Long before Augustine Herman’s death, Lord Baltimore had granted him a second estate, called the manor of St. Augustine, extending eastward from Bohemia Manor to the shore of Delaware Bay; but to the greater part of it the Herman family never succeeded in making good their title, for the territory passed out of Lord Baltimore’s domain. Once more the heedlessness and bad faith of the Stuart kings, in their grants of American lands, was exhibited, and as Baltimore’s patent had once encroached upon the Virginians, so now he was encroached upon by the Duke of York and presently by William Penn. The province of New Netherland, which Charles II. took from the Dutch in 1664 and bestowed upon his brother as lord proprietor, extended from the upper waters of the Hudson down to Cape May at the entrance to Delaware Bay, but did not include a square foot of land on the west shore of the bay, since all that was expressly included in the Maryland charter. It was not to be expected that Swedes or Dutchmen would pay any heed to that English charter; but it might have been supposed that Charles II. and his brother James would have shown some respect for a contract made by their father. Not so, however. The little Swedish and Dutch settlements on the west shore were at once taken in charge by officers of the Duke of York, as if they had belonged to his domain of New Netherland, while the southern part of that domain was granted by him, under the name of New Jersey, to his friends, Lord Berkeley and Sir George Carteret.

Nothing more of consequence occurred for several years, in the course of which interval, in 1675, Cecilius Calvert died and was succeeded by his son Charles, third Lord Baltimore. Not long afterward William Penn appeared on the scene, at first as trustee of certain Quaker estates in New Jersey, but presently as ruler over a princely domain of his own. The Quakers had been ill treated in many of the colonies; why not found a colony in which they should be the leaders? The suggestion offered to Charles II. an easy way of paying an old debt of £16,000 owed by the crown to the estate of the late Admiral Penn, and accordingly William was made lord proprietor of a spacious country lying west of the Delaware River and between Maryland to the south and the Five Nations to the north. His charter created a government very similar to Lord Baltimore’s but far less independent, for laws passed in Pennsylvania must be sent to England for the royal assent, and the British government, which fifty years before had expressly renounced the right to lay taxes upon Marylanders, now expressly asserted the right to lay taxes upon Pennsylvanians. This change marks the growth of the imperial and anti-feudal sentiment in England, the feeling that privileges like those accorded to the Calverts were too extensive to be enjoyed by subjects.

According to Lord Baltimore’s charter his northern boundary was the fortieth parallel of latitude, which runs a little north of the site of Philadelphia. The latitude was marked by a fort erected on the Susquehanna River, and when the crown lawyers consulted with Baltimore’s attorneys, they were informed that all questions of encroachment would be avoided if the line were to be run just north of this fort, so as to leave it on the Maryland side.105 Penn made no objection to this, but when the charter was drawn up no allusion was made to the Susquehanna fort. Penn’s southern boundary was made to begin twelve miles north of Newcastle, thence to curve northwestward to the fortieth parallel and follow that parallel. Measurement soon showed that such a boundary would give Penn’s province inadequate access to the sea. His position as a royal favourite enabled him to push the whole line twenty miles to the south. Even then he was disappointed in not gaining the head of Chesapeake Bay, and, being bent upon securing somewhere a bit of seacoast, he persuaded the Duke of York to give him the land on the west shore of Delaware Bay which the Dutch had once taken from the Swedes. By further enlargement the area of this grant became that of the present state of Delaware, the whole of which was thus, in spite of vehement protest, carved out of the original Maryland. In such matters there was not much profit in contending against princes.

In the course of this narrative we have had occasion to mention the grants of Bohemia and other manors. In order that we should understand the course of Maryland history before and after the Revolution of 1689, some description of the manorial system is desirable. One of the most interesting features in the early history of English America is the way in which different phases of English institutions were reproduced in the different colonies. As the ancient English town meeting reached a high development in New England, as the system of close vestries was very thoroughly worked out in Virginia, so the old English manor was best preserved in Maryland. In 1636 Lord Baltimore issued instructions that every grant of 2,000 acres or more should be erected into a manor, with court baron and court leet. “The manor was the land on which the lord and his tenants lived, and bound up with the land were also the rights of government which the lord possessed over the tenants, and they over one another.”106 Such manors were scattered all over tidewater Maryland. Mr. Johnson, in his excellent essay on the subject, cites at random the names of “George Evelin, lord of the manor of Evelinton, in St. Mary’s county; Marmaduke Tilden, lord of Great Oak Manor, and Major James Ringgold, lord of the manor on Eastern Neck, both in Kent; Giles Brent, lord of Kent Fort, on Kent Island; George Talbot, lord of Susquehanna Manor, in Cecil county,” and he mentions a sale, in 1767, of “twenty-seven manors, embracing 100,000 acres.”

In the life upon these manors there was a kind of patriarchal completeness; each was a little world in itself. There was the great house with its generous dining-hall, its panelled wainscoat, and its family portraits; there was the chapel, with the graves of the lord’s family beneath its pavement and the graves of common folk out in the churchyard; there were the smoke-houses, and the cabins of negro slaves; and here and there one might come upon the dwellings of white freehold tenants, with ample land about them held on leases of one-and-twenty years. In establishing these manors, Lord Baltimore had an eye to the military defence of his colony. It was enacted in 1641 that the grant of a manor should be the reward for every settler who should bring with him from England twenty able-bodied men, each armed with a musket, a sword and belt, a bandelier and flask, ten pounds of powder, and forty pounds of bullets and shot.

These manors were little self-governing communities. The court leet was like a town meeting. All freemen could take part in it. It enacted by-laws, elected constables, bailiffs, and other local officers, set up stocks and pillory, and sentenced offenders to stand there, for judicial and legislative functions were united in this court leet. It empanelled its jury, and with the steward of the manor presiding as judge, it visited with fine or imprisonment the thief, the vagrant, the poacher, the fraudulent dealer.

Side by side with the court leet was the court baron, an equally free institution in which all the freehold tenants sat as judges determining questions of law and of fact. This court decided all disputes between the lord and his tenants concerning such matters as rents, or trespass, or escheats. Here actions for debt were tried, and transfers of land were made with the ancient formalities.

These admirable manorial institutions were brought to Maryland in precisely the same shape in which they had long existed in England. They were well adapted for preserving liberty and securing order in rural communities before the days of denser population and more rapid communication. In our progress away from those earlier times we have gained vastly, but it is by no means sure that we have not also lost something. In the decadence of the Maryland manors there was clearly an element of loss, for that decadence was chiefly brought about by the growth of negro slavery, which made it more profitable for the lord of the manor to cultivate the whole of it himself, instead of leasing the whole or parts of it to tenants. Slavery also affixed a stigma upon free labour and drove it off the field, very much as a debased currency invariably drives out a sound currency. From these causes the class of freehold tenants gradually disappeared, “the feudal society of the manor” was transformed into “the patriarchal society of the plantation,”107 and the arbitrary fiat of a master was substituted for the argued judgments of the court leet.

Among the people of Lord Baltimore’s colony, as among English-speaking people in general, one might observe a fierce spirit of political liberty coupled with engrained respect for law and a disposition to achieve results by argument rather than by violence. Such a temper leads to interminable parliamentary discussion, and in the reign of Charles II. the tongues of the Maryland assembly were seldom quiet. As compared with the stormy period before 1660, the later career of Cecilius and that of his son Charles down to the Revolution of 1689 seem peaceful, and there are writers who would persuade us that when the catastrophe arrived, it came quite unheralded, like lightning from a cloudless sky. A perusal of the transactions in the Maryland assembly, however, shows that the happy period was not so serene as we have been told, but there were fleecy specks on the horizon, with now and then a faint growl of distant thunder.

That the proprietary government had many devoted friends is not to be denied, and it is clear that some of the opposition to it was merely factious. There is no doubt as to the lofty personal qualities of the second Lord Baltimore, his courage and sagacity, his disinterested public spirit, his devotion to the noble ideal which he had inherited. As for Charles, the third lord, he seems to have been a paler reflection of his father, like him for good intentions, but far inferior in force. The period of eight-and-twenty years which we are considering, from 1661 to 1689, is divided exactly in the middle by the death of Cecilius in 1675. Before that date we have Charles administering the affairs of Maryland subject to the approval of his father in London; after that date Charles is supreme.

Now the circumstances were such that father and son would have had to be more than human to carry on the government without serious opposition. In the first place, they were Catholics, ruling a population in which about one twelfth part were Catholics, while one sixth belonged to the Church of England, and three fourths were dissenting Puritans. To most of the people the enforced toleration of Papists must have seemed like keeping on terms of polite familiarity with the devil. In the second place, the proprietor was apt to appoint his own relatives and trusted friends to the highest offices, and such persons were usually Catholics. As these high officers composed the council, or upper house of the assembly, the proprietor had a permanent and irreversible majority in that body. When we read the minutes of a council composed of Governor Charles Calvert, his uncle Philip, his cousin William, Mr. Baker Brooke, who had married cousin William’s sister, Mr. William Talbot, who was another cousin, and Mr. Henry Coursey, who was uncle Philip’s bosom friend, we seem to be assisting at a pleasant little family party. Again, when the governor marries a widow, and each of his five stepchildren marries, and we are told that “every one who became related to the family soon obtained an office,”108 we begin to realize that there was coming to be quite a clan to be supported from the revenues of a small province. Nepotism may not be the blackest of crimes, but it is pretty certain to breed trouble.

The governing power opposed to this family party was the House of Burgesses, or lower house of assembly. Those freeholding tenants and small proprietors who had brought with them from England their time-honoured habits of self-government in court leet and court baron, represented the democratic element in the constitution of Maryland, as the upper house represented the oligarchical element. The history of the period we are considering is the history of a constitutional struggle between the two houses. We have seen that it was not a part of the proprietor’s original scheme that the assembly should take an initiative in legislation, and that on this ground he refused his assent to the first group of laws sent to him in 1635 for his signature. Apparently it was his idea that his burgesses should simply comment on acts passed by their betters, as on old Merovingian fields of March the magnates legislated while the listening warriors clashed their shields in token of approval. If such was the first notion of Cecilius he promptly relinquished it and gracefully conceded the claim of the assembly to take the initiative in legislation. But the veto power, without any limitation of time, was a prerogative which he would not give up. At any moment he could use this veto power to repeal a law, and this was felt by the colonists to be a grievance. On such constitutional matters, when we read of antagonism between the proprietor and the assembly, it is the burgesses that we are to understand as in opposition, since the council was almost sure to uphold the proprietor.

One point upon which the upper house always insisted was that the burgesses were not a house of commons with inherent rights of legislation, but that they owed their existence to the charter, with powers that must be limited as strictly as possible. But this point the burgesses would never concede. They were Englishmen, with the rights and privileges of Englishmen, and it was an inherent right in English representatives to make laws for their constituents; accordingly they insisted that they were, to all intents and purposes, a house of commons for Maryland.109 On one occasion a clergyman, Charles Nichollet, preached a sermon, in which he warned the burgesses not to forget that they had no real liberty unless they could pass laws that were agreeable to their conscience; as a house of commons they must keep their hand upon the purse strings and consider if the taxes were not too heavy. The family party of the upper house called such talk seditious, and the parson was roundly fined for preaching politics.

But it would be grossly unfair to the proprietor to overlook the fact that on some important occasions he took sides with the representatives of the people against his own little family party. As an instance may be cited the act of 1666 concerning the “Cessation of Tobacco.” As the fees of public officials were paid in tobacco, a large crop was liable to diminish their value, and accordingly the upper house wished to contract the currency by an act stopping all planting of tobacco for one year. The lower house objected to this, but after a long dispute was induced to give consent, provided Virginia should pass a similar act. The speaker, however, wrote to Cecilius urging him to veto the act, and he did so.110

The occasions of difference between the two houses were many and various. One concerned the relief of Quakers. In Rhode Island, New Jersey, and Jamaica, they were allowed to make affirmations instead of taking oaths. When the Quakers of Maryland petitioned for a similar relief, the burgesses granted it, but the council refused to concur. A more important matter was the appointment of sheriffs. In addition to the ordinary functions of the sheriff, with which we are familiar in more modern times, these officers collected all taxes, superintended all elections, and made out the returns. These were formidable powers, for a dishonest or intriguing sheriff might alter the composition of the House of Burgesses. Sheriffs were appointed by the governor, and were in no way responsible to the county courts. The burgesses tried to establish a check upon them by enacting that the county court should recommend three persons out of whom the governor should choose one, and that the sheriff thus selected should serve for one year; but the upper house declared that such an act infringed the proprietor’s prerogative. No check upon the sheriffs, therefore, was left to the people except the regulating of their fees, and upon this point the burgesses were stiff.

In 1669 the disputes between the houses were more stormy than usual, and in the election of the next year the suffrage was restricted to freemen owning plantations of fifty acres or more, or possessed of personal property to the amount of £50 sterling. This restriction was not accomplished by legislation; it must have been a sheer assertion of prerogative, either by Cecilius or by Charles acting on his own responsibility. All that is positively known is that the sheriffs were instructed to that effect in their writs. It is worthy of note that a similar restriction of suffrage had just occurred in Virginia. Perhaps Charles Calvert was imprudently taking a lesson from Berkeley. But still worse, in summoning to the assembly the members who had been elected, he omitted a few names, presumably those of persons whose opposition was likely to prove inconvenient. When the burgesses demanded the reason for this omission, Charles made a shuffling explanation which they saw fit to accept for the moment, and thus a precedent was created of which he was not slow to avail himself, and from which endless bickering ensued. For the present a house of burgesses was obtained which was much to the governor’s liking; accordingly, instead of allowing its term to expire at the end of a year, he simply adjourned it, and thus kept it alive until 1676,—another lesson learned from Berkeley.

It was this comparatively submissive assembly that in 1671 passed the act which for eleven years had been resisted, granting to the proprietor a royalty of two shillings on every hogshead of tobacco exported. In return for this grant, however, the lower house obtained some concessions. With the death of Cecilius, in 1675, the situation was certainly changed for the worse. Now for the first time the people of Maryland had their lord proprietor dwelling among them and not in England; but Charles was narrower and less public-spirited than his father, his measures were more arbitrary, and the feeling that the country was governed in the interests of a small coterie of Papists rapidly increased. In 1676 Maryland seemed on the point of following Virginia into rebellion. Lord Baltimore went to England in the spring, and by midsummer it had become evident that Bacon had able sympathizers in Maryland. A set of manuscript archives, recently recovered from long oblivion,111 make it probable that but for Bacon’s sudden death in October and the collapse of the movement in Virginia, there would have been bloodshed in the sister colony. In August a seditious paper was circulated, alleging grievances similar to those of Virginia, and threatening the proprietor’s government. Two gentlemen named Davis and Pate, with others, gathered an armed force in Calvert county with the design of intimidating the governor and council, and extorting from them sundry concessions. When the governor, Thomas Notley, ordered them to disband, promising that their demands should be duly considered at the next assembly, they refused on the ground that the assembly had been tampered with and no longer represented the people. As Notley afterward wrote to Lord Baltimore, never was there a people “more replete with malignancy and frenzy than our people were about August last, and they wanted but a monstrous head to their monstrous body.” But this incipient Davis and Pate rebellion derived its strength from the Bacon rebellion, and the collapse of the one extinguished the other. Davis and Pate were hanged, at which Notley tells us the people were “terrified,” and so peace was preserved.

An episode which occurred before the final catastrophe throws some light upon the relations of parties at the time. An Irish kinsman of Lord Baltimore’s, by name George Talbot, obtained in 1680 an extensive grant of land on the Susquehanna River, where he lived in feudal style, with a force of Irish retainers at his beck and call, hunting venison, drinking strong waters, browbeating Indians, and picking quarrels with William Penn’s newly arrived followers. In 1684 Lord Baltimore went again to England, leaving his son, Benedict Calvert, in the governorship; and as Benedict was a mere boy, there was a little regency of which George Talbot was the head. Now the exemption of Maryland from king’s taxes did not extend to custom-house duties. These were collected by crown officers and paid into the royal treasury; and the collectors were apt to behave themselves, as in all ages and countries, like enemies of the human race. Between them and the proprietary government there was deep-seated antipathy. They accused Lord Baltimore of hindering them in their work, and this complaint led the king to pounce upon him with a claim for £2,500 alleged to have been lost to the revenue through his interferences. One of these collectors, Christopher Rousby, was especially overbearing, and some called him a rascal. Late in 1684 a small ship of the royal navy was lying at St. Mary’s, and one day, while Rousby was in the cabin drinking toddies with the captain, Talbot came on board, and a quarrel ensued, in the course of which Talbot drew a dagger and plunged it into Rousby’s heart. The captain refused to allow Talbot to go ashore to be tried by a council of his relatives; he carried him to Virginia and handed him over to the governor, Lord Howard of Effingham. Talbot was imprisoned not far from the site where once had stood the red man’s village, Werowocomoco, where he was in imminent danger of the gallows, or perhaps of having to pay his whole fortune as a bribe to the greedy Howard. But Talbot’s brave wife, with two trusty followers, sailed down the whole length of Chesapeake Bay and up York River in a boat. On a dark winter’s night they succeeded in freeing Talbot from his jail, and returning as they came, carried him off exulting to Susquehanna Manor. For the sake of appearances his friends in the Maryland council thought it necessary to proclaim the hue and cry after him, and there is a local tradition that he was for a while obliged to hide in a cave, where a couple of his trained hawks kept him alive by fetching him game—canvas-back ducks, perhaps, and terrapin—from the river! It is not likely, however, that the search for him was zealous or thorough. For some time he staid unmolested in his manor house, but presently deemed it prudent to go and surrender himself. The council refused to bring him to trial in any court held in the king’s name, until a royal order came from England to send him over there for trial, but before this was done Lord Baltimore interceded with James II. and secured a pardon.

The general effect of this Talbot affair was to weaken the palatinate government by making it appear lukewarm in its allegiance and remiss in its duties to the crown. The custom-house became a subject of hot discussion, and the charges of defrauding the royal revenue were reiterated with effect. Some time before this, a remarkable pamphlet had appeared with the title, “Complaint from Heaven with a Huy and Crye and a petition out of Virginia and Maryland.” It was evidently written by some Puritan friend of Fendall’s. After a bitter denunciation of the palatinate administration some measures of relief were suggested, one of which was that the king should assume the government of Maryland and appoint the governors. The time was now at hand when this suggestion was to bear fruit.

The forced abdication of James II. in 1688, with his flight to France, was the occasion of an anti-Catholic panic throughout the greater part of English America. It was as certain as anything future could be that the antagonism between Louis XIV. and William of Orange would at once break out in a great war, in which French armies from Canada would invade the English colonies. There was a widespread fear that Papists in these colonies would turn traitors and assist the enemy. It was in this scare that Leisler’s rebellion in New York originated, although there too a conflict between democracy and oligarchy was concerned, somewhat as in Maryland. Everywhere the ordinary dread of Papists became more acute. It was soon after this time that the clause of an act depriving Roman Catholics of the franchise found its way into the Rhode Island statutes, the only instance in which that commonwealth ever allowed itself to depart from the noble principles of Roger Williams.112

While there were absurdities in this anti-Catholic panic, it contained an element that was not unreasonable. Throughout the century the Papist counter-reformation had made alarming progress. In France, the strongest nation in the world, it had just scored a final victory in the expulsion of the Huguenots. In Germany the Thirty Years’ War had left Protestantism weaker than it had been at the death of Martin Luther. England had barely escaped from having a Papist dynasty settled upon her; nor was it yet sure that she had escaped. A caprice of fortune might drive King William out as suddenly as he had come. Ireland still held out for the Stuarts, and there in May, 1689, James II. landed with French troops, in the hope of winning back his crown. The officer who held Ireland for James was Richard Talbot, Duke of Tyrconnel, a distant relative and intimate friend of Lord Baltimore. Under these circumstances a panic was natural. There were absurd rumours of a plot between Catholics and Indians to massacre Protestants. More reasonable was the jealous eagerness with which men watched the council to see what it would do about proclaiming William and Mary. Lord Baltimore was prompt in sending from London directions to the council to proclaim them; whatever his political leanings might have been, he could in prudence hardly do less. But the messenger died on the voyage, and a second messenger was too late.

Meanwhile, in April, 1689, there was formed “An Association in arms for the defense of the Protestant Religion, and for asserting the right of King William and Queen Mary to the Province of Maryland and all the English Dominions.” The president of this association was John Coode, who had married a daughter of that Thomas Gerrard who took a part in Fendall’s rebellion. Another leader, who had married another daughter of Gerrard, was Nehemiah Blackiston, collector of customs, who had been foremost in accusing the Calverts of obstructing his work. Others were Kenelm Cheseldyn, speaker of the house, and Henry Jowles, colonel of the militia. As the weeks passed by, and news of the proclaiming of William and Mary by one colony after another arrived, and still the council took no action in the matter, people grew impatient and the association kept winning recruits. At last, toward the end of July, Coode appeared before St. Mary’s at the head of 700 armed men. No resistance was offered. The council fled to a fort on the Patuxent River, where they were besieged and in a few days surrendered. Coode detained all outward-bound ships until he had prepared an account of these proceedings to send to King William in the name of the Protestant inhabitants of Maryland. Like the insurrection in Boston, three months earlier, which overthrew Sir Edmund Andros, this bold stroke wore the aspect of a rising against the deposed king in favour of the king actually reigning. William was asked to undertake the government of Maryland, and the whole affair met with his approval. He issued a scire facias against the Baltimore charter, and before a decision had been reached in the court of chancery he sent out Sir Lionel Copley in 1691, to be royal governor of Maryland. In such wise was the palatinate overturned.

If any party in Maryland expected the millennium to follow this revolution, they were disappointed. Taxes were straightway levied for the support of the Church of England, the further immigration of Catholics was prohibited under heavy penalties, and the public celebration of the mass was strictly forbidden within the limits of the colony. When Governor Nicholson arrived upon the scene, in 1694, he summoned his first assembly to meet at the Anne Arundel town formerly known as Providence; and in the course of that session it was decided to move the seat of government thither from St. Mary’s. The purpose was to deal a blow at the old capital, the social and political centre of Catholicism in Maryland. Bitter indignation was felt at St. Mary’s, and a petition signed by the mayor and other municipal officers, with a number of the freemen, was sent to the assembly, praying that the change might be reconsidered. The House of Burgesses returned an answer, brutal and vulgar in tone, which shows the wellnigh incredible virulence of political passion in those days.113 The blow was final, so far as St. Mary’s was concerned. Her civic life had evidently depended upon the presence of the government. At one time, with its fifty or sixty houses, the little city founded by Leonard Calvert was much larger than Jamestown; but after the removal it dwindled till little was left save a memory. The name of the new capital on the Severn was doubtless felt to be cumbrous, for it was presently changed to Annapolis,114 the first of a set of queer hybrid compounds with which the map of the United States is besprinkled. Nicholson wished to crown the work of founding a new capital by establishing a school or college there, and accordingly in 1696 King William School was founded. For many years the income for supporting this and other free schools was derived from an export duty on furs.115

The change of the capital was perhaps bewailed only by the Catholics and others who were most strongly attached to the proprietary government. But the change in ecclesiastical policy disgusted everybody. Taxation for the support of the Episcopal church, of which only a small part of the population were members, was as unpopular with Puritans as with Papists. The Puritans, who had worked so zealously to undermine the proprietary government, had not bargained for such a result as this. The manner in which the church revenue was raised was also extremely irritating. The rate was forty pounds of tobacco per poll, so that rich and poor paid alike. A more inequitable and odious measure could hardly have been devised. The statute, however, with the dullness that usually characterizes the work of legislative bodies, forgot to specify the quality of tobacco in which the rates should be paid. Naturally, therefore, they were paid in the vilest unmarketable stuff that could be found, and the Episcopal clergymen found it hard to keep the wolf from the door. There was thus no inducement for competent ministers to come to Maryland, and those that were sent from England were of the poorest sort which the English Church in that period of its degradation could provide. Dr. Thomas Chandler, of New Jersey, who visited the eastern shore of Maryland in 1753, wrote to the Bishop of London as follows: “The general character of the clergy ... is wretchedly bad.... It would really, my lord, make the ears of a sober heathen tingle to hear the stories that were told me by many serious persons of several clergymen in the neighbourhood of the parish where I visited; but I still hope that some abatement may be fairly made on account of the prejudices of those who related them.”116 The Swedish botanist, Peter Kalm, who visited Maryland about the same time, tells us that it was a common trick with a parson, when performing the marriage service for a poor couple, to halt midway and refuse to go on till a good round fee had been handed over to him.117 On such occasions it may be presumed that the tobacco was of unimpeachable quality.

The last decade of the seventeenth century was a period of ceaseless wrangling over church matters. Almost every year saw some new act passed from which its opponents succeeded in causing the assent of the crown to be withheld. The government of William III. was not ill-disposed toward a policy of toleration, except toward Papists. Accordingly, although the act of 1692 remained substantially in force until the American Revolution, it was so qualified in 1702 as to exempt Quakers and other Protestant Dissenters from civil disabilities, and to allow them the free exercise of public worship in their own churches or meeting-houses. They were not exempted, however, from the poll tax for the maintenance of the Episcopal church.

For the Catholics there was neither exemption nor privilege; they were shamefully insulted and vexed. In the autumn of 1704 two priests were summoned before the council: the one, William Hunter, was accused of consecrating a chapel, which he answered with a plea that was in part denial and in part “confession and avoidance;” the other, Robert Brooke, acknowledged the truth of the charge that he had said mass at the chapel of St. Mary’s. The request of these gentlemen for legal counsel was refused. As the complaint against them was a first complaint, they were let off with a reprimand, which the newly installed governor, John Seymour, thus politely administered: “It is the unhappy temper of you and all your tribe to grow insolent upon civility and never know how to use it, and yet of all people you have the least reason for considering that, if the necessary laws that are made were let loose, they are sufficient to crush you, and which (if your arrogant principles have not blinded you) you must need to dread. You might, methinks, be content to live quietly as you may, and let the exercise of your superstitious vanities be confined to yourselves, without proclaiming them at public times and in public places, unless you expect by your gaudy shows and serpentine policy to amuse the multitude and beguile the unthinking, ... an act of deceit well known to be amongst you. But, gentlemen, be not deceived.... In plain and few words, if you intend to live here, let me hear no more of these things; for if I do, and they are made good against you, be assured I’ll chastise you.... I’ll remove the evil by sending you where you may be dealt with as you deserve.... Pray take notice that I am an English Protestant gentleman, and can never equivocate.” After this fulmination the governor ordered the sheriff of St. Mary’s county to lock up the Catholic chapel and “keep the key thereof;” and for all these proceedings the House of Burgesses declared themselves “cheerfully thankful” to his excellency, whom they found “so generously bent to protect her majesty’s Protestant subjects here against insolence and growth of Popery.”118

From 1704 to 1718 several ferocious acts were passed against Catholics. A reward of £100 was offered to any informer who should “apprehend and take” a priest and convict him of saying mass, or performing any of a priest’s duties; and the penalty for the priest so convicted was perpetual imprisonment. Any Catholic found guilty of keeping a school, or taking youth to educate, was to spend the rest of his life in prison. Any person sending his child abroad to be educated as a Catholic was to be fined £100. No Catholic could become a purchaser of real estate. Certain impossible test oaths were to be administered to every Papist youth within six months after his attaining majority, and if he should refuse to take them he was to be declared incapable of inheriting land, and his nearest kin of Protestant faith could supplant him. The children of a Protestant father might be forcibly taken away from their widowed mother and placed in charge of Protestant guardians. When extra taxes were levied for emergencies, Catholics were assessed at double rates.119

These atrocities of the statute book were a symptom of the inflammatory effect wrought upon the English mind by the gigantic war against Louis XIV., and immediately afterward by the wild attempt of the so-called James III. to seize the crown of Great Britain. From the accession of William and Mary to the end of the reign of Anne, war against France was perpetual except for the breathing spell after the Peace of Ryswick. This state of things brought a fresh burden upon Maryland. War between France and Great Britain meant war between the Algonquin tribes and the English colonies aided by the Five Nations. The new situation was heralded in the Congress which met at New York in 1690, at Leisler’s invitation, when Maryland was called upon to contribute men and money toward the invasion of Canada. With the advent of the royal government came royal requisitions for military purposes; and although this new burden was due to the new continental situation rather than to the change in the provincial government, it was one thing the more to make Marylanders look back with regret to the days of the proprietary rule.

For four-and-twenty years after 1691 the third Lord Baltimore lived in England in the full enjoyment of his private rights and revenues, though deprived of his government. His son, Benedict Leonard Calvert, was a prince who took secular views of public policy, like the great Henry of Navarre. He preferred his palatinate to his church, and abjured the Catholic faith, much to the wrath and disgust of his aged father, who at once withdrew his annual allowance of £450. Benedict was obliged to apply to the crown for a pension, which was granted by Anne and continued by George I. until on February 20, 1715, the situation was completely changed by the father’s death. On the petition of Benedict, fourth Lord Baltimore, the proprietary government of Maryland was revived in his behalf. But Benedict survived his father only six weeks, and on April 5 his son Charles Calvert became fifth Lord Baltimore. As Charles was a lad of sixteen, whose Romanist faith had been forsworn with his father’s, he was forthwith proclaimed Lord Proprietor of Maryland, and royal governors no more vexed that colony.

Despite all troubles it had thriven under their administration. The population had doubled within less than twenty years, and on Charles’s accession it was reckoned at 40,700 whites and 9,500 negroes.120 Oppressive statutes had not prevented the Catholics from increasing in numbers and the influence which ability and character always wield. They were preëminently the picked men of the colony. Entire suppression of their forms of worship had been recognized as impracticable. An act of 1704 had allowed priests to perform religious services in Roman Catholic families, though not in public. From this permission advantage was taken to build chapels as part of private mansions, so that the family with their guests might worship God after their manner, relying upon the principle that an Englishman’s house is his castle. By some of these people it was hoped that the restoration of the palatinate would revive their political rights and privileges. But this renewal of the palatinate was far from restoring the old state of things. The position of the fifth Lord Baltimore was very different from that of the second and third. They were Catholic princes, and were steadily supported by two Catholic kings of England. The new proprietor was a Protestant, dependent upon the favour of a Protestant king. The features of the old palatinate government, therefore, which lend the chief interest to its history, were never restored. Catholic citizens remained disfranchised, and continued to be taxed for the support of a church which they disapproved.

An interesting project was entertained about this time, by Charles Carroll and other Catholic gentlemen, of leading a migration to the Mississippi valley, thus transferring their allegiance from Great Britain to France. Mr. Carroll, a descendant of the famous Irish sept of O’Carrolls, and one of the foremost citizens of Maryland, had long been agent and receiver of rents for the third Lord Baltimore. The scheme which he was now contemplating might have led to curious results, but it was soon abandoned. A grant of territory by the Arkansas River was sought from the French government,121 but it proved impossible to agree upon terms, and that region remained a wilderness until several questions of world-wide importance had been settled.