The Government of Maryland: Lord Baltimore and Roman Catholics

Lord Baltimore died in 1675, after a rule in Maryland, with several interruptions, for forty-three years. He was crowned in his old age with the blessing and honors of a colony which he had planted in his youth. He had never trodden the soil of Maryland, but a grateful people cherished his memory as they would that of a beloved father known to them in person. The commercial capital of that State bears the name of his title. His son and successor, Charles, followed in the footsteps of his liberal father in fostering toleration and humanity; and he and his successors continued, with a few interruptions, to administer the government of the province until the storm of the revolution, which burst forth in 1775, swept away every vestige of proprietary and royal government in the English-American colonies. The title of Lord Baltimore became extinct in 1771, and the last of the family in England, of whom anything is known, was a prisoner for debt in the Queen's Bench prison in London, in 1860. In that, and the Fleet prison, he had then been confined, by the fiat of the barbarous law, twenty years.

Maryland, like the other colonies, was shaken by the revolution in England in 1688, and experience deep sorrows for awhile. For several years before, the democratic ideas then rapidly spreading over the provinces, could not reconcile the rule of a lord proprietor with the principles of republicanism. Even so early as when Charles Calvert went to England after the death of his father, signs of political discontent were conspicuous in Maryland. In 1678, the General Assembly, influenced by the popular feeling, established the right of suffrage--casting of a vote for rulers--on a broad basis. When Charles returned in 1681, he annulled this act, and by an arbitrary ordinance restricted the right to freemen owning fifty acres of land or personal property of the value of forty pounds sterling. This produced great disquietude, and Ex-Governor Fendall planned an insurrection for the purpose of abolishing the proprietorship and establishing an independent Republican government. The king was induced to issue orders that all offices of government in Maryland should be filled by Protestants alone; and so, again, the Roman Catholics were deprived of their political rights.

In 1684, Lord Baltimore again went to England, leaving the government of his province in charge of several deputies under the nominal governorship of his infant son. There he found his rights in great peril; but before the matter was brought to a direct issue by the operation of a writ of quo warranto, King James was driven from the throne and Protestant William and Mary ascended it. Lord Baltimore immediately acquiesced in the political change. Because his instructions to his deputies to proclaim the new monarchs were delayed in their transmission, he was charged with hesitancy; and a restless spirit named Coode, an associate of Fendall in his insurrectionary movements--a man of loose morals and blasphemous speech--excited the people by the cry of "a Popish plot!" He circulated the false story that the local magistrates in Maryland, and the Roman Catholics there, had engaged with the Indians in a plot for the destruction of the Protestants in the province. An actual league at that time between the French and the Jesuit missionaries with the savages on the New England frontiers for the destruction of the English colonies in the East gave the coloring of truth to the story, which created great excitement. The old feud burned intensely. The Protestants formed an armed association. Led by Coode, they marched to the Maryland capital, took possession of the records and assumed the functions of a provisional government, in May, 1689. They met in convention in August following, when they prepared and sent to the new sovereigns a report of their proceedings and a series of absurd and false accusations against Lord Baltimore. In conclusion, they requested the monarchs to depose Lord Baltimore by making Maryland a royal province and taking it under the protection of the crown.

The sovereigns listened favorably to the representations of the convention and complied with their requests. Coode was ordered to administer the government in the name of the king, and so the people were punished for their folly in elevating him to leadership. He ruled with the spirit of a petty tyrant, until the people of every religious and political creed were heartily disgusted with him. He was displaced in 1692, when the king sent Sir Lionel Copley to be governor of Maryland.

The new governor arrived in the spring of that year and summoned a General Assembly to meet at St. Mary's in May. New laws were instituted. Religious toleration was abolished. The Church of England was made the state church for Maryland, to be supported by a tax on the whole people. "Thus," says McMahon, "was introduced, for the first time in Maryland, a church establishment sustained by law and fed by general taxation. Other laws oppressive in their bearings upon those opposed in religious views to the dominant party were enacted, some of which remained in force until the glorious emancipation day in the summer of 1776 gave freedom to our nation.