9 deal. He was not, it must be allowed, promising material on which to work, and recognizing this they groaned under the yoke. They might as well, aye better, have stayed in England, as live under the absolute lordship of one who seemed to put beaver-skins and corn before the Kingdom of God and His righteousness. Yet, had they known it, their safety lay only in obedience. The storm which swept them away from Maryland would never have broken had they listened to the advice of the proprietary and followed his injunctions. But this was the one thing they did not intend to do. In Maryland at any rate they had the upper hand. It was all very well for the lord proprietary to lay down plans but it was another thing to enforce them. Communication between him and his distant province was often slow and uncertain, and always irregular. Much might be done of which the absent lord would never hear at all, and at any rate months must elapse before any course of action entered upon by them could be repudiated. And advantage was not seldom taken of this. Then, too, they controlled the young Governor of Maryland and as long as they could do this they had little to fear. And so it speedily became evident that it is one thing to give laws, 9 Calvert Papers, Vol. I, P. 132. and another to enforce them, even although you have right, justice and sweet reasonableness on your side, when dealing with men who have their own purposes to serve; and yet upon whose co-operation you depend for success. The precautions of Lord Baltimore were excellent, but The best-laid plans o' mice an' men Gang aft a-gley. And so, consequently, notwithstanding the law and the voice of authority, the Jesuits entered upon a course which only an enemy would have desired them to take. Ignoring alike the dictates of prudence and the injunctions of the lord proprietary, they had began a contest for supremacy in Maryland which was to end in their own undoing; for supremacy was just what they could not have in any English colony. Had they been satisfied to contend for liberty, to practice their religion in peace and quietness, to minister unostentatiously to their own people and to carry the tidings of the Gospel to the heathen Indians, they would not merely have been left unmolested, but they would have gone far towards realising the dreams of their superiors in making Maryland a Roman Catholic province. But they were not wise in their generation, and as they chose to pursue a policy of aggression they were overwhelmed by disaster. CHAPTER XV. BATTLES WITH THE JESUITS—THE DE FEAT OF LORD BALTIMORE. 1638-1641. "Twas blow for blow, disputing inch by inch, The letters of Captain Cornwaleys and Father Copley, must have been anything but pleasant reading to Lord Baltimore. At a time when he had practically made himself bankrupt through having put all his available assets into his Maryland venture, and just at the moment when he was beginning to expect a rich return from that investment, he is confronted with the spectacle of a religious quarrel, parting his settlers into two rival religious factions, and dividing Maryland herself into two hostile camps. It was as if a chasm had suddenly yawned at his feet, into which at any moment might be irretrievably precipitated all his expenditure in the past; all his brilliant prospects for the future; and even his very tenure of the province itself. Other information which came to Lord Baltimore about the same time tended still further to increase his anxiety. This was concerning the conduct of Father Copley. Notwithstanding Copley's professions of loyalty, and his assurance that under no circumstances would he receive land from the Indians, except under Baltimore's seal, it now transpired that at the very time he was making this statement he was secretly acquiring from King Pathuen the valuable estate of Mattapany, near the mouth of the Patuxent River. 1 This alone was bad enongh, but what lent the affair an importance out of all proportion to itself, and caused to the lord proprietary infinite anxiety and alarm was the action of the Jesuit Society which, far from disclaiming responsibility for its agent's misdoings, boldly took his part and justified his conduct. Moreover, not content with doing this, for the sake we may presume, of consistency, the society openly disputed Lord Baltimore's title to any lands not ceded to him by the Indians. It even went on to deny the right of the English Crown to grant Maryland, and scoffed at his lordship's claims as againt the Indian kings. 2 Fortunately, there was now one man in the colony upon whose activity, ability and loyalty Baltimore 1 Md. Hist. Soc., F. P. No. 18. 2 Md. Hist. Soc., F. P., No. 9. Pp. 56, 63. P. 249 could confidently rely to cope with the crisis which had so unexpectedly arisen, and to avert the serious dangers which thus threatened the very existence of his colony. This man was John Lewger, the secretary, who had arrived in the province on Nov. 28th, 1637. Lewger was a Roman Catholic, but of that moderate and conservative type which found no favor with such men as Copley. He had formerly been a clergyman of the English Church, but, unlike the majority of converts, had not thought it necessary on joining the Roman Church to become more ultramontane than the ultramontanes themselves. They do Rome an injustice who assert that she crushes out of her children all individuality. Cardinal Manning did not see eye to eye with Cardinal Vaughan. Even Leo XIII does not walk in the footsteps of Pius IX. Neither was Lewger a Romanist after the Copley type. He was of course always a persona non grata to the Jesuits. Acceptable to the more conservative Romanists, who were for the most part like himself scholars, and gentlemen, the Jesuits, in Maryland conventional phrase, "had no use for him." To them he was only an ex-minister who "yet retained much of the leaven of heresy." 3 But none perceived more clearly than 3 Md. Hist. Soc., F. P., No. 18. P. 8o. |