XII
Kent Island and the Backside of Virginia
At the time of Lord Baltimore’s arrival the Virginians were already suffering from mass hypertension induced by fear. Early in the summer of 1629 there had been another massacre along the James River, and no sooner had this Indian uprising been quelled than rumors were rife that the Spaniards were about to attack.
Captain Claiborne led the colonial forces against the offending Pamunkeys of the Powhatan Confederacy in an effort to “utterly exterpate” them, that being the settled policy of the colony. No thought had been given to any further trade with these neighboring savages since the first bloody massacre they committed in 1622. The Pamunkeys were fair game and in 1629 the English soldiers “obtained more spoil and revenge than they had done since the great massacre.”
But even more pressing than the Indian war that year was the feverish urgency about rebuilding and fortifying the fort at Point Comfort to protect the plantations against a surprise attack from Florida. Nervously on the alert for Spanish spies and treachery, the protestant Virginians not only didn’t trust the intentions of their Catholic neighbors to the south, they didn’t trust their own king. After all, they no doubt reasoned, Charles did have a Catholic wife! And didn’t he have as his new advisor, William Laud, the Bishop of London, who everyone knew was trying to reconcile the English Church to Rome?
The bigotries of the seventeenth century were indeed unreasoning. But they were very real to the Virginians in their lonesome outpost of civilization. To them Spaniard and Catholic were one.
Now into their midst came Lord Baltimore! Had he not once connived with Gondomar, the hated Spanish ambassador, to bring about the marriage of the baby Prince Charles to the Infanta Maria of Spain? Maybe he was in league now with Spain under some subtle arrangement made by King Charles himself. Anything was possible to the fear-ridden colonists on the James.
To dispose of this unwelcome intruder, without the risk of too greatly offending the king, they had to have something fool-proof on which to hang their collective hats. In the end, they offered Baltimore the prescribed oath of allegiance and supremacy, making it mandatory for him to subscribe to the supreme authority of the English sovereign in all matters ecclesiastical and spiritual. He refused to take the oath and so was ordered to leave the colony.
Always in the front rank of the opposition to Lord Baltimore of course had been the merchants who foresaw the loss of their tidewater trade, but even more especially William Claiborne and his followers with their own grand plan for colonization and trade on the backside of Virginia. Working for them in addition to fear and prejudice during this clash of rival plans was the rising sense of political independence in the colony, an increasing determination to fight for the sovereignty of possessed land and for “democrattical rights.”