Antichrist in the Indies: Anti-Catholic Discourse and English Responses to Roman Catholic Missions in the Americas and East Asia, c. 1558-1660

Abstract

This thesis examines late sixteenth and early to mid-seventeenth-century English Protestant responses to Roman Catholic missions in Spanish America, Japan, and (to a lesser extent) other “heathen countries.” It focuses on how anti-Catholicism infused and shaped authors’ writings and their interactions with the missionaries. Particular attention is given to how writers characterised the missionaries, and their views on the efficacy of the missions. The thesis argues that while responses to the missions frequently followed stock anti-Catholic arguments and denunciations, they could vary considerably and were not always entirely critical. It demonstrates how individual Protestant’s loyalties, beliefs, objectives and circumstances shaped how they represented and interacted with the missions. This analysis of anti-Catholic rhetoric is conducted through case studies of five Protestant authors and travellers. It compares and contrasts their accounts of and interactions with the missions, and considers them within the wider anti-Catholic discourse identified in the scholarship. The first chapter focuses on three Church of England divines, George Abbot, Samuel Purchas, and Peter Heylyn, whose cosmographical and controversial texts contained some of the most prominent second-hand discussions of the missions written by English Protestants. The chapter establishes the common arguments made about the missions and reveals how the differing doctrinal perspectives of the three divines shaped their responses. The second chapter discusses Thomas Gage, a Dominican friar who served with the mission in New Spain in the 1630s before converting to Protestantism. It analyses how his personal circumstances and multiple loyalties rendered his seemingly conventional anti-Catholic account of the missions ambiguous. The final chapter discusses the East India Company merchant Richard Cocks, who witnessed the suppression of the Catholic mission in Japan in the early seventeenth century. It reveals clearly how the changing political and economic environment in which he lived and conducted the Company’s business dramatically coloured his response to the missions. The scholarship on English anti-Catholicism has largely neglected early modern Protestant attitudes to Rome’s expansive global missionary efforts. My thesis therefore seeks to address this gap in the literature and deepen our understanding of anti-Catholicism through its comparative analysis which combines differing clerical views with those of a converted former missionary in Spanish America and the secular perspective of a merchant in Japan. Anti-Catholicism provided Protestants with a rich stock of tropes to draw upon in their texts and interactions with Catholics. My thesis contends that the ones they selected and how they deployed them were subject to a writer’s individual outlook, experience, and circumstance.