Henry VIII, Founder of the English Church, as he had, whilom, been, Defender of the Roman Faith, was no friend of toleration; but the rigor of his system was somewhat relaxed during the reign of the sixth Edward. Mary, daughter of Henry, and sister of Edward, re-constructed the great ancestral church, and the world is hardly divided in opinion as to the character of her reign. Elizabeth re-established the church that had been founded by her father; and her successor James I of England and VI of Scotland,—the Protestant son of a Catholic mother,—while he openly adhered to the church of his realm, could not avoid some exhibitions of coquettish tenderness for the faith of his slaughtered parent.
But, amid all these changes, there was one class upon which the wrath of the Church of England and of the Church of Rome, met in accordant severity;—this was the Puritan and ultra Puritan sect,—to which I have alluded at the commencement of this discourse,—whose lot was even more disastrous under the Protestant Elizabeth, than under the Catholic Mary. The remorseless courts of her commissioners, who inquisitorially tried these religionists by interrogation on oath, imprisoned them, if they remained lawfully silent and condemned them if they honestly confessed!
A congregation of these sectaries had existed for some time on the boundaries of Lincoln, Nottingham and York, under the guidance of Richard Clifton and John Robinson, the latter of whom was a modest, polished, and learned man. This christian fold was organized about 1602; but worried by ceaseless persecution, it fled to Holland, where its members, fearing they would be absorbed in the country that had entertained them so hospitably, resolved in 1620 to remove to that portion of the great American wilderness, known as North Virginia. Such, in the chronology of our Continent, was the first decisive emigration of our parent people to the New World, for the sake of opinion.
It is neither my purpose, nor is it necessary, to sketch the subsequent history of this New England emigration, or of the followers, who swelled it into colonial significance.
Its great characteristic, seems to me, to have been, an unalterable will to worship God according to its own sectarian ideas, and to afford an equal right and protection to all who thought as it did, or were willing to conform to its despotic and anchoritic austerity. It is not very clear, what were its notions of abstract political liberty; yet there can be very little doubt what its practical opinions of equality must have been, when we remember the common dangers, duties, and interests of such a band of emigrants on the dreary, ice-bound, savage haunted, coasts of Massachusetts.
"When Adam delved, and Eve span,
Pray who was then the gentleman?"
may well be asked of a community which for so long a time, had been the guest of foreigners, and now saw the first great human and divine law of liberty and equality, taught by the compulsion of labor and mutual protection, on a strip of land between the sea and the forest. The colonists were literally reduced to first principles; they were stripped of the comforts, pomps, ambitions, distinctions, of the Old World, and they embraced the common destiny of a hopeful future in the New.[4] They had been persecuted for their opinions, but that did not make them tolerant of the opinions of their persecutors. It was better, then, that oppressor and oppressed should live apart in both hemispheres; and thus, in sincerity, if not in justice, their future history exhibits many bad examples of the malign spirit from which they fled in Europe. If they were, essentially, Republicans, their democracy was limited to a political and religious equality of Puritan sectarianism;—it had not ripened into the democracy of an all embracing Christianity.[5]
These occurrences took place during the reign of the prince who united the Scottish and English thrones. At the Court of James, and in his intimate service, during nearly the whole period of his sovereignty, was a distinguished personage, who, though his name does not figure grandly on the page of history, was deeply interested in the destiny of our continent.
Sir George Calvert, was descended from a noble Flemish family, which emigrated and settled in the North of England, where, in 1582, the Founder of Maryland was born. After taking his Bachelor's degree at Oxford and travelling on the Continent, he became, at the age of twenty-five, private Secretary to Sir Robert Cecil, the Lord Treasurer—afterwards the celebrated Earl of Salisbury. In 1609, he appears as one of the patentees named in the new Charter then granted to the Virginia Company. After the death of his ministerial patron, he was honored with knighthood and made clerk of the crown to the Privy Council. This brought him closely to the side of his sovereign. In 1619, he was appointed one of the Secretaries of State, and was then, also, elected to Parliament; first for his native Yorkshire, and subsequently for Oxford. He continued in office, under James, as Secretary of State, until near that monarch's death, and resigned in 1624.