USA > Maryland > Studies in the civil, social and ecclesiastical history of early Maryland; lectures delivered to the young men of the Agricultural College of Maryland > Part 8
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But instead, whether on the one side against the Roman Catholics, or on the other against the Anabaptists, whom all men then spoke against, his word was one of peace.
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Let them alone, was at one time his command when an attempt had been made upon the Roman Catholic. "We declare to you," he said in 1578, "that you have no right to trouble yourselves with any man's conscience, so long as nothing is done to cause private or public scandal. We therefore expressly ordain that you desist from molesting these Baptists." As early as 1576, the States General, through his influence, granted not merely freedom of con- science, but freedom of worship to all denominations, a privilege and a right that meant all that it claimed to be. Here, therefore, if any man is to be glorified, is the one. Rising supremely over all circumstances, early education, the sense of great personal and national outrage, and all the prejudices and accepted rules of his own day, he declared and illustrated the great principle with all clear- ness and fulness. At the same time he was bold, fearless, chivalrous, and distinguished among the great soldiers of the day. Religious freedom at his hand meant that he had grasped definitely the cardinal principle of human freedom. His conversion also testifies the man; for it was the surrender of great opportunities, for exposure, danger, and at last assassination; for, as is well known, a price was set upon his head, and he fell by the assassin's hand in 1584.
Let us now look at the circumstances under which the law in Maryland was passed. And first of all we must remember what we have seen, that the years preceding 1649 were years of trouble and confusion in the province. Lord Baltimore's government had been entirely over- thrown, and his brother, the governor, driven to Virginia, where he had been compelled to remain about two years. The condition of things had become so desperate that
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Lord Baltimore felt that further effort to preserve his colony was useless, or that it was not worth the struggle that had to be bestowed upon it. His brother, however, who knew all the circumstances, thought differently, and made, as we have seen, a successful attempt to recover it.
But what was at the bottom of this difficulty, and why were Claiborne and Ingle able so easily to overturn the government and retain so long possession of the pro- vince? It was, doubtless, because they reached some point in the people's minds in which they were antagon- istic to the ruling powers, and that point was in the matter of religion. Even of the first company that came over in the Ark and the Dove, the pronounced majority was of the Protestant faith. Even among the "gentleman adven- turers" there were some of this faith, as is indicated by the "Instructions " sent out with the colony; for by these Lord Baltimore provided for the sending of deputies to the Governor of Virginia as well as to Claiborne, to placate them, and he also provided that such deputies should be of the Church of England. As none but a "gentleman" was fitted for that office, there must have been some of the Protestant faith even among the chosen few. Thomas Cornwaleys, the most influential and capable man of the province, has been said by some to have been a Protestant, and certainly he was of good Church of England stock, and his descendants were of that faith. But of himself not enough is known to lift the question out of the realm of doubt.
We are not, however, left in doubt as to the religious views of the first colonists. The majority of them from the start were not of his lordship's faith, as we learn from the Jesuit fathers themselves, who commanded all
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the information; for the provincial of the order in Eng- land, writing to Rome in 1642, declared that the affair was surrounded with many and great difficulties, for in leading the colony to Maryland by far the greater part were heretics. Father White, it is true, wrote, soon after coming into the colony, that they had been able to make various converts; but in 1641 he again wrote that "three parts of the people in four at least are heretics." It is in the same communication quoted above, from the Eng- lish provincial to Rome, that we find Secretary Lewger is said to have summoned a parliament " composed, with few exceptions, of heretics." This was probably the Assembly of 1640, as he is referring to the troubles Lord Baltimore was having with the Jesuit fathers. As the Secretary was compelled to summon all the freemen, it indicates that the Protestants greatly preponderated.
And as it was then, so it continued all the way along. The ratio in favor of the Protestant majority always con- tinued increasing. This abundance of evidence shows. In 1676 Charles, the third Lord Baltimore, who had just returned from Maryland, declared that the nonconformists outnumbered the Churchmen and Roman Catholics three to one, and that the Churchmen were more numerous than the Roman Catholics. This would make the num- ber of these last relatively very small, a tenth or twelfth of the whole body of the people, a ratio that was declared to be true a few years after this time. It is a notable thing that the Roman Catholics, for whose relief the colony has been said by some to have been created, and who had, under the charter, the liberty of leaving Eng- land for the colony, do not seem to have come. They were denied the privileges of citizenship at home, the
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full exercise of their mode of worship was a felony, they were suspected, they had every inducement held out to make the province of Maryland a retreat and to enjoy all the blessings of liberty, but they did not come. The few that did, were soon lost in the preponderating num- bers of another faith. An inexact manifestation of the two great classes, Protestant and Roman Catholic, is given by a return made under a levy of 1667; for while the Roman Catholic counties, St. Mary's and Charles, where, however, there were many Protestants, returned together one hundred and twenty-one men, the other counties of the province, where the inhabitants were almost exclusively Protestants, gave two hundred and eighty-eight. In fact, almost the whole Roman Catholic immigration was in the beginning of the colony, and their settlements were confined to the region first occupied.
And Lord Baltimore recognized this state of things. Whether he was chagrined or not at the fewness of those coming over, we do not know. It was anticipated, evi- dently, from the Jesuit papers, that a Roman Catholic settlement was to be made, and provision was made for inevitable objections that would be raised, about their sympathy with the Spaniards, about the danger to the Puritan colonies in the North and to the Church of Eng- land colony in the South, from the contiguity of their Roman Catholic settlement. Also the bringing out of Jesuit fathers only, while so many of the people were Protestants, helps to show the animus. But the Roman Catholics, oppressed and disfranchised in England, did not come. Why, it would be hard to say. The colony became Protestant from the start, with a Roman Catholic
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over-lord and a Roman Catholic governor and council. This taking of the officers of the colony from among a small minority of the citizens, was a piece of bad policy on the part of the proprietary.
But in 1648 Lord Baltimore recognized the true state .of things and changed his policy. He took the local administration out of the hands of the Roman Catholics and put it in the hands of Protestants, choosing as the governor and the majority of the council persons of that faith. He did not do this because he loved to do it, for he had been pursuing the contrary policy for fourteen years, in spite of the murmurs and contentions that it had excited, the government having been restored on its old basis after its re-establishment in 1646. He did it because, evidently, it was now a necessity. Even his faithful and liberal-minded secretary, Lewger, who had acted such good part for him in the difficulties he had had with the Jesuit fathers, and who was a man after his own heart, was displaced, and his, along with other offices, turned over to the heretics. He was wise in so doing, and he was consistent, on the ground that his purpose had been to establish an English colony, not as a refuge for the Roman Catholics, but where religious freedom was to be observed and enjoyed by all. He had never asserted anything else, only he had been inconsistent in drawing a religious line in the matter of administration.
But now he changed all this, and Stone as governor, and Hatton as secretary, and Price as muster-general, and Vaughan as commander of Kent, were given com- missions. The oath which he required, gives us light upon his motive. He saw it was in the power, and it might be in the pleasure, of the Protestant majority to
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restrain and persecute the members of his church, for whom up to this time he had been able to secure immu- nity by the character of the men whom he had appointed in the province. But now he must create for them another defense, and while he would appoint men who had no religious sympathy for his own people, he would secure for them a sufficient protection.
That is the meaning of the oath which he exacted of the governor and council: "I do further swear that I will not by myself nor any person, directly nor indirectly, trouble, molest or discountenance any person whatsoever, in the said province, professing to believe in Jesus Christ, and in particular no Roman Catholic, for or in respect of his or her religion, nor his or her free exercise thereof, within the said province." Of the governor it was also required that in bestowing the offices of the colony no distinction should be made for religion's sake, and also that he would forbid any persecution for the sake of religion; and that if without his consent and privity any person professing to believe in Jesus Christ were perse- cuted merely for or in respect of his or her religion, that he would relieve and protect such person, and punish the offender.
This indicates a revolution, and it was not made with- out cause; it had become a great necessity. Lord Balti- more was not a very strict Roman Catholic as the Jesuit fathers counted strictness; that is, he would not have the spiritual fathers trespass in their spiritual claims upon his civil rights and prerogatives, but would confine papal rights, as was said by Lewger, in foro conscientic. At the same time he would do his utmost to preserve the peace of the colony, and to secure to the Roman Catholics,
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what up to this time he had been able, almost from the beginning, to command for them. Power to this end was slipping out of his hand, and he secured all that was possible for their relief and protection. This was in August, 1648, and during the winter that succeeded, the . . draft of the "Act Concerning Religion" was brought over, and was submitted to the Assembly the beginning of the following April.
It will be remembered also that at this time the royal cause was utterly prostrated in England, that the king who had bestowed the charter, with all its extensive franchises, upon Lord Baltimore, was now in the hands of his enemies, who were giving no uncertain indications that their purpose was the utter overthrow of the mon- archy. Besides, as regards the colony, a condition of . Governor Stone's appointment had been that he would bring into the province five hundred colonists; who did come, and whom Lord Baltimore doubtless expected to come, out of Virginia, a colony of Puritan noncon- formists, who both would increase the Protestant majority, and probably infuse into it a spirit of vindictiveness which seemed to belong to their form of faith, and which had been fostered by their treatment in Virginia.
These are the circumstances, therefore, that led up to the Act of 1649; and while the Act was good, and the principles embodied in it those which the world now delights to honor (only the world goes a good deal farther now than that act went), yet the circumstances do not justify the admirers of Lord Baltimore in offering him as a great and singular hero. He was a wise states- man, he was under definite prejudices, as every man will be, but he sought, and saw the best means of attaining,
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peace for his province. In the revolution that had become necessary in the administration, he secured a perpetuation of the peace policy that had governed him in the past, doing this not only by means of the officers appointed, but also by the law that was to control the administration.
The advisability of the law is seen in the fact that afterwards, when the Puritan sentiment, in the Claiborne- Bennett rebellion, attained for a time the control, this law was annulled, and another, though called by the same title, was passed in its stead, but which put both the religion of Lord Baltimore and that of the Church of England under the ban. The original act, however, was afterwards restored and continued in force till the Prot- estant revolution, when the Roman Catholic faith was again put under interdict.
Let us now look at the law itself. And first, of the intention, as announced by Lord Baltimore in the com- mission that accompanied the body of laws submitted, of which this was the first. The laws were proposed to him for "the good and quiet settlement of the colony and people." It was, in other words, a peace-preserving measure in its intention as well as in its terms, a pro- vision against the oncoming times of turbulence which Lord Baltimore apprehended, and which did come within the next three years. Also it will be observed that it was the joint act of the proprietary and the people, so that neither party could claim exclusively what merit belonged to the passage of the law. The law, he says, " was proposed to him," by whom we are not told, and he approved the suggestion as wise and discreet, and well suited to give a good and quiet settlement of the colony and people.
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1
The Assembly was then, and had been for ten years, composed of a large majority of Protestants, and the merit was more theirs, as preserving protection and religious freedom for a small minority, than it was his, who felt himself protector of that minority; though it is true, neither could do anything without the other. . Besides, Lord Baltimore was not a stalwart Roman Catholic, however great his prejudices might be, but of that English type of mind that, while he could worship only in a Roman Catholic sanctuary, and accept the dogmas of the Roman creed, could trample under foot even the great papal bull In cona Domini, when this bull proposed doctrines that were inconsistent with his prerogatives,-a kind of provincial Henry VIII. in the assertion of his temporal supremacy; for all his legis- lation, as well as his private utterances, spurned the pre- tensions of the Roman Catholic fathers to the peculiar privileges of their order; which in other times they had claimed in England, and which in other less-favored lands they were exercising at this time.
Whether the English Catholic Lord Baltimore, swelling with indignation, and reviling the persons of the pre- sumptuous priests, is to be taken as the representative of the Roman Church, or those priests themselves who vilified the representative and agent of Lord Baltimore, who for him resisted their attempts to establish an eccle- siastical oligarchy in Maryland, is a question that is very easily answered. We may bestow praise upon Lord Bal- timore as a wise and plastic statesman, whose judgment could be swayed by the necessity of the times; but we . shall have to leave the church in the hands of the Jesuit fathers, as they far better present its tone and spirit.
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The first section of the Act is Draconic in its severity, and indicates that however much the men that framed and passed it, may have been disposed to grant toleration in the matter of religion, they were not disposed to grant any whatsoever in the matter of irreligion. The whole idea of religious freedom was still in swaddling bands; for religious freedom takes the whole question out of the realm of civil administration, and means that a man shall believe as much and as little as he pleases. But in that day the majority, simply by toleration, graciously extended to all persons the privilege of believing, pro- vided they believed aright according to the judgment of the majority. And so by this first section, if any one denied the Saviour to be the Son of God, or denied the Holy Trinity, or the Godhead of any of the three Persons of the Trinity, or the Unity of the Godhead, he should be " punished with death, and confiscation or forfeiture of all his or her land or goods to the lord proprietary and his heirs."
The second section is also restrictive, in that it pro- vides that if any persons " shall use or utter any reproach- ful words or speeches concerning the Blessed Virgin Mary, the Mother of our Saviour, or the Holy Apostles or Evangelists, or any of them," shall be fined, and if he cannot pay the fine or will not, then he shall be whipped and imprisoned. For a second offense the fine was doubled, with whipping and imprisonment as an alter- native; and for a third offense the punishment was for- feiture of lands and goods and perpetual banishment from the colony.
The third section was also restrictive, in that it forbade persons to call one another names, as heretic, schismatic,
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idolater, Puritan, Presbyterian, Independent, Popish priest, Jesuit, Jesuited papist, Lutheran, Calvinist, Ana- baptist, Brownist, Antinomian, Barrowist, Roundhead, Separatist, or any other name or term in a reproachful manner, and the penalty was in this case fine. There was nothing very heinous in some of these names. They are good old honest names, and exactly describe what they were meant to indicate. The enactment of such a law shows how sensitive was the public feeling and how keenly anxious Lord Baltimore was to avoid every occa- sion of offense, and also it shows that the Act was a peace- preserving measure, and not the lofty and disinterested act of some one who had grasped, before his time, the great principle and postulate of human freedom in the realm of conscience.
The fourth section provides against Sabbath-breaking, and forbids uncivil and disorderly recreation, also work- ing on Sunday when "absolute necessity doth not re- quire," and the punishment was to be fine or whipping.
The next, or fifth section, is the one that has called forth so much comment and so great commendation in America and in England, in the church and also in the state. It begins with the proposition: that "Whereas the inforcing of the conscience in the matters of religion hath frequently fallen out to be of dangerous conse- quence in those commonwealths where it hath been practised, and for the more quiet and peaceable govern- ment of this province and the better to preserve mutual love and unity among the inhabitants here." As regards the first declaration about dangerous consequences, that was exemplified on all hands. Archbishop Laud had attempted it in England, the Roman Catholic princes had
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attempted it on the Continent, Charles the Ninth had attempted it in France, the Presbyterians were now attempting it in England, the awful Inquisition was at this time attempting it everywhere, wherever the Roman Church could force it upon the civil government, and the Thirty Years' War, and the Massacre of St. Bartholomew, and the rack and the stake, and universal gloom had been the consequences; surely dangerous enough.
But the whole animus of the law, legitimate but not exalted, is expressed in the words next following, "for the more quiet and peaceable government of this prov- ince and the better to preserve mutual love and unity amongst the inhabitants here." The whole is a matter of policy, good policy, it is true, but policy: the more quiet and peaceable government. No recognition of a man's inherent and inalienable right to worship God according to the dictates of a man's own conscience. He must profess to believe in Jesus Christ; so far must he be orthodox. A Jew might be placed under the ban; a Unitarian was liable to be punished with death and con- fiscation of his goods, and his family left in poverty, the goods to go to the proprietary. There was no pro- tection for such. By the first clause of the Act they were liable to punishment, and by this clause they might be molested, disturbed at pleasure.
And this is all there is of this much-vaunted law. Surely it must be because of a general poverty of claims that so much is made of this one instance. There was no religion in it whatever, no recognition of inherent human rights, only a wise adaptation to an emergency by a shrewd and observant man, who felt that the whole drift of the times and the power of numbers were against
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him and the general policy of his administration. He on the one side and the colonists on the other, each of free will considered the other, and united to establish by statute what had been from the beginning the common practice of the province, a practice always rendered neces- sary by imperative circumstances.
It was a useful law, too, for it provided a sufficient answer in after-days to the charges made against the succeeding Lord Baltimore, that the Roman Catholics were unduly favored. He could point to this law as establishing the administration of the colony. The Puri- tans did not like it, so that when afterwards in 1654 they . had gotten control of the colony they annulled it, passing a new law, in which both papists and prelatists, all persons but themselves, were denied its benefits. The law, how- ever, was renewed when the provincial government was restored to Lord Baltimore.
Maryland has always occupied an honorable position among the commonwealths, not only of America, but of the world. We shall see hereafter the treatment the Roman Catholics received after the Protestant revolution, treatment wholly unjustifiable and wholly unnecessary from any point of view, and so far Maryland's record is blameworthy. But remembering the treatment of the Puritans in Virginia, and of the papists, prelatists, witches and Quakers in New England, and then observing what her conduct was, we can but be astonished at the measure of liberty she attained; for notwithstanding the universal belief in witchcraft and the tortures to which suspected persons were subjected in England as well as in America, it is surprising how free her record is. And as concerns Quakers, she was among the very first to accommodate
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her laws to their peculiar idiosyncrasies, and to so frame her rules of procedure that they might live within her borders in peace and enjoy the privileges of citizenship. Her record is honorable, not, however, because she was faultless according to the standard of this day; for in those earlier days she had much to learn and much to unlearn; but honorable because in all the great social questions, no State or Territory has occupied higher ground than she, and because, also, in the great develop- ment that took place in both church and state matters through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, her position was always at the front.
SEVENTH LECTURE.
THE PROTESTANT REVOLUTION.
We have seen that after the year 1659 the troubles of Maryland ceased, that is, those caused by the Protestant faction that had been showing its spirit from time to time since the year 1644. Its motives, it is true, were not always avowedly religious, yet the probability is that that was the string on which they played to arouse the ani- mosities of the people. After 1659, however, when Cromwell recognized the claims of Lord Baltimore and required that his province be restored, comparative peace reigned, hardly disturbed at all by the agitation and com- plaints that were heard from the lower house of the Assembly, presenting what they esteemed grievances. And this lasted till the year 1689. Then, however, it was broken, with very lamentable results for the proprietary.
Between these dates the first of those navigation acts was passed, by which it was sought more and more to bind the colonies to the mother country by unjust exactions, restraining the freedom of commerce, shutting up the ports of the world to colonial enterprise, forbid- ding foreign vessels to frequent colonial ports, preventing the building of ships. England, that at first neglected her colonies, doing nothing for their planting, but leav- ing everything to private enterprise, and allowing them to languish, and probably astonished at last that they continued to exist at all; afterwards, when the colonies
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