They founded a city, the capital of the colony, and called it St. Mary’s. A Catholic chapel was subsequently erected there; and this too was dedicated to S. Mary. The city has passed away, but the little chapel still stands, preserved alike by Catholic and Protestant hands, as a monument of the faith and zeal of the Catholic pilgrims of Maryland. Mr. Griffith, the historian, uniting his voice to that of Bancroft and other writers, speaking of the object which inspired the settlement from its inception by Lord Baltimore in England, says: “Out of respect for their religion they planted the cross, and, after fortifying themselves, plainly and openly set about to obtain, by the fairest means in their power, other property and homes, where they should escape the persecutions of the religious and political reformers of their native country at that time.”[111]
The church and parish of S. Mary were for many years the headquarters of the Jesuit missions of Maryland. During the succeeding years prior to 1649 there was a steady influx of Catholics into the colony from England, as is evident by the land records and other official documents, and by the fact that the number of Catholic priests required for the settlement increased from two in 1634 to four priests and one coadjutor prior to 1644. The Catholic strength was also increased by numerous conversions, as is shown by Father White’s Narrative, in which, at page 56, he relates that, “among the Protestants, nearly all who came over from England, in this year 1638, and many others, have been converted to the faith, together with four servants … and five mechanics whom we … have in the meantime won to God.” So numerous were these conversions, and they created so great a sensation in England, that measures were taken there to check them.
That the colony was Catholic in its origin, and so continued until after the year 1649, when the Toleration Act was passed, has never been denied, according to our researches, except by Mr. Gladstone and the two Protestant ministers whom he quotes. Bancroft, writing of the religious toleration which prevailed in Maryland during this period, always speaks of it as the work of Catholics. In referring to the original colonists he adds, “most of them Roman Catholic gentlemen and their servants.” Even so unfriendly a writer as Bozman says: “The most, if not all, of them were Catholics.” Chancellor Kent speaks of the colony as “the Catholic planters of Maryland,” and Judge Story says they were “chiefly Roman Catholics.” Father White, in his Narrative, speaks of the few Protestants on board the Ark as individuals, and not as a class. Bozman, alluding to the year 1639, and to “those in whose hands the government of the province was,” says: “A majority of whom were, without doubt, Catholics, as well as much the greater number of the colonists.” Mr. Davis, a Protestant, who drew his information from the official documents of the colony and State, gives unanswerable proofs of the fact for which we are contending. We give a single passage from his work on this point:
“St. Mary’s was the home—the chosen home—of the disciples of the Roman Church. The fact has been generally received. It is sustained by the tradition of two hundred years and by volumes of unwritten testimony; by the records of the courts; by the proceedings of the privy council; by the trial of law-cases; by the wills and inventories; by the land-records and rent-rolls; and by the very names originally given to the towns and hundreds, to the creeks and rivulets, to the tracts and manors of the county. The state itself bears the name of a Roman Catholic queen. Of the six hundreds of this small county, in 1650, five had the prefix of St. Sixty tracts and manors, most of them taken up at a very early period, bear the same Roman Catholic mark. The creeks and villages, to this day, attest the widespread prevalence of the same tastes, sentiments, and sympathies. Not long after the passage of the act relating to ‘religion,’ the Protestants, it is admitted, outgrew their Roman Catholic brethren, and in 1689 succeeded very easily in their attempt to overthrow the proprietary. But judging from the composition of the juries in 1655, we see no reason to believe that they then had a majority.”[112]
Mr. Gladstone seems to favor the view that religious toleration in Maryland was derived from the charter. We are surprised at this, since “E. D. N.” (Rev. Edward D. Neill), whose pamphlet has furnished the substance of the entire passage we have quoted from Mr. Gladstone’s Preface, says in his Maryland not a Roman Catholic Colony, “The charter of Maryland granted to Lord Baltimore was not a charter of religious liberty, but the very opposite.” McSherry, a Catholic historian, says that “the ecclesiastical laws of England, so far as related to the consecration and presentation of churches and chapels, were extended to the colony, but the question of state religion was left untouched, and therefore within the legislative power of the colonists themselves.”[113] And Bozman, a Protestant historian, adopts the same view of the charter, for he regards the “Act for Church Liberties” passed in 1639, enacting that “Holy Church within this province shall have all her rights and privileges,” as an attempt to exercise a control of religion, and says: “We cannot but suppose that it was the intention of the Catholic government to erect a hierarchy, with an ecclesiastical jurisdiction, similar to the ancient Church of England before the Reformation, and to invest it with all its rights, liberties, and immunities.”[114] The same views are expressed by the same author at pages 68 and 350 of his history. While civil liberty was guaranteed by the charter to all within the province, we find no mention of religious toleration in its provisions. Nor do we find that immigration was made free by the charter, as alleged by Mr. Gladstone; the provision to which he refers simply assures to the subjects of England, “transported or to be transported into the province, all privileges, franchises, and liberties of this our kingdom of England,” but the decision of the point as to who should be transplanted or admitted to settle there was left to the lord proprietary and the provincial legislature. The grant by the king to Lord Baltimore of all the lands of the province in itself gave him the full control over immigration, by enabling him to fix the conditions to the grants of land to colonists, which would have kept out all except such as the lord proprietary wished to enter.
We think we have shown that the Catholics were in the majority during the whole period covered by our discussion, and that the charter left them free to protect themselves from intrusion; that they were, consequently, all-powerful to perpetuate their numerical preponderance and control of the government. Why had they not the same motives for practising intolerance as the Puritans? Their positions, respectively and relatively, were the same in this particular, and the same reasons apply to both. No, they were actuated by a different spirit, and guided by different traditions. They possessed the power, and used it with mercy and benevolence; not only permitting but inviting Christians of every shade of opinion to settle in the province, but also offering grants of land on easy terms, and protecting the settlers from molestation on account of their religion. If they had not the power to proscribe, why should Bancroft, Griffith, Chambers, Kent, Story, and nearly all writers on the subject, have bestowed such encomiums on them for doing what they could not have refrained from doing? Why extol the toleration enjoined by Lord Baltimore and proclaimed by Governor Leonard Calvert, and the subsequently enacted Toleration Act of 1649, if the liberty it enacts was already secured by the charter of 1632?
It is not necessary for us to go further into this question, since in either event the honor and credit of religious toleration in Maryland is due to a Catholic source. If the charter secured it, our answer is that the charter itself was the work of a Catholic, for Lord Baltimore is the acknowledged author of that document. “The nature of the document itself,” says Bancroft, “and concurrent opinion, leave no doubt that it was penned by the first Lord Baltimore himself, although it was finally issued for the benefit of his son.”[115] “It was prepared by Lord Baltimore himself,” says McSherry, “but before it was finally executed that truly great and good man died, and the patent was delivered to his son, Cecilius, who succeeded as well to his noble designs as to his titles and estates.”[116] It will be more than sufficient to add here that both Mr. Bozman and the Rev. Ethan Allen concede that Lord Baltimore was the author of the charter.
We propose now to show that the religious toleration which prevailed in Maryland had its origin in the good-will, generosity, and mercy of the Catholic lord proprietary and his Catholic government and colony of Maryland; was practised from the very beginning of the settlement, and that we are not indebted for it to the Toleration Act of 1649, except perhaps as a measure by which its provisions were prolonged. Toleration was the course adopted in organizing the Maryland colony, even in England and before the landing of the pilgrims. Thus we find that some Protestants were permitted to accompany the colonists and share equal rights and protection with their Catholic associates. Father White speaks of them on board the Ark and Dove. The author of Maryland not a Catholic Colony refers to the fact that “Thomas Cornwallis and Jerome Hawley, who went out as councillors of the colony, were adherents of the Church of England,” as evidence in part that Maryland was “not a Catholic colony.” We take the same fact to show that not only were Protestants tolerated in the colony from its inception, but were liberally and generously given a share in its government. The Rev. Ethan Allen relates a succession of proofs of this fact, though not for that purpose, in the following passage: “Witness the fact of so large a portion of the first colonists being Protestants; his invitation to Capt. Fleet; his invitation to the Puritan colonists of Massachusetts to come and reside in the colony in 1643; his constituting Col. Stone his governor in 1648, who was a Protestant, and was to bring five hundred colonists; his admitting the Puritans of Virginia in the same year; and in the year following erecting a new county for Robert Brooke, a Puritan, and his colonists.”[117] McSherry says, speaking of the act of possession on landing in 1634: “Around the rough-hewn cross, on the island of St. Clement’s, gathered the Catholic and the Protestant, hand in hand, friends and brothers, equal in civil rights, and secure alike in the free and full enjoyment of either creed. It was a day whose memory should make the Maryland heart bound with pride and pleasure.”[118] The same author says that the Toleration Act of 1649 was passed “to give additional security to the safeguards which Lord Baltimore had already provided.” Bancroft makes religious toleration commence from the first landing “when the Catholics took possession,” and extend throughout the fourteen years up to the passage of the act of 1649. He says that “the apologist of Lord Baltimore could assert that his government, in conformity with his strict and repeated injunctions, had never given disturbance to any person in Maryland for matter of religion.”[119] The Rev. Ethan Allen relates that the Protestants in the colony were allowed to have their own chapel and to conduct therein the Protestant service. He cites a case in which a Catholic was severely punished for abusive language towards some Protestant servants in respect to their religion, and remarks that “the settling of the case was unquestionably creditable and honorable to the Catholic governor and council.”[120] Mr. Davis, a Protestant, says: “A freedom, however, of a wider sort springs forth at the birth of the colony—not demanded by that instrument [the charter], but permitted by it—not graven upon the tables of stone, nor written upon the paper of the statute-books, but conceived in the very bosom of the proprietary and of the original pilgrims—not a formal or constructive kind, but a living freedom, a freedom of the most practical sort. It is the freedom which it remained for them, and for them alone, either to grant or deny—a freedom embracing within its range, and protecting under its banner, all those who were believers in Jesus Christ.”[121]
Again, the same author writes: “The records have been carefully searched. No case of persecution occurred, during the administration of Gov. Leonard Calvert, from the foundation of the settlement at St. Mary’s to the year 1647.”[122] Langford, a writer contemporaneous with the period of which we are treating, in his Refutation of Babylon’s Fall, 1655, confirms the result of Mr. Davis’ investigation of the records. The Protestants of the colony themselves, in a declaration, of which we will speak again, attribute the religious toleration they enjoyed not solely to the Toleration Act, but also to “several other strict injunctions and declarations of his said lordship for that purpose made and provided.” Gov. Leonard Calvert also enjoined the same by a proclamation, which is mentioned by numerous historians. A case arising under this proclamation is given by Bozman and others in 1638, eleven years before the passage of the Toleration Act. Capt. Cornwallis’ servants, who were Protestants, were lodged under the same roof with William Lewis, a zealous Catholic, who was also placed in charge of the servants. Entering one day the room where the servants were reading aloud from a Protestant book—Mr. Smith’s Sermons—at the very moment the Protestants were reading aloud a passage to the effect “that the pope was Antichrist, and the Jesuits were anti-Christian ministers,” supposing that the passage was read aloud especially for him to hear, he ordered them with great warmth not to read that book, saying that “it was a falsehood, and came from the devil, as all lies did; and that he that writ it was an instrument of the devil, and he would prove it; and that all Protestant ministers were ministers of the devil.” All the parties were tried before the governor and his council; the case against the servants was postponed for further testimony, but Mr. Lewis, the Catholic, was condemned to pay a fine of five hundred pounds of tobacco (then the currency of the colony), and to remain in the sheriff’s custody until he found sufficient sureties in the future. Bozman thus remarks upon this decision: “As these proceedings took place before the highest tribunal of the province, composed of the three first officers in the government, they amply develop the course of conduct with respect to religion which those in whose hands the government of the province was placed, had resolved to pursue.”[123] Not only did the Catholic lord proprietary, in 1648, appoint Mr. Stone, a Protestant, to be the governor of the province, but also he at the same time appointed a majority of the privy councillors from the same faith.
We will close our testimony on this point with the official oath which Lord Baltimore required the governor and the privy councillors to take; it was substantially as follows: