With the General Court dominated by the overbearing and avaricious Governor no man was safe. At any moment one might be hauled before the bar, charged with some petty offence, found guilty, and given a ruinous fine. Mathews said that there were an "infinite number of particular men's grievances."[14] William Claiborne thought it strange that Harvey "should so demean himself," for "all men were wronged, and even good and bad had forsaken him."[15] It was in every man's mouth that "no justice was done." When a report of these things reached England, Sir John Wolstenholm, one of the Virginia Commissioners, said that "Sir John Harvey stunk in Court and city."[16]
Harvey's attempts to make himself absolute, his disregard of other men's rights, his perversion of justice did not go unchallenged. Soon the meetings of the Council became stormy. The Governor insisted that he, as the King's substitute, had a right to determine all things. The Councillors were merely his assistants, whose duty it was to advise him, but not to oppose him. But the Councillors dissented vigorously. Look at your commission, they told him, and you will see that it directs that all matters must be determined by the majority of voices. Does it not say that the King grants to the Governor and Council "and the greater number of you respectively full power and authority to execute" the duties of the executive body?
Soon Harvey was filling his letters with complaints of the opposition of the Council. "For instead of giving me assistance, they stand contesting and disputing my authority, averring that I can do nothing but what they shall advise me, and that my power extendeth no further than a bare casting voice."[17] He had shown them a letter from the King strengthening his commission, but they refused to budge from their position. He would be grateful if his Majesty would be so explicit "that the place of Governor and the duty of Councillors may be known and distinguished."[18]
The Privy Council answered by warning both sides to put an end to their disputes and cooperate with each other in advancing the good of the colony. So they drew up and signed a formal reconciliation. They promised "to swallow up and bury" all complaints, and to turn their "alienated and distempered" minds to thoughts of love and peace. The Councillors vowed to give the Governor "all the service, honor, and due respect which belongs to him as his Majesty's substitute."[19]
The reconciliation proved a sham. Harvey continued to be overbearing and arbitrary; the Councillors were as bitter as ever. When one of them, Thomas Hinton, in an outburst of anger gave Harvey some "ill words," he ousted him from his seat. Love and peace were far indeed from the Governor's mind when he responded to some "ill language" from Captain Richard Stevens by landing a blow in his face with a cudgel and knocking out some of his teeth.[20]
In 1634 a certain Captain Thomas Young arrived in Virginia with a commission from the King authorizing him to discover and search the unexplored parts of the colony. Needing two shallops, and hearing that one of the planters had an indentured worker who was a skilled shipwright, he seized him and put him to work. In this violation of property rights he was supported by the Governor. But it aroused the anger of the Council, and several of them came to Harvey to demand an explanation.
Harvey may have had in mind the Forced Loans as a precedent for taking the property of the subject, when he replied that his Majesty had given Young "authority to make use of any persons he found there." Young needed the shipwright "to prosecute with speed the King's service," he said. Speaking for the others, Samuel Mathews retorted angrily that if things were done in that fashion it would breed ill blood in Virginia. Turning his back he whirled a truncheon he carried in his hand, and lashed off the heads of some high weeds.[21] The Governor, ignoring this, said: "Come, gentlemen, let us go to supper, and for the night leave this discourse." But they were in no humor to be appeased. With one accord they turned their backs and left "in a very irreverent manner."
The Virginians were further embittered against Harvey for the aid he gave to Lord Baltimore's settlers. It was on February 27, 1634, that the Ark and the Dove, with Leonard and George Calvert, twenty "gentlemen adventurers," and three-hundred laborers, arrived at Point Comfort. They bore a letter to the Governor from the King requiring him to treat them with courtesy and respect, permit them to buy cattle and other commodities, and do all he could to advance their settlement.
Harvey did his best to comply. He sent them some of his own cows and promised to procure more. But this was not easy. The planters were so outraged at having a part of their territory torn away for a colony of Catholics that they swore they would knock their cattle on the head rather than sell them to the Marylanders. Some of the members of the Council had been informed by letters from England of Lord Baltimore's plans. When Samuel Mathews opened one of them, he threw his hat on the ground in a fury, stamped, and cried: "A pox upon Maryland!"[22] He, with William Claiborne and other members of the Council, held many secret meetings to decide upon a course of action. But they were powerless to prevent the Ark and the Dove from moving up the Chesapeake Bay with the newcomers, and the founding of a little town near the mouth of the Potomac.
Three years before their arrival Claiborne had made a settlement on Kent Island in the Chesapeake near the site of Annapolis. So now he found himself torn from Virginia and handed over to another government. The result was open warfare. It was prophetic of the battle between the Merrimac and the Monitor in Chesapeake waters more than two centuries later, when two pinnaces full of armed men captured an armed vessel sent out by the Kent Islanders.