Note 1, page 191.Morton's settlement has become the subject of a literature of its own, and of some rather violent and amusing discussion even in our times. Morton's New English Canaan has been edited by Mr. C. F. Adams for the Prince Society. His defensive account of himself leaves the impression that the author was just the sort of clever and reckless rake who is most dangerous to settlements in contact with savages, and who might be expelled neck and heels from a frontier community holding no scruples of a Puritan sort. The Royal Proclamation in Rymer's Foedera, xvii, 416 (and Hazard's State Papers, i, 151), 1622, sets forth the evil of the sale of arms to the savages, but it was leveled at earlier offenders than Morton. Compare Sainsbury's Calendar, September 29 and November 24, 1630, pp. 120, 122. There are also references, more or less extended, to Morton in the Massachusetts Records, Winthrop's Journal, Bradford's Plimouth Plantation, Dudley's Letter to the Countess of Lincoln in Young's Chronicles of Massachusetts, and in other early accounts.Note 2, page 193.Abbott's account of Laud's rise, Rushworth, i, 440, is traced with a bitter pen, no doubt, but the student Laud, as Abbott draws him, is so much like his later self that one can not but believe that the description of him picking quarrels with the public readers and carrying information against them to the bishop has a basis of fact.Note 3, page 199.Rushworth, writing under the later date of 1637, says: "The severe Censures in Star Chamber, and the greatness of the Fines, and the rigorous Proceedings to impose Ceremonies, the suspending and silencing Multitudes of Ministers, for not reading in the Church the Book for Sports to be exercised on the Lord's day, caused many of the Nation, both Ministers and others, to sell their Estates, and to set Sail for New England (a late Plantation in America), where they hold a Plantation by Patent from the King." Part II, vol. i, p. 410.Note 4, page 204."We trust you will not be unmindful of the main end of our Plantation, by endeavouring to bring the Indians to a knowledge of the Gospel." Cradock's letter to Endecott, February 16, 1629, Young's Chronicle, 133; also the official letter, ibid., page 142, where the "propagation of the Gospel" among whites andIndians is the "aim." The Royal Charter itself declared that "to win and invite the natives of the country to the knowledge and obedience of the only true God and Saviour of mankind ... is the principal end of this Plantation." (A similar provision was inserted in the Connecticut Charter in 1662, in imitation of that of Massachusetts.) The common seal of the Massachusetts colony, sent over in 1629, bore an Indian with the inscription, "Come over and help us." Young's Chronicles of Massachusetts, 155, Instructions to Endecott. The paper of "Reasons," attributed to Winthrop, keeps the conversion of the Indians in view, but it is blended with that which was in his mind the main end, the founding of a Puritan church. The first paragraph reads, "It will be a service to the Church of great consequence to carry the Gospell into those parts of the world, to helpe on the comminge of the fullnesse of the Gentiles, & to raise a Bulworke against the kingdome of Ante-Christ which the Jesuites labour to reare up in those parts." Life and Letters of Winthrop, i, 309. The copy of this paper in Sir John Eliot's handwriting has a preamble written in a nervous style that may well be Eliot's own. This preamble goes back to the conversion of the Indians as a main purpose. The Antapologia of T. Edwards, 1644, declares that White of Dorchester and others had the conversion of the Indians in view in promoting emigration to New England. Edwards says, page 41, that the establishing of Congregational churches "was not in the thoughts of them that were the first movers in that or of the ministers that were sent over in the beginning." The statement is quite too strong, but the ecclesiastical purpose seems to have grown rapidly when the number of emigrants revealed the greatness of the opportunity.Note 5, page 204.Cotton Mather says, Magnalia, Book II, chap. iv, 3, that Winthrop was made a justice at eighteen, but Mather's account of anything marvelous needs support. Winthrop held his first court at Groton Hall several months after he had attained his majority. Life and Letters, i, 62. Compare page 223 of the same volume.Note 6, page 205.Of his election to the governorship he wrote to his wife, "The onely thinge that I have comforte of in it is, that heerby I have assurance that my charge is of the Lorde & that he hath called me to this worke." Life and Letters, i, 340.Note 7, page 208.The government of the colony under Endecott was substantially that prescribed for "particular plantations" in the general order of the Virginia Company at the time the charter for thePilgrim colony was granted, and like that which was formed at Plymouth under the Compact. The Massachusetts form may have been borrowed from Plymouth. This may be considered the primary form of colony government in the scheme of the Virginia Company. The plan antedates the formation of the Virginia Company by at least twenty years, for it was a form proposed by Ralegh when, in 1587, he organized his colony under the title: "The Governor and Assistants of the city of Ralegh in Virginia." The secondary form of government was that prescribed for Virginia in the charter of 1618, which added a lower house elective by the people. This fully developed government could come only when the population had become large enough to render a representative system possible.Note 8, page 210.It has been maintained by several writers that the charter had been worded with a view to removal. See, for example, Palfrey's New England, i, 307. But a paper read before the Massachusetts Historical Society, and printed in the Proceedings for December, 1869, by the late Charles Deane, shows that such a presumption is groundless. In calling the subordinate government of Endecott "London's Plantation in Massachusetts Bay in New England," the company showed that it proposed to keep its headquarters in London. It is open to question, however, whether Deane does not go too far in denying that the charter gave authority for the transfer. In that technical age the letter of the instrument would probably be counted more conclusive than at present, and the evidence of the dockets would have less weight. The removal of the government was not one of the charges made in thequo warrantoproceedings against the company. On the main question compare also the very significant treatment of the subject by Winthrop in his paper on Arbitrary Government, Life and Letters, ii, 443, where he expressly says that it was intended to have the chief government in England, "and with much difficulty we gott it abscinded." It is to be remembered that the exercise of governmental functions by a commercial corporation was not a novel spectacle in that age. In 1620 the English and Dutch East India Companies, after having been at war while the two nations were allies, concluded a treaty of peace. No doubt the exercise of such powers by trading companies had been made familiar by the mingling of the functions of government with those of commerce by the merchants of the Hanse cities. The East India and the Hudson Bay Companies continued to exercise territorial jurisdiction until a very recent period.Note 9, page 214.This rebound from their previous attitude of compromise is well exemplified in the church covenant adopted at Dorchester, Mass., in 1636, under the lead of Richard Mather, which contains these words: "We do likewise promise by his Grace assisting us, to endeavour the establishing amongst ourselves all His Holy Ordinances which He hath appointed for His church here on Earth, ... opposing to the utmost of our power whatsoever is contrary thereto and bewailing from our Hearts our own neglect hereof in former times and our poluting ourselves therein with any Sinful Invention of men." Blake's Annals of Dorchester. Robinson of Leyden, in his Justification of Separation, 1610, declared that the Puritans would soon separate if they might have the magistrates' license; and Backus, who quotes the passage (i, pp. 2, 3), remarks on the confirmation which the history of Massachusetts gives to Robinson's theory of conformity.Note 10, page 215.In his Way of the Churches Cleared, controversial necessity drove Cotton to assert that Plymouth had small share in fixing the ecclesiastical order of Massachusetts, but he is compelled to admit its influence. "And though it bee," he says, "very likely, that some of the first commers might helpe their Theory by hearing and discerning their practice at Plymmouth: yet therein the Scripture is fulfilled, 'The Kingdome of Heaven is like unto leaven,'" etc., pp, 16, 17.
Note 1, page 191.Morton's settlement has become the subject of a literature of its own, and of some rather violent and amusing discussion even in our times. Morton's New English Canaan has been edited by Mr. C. F. Adams for the Prince Society. His defensive account of himself leaves the impression that the author was just the sort of clever and reckless rake who is most dangerous to settlements in contact with savages, and who might be expelled neck and heels from a frontier community holding no scruples of a Puritan sort. The Royal Proclamation in Rymer's Foedera, xvii, 416 (and Hazard's State Papers, i, 151), 1622, sets forth the evil of the sale of arms to the savages, but it was leveled at earlier offenders than Morton. Compare Sainsbury's Calendar, September 29 and November 24, 1630, pp. 120, 122. There are also references, more or less extended, to Morton in the Massachusetts Records, Winthrop's Journal, Bradford's Plimouth Plantation, Dudley's Letter to the Countess of Lincoln in Young's Chronicles of Massachusetts, and in other early accounts.
Note 2, page 193.Abbott's account of Laud's rise, Rushworth, i, 440, is traced with a bitter pen, no doubt, but the student Laud, as Abbott draws him, is so much like his later self that one can not but believe that the description of him picking quarrels with the public readers and carrying information against them to the bishop has a basis of fact.
Note 3, page 199.Rushworth, writing under the later date of 1637, says: "The severe Censures in Star Chamber, and the greatness of the Fines, and the rigorous Proceedings to impose Ceremonies, the suspending and silencing Multitudes of Ministers, for not reading in the Church the Book for Sports to be exercised on the Lord's day, caused many of the Nation, both Ministers and others, to sell their Estates, and to set Sail for New England (a late Plantation in America), where they hold a Plantation by Patent from the King." Part II, vol. i, p. 410.
Note 4, page 204."We trust you will not be unmindful of the main end of our Plantation, by endeavouring to bring the Indians to a knowledge of the Gospel." Cradock's letter to Endecott, February 16, 1629, Young's Chronicle, 133; also the official letter, ibid., page 142, where the "propagation of the Gospel" among whites andIndians is the "aim." The Royal Charter itself declared that "to win and invite the natives of the country to the knowledge and obedience of the only true God and Saviour of mankind ... is the principal end of this Plantation." (A similar provision was inserted in the Connecticut Charter in 1662, in imitation of that of Massachusetts.) The common seal of the Massachusetts colony, sent over in 1629, bore an Indian with the inscription, "Come over and help us." Young's Chronicles of Massachusetts, 155, Instructions to Endecott. The paper of "Reasons," attributed to Winthrop, keeps the conversion of the Indians in view, but it is blended with that which was in his mind the main end, the founding of a Puritan church. The first paragraph reads, "It will be a service to the Church of great consequence to carry the Gospell into those parts of the world, to helpe on the comminge of the fullnesse of the Gentiles, & to raise a Bulworke against the kingdome of Ante-Christ which the Jesuites labour to reare up in those parts." Life and Letters of Winthrop, i, 309. The copy of this paper in Sir John Eliot's handwriting has a preamble written in a nervous style that may well be Eliot's own. This preamble goes back to the conversion of the Indians as a main purpose. The Antapologia of T. Edwards, 1644, declares that White of Dorchester and others had the conversion of the Indians in view in promoting emigration to New England. Edwards says, page 41, that the establishing of Congregational churches "was not in the thoughts of them that were the first movers in that or of the ministers that were sent over in the beginning." The statement is quite too strong, but the ecclesiastical purpose seems to have grown rapidly when the number of emigrants revealed the greatness of the opportunity.
Note 5, page 204.Cotton Mather says, Magnalia, Book II, chap. iv, 3, that Winthrop was made a justice at eighteen, but Mather's account of anything marvelous needs support. Winthrop held his first court at Groton Hall several months after he had attained his majority. Life and Letters, i, 62. Compare page 223 of the same volume.
Note 6, page 205.Of his election to the governorship he wrote to his wife, "The onely thinge that I have comforte of in it is, that heerby I have assurance that my charge is of the Lorde & that he hath called me to this worke." Life and Letters, i, 340.
Note 7, page 208.The government of the colony under Endecott was substantially that prescribed for "particular plantations" in the general order of the Virginia Company at the time the charter for thePilgrim colony was granted, and like that which was formed at Plymouth under the Compact. The Massachusetts form may have been borrowed from Plymouth. This may be considered the primary form of colony government in the scheme of the Virginia Company. The plan antedates the formation of the Virginia Company by at least twenty years, for it was a form proposed by Ralegh when, in 1587, he organized his colony under the title: "The Governor and Assistants of the city of Ralegh in Virginia." The secondary form of government was that prescribed for Virginia in the charter of 1618, which added a lower house elective by the people. This fully developed government could come only when the population had become large enough to render a representative system possible.
Note 8, page 210.It has been maintained by several writers that the charter had been worded with a view to removal. See, for example, Palfrey's New England, i, 307. But a paper read before the Massachusetts Historical Society, and printed in the Proceedings for December, 1869, by the late Charles Deane, shows that such a presumption is groundless. In calling the subordinate government of Endecott "London's Plantation in Massachusetts Bay in New England," the company showed that it proposed to keep its headquarters in London. It is open to question, however, whether Deane does not go too far in denying that the charter gave authority for the transfer. In that technical age the letter of the instrument would probably be counted more conclusive than at present, and the evidence of the dockets would have less weight. The removal of the government was not one of the charges made in thequo warrantoproceedings against the company. On the main question compare also the very significant treatment of the subject by Winthrop in his paper on Arbitrary Government, Life and Letters, ii, 443, where he expressly says that it was intended to have the chief government in England, "and with much difficulty we gott it abscinded." It is to be remembered that the exercise of governmental functions by a commercial corporation was not a novel spectacle in that age. In 1620 the English and Dutch East India Companies, after having been at war while the two nations were allies, concluded a treaty of peace. No doubt the exercise of such powers by trading companies had been made familiar by the mingling of the functions of government with those of commerce by the merchants of the Hanse cities. The East India and the Hudson Bay Companies continued to exercise territorial jurisdiction until a very recent period.
Note 9, page 214.This rebound from their previous attitude of compromise is well exemplified in the church covenant adopted at Dorchester, Mass., in 1636, under the lead of Richard Mather, which contains these words: "We do likewise promise by his Grace assisting us, to endeavour the establishing amongst ourselves all His Holy Ordinances which He hath appointed for His church here on Earth, ... opposing to the utmost of our power whatsoever is contrary thereto and bewailing from our Hearts our own neglect hereof in former times and our poluting ourselves therein with any Sinful Invention of men." Blake's Annals of Dorchester. Robinson of Leyden, in his Justification of Separation, 1610, declared that the Puritans would soon separate if they might have the magistrates' license; and Backus, who quotes the passage (i, pp. 2, 3), remarks on the confirmation which the history of Massachusetts gives to Robinson's theory of conformity.
Note 10, page 215.In his Way of the Churches Cleared, controversial necessity drove Cotton to assert that Plymouth had small share in fixing the ecclesiastical order of Massachusetts, but he is compelled to admit its influence. "And though it bee," he says, "very likely, that some of the first commers might helpe their Theory by hearing and discerning their practice at Plymmouth: yet therein the Scripture is fulfilled, 'The Kingdome of Heaven is like unto leaven,'" etc., pp, 16, 17.
Centrifugal forces.At every new stage in the history of the American settlement, we are afresh reminded that colonies are planted by the uneasy. The discontent that comes from poverty and financial reverse, that which is born of political unrest, and that which has no other cause than feverish thirst for novelty and hazardous adventure, had each a share in impelling Englishmen to emigrate. But in the seventeenth century religion was the dominant concern—one might almost say the dominant passion—of the English race, and it supplied much the most efficient motive to colonization. Not only did it propel men to America, but it acted as a distributing force on this side of the sea, producing secondary colonies by expelling from a new plantation the discontented and the persecuted to make fresh breaks in the wilderness for new settlements. Connecticut and Rhode Island were secondary plantings of this kind. Religious differences also madetwain the Chesapeake region, the first home of the English in America, one of the two rival colonies being intolerantly Protestant, the other a home for Catholic refugees.
Character of George Calvert.George Calvert, the first Baron Baltimore, who projected the Maryland colony and left it to his son to carry forward, belonged to the order of men who are shrewd without being creative—men of sagacity as differentiated from men of ideas. The man in whose mind there is a ferment of original ideas has theories to promulgate or expound. Sagacity has small necessity for speech—its very reticence gives an advantage in the conduct of affairs. The parliamentary antagonist and political rival who confronted Calvert was no other than our old acquaintance Sir Edwin Sandys, of the Virginia Company. Calvert and Sandys were alike men of rare accomplishments, and both were interested in schemes for colonization; otherwise they were antipodal. Sandys was a statesman of advanced ideas, creative, liberal, and original, fitted to be the founder of representative government in the English colonies. In that age of worn and brittle institutions it was not deemed wholly safe to suffer so robust a thinker as Sandys to be always at large, and it was one of Calvert's most difficult duties, as the king's secretary and chosen intermediary, to explain to Parliament why its leader was under restraint. Sandys, as we have already said, was described as "right-handed toevery great employment"; when Calvert came upon the scene, he was aptly characterized as "a forward and knowing person in matters relating to the state." The phrase denotes, perhaps, clever adroitness within the limits of that mediocrity which in those perilous times was a safeguard to the man who ventured into politics. After having started well at court, Sandys had fallen into irretrievable disfavor by his resolute advocacy of the liberties of his countrymen. The message to the Virginia Company, already recited, "Choose the devil, but not Sir Edwin Sandys," expressed the depth of the king's antipathy. But if Sandys seemed to the king a devil, Calvert became for him a convenient angel. Notions about human rights and the liberty of Parliament did not obstruct Calvert's career. Not that he was a man to prove unfaithful to his convictions, as did his bosom friend Wentworth, or to suppress liberal opinions in order to smooth an ascending pathway, as did his great contemporary Bacon. Calvert played a far simpler part and one less dishonorable. It was his fortune to be a man of facile mind, naturally reverential toward authority. The principles enunciated by his sovereign and the measures by which those in power sought to attain the end in view were pretty sure to seem laudable or at least excusable to him. Such a mind can not be called scrupulous, neither is it consciously dishonest. The quality most highly esteemed at the court of James was fidelity, unswerving devotion to the interests ofthe king and of one's friends. And this, the dominant virtue of his time and of his class—this honor of a courtier—Calvert possessed in a high degree; it is a standard by which he has a right to be judged. To a French ambassador he seemed an honorable, sensible, courteous, well-intentioned man, devoted to the interests of England, but without consideration or influence.
Calvert's rise.Whatever his lack of influence in councils of state, Calvert's fidelity, useful abilities, and many accomplishments won the friendship of James, and in that lavish reign when all the fairy stories came true at a court which was "like a romance of knight errantry," as the Spanish minister declared, the favor of the king was sure to result in good fortune to the favorite.Note 1.From being secretary to Burleigh, Calvert rose to be principal Secretary of State, was knighted, and at last ennobled. Grants of estates in Ireland and of great unexplored tracts of territory in the wilderness of America, pensions, sinecure offices, grants of money out of increased customs fees, and presents from those who had ends to serve at court, were the means by which a successful courtier bettered his estate, and by some or all of these Secretary Calvert thrived. That he did thrive is proved by the great sum he was able to lose in his futile attempt to plant a colony in Newfoundland. It was believed that he had accepted a share of the money dispensed lavishly in presents and pensions to English courtiers by Spain, but this Calvert denied, and one can believethat a man of his fidelity to king and country would be able to resist a temptation to which others succumbed.Note 2.
The colony of Avalon.Calvert was very early interested in colonization. He was a member of the Virginia Company in 1609, and later one of the councilors for New England.Cal S. P. America, pp. 25, 26, March 16, 1620.In 1620 he was one of a commission appointed to settle the affairs of a Scotch company for colonizing Newfoundland, and in the next year he dispatched his first colony to the southeastern peninsula of that island which he had bought from Sir William Vaughan. In this latter year (1621) he secured a grant of the whole vast island, but in 1622 he accepted a re-grant of the peninsula alone, and this became his first proprietary colony. Captain Whitbourne's pamphlet on Newfoundland was just then circulating gratuitously by the aid of collections made in the churches with the sanction of royal authority. It described a Newfoundland of Edenic fruitfulness. Even cool-headed statesmen like Calvert appear to have been captivated by the stories of this veteran seaman and weather-beaten romancer. Calvert called his new province Avalon. The name signifies the land of apples—that is, the fruitful country. In old British mythology it was the paradise of the blessed, the island in the western seas to which King Arthur was translated in the famous legend. This name of promise suited the situation of the new island state, and fitted well the enthusiastic tales of Whitbourne and thegroundless hopes of Calvert. The bleak Newfoundland coast had already blossomed with fanciful names; there was the Bay of Plesaunce and the Bay of Flowers, Robin Hood's Bay and the River of Bonaventure; there was the Harbor of Formosa and the Harbor of Heartsease.Note 3.Avalon, the earthly paradise, was but the complement of these.
The charter of Avalon.Sir George Calvert probably drafted with his own hand—the hand of an expert and accomplished man of the court—the charter of April 7, 1623, that conferred on him an authority little short of sovereignty over his new territory. This masterpiece of dexterous charter-making afforded a model for other proprietary charters, and Calvert himself bettered it but little in the Maryland charter of a later date. The ambiguous passages in the Maryland charter, which have been accounted evidence of a design to make way for the toleration or even the possible dominance of Roman Catholicism, appear already in the charter of Avalon.Note 4.Was the colony of 1621 or its charter of 1623 intended to supply a refuge, if one should be needed, for Englishmen of the Catholic faith? The question is not easily answered. The primary design of the Avalon colony was, no doubt, to better the fortunes of Sir George Calvert and to lift him and his successors into the authority and dignity of counts-palatine in the New World. But there can hardly be a doubt that, before the charterof 1623 was granted, Secretary Calvert was already a Catholic, secretly or latently, if not overtly. His charter of Avalon naturally left open a door for the toleration of the faith to which he was already attached, or toward which he was tending.Note 5.
Calvert's conversion.Calvert's conversion was almost inevitable. He favored the project for the Spanish match, and he was, like some other courtiers, under the influence of Gondomar, a consummate master of intrigue. He was bound by ties of friendship, and later by the marriage of his son, to Lord Arundel of Wardour, a Catholic, and the constitution of his mind and all the habits of a lifetime made him a lover of authority in church and state. Under favoring circumstances such a man becomes a Roman Catholic by gravitation and natural affinity.
There was a Catholic revival in England at this time, especially among the courtiers and upper classes. In 1623 there was a large influx to England of priests and Jesuits. English Romanists flocked to the vicinage of London, and resorted in great numbers to the mass in the houses of foreign ambassadors; and in many English country houses the mass was openly celebrated in defiance of law.Petition in Rushworth, Part I, i, 141. Compare Neal, Part II, c. ii.The Commons, in alarm, adopted what James fitly called "a stinging petition against the papists."
His resignation.Calvert had staked his hopes for himself and for English Catholicism on the Spanish match. This otherwise pliant courtier was intractable where his religious convictions were concerned.1624.He scrupled to draw back at the bidding of Charles and Buckingham, when drawing back involved a violation of the treaty oath of the king and council, the plunging of England into a Spanish war, the sacrifice of the interests of the Catholic church, and a fresh exposure of his co-religionists in England to a harsh persecution. Calvert was one of that party in the junta for Spanish affairs which was unwilling to break a solemn treaty in order to gratify the wounded vanity of Buckingham and Charles, and he paid dearly for his firmness. To bring about his resignation, his antagonists diverted business from his office, thus reducing his fees and subjecting his pride to mortification. Under this treatment it was noted by a letter writer of the time that Mr. Secretary Calvert "droops and keeps out of the way." It was reported that he was ill, and then that he had been rebuked by the king and the prince, and it was known that he wished to sell his office to some one acceptable to Buckingham. Calvert's cleverness as a courtier did not fail him in his fall. He succeeded at the last in mollifying Buckingham, whose consent he gained to the sale of the secretaryship. After nearly a year of the prolonged agony ofholding office in disfavor, he resigned in February, 1625, receiving six thousand pounds for his office, which was worth to the incumbent two thousand a year.1625.He was at the same time raised to the Irish peerage as Baron Baltimore. He made his religious scruples the ostensible reason for his resignation, and he was already known to be "infinitely addicted to the Catholic faith." He made no secret of his proscribed religion; he exposed to visitors the altar, chalice, and candlesticks in his best room; and he catechised his children assiduously in the doctrines of the ancient church. At the accession of Charles he retired from the Privy Council rather than take an oath offensive to his conscience.Note 6.
Calvert deserts Newfoundland.During the period of his decline from court favor Calvert's colony of Avalon probably suffered from neglect. He now gave his new leisure to the work of rescuing it. In 1627 he made a voyage to Newfoundland, taking a company of Catholic settlers and two priests. He went again in 1628. From Newfoundland he wrote to one of the Jesuits in England a letter of affection, declaring his readiness to divide with him "the last bit" he had in the world. In Avalon began the long chapter of the troubles of the Baltimores with the Puritan opposition. Besides his contentions with Puritan settlers, who abhorred the mass as a Jewish prophet did idolatry, he found it necessary to fight with French privateers bent on plunder.Letters of Wynne, Daniel, and Hoskins, in Whitbourne's second ed.Bythe time the almost interminable Newfoundland winter had begun, he discovered that Avalon was not the earthly paradise it appeared in the writings of pamphleteers and in the letters of his own officeholders interested only in the continuance of their salaries.Note 7.The icy Bay of Plesaunce and the bleak Bay of Flowers mocked him with their names of delight; of little avail was the fast-bound River of Bonaventure to its unlucky lord, or the Harbor of Heartsease to him who had sunk a fortune of thirty thousand pounds in the fruitless attempt to plant a settlement on a coast so cold. Ill himself, and with half his company down with scurvy, some of them dying, Baltimore turned his thoughts toward Virginia, now, after all its trials, prosperous under a genial sun.
Sails to Virginia.He knew the conditions of that colony and the opportunities it afforded. A member of the Virginia Company during nearly all the years of its stormy existence, he had been made one of the fifty-six councilors that took over its effects at its demise, and he was one of the eight who constituted the quorum, and who probably transacted the business of this Council for Virginia.Rymer's Fœdera, tom. vii, iv, 147.Even under the government of the Company there had been precedents for the establishment of a "precinct" within Virginia independent of the Jamestown government. Such a plantation had been that of Captain Martin and that proposed by Rich and Argall, and a charter for such had been given to the Leyden pilgrims. Baltimore wrote to askfor a precinct, pleading the king's promise already made that he might choose a part of Virginia. Here he would still be the head of a little independent state—a state in which the mass might be said without molestation. Before another winter set in he abandoned Avalon to fishermen and such hardy folk, and took ship for the James River, where he arrived in October, 1629.
Virginia antagonism.Baltimore's reception in Virginia was most inhospitable. He had perhaps counted on his former relation to the colony as a councilor to assure him a welcome. But the Virginians of that time were Sandys and Southampton men. They may have remembered that Calvert had been Sandys's enemy and political rival, and that he belonged to the faction of Sir Thomas Smyth in the company. The members of that faction had been the executioners of the company when they could no longer control it. Calvert was one of the later council, which had tried to take away insidiously the privileges granted to Virginians by their charter from the Virginia Company. This attack on their liberties they had stoutly resisted, even to cutting off a piece of one of the ears of the clerk of their own assembly for abetting it. Now a nobleman of the detested faction, an advocate of absolute government and a close friend of the king, had come among them. Baltimore might easily expect to secure the governorship of Virginia itself.Note 8.Perhapsit is hardly necessary to go even so far afield for a motive. The prospect of a settlement of Roman Catholics within the limits of the colony was in itself enough to excite the opposition of the Virginia churchmen. Baltimore's party of Catholics was not the only one repelled from Virginia about this time. Soon after Lord Baltimore's visit, perhaps, or just before, the Virginians refused permission to a company of Irish Catholics to settle within their bounds. These appear to have gone afterward to the island of St. Christopher's, where again Protestant fellow-colonists fell out with them about religion, so that they were finally sent to settle the neighboring island of Montserrat.Note 9.
Character of the early Virginians.The Virginians, after all their sufferings, were now prosperous in a gross way, reaping large profits from tobacco, and living in riotous profusion after the manner of men beginning to emerge from the hardships and perils of a pioneer condition into sudden opulence.Leah and Rachel, and De Vries Voyages,passim.Their rude living did not at all prevent the colonists from being fastidious about their religion—it was the seventeenth century. Most of the Virginia clergy at this period were as reckless in life as the people, but the Protestantism of the colony was incorruptible. Some of the rabble even showed their piety by railing at the newly arrived papist nobleman.
Expulsion of Baltimore.A weapon of defense against Baltimore was ready to hand. Three years before his coming instructions had been sent from England to Yeardleyto proffer the oath of supremacy "to all such as come thither with an intention to plant and reside, which, if any shall refuse, he is to be retorned or shipped from thence home." This order may not have been intended for so great a personage as a nobleman of the Court. It may have been meant only to head off humble Irishmen like those who settled Montserrat, or it may have been merely a fence against Separatists. But it served the turn of the alarmed colonists. Pott and Mathews, Claiborne and Roger Smyth, who led the opposition, offered the oath to Baltimore. Baltimore had sacrificed his place in the Privy Council rather than take this oath so contrary to his conscience, and he now again stood by his religious convictions, and took ship for England as ordered by the Virginia Council. He was disappointed and already shaken in health. The members of the council, appalled at their own boldness, perhaps, wrote to the king in self-defense. There is still extant an old manuscript record book of the seventeenth century which contains the instructions to Yeardley.MS. Book of Instructions, Library of Congress, folio 136.Immediately following, as if to put it under the shelter of royal authority, is the report of the council, without date or signature, that the oath had been offered to Baltimore and refused.
Baltimore's seal.Baltimore's hardships during two voyages to Newfoundland, and a winter in the rude abodes of pioneers there, his illness during that winter, theconstant spectacle of sickness and death about him, and the disappointment caused by his rude reception in Virginia, were enough, one would think, to have broken his resolution. He went back to England "much decayed in his strength," as he confessed; but, strangely enough, this accomplished man of the world, whose career had been that of a courtier, was far from living in ease and quietness as his friends had expected him to do. He was possessed of a passion for peopling the wilderness. He had written to the king from America that he was resolved to spend "the poore remaynder" of his days in colony-planting, his "inclinations carrying him naturally" to such work. To what extent he was prompted by a desire to leave to his heir the semi-sovereignty of a principality, and how far he was carried by a naturally adventurous temper hitherto latent, we have no means of deciding; but one can hardly resist the conclusion that a fervent religious zeal was the underlying spring of a resolution so indomitable. Like many another man of that time, Calvert was lifted from worldliness to high endeavor by religious enthusiasm. The king felt obliged to interpose his authority; he forbade Baltimore's risking his life in another voyage, but he granted him a charter for a new palatinate on the north side of the Potomac.
Death of the first Lord Baltimore.Lord Baltimore was doomed never to see the desire of his eyes. He died on the 15th of April, 1632, before the charter had passed, leaving theplanting of Maryland to be carried forward by his son and heir, Cecilius. The charter of Maryland passed the seals on the 22d of the following June in favor of Cecilius, the second Lord Baltimore.
The charter of Maryland.The Maryland charter was no doubt the work of George Calvert's own hand. Its main provisions are identical with those of Avalon; but it put the proprietary in a still better position. He held Avalon by knight's service, Maryland in free and common soccage, and the holdings of Maryland settlers would be under the proprietary, not under the crown. In fact, the crown retained practically no rights of value in Maryland beyond the bare allegiance of the settlers. Larger privileges of trade were conceded to Maryland than had been given to Avalon. In one respect the liberties of the future settlers were apparently better guarded in the Maryland charter, for there is a faint promise of a representative government in its phraseology. But even this was not definitely assured. In a single regard the charter of Maryland appears less favorable to the Catholic religion than its predecessors. Historic specialists with a religious bias, doing their small best to render the current of history turbid, have not failed to convince themselves by means of the new clause that Maryland was a Protestant colony. The patronage and advowsons of all churches had been conferred on the proprietary in the Avaloncharter, and a like concession is made in the Maryland grant; but to this, in the Maryland charter, is attached a sort of "lean-to"—a qualifying clause that appears to limit the ecclesiastical organization of the colony to Anglican forms. "Together with license and power," runs the charter, "to build and found Churches, Chapels and Oratories in convenient and fit places within the premises, and to cause them to be dedicated and consecrated according to the ecclesiastical laws of our kingdom of England."Note 10.In 1632 the Baltimore family was openly Catholic. The Puritans were raging against every indulgence shown by the court to Romanists. The clamor of the Catholic-baiters did not stop with a demand that Romanists should be expelled from England.Rushworth, Part I, vol. i, 141, 1623.The Commons had a few years earlier petitioned the King that they be excluded from "all other Your Highness's dominions." The founding of an English colony that might make a home for English and Irish Romanists was a more difficult project in the reign of Charles than it had been in the time of James when Avalon was granted. The clause which allowed Baltimore to dedicate his churches according to the ecclesiastical laws of England excites admiration.Note 11.It graciously permitted an Anglican establishment in Maryland; it did not oblige Baltimore to do anything at all, nor did it, in fact, put any constraint whatever on his actions in this regard. The impotent clause which seemed to limit, but did not limit, the ecclesiastical organization was breathlessly followed by one farfrom impotent—a masterpiece of George Calvert's skill. It gave to the proprietary the legal power exercised from ancient times by the Bishops of Durham as counts-palatine. The regalities of Durham having been pared down by Henry VIII, the charter somewhat furtively reached back after the local absolutism of the middle ages by giving Baltimore all the temporal power ever possessed by any Bishop of Durham.Note 12.But if alarm should be taken at the giving of powers so vast to a Roman Catholic subject, there might be reassurance for timid souls in a clause in imitation of older charters than Calvert's, which stipulated that no interpretation should be put upon the charter by which God's holy and true Christian religion might be prejudiced. Ambiguity spread from the charter to some of the early Maryland laws, which wore a Protestant or a Catholic face according to the side from which they were approached.
Condition of English Catholics.When George Calvert projected his new southern colony he had every reason to suppose that it would be quickly supplied with settlers from the discontented English and Irish Catholics. The statute enacted in the third year of James, soon after the Gunpowder Plot, put those who adhered to the Roman communion in a precarious and exasperating situation. For the first year that a Catholic wholly neglected the sacraments of the English church he must pay twenty pounds. Thiswas raised to forty the second year, and to sixty for every year of conscientious abstention thereafter.An act for the better discovering and repressing of popish recusants. Also, An act to prevent, etc., 3 Jac. I, chaps. iv and v.If he did not attend the parish church at all, the luxury of a conscience cost him twenty pounds a month, which, as money then went, was a large sum. If he were a rich landholder, the king might take the use or rentals of two thirds of his land until he should conform. The oath of allegiance by which he was to be tested was made ingeniously offensive to a Catholic conscience. If a Romanist should persuade a Protestant to accept his own faith he was guilty of treason, as was also his convert. The man who harbored a Roman Catholic neglecting to attend the parish church was to be fined ten pounds a month. Marriage by a Romish priest invalidated accruing land tenures. The Catholic was not suffered to send his children beyond seas for an education, nor yet to keep a schoolmaster of his own faith; he could not serve as an executor; he might not have the charge of any child; his house might be searched for Catholic books; he was not allowed to keep weapons; and when at last his vexed and troubled life was over, his dead body might not be buried among the graves of his forefathers in the parish churchyard.
Administration of the law.The administration of this law was attended by many aggravations. The pursuivants took the very cattle and household goods of the poor; from the rich they exacted large payments, failing which, they pounced on valuable plate and jewels, which they seized under pretense that these werearticles of superstition or the concealed property of Jesuits.Lingard, viii, 189, cites Rymer, xxii, 13; Hardwicke Papers, 1446, and a private letter.It is said that James derived a revenue of thirty-six thousand pounds a year from the fines of lay Catholics. To the several Scotch favorites of the king were assigned certain rich recusants from whom they might squeeze whatever could be got by the leverage of the law.
Influence of foreign policy.Very embarrassing to the foreign policy of England was the severity of English laws against Catholics, and Lord Treasurer Burleigh found it needful to publish in Elizabeth's time, for circulation in all the courts of Europe, a treatise on The Execution of Justice in England and the Maintenance of Public Order and Christian Peace; and in the following reign James himself turned pamphleteer and published an Apologie for the Oath of Allegiance.1583, reprinted 1688.1609, sm. 4to, pp. 112.There were periods when pressure from abroad softened the administration of the law. But it was only irregularly and intermittently that the Government could be brought to grant indulgences that roused the pious wrath of Puritans and reduced the revenue of the king and his favorites. If Spain, and afterward France, made it a condition precedent to a marriage treaty that the penal laws against English recusants should be relaxed, Parliament, resenting foreign dictation, demanded of the king a renewal of the severities against papists.Ellis Collection, first series, iii, 128.Twenty-four Catholics suffered capitally in James's reign, before 1618; and when in 1622 it was necessary to condone Catholicism in order to conciliate Spain, it is said that four hundredJesuits and priests were set free on bail at one time.Neal, ii, ch. ii. Rapin, 215, 2d ed.The number of Catholics, lay and cleric, released in this year is put at four thousand, but this may be an exaggeration.
Catholic emigration small.In 1627, and again in 1628, Lord Baltimore took Catholics with him to Newfoundland and settled priests there. The English court was just then sailing on a Protestant tack, and England had allied itself with the Huguenots of La Rochelle. Another of the good works by which the government of Charles and Buckingham was endeavoring to prove its sanctification was the enforcement of the penal statutes against Roman Catholics. It is notable that Baltimore sailed with the first Catholic emigrants to Avalon about the time of the setting in of the movement toward Massachusetts which swelled at length into the great Puritan exodus. The five years of delay caused by the change from Avalon to Maryland, and also perhaps by the exhaustion of Baltimore's resources and his death, was unfavorable to the project of a Catholic province. The English government by 1634 had grown more lenient toward Romanists, the co-religionists of the queen. The work at which Laud kept all hands busy just then was the suppression of Puritanism, and thousands of Puritans were by this time shaking the dust of England from their feet and seeking a home in the western wilderness, persuaded that the Church of England under Laudhad all sails set for Rome.Harl. Miscell., ii, 492, and following, where passages from contemporary writers are quoted.This illusion regarding the purposes of the archbishop and his party, which alarmed the Puritans, heartened the Catholics, who naturally preferred to stay at home where a flood tide seemed to be setting toward Catholicism. The small Catholic migration to Maryland was not to be compared with that stream of Puritan emigration that about this time poured into New England twenty thousand people in a decade. The fall of Laud and the rise of the Puritans to power put a complete stop to the New England migration, but it failed to quicken the Catholic movement, for Maryland herself had become sadly involved in the civil commotions of the time.
Baltimore's partners.Cecilius Calvert undoubtedly counted on a large migration of Catholic recusants, and the documents show that the Jesuit order in England took great interest in the movement. The second Lord Baltimore was joined by partners in the financial risks of the venture, and though we meet with more than one allusion to these adventurers whose interest in the colony was apparently still active twenty years after its beginning, they were profoundly silent partners; their names are nowhere recorded, and we are left to conjecture the origin of their interest in Maryland.Note 13.
The religious aim."The first and most important design of the Most Illustrious Baron, which ought also to be the aim of the rest, who go in the same ship, is, not tothink so much of planting fruits and trees in a land so fertile, as of sowing the seeds of religion and piety." This was Lord Baltimore's authoritative declaration, and because it varies in form from the stock phrases so common at the time, it bears an air of some sincerity, though it is diplomatically ambiguous.
Efforts to obstruct the ships.Baltimore's opponents made great exertions to prevent the departure of the Ark and the Dove, which were to bear faithful Catholics across the flood to a new world. A story was started that these ships were carrying nuns to Spain, and another tale that found believers was that they had soldiers on board going to France to serve against the English. It was told that Calvert's men had abused the customs officers at Gravesend, and sailed without cockets in contempt of all authority, the people on board refusing the oath of allegiance. The Ark was stopped and brought back by order of the Privy Council, and the oath of allegiance was given to a hundred and twenty-eight passengers.Letters of Baltimore to Wentworth in Strafford papers,passim.But the ships came to again at the Isle of Wight, and when they got away at last there were near three hundred passengers on board, including Jesuit priests. Most of the passengers were "laboring men"; how many were Catholic and how many Protestant it is impossible now to tell. That the leaders and the gentry were, most of them, Catholics there is every reason to believe. The passengers called Protestants were rather non-Catholics, preciselythe kind of emigrants that would give the Jesuits the converts of which they tell exultantly in their letters. There was no Protestant minister on board, nor was there the slightest provision for Protestant worship, present or future.Note 14.
Toleration.Toleration was the Baltimore policy from the beginning. It was no doubt in the original plan of George Calvert and his associates, whoever they were.Note 15.The Provincial of the Society of Jesus privately furnished Baltimore with arguments in defense of this policy before the first colony sailed. The founders of Maryland were men of affairs shaping plan to opportunity, and the situation was inexorable. Toleration and protection was all that English Roman Catholics could hope to find in traveling thus to the ends of the earth.
Toleration a policy.Cecilius gave positive instruction that on shipboard acts of the Roman Catholic religion should be performed with as much privacy as possible, so as not to offend the Protestant passengers "whereby any just complaint may hereafter be made by them in Virginia or in England." There is no pretense of theory here; all is based on the exigency of the situation and sound policy. The policy was George Calvert's, whose school was the court of James, and whose whole career shows that he entertained no advanced views of human liberty. Had he held toleration as a theory of government, his doctrine would have been more liberal thanthat of Ralegh and Bacon and far in advance of that of contemporary Puritan leaders. They quite misunderstand the man who regard him as a progressive thinker; he was a conservative opportunist. Still less was Cecilius a man likely to act on general principles.
Religious observance at sea.We have seen how religiously the Puritans passed their time at sea in long daily expositions of Scripture and other devotions, and that sometimes even the watch was set with a psalm. Not less religious were the Catholic pilgrims, and though the form is strikingly different, the believing and zealous age is the same. To make things safe, the Jesuit fathers committed the principal parts of the ship in some detail to the protection of God in the first place, and then to that "of His Most Holy Mother and of St. Ignatius and of all the angels of Maryland."Relatio Itineris, p. 10.These angels to whom the safety of Maryland was committed were kept busy by special spiritual opponents. A dangerous storm was raised on one occasion by all the "malignant spirits of the tempest and all the evil genii of Maryland."Note 16.But Father White circumvented this combination of ordinary storm spirits with imps of Protestant proclivities by setting forth to Christ and the Blessed Virgin, while the storm was at its worst, "that the purpose of this journey was to glorify the Blood of our Redeemer in the salvation of the Barbarians, and also to build up a kingdomfor the Saviour and to consecrate another gift to the Immaculate Virgin his mother."Relatio Itineris, 16, 17.The last clause apparently refers to Maryland, as if it were named in honor of the Virgin. The representation was effective; the good father had scarcely ceased speaking when the storm began to abate.