BOOK III.
CENTRIFUGAL FORCES IN COLONY-PLANTING
CHAPTER THE FIRST.
THE CATHOLIC MIGRATION
I
Centrifugal forces. At every new stage in the history of the American settlement, we are afresh reminded that colonies are planted by the uneasy. The discontent that comes from poverty and financial reverse, that which is born of political unrest, and that which has no other cause than feverish thirst for novelty and hazardous adventure, had each a share in impelling Englishmen to emigrate. But in the seventeenth century religion was the dominant concern – one might almost say the dominant passion – of the English race, and it supplied much the most efficient motive to colonization. Not only did it propel men to America, but it acted as a distributing force on this side of the sea, producing secondary colonies by expelling from a new plantation the discontented and the persecuted to make fresh breaks in the wilderness for new settlements. Connecticut and Rhode Island were secondary plantings of this kind. Religious differences also made twain the Chesapeake region, the first home of the English in America, one of the two rival colonies being intolerantly Protestant, the other a home for Catholic refugees.
II
Character of George Calvert. George Calvert, the first Baron Baltimore, who projected the Maryland colony and left it to his son to carry forward, belonged to the order of men who are shrewd without being creative – men of sagacity as differentiated from men of ideas. The man in whose mind there is a ferment of original ideas has theories to promulgate or expound. Sagacity has small necessity for speech – its very reticence gives an advantage in the conduct of affairs. The parliamentary antagonist and political rival who confronted Calvert was no other than our old acquaintance Sir Edwin Sandys, of the Virginia Company. Calvert and Sandys were alike men of rare accomplishments, and both were interested in schemes for colonization; otherwise they were antipodal. Sandys was a statesman of advanced ideas, creative, liberal, and original, fitted to be the founder of representative government in the English colonies. In that age of worn and brittle institutions it was not deemed wholly safe to suffer so robust a thinker as Sandys to be always at large, and it was one of Calvert's most difficult duties, as the king's secretary and chosen intermediary, to explain to Parliament why its leader was under restraint. Sandys, as we have already said, was described as "right-handed to every great employment"; when Calvert came upon the scene, he was aptly characterized as "a forward and knowing person in matters relating to the state." The phrase denotes, perhaps, clever adroitness within the limits of that mediocrity which in those perilous times was a safeguard to the man who ventured into politics. After having started well at court, Sandys had fallen into irretrievable disfavor by his resolute advocacy of the liberties of his countrymen. The message to the Virginia Company, already recited, "Choose the devil, but not Sir Edwin Sandys," expressed the depth of the king's antipathy. But if Sandys seemed to the king a devil, Calvert became for him a convenient angel. Notions about human rights and the liberty of Parliament did not obstruct Calvert's career. Not that he was a man to prove unfaithful to his convictions, as did his bosom friend Wentworth, or to suppress liberal opinions in order to smooth an ascending pathway, as did his great contemporary Bacon. Calvert played a far simpler part and one less dishonorable. It was his fortune to be a man of facile mind, naturally reverential toward authority. The principles enunciated by his sovereign and the measures by which those in power sought to attain the end in view were pretty sure to seem laudable or at least excusable to him. Such a mind can not be called scrupulous, neither is it consciously dishonest. The quality most highly esteemed at the court of James was fidelity, unswerving devotion to the interests of the king and of one's friends. And this, the dominant virtue of his time and of his class – this honor of a courtier – Calvert possessed in a high degree; it is a standard by which he has a right to be judged. To a French ambassador he seemed an honorable, sensible, courteous, well-intentioned man, devoted to the interests of England, but without consideration or influence.
Calvert's rise. Whatever his lack of influence in councils of state, Calvert's fidelity, useful abilities, and many accomplishments won the friendship of James, and in that lavish reign when all the fairy stories came true at a court which was "like a romance of knight errantry," as the Spanish minister declared, the favor of the king was sure to result in good fortune to the favorite. 70 From being secretary to Burleigh, Calvert rose to be principal Secretary of State, was knighted, and at last ennobled. Grants of estates in Ireland and of great unexplored tracts of territory in the wilderness of America, pensions, sinecure offices, grants of money out of increased customs fees, and presents from those who had ends to serve at court, were the means by which a successful courtier bettered his estate, and by some or all of these Secretary Calvert thrived. That he did thrive is proved by the great sum he was able to lose in his futile attempt to plant a colony in Newfoundland. It was believed that he had accepted a share of the money dispensed lavishly in presents and pensions to English courtiers by Spain, but this Calvert denied, and one can believe that a man of his fidelity to king and country would be able to resist a temptation to which others succumbed. 71
III
The colony of Avalon. Calvert was very early interested in colonization. He was a member of the Virginia Company in 1609, and later one of the councilors for New England. Cal S. P. America, pp. 25, 26, March 16, 1620. In 1620 he was one of a commission appointed to settle the affairs of a Scotch company for colonizing Newfoundland, and in the next year he dispatched his first colony to the southeastern peninsula of that island which he had bought from Sir William Vaughan. In this latter year (1621) he secured a grant of the whole vast island, but in 1622 he accepted a re-grant of the peninsula alone, and this became his first proprietary colony. Captain Whitbourne's pamphlet on Newfoundland was just then circulating gratuitously by the aid of collections made in the churches with the sanction of royal authority. It described a Newfoundland of Edenic fruitfulness. Even cool-headed statesmen like Calvert appear to have been captivated by the stories of this veteran seaman and weather-beaten romancer. Calvert called his new province Avalon. The name signifies the land of apples – that is, the fruitful country. In old British mythology it was the paradise of the blessed, the island in the western seas to which King Arthur was translated in the famous legend. This name of promise suited the situation of the new island state, and fitted well the enthusiastic tales of Whitbourne and the groundless hopes of Calvert. The bleak Newfoundland coast had already blossomed with fanciful names; there was the Bay of Plesaunce and the Bay of Flowers, Robin Hood's Bay and the River of Bonaventure; there was the Harbor of Formosa and the Harbor of Heartsease. 72 Avalon, the earthly paradise, was but the complement of these.
IV
The charter of Avalon. Sir George Calvert probably drafted with his own hand – the hand of an expert and accomplished man of the court – the charter of April 7, 1623, that conferred on him an authority little short of sovereignty over his new territory. This masterpiece of dexterous charter-making afforded a model for other proprietary charters, and Calvert himself bettered it but little in the Maryland charter of a later date. The ambiguous passages in the Maryland charter, which have been accounted evidence of a design to make way for the toleration or even the possible dominance of Roman Catholicism, appear already in the charter of Avalon. 73 Was the colony of 1621 or its charter of 1623 intended to supply a refuge, if one should be needed, for Englishmen of the Catholic faith? The question is not easily answered. The primary design of the Avalon colony was, no doubt, to better the fortunes of Sir George Calvert and to lift him and his successors into the authority and dignity of counts-palatine in the New World. But there can hardly be a doubt that, before the charter of 1623 was granted, Secretary Calvert was already a Catholic, secretly or latently, if not overtly. His charter of Avalon naturally left open a door for the toleration of the faith to which he was already attached, or toward which he was tending. 74
V
Calvert's conversion. Calvert's conversion was almost inevitable. He favored the project for the Spanish match, and he was, like some other courtiers, under the influence of Gondomar, a consummate master of intrigue. He was bound by ties of friendship, and later by the marriage of his son, to Lord Arundel of Wardour, a Catholic, and the constitution of his mind and all the habits of a lifetime made him a lover of authority in church and state. Under favoring circumstances such a man becomes a Roman Catholic by gravitation and natural affinity.
There was a Catholic revival in England at this time, especially among the courtiers and upper classes. In 1623 there was a large influx to England of priests and Jesuits. English Romanists flocked to the vicinage of London, and resorted in great numbers to the mass in the houses of foreign ambassadors; and in many English country houses the mass was openly celebrated in defiance of law. Petition in Rushworth, Part I, i, 141. Compare Neal, Part II, c. ii. The Commons, in alarm, adopted what James fitly called "a stinging petition against the papists."
VI
His resignation. Calvert had staked his hopes for himself and for English Catholicism on the Spanish match. This otherwise pliant courtier was intractable where his religious convictions were concerned. 1624. He scrupled to draw back at the bidding of Charles and Buckingham, when drawing back involved a violation of the treaty oath of the king and council, the plunging of England into a Spanish war, the sacrifice of the interests of the Catholic church, and a fresh exposure of his co-religionists in England to a harsh persecution. Calvert was one of that party in the junta for Spanish affairs which was unwilling to break a solemn treaty in order to gratify the wounded vanity of Buckingham and Charles, and he paid dearly for his firmness. To bring about his resignation, his antagonists diverted business from his office, thus reducing his fees and subjecting his pride to mortification. Under this treatment it was noted by a letter writer of the time that Mr. Secretary Calvert "droops and keeps out of the way." It was reported that he was ill, and then that he had been rebuked by the king and the prince, and it was known that he wished to sell his office to some one acceptable to Buckingham. Calvert's cleverness as a courtier did not fail him in his fall. He succeeded at the last in mollifying Buckingham, whose consent he gained to the sale of the secretaryship. After nearly a year of the prolonged agony of holding office in disfavor, he resigned in February, 1625, receiving six thousand pounds for his office, which was worth to the incumbent two thousand a year. 1625. He was at the same time raised to the Irish peerage as Baron Baltimore. He made his religious scruples the ostensible reason for his resignation, and he was already known to be "infinitely addicted to the Catholic faith." He made no secret of his proscribed religion; he exposed to visitors the altar, chalice, and candlesticks in his best room; and he catechised his children assiduously in the doctrines of the ancient church. At the accession of Charles he retired from the Privy Council rather than take an oath offensive to his conscience. 75
VII
Calvert deserts Newfoundland. During the period of his decline from court favor Calvert's colony of Avalon probably suffered from neglect. He now gave his new leisure to the work of rescuing it. In 1627 he made a voyage to Newfoundland, taking a company of Catholic settlers and two priests. He went again in 1628. From Newfoundland he wrote to one of the Jesuits in England a letter of affection, declaring his readiness to divide with him "the last bit" he had in the world. In Avalon began the long chapter of the troubles of the Baltimores with the Puritan opposition. Besides his contentions with Puritan settlers, who abhorred the mass as a Jewish prophet did idolatry, he found it necessary to fight with French privateers bent on plunder. Letters of Wynne, Daniel, and Hoskins, in Whitbourne's second ed. By the time the almost interminable Newfoundland winter had begun, he discovered that Avalon was not the earthly paradise it appeared in the writings of pamphleteers and in the letters of his own officeholders interested only in the continuance of their salaries. 76 The icy Bay of Plesaunce and the bleak Bay of Flowers mocked him with their names of delight; of little avail was the fast-bound River of Bonaventure to its unlucky lord, or the Harbor of Heartsease to him who had sunk a fortune of thirty thousand pounds in the fruitless attempt to plant a settlement on a coast so cold. Ill himself, and with half his company down with scurvy, some of them dying, Baltimore turned his thoughts toward Virginia, now, after all its trials, prosperous under a genial sun.
Sails to Virginia. He knew the conditions of that colony and the opportunities it afforded. A member of the Virginia Company during nearly all the years of its stormy existence, he had been made one of the fifty-six councilors that took over its effects at its demise, and he was one of the eight who constituted the quorum, and who probably transacted the business of this Council for Virginia. Rymer's Fœdera, tom. vii, iv, 147. Even under the government of the Company there had been precedents for the establishment of a "precinct" within Virginia independent of the Jamestown government. Such a plantation had been that of Captain Martin and that proposed by Rich and Argall, and a charter for such had been given to the Leyden pilgrims. Baltimore wrote to ask for a precinct, pleading the king's promise already made that he might choose a part of Virginia. Here he would still be the head of a little independent state – a state in which the mass might be said without molestation. Before another winter set in he abandoned Avalon to fishermen and such hardy folk, and took ship for the James River, where he arrived in October, 1629.
VIII
Virginia antagonism. Baltimore's reception in Virginia was most inhospitable. He had perhaps counted on his former relation to the colony as a councilor to assure him a welcome. But the Virginians of that time were Sandys and Southampton men. They may have remembered that Calvert had been Sandys's enemy and political rival, and that he belonged to the faction of Sir Thomas Smyth in the company. The members of that faction had been the executioners of the company when they could no longer control it. Calvert was one of the later council, which had tried to take away insidiously the privileges granted to Virginians by their charter from the Virginia Company. This attack on their liberties they had stoutly resisted, even to cutting off a piece of one of the ears of the clerk of their own assembly for abetting it. Now a nobleman of the detested faction, an advocate of absolute government and a close friend of the king, had come among them. Baltimore might easily expect to secure the governorship of Virginia itself. 77 Perhaps it is hardly necessary to go even so far afield for a motive. The prospect of a settlement of Roman Catholics within the limits of the colony was in itself enough to excite the opposition of the Virginia churchmen. Baltimore's party of Catholics was not the only one repelled from Virginia about this time. Soon after Lord Baltimore's visit, perhaps, or just before, the Virginians refused permission to a company of Irish Catholics to settle within their bounds. These appear to have gone afterward to the island of St. Christopher's, where again Protestant fellow-colonists fell out with them about religion, so that they were finally sent to settle the neighboring island of Montserrat. 78
Character of the early Virginians. The Virginians, after all their sufferings, were now prosperous in a gross way, reaping large profits from tobacco, and living in riotous profusion after the manner of men beginning to emerge from the hardships and perils of a pioneer condition into sudden opulence. Leah and Rachel, and De Vries Voyages, passim. Their rude living did not at all prevent the colonists from being fastidious about their religion – it was the seventeenth century. Most of the Virginia clergy at this period were as reckless in life as the people, but the Protestantism of the colony was incorruptible. Some of the rabble even showed their piety by railing at the newly arrived papist nobleman.
Expulsion of Baltimore. A weapon of defense against Baltimore was ready to hand. Three years before his coming instructions had been sent from England to Yeardley to proffer the oath of supremacy "to all such as come thither with an intention to plant and reside, which, if any shall refuse, he is to be retorned or shipped from thence home." This order may not have been intended for so great a personage as a nobleman of the Court. It may have been meant only to head off humble Irishmen like those who settled Montserrat, or it may have been merely a fence against Separatists. But it served the turn of the alarmed colonists. Pott and Mathews, Claiborne and Roger Smyth, who led the opposition, offered the oath to Baltimore. Baltimore had sacrificed his place in the Privy Council rather than take this oath so contrary to his conscience, and he now again stood by his religious convictions, and took ship for England as ordered by the Virginia Council. He was disappointed and already shaken in health. The members of the council, appalled at their own boldness, perhaps, wrote to the king in self-defense. There is still extant an old manuscript record book of the seventeenth century which contains the instructions to Yeardley. MS. Book of Instructions, Library of Congress, folio 136. Immediately following, as if to put it under the shelter of royal authority, is the report of the council, without date or signature, that the oath had been offered to Baltimore and refused.
IX
Baltimore's seal. Baltimore's hardships during two voyages to Newfoundland, and a winter in the rude abodes of pioneers there, his illness during that winter, the constant spectacle of sickness and death about him, and the disappointment caused by his rude reception in Virginia, were enough, one would think, to have broken his resolution. He went back to England "much decayed in his strength," as he confessed; but, strangely enough, this accomplished man of the world, whose career had been that of a courtier, was far from living in ease and quietness as his friends had expected him to do. He was possessed of a passion for peopling the wilderness. He had written to the king from America that he was resolved to spend "the poore remaynder" of his days in colony-planting, his "inclinations carrying him naturally" to such work. To what extent he was prompted by a desire to leave to his heir the semi-sovereignty of a principality, and how far he was carried by a naturally adventurous temper hitherto latent, we have no means of deciding; but one can hardly resist the conclusion that a fervent religious zeal was the underlying spring of a resolution so indomitable. Like many another man of that time, Calvert was lifted from worldliness to high endeavor by religious enthusiasm. The king felt obliged to interpose his authority; he forbade Baltimore's risking his life in another voyage, but he granted him a charter for a new palatinate on the north side of the Potomac.
Death of the first Lord Baltimore. Lord Baltimore was doomed never to see the desire of his eyes. He died on the 15th of April, 1632, before the charter had passed, leaving the planting of Maryland to be carried forward by his son and heir, Cecilius. The charter of Maryland passed the seals on the 22d of the following June in favor of Cecilius, the second Lord Baltimore.