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Sir Christopher: A Romance of a Maryland Manor in 1644

Chapter 4: FOOTNOTE:
By Maud Wilder Goodwin
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About This Book

The narrative follows the lives and loves of families on a Maryland manor in the mid-seventeenth century, tracing personal loyalties, inheritances, and rivalries set against Catholic–Protestant and Cavalier–Roundhead tensions. Central threads portray a widow’s efforts to shield her son, a young gentleman whose fortunes and honor are tested, and the interwoven fortunes of neighboring households as disputes, alliances, and romantic attachments shape their fates. Episodes move between domestic intimacy and public confrontation, offering episodic adventures and social ritual while exploring duty, courage, and shifting loyalties in a colonial frontier community.

Preface

On a bluff of the Maryland coast stand a church, a school, a huddle of gravestones, and an obelisk raised to the memory of Leonard Calvert. These alone mark the site of St. Mary's, once the capital of the Palatinate.

It is near this little town, about the middle of the seventeenth century, that my story begins, among the feuds then raging between Catholic and Protestant, Cavalier and Roundhead, Marylander and Virginian. The Virginians of that day were but a generation removed from the pioneers who suffered in the massacre of 1622; and the sons and daughters of those early settlers whose lives were traced in "The Head of a Hundred"[A] appear in the present romance.

The adventures of Romney Huntoon, of the Brents, and, most of all, of Christopher Neville and Elinor Calvert, furnish the material of my story; but I venture to hope that the reader will feel beneath the incidents and adventures that throbbing of the human heart which has chiefly interested me.

FOOTNOTE:

[A]Published 1895.