant” Ireland by expropriating land and transplanting people on a scale that surpassed all Tudor and Stuart precedent. This required legislation in London and land surveys of the conquered territory. Once again, Dury was associated with the central figures undertaking this work. Dury's brother-in-law, Sir Robert King, served in the Parliament of 1653 and had a key role in producing an Act for the allocation of vast amounts of profitable confiscated land.Footnote 36 Two of Hartlib and Dury's associates, Benjamin Worsley and William Petty, were the leading land surveyors in Ireland under Cromwell.Footnote 37
The implementation of this policy amounted to the single most significant expropriation of land by British settlers in Irish history. The Cromwellian settlement of Ireland was the most ambitious English plantation project of its time, in that it envisaged a “massive destruction and relocation” of the native population and an immediate transformation of the social structure to follow an English model. In 1640, English and Scottish Protestants held 30 percent of land in Ireland; by 1670, it was 67 percent. Roughly seven million acres of Irish land were transferred from Catholic into Protestant hands. The majority of this transfer took place between 1652 and 1660. The combined Cromwellian and Restoration settlements constituted a watershed moment in Ireland's history, effectively inaugurating an entirely new social order of Protestant dominium and domination.Footnote 38
Several historians have recently argued that the intertwined processes of military conquest and forced migration in the 1650s represent a transformative moment in the development of English imperialism. The English Atlantic world in this period saw a crucial shift toward the transportation of unfree laborers rather than voluntary settlers. Thousands of Irish were transported as bound laborers, especially to West Indian colonies with staggeringly high mortality rates, and still this fell short of the ambitious plans of some English officials.Footnote 39 This was the obverse side to the proposals of Dury, Cromwell, and others to transplant foreign Protestants to Ireland: it would not be possible without the forceful relocation of thousands of Irish Catholics by English authorities.
Such radical changes, for Dury, were signs of an apocalyptic age. By the time of its publication in 1652, Dury's preface to Irelands Naturall History was only the latest in a series of radically providentialist pronouncements he had made since 1649 in his service as an active propagandist for the divinely ordained legitimacy of the English Commonwealth. He had published a series of pamphlets urging his fellow divines at Westminster to take the Oath of Engagement and to swear their loyalty to the Commonwealth. He had produced a French translation of John Milton's anti-royalist polemic Eikonoklastes at the request of the Council of State.Footnote 40 By the time this translation was published in 1652, he had been granted a yearly allowance of £200 from the council for his services. Dury's pamphlets in defense of the Engagement made use of his long-standing rhetoric of an impartial Christianity that must rise above partisanship and seek the public good. But they evinced an even deeper providential approach to politics. God, he claimed, was “shaking the titles of the earth,” exalting some rulers and humbling others, and had disowned the Stuart monarchy. Therefore, Dury concluded, to attempt to restore the monarchy or House of Lords was “to betray the common cause to particular designs,” and such self-seekers “will be found to be Children of their Father the Devill.”Footnote 41
This summary repudiation of the Stuart dynasty is jarring when one considers Dury's ties to the court of Elizabeth of Bohemia in The Hague and his past service (on two occasions) as tutor to the king's children. This opportunism is best understood as a stark example of his full commitment to a providentialist politics and the pan-Protestant cause. Scott Mandelbrote has observed that Dury's defense of the Engagement highlights the way his thoroughgoing providentialism was combined with a deep and consistent reverence for magisterial authority. Secular rulers held their office by divine mandate, but this was not a mandate guaranteed by hereditary succession; it could be won or lost through outward signs of God's favor or displeasure.Footnote 42 Dury was thereby able to see the death of Charles I and the establishment of the English Commonwealth as divinely ordained and needing no other justification. It was an example of the upheaval that God was effecting across the world. To retain one's personal loyalty to the Stuarts after they had been so decisively rejected by God was, for Dury, yet another example of the Antichristian partiality that had divided the Protestant cause for too long. It was his loyalty to that cause that had led him on an exhausting journey through Protestant Europe for the better part of two decades.
This upheaval, for Dury, was pointing toward something even greater than Ireland, or England, or Protestantism itself. More profound transformations were still to come. Now was the time to expand the common cause well beyond the defense and unification of the existing Protestant churches in Britain, Ireland, and the European continent. Now, more than ever, the time was “seasonable” for Protestants to renew their efforts to bring Jews to Christianity, and to support the work of bringing religion and “civility” to the indigenous people of New England, whom Dury regarded as possible descendants of the Lost Tribes of Israel. Each of these can be viewed as an extension of Dury's efforts to unify and edify the Protestant godly and of his attempts to counteract the international—indeed global—spread of early modern Catholicism.
Reassessing Dury's Philo-Semitism
Dury and Hartlib's heightened interest in Jewish people and oriental learning during the 1640s and 1650s has drawn considerable attention from intellectual historians. This has earned Dury the label of “philo-semite,” especially given his tentative support for the toleration of Jews in England in 1655. The distillation of a peculiarly Protestant form of philo-semitism has encouraged scholars to tell a story that connects Dury and Hartlib to the sectarian Protestant “Judaizers” of early Stuart England or that credits him with helping “to produce a world in which there could be mutual respect, first between Christians and Jews, and then between Christians and non-Christians in general.” This philo-semitic current has earned a prominent place in modern accounts of how a Jewish community obtained permission in 1656 to live and worship openly in England for the first time since Edward I's expulsion order of 1290.Footnote 43
These valuable studies of Dury's philo-semitism have largely neglected two defining preoccupations of his career: his pan-Protestant irenicism and his anti-Catholicism. They have thus obscured the ways in which Dury's proposals for a rapprochement between Protestants and Jews possessed a decidedly irenic character. His attitude toward the toleration of Jews in England shared much with his efforts to foster spiritual reconciliation and growth among the Protestant churches and his wish to root out all traces of what he perceived to be insularity or self-seeking within Christian fellowship. More important, they have overlooked how Dury's expressions of sympathy for Jews mirrored his treatment of fellow Protestants victimized and dislocated by Catholic cruelty. Philo-semitism is a tendentious analytical category; to employ it requires a careful exploration of other accompanying motives and mentalities. As Jonathan Karp and Adam Sutcliffe have written, the aim of historians “should not be to expose ‘false’ or self-interested philosemites, or to identify ‘true’ ones, but rather to comprehend the significance and function of positives perceptions of Jews and Judaism within their broader intellectual frameworks.”Footnote 44 Any recognition of Dury's importance as a Protestant philo-semite must acknowledge not only his irenic hope for the ultimate reconciliation of Lutherans, Calvinists, and converted Jews in the Kingdom of God but also his inclusion of Jews among the victims of an oppressive and idolatrous popery.
The standard account of Dury's philo-semitism in the 1640s stresses his interest in Christian Hebraism and millenarian eschatology.Footnote 45 In brief, Dury advocated closer Protestant engagement with the Hebrew language and Jewish scholarship for two reasons: to allow Christians to uncover and possess the hidden secrets of Jewish knowledge and to hasten a Jewish conversion to Christianity that must precede the end of days. Dury and Hartlib's reform programs for the advancement of learning bore the influence of their association with Christian Hebraists on the European continent, including Johannes Rittangel and Adam Boreel. They hoped that improved rabbinic and kabbalistic scholarship might help to make “Christianity lesse offensive, and more knowne unto the Jewes, then now it is, and the Jewish State and Religion as it standeth now more knowne unto Christians.”Footnote 46 Following the execution of the king in 1649, Dury called on the revolutionary government to sponsor the “advancement of knowledge in the Orientall tongues, and Jewish Mysteries.” This proposal rehearsed a series of claims inherited from Renaissance Christian Kabbalism and Christian Hebraic political theory in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Hebrew was the original language of God's laws and instructions for mankind. It contained mystical qualities and “hidden treasures.” The Jewish rabbis and kabbalists had privileged access to secret knowledge that Christians might use to advance the everlasting kingdom and proper worship of God for all mankind.Footnote 47
In the 1650s, Dury's intellectual curiosity blossomed into apocalyptic speculation and political activism. He speculated that the Lost Tribes of Israel might be found in America and that to convert those peoples to Christianity might have widespread apocalyptic consequences. He cultivated a relationship with the Rabbi Menasseh ben Israel of Amsterdam and disseminated the rabbi's own messianic writings in England. When the rabbi petitioned Cromwell and the Council of State for official toleration, Dury voiced his approval, on the condition that “friendly” but persistent efforts be made to convert the Jewish population to Protestantism and to limit their freedom so as to prevent them from boasting over Christians, dominating trade, or undermining the state. In 1657, an encounter with the traveling Rabbi Nathan Shapira of Jerusalem led Dury and some like-minded friends to launch a fundraising effort for the distressed Jews of Palestine.Footnote 48
Yet it must be pointed out that Dury's philo-semitic writings relied on the same perfectionist, irenic, and commercial language that animated his calls for the reconciliation of the Protestant churches and the advancement of learning. His irenic tracts drew their rhetorical strength from a repeated and insistent contrast between the true universal faith and self-seeking human partiality, between his own concern for the “publick good” and the mere “private spirit” of his opponents.Footnote 49 As Dury wrote in the preface to Irelands naturall history, Christians who desired a place in God's kingdom required a “more perfect knowledge, both in Natural and Spiritual things.” The perfection of this knowledge, he explained elsewhere, demanded collaboration and mutual “correspondency,” whether among clergymen or scholars of the arts and sciences.Footnote 50 Moreover, Dury often presented this intellectual collaboration in the language of commerce and profit. The work of a library-keeper was akin to that of “a factor and trader” as well as a treasurer and dispenser. A regular “brotherly correspondencie” among Lutheran and Reformed ministers would produce an increase in religious knowledge that “may become profitable in common to all, and be communicated without grudging or envie.”Footnote 51
Each of these elements—the perfectibility of spiritual knowledge, the distinction between public- and private-spiritedness, and the analogy of commerce and mutual profit—was present in Dury's most detailed proposal regarding the study of Judaism. While Christians have the Gospel in their “Treasury,” he wrote, it is “but an imperfect provision, so long as the old is not brought in also.” Christian spiritual knowledge needs to be perfected through the study of the “Orientall Languages” and Jewish mysteries, or Christians will remain “but half instructed for the advancement of the Kingdom to the world.” Individual Christians might attain “salvation in things privately,” but the public and universal aims of advancing Christ's kingdom cannot be achieved. English Christians, he remarks, are already engaged with Jews in “a free Commerce and Trade for worldly Commodities.” How will they answer to God if they do not attempt a trade in spiritual things, which will yield “inestimable profit unto both, through the manifestation of Christ his glory in his Kingdom. For the benefit of the Trade will be reciprocall”?Footnote 52 This comparison to a reciprocal and mutually beneficial commercial trade was more than just a gentle allusion to the mercantile character of the Portuguese Jewish community of nearby Amsterdam and its network of connections to overseas goods and ports. It was central to Dury's broader representation of his role as an intellectual reformer and his method as an irenicist.
This understanding of how Dury's irenic method permeated his philo-semitic writings helps us to explain the ambivalence of his support for the official toleration of Jews in England in 1655. David S. Katz has called Dury's cautions and suspicions regarding the Jews “almost surprising in light of his powerful philo-semitic ideals.” In a letter to Hartlib that was subsequently published, Dury recommended that Jews be required to listen to Christian sermons and converse openly with Christians about their faith and worship. The state, he added, must constrain Jewish liberty so as to protect the English from blasphemy, financial domination, and “oppression” at the hands of crafty Jews, who “are naturally more high minded then other nations” and who have the capacity to undermine a state when left unchecked. The Jews, Dury explained, never integrate within a Christian commonwealth; instead, they “forme a Societie, or kind of Common-wealth among themselves.” Katz suggests that this letter shows how a “committed and well-informed philo-semite … began to waver when faced with the prospect of living Jews rather than theological abstractions.” Yet this was not a new development. Six years earlier, Dury had denounced the Jews in classic anti-Judaic terms for their “superstitious imaginary foolish conceits” and their pestilent and destructive usury. This was well before there was any serious talk of tolerating Jews in England.Footnote 53
For Dury, neither formal toleration, nor what we might call philo-semitism, should be taken as an approbation of religious difference. But neither should his quest for ecclesiastical peace. Irenicism was only a method, and toleration might be a grudging stopgap. But what Dury ultimately sought through these peaceable means—as he stated again and again—was a perfect unity. The aim of establishing a toleration, he wrote in 1648 in regard to the English Independent churches, “should not bee to settle a forbearance which should leave the parties or confirme them in the distance, whereinto they are unhappily fallen.” Both sides should agree “that a dore may bee kept open and enlarged, to further a more perfect unity then as yet the parties have attained unto.” Insularity was his greatest concern. The Independents, he wrote, seemed more interested in separation from their fellow Christians than in brotherly communion. They sought “to please themselves” in satisfying their own “humour” rather than working to edify others in the faith. Without constant progress toward religious unity, toleration would simply reinforce existing divisions, stunt the spiritual growth of believers, and hinder the process of perfecting the saints into one unity as Christ's spiritual body.Footnote 54 What Dury feared from tolerating Jewish worship in England, therefore, was not only their financial domination and blasphemy but also their insularity—a collective particularism and “high-mindedness” that would lead them to spurn the conversionist efforts of the Christian philo-semites who had advocated for their admission.
Yet the most important reason to bring Dury's irenicism into conversation with his philo-semitism is to reveal the deeply anti-Catholic and anti-Spanish worldview that underlay nearly everything he wrote about Jews. Dury blamed Spanish cruelty and Catholic idolatry for widening the gap between Jews and Christians, just as during the Thirty Years’ War he had attributed sectarian divisions among Protestants to the efforts of a Habsburg-led papal conspiracy, seeking to divide the Protestant churches in order to destroy them.Footnote 55 He argued in 1655 for the toleration of Jews in England because they “are banished from the Country of their inheritance” and were “a people in misery and distresse” in need of hospitality, likely thinking of the hundreds of impoverished Portuguese Jews recently arrived in Amsterdam after the collapse of Dutch Brazil.Footnote 56 The need to show hospitality to refugees and victims of Catholic persecution was a subject dear to Dury's heart. He and Hartlib had long been dedicated to the relief of exiled Protestant ministers and to their re-settlement in England and Ireland. Many of Dury's close friends and supporters, including his wife Dorothy and the celebrated Comenius, were Protestants who had suffered displacement and loss at the hands of Catholic rebels in Ireland or Habsburg armies in continental Europe.
The strongest evidence for the anti-Catholic dimension to Dury's philo-semitism comes from his role in disseminating a series of works in 1649 and 1650 suggesting that the Lost Tribes of Israel had been found in America. Dury's apocalyptic preface to Thomas Thorowgood's Iewes in America; or, Probabilities that the Americans are of that race (1650) expressed hope for a military alliance between Jews and Protestants against Spain, thus bringing an end to Inquisitorial cruelty and persuading the Jews to convert to Protestant Christianity. The Spanish Monarchy, Dury claimed, might soon attempt a conquest of the Holy Land, taking advantage of Ottoman decline. But this will be thwarted by the Jews, who will “finde their interest to be the enjoyment of their owne inheritance,” and who will “resist and oppose the Spanish Monarchy, that it may not propagate it selfe Eastward, and Southward, beyond the Mediterranean Sea; and that the Inquisition by which they have been so cruelly persecuted, may be every where abolished.” Protestant Christians will help them in this holy conquest, and the grateful Jews will convert to the true form of Christianity, freed from papal superstition:
they will finde assistance from all Christians that are not slaves to superstition and tyranny, and that assistance and favour which by such Christians will be given them, may in Gods hand be a meanes to open the Pharisee his eyes, to see somewhat in Christianity, from which he hath been hitherto blinded, by reason of the prejudice which the Idolatry of the Papall Sea, and the Spanish Inquisition hath begotten in him.Footnote 57
That same year, Dury was at work behind the scenes in the publication of another text that combined the Israelite Indian theory with an invective against Spanish Catholic cruelty: the English translation of Rabbi Menasseh ben Israel's The hope of Israel. Dury wrote the work's dedication, acted as its distributor in England, and was the one to suggest dedicating the Latin version of the work to the English Parliament.Footnote 58 After a detailed discussion of the whereabouts of the Lost Tribes, Menasseh's book turned to the scattering of the Jewish people as a product of persecution, particularly “that horrible monster, the Spanish Inquisition.” Menasseh positioned the Inquisition and the 1492 expulsion from Spain as prophesied calamities of the same order as the destruction of the Temple.Footnote 59 These twin themes of dispersion and Spanish persecution would return with even more force in the rabbi's 1655 petition to Cromwell for toleration.Footnote 60 For Dury, Jews and Protestants might share a common future in the communion of saints, but his collaboration with Menasseh ben Israel persuaded him that they most certainly shared a common plight as victims of Catholic cruelty, carried out especially by the Habsburg monarchies of Austria and Spain.
Protestant Plantation and Propaganda fide: Dury and the Civilizing Mission
The Lost Tribes literature was not only about Jews. Dury had introduced the theory in an appendix to Edward Winslow's The Glorious progress of the Gospel amongst the Indians in New England (1649). This was a promotional work composed of letters from New England missionaries intended to raise public support and funds for expanded evangelization efforts. Winslow was an experienced agent for the New England colonies who had sailed upon the Mayflower in 1620 and served three terms as Governor of the Plymouth colony. In 1649, he was lobbying Parliament to ratify an Act that would create a new corporation, the Society for Propagation of the Gospel in New England, charged with raising and distributing funds for evangelical activity.Footnote 61 Dury's appendix provided a short list of reasons to ascribe an Israelite ancestry to the American Indians. He concluded that the “sometimes poor, now precious Indians … may be as the first fruits of the glorious harvest, of Israels redemption.” Dury thus drew attention to the providential significance of preaching to the Lost Tribes of Israel just as many judicious divines expect that the time for Jewish conversion is at hand. “The palpable and present acts of providence,” he explained, “doe more then hint the approach of Jesus Christ.” The possibility that the American Indians were of Israelite descent gave reason “to hope that the work of Christ among them, may be as a preparatory to his own appearing.” The appendix concludes with an explicit appeal for financial support for the New England mission. “Come forth ye Masters of money,” he urged, and “part with your Gold to promote the Gospel … Christ will keep account thereof, and reward it.”Footnote 62
Dury's speculations about Israelite Indians added eschatological meaning and drama to a tract whose primary purpose was to seek financial and political support for the re-making of “barbarous” New England Indians through the spread of religion, literacy, clothing, “civility,” planting, and skilled trades. Dury acknowledged that his readers might not find the argument for Israelite ancestry persuasive. Nevertheless, he asked them to recognize at least that “the work of God among the Indians in America, is glorious” and to be admired by all good Christians. The missionary John Eliot, whose letters made up the bulk of The Glorious Progress, explained that evangelization was difficult in New England “not only in respect of the language, but also in respect of their barbarous course of life and poverty.” It was “absolutely necessary,” he insisted, “to carry on civility with religion.” Conversion should be accompanied by a project to clothe the Indians and to employ them in “planting Orchards and Gardens.” He outlined a plan to establish a new community, where he could teach them the Gospel together with “Letters, Trades, and Labours, as building, fishing, Flax and Hemp dressing, planting Orchards, &c.” But this project, he adds, was “too costly an enterprize” at the moment. This work aimed not only at evangelizing the Indians of New England but also sought to refashion their society and culture into something that would, from the English point of view, be recognizably civilized, industrious, and appropriate for life as Christians.Footnote 63
Dury had ties to colonization efforts in Ireland and the Scottish Isles that purported to instill religion together with civility among a “barbarous” people. His father, Robert Durie, had accompanied a group of 11 Scottish gentlemen adventurers from Fife on a mission to “plant policy and civilisation in the hitherto most barberous Isle of Lewis” in 1598.Footnote 64 As we have seen, Dury was closely associated with an Irish Protestant lobby in London that counted the “Wild Irish” among “the most barbarous nations of the earth.” English colonists since the late-sixteenth century had often deemed the Irish profession of Catholicism to be little more than a thin veneer covering their brutish customs. Conversion to Protestantism would not be possible, therefore, until they had been reformed and civilized.Footnote 65 Dury had suggested in 1645 that God might send the “Religious & conscienced” Independents to Ireland as “instruments to propagate the light of Truth to such as are in darknes.” In The Glorious Progress, he similarly argued that divine providence has sent the great migration of “godly persons” to New England to spread the Gospel to the “poor Heathens” who live in darkness as “Captives to Satan.”Footnote 66
Whereas Winslow's A Glorious Progress (1649) calls to evangelize and civilize the indigenous peoples of New England, Thorowgood's Iewes in America (1650) explains that Spanish Catholics have taught the American Indians to hate the name of Christianity. Thorowgood condemns the lust, covetousness, and “horrid cruelties” of the Spaniards, citing the histories of Girolamo Benzoni and Bartolomé de las Casas. “The Spanish instruction then,” Thorowgood asserted, “it is evident, was the Natives destruction, and not so much a plantation as a supplantation, not a consciencious teaching, but a Lion-like rather devouring of soules.”Footnote 67 Read together, these two tracts present much more than just a Jewish Indian theory: they provide a broad and generalized picture of American Indians in desperate need of English Protestant help. This is a need both material and spiritual, specifically defined against the alleged ill effects of Spanish colonialism. These poor souls need to be taught civility rather than cruelty; they need to be taught religion rather than idolatry.
The picture becomes clearer still when these tracts are read together with Dury's A Seasonable Discourse (1649), his most expansive statement urging the study of “the Orientall tongues, and Jewish Mysteries.” This tract, which is rooted in a series of recommendations for the reform of English schooling and pedagogy, proposes far more than what Richard Popkin has called a College for Jewish Studies. It provides a rough sketch for a Protestant counterpart to the Sacra Congregatio de Propaganda Fide in Rome. Dury envisions London as a center for training missionaries and directing Protestant evangelization throughout the world. “The diligence and zeale of the Romish Condare in their Colledge de Propaganda Fidem,” he writes, “should stirre us up to emulation, to doe our dutie in a better cause.” While the Roman institution, Dury explains, exists to undermine the Protestant churches and “propagate their own Superstition,” Dury's college “will aime onely at the propagation and confirmation of things Necessarie”, upholding the fundamentals of Christianity and “advanc[ing] unto all, the meanes of Pietie and Learning which are concealed.”Footnote 68 Dury would repeat this suggestion in a 1655 letter to J. J. Ulrich, head of the Zurich church, calling for the establishment of a seminary to train Protestant missionaries “for the propagation of the truth” among those living in idolatry and under papal domination. As early as 1641, Dury had criticized Protestants for standing idly by, doing nothing to propagate the true faith, while “Papists fast & pray, and erect societies, and spend great revenues to breed and send forth Emissaries, to undermine the truth, and propagate their superstitions and idolatries.”Footnote 69
Dury's call for increased missionizing was thus propelled by anxiety over Protestant stagnation as the Catholic Church pursued an aggressive program of evangelical expansion. Moreover, the pro-evangelization, anti-Spanish, and anti-Catholic thrust of the literature concerned with the Lost Tribes and the Jews in 1649–1650 was consistent with Dury's continuing efforts, since 1645, on behalf of the French Protestants, Hugh L'Amy and Peter Le Pruvost, who sought to establish and fortify a new plantation in the West Indies. In August 1649, Dury tried to persuade Le Pruvost to return to England, where recent events had released political affairs from the interest of “a debauched and tyrannical nobility.” If God granted the English Commonwealth a swift conquest of Ireland, Dury explained, then there would be many in government with the spirit and resolve to put Le Pruvost's colonization proposals into action. “Mister Hartlib & I,” he wrote, “are always on guard and watching for propitious opportunities, if the bounty of God is willing to offer them to us.” Le Pruvost was unconvinced; he harbored too many doubts about the stability of England's new regime, and had come to see France, despite its Catholicism, as a more capable champion against Spain and the papacy.Footnote 70 But Dury's continuing desire to see the new English Commonwealth support the French would-be colonists reflected his hope, as in the case of Irelands naturall history, that new plantation efforts might represent a collaborative godly project. English and French Protestants would come together and make a united strike against Spanish Catholicism. The struggle against the Counter-Reformation encompassed not only Europe but the New World as well, where an anti-Catholic foreign policy could intersect with propagating the Gospel among those living in darkness.
Although the Huguenot colony never came to pass, the desire for a muscular Protestant foreign policy did become reality in 1654, as Oliver Cromwell launched his Western Design against Spanish colonial possessions in the West Indies. This campaign was ideologically connected to the war against popery and cruelty in Ireland and to the call for the salvation of the “poor” and “barbarous” Indians of New England. The eventual goal of this ambitious expedition was to be nothing less than the total removal of Spanish power from the Western Hemisphere. Propagandists in London compared Spanish atrocities in America to those committed against English Protestants by Irish Catholics in 1641. They proclaimed the English as saviors of the West Indians and slaves suffering under Spanish cruelty.Footnote 71 One of Cromwell's five appointed commissioners for this expedition was Edward Winslow, the same New England agent who had compiled The Glorious progress of the Gospel amongst the Indians in New England. Winslow argued that the expedition to the Spanish West Indies was an instrument in God's right hand “to execute his determined vengeance upon that tyrannous and idolatrous and bloudy nation that hath inflicted so many cruelties upon the nations of the earth.” Another commissioner, General Robert Venables, had distinguished himself under Cromwell's command against the rebels in Ulster, serving for a time as governor of Londonderry and receiving vast estates in Ireland as reward for his military success.Footnote 72
By the mid-1650s, however, Dury had turned his attention back to continental Europe. Cromwell had sent him to Switzerland, Germany, and the Netherlands on a mission to unite European Protestantism under English leadership. The establishment of the Protectorate had inaugurated a new era in English foreign policy, and Cromwell was eager to cultivate the image of himself as a champion of international Protestantism. Dury's letters from Switzerland provided valuable intelligence for Secretary John Thurloe and included reports of the Duke of Savoy's massacres of Waldensians in Piedmont in 1655. Cromwell responded with fund-raising, an offer of refuge, and political pressure that ultimately persuaded Mazarin's France to intervene in Piedmont.Footnote 73
Like Gustavus Adolphus two decades earlier, Cromwell appeared to Dury as a divinely ordained champion for the Protestant cause. It is not surprising to find Dury, after acclaiming Cromwell as an instrument of God's providence for his conquest of Ireland, declaring that the hand of God could be seen in Cromwell's dissolution of the Rump Parliament in April 1653.Footnote 74 But, unlike the Swedish king, Cromwell's godly assault on Habsburg Catholicism was transatlantic in scope and accompanied by overtures to Portuguese Jews. So too was Dury's own evolving and expanding understanding of the Protestant cause by 1650. The protracted conflicts of the Thirty Years’ War may have finally come to an end, but the experience of the 1640s had only broadened Dury's project of unifying the godly against Roman Catholicism. Cromwell's willingness in the mid-1650s to intervene on behalf of persecuted Protestants in Piedmont, to assume an aggressive posture against Spanish power and cruelty in both Europe and the New World, and to convene a conference at Whitehall to debate the toleration of Jews in England—each of these actions resonated strongly with Dury's worldview. But Dury could only play his own part. His clerical vocation, his unique abilities, and his long-standing mission made him best suited to resume his work of theological diplomacy in Protestant Europe, as he did with the support of Cromwell under the Protectorate.
It is easy to be drawn into Dury's irenic language, which repeatedly repudiates conquest, material profit, and glory as worldly aims unworthy of a truly “spiritual” Christianity. A central purpose of this article has been to draw attention to the dangers of doing so. It must be stressed that Dury's efforts in pursuit of Protestant unity, since 1628, had been founded upon the anxiety that an expanding Roman Catholic Church was threatening to overcome the Protestant challenge and to expand its reach across the Old World and the New. In Dury, we are presented with a revealing ideological connection between the Thirty Years’ War and the English Revolution and between the Protestant cause in Europe and English imperial expansion. Dury's interests in Irish land, Jewish knowledge, and American Indian souls were inseparable from his desire to unite the godly in the struggle against Counter-Reformation Catholicism and especially the Habsburg monarchies of Austria and Spain. The distinctly Protestant irenicism and philo-semitism that Dury championed were “spiritual” aspects of a militant and colonialist program that called for the sword and the spirit to work side by side in the name of true reformation.
