Lord Baltimore and Maryland

"Even Catholics were soon living in America in organized communities. This was the work of the Calvert family. George Calvert, born in 1597, was an energetic Yorkshireman who became James I’s Secretary of State and did some vigorous ‘planting’ in Ireland as well as investing largely in the East India Company and the Virginia Company. When he became a Catholic in 1625 he retired into private life, but James made him a peer, Lord Baltimore, and encouraged him to found a colony for his fellow-papists (James was sympathetic to the Roman Catholics since his mother Mary, Queen of Scots, had remained a faithful Roman Catholic to her death). Baltimore looked at Newfoundland twice, but decided it was too cold. Then he visited Jamestown, but felt unable to sign the Protestant Oath of Supremacy there. In the end Charles I gave him a charter to settle the northern Chesapeake area. It was left to his son Cecil, 2nd Baron Baltimore, to organize the actual settlement in 1633. He recruited seventeen younger sons of Catholic gentry to lead and finance the expedition, taking with them about 100 ordinary settlers, mostly Protestants, some of them married, a few farmers. They had two ships, the Ark, 350 tons, and the Dove, a mere pinnace, but both armed to the teeth. Various attempts were made by religious enemies to sabotage the venture and in the end Baltimore had to stay behind to protect its London end. Two Jesuits were taken aboard secretly at Cowes on the Isle of Wight. Baltimore, who had studied Captain John Smith’s account of Virginia, gave handwritten instructions to his brother Leonard, who was to act as governor, and Jerome Halwey and Thomas Cornwallis, Catholic gentlemen, his co-commissioners. They were to get on good terms with the Virginians, using their Protestant passengers as intermediaries. They were not to disperse but to build a town and concentrate all their efforts on feeding themselves and becoming self-sufficient as quickly as possible. They were to train a militia and build a fort but to try and remain at peace with the Indians. The three leaders were to be ‘very careful to preserve unity and peace’ between the Protestants and the Roman Catholics: the Protestants were to receive ‘mildness and favour’, the Catholics to practice their faith as quietly as possible. One of the priests aboard, Father Andrew White, kept a record of the colony’s foundation, and found it full of splendid auguries for success. Of the Chesapeake he wrote: ‘This baye is the most delightful water I ever saw…two sweet landes, firm and fertile: plenty of fish, woods of walnuts, oakes, and cedars.’ He noted ‘salad herbes and such like, strawberries, raspberries, fallen mulbery vines, rich soil, delicate springs of water, partridge, deer, turkeys, geese, ducks, and also squirrels, eagles and herons’—‘the place abounds not only with profit but with pleasure.’ Maryland, he concluded, being halfway between the extremes of Virginia and New England, had ‘a middle temperature between the two, and enjoys the advantages, and escapes the evils, of each.’ The land was called Maryland after Charles I’s French wife, Henrietta Maria, and the township was St Mary’s. Father White had a cross set up and said a dedicatory mass on the shore, ‘to take solemn possession of the country.’ They traded axes, hoes, hatchets, and cloth for 30 miles of land below the Wicomico River.91 Strictly speaking, Baltimore’s colony was, in English law, a feudal fiefdom, with palatine powers like those of the Bishop of Durham. He was answerable only to the King, owned all the territory granted, received rents, taxes, and fees, appointed all officials, exercised judicial and political authority, could build forts and wage defensive war, confer honors and titles, incorporate boroughs and towns, license trade, was head of the church, could erect and consecrate chapels and churches, and these his ‘ample rights, liberties, immunities and temporal franchises’ were to be enjoyed by him and his heirs for ever. But this was theory, English lawyers’ big talk. In practice none of these grandiose baronies based on feudal models worked as they were intended, quickly losing their gilding under the erosion of America’s democratic rock."
Paul Johnson, A History of the American People (pp. 55-56). Harper Perennial