From Perfidious Papist to Prosperous Planter: Religion, Race, and the Remaking of Cornelius Bryan in the Early Modern English Caribbean

On 15 January 1656, the Barbados Assembly sentenced Irishman Cornelius Bryan to twenty-one lashes for colorfully suggesting that eating English flesh was a prospect that might give him much joy. Bryan was ordered to leave the island within one month; failure to do so would see him tried as a mutineer. Bryan seems to be a prime example of the rebellious Irish Catholic, viewed by English authorities as untrustworthy and inferior because of his Catholicism and supposed savage behavior. His early life reflects the experiences of most Irish in the Caribbean who had been forced out of Ireland by Cromwell’s policy of transportation at mid-century. But when Bryan died, in 1683, he did so on Barbados as a landowning, slaveowning father of six who bore little resemblance to his younger, more rebellious, self. This paper explores the circumstances under which Bryan, torn from his home, and placed in a hostile environment in the 1650s, managed to become part of the planter elite on Barbados thirty years later.

Piecing together the life of someone so marginalized in the records is difficult. We glimpse Bryan’s world through his appearances in front of the Barbados Assembly, and later through deeds and wills that trace his progression from servant to planter. Careful reading of the record allows us to see Bryan as an agent in his own rise. I argue that it was Bryan’s specific embrace of English social and racial norms, and his minimizing of his Catholic faith, that distinguished him from Irish Catholics who appear in colonial records as untrustworthy, perfidious papists. Bryan’s remaking of himself demonstrates how marginalized colonial subjects found ways to survive, and even thrive, despite the upheaval of their dislocation, or the unfamiliarity of the world in which they now found themselves.