USA > Maryland > Maryland, two hundred years ago, a discourse > Part 4
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Their remonstrance and the fear of committing a mortal sin or incurring excommunication, prevailed. The features in the conditions, which to the pious fathers appeared so excep- tionable, were for the present softened down. But Lord Bal- timore was determined to have his proprietary rights acknow- ledged by every inhabitant 'of the colony, and to keep the The Jesuits - > civil, paramount to the ecclesiastical power. were soon after (Oct. 16-42) desirous of sending two addi- tional laborers to strengthen their mission in Maryland ; but Lord Baltimore positively refused his assent, unless, before assuming their functions, they would subscribe to conditions proposed by him. His nearest relatives interceded, but in vain; and the fathers were finally obliged to yield the point. The preamble was strongly and significantly expressed. "Considering the dependence of the government of Mary- land on the state of England, unto which it must, (as near as may be,) be conformable, no ecclesiastic whatever in the province ought to expect, nor is Lord Baltimore nor any of his officers, (although they are Roman Catholics,) obliged in conscience to allow to said ecclesiastics any more or other privileges, exemptions or immunities for their persons, lands, or goods, than is allowed by his Majesty or his officers to like
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persons in England." This was followed by clauses in which the obligation of the clergy not to take lands from the Indians was acknowledged, as also their liability, like other persons, to legal procedures, for the doing of right or for maintaining the prerogatives of the Proprietary; and all this, without entail- ing upon the authorities the imputation of sin, or the censure of the papal Bullo ccna for so doing. The two priests sailed for Maryland; but those of the colony adhered to their former opinion, and even brought the new comers over to the same view; so that the adoption of the line of policy, in this par- ticular, so anxiously desired by his Lordship, was delayed 40 for several years.ª
The disposition on the part of the colonists to accept lands from the Indians, as the missionaries had done, or to occupy tracts without a formal grant from his lordship, seems to have greatly troubled him and his brother at this period; and, with other causes of distrust and embarrassment, led Leon- ard Calvert to seek the personal advice of his brother in
By the Bulla in cana Domini, the Pope asserts full supremacy over all powers and persons, temporal and ecclesiastical. It forbids all persons what- soever, directly or indirectly, to violate, depress, or restrain the ecclesiastical + liberties or rights of the apostolic see and church of Rome, howsoever and whensoever obtained or to be obtained, under pain of excommunication ; and all who presume to oppose any of its provisions, are left under the displeasure , of Almighty God.
Lord Baltimore's requirements were in violation of articles in the Bull, one of which forbade the subjection of ecclesiastical persons to the secular tribu- nals ; and he must have either had a special exemption, or have been one of those, who doubted the power of the Pope to interfere with the administra- tion of civil law in remote nations. The Parliament of Paris did not hesitate to deny the binding force of this Bull upon France ; and I believe many of the Roman Catholics of England, did not consider it fully binding upon them.
The authors of a tract entitled " Virginia and Maryland," published in 1655, in answer to one by Lord Baltimore, (probably the agents of Virginia in Eng- land) say, Lord Baltimore " first made Maryland a receptacle for Papists, Priests and Jesuits, in some extraordinary and zealous manner ; but huth since discontented them many times and many ways ; though intelligence with Letters, Bulls, Sc. from the Pope and Rome be ordinary for his own interests." Perhaps they referred to the controversy with the priests, which has been detailed.
2 Reports from the Jesuit Fathers; Correspondence of Mrs. Anne Peaseley, (sister of Lord Baltimore,) Articles of Agreement, and other documents ;- for the opportunity of inspecting which, I am indebted to B. U. Campbell, Esq.
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England, (April 1643.) The result of their conference, was a determination on the part of the Proprietary to visit the colony in person early the following year ; a resolution which, however, he was unable to carry into effect. After a stay of nearly a year in England, Leonard Calvert returned, bringing with him, as an evidence of his own loyalty and a proof of the confidence of his sovereign, authority to treat with the Assembly of Virginia, for the passage of an aet for levying customs in that colony, for the use of the king; of which revenues, Cecilius, by a special contract, (April 1644,) was to be Collector or Receiver.
He found, on his return, the affairs of the colony in great confusion. Richard Ingle,' a captain of a ship engaged in trade with the colony, had, not long before his arrival, been proclaimed by the authorities a traitor to his majesty, his vessel seized, and an attempt made, though unsuccessful, to accomplish his arrest ;- the surrounding Indians had become hostile ;- the principal officers of the government were at variance ;- and a portion of the people factious, especially on Kent; the inhabitants of which shewed a leaning towards their old leader, Claiborne, who also manifested a disposition to revive his claim to that island. Governor Calvert brought with him a new commission of government, and new condi- tions of plantation ; in which was inserted a clause, requiring from all who should henceforward take up lands, an oath of fidelity to the Proprietary, recognizing his " absolute rights" - and " royal jurisdiction," instead of the oath of allegiance to the king, formerly exacted. This was, in substance, the oath which had been opposed by the missionaries, and the enforce- ment of which, in after times, was made the plea for resist- ance to the authorities, and the ground of a controversy, that finally ripened into civil war.
Early in February, 1645, the Governor called an Assembly; but hardly had the session been opened, when St. Mary's
1 " The last ship that goes now thither, under the command of Ingle the master, will be ready to sail from Gravesend about a fortnight or three weeks hence." Letter from W'm. Peuseley, Oct. 7th, 1642.
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was surprised by a force under Capt. Ingle, acting probably under a commission from Parliament ; and, before the people could recover from their panic, the members had dispersed, Calvert was a fugitive in Virginia, and the province in the hands of Ingle and his adherents. The invaders appear to have made a severe use of their success. The friends of Lord Baltimore were subjected to exactions, and some of them driven from the province ; the Jesuit fathers were seized « and sent to England for trial ; and an oath of submission was tendered, which may have been taken by the Protestants, but which only a single Catholic was even suspected of hav- · ing subscribed, and he was afterwards vindicated by the Assembly from the suspicion.
The odium of these and other excesses has long rested on Claiborne, whose name it is common to associate with that of Ingle in this invasion. But Claiborne can be shewn to have been in his place in the Virginia legislature when Ingle made his demonstration on St. Mary's; and, during the time of the occupancy of Maryland by the invaders, to have been a regular attendant on the courts of that colony, where his official duties as Treasurer, required him to be present. . That he re-asserted his claim to Kent island, during this period, is true,' but this, I believe, was the extent of his connection with a movement, the credit or the odium of which properly belongs to Ingle alone. 2
A fugitive in Virginia,-Leonard Calvert endeavored to
1 In " Plantagenet's New .Albion," a pamphlet published in 1648, giving an account of the author's wanderings, about the year 1645, in search of a conve- nient place for settlement, I find the following passage, which shows the reli- gious character of the movement in Maryland and the extent of Claiborne's interference : " I went to Chicacoen, avoiding Maryland, for then it was in war both with the Susquehannacks, and all the Eastern Bay Indians, and a civill war between some revolters, Protestants, assisted by fifty plundered Virgin- ians, by whom MI. Leonard Calvert, was taken prisoner and expelled; and the Isle of Kent taken from him also by Captain Clayborn of Virginia."
? A tradition is still current in the Claiborne family, that their progenitor once headed an expedition, during which he took Governor Calvert prisoner, carried him to Kent, gave him a severe flogging, and expelled him from the island. The story probably had its origin in the events of this period.
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interest the Governor and Council in his behalf; but suc- ceeded only so far as to induce them to express the opinion that Captain Claiborne should " for the present surcease to intermeddle with the government of the isle of Kent," and to propose a reference of the differences between him and the people of Maryland to their arbitration. At the same time, (Ang. 9th, 1645,) they informed him, that " in respect of their daily opposition by the Indians, they could send him no help."' The Governor, seeing that what he had in view must be accomplished by his own efforts and resources, addressed himself to the work ; and by the close of the year 1646, was at the head of a considerable force, with which he made a descent upon St. Mary's, and again became master of the province. With this service, closed a life, the best years of which had been faithfully devoted to upholding the proprietary interests of his brother and laying the foundations of his colony. He died on the 9th of June, 1617. 1. 5459
Thomas Greene, a member of the Council, became his suc- ( ... cessor ; a man of activity and zeal, but unfortunately wanting in principle, and unsustained by the confidence and respect of the colonists. Notwithstanding his energy, had it not been for, the spirit and tact of a lady, the province would have been a second time revolutionized. The soldiers, whom Governor Calvert had kept in arms since his return, and for whose payment he had pledged his own estate and that of his brother, were on the point of mutiny for want of pay; when Miss, or in the phrase of that period, Mrs. Margaret Brent, as the administrairix of Leonard Calvert's estate and attorney for his Lordship, made use of the only currency at her command,-paid off the exasperated soldiery in cows, heifers, and calves, of the Proprietary's private stock, and saved the province. For her use of his cattle, Lord Balti-
1 Virginia Records.
? The name of this lady deserves also to be remembered, in these days of reform, as one who, not only proved herself equal to the most complicated legal transactions and the most trying emergencies of state, but if accounts are true, led the way in Maryland, in the assertion of the unrestricted rights of her - sex. While the members of the Assembly were earnestly occupied with mea-
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more also repaid her with reproaches, and even carried his complaints to the Assembly ; which, after some sharp corres- pondence, voted him an indemnity. This amusing passage between the Proprietary and the Assembly, may remind the classical student of the controversy in the Homeric Hymn to Mercury ; in which the roguish hero, charged by Apollo with being concerned in the abstraction of his oxen, asks with all the energy of injured innocence,
" Apollo ! why this harsh complaint of thine ? Why com'st thou here to seek thy missing kine ?"
The termination of the two controversies was somewhat similar, only in point of liberal atonement in favor of the Maryland Assembly ; for, while Mercury, after much hard swearing, was at last induced to restore the stolen cattle, and, as some amends for his mischief, presented Apollo with , the lyre, just invented by him, the Assembly agreed to replace his Lordship's "missing kine," with "sixteen cows and a bull," which they gravely assure him is more, by a third, than has ever been found of his known stock in the colony, since its recovery.
It would aid us in unwinding the tangled thread of our colonial history, could we precisely fix the position and poli- tical affinities of Lord Baltimore at this period. That he > was, as late as April, 1644, an adherent of the king, we have scen ; but, of his course for several subsequent years, we know but little. England was at this time in great commo- tion. Charles was under constraint on the isle of Wight ;
sures for preserving their own rights as freemen, they were startled by a demand openly preferred by Miss Brent, that shewed her greatly in advance of the times, in her appreciation of the rights of women, and involved preten- sions, which, though strange to the legislators of that day, are by no means unfamiliar to the ears of those of the present. This was no less than a claim › to be allowed one vote in the House for herself, and one as his Lordship's attorney ;- but the Governor ungallantly refused to put the question, and the injured lady, as her only means of retaliation, protested in form against the acts of that session, as invalid, unless her vote were received and recorded, as well as those of the male members.
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the Independents and the Presbyterians were struggling for the mastery ; the former were charged with meditating the destruction of the king; the latter were willing and anxious to have a sovereign, provided only he would adopt their say- ing faith. Hence, arose a general movement in favor of Charles ;-- royalist insurrections in Kent, Wales, and other parts of the kingdom ; the revolt of a portion of the fleet ; and an invasion from the Scotch, who marched, breathing complaints against the Independents for their "impious act of toleration," and swearing not to allow the introduction of Episcopacy into their kirk, yet claiming to vindicate the rights and protect the sacred person of the king.
Cromwell, now the main reliance of the Independents, .. marches westward with a strong force, extinguishes in blood torch after torch of insurrection, sweeps rapidly by Bath, and throws all the weight of his iron ranks upon the hapless rebels of Wales. Fairfax dashes upon the centres of insur- rection in the east, and drives the insurgents in hopeless rout before him. In the north, affairs as yet look favorable for the king.
In the city of Bath, in the midst of this din of war, we now find the Proprietary of Maryland, his attention fixed upon his little empire across the sea, which he is anxiously endeavoring, at the same time to strengthen and hold in sub- jection. His position and his prospeets are, in several particulars, similar to those of his ill-fated sovereign.
Charles contended for his royal prerogatives, the English Parliament and people for their ancient privileges and liber- ties ;- Lord Baltimore, in effect a king, strove to maintain his rights against an Assembly and a people, sturdy offshoots from the old English stock, who, in changing their domicile, had not lost their taste for the " strong meat of Saxon free- dom" that the mother country had given them to eat ;- and, retaining the national jealousy of attempts on their rights as freemen, kept close watch on the movements of Proprietary and Governors, and, often unjustly suspicious of both, expressed their discontent in most audible remonstrances, or by actual rebellion. The king struggled to recover a power 6
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which had been wolently torn from him by fanatical secta- rians ;-- the Proprietary had seen his authority overthrown, his rights demed, his representative driven from the province > by adherents of the same rebellious party. The king, an Episcopalian, negotiated with the Catholics of Ireland for a force to assist him in recovering his throne, and, to obtain pecuniary aid, even offered to piedge his kingdoms as secu- rity ;- the Catholic brother of Lord Baltimore, a fugitive in
- Virginia, gathered forces from among the Episcopalians of 35 that colony, for whose payment he pledged his own estate and his brother's province; but, more fortunate than his sovereign, by their aid regained his place, and restored the province to its rightful proprietor.
Between the policy of Charles and that of Lord Baltimore in regard to religion, no parallel can be drawn. Charles attempted, by rasl: and tyrannical measures, to proscribe dis- · senters and compel conformity to the established church, an effort which was one of the principal causes of his over- throw ;- Lord Baltimore, a member of a proscribed and dis- franchised sect, had not the power, even had he felt the inclination, to make Catholicism the exclusive religion of his colony, or to shut out from it the followers of Protestantism. Governor Berkeley, the zealous Church of England man, could do that in Virginia, which might have cost the Catho- lic Proprietary his province; and, from the beginning, his good sense taught him, that, to save those of his own creed from oppression, even in Maryland, his true policy was, not to open the religious question ; not to force the right of Roman Catholics to liberty of conscience upon public notice, but quietly to adopt such regulations in the province, as would keep down all religious discussions, and leave every
! Much stress has been laid by some writers on the case of William Lewis, a Catholic, who, in July, 1638, was charged by certain Protestant servants in the colony, with interrupting them while reading passages from Smith's Ser- 55 mons, in which the Pope was called Antichrist, and the Jesuits antichristian ministers, &c., and forbidding them to read the book, the author of which, he asserted, was himself an instrument of the devil. For this offence, as a trans- gression of a proclamation " made for the suppression of all further disputes
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man to the enjoyment of his own opinions, provided he die not interfere with those of others.
The religious question, which became so marked an ele- ment in the struggle in England, and in fact, the turning point in the later negotiations between Parliament and the king, did not, for some time, become prominent in Maryland. With the existing arrangements on this subject, all parties appeared satisfied ; and the Protestants, who, for fifteen years . were with few exceptions Episcopalians, though occasionally carried away by excitement or the intrigues of interested per- sons to resist the government, were, up to the year 1650, faithful supporters of his Proprietary claims ;- some of the most unreserved recognitions of his rights having been made when they commanded a majority in the Assembly.
A close survey of the tendency of political affairs and the state of religious feeling in England and in his province, now determined the Proprietary to change his colonial policy, and to transfer the government of Maryland from the hands of the Catholics, who had held it since the first settlement, to those
tending to the opening of a faction in religion," Lewis was promptly fined. The sentence is appealed to, as an evidence that toleration was the established law of the colony ; but to my apprehension, a proclamation to suppress all religious discussions, avowedly to preserve the public peace, is one thing ;- the recognition by law or otherwise of the inalienable right of men to think for themselves on religious subjects, quite another.
If the enforcement of Gov. Calvert's proclamation proves tolerance, it will be easy to show that the Massachusetts authorities were tolerant in the same way and on the same principle. Hubbard, an old writer, says, "it was on that account (the di-turbance of the eivil peace, ) that men suffered (in New England,) under authority, and not for their opinions ;- for if men that have drunk in any erroneous principles, would also make use of so much prudence as not to publish them in a tumultuous manner, and to the reproach of the worship established in the place where they live, they would not have occasion to complain of the severity of the civil laws."
The Sermons mentioned above, were by Henry Smith. a divine of the . Church of England, but of the Puritanic party, and " by them esteemed the prime preacher of the nation." The volume, "containing necessary and profitable doctrine, as well for the reformation of our lives as for the comfort of troubled consciences in distress," was published in 1592. The only copy , I have ever seen, is in the valuable library of Bishop Whittingham, of this city.
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of Protestants. Accordingly, in the summer of 1648, (June 3 /. 3 . 20th,) he set his seal to new conditions of plantation, in which he inserted the restrictive clause concerning religious frater- nities, that the fathers had successfully opposed, six years 32 before. These were followed by a commission (Aug. 1618) appointing to the government of Maryland, Capt. William sy Stone, a Protestant and a gentleman of standing, who had for some years been High Sheriff of Southampton county in Virginia, and who had recently contracted to introduce five hundred settlers, of English or Irish descent, into the pro- vince.' The commission to Governor Stone and the accom- panying papers are remarkable, as indicating the first steps of Lord Baltimore in a system of politic deference to the pre- - vailing religious and political opinions of the times, an entire re-modeling of the laws, and a legislative recognition of the principles of toleration previously practised in the colony, and
' The only item I have been able to obtain, relative to this gentleman's per- sonal history, is so amusingly illustrative of the customs of that period, that I must be excused for introducing it. It appears that Capt. Stone, in connection with John Rosyer, had charge of the funeral of one William Burdett. Among the bills of expenses, was one brought by Dr. Richard Hall for wine drank dur- ing the ceremonies, to the value of 4320 pounds of tobacco, sent for and re- ceived by the managers. Payment having been declined, a suit was brought against the Sheriff and his friend ; but, says the record, " no proof appearing against Capt. Stone, but it appearing that the wine was sent for by Rosyer," the former was exempted and the latter sentenced to pay the bill in full.
Either wine was dear in Virginia at that time, or those who attended made a merry funeral of it. If the physician who supplied the wine attended the pa- tient also, and charged as largely for his prescriptions as for his refreshments, his bill may also have been subjected to legal scrutiny. The extortion of med- ical practitioners, had before that time become so oppressive in the province, that the Assembly had felt itself obliged to pass a law, compelling every physi- cian to swear, if required, to the cost of the drugs charged in his bill, and to submit to such reduction as the Court might prescribe. Nor were the medical faculty alone in bad odor; for, at the same period, attorneys were by law pro- hibited from practising in the province, on account of the litigious spirit their presence and profession were believed to engender ; while a standing enactment forbade clergyinen to " give themselves to excesse in drinkynge or riott, or to spend their time idly by day or night, playing at dice, cards, or any other un- lawful game." If on these laws is to be based our estimate of the learned pro- fessions in Virginia at that period, the inhabitants of our sister state have reason to congratulate themselves on the wonderful change which two centuries have wrought in their practices and position.
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then upheld by the Independents alone in England, but not even by them extended to the Roman Catholics.
The honor of originating this measure has long been the subject of controversy, and claimed alike by Catholics and Protestants ; by the former, on the ground that the instructions and laws which embodied that divine principle emanated from Lord Baltimore ;- by the latter, because the laws were enac- ted by a Protestant Assembly, over whom and whose constitu- ents they were to be enforced. ' My investigations into the origin of these laws, have convinced me that they originated primarily neither with Lord Baltimore nor the Assembly ; that their provisions sprang from no congenial principles at that day active in either the Catholic or Protestant divisions of the church ; that they were drawn up in deference to the progres- sive doctrines and increasing political strength of the Inde- pendents in England, as well as to meet the wants of the mixed population of the province ; and their adoption was an act prompted far less by feelings of religious benevolence than by civil necessity. If this view be correct, neither Catholics nor Protestants, as sects, at the present day, have any espe- cial ground for self-laudation on the subject, nor any reason for attempting to make capital, in opposition to each other, out of what was done by their predecessors in Maryland, two hundred years ago.
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