If one stops to consider what a howl of outraged virtue would have been raised by the people of Great Britain, and what a hurricane would have descended upon the head of the monarch, had he granted the Catholics a charter without stipulating for freedom of worship, it will be realized that the much-vaunted "toleration" of Lord Baltimore's colony was not entirely an evidence of his own broad-mindedness. However, this toleration had its limits. Disbelief in the doctrine of the Trinity was a capital offense.
In 1634, the little town of St. Mary was established as the center for the new colony. Few Catholics of the home country seem to have been anxious to take advantage of the opportunities offered, and Lord Baltimore began to seek tenants elsewhere. As early as 1634, he was writing to Boston and urging Massachusetts people to emigrate, but the first great invasion of Puritans came in 1649.
Inspired by enthusiasm for the cause of the King, after he had lost his head, the Virginians under the leadership of Governor Berkeley passed ordinances expelling non-conformists from their colony, and a thousand of these who had previously gone from New England to Virginia were driven out and took refuge in Maryland, establishing the settlement which later became Annapolis.
During the next generation most of the arrivals in Maryland were either Puritans or Quakers. The policy of tolerance was not held to apply to Quakers, who, by a law of 1659, were to be whipped out of any town which they entered, but this measure does not seem to have been enforced very long, and English Quakers from other colonies soon formed an important part of the population.
In 1689, word reached the New World of the expulsion of James II, and the occupation of the British throne by the uncompromisingly Protestant House of Orange. While James II was on the throne a general alarm had arisen throughout the colonies over the prospects of Catholic aggression.
Many of the colonies contained a sprinkling of the Huguenot refugees who had been driven out of France only a few years before because of their Protestantism, and there were thus in every colony men who knew the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes and the terrible persecution which followed. The tragedy of the Thirty Years War was also still fresh in the minds of many.
There was no disposition in America, therefore, to look upon the Catholics as a group who, if in power, would distinguish themselves by a policy of broad toleration, and the one colony in which there was any appreciable number of Catholics, namely, Maryland, naturally felt the situation most keenly. The number of Catholics in the colony at that time, however, even including Negroes, was only a few thousand, and their capital of St. Mary was a hamlet of scarcely sixty houses. Probably eleven-twelfths of the population of Maryland were Protestants, and of them a majority were Puritans. These lost no time in taking steps to protect their freedom which they knew the Catholic church would never tolerate if able to do otherwise, and by a homemade revolution turned out the proprietary government and set up a staunch Protestant regime. Under this new rule, however, the few Catholic residents were subjected to no harm, but were placed under approximately the same disabilities as they had long lived under in Great Britain. Thereupon the little Roman Catholic principality in the United States was at an end, and the then Lord Baltimore, fourth of that title, shortly conformed by returning to his ancestral Protestant faith.
The Revolution of 1689 cost St. Mary its existence, for the Puritans transferred the capital to their own town of Providence (rebaptized Annapolis), and the headquarters of the Roman Catholics soon relapsed into the wilderness.
Maryland continued to be almost wholly an English colony, with more than its share of Negroes and transported convicts, and with a very slight sprinkling of aliens, much as all the colonies had. When the Acadians were transported from Nova Scotia in 1755, a considerable number of them were landed in Maryland.