The Beginners of a Nation Part 25

Very embarra.s.sing to the foreign policy of England was the severity of English laws against Catholics, and Lord Treasurer Burleigh found it needful to publish in Elizabeth's time, for circulation in all the courts of Europe, a treatise on The Execution of Justice in England and the Maintenance of Public Order and Christian Peace; and in the following reign James himself turned pamphleteer and published an Apologie for the Oath of Allegiance. There were periods when pressure from abroad softened the administration of the law. But it was only irregularly and intermittently that the Government could be brought to grant indulgences that roused the pious wrath of Puritans and reduced the revenue of the king and his favorites. If Spain, and afterward France, made it a condition precedent to a marriage treaty that the penal laws against English recusants should be relaxed, Parliament, resenting foreign dictation, demanded of the king a renewal of the severities against papists. Twenty-four Catholics suffered capitally in James's reign, before 1618; and when in 1622 it was necessary to condone Catholicism in order to conciliate Spain, it is said that four hundred Jesuits and priests were set free on bail at one time. The number of Catholics, lay and cleric, released in this year is put at four thousand, but this may be an exaggeration.

XII.

[Sidenote: Catholic emigration small.]

[Sidenote: Harl. Miscell., ii, 492, and following, where pa.s.sages from contemporary writers are quoted.]

In 1627, and again in 1628, Lord Baltimore took Catholics with him to Newfoundland and settled priests there. The English court was just then sailing on a Protestant tack, and England had allied itself with the Huguenots of La Roch.e.l.le. Another of the good works by which the government of Charles and Buckingham was endeavoring to prove its sanctification was the enforcement of the penal statutes against Roman Catholics. It is notable that Baltimore sailed with the first Catholic emigrants to Avalon about the time of the setting in of the movement toward Ma.s.sachusetts which swelled at length into the great Puritan exodus. The five years of delay caused by the change from Avalon to Maryland, and also perhaps by the exhaustion of Baltimore's resources and his death, was unfavorable to the project of a Catholic province.

The English government by 1634 had grown more lenient toward Romanists, the co-religionists of the queen. The work at which Laud kept all hands busy just then was the suppression of Puritanism, and thousands of Puritans were by this time shaking the dust of England from their feet and seeking a home in the western wilderness, persuaded that the Church of England under Laud had all sails set for Rome. This illusion regarding the purposes of the archbishop and his party, which alarmed the Puritans, heartened the Catholics, who naturally preferred to stay at home where a flood tide seemed to be setting toward Catholicism. The small Catholic migration to Maryland was not to be compared with that stream of Puritan emigration that about this time poured into New England twenty thousand people in a decade. The fall of Laud and the rise of the Puritans to power put a complete stop to the New England migration, but it failed to quicken the Catholic movement, for Maryland herself had become sadly involved in the civil commotions of the time.

[Sidenote: Baltimore's partners.]

[Sidenote: Note 13.]

Cecilius Calvert undoubtedly counted on a large migration of Catholic recusants, and the doc.u.ments show that the Jesuit order in England took great interest in the movement. The second Lord Baltimore was joined by partners in the financial risks of the venture, and though we meet with more than one allusion to these adventurers whose interest in the colony was apparently still active twenty years after its beginning, they were profoundly silent partners; their names are nowhere recorded, and we are left to conjecture the origin of their interest in Maryland.

XIII.

[Sidenote: The religious aim.]

"The first and most important design of the Most Ill.u.s.trious Baron, which ought also to be the aim of the rest, who go in the same s.h.i.+p, is, not to think so much of planting fruits and trees in a land so fertile, as of sowing the seeds of religion and piety." This was Lord Baltimore's authoritative declaration, and because it varies in form from the stock phrases so common at the time, it bears an air of some sincerity, though it is diplomatically ambiguous.

[Sidenote: Efforts to obstruct the s.h.i.+ps.]

[Sidenote: Letters of Baltimore to Wentworth in Strafford papers, _pa.s.sim_.]

[Sidenote: Note 14.]

Baltimore's opponents made great exertions to prevent the departure of the Ark and the Dove, which were to bear faithful Catholics across the flood to a new world. A story was started that these s.h.i.+ps were carrying nuns to Spain, and another tale that found believers was that they had soldiers on board going to France to serve against the English. It was told that Calvert's men had abused the customs officers at Gravesend, and sailed without c.o.c.kets in contempt of all authority, the people on board refusing the oath of allegiance. The Ark was stopped and brought back by order of the Privy Council, and the oath of allegiance was given to a hundred and twenty-eight pa.s.sengers. But the s.h.i.+ps came to again at the Isle of Wight, and when they got away at last there were near three hundred pa.s.sengers on board, including Jesuit priests. Most of the pa.s.sengers were "laboring men"; how many were Catholic and how many Protestant it is impossible now to tell. That the leaders and the gentry were, most of them, Catholics there is every reason to believe. The pa.s.sengers called Protestants were rather non-Catholics, precisely the kind of emigrants that would give the Jesuits the converts of which they tell exultantly in their letters. There was no Protestant minister on board, nor was there the slightest provision for Protestant wors.h.i.+p, present or future.

XIV.

[Sidenote: Toleration.]

[Sidenote: Note 15.]

Toleration was the Baltimore policy from the beginning. It was no doubt in the original plan of George Calvert and his a.s.sociates, whoever they were. The Provincial of the Society of Jesus privately furnished Baltimore with arguments in defense of this policy before the first colony sailed. The founders of Maryland were men of affairs shaping plan to opportunity, and the situation was inexorable.

Toleration and protection was all that English Roman Catholics could hope to find in traveling thus to the ends of the earth.

[Sidenote: Toleration a policy.]

Cecilius gave positive instruction that on s.h.i.+pboard acts of the Roman Catholic religion should be performed with as much privacy as possible, so as not to offend the Protestant pa.s.sengers "whereby any just complaint may hereafter be made by them in Virginia or in England." There is no pretense of theory here; all is based on the exigency of the situation and sound policy. The policy was George Calvert's, whose school was the court of James, and whose whole career shows that he entertained no advanced views of human liberty. Had he held toleration as a theory of government, his doctrine would have been more liberal than that of Ralegh and Bacon and far in advance of that of contemporary Puritan leaders. They quite misunderstand the man who regard him as a progressive thinker; he was a conservative opportunist. Still less was Cecilius a man likely to act on general principles.

XV.

[Sidenote: Religious observance at sea.]

[Sidenote: Relatio Itineris, p. 10.]

[Sidenote: Note 16.]

[Sidenote: Relatio Itineris, 16, 17.]

We have seen how religiously the Puritans pa.s.sed their time at sea in long daily expositions of Scripture and other devotions, and that sometimes even the watch was set with a psalm. Not less religious were the Catholic pilgrims, and though the form is strikingly different, the believing and zealous age is the same. To make things safe, the Jesuit fathers committed the princ.i.p.al parts of the s.h.i.+p in some detail to the protection of G.o.d in the first place, and then to that "of His Most Holy Mother and of St. Ignatius and of all the angels of Maryland." These angels to whom the safety of Maryland was committed were kept busy by special spiritual opponents. A dangerous storm was raised on one occasion by all the "malignant spirits of the tempest and all the evil genii of Maryland." But Father White circ.u.mvented this combination of ordinary storm spirits with imps of Protestant proclivities by setting forth to Christ and the Blessed Virgin, while the storm was at its worst, "that the purpose of this journey was to glorify the Blood of our Redeemer in the salvation of the Barbarians, and also to build up a kingdom for the Saviour and to consecrate another gift to the Immaculate Virgin his mother." The last clause apparently refers to Maryland, as if it were named in honor of the Virgin. The representation was effective; the good father had scarcely ceased speaking when the storm began to abate.

[Ill.u.s.tration: The colony at St. Mary's.]

[Sidenote: The arrival.]

The Puritans when using a geographical name that began with the word "saint" scrupulously uncanonized it by leaving off the prefix. But these devout pilgrims of the Roman faith, when once the saints and guardian angels of Maryland had piloted them safe in spite of the malice of storm spirits and evil genii into landlocked waters and the bounds of Lord Baltimore's grant, proceeded to sanctify the whole region by sprinkling it with the names of saints and angels from Michael the archangel downward. The ancient Indian designations were marks of a heathenism they purposed to overthrow, and they began by trying to get rid of the whole "bead roll of unbaptized names." No convenient island, creek, river, bay, or cape escaped Christian baptism. On Annunciation Day, 1634, they landed on Heron Island, in the Potomac, which they named appropriately for St. Clement, who was martyred by being thrown into the sea attached to an anchor, and here the sacrifice of the ma.s.s was celebrated, the wors.h.i.+pers reflecting that "never before had this been done in this part of the world."

After the ma.s.s they took upon their shoulders a great cross hewn out of a tree and advanced in order to the place appointed, where the governor and his a.s.sistants took part in its erection. The Catholics of the party, seeing this symbol of the faith erected in a new land, knelt upon the ground and recited the litanies of the cross in a kind of religious ecstasy. Here in another form was that tender attachment to their faith that one finds among the more devout Protestant exiles, and in the n.o.bler natures there was doubtless that element of the heroic and the saintly often evolved in the religious sufferings and activities of that day--a relief to the pettiness of the debates and the irksomeness of the bigotries of the age.

XVI.

[Sidenote: A Catholic colony.]

[Sidenote: Compare Clarke's Gladstone and Maryland Toleration.]

[Sidenote: Maryland Archives, i, 23.]

[Sidenote: Excerpta de Diversis Literis, etc., 56-60.]

The colony had been named Maryland by King Charles in honor of his wife Henrietta Maria; at least there was a.s.signed to the king responsibility for a name that, like nearly everything else about Maryland, was ambiguous. But the phrase _Terra Mariae_ in the charter, though represented there to be the equivalent of Maryland, was significant to a devout Catholic of something better than a compliment to a Catholic queen. The Indian village which with its gardens and cornfields had been bought for the germinal settlement and capital, took the name of St. Mary's, and the whole infant colony is called the Colony of St. Maries, by its own Legislative a.s.sembly in 1638, as though by Maryland were intended the land of Mary. Notwithstanding the manifest care of the second Lord Baltimore to hold the missionaries within the limits of worldly prudence, the zealous fathers lived and labored in a spirit of other-worldliness. They set themselves first of all to convert those sheep without a shepherd, the Protestants of Maryland. Some of these appear to have been men of reckless and immoral lives, who were greatly bettered by an acceptance of religious restraint. Those non-Catholics who were ill, and those who found themselves languis.h.i.+ng and dying in the wilderness without the consolations of their own religion, were zealously visited and converted _in extremis_ by the Jesuits. The servants and mechanics employed by or apprenticed to the missionaries were brought under their constant influence and were readily won. Nearly all the Protestants who arrived in 1638 were swiftly brought over to the faith of the missionaries, and twelve converts were joyously reckoned as fruits of the Jesuit labors in 1639. There was more than one instance of the miraculous, or at least of the marvelous, to help on this work.

One man of n.o.ble birth, who had by dissipation brought himself to desperate straits, and then sunk until he became at length a bond servant in Maryland, embraced Catholicism. After the death of this convert a very bright light was sometimes seen burning about his place of burial, and even those who were not Catholics were permitted to see this wonder. The horrible punishments that resulted from the Divine wrath against those who scoffingly rejected the Catholic faith in Maryland remind one of the equal calamities that befell those who were unfaithful to Puritanism in New England. Seventeenth-century Englishmen with sky-wide differences in opinion were one in the traits that belonged to their age. Father White was sure that the destruction of Indians in Maryland was specially ordered by G.o.d to provide an opening "for His own everlasting law and light"; but not more sure than were the Puritans that the cruel plague which exterminated whole villages on the Ma.s.sachusetts coast was sent to open a way for the planting of Calvinistic churches. Each division of Christians in turn reduced the Almighty Creator to the level of a special tutelary divinity, sometimes to that of a rather vindictive genius of the place.

[Sidenote: Note 17.]

In this work of propagandism the missionaries did not forget the red men. Their labors among the aborigines were fairly successful at first, then interrupted by relapse and by war. Such is the history of Indian missions. Much was made of the solemn profession and baptism of an Indian "king," at which the governor and other distinguished men "honored by their presence the Christian sacraments," the governor marching behind the neophyte in the procession. Maryland was in fact openly a Catholic colony until after 1640.

[Sidenote: Failure to make a Catholic state.]

[Sidenote: Note 18.]

[Sidenote: Note 19.]

But as a Catholic colony it was a failure. In fear of the rising Puritan tempest in England, or the violent opposition on several grounds of its stronger neighbor Virginia, and of the mutinous bigotry of its own Puritan settlers, who regarded Baltimore's government as a "Babylon" to be overthrown, it was never able to afford to Catholics perfect security, much less was it able to promise them domination. But the Catholics included most of the rich and influential families, and it was a Jesuit boast that they were superior to other American settlers in breeding and urbanity. As they had choice of the best land in the province, the Catholic families remained during the whole colonial period among the most prominent people of Maryland. There is also evidence that the Catholics were numerically considerable in proportion to the population, though the reports on the subject are vague and conflicting. In 1641 they were about one fourth of the whole. The ranks of the early Catholic settlers, both of the rich and poor, seem to have been recruited from Ireland as well as from England, but the Maryland government in Queen Anne's Protestant time pa.s.sed acts levying an import tax of twenty pounds on each Irish Catholic servant, in order that the bond servants and even the transported convicts in Maryland should be orthodox Protestants.

XVII.

[Sidenote: Opposition to Maryland.]

George Calvert, the first Baron Baltimore, molded the Maryland enterprise until the drafting of the charter, and his spirit was felt in it after his death. Cecilius, his son, was a man of a somewhat different sort, and his traits became more apparent as time went on.

He was strongly supported at court by Strafford, his father's most devoted and obliged friend, and no doubt also by the queen, who was G.o.dmother to Maryland. The opposition to Maryland was probably embittered by the hatred to Strafford and the jealousy of a Catholic queen.