Lord Baltimore was no ordinary man this remarkable success clearly proves. Any man who could emerge with honor from such a precarious and even compromising position as that in which he had stood commands our admiration and our respect. Consider what he had done. A Roman Catholic, at a time when to be a Roman Catholic was to be politically a traitor, and ecclesiastically entitled to no sympathy at all; a landlord, whose property had been bestowed upon him by a king whose own lawlessness and indifference to public sentiment had cost him his throne and his life; a landlord too, whose Roman Catholic tenants had brought the administration of his vast estate everywhere into great disfavor; a landlord, moreover, whose own record in the matter of his dealings with a part of his estate had been by no means free from blame; yet it is this same man who when tried on a frivolous pretext before the bar of his peers, and by a hypocritical and hostile government, comes to the front to receive at the hands of that same government his

6. The Commonwealth would bring itself but contempt if it rewarded Lord Baltimore's well known fidelity to its cause by doing anything prejudicial to his patent, his colony having been faithful when all other colonies, New England only excepted, had proved faithless.

See Archives of Maryland, Council, Pp. 280, 281.

sceptre of sovereignty again. It were a pity that even on the wider scale of a kingdom such talents had not found an outlet. One wonders what might have been the history of England herself if in the critical times of Charles I. or James II., Cecilius Calvert had been summoned to the throne. That the giving back of the sceptre of Maryland into his hands as the hands best fitted to wield it was itself an act inconsistent with the position of a government that had abolished kingship, only increases our admiration of him. Even Clayborne ought to have congratulated him upon attaining such wonderful success. In the facility with which he could acknowledge king or lord protector, monarchy or commonwealth, according to whichever should be uppermost, Lord Baltimore has been somewhat severely arraigned, even by Protestants, as "that aristocratic Mr. Facing-both-ways," 12 a sort of forerunner of the famous Vicar of Bray. But that versatile eccelesiastic, claiming for himself a certain consistency among all his tergiversations, for he would live and die the Vicar of Bray, emphatically denied the impeachment. So with Lord Baltimore. He, too, was consistency itself. Whatever king might reign, he would be Lord Proprietary of Maryland.

12 Prowse, History of Newfoundland, P. 159.

CHAPTER XX.

LORD BALTIMORE ENJOYS HIS OWN

AGAIN.

1656-1675.

"And the night shall be filled with music,

And the cares that infest the day

Shall fold their tents, like the Arabs,

And as silently steal away."

-LONGFELLOW: "Day is done."

Not for a full year after the decision of the Committee of Trades and Plantations in his favor did Lord Baltimore come into undisputed possession of his province. He obtained his rights in St. Mary's at once. But the Puritans, as if no voice had gone out against them, still held possession of the northern parts of the Chesapeake, and there ruled with a strong hand. They retained also the the records and the great seal of the Province. Finally, however, an agreement being reached between their leader and Lord Baltimore, they yielded to the inevitable, and the rebellion of six years standing came to an end. From this time until Lord Baltimore's death, November 30th, 1675,

save for an incipient rebellion headed by his own governor, Josias Fendall, when Charles II. came to the throne, there was a long period of rest which Lord Baltimore diligently used to push forward by every legitimate means the material advancement of his colony, particularly by sending out new emigrants to develop its untold resources. In this he succeeded so well that during the twenty years which followed the fall of the Puritans the population of Maryland increased from ten thousand to twenty thousand.

The new settlers were not all Church people. "A considerable number of them were Presbyterians from Scotland, and here indeed was the cradle of Presbyterianism in the United States."" Scarcely any of the emigrants were of the Roman Church, it may be that none of them were-the members of that Church already in Maryland having had too unpleasant an experience of the country to warrant their describing it to their brethren as "the land of the sanctuary." It thus resulted that the Roman Catholics were not even at this early period, according to the most generous estimate, more than a fourth of the total population of the province.

But Romanism was not yet a dead issue. A piece of very decided interference with individual liberty, bordering perilously on actual persecution, occurred as late as 1657 on the part of a Jesuit father named Fitzherbert. This priest, like his brethren, had entered Maryland under an assumed name, being recorded on the ship's books as "Francis Darby, Gent."2 Discarding, almost immediately on his arrival, the prudence which he had showed himself to possess, it was not long before one of the Marylanders-a Mr. Henry Coursey-felt it his duty to draw Lord Baltimore's attention to his doings as one who was apparently bent on becoming a worthy successor of Mr. Copley, who had recently died, and whose mantle had evidently been bequeathed to him. This gentleman, writing to Lord Baltimore, said, “Since I wrote my last to you, I have received a message from Mrs. Gerrard, which is that Mr. Fitzherbert hath threatened excommunication to Mr. Gerrard, because he doth not bring to church his wife and children. And further, Mr. Fitzherbert said that he hath written home to the heads of the Church in England, and that if it be their judgment to have it so, he will come with a party and compel them. 2 Neill, Founders of Maryland, P. 129.