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. This was 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 were articles 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 hundred Jesuits 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.
XII.
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 Laud had 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.]
XIII.
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 to think 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, precisely the 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.]