The Lost Capital of Maryland, II
Reilly, Louis W.
514 THE COMMONWEAL March 17, 1926 THE LOST CAPITAL OF MARYLAND II. THE CROWN SEIZES THE COLONY By LOUIS W. REILLY WE have seen, in a previous article, the highhanded fashion in which the...
...Yet the malcontents were not ashamed of having borne false witness...
...Determined to subdue the countumacious Puritans, Governor Stone set out from St...
...In his opening message to the new legislature he referred to the gracious intentions of the King in complying with their request to grant them a Protestant governor...
...Mary's in March, 1655, with 130 men in a dozen small boats...
...In January, 1689, they heard the news of the expected invasion of England by William of Orange, and in April of that year a revolutionary society was formed among them under the title of "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...
...Further complaints were made to King Charles II...
...and its refusal to establish Protestantism by law and its practice of granting equal protection to all Christian denominations, was always the chief fault found with it...
...Lord Baltimore easily vindicated his government every time it was assailed...
...Led by Coode, Henry Jowles, Kenelm Cheseldine and others, the associators took up arms against the deputy governors, drove them into the garrison at Mattapany, and forced them, on August 1, 1689, to surrender...
...Mary's men had been killed by a cannon ball fired from the merchant ship, Golden Lyon, which the Ann Arundel men had impressed into their service, a battle took place between the two forces...
...There is, therefore, nothing in the records of the colony to justify the statements of the association, but many facts in its history for years before the Protestant Revolution, to prove them false...
...By a poetical justice, the Puritans, who were both the quickest to rebel against religious liberty in a land to which they had been welcomed from Protestant persecution, and the most bitter in agitating for intolerance, became themselves in turn victims of the establishment of Protestantism as the state religion...
...But the monarch procured "a legal opinion" from a subservient judge to cloak his invasion of his subject's rights, and on the pretense of "it being a case of necessity," he did not wait for judicial sanction but hurried forward a representative to grasp the reins of power...
...After inveighing against the coercion of conscience, it provided that no one professing belief in Jesus Christ should be "in any wise troubled, molested or discountenanced for or in respect of his or her religion, nor in the free exercise thereof...
...the Assembly pouring forth its congratulations for the royal protection and its redemption "from the arbitrary will and pleasure of a tyrannical Popish government...
...that his aim should be public unity, and that if any person or officer should molest any person, professing to believe in Jesus Christ, on account of his religion, he would protect the person molested and punish the offender...
...The priests are provided for, and the Quakers take care of those that are speakers...
...The spread of this organization was hastened by rumors, one of which declared that, because the nine deputy governors to whom Lord Baltimore had confided the administration during his sojourn in London, had ordered the public arms to be collected, "a Popish plot" had been concocted, and the massacre of the Protestants planned, with the aid of neighboring savages...
...In January, 1655, a letter from Lord Baltimore was received by Stone upbraiding him for yielding the government of the province "without striking one stroke...
...Here are ten or twelve counties, and in them at least 20,000 souls...
...the government of the colony in the hands of the crown and administered by men hitherto unknown to it...
...The Puritans would not yield to the proclamation...
...He produced a copy of the law of religious liberty passed in 1649 and made permanent in the enactments of Maryland...
...The abuses complained of were imputed to the attorney-general, the receiver of quit-rents, and the secretary of the province, but these were ascribed to them personally and were expressly disclaimed by the deputy governors when the promise of redress was made...
...Again, in 1676, Charles Calvert was haled before the Lords of Trade and Plantations on the score that "the province of Maryland is in a deplorable condition for want of an established ministry...
...Over and over again, the government of Lord Baltimore was denounced in England...
...that they were plotting with the French and the Indians...
...As he approached Annapolis, the inhabitants sent him messages proposing to submit to him on three conditions...
...When James II ascended the throne, the Protestants of Maryland naturally became apprehensive that the law-made supremacy of their religion in England would suffer some injury during his reign, and that their own freedom of conscience might be impaired...
...Thereupon he resumed the office of governor...
...Mr...
...THE CROWN SEIZES THE COLONY By LOUIS W. REILLY WE have seen, in a previous article, the highhanded fashion in which the commissioners sent out by Cromwell, deposed the acting governor, Captain Stone, and with the aid of a packed legislature, in which the majority were of the PuritanProtestant profession of faith, reversed Calvert's policy of toleration...
...his officers and agents degraded and harassed in every manner...
...Hammond made this report: "I went unarmed amongst the Sons of Thunder, only three or four to row me, and despite all their braves of raising the country, calling in his servants to apprehend me, threatened me with the severity of their new-made law, myself alone seized and carried away the records in defiance...
...It grieved them that the thousand or two of Catholics among the 25,000 inhabitants of the colony were not oppressed...
...Foremost among the leaders of that association was the notorious John Coode, a minister, who was subsequently convicted of the grossest blasphemies by the very Protestant government which he had helped to set up...
...The victors promised the vanquished quarter, and on that understanding the latter surrendered...
...the proprietary himself impeached to the crown by that Assembly...
...that the deputy governors had delayed to acknowledge and proclaim King William...
...They lost only four men, and they slew or wounded about fifty of their opponents and captured all but four or five...
...Hence Puritanism practically vanished from the city it originally dominated...
...But it was not until March, 1658, six years after Bennett and Claiborne had usurped the government, that the Palatinate was actually restored to Lord Baltimore...
...Luke Barber...
...that the churches were all appropriated to "Popish idolatry...
...The royal government, so established, lasted twenty-three years, at the conclusion of which period, the rule of the then Lord Baltimore was restored by George I. In drawing up their petition to King William to justify their rebellion and to persuade him to take charge of the colony by means of a governor to be appointed by him directly, the associators alleged many malpractices and oppressions—that the officers of the province were under the control of the Jesuits...
...and that "above all, we consider ourselves, during this general jubilee, discharged from all manner of fidelity to the chief magistrates here, because they have departed from their allegiance, upon which alone fidelity depended, by endeavoring to deprive us of our lives, properties, and liberties, which they were bound to protect...
...The Puritans thereafter completely had their way in the colony for more than a year...
...The first act of that Assembly was the passage of a bill officially recognizing William and Mary, and its second was to establish the Protestant religion by law and to provide for its maintenance by public taxation...
...and, to crown the whole, the reply of the governors and council, in answer to their articles, was so entirely satisfactory that the lower House, in a body, presented them their thanks for its favorable character...
...Against this arbitrary course, the proprietary protested...
...Then, in October, 1656, Lord Baltimore, having received the decision of the Committee of Trade that he was entitled to his province, sent word to his lieutenant and council to require the people of Ann Arundel County to peacefully submit to his government, adding: His Lordship wills and requires his said lieutenant and council that the law in the said province instituted, "an act concerning religion," and passed heretofore there with his Lordship's assent, whereby all persons who profess to believe in Jesus Christ have liberty of conscience and free exercise of their religion there, be duly observed in the said province by all the inhabitants thereof, and that the penalties mentioned in the said act be duly put in execution upon any offenders against the same...
...The Puritans were victorious...
...Their headquarters at Providence, or the Town at Proctor's, as Annapolis was then called, became a storm-centre of unrest...
...Among them, in addition to the charge that religious March 17, 1926 THE COMMONWEAL liberty was impartially enforced, was the allegation that the civil and military offices were in the hands of Catholics...
...John Hammond to Patuxent to recover the records of the colony and to seize a magazine of arms and ammunition that belonged to the Puritans...
...that no allegiance was known in the province except to the proprietary...
...They do not even insinuate the slightest danger to the Protestant religion or impute to the proprietary administration a single act or intention militating against the free enjoyment and exercise of it...
...They were then set aside by the King, who, nevertheless, decided to seize the government of Maryland, without authority of law...
...and but three Protestant ministers of the Church of England...
...He showed that all Christian denominations were tolerated and none were supported at public expense...
...Shortly after he arrived, he dissolved the Convention on April 9, 1692, and summoned an Assembly...
...that he would make no difference of person, in conferring offices, favors, or rewards, for or in respect of religion, but merely as they should be found faithful and well-deserving, and endued with moral virtues and abilities...
...He sent a Mr...
...that the proprietary continually exercised the power of declaring laws void by proclamation...
...The association, after deposing the proprietary's representatives, administered the palatinate by means of a convention until April, 1692, when, at its instance, the government was assumed by the crown...
...The first governor sent out from England by the crown to rule Maryland was Sir Lionel Copley...
...that murders and outrages of every kind were committed by Catholics upon Protestants...
...That this whole petition was a series of falsehoods is proved by the state of the colony only four years before, which is the closest date concerning which there is unquestioned evidence extant, and by the disposition that the King made of the document itself...
...Two of the commonwealth's commissioners, for instance, Bennett and Matthew, appealed to Cromwell not to restore the province of the proprietary in 1656, and their leading argument was directed to rouse his fanaticism by stating that religious toleration prevailed...
...He brought forth the oath of office prescribed by his father for the governors of the province from 1636 until 1649, by which each of them was made to swear "that he would not, by himself or another, directly or indirectly, trouble, molest, or discountenance, any person professing to believe in Jesus Christ, for or in respect of religion...
...Among the articles of the capitulation was one excluding Catholics from all offices, civil and military, within the province...
...that the very acknowledgment of English sovereignty was regarded as a crime...
...In 1688, the lower House of the Assembly, which was composed almost exclusively of Protestants, presented to the upper council a list of the grievances that then troubled them, but the historian McMahon says: They do not ascribe a single act of deliberate oppression or wanton exercise of power immediately to the proprietary or his governors...
...They were presented under the expectation of redress...
...and to my knowledge, at the sending out of parties (as occasion served) he gave strict command that if they met any of the Ann Arundel men, they should not fire the first gun, nor, upon pain of death, plunder any...
...When they were investigated by the Privy Council, which sought to annul Lord Baltimore's charter, they were not verified by any evidence...
...For as the form of Protestantism which was singled out for support was the Church of England, they had to contribute to the exaltation and maintenance of a church in Annapolis and elsewhere that was obnoxious to them, and to see many of their children eventually join the fashionable sect...
...but no care is taken to build up churches in the Protestant religion...
...Here the curtain drops and when it next rises it presents to our view the proprietary dominion prostrate...
...And this union of church and state, so made on the ruins of equal rights, was kept up until after the Revolutionary War...
...In the end of this declaration," the messenger afterwards testified, "the Governor did protest, as in the presence of Almighty God, that he came, not in a hostile way to do them any hurt, but sought by all means possible, to reclaim them by faire meanes...
...and the Catholic inhabitants the objects of jealousy and penalties...
...And, finally, he transmitted full lists of the officers of the province from which it was clear that honors and emoluments were distributed without a religious test...
...but two or three days later, the Puritans condemned ten to death, including Governor Stone, and executed four of them, and would have taken the lives of the others if some women and the common soldiers had not entreated that no more prisoners be killed in cold blood...
...but he, either not putting trust in their promises or not liking a qualified submission, disembarked near the town and sent forward a proclamation by Dr...
...The opposition to the proprietary on account of his religion and of the toleration of Catholics in his colony, which was at the bottom of the insubordination of the Puritans, was a leaven of malignity that was constantly at work throughout the province and manifested its mischievous presence at frequent intervals...
...So, after one of the St...
Vol. 3 • March 1926 • No. 19
