BOOK III.

CENTRIFUGAL FORCES IN COLONY-PLANTING.

CHAPTER THE FIRST.

_THE CATHOLIC MIGRATION._

I.

[Sidenote: 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.

[Sidenote: 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.

[Sidenote: Calvert's rise.]

[Sidenote: Note 1.]

[Sidenote: Note 2.]

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. 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.

III.

[Sidenote: The colony of Avalon.]

[Sidenote: Cal S. P. America, pp. 25, 26, March 16, 1620.]

[Sidenote: Note 3.]

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. 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. Avalon, the earthly paradise, was but the complement of these.

IV.

[Sidenote: The charter of Avalon.]

[Sidenote: Note 4.]

[Sidenote: Note 5.]

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. 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.

V.

[Sidenote: 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.

[Sidenote: Petition in Rushworth, Part I, i, 141. Compare Neal, Part II, c. ii.]

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. The Commons, in alarm, adopted what James fitly called "a stinging petition against the papists."

VI.

[Sidenote: His resignation.]

[Sidenote: 1624.]

[Sidenote: 1625.]

[Sidenote: Note 6.]

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. 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. 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.

VII.

[Sidenote: Calvert deserts Newfoundland.]

[Sidenote: Letters of Wynne, Daniel, and Hoskins, in Whitbourne's second ed.]

[Sidenote: Note 7.]

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. 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. 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.

[Sidenote: Sails to Virginia.]

[Sidenote: Rymer's Foedera, tom. vii, iv, 147.]

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. 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.

[Sidenote: Virginia antagonism.]

[Sidenote: Note 8.]

[Sidenote: Note 9.]

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. 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.

[Sidenote: Character of the early Virginians.]

[Sidenote: Leah and Rachel, and De Vries Voyages, _passim_.]

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. 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.

[Sidenote: Expulsion of Baltimore.]

[Sidenote: MS. Book of Instructions, Library of Congress, folio 136.]

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. 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.

[Sidenote: 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.

[Sidenote: 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.

X.

[Sidenote: The charter of Maryland.]

[Sidenote: Note 10.]

[Sidenote: Rushworth, Part I, vol. i, 141, 1623.]

[Sidenote: Note 11.]

[Sidenote: Note 12.]

The Maryland charter was no doubt the work of George Calvert's own hand. Its main provisions are identical with those of Avalon; but it put the proprietary in a still better position. He held Avalon by knight's service, Maryland in free and common soccage, and the holdings of Maryland settlers would be under the proprietary, not under the crown. In fact, the crown retained practically no rights of value in Maryland beyond the bare allegiance of the settlers. Larger privileges of trade were conceded to Maryland than had been given to Avalon. In one respect the liberties of the future settlers were apparently better guarded in the Maryland charter, for there is a faint promise of a representative government in its phraseology. But even this was not definitely assured. In a single regard the charter of Maryland appears less favorable to the Catholic religion than its predecessors. Historic specialists with a religious bias, doing their small best to render the current of history turbid, have not failed to convince themselves by means of the new clause that Maryland was a Protestant colony. The patronage and advowsons of all churches had been conferred on the proprietary in the Avalon charter, and a like concession is made in the Maryland grant; but to this, in the Maryland charter, is attached a sort of "lean-to"--a qualifying clause that appears to limit the ecclesiastical organization of the colony to Anglican forms. "Together with license and power," runs the charter, "to build and found Churches, Chapels and Oratories in convenient and fit places within the premises, and to cause them to be dedicated and consecrated according to the ecclesiastical laws of our kingdom of England." In 1632 the Baltimore family was openly Catholic. The Puritans were raging against every indulgence shown by the court to Romanists. The clamor of the Catholic-baiters did not stop with a demand that Romanists should be expelled from England. The Commons had a few years earlier petitioned the King that they be excluded from "all other Your Highness's dominions." The founding of an English colony that might make a home for English and Irish Romanists was a more difficult project in the reign of Charles than it had been in the time of James when Avalon was granted. The clause which allowed Baltimore to dedicate his churches according to the ecclesiastical laws of England excites admiration. It graciously permitted an Anglican establishment in Maryland; it did not oblige Baltimore to do anything at all, nor did it, in fact, put any constraint whatever on his actions in this regard. The impotent clause which seemed to limit, but did not limit, the ecclesiastical organization was breathlessly followed by one far from impotent--a masterpiece of George Calvert's skill. It gave to the proprietary the legal power exercised from ancient times by the Bishops of Durham as counts-palatine. The regalities of Durham having been pared down by Henry VIII, the charter somewhat furtively reached back after the local absolutism of the middle ages by giving Baltimore all the temporal power ever possessed by any Bishop of Durham. But if alarm should be taken at the giving of powers so vast to a Roman Catholic subject, there might be reassurance for timid souls in a clause in imitation of older charters than Calvert's, which stipulated that no interpretation should be put upon the charter by which God's holy and true Christian religion might be prejudiced. Ambiguity spread from the charter to some of the early Maryland laws, which wore a Protestant or a Catholic face according to the side from which they were approached.

XI.

[Sidenote: Condition of English Catholics.]

[Sidenote: An act for the better discovering and repressing of popish recusants. Also, An act to prevent, etc., 3 Jac. I, chaps. iv and v.]

When George Calvert projected his new southern colony he had every reason to suppose that it would be quickly supplied with settlers from the discontented English and Irish Catholics. The statute enacted in the third year of James, soon after the Gunpowder Plot, put those who adhered to the Roman communion in a precarious and exasperating situation. For the first year that a Catholic wholly neglected the sacraments of the English church he must pay twenty pounds. This was raised to forty the second year, and to sixty for every year of conscientious abstention thereafter. If he did not attend the parish church at all, the luxury of a conscience cost him twenty pounds a month, which, as money then went, was a large sum. If he were a rich landholder, the king might take the use or rentals of two thirds of his land until he should conform. The oath of allegiance by which he was to be tested was made ingeniously offensive to a Catholic conscience. If a Romanist should persuade a Protestant to accept his own faith he was guilty of treason, as was also his convert. The man who harbored a Roman Catholic neglecting to attend the parish church was to be fined ten pounds a month. Marriage by a Romish priest invalidated accruing land tenures. The Catholic was not suffered to send his children beyond seas for an education, nor yet to keep a schoolmaster of his own faith; he could not serve as an executor; he might not have the charge of any child; his house might be searched for Catholic books; he was not allowed to keep weapons; and when at last his vexed and troubled life was over, his dead body might not be buried among the graves of his forefathers in the parish churchyard.

[Sidenote: Administration of the law.]

[Sidenote: Lingard, viii, 189, cites Rymer, xxii, 13; Hardwicke Papers, 1446, and a private letter.]

The administration of this law was attended by many aggravations. The pursuivants took the very cattle and household goods of the poor; from the rich they exacted large payments, failing which, they pounced on valuable plate and jewels, which they seized under pretense that these were articles of superstition or the concealed property of Jesuits. It is said that James derived a revenue of thirty-six thousand pounds a year from the fines of lay Catholics. To the several Scotch favorites of the king were assigned certain rich recusants from whom they might squeeze whatever could be got by the leverage of the law.

[Sidenote: Influence of foreign policy.]

[Sidenote: 1583, reprinted 1688.]

[Sidenote: 1609, sm. 4to, pp. 112.]

[Sidenote: Ellis Collection, first series, iii, 128.]

[Sidenote: Neal, ii, ch. ii. Rapin, 215, 2d ed.]

Very embarrassing 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 passages 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 Rochelle. 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 Massachusetts 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 documents 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 Illustrious Baron, which ought also to be the aim of the rest, who go in the same ship, 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 ships.]

[Sidenote: Letters of Baltimore to Wentworth in Strafford papers, _passim_.]

[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 ships 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 cockets 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 passengers. But the ships came to again at the Isle of Wight, and when they got away at last there were near three hundred passengers on board, including Jesuit priests. Most of the passengers 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 passengers 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 worship, 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 associates, 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 shipboard acts of the Roman Catholic religion should be performed with as much privacy as possible, so as not to offend the Protestant passengers "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 passed 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 principal parts of the ship in some detail to the protection of God 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 circumvented 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.

[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 mass was celebrated, the worshipers reflecting that "never before had this been done in this part of the world." After the mass 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 assistants 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 nobler 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 assigned to the king responsibility for a name that, like nearly everything else about Maryland, was ambiguous. But the phrase _Terra Mariæ_ 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 Assembly 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 languishing 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 noble 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 God 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 Massachusetts 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 passed 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 godmother to Maryland. The opposition to Maryland was probably embittered by the hatred to Strafford and the jealousy of a Catholic queen.

[Sidenote: The second Lord Baltimore and Virginia.]

[Sidenote: Note 20.]

On his enemies in Virginia the younger Baltimore took ample vengeance. He got one of the queen's household appointed treasurer of the colony, and the Virginians found themselves obliged to pay the quitrents, which had been neglected and apparently forgotten. Other officers of the colony were nominated by Baltimore. Harvey, the governor, hoping to collect money due him from the royal treasury by Baltimore's assistance, was his obsequious tool, to the bitter indignation of the Virginians, who hated Baltimore not only because he was a Romanist, but also because he had divided the first colony and cut off the northern Indian trade from Virginia. In consequence of the quarrel between Harvey and the Virginians over Maryland there ensued a revolution in Virginia; Harvey was shipped to England by the same bold men who had sent the first Lord Baltimore packing. But Harvey was sent back again by the king, and by this counter revolution the colonial constitution of Virginia was modified for the worse. It was altogether an exquisite revenge.

[Sidenote: Baltimore seeks to control Virginia.]

[Sidenote: Note 21.]

Cecilius meditated even a bolder stroke. He schemed through Windebank to have himself made governor of Virginia, promising to wring out of it eight thousand pounds more of revenue for the king from some neglected sources. To achieve this, he proposed a scheme by which Windebank was to impose on the king's credulity. Secretary Windebank may have recoiled from the part he was to play; it is certain that Charles was not persuaded to hand over Virginia bound hand and foot into the power of the proprietary of the rival colony.

XVIII.

[Sidenote: Cautious policy of Baltimore.]

[Sidenote: Baltimore's instructions, 15 Nov., 1633, Calvert Papers.]

Intolerance on the part of the authorities of Maryland directed toward Protestants might have brought a swift overthrow of the whole project. The instructions given for the first voyage already cited show throughout the need for extreme caution in the face of extreme peril. It is required of the governor and commissioners that "they be very careful to preserve the peace amongst all the passengers on shipboard, and that they suffer no scandal nor offense to be given to any of the Protestants." The rulers are to instruct the Catholics to be silent "upon all occasions of discourse concerning matter of religion," and those in authority are to "treat the Protestants with as much mildness and favor as justice will permit." These instructions were to hold good after landing, and in one notable case of religious dissension after the arrival in Maryland, justice was meted out against the Catholic offender in a way that showed a disposition to observe this policy of conciliation toward Protestants at the expense of some unfairness toward Catholics. Very early a proclamation was issued for the suppression of all religious disputes, and Copley, the business administrator of the Jesuits, thought they ought to be put down for fear the writings should be sent to the governor of Virginia.

[Sidenote: Necessary ambiguity.]

[Sidenote: Note 22.]

The ambiguous charter of Maryland was a necessary hypocrisy. The plan of toleration was also inevitable, and it was carried no further than necessity required, for in that age, when toleration was odious, a liberal policy had also its perils. The Act for Church Liberties of 1639 was a fine example of the studied ambidexterity of the Maryland government. It was enacted "that Holy Church within this province shall have all her rights, liberties, and immunities, safe, whole, and inviolate in all things." Holy Church here is a deliberate substitution for "the Church of England" in a similar phrase of Magna Charta. Such an act was worthy of Bunyan's Mr. Facing-both-ways. Interpreted by judges holding office at the will of a Catholic proprietary, it could have but one meaning. For the outside world it might bear another sense. It did all that could be done in the circumstances for the Roman Catholic religion and for Catholic ecclesiastics.

XIX.

[Sidenote: Puritan settlers invited.]

[Sidenote: Note 23.]

[Sidenote: Winthrop's Journal, ii, 148, 149.]

In 1643, Parliament, dominated by Puritans, could not let the distant Maryland province rest in peace. It passed an ordinance making the Earl of Warwick Governor in Chief and Lord High Admiral of all the plantations in America. This act contained covert allusions to papists, Spaniards, and governors recently appointed by the king. Baltimore met the rising tempest in a way characteristic of him. If he could settle a portion of his province with Puritans they might serve to shield him from the storm. Besides, the Catholic emigration had not proved large, and his province needed inhabitants. He wrote to a Captain Gibbons, of Boston, sending him a commission under the Maryland government, and offering "free liberty of religion and all other privileges" to such of the New England people as were willing to remove to Maryland. There were those in New England in that day who longed for a more genial climate, but to settle under the authority of a papist was to them much like pitching a tent on the confines of perdition.

[Sidenote: Puritans from Virginia.]

[Sidenote: 1643.]

Though Puritans could not be induced to move from New England, it happened that the Puritans living in Virginia were persecuted in this same year by that stanch cavalier and retrograde churchman, Sir William Berkeley, who wanted his parsons to read prayers, but did not like preaching ministers of any sort. He was new to his government, and had brought over with him plenty of hostility to the party that had affronted his royal master in England. Virginia Puritans had no choice but to suffer or depart, and Maryland was convenient. They began soon after this to seek a refuge under the protection of a proprietary who was a papist and who practiced toleration--two things almost equally hateful to the Puritans. Mr. James, a Puritan minister, tarried in Maryland a short time, as early as 1643; he was probably the only Protestant minister that set foot on Maryland soil before 1650. But the Puritan was never easy unless he was uneasy, and he was sure to be uneasy within when there was none to molest from without. To take an oath of fidelity to a papist was to him swearing fealty to antichrist; but so desirous was Baltimore of Puritan settlers that even the Maryland oath of fidelity was modified, and a saving clause was inserted for the ease of the Puritan conscience. The coming of Puritans who were in sympathy with the Parliament in England and who abhorred a tolerant papist, contributed something to the multifarious turmoils of the following years.

XX.

[Sidenote: Maryland turmoils.]

[Sidenote: Note 24.]

What we know of the petty civil wars of Maryland is tedious and perplexing. The broils before 1649 sprang from diverse sources, some of which we know, others we may easily conjecture. There was the old claim of Claiborne to jurisdiction over Kent Island; there was a disposition on the part of some of the Marylanders to relieve the tedium of existence by taking a hand in the great struggle against royal authority which was rending England; there was the tendency common in frontier communities to carry debates to a violent issue; there was perhaps a natural proneness to insurrection on the part of bond servants and men lately out of service; and there was an innate hunger for spoil of any sort in the seamen of that age and in the rougher class on shore. But by 1648 the tempest had passed for the time; order had been reestablished; the Catholic and the Puritan were living in peace like the lion and the lamb of Hebrew prophecy; and the Catholic proprietary, always promptly bending before the storm, had delegated his authority to a Protestant governor who took the Parliament side.

XXI.

[Sidenote: The Act of 1649.]

[Sidenote: Note 25.]

Before this epoch Maryland toleration had been merely a practical fact. It had not been theoretically stated; it had not been a matter of legislation at all; its extent and limitations were unknown. But now that this colonial home of Catholics was to be a land of Protestants, and particularly of Puritans, it was necessary to formulate the principle of toleration, the more, that Baltimore's own co-religionists were to be put under a Protestant governor. Governor and high officers of state were required to swear that they would molest on account of religion no person professing to believe in Jesus Christ, "and in particular no Roman Catholic." By the mere march of events it had come to pass that in the state founded by Catholics as a cradle for the Roman Catholic religion, the Catholic was now compelled to secure as best he could the toleration of his religion at the hands of the heretic. Part of Baltimore's plan for this new settlement of affairs involved the sending over of a code of perpetual laws to be adopted by the Assembly. The proprietary gave orders that the governor should not assent to any of these laws if all were not passed; but the Assembly of Maryland farmers was too cunning to be entrapped into passing laws which it thought inconvenient and unjust. A humble letter was sent from the members to the lord proprietary complaining that they were "illeterate" and "void of that Understanding and Comprehension" necessary to the discussion of such a code, and that in April they were too busy with their "necessary employment in a Crop" to give attention to it. They selected certain acts out of the code which they passed, among which was the famous Act of Toleration of 1649. That this was part of the code sent from England there can be no doubt; the "illeterate" colonists were not capable of framing it, and it bears the character-mark of the Baltimore policy throughout. Here is no philosophic theory of toleration, no far-reaching conclusion like that of Roger Williams, that the magistrate may not take cognizance of merely religious offences. Williams was a thinker, a doctrinary, too far in advance of his age to be the successful organizer of a new state. Baltimore, on the other hand, accepted a practical toleration as an expedient--he may even have come to believe in it as a theory by force of his own situation. But he was not primarily a thinker at all. Even here, where Baltimorean toleration reaches high tide, no philosophic congruity is sought. The Jew and the Unitarian who deny the divinity of Christ are to be put to death. Only so much toleration is granted as is needful to the occasion. And even this toleration is not put upon any other ground than public policy; the forcing of conscience in religion "hath frequently fallen out to be of dangerous consequence"; therefore this law is made "to preserve mutual love and amity amongst the inhabitants." The provisions against such offences as blasphemy and Sabbath-breaking and religious disputes precede those for toleration. Very politic is the arrangement by which reviling of God is made a capital offence, while reviling the Virgin Mary is adroitly associated with speeches against the "holy apostles or evangelists" as a sort of second-class blasphemy, a finable offence.

[Sidenote: Vicissitudes of toleration.]

And yet it was toleration, and the law was all the more influential as an example, perhaps, because it was only practical and quite incongruous. It was eminently prudent and statesmanlike. That it was not perpetually effective was the fault not of Baltimore but of the times. Puritan ideas were rampant. The government of the proprietary was overthrown; the Jesuits fled to the inhospitable Virginia, where they lived concealed in a low hut like a cistern or a tomb, not lamenting their physical privations so much as the lack of wine which deprived them of the consolation of the sacrament. The new government of Maryland, five years after Baltimore's famous "act concerning Religion," passed a new act with the same title--an act brusque and curt, a law with its boots and spurs on. "That none profess and exercise the papist religion" is its rude forbidding. The tables are turned; it is no longer the nonresident Jew and the hypothetical Unitarian who are excepted. But the wheels rolled swiftly once more, and in three years Cecilius, absolute lord and proprietary, was again master of Maryland, and the beneficent act of 1649 resumed its sway. It protected the Catholic element, which, though always rich and influential, came to be in latter colonial times but about a twelfth of the population. Toleration also served to make Maryland an early dwelling place for abounding Quakers and others holding religious views not relished in colonies less liberal.

ELUCIDATIONS.

[Sidenote: Note 1, page 223.]

"Voto a Dios que la Corte d'Inglatierra es como un libro de cavalleros andantes." Quoted by Chamberlain in Birch, i, 413. In view of the swift mutations of fortune among courtiers, Dudley Carleton the younger wrote on December 18, 1624, "He is happiest who has least to do at court"--a truth which Calvert probably had come to appreciate by that time.

[Sidenote: Note 2, page 224.]

"The third man who was thought to gain by the Spaniard was Secretary Calvert; and as he was the only secretary employed in the Spanish match, so undoubtedly he did what good offices he could therein for religion's sake, being infinitely addicted to the Roman Catholic faith, having been converted thereunto by Count Gondomar and Count Arundel.... Now this man did protest to a friend of his own that he never got by the Spaniards so much as a pair of pockets; which it should seem is a usual gift among them, being excellently perfumed, and may be valued at twenty nobles or ten pounds price." Goodman's Court of King James, i, 376, 377.

[Sidenote: Note 3, page 225.]

Whitbourne gives these names. Those who believe that Calvert was already actuated by religious zeal, remind us that Glastonbury (by a curious legendary confusion of names) was also called Avalon, and that in the Christian legend Joseph of Arimathea began at Glastonbury the planting of the Christian religion in Britain. See Anderson's Church of England in the Colonies, second edition, i, 325, 326. This interpretation of Calvert's intention in naming his colony was early given. British Museum, Sloane MSS. XXG. 3662, folio 24, date 1670. When Calvert's first colony was sent out the Scotch settlement in Newfoundland was of twelve years' standing, while the Bristol colony had been seated there five years. Calvert's enterprise seems to have been pushed with more energy and with a more liberal expenditure than its predecessors. Compare Whitbourne _passim_ with the statement of Sir William Alexander in his Encouragement to Colonies, 1624, p. 25.

[Sidenote: Note 4, page 225.]

Among the papers at Landsdowne House which I was permitted to examine by the kindness of Lord Edmund Fitzmaurice, there is an unpublished work by James Abercromby, written in 1752. It discusses with acuteness the nature of the several colonial governments. I shall refer to it hereafter under the title of Abercromby's Examination, Landsdowne House, 47. Abercromby was, so far as I know, the first to point out the apparently intentional ambiguity of the passages in the Maryland charter that have to do with religion.

[Sidenote: Note 5, page 226.]

It is interesting that in 1622, the year preceding the division of New England by lot, three shares were laid off and no more. They were at the extreme north of the territory divided the next year, and were assigned respectively to the Duke of Lenox, the Earl of Arundel, and Sir George Calvert. A "grand patent" was then in preparation for a colony on the coast of Maine to be called Nova Albion. Calendar Colonial Documents, July 24, 1622. It seems probable, from the charter of Avalon, that Calvert intended it to be a colony that should harbor Catholics, but on the other hand the first settlers were chiefly Protestants, with a clergyman of their own faith, and there seem to have been few Romanists or none in Avalon until the arrival of a company with the lord proprietary in 1627.

[Sidenote: Note 6, page 228.]

Fuller's oft-quoted account of the circumstances of Calvert's resignation, Worthies, Nuttall's edition, iii, 417, 418, gives probably the commonly received story, and shows that the religious motive was popularly accepted as the reason for his leaving office. Archbishop Abbot was better informed though less impartial. His letter is in the curious work entitled "The Negotiations of Sir Thomas Roe in his Embassy to the Ottoman Porte from the Year 1621 to 1628," etc., published in 1740. Abbot says: "Mr. secretary Calvert hath never looked merily since the prince his coming out of Spaine: it was thought hee was muche interested in the Spanishe affaires: a course was taken to ridde him of all imployments and negotiations. This made him discontented; and, as the saying is, _Desperatio facit monachum_, so hee apparently did turne papist, whiche hee now professeth, this being the third time that hee hath bene to blame that way. His Majesty to dismisse him, suffered him to resigne his Secretaries place to Sir Albertus Moreton, who payed him three thousand pounds for the same; and the kinge hath made him baron of Baltimore in Ireland; so hee is withdrawn from vs, and having bought a ship of 400 tuns, hee is going to New England, or Newfoundlande, where hee hath a colony." Page 372. The letters preserved among the state papers are the main authority, especially those addressed to Sir Dudley Carleton, who desired to buy Calvert's place. See, _passim_, the Calendar of Domestic Papers for 1624 and 1625 to February 12th. The circumstantial account given in the Salvetti correspondence, though cited as authority by Mr. Gardiner, has never been printed, for which reason it is here given in the original from the British Museum Additional MSS. 27962 C.: "Il Signor Cavalier Calvert primo Segretario et Consigliero di Stato, credendosi, doppo la rottura de' trattati, che si haveva con Spagna, (che per comandamento di sua Maestà haveva lui solo maneggiati,) d'essere eclipsato nell' oppinione del Sig{r}. Principe et Signor Duca, et di non essere più impiegato con quella confidenza, che solevano ricorse pochi giorni sono dal Signor Duca di Buchingam per fargli intendere la sua risolutione, la quale era, che vedendo di non potere godere della buona grazia dell' Eccellenza sua nella medesima forma che godeva avanti della sua andata in Spagna era risoluto di rittrarsi dalla Corte, et di mettere in sua mano, come di presente faceva, la sua carica, perchè ne disponasse ovonque le piacesse con molte altre parole tutte piene di valore et magnanimita: soggiugnendoli di più come dicono, che essendo risoluto per l'avvenire di vivere et morire Cattolicamente, conosceva di non poterlo fare nel servizio dove era senza gelosia dello stato et pericolo del Parlamento. Il Signor Duca ancorche non amasse questo Cavaliero, ne nessuno altro che ha hauto le mani nel parentado di Spagna, con tutto ciò vedendo un atto cosi honorato, gli rispose: che non potera negare che non gli fusse stato da non so che tempo in qua nemico; ma che hora vedendo la franchezza et nobiltà d'animo, col rispetto che gli haveva mostrato, l'abracciava per amico, per mostrargliene gli effeti, sempre che ne havesse occasione, con assicuratione de più che operrebbe con sua Maesta gli fusse confermato le suoi pensioni, et di più dato honorevole ricompensa per la sua carica di segretario. Et che quanto alla sua religione egli l'havrebbe protetto quanto fusse mai stato possibile," etc. Salvetti, Correspondence, iii, February 6, 1624-'25.

The letter of the 28th February (O.S.) in the same volume gives an account of the formal resignation to the king, and states that the greater part of the money paid to Calvert was from his successor, and that it was paid _denari contanti_, "cash down," and adds sympathetically that "this good lord will be able to live easily and quietly" hereafter.

[Sidenote: Note 7, page 229.]

Calvert attributes his deception to interested letters. The principal motives to settle in Newfoundland may be seen by the reader who has patience enough to thread his way through the jumble of mythology, allegory, political economy of a certain sort, verse in English and Latin, theology, satire, and an incredible number of what-nots besides "for the generall and perpetuall good of Great Britain," found in Vaughan's Golden Fleece, published in 1626. The nearness of Newfoundland to Ireland and the comparative cheapness of transportation thither, but especially the well-established value of its fisheries and the market they afforded for the produce of the colony, were the most plausible reasons for settling a colony there. Probably there was a lurking purpose to turn the shore fishery into a monopoly such as was contemplated by projectors for the New England coast. The fact was insisted upon that part of Newfoundland was "equal in climate," or at least in latitude, to "Little Britain in France," or Brittany. Then, too, Newfoundland is an island, and Vaughan at least persuaded himself that "Ilanders should dwel in Ilands." As some of the apostles were fishermen, "Newfoundland the grand port of Fishing was alloted to Professors of the Gospell." Golden Fleece, Part Third, pp. 5 and 6 and _passim_.

[Sidenote: Note 8, page 230.]

Lord Baltimore may have had the governorship of Virginia in view. Cecilius, his son, sought to have himself made governor in 1637. Colonial Papers, ix, 45, Record Office. See an earlier communication on the same subject in Sainsbury, 246, under the date of February 25, 1637. It is almost the only petition of the second Lord Baltimore that was not granted. See also section xvii of the present chapter, and note 21 below.

[Sidenote: Note 9, page 231.]

I have ventured to conjecture so much on evidence not complete. Father White, who was cordially entertained by the Governor of St. Kitts in 1634, speaks of the people of Montserrat as "pulsos ab anglis Virginiæ ob fidei Catholicæ professionem." White's choice of words does not necessarily imply, I suppose, an actual banishment from Virginia, but at least a refusal of permission to come. Neither Edwards nor Oldmixon mention this fact; but as White visited St. Kitts only two years after the settlement at Montserrat, which was made immediately from St. Kitts (according to Edwards) and was subject to the same governor, his information was doubtless correct. There seems to have been another project to plant Catholics in Virginia about this time, unless, as is rather probable, we meet the same plan in another form. Sir Pierce Crosby offered to plant ten companies "of the Irish Regiment into a fruitful part of America not yet inhabited." To make the proposal acceptable, it was stated, somewhat diplomatically perhaps, that the major part of the officers and many of the soldiers were Protestants. Sainsbury's Calendar, p. 95, where the conjectural date is 1628.

[Sidenote: Note 10, page 235.]

The translation quoted is that published by Cecilius Calvert in the Relation of 1635. The original reads: "Unacum licencia et facultate Ecclesias Capellas et Oratoria in locis infra premissa congruis et idoneis Extruendi et fundandi eaque dedicari et sacrari juxta leges Ecclesiasticas regni nostri Anglie facendas." Maryland Archives.

[Sidenote: Note 11, page 235.]

Sir Edward Northey, Attorney-General of England in the following century, gave this decision: "As to the said clause in the grant of the province of Maryland, I am of opinion the same doth not give him power to do anything contrary to the ecclesiastical laws of England." This is as ingeniously ambiguous as the clause itself. The attorneys-general and solicitors-general during the eighteenth century set themselves to the task of subordinating colonial government to parliamentary authority by a series of opinions in which they make rather than explain law. In the present instance Northey was more modest than usual, for he reaches a purely negative and impotent conclusion, which Neill turns into a positive one in his text. Founders of Maryland, 99. There is a collection of opinions on colonial subjects rendered by the attorneys and solicitors-general in the first half of the eighteenth century, in a volume at Landsdowne House which I have examined. This collection was made, or at least furnished, for the use of Lord Shelburne. Before Northey's opinion was given the English Parliament had assumed power to override some provisions of the Maryland charter, as is pointed out in Abercromby's Examination, MS. at Landsdowne House, 47. How slowly the Church of England grew in the colony may be inferred from the statement made in 1677, that four clergymen have plantations and settled "beings" of their own--a phrase sufficiently obscure. Others were sustained by voluntary contributions. Colonial Papers, No. 49, Record Office, folios 54, 55. This is Baltimore's reply to the paper at folio 56, the order of which is evidently reversed. The population of the province, it is stated, was composed at that time chiefly of dissenters of various sects, Catholics and Anglicans being the smallest bodies.

[Sidenote: Note 12, page 236.]

As early as 1752 it was remarked that the Maryland charter contained "the most extensive power of any charter in British America." Abercromby's Examination, MS., Landsdowne House. In Collier's Ecclesiastical History of Great Britain, vol. ix, is the writ of Edward III, A. D. 1327, by which the regalities of the bishopric of Durham are confirmed after a trial in parliament.

[Sidenote: Note 13, page 240.]

Cecilius, Lord Baltimore, wrote to Strafford, 10 January, 1633-'34, that he had sent "a hopeful colony into Maryland with a fair and probable Expectation of Success, however without Danger of any great prejudice unto myself, in Respect that many others are joined with me in the Adventure"--that is, in the financial risk. Strafford Papers, i, 179. Twenty years later Cromwell writes to Bennet, Governor of Virginia, "We have therefore at the request of Lord Baltimore and of divers other persons of quality here who are engaged in great adventures in his interest," etc. Thurloe, i, 724. A tradition of this co-operation may have remained in Maryland a century later, for in 1755 or 1756 there was presented to the Lord Baltimore of that day, who was a Protestant, a petition from Roman Catholic residents of Maryland in which this assertion occurs: "The money and persons of this persuasion contributed chiefly to the settling and peopling of this colony." British Museum MS. 15,489.

[Sidenote: Note 14, page 242.]

The statement of Father Henry More, in 1642, that "in leading the colony to Maryland by far the greater number were heretics," is not conclusive, though it is relied on by General Bradley T. Johnson and others. More was Provincial of the Jesuits in England, and he is no doubt repeating loosely the information contained in Father White's letter of the year before, which says, "Whereas three parts of the people in four at least are heretics"--a statement true, no doubt, in 1641, when the Kent Islanders and newcomers were counted, but not true, probably, of the company of 1634, as Bancroft seems to say.

[Sidenote: Note 15, page 242.]

The original document is in the Stoneyhurst MSS., Anglia, vol. iv. It is reprinted in full in General Bradley T. Johnson's "The Foundation of Maryland." It tends to show that the emigration of many recusants was confidently expected.

[Sidenote: Note 16, page 243.]

"Nubes, terrificum in morem excresentes, terrori erant intuentibus antequam discinderentur: et opinionem faciebant prodiisse adversùm nos in aciem, omnes spiritus tempestatum maleficas, et malos genios omnes Marylandiæ." Relatio Itineris, 15.

[Sidenote: Note 17, page 247.]

See _passim_, Letters of Missionaries. A letter of Copley, the Jesuit, to Lord Baltimore, in Calvert Papers, p. 165, implies the possibility of Catholic incumbents of Maryland parishes. He is complaining of the law of the Assembly of 1638 relating to glebe land: "In euery Mannor 100 acres must be laid out for Gleabe lande, if then the intention to bind them to be pastors who enjoy it, we must either by retaining so much euen of our owne land undertake the office of pastors or lesse euen in our owne Mannor maintaine pastors, both which to us would be uery Inconuenient."

[Sidenote: Note 18, page 248.]

Letters of Missionaries, p. 77. "The Catholics who live in the colony are not inferior in piety to those who live in other countries; but in urbanity of manners, according to the judgment of those who have visited the other colonies, are considered far superior to them." More than a hundred years later the Catholics retained a superiority, according to Updike's Appendix to McSparran, 1752: "The Catholics, having the start in point of time of the after settlers, are also to this day ahead of them in wealth and substance; by which means the first and best families are for the most part still of the Roman communion," p. 492.

[Sidenote: Note 19, page 248.]

The act passed in 1704 was renewed in 1715 and still in force in 1749. I cite from Ogle's Account of Maryland, of the latter date, a manuscript at Landsdowne House, numbered 45, folio 199. In No. 61 at Landsdowne House is a decision of the Attorney-General in England in 1605 that Jesuits may be expelled from Maryland by order of the queen if aliens, but not if they are subjects. The various eighteenth-century enactments against Catholics will be found in Bacon's Laws of Maryland, _passim_. MS. 15,489, British Museum, cites some of these severe laws and the proceedings taken under them. Strong petitions against these measures were signed by Charles Carroll and others.

[Sidenote: Note 20, page 249.]

Gabriel Hawley, Robert Evelin, and Jerome Hawley, appointed to places in Virginia, appear to have been Catholics and partisans of Baltimore. Aspinwall Papers, i, page 101, note.

[Sidenote: Note 21, page 250.]

Baltimore's letter bears date February 25, 1637, and is in the Record Office, Colonial Papers, xiv, No. 42. The memorial apparently sent with it is No. 49 in the same volume. Baltimore proposes to reward Windebank for his assistance, and he sets down the very manner in which the secretary is to approach the king with a diplomatic falsehood. Both the letter and memorial are printed in Maryland Archives, Council Proceedings, pp. 41, 42.

[Sidenote: Note 22, page 251.]

The act was one of those that for some reason of expediency was never read a third time, but was condensed into what would now be called an omnibus bill. The act is given in Bacon's Laws, and is compared by Bozman with Magna Charta. Bozman regards this law of 1639 as an attempt to establish the Roman Catholic religion.

[Sidenote: Note 23, page 252.]

A copy of the ordinance as printed separately at the time is in the Lenox Library. It is reprinted in Churchill's Voyages, viii, 776.

[Sidenote: Note 24, page 254.]

It is extremely curious that, in the letters of one of the Jesuits reporting the attack upon them in 1645, he should have used an expressive word hitherto supposed to be very modern and American. He says that the assault was made "by a party of 'rowdies' or marauders." From the way in which the sentence is printed in the Records of the Society of Jesus, iii, 387, I suppose that in the original manuscript the English word "rowdies" is given and explained by a Latin equivalent.

[Sidenote: Note 25, page 256.]

Charles, the third Lord Baltimore, writes in defense of the Maryland policy of toleration under date of March 26, 1678: "That at the first planteing of this Provynce of my ffather--Albeit he had an absolute Liberty given to him and his heires to carry thither any Persons out of any the Dominions that belonged to the Crown of England that should be found Wylling to goe thither, yett when he comes to make use of this Liberty He found very few who were inclyned to goe and seat themselves in those parts But such as for some Reasons or other could not Lyve with ease in other places, And of these a great parte were such as could not conforme in all particulars to the severall Lawes of England relateing to Religion. Many there were of this sort of people who declared their Wyllingness to goe and Plant themselves In this Provynce soe as they might have a generall toleracon settled there by a Lawe by which all of all sorts that professed Christianity in Generall might be at liberty to worship God in such manner as was most agreeable with their respective Judgments and Consciences without being Subject to any Penaltyes whatever for their soe doing." Colonial Papers, vol. xlix, Record Office. Compare Leah and Rachel, p. 23, where the author also implies that the Act of Toleration was a concession to Puritan demands.

CHAPTER THE SECOND.

_THE PROPHET OF RELIGIOUS FREEDOM._

I.

[Sidenote: Centrifugal forces in Massachusetts.]

The centrifugal force of religious differences acted with disastrous results in Maryland, because the Catholic party, which had always a controlling negative there through the proprietary, was in the minority. The Massachusetts people, on the other hand, were fairly homogeneous in religious opinion, and their government was admirably compacted. In Massachusetts religious sentiment was a powerful centripetal force. Magistrates and ministers were nicely poised, and each order relied upon the other to maintain existing conditions. If the magistrates were perplexed or were seriously opposed, the elders were called in to advise or to lend a powerful ecclesiastical sanction to the rulers. When any disturbance of church order was threatened, the magistrates came to the front and supported the clergy with the sharp smiting of the secular arm. In the magistracy and in the ranks of the clergy were men of unusual prudence and ability. If the little Puritan commonwealth seemed a frail canoe at first, it was navigated--considering its smallness one might rather say it was paddled--most expertly. But in Massachusetts, as well as in Maryland, religious opinion was the main source of disturbance. The all-pervading ferment of the time could not be arrested, and more than once it produced explosion. Now one and now another prophet of novelty or prophet of retrogression arose to be dealt with for religious errors; there were divergences from the strait path of Puritanism in the direction of a return to Church of England usage, divergences in the direction of extreme Separatism, in the direction of the ever-dreaded "Anabaptism," in the direction of Arianism, and of so-called Antinomianism. In the case of the Antinomians, the new movement was able to shelter itself under the authority of the younger Vane, then governor, and for a while under the apparent sanction of the powerful Cotton. But no other religious disturbance was ever allowed to gather head enough to become dangerous to the peace and unity of the little state. Dislike as we may the principles on which uniformity was enforced, we must admire the forehanded statesmanship of the Massachusetts leaders in strangling religious disturbances at birth, as Pharaoh's midwives did infant Hebrews.

II.

[Sidenote: Early life of Roger Williams.]

[Sidenote: N. Eng. Hist., Gen. Reg., July, 1889.]

[Sidenote: Indorsement of Mrs. Sadleir on Williams's letter, transcript, Lenox Library; also in Narragansett Club, Pub. VI.]

[Sidenote: Note 1.]

[Sidenote: Note 2.]

One of the most formidable of all those who ventured to assail the compact phalanx presented by the secular and religious authorities of Massachusetts was Roger Williams. Williams was the son of a merchant tailor of London. He manifested in boyhood that quickness of apprehension which made him successful in acquiring languages later in life. Before he was fifteen the precocious lad was employed in the Star Chamber in taking notes of sermons and addresses in shorthand, and his skill excited the surprise and admiration of Sir Edward Coke. Coke had found time, in the midst of a tempestuous public career and the arduous private studies that brought him permanent renown, to defend the legacy which founded the new Sutton's Hospital, later known as the Charter-House School. Of this school he was one of the governors, and he appointed young Roger Williams to a scholarship there, Williams being the second pupil that ever gained admission to that nursery of famous men. His natural inclination to industry in his studies was quickened by the example and encouragement of Coke, who was wont to say that he who would harrow what Roger Williams had sown must rise early. From the Charter House Williams went to Pembroke College, Cambridge. He early manifested sincere piety and a tendency to go to extremes in his Puritan scruples. Even in his father's house he had begun to taste the bitterness of persecution. His eager temper transformed his convictions into downright passions; his integrity was an aggressive force, and there was a precipitation in his decisions and actions that was trying to his friends. From an early period he showed a conscience intolerant of prudent compromises. Puritanism had contrived to exist and to grow to formidable strength within the church by means of such compromises. Hooker and Cotton, two of the greatest luminaries of that party and afterward the lights that lightened New England, one day urged on the impetuous Williams the propriety of temporarily conforming in the use of the common prayer. By conceding so much to the judgment of his revered elders, Williams would have removed the only obstacle to his advancement, for preferment was offered to the clever and exemplary _protégé_ of Coke in the universities, in the city, in the country, and at court. But neither interest nor example could sway the impractical young minister. He took refuge, like other extreme Puritans, in a private chaplaincy, and refused all compromise, in order, as he afterward declared, to keep his "soul undefiled in this point and not to act with a doubting conscience." Most men feel bound to obey conscience only where it clearly commands or forbids; good men may act on the balance of probabilities where there is doubt; but this young man would not do anything concerning which his moral judgment felt the slightest halting. Here is the key to his whole career; his strength lay in his aspiration for a soul undefiled; his weakness, in that he was ever a victim to the pampered conscience of an ultraist. Property of some thousands of pounds, that might have been his had he been willing to make oath in the form required in chancery, he renounced to his scruples. It certainly seemed rash in a young man just setting out in life, with a young wife to care for, to indulge in such extravagant luxury of scruple.

III.

[Sidenote: Flight of Williams from England.]

[Sidenote: Williams's letter to Mrs. Sadleir, as above.]

Laud succeeded in hunting the non-conforming Puritans from their lectureships and chaplaincies. It became with Williams no longer a question of refusing preferments on both hands with lavish self-denial, but of escaping the harsh penalties reserved for such as he by the Courts of High Commission and the Star Chamber. There was nothing left but to betake himself to New England for safety. He fled hurriedly across country on horseback, feeling it "as bitter as death" that he dared not even say farewell to his great patron Sir Edward Coke, who detested schism.

[Sidenote: Arrival in New England.]

[Sidenote: Note 3.]

Here, as in after life, the supreme hardship he suffered was not mere exile, but that exile of the spirit which an affectionate man feels when he is excommunicate of those he loves. His escape by sea was probably the more difficult because he was unwilling to "swallow down" the oath exacted of those who emigrated. But he succeeded in sailing with his young wife, and in 1631 this undefiled soul, this dauntless and troublesome extremist, landed in New England. He was invited to become one of the ministers of the Boston church. But Williams was conscientiously a Separatist, and he refused to enter into communion with the Boston congregation because of its position with reference to the church in England.

[Sidenote: Note 4.]

This protest by withdrawal of communion was a fundamental principle of Separatism. It was not, as it appears on the surface, a manifestation of uncharitableness toward persons, but a solemn protest by act in favor of a principle. Never was any man more forgiving, long-suffering, and charitable toward opponents than Williams, but never was a man less inclined to yield a single jot in the direction of compromise where his convictions were involved, whatever might be the evils sure to result from his refusal.

IV.

[Sidenote: Williams at Salem.]

[Sidenote: Winthrop's Journal, i, 63, 12th April, 1631.]

[Sidenote: Note 5.]

Williams repaired first to Salem, the north pole of Puritanism, where the pioneer church of Massachusetts had a more Separatist tone than any other. In the phrase of the time, no other churches in the world were so "pure" as the New England churches, and Salem was accounted the "purest" church in New England. Its surviving minister, Skelton, and its principal layman, Endecott, both tended to extreme Congregationalism; but the General Court of the colony protested against the selection of Williams to be one of the ministers of the Salem church. Skelton's Separatist tendencies, Endecott's impetuous radicalism, and Salem's jealous rivalry with the younger town of Boston, were already sources of anxiety to the rulers. The addition of Williams to these explosive forces was alarming. Williams's ecclesiastical ideals were not those which the leaders of the colony had devoted their lives and fortunes to establish. Had this young radical been less conscientious, less courageous, less engagingly good and admirable, there would not have been so much reason to fear him. A letter was written to Endecott protesting against Williams's ordination, because he had refused communion with the church at Boston, and because he denied the power of the magistrate to enforce duties of the first table--that is, duties of religion. Here at the very outset of his American life we find that Williams had already embraced the broad principle that involved the separation of church and state and the most complete religious freedom, and had characteristically pushed this principle to its logical result some centuries in advance of the practice of his age. The protest of the court prevented his ordination. He yielded to the opposition and soon after removed to Plymouth, where the people were Separatists, modified by the conservative teachings of John Robinson, somewhat modified also by the responsibility of founding a new state, and perhaps by association with Puritans of the neighboring colony.

[Sidenote: Williams at Plymouth.]

[Sidenote: Maverick's Description of New England, 25.]

[Sidenote: Williams to Winthrop, 1632.]

At Plymouth the young idealist "prophesied" in his turn, but did not take office in the church, which already had a pastor in Ralph Smith, the Separatist, who had been suffered to come over in a Massachusetts ship only on his giving a promise not to preach in that jurisdiction without leave. The congregation at Plymouth was poor, and Roger Williams mainly supported himself by hard toil "at the hoe and the oar"--that is, perhaps, in farming and fishing. His body seems to have been vigorous, and no physical fatigue abated anything of his mental activity. The Pilgrims had passed more than twelve years in Holland, and almost every adult in Plymouth must have known Dutch. Those of Roger Williams's own age, who were children when they migrated to Leyden and men when they left, probably spoke it as well as they did their mother tongue. The Plymouth people, indeed, were styled "mungrell Dutch" a quarter of a century later. It is probable that Williams, with his usual eagerness to acquire knowledge, now added Dutch to his stock of languages; it is certain that he afterward taught Dutch to John Milton. But he was still more intent on learning the language of the natives, that he might do them good. He resolved not to accept office as pastor or teacher, but to give himself to work among the Indians. Perhaps his tendency to individualism made this prospect pleasing to him. He may have begun already to realize in a half-conscious way that there was scant room in any organization for such as he. The learning of the Indian language was an arduous toil in more ways than one. "God was pleased to give me a painful patient spirit," wrote Williams long after, "to lodge with them in their filthy, smoky holes to gain their tongue." He afterward wrote an excellent treatise on the dialect of the New England Indians.

[Sidenote: Writes against the royal patents.]

[Sidenote: Bradford, 310.]

[Sidenote: Knowles's Life of Williams, 53.]

[Sidenote: Williams returns to Salem.]

At Plymouth Williams spoke, as he had at Salem, without restraint from any motive of expediency or even of propriety. Separatist Plymouth, whose days of advance were over, was a little disturbed by his speech. In his own sweet, reckless way he sometimes sharply rebuked even the revered Bradford when he thought him at fault. And in the interest of the aborigines and of justice Williams laid before Governor Bradford a manuscript treatise which argued that the king had no right to give away, as he had assumed to do in his grants and charters, the lands of the Indians merely because he was a Christian and they heathen. That it was right to wrong a man because he was not orthodox in belief could find no place in the thoughts of one whose conscience was wholly incapable of sophistication. Bradford accepted candidly the rebukes of Williams and loved him for his "many precious parts." But as governor of a feeble colony he was disturbed by Williams's course. In spirituality, unselfish fearlessness, and a bold pushing of Separatist principles to their ultimate logical results, Roger Williams reminded the Pilgrims of the amiable pastor of the Separatist church in Amsterdam whose change step by step to "Anabaptism," the great bugbear of theology in that time, had been a tragedy and a scandal to the Separatists of Leyden. Elder Brewster feared that Williams would run the same course. Williams wished to return to Salem, where he might still devote himself to the neighboring Indians, and assist Skelton, now declining in health. Brewster persuaded the Plymouth church to give him a letter of dismissal. The leading Pilgrims felt bound to send "some caution" to the Salem church regarding the extreme tendencies of Williams. On the other hand, some of the Plymouth people were so captivated by his teachings and his personal character that they removed with him. This following of an approved minister was common among Puritans; an acceptable preacher was of as much value to a town as good meadows, broad pastures, and pure water.

V.

[Sidenote: The town system.]

[Sidenote: Note 6.]

To understand the brief career of Williams at Salem and its catastrophe, we must recall the character of colonial life in Massachusetts at the time. There were already sixteen settlements or "towns" on the shores of Massachusetts Bay, with an indefinite stretch of gloomy wilderness for background, the dwelling place of countless savages and wild beasts. The population of all the settlements may have summed up five thousand people--enough to have made one prosperous village. The inhabitants of the various towns of the bay were from different parts of England; their dress and dialect were diverse, and their Puritanism was of various complexions. The town system, at first a reproduction on new soil of the township field communes that had subsisted in parts of England from ages beyond the fountain heads of tradition, gave some play to local peculiarities and prejudices. There is evidence that the central government relieved itself from strain by means of this rural borough system. The ancient town system in turn appears to have taken on a new youth; it was perhaps modified and developed by the local diversity of the people, and it lent to Massachusetts, at first, something of the elasticity of a federal government.

[Sidenote: Life in the Massachusetts settlements.]

[Sidenote: 1630 to 1640.]

This community of scattered communes was cut off from frequent intercourse with the world, for the sea was far wider and more to be feared in that day of small ships and imperfect navigation than it is now. The noise of the English controversies in which the settlers had once borne a part reached them at long intervals, like news from another planet. But most of the time these lonesome settlements had no interest greater than the petty news and gossip of little forest hamlets. The visitor who came afoot along Indian trails, or by water, paddling in a canoe, to Boston on lecture day, might bring some news of sickness, accident, or death. Sometimes the traveling story was exciting, as that wolves had slaughtered the cattle at a certain place, while yet cattle were few and precious. Or still more distressing intelligence came that the ruling elder of the church at Watertown had taken the High-church position that Roman churches were Christian churches, or that democratic views had been advanced by Eliot of Roxbury. A new and far-fetched prophetical explanation of a passage in the Book of Canticles, and a tale of boatmen wrecked in some wintry tempest, might divide the attention of the people. Stories of boats capsized, of boatmen cast on islands where there was neither shelter nor food, of boats driven far to sea and heard of no more, were staples of excitement in these half-aquatic towns; and if the inmates of a doomed boat had been particularly profane, these events were accounted edifying--divine judgments on the ungodly. When the governor wandered once and lost himself in the forest, passing the night in a deserted wigwam, there was a sensation of a half-public character. That a snake and a mouse had engaged in a battle, and that the puny mouse had triumphed at last, was in one budget of traveling news that came to Boston. To this event an ominous significance was given by John Wilson, pastor of the Boston church, maker of anagrams, solemn utterer of rhyming prophecies which were sometimes fulfilled, and general theological putterer. Wilson made the snake represent the devil, according to all sound precedents; the mouse was the feeble church in the wilderness, to which God would give the victory over Satan. Thus enhanced by an instructive interpretation from the prophet and seer of the colony, the story no doubt took up its travels once more, and now with its hopeful exegesis on its back. The Massachusetts mouse was an auspicious creature; it is recorded by the governor, and it was no doubt told along the coast, that one got into a library and committed depredations on a book of common prayer only, nibbling every leaf of the liturgy, while it reverently spared a Greek Testament and a Psalter in the same covers.

In a petty state with a range of intellectual interests so narrow, the conflict between Williams and the General Court took place.

VI.

[Sidenote: Self-consciousness of the Massachusetts community.]

[Sidenote: Note 7.]

It was a community that believed in its own divine mission. It traced the existence of its settlements to the very hand of God--the God who led Israel out of Egypt. The New England colonists never forgot that they were a chosen people. Upon other American settlers--the Dutch in New Netherland, the Virginia churchmen, the newly landed Marylanders, with their admixture of papists--they looked with condescension if not with contempt, accounting them the Egyptians of the New World. The settlers on the Bay of Massachusetts were certain that their providential exodus was one of the capital events in human history; that it had been predesigned from eternity to plant here, in a virgin world, the only true form of church government and to cherish a church that should be a model to the Old World in turn, and a kind of foreshadowing of the new heaven and the new earth. Some dreamed that the second coming of Christ would take place among the rocky woodlands of New England. The theocratical government was thought to be the one most pleasing to God, and a solemn obligation was felt to import into this new theocracy the harsh Oriental intolerance which had marked that fierce struggle in which the Jewish tribes finally shook off image worship.

[Sidenote: John Cotton, 1633.]

[Sidenote: Note 8.]

The apostle of theocracy who arrived soon after Williams's return to Salem was John Cotton, a Puritan leader in England, in whom devoutness was combined with extreme discretion, a dominant will with a diplomatic prudence and a temper never ruffled. Cotton's ingenious refinements made him a valuable apologist in an age of polemics, but they often served to becloud his vision of truth and right. He was prone to see himself as he posed, in the character of a protagonist of truth. He gave wise advice to the Massachusetts Puritans at their departure from England. When, a few years later, Laud's penetrating vigilance and relentless thoroughness made even Cotton's well-balanced course of mild non-conformity impossible, he fled from his parish of Boston, in Lincolnshire, to London, and escaped in 1633 with difficulty to the new Boston in New England. As John Cotton had been the shining candle of Puritanism in England, his arrival in America was hailed with joy, and from the time of his settlement in the little capital his was the hand that shaped ecclesiastical institutions in New England, and he did much also to mold the yet plastic state. Though he usually avoided the appearance of personal antagonism, every formidable rival he had left Massachusetts early. Williams, Hooker, Davenport, and Hugh Peter all found homes beyond the bounds of the colony. There can not be two queen bees in one hive, nor can there well be more than one master mind in the ecclesiastical order of a petty theocratic state. It was the paradox of colonial religious organization that the Episcopal colonies had parishes almost independent of all supervision, while the New England Congregationalists were, from the arrival of Cotton, subject to the dominance of ministers who virtually attained to the authority of bishops.

VII.

[Sidenote: Salem refractory.]

Salem, the oldest town of the commonwealth, was the most ready to pursue an independent course and it was attached to Williams, whose ability attracted new settlers and who maintained a position of independence toward Cotton and the authorities at Boston. To subdue the refractory Salem was no doubt one of the secondary purposes of the proceedings against Williams. There seems to have been no personal animosity toward Williams himself; his amiable character and his never-doubted sincerity were main obstacles to his punishment.

[Sidenote: Collision inevitable.]

The return of Roger Williams to such a place as Salem was naturally a matter of alarm to the ministers and magistrates of Massachusetts. Collision was not a matter of choice on either side. The catastrophe was like one that comes from the irresistible action of physical forces. In a colony planted at great cost to maintain one chosen form of worship and subordinating all the powers of government to this purpose, a preacher who asserted the necessity for a complete separation of religion and government in the interest of soul liberty had no place. His ideal was higher than the prevailing one, but that age could not possibly rise to it.

VIII.

[Sidenote: The book against the patent.]

[Sidenote: Note 9.]

[Sidenote: Reply to Cotton, 276, 277.]

Williams was yet only a private member of the church in Salem, but in the illness of the pastor he "exercised by way of prophecy"--that is, preached without holding office. An alarming report was soon in circulation that he had written a book against the king's patent, the foundation of the colonial authority. This treatise, we have said, was written in Plymouth for the benefit of Governor Bradford. Like many of the manuscript books that have come down to us, it appears to have been a small quarto, and, if it resembled other books of the sort, it was neatly stitched and perhaps even bound by its author in the favorite pigskin of the time. Williams sent his book promptly to be examined. Some of the "most judicious ministers much condemned Mr. Williams's error and presumption," and an order was made that he "should be convented at the next court." In the charges no fault was found with the main thesis of the book, that the king could not claim and give away the lands of the Indians; but it was thought that there were disloyal reflections cast upon both James and Charles--at least those eager to condemn construed the obscure and "implicative phrases" of Williams in that sense--and these supposed reflections were the subject of the charges. Williams wrote a submissive letter, and offered his book, or any part of it, to be burned after the manner of that time. A month later, when the governor and council met, the whole aspect of the affair had changed. Cotton and Wilson, the teacher and the pastor of the Boston church, certified, after examination of Williams's quarto, that "they found the matters not so evil as at first they seemed." It was decided to let Williams off easily. There are some things unexplained about the affair; the eagerness of the "judicious ministers" and court to condemn without due examination, the failure even to specify the objectionable passages at last, and the unwonted docility of Williams--all leave one to infer that there was more in this transaction than appears. Laud and his associates were moving to have the Massachusetts charter vacated, and it may have seemed imprudent for the magistrates to found their authority on a base so liable to disappear. If the charter had been successfully called in, Williams's ground of the sufficiency of the Indian title to lands might have proved useful as a last resort. Williams asserted, long afterward, that before his troubles began he had drafted a letter addressed to the king, "not without the approbation of some of the chiefs of New England," whose consciences were also "tender on this point before God." This letter humbly acknowledged "the evil of that part of the patent which relates" to the gift of lands. Had the letter been sent to its destination it would have cut a curious figure among the worldly-minded state papers of the time.

[Sidenote: An abstract principle.]

It is probable that most of the land of the colony had been secured from the natives by purchase or by treaty of some sort; at least the Indians were content, and the little quarto had at that time no practical bearing whatever, but that did not matter to Williams. The more abstract a question of right and wrong, the more he relished a discussion of it. It was of a piece with his exquisite Separatism, a mere standing up in the face of heaven and earth for an abstract principle. His purpose was not to right a specific and concrete wrong, for there had been none, but to assert as a broad principle of everlasting application that a Christian king may not dispose of the land owned by heathens merely because of his Christianity. Williams was not a judge or a lawgiver; he was a poet in morals, enamored of perfection, and keeping his conscience purer than Galahad's.

IX.

[Sidenote: The alarm.]

[Sidenote: 1634.]

It was in the winter of 1633-'34 that the book about the patent was called in question. Skelton, pastor of Salem, died in the following August, and the Salem people, in spite of an injunction from the magistrates, made Williams their teacher in his stead. The country was now full of alarm at news from England that the charter was to be revoked, that a general governor of New England was to be appointed, and that a force was to be sent to support his authority. Laud was put at the head of a commission for the government of the colonies in April, 1634. There could be no doubt of the meaning of this measure. For more than a year the alarm in Massachusetts continued. The ministers were consulted regarding the lawfulness of resistance to force. A platform was constructed on the northeast side of Castle Island, and a fortified house was proposed to defend the platform. The trainbands were drilled, muskets, "bandeleroes" or cartridge belts, and rests were distributed to the several towns, and pikemen were required to learn to use the cumbrous musket of the time. Puritans in England, angry that Laud, the new archbishop and old persecutor, should stretch a long arm to America, sent powder and cannon to their co-religionists, the object of whose military vigilance could easily be covered by dangers from the savages, from the French, or from the Spaniards.

[Sidenote: Debates not appeased.]

But these assiduous preparations, under the supervision of a military commission which had "power of life and limb," did not abate in the least the discussion of questions of doctrine and casuistry. Refinements of theology were quite as real and substantial to the Puritan mind as trainbands and fortifications. Sound doctrine and a scrupulous observance of the "ordinances" conciliated God; they were indeed more important elements of public safety than drakes and demi-culverins.

[Sidenote: Reform in dress.]

[Sidenote: Mass. Records, 3d September, 1634.]

[Sidenote: Compare Ward's Simple Cobbler, _passim_.]

The General Court of September, 1634, undertook to provide for the public safety in both respects. Along with regulations and provisions of a military nature, it set out to remove those flagrant sins that had provoked the divine wrath. The wearing of silver, gold, and rich laces, girdles, and hatbands was forbidden; slashed clothes were also abolished, "other than one slash in each sleeve and another in the back"; ruffs and beaver hats, which last were apparently a mark of dudishness, were not to be allowed. Long hair and other fashions "prejudicial to the general good" were done away with in this hour of penitence. Men and women might wear out the clothes they had, except their "immoderate great sleeves, slashed apparel, immoderate great rayles, long wings," which were to go at once without reprieve or ceremony. The use of tobacco, socially and in public, or before strangers was made an offense. If taken secretly or medicinally, the Court did not take cognizance of it.

X.

[Sidenote: The fast-day sermon.]

[Sidenote: 1634.]

Seeing that the millinery sins recounted in this act had cried to Heaven, and that, beside the danger from England, there was the desire of Hooker's party to remove to the Connecticut, and a dissension concerning the power of the Upper House that threatened trouble, the Court appointed the 18th of September a solemn fast-day, hoping by repentance, prayer, and the penance of hunger to avert the manifold disasters that threatened them. Roger Williams was sure to speak like a prophet on such an occasion. He did not stop at slashed garments, great sleeves, and headdresses with long wings; he preached on eleven "public sins" that had provoked divine wrath. We have no catalogue left us. The list may have included some of those amusing scruples that he held in common with other Puritans, or some of those equally trivial personal scruples that Williams cherished so fondly. But no sermon of his on public sins could fail to contain a declaration of his far-reaching and cherished principle of religious freedom, including perhaps a round denunciation of the petty inquisition into private opinion which had been set up in Massachusetts. The Sabbath law, the law obliging men to pay a tax to support religious worship, the requirement that all should attend religious worship under penalty, and the enforcement of a religious oath on irreligious and perhaps unwilling residents, the assumption of the magistrate to regulate the orthodoxy of a church under the advice of the ministers, were points of Massachusetts law and administration that he denounced at various times; and some of them, if not all, were no doubt put in pillory in this fast-day sermon in the early autumn of 1634. Judged by modern standards, the sermon may have had absurdities enough, but it was no doubt a long way in advance of the General Court's mewling about lace, and slashes, and long hair, and other customs "prejudicial to the general good." To this sermon, whatever it was, Williams afterward attributed the beginning of the troubles that led to his banishment.

XI.

[Sidenote: Williams dealt with ecclesiastically.]

[Sidenote: Note 10.]

Winthrop, just but gentle, narrow-minded but ever large-hearted, had been superseded in the governorship by Dudley, open and zealous advocate of religious intolerance. Dudley, who was always hot-tempered, was for proceeding out of hand with the bold "teacher" of the church in Salem, but he felt bound to consult with the ministers first, since Williams was an "elder," and even among Puritans there was a sort of benefit of clergy. Cotton had developed a complete system of church-state organization hammered out of, or at least supported by, Bible texts linked by ingenious inferences, and from the time of Cotton's arrival there was a strong effort to secure uniformity. But Cotton was timid in action, and he was nothing if not orderly and ecclesiastical. Williams was an elder, entitled as such to be proceeded with "in a church way" first. As leader and spokesman of the clergy Cotton expressed his charitable conviction that Williams's "violent course did rather spring from scruple of conscience than from a seditious principle." The clergy proposed to try to convert him by argument, not so much, perhaps, from hope of success as from a conviction that this was the orderly and scriptural rule. Dudley, impatient to snuff out Williams at once, replied that they "were deceived in him if they thought he would condescend to learn of any of them." But the "elders" now proceeded in the roundabout way prescribed by Cotton's system ingeniously deduced from Scripture. The individual church must deal with its own member; the sister churches might remonstrate with a church. Cotton and Wilson, for example, could appeal to the Boston church to appeal to the Salem church to appeal to Williams, and in this order much of the correspondence went on.

[Sidenote: The governor's verse.]

It was, perhaps, when his desire to act promptly against the Salem heretic was thus foiled by Cotton's prudent and intricate orderliness in procedure that Dudley relieved his emotions by what is happily the only example of his verse that has survived:

[Sidenote: Eliot's New England Biography, 156, 157.]

Let men of God in courts and churches watch O'er such as do a toleration hatch, Lest that ill egg bring forth a cockatrice To poison all with heresy and vice. If men be left and otherwise combine, My epitaph's I die no libertine.

XII.

[Sidenote: Note 11.]

The most substantial grievance of the rulers against Williams was his opposition to "the oath." In order to make sure of the loyalty of the residents in this time of danger a new oath of fidelity to be taken by residents had been promulgated. Practical men are wont to put aside minor scruples in time of danger. David eats the sacred shew-bread when he is famishing: but Williams would rather starve than mumble a crumb of it. He did not believe in enforced oaths; they obliged the wicked man to a religious act, and thus invaded the soul's freedom. Cotton says that Williams's scruples excited such an opposition to the oath that the magistrates were not able to enforce it. He thus unwittingly throws a strong light on the weakness of the age, and extenuates the conduct of Williams as well as that of the rulers. The age was in love with scrupulosity, and Williams on this side was the product of his time. In such an age a scruple-maker of ability and originality like Williams might be a source of danger.

[Sidenote: Scruples small and great.]

During the year following Williams was several times "convented" before the Court. He was charged with having broken his promise not to speak about the patent, with opposing the residents' oath, with maintaining certain scruples in opposition to the customs of the times, as that a man should not return thanks after a meal, or call on an unregenerate child to give thanks for his food. These were not more trivial certainly than half a hundred scruples then prevalent, but they chanced to be unfashionable--a damning fault in a scruple. The sense of proportion was feeble in religionists of that day, and neither Williams nor his opponents understood the comparative magnitude of his greater contentions, and the triviality of those petty scruples about which, like the whole Puritan world, he was very busy. Religious freedom and the obligation of grace after meat could then be put into the same category. As years went by, although the mind of Williams was never disentangled from scrupulosity, he came to see clearly what was the real battle of his life. No better fortune can befall a great spirit than such a clarification of vision. The extended works of Williams's later life are written mainly to overthrow the "bloody tenent of persecution." It was this championship of soul liberty as the weightiest matter of the law that lifted him above all others who paid tithes of their little garden herbs.

[Sidenote: Williams inflexible.]

[Sidenote: Savage's Winthrop's Journal, i, 81.]

[Sidenote: Mass. Rec., i, 135, 136.]

[Sidenote: Mass. Rec., i, 156, 157. Winthrop's Journal, i, 194.]

Williams was certainly incorrigible. Richard Brown, the ruling elder of the church at Watertown, seems to have submitted to the remonstrance of the magistrates against his too charitable judgment of the Roman churches. Eliot, of Roxbury, afterward the Indian apostle, advanced peculiar opinions also, but he was overborne and convinced. Stoughton, who had denied that the "assistants" of a corporation were scriptural magistrates, was brought to book about this time, and he retracted. Salem itself was forced to bend its stiff neck at last. The town had been refused its land on Marble Neck because of its ordination of Williams, and having, under Williams's leadership, protested in a letter to the churches against the injustice of spiritual coercion by financial robbery, the deputies of Salem were now summarily turned out of the court. Endecott, with characteristic violence, protested further against the double injustice to Salem. He was promptly put under arrest, and this severity brought swift conviction to his mind, so that he humbly apologized and submitted the same day. The only bond of unity between the rash Salem leader and Williams was a common tendency to go to extremes. In spirit, the heroic, long-suffering Williams, who rested in what he called the "rockie strength" of his opinions in spite of penalties and majorities, was far removed from a leader who bent before the first blast, and who became in later life the harshest persecutor in the commonwealth.

XIII.

[Sidenote: Williams's trial.]

[Sidenote: Note 12.]

Williams remained the one resolute, stubborn, incorrigible offender. Eliot, Stoughton, and Endecott, and even Williams's fellow-elder, Sharpe, and the whole church at Salem, might be argued into conformity by the sharp dialectics of the clergy, or bullied out of their convictions by the sharper logic of the magistrates, but Roger Williams could not be overborne. Individualist in his very nature, his self-reliant spirit was able to face isolation or excommunication. The great Hooker was set to dispute with him. Hooker's refined arguments were drawn out by inferences linked to inferences. He proved to the satisfaction of everybody but the culprit that it was not lawful for Williams, with his opinions, to set food before his unregenerate child, since he did not allow an irreligious child to go through the form of giving thanks. But the wire-drawn logic of Hooker, though Williams could not always answer it, had no more influence with him than the ingenious sophistications of the pious Cotton; Williams constantly fell back upon the "rockie strength" of his principles. On the 9th of October, 1635, he was sentenced to banishment. After the manner of that curious age, his banishment was based on charges of great importance mixed with charges utterly trivial. His denial of the authority of the magistrate to regulate the orthodoxy of the churches and the belief of individuals is, however, made one of the cardinal offenses in all the trustworthy accounts given at the time. With this were joined in the proceedings, but not in the sentence, such things as the denial of the propriety of grace after meat. All the elders but one advised his banishment.

[Sidenote: Williams banished.]

[Sidenote: Note 13.]

[Sidenote: Note 14.]

[Sidenote: Note 15.]

[Sidenote: Note 16.]

[Sidenote: Savage's Winthrop, i, 209, 210.]

The magistrates, though deeply "incensed" against him, probably felt at the last some reluctance to banish such a man. Six weeks were accorded him in which to leave. Winthrop, who was Williams's friend, and who seems to have been loath to consent to his banishment, wrote to him to "steer his course for Narragansett Bay," where there was territory beyond the bounds of Massachusetts and Plymouth. The forest journeys or boat voyages to Boston and back, the bitter controversies there, and the uproar of indignation which was produced in Salem by the news of the verdict, the desertion of Williams by Endecott, convinced by force, and by Sharpe, the ruling elder, who had been also dealt with, the natural yielding of the Salem church after a while to the pressure from the General Court, and to the desire of the townsmen to secure the lands at Marble Neck, put a strain on Williams which, added to his necessary toil in the field, broke his health and he fell ill. The General Court probably also felt the recoil of its act. When six weeks had expired consent was given that Williams should remain during the winter provided he would refrain from preaching. But Williams was in Salem, and in Salem he was the center of interest--just now he was the center of explosion. It was impossible for the great Separatist to be silent. A few faithful friends, come-outers like himself, clave to him and repudiated as he did communion with the church at Salem, which could condone the offenses of the magistrates for the sake of "these children's toys of land, meadows, cattle, and government." These fellow-Separatists, some of whom perhaps had removed from Plymouth out of love for this unworldly saint, loved him none the less for his courage and his sorrows. They frequented his house on Sunday as he convalesced. Indeed, the attachment to him was so great that the "ordinances" which had been appointed by the magistrates and enforced on Salem as the price of the common land on Marble Neck, were neglected and almost deserted. Williams could not refrain from speech with this concourse of visitors, and at length word came to Boston that more than twenty persons had definitely adhered to the opinions of their former teacher, unconvinced by the argument of the rod of justice applied to Endecott and Sharpe, or by the valuable land on Marble Neck. These disciples proposed to remove in the spring with Williams to the shores of Narragansett Bay. This might meet the approval of the sagacious and kindly Winthrop, who had directed Williams's attention to that promising place, and who foresaw perhaps the usefulness of such a man in the dangerous Indian crisis now threatening the colony. But to devotees of uniformity, the prospect of a community on the very border of the land of the saints tolerating all sorts of opinionists was insufferable. When once the civil government weights itself with spiritual considerations, its whole equilibrium is disturbed. Liberty and justice seem insignificant by the side of the immensities. The magistrates, or a part of them, were alarmed at the prospect of a settlement of the followers of Williams at Narragansett Bay, "whence the infection would easily spread into these churches, the people being, many of them, much taken with an apprehension of his godliness." It was therefore agreed to send him to England on a ship soon to sail.

XIV.

[Sidenote: Escape to the Indians.]

The hardships of such a voyage in midwinter in his state of health might prove fatal, and his arrival in England would almost certainly deliver him into the hands of Laud. But what is justice or mercy when the welfare of churches and the rescue of imperiled souls is to be considered? A warrant was dispatched ordering him to Boston within a certain time. Probably knowing what was in store for him, he protested that it would be dangerous for him, in view of his health, to make the journey, and some of the Salem people went to Boston in his behalf, and, as was natural in the circumstances, made exaggerated representations regarding his physical condition. But the magistrates had other information. They sent the valiant and notorious Captain Underhill, in whom were mingled about equally devoutness, military courage, and incorrigible lewdness, to bring Williams by sea in a shallop. Williams was probably informed of their purpose, for, while Underhill in his little craft was beating up to Salem in wintry seas on an errand so congenial, expecting perhaps to come upon his quarry unawares, Williams was fleeing from one hamlet of bark wigwams to another. Here among the barbarians he was sure of faithful friends and secure concealment. Underhill found on his arrival that the culprit had disappeared three days before he got there, and nobody in Salem, that could, would tell whither the fugitive had gone.

[Sidenote: Williams founds Providence.]

Meantime Williams was, to use his own figure of speech, "steering his course" "in winter snow" toward Narragansett Bay. "I was sorely tossed for one fourteen weeks in a bitter winter season," he says, in his vivid and hyperbolic fashion of speech, "not knowing what bed or bread did mean." He began one settlement on the eastern bank of the Seekonk River after getting land from the Indians, but his old enemies the royal patents now had their revenge. Winslow, governor of Plymouth, a kind-hearted, politic man, the one born diplomatist of New England, warned him that he was within the bounds of Plymouth, and asked him to remove to the other side of the water, because they "were loath to displease the Bay." It was not enough to drive a heretic from the bounds of Massachusetts; the pragmatic Puritanism of the time would have expelled him from the continent had its arm been long enough. Williams had already begun to build and to plant, but he removed once more to the place which he named Providence. He planted the germinal settlement of the first state in the world that founded religious liberty on the widest possible basis, reserving to the law no cognizance whatever of religious beliefs or conduct where the "civil peace" was not endangered.

XV.

[Sidenote: Williams's banishment an act of persecution.]

[Sidenote: Note 17.]

Local jealousy and sectarian prejudice have done what they could to obscure the facts of the trial and banishment of Williams. It has been argued by more than one writer that it was not a case of religious persecution at all, but the exclusion of a man dangerous to the state. Cotton, with characteristic verbal legerdemain, says that Williams was "enlarged" rather than banished. The case has even been pettifogged in our own time by the assertion that the banishment was only the action of a commercial company excluding an uncongenial person from its territory. But with what swift indignation would the Massachusetts rulers of the days of Dudley and Haynes have repudiated a plea which denied their magistracy! They put so strong a pressure on Stoughton, who said that the assistants were not magistrates, that he made haste to renounce his pride of authorship and to deliver his booklet to be officially burned, nor did even this prevent his punishment. The rulers of "the Bay" were generally frank advocates of religious intolerance; they regarded toleration as a door set open for the devil to enter. Not only did they punish for unorthodox expressions; they even assumed to inquire into private beliefs. Williams was only one of scores bidden to depart on account of opinion.

[Sidenote: Intolerance as a virtue.]

[Sidenote: Note 18.]

[Sidenote: Note 19.]

[Sidenote: Simple Cobbler of Agawam, pp. 3 and 6.]

The real and sufficient extenuation for the conduct of the Massachusetts leaders is found in the character and standards of the age. A few obscure and contemned sectaries--Brownists, Anabaptists, and despised Familists--in Holland and England had spoken more or less clearly in favor of religious liberty before the rise of Roger Williams, but nobody of weight or respectable standing in the whole world had befriended it. All the great authorities in church and state, Catholic and Protestant, prelatical and Puritan, agreed in their detestation of it. Even Robinson, the moderate pastor of the Leyden Pilgrims, ventured to hold only to the "toleration of tolerable opinions." This was the toleration found at Amsterdam and in some other parts of the Low Countries. Even this religious sufferance which did not amount to liberty was sufficiently despicable in the eyes of that intolerant age to bring upon the Dutch the contempt of Christendom. It was a very qualified and limited toleration, and one from which Catholics and Arminians were excluded. It seems to have been that practical amelioration of law which is produced more effectually by commerce than by learning or religion. Outside of some parts of the Low Countries, and oddly enough of the Turkish Empire, all the world worth counting decried toleration as a great crime. It would have been wonderful indeed if Massachusetts had been superior to the age. "I dare aver," says Nathaniel Ward, the New England lawyer-minister, "that God doth no where in his word tolerate Christian States to give tolerations to such adversaries of his Truth, if they have power in their hands to suppress them." To set up toleration was "to build a sconce against the walls of heaven to batter God out of his chair," in Ward's opinion.

XVI.

[Sidenote: The casuistry of Cotton.]

[Sidenote: Note 20.]

[Sidenote: Hutchinson Papers, 496.]

[Sidenote: Note 21.]

[Sidenote: Controversie concerning Liberty of Conscience.]

[Sidenote: Character of Puritanism.]

[Sidenote: Note 22.]

[Sidenote: Savage's Winthrop, i, 211-214.]

This doctrine of intolerance was sanctioned by many refinements of logic, such as Cotton's delicious sophistry that if a man refused to be convinced of the truth, he was sinning against conscience, and therefore it was not against the liberty of conscience to coerce him. Cotton's moral intuitions were fairly suffocated by logic. He declared that men should be compelled to attend religious service, because it was "better to be hypocrites than profane persons. Hypocrites give God part of his due, the outward man, but the profane person giveth God neither outward nor inward man." To reason thus is to put subtlety into the _cathedra_ of common sense, to bewilder vision by legerdemain. Notwithstanding his natural gift for devoutness and his almost immodest godliness, Cotton was incapable of high sincerity. He would not specifically advise Williams's banishment, but having labored with him round a corner according to his most approved ecclesiastical formula, he said, "We have no more to say in his behalf, but must sit down"; by which expression of passivity he gave the signal to the "secular arm" to do its worst, while he washed his hands in innocent self-complacency. When one scrupulous magistrate consulted him as to his obligation in Williams's case, Cotton answered his hesitation by saying, "You know they are so much incensed against his course that it is not your voice nor the voice of two or three more that can suspend the sentence." By such shifty phrases he shirked responsibility for the results of his own teaching. Of the temper that stands alone for the right, Nature had given him not a jot. Williams may be a little too severe, but he has some truth when he describes Cotton on this occasion as "swimming with the stream of outward credit and profit," though nothing was further from Cotton's conscious purpose than such worldliness. Cotton's intolerance was not like that of Dudley and Endecott, the offspring of an austere temper; it was rather the outgrowth of his logic and his reverence for authority. He sheltered himself behind the examples of Elizabeth and James I, and took refuge in the shadow of Calvin, whose burning of Servetus he cites as an example, without any recoil of heart or conscience. But the consideration of the character of the age forbids us to condemn the conscientious men who put Williams out of the Massachusetts theocracy as they would have driven the devil out of the garden of Eden. When, however, it comes to judging the age itself, and especially to judging the Puritanism of the age, these false and harsh ideals are its sufficient condemnation. Its government and its very religion were barbarous; its Bible, except for mystical and ecclesiastical uses, might as well have closed with the story of the Hebrew judges and the imprecatory Psalms. The Apocalypse of John, grotesquely interpreted, was the one book of the New Testament that received hearty consideration, aside from those other New Testament passages supposed to relate to a divinely appointed ecclesiasticism. The humane pity of Jesus was unknown not only to the laws, but to the sermons of the time. About the time of Williams's banishment the lenity of John Winthrop was solemnly rebuked by some of the clergy and rulers as a lax imperiling of the safety of the gospel; and Winthrop, overborne by authority, confessed, explained, apologized, and promised amendment. The Puritans substituted an unformulated belief in the infallibility of "godly" elders acting with the magistrates for the ancient doctrine of an infallible church.

XVII.

[Sidenote: Character of Williams. His scruples.]

[Sidenote: New England Firebrand Quenched, 246.]

[Sidenote: Williams to Winthrop, 1637, Narr. Club, vi.]

[Sidenote: Note 23.]

In this less scrupulous but more serious age it is easy to hold Williams up to ridicule. Never was a noble and sweet-spirited man bedeviled by a scrupulosity more trivial. Cotton aptly dubbed him "a haberdasher of small questions." His extant letters are many of them vibrant with latent heroism; there is manifest in them an exquisite charity and a pathetic magnanimity, but in the midst of it all the writer is unable to rid himself of a swarm of scruples as pertinacious as the buzzing mosquitoes in the primitive forest about him. In dating his letters, where he ventures to date at all, he never writes the ordinary name of the day of the week or the name of the month, lest he should be guilty of etymological heathenism. He often avoids writing the year, and when he does insert it he commits himself to the last two figures only and adds a saving clause. Thus 1652 appears as "52 (so called)," and other years are tagged with the same doubting words, or with the Latin "_ut vulgo_." What quarrel the tender conscience had with the Christian era it is hard to guess. So, too, he writes to Winthrop, who had taken part in his banishment, letters full of reverential tenderness and hearty friendship. But his conscience does not allow him even to seem to hold ecclesiastical fellowship with the man he honors as a ruler and loves as a friend. Once at least he guards the point directly by subscribing himself "Your worship's faithful and affectionate in all _civil_ bonds." It would be sad to think of a great spirit so enthralled by the scrupulosity of his time and his party if these minute restrictions had been a source of annoyance to him. But the cheerful observance of little scruples seems rather to have taken the place of a recreation in his life; they were to him perhaps what bric-a-brac is to a collector, what a well-arranged altar and candlesticks are to a ritualist.

[Sidenote: Williams becomes a Seeker.]

[Sidenote: Note 24.]

Two fundamental notions supplied the motive power of every ecclesiastical agitation of that age. The notion of a succession of churchly order and ordinance from the time of the apostles was the mainspring of the High-church movement. Apostolic primitivism was the aim of the Puritan and still more the goal of the Separatist. One party rejoiced in a belief that a mysterious apostolic virtue had trickled down through generations of bishops and priests to its own age; the other rejoiced in the destruction of institutions that had grown up in the ages and in getting back to the primitive nakedness of the early Christian conventicle. True to the law of his nature, Roger Williams pushed this latter principle to its ultimate possibilities. If we may believe the accounts, he and his followers at Providence became Baptists that they might receive the rite of baptism in its most ancient Oriental form. But in an age when the fountains of the great deep were utterly broken up he could find no rest for the soles of his feet. It was not enough that he should be troubled by the Puritan spirit of apostolic primitivism; he had now swung round to where this spirit joined hands with its twin, the aspiration for apostolic succession. He renounced his baptism because it was without apostolic sanction, and announced himself of that sect which was the last reduction of Separatism. He became a Seeker.

[Sidenote: The Seekers.]

Here again is a probable influence from Holland. The Seekers had appeared there long before. Many Baptists had found that their search for primitivism, if persisted in, carried them to this negative result; for it seemed not enough to have apostolic rites in apostolic form unless they were sanctioned by the "gifts" of the apostolic time. The Seekers appeared in England as early as 1617, and during the religious turmoils of the Commonwealth period the sect afforded a resting place for many a weatherbeaten soul. As the miraculous gifts were lost, the Seekers dared not preach, baptize, or teach; they merely waited, and in their mysticism they believed their waiting to be an "upper room" to which Christ would come. It is interesting to know that Williams, the most romantic figure of the whole Puritan movement, at last found a sort of relief from the austere externalism and ceaseless dogmatism of his age by traveling the road of literalism until he had passed out on the other side into the region of devout and contented uncertainty.

XVIII.

[Sidenote: Moral elevation of Williams]

In all this Williams was the child of his age, and sometimes more childish than his age. But there were regions of thought and sentiment in which he was wholly disentangled from the meshes of his time, and that not because of intellectual superiority--for he had no large philosophical views--but by reason of elevation of spirit. Even the authority of Moses could not prevent him from condemning the harsh severity of the New England capital laws. He had no sentimental delusions about the character of the savages--he styles them "wolves endued with men's brains"; but he constantly pleads for a humane treatment of them. All the bloody precedents of Joshua could not make him look without repulsion on the slaughter of women and children in the Pequot war, nor could he tolerate dismemberment of the dead or the selling of Indian captives into perpetual slavery. From bigotry and resentment he was singularly free. On many occasions he joyfully used his ascendency over the natives to protect those who kept in force against him a sentence of perpetual banishment. And this ultra-Separatist, almost alone of the men of his time, could use such words of catholic charity as those in which he speaks of "the people of God wheresoever scattered about Babel's banks either in Rome or England."

[Sidenote: Superior to the age.]

Of his incapacity for organization or administration we shall have to speak hereafter. But his spiritual intuitions, his moral insight, his genius for justice, lent a curious modernness to many of his convictions. In a generation of creed-builders which detested schism he became an individualist. Individualist in thought, altruist in spirit, secularist in governmental theory, he was the herald of a time yet more modern than this laggard age of ours. If ever a soul saw a clear-shining inward light not to be dimmed by prejudices or obscured by the deft logic of a disputatious age, it was the soul of Williams. In all the region of petty scrupulosity the time-spirit had enthralled him; but in the higher region of moral decision he was utterly emancipated from it. His conclusions belong to ages yet to come.

[Sidenote: His prophetic character.]

This union of moral aspiration with a certain disengagedness constitutes what we may call the prophetic temperament. Bradford and Winthrop were men of high aspiration, but of another class. The reach of their spirits was restrained by practical wisdom, which compelled them to take into account the limits of the attainable. Not that they consciously refused to follow their logic to its end, but that, like other prudent men of affairs, they were, without their own knowledge or consent, turned aside by the logic of the impossible. Precisely here the prophet departs from the reformer. The prophet recks nothing of impossibility; he is ravished with truth disembodied. From Elijah the Tishbite to Socrates, from Socrates to the latest and perhaps yet unrecognized voice of our own time, the prophetic temperament has ever shown an inability to enter into treaty with its environment. In the seventeenth century there was no place but the wilderness for such a John Baptist of the distant future as Roger Williams. He did not belong among the diplomatic builders of churches, like Cotton, or the politic founders of states, like Winthrop. He was but a babbler to his own time, but the prophetic voice rings clear and far, and ever clearer as the ages go on.

ELUCIDATIONS.

[Sidenote: Note 1, page 268.]

Sir William Martin, an early friend of Williams, describes him as passionate and precipitate, but with integrity and good intentions. Hutchinson Papers, 106. See also, for example, the two letters of Williams to Lady Barrington, in New England Genealogical Register, July, 1889, pp. 316 and following.

[Sidenote: Note 2, page 269.]

Letter to John Cotton the younger, 25th March, 1671. "He knows what gains and preferments I have refused in universities, city, country and court," etc. Williams's enthusiastic nature gave a flush of color to his statement of ordinary fact, the general correctness of which, however, there is never reason to doubt.

[Sidenote: Note 3, page 270.]

Letter to John Cotton the younger, Narragansett Club Publications, vi, 356. There is no account of this event elsewhere, but the church records of that early date are imperfect, and there is every reason to accept the circumstantial statement of Williams. That he refused to enter into membership with the church is confirmed by Winthrop's Journal, 12th April, 1631, and such refusal must have had some such occasion.

[Sidenote: Note 4, page 271.]

"We have often tried your patience, but could never conquer it," were Winthrop's words to Williams, who gave to Massachusetts lifelong service in return for its lifelong severity toward him. The sentence is quoted in Williams's letter to the younger Cotton, cited above, which is itself a fine example of his magnanimity of spirit. Narragansett Club Publications, vi, 351-357.

[Sidenote: Note 5, page 272.]

There is difference of opinion on this point, but certain words of Williams himself seem to bear on it. After his retirement from Salem to Plymouth he received a letter from Winthrop, which appears to have intimated that no man under twenty-five ought to be ordained. Williams explains in reply that he is "nearer upwards of thirty than twenty-five," but avers, "I am no elder in any church ... nor ever shall be, if the Lord please to grant my desires that I may intend what I long after, the natives souls." Williams's Letter, Narragansett Club Publications, vi, 2. Of course, these words might have been written if he had resigned the eldership before leaving Salem, but they would have had much less pertinency.

[Sidenote: Note 6, page 276.]

Mr. Straus, in his Life of Roger Williams, says aptly that Massachusetts was under a government of congregations rather than of towns, since only church members could vote. A fuller discussion of the source and evolution of the town system is deferred to a later volume of this series.

[Sidenote: Note 7, page 278.]

David Pieterzen de Vries, in his Voyages, reports this feeling of superiority as freely expressed at Hartford in 1639. There is a quaint humor in what he says of it that is enhanced by the naïve Dutch phrase in which it is set down: "Dit Volck gaven haer uyt det sy Israëliten waren, ende dat wy aen onse colonie Egyptenaren waren, end' Engelsen inde Vergienies waren mede Egyptenaren," p. 151.

[Sidenote: Note 8, page 279.]

"And such was the authority ... Mr. Cotton had in the hearts of the people, that whatever he delivered in the pulpit was soon put into an Order of Court, if of a civil, or set up as a practice in the church, if of an ecclesiastical concernment." Hubbard, History of Massachusetts, 182.

[Sidenote: Note 9, page 281.]

Knowles's Life of Williams, 58, note, quotes from a letter of Coddington's appended to Fox's reply to Williams, in which Coddington, who was one of the magistrates that examined the treatise, charges Williams with having "written a quarto against the King's patent and authority."

[Sidenote: Note 10, page 288.]

Cotton's Answer to Williams's Examination, 38. I have followed Cotton implicitly here, but without feeling sure that his memory can ever be depended on where his polemical feeling is concerned. On the next page he is guilty of a flagrant but no doubt unconscious suppression of an important fact. "It pleased the Lord to open the hearts of the Church to assist us," etc., he says, putting out of sight the sharp dealing by which the Salem church was brought to ignominious subjection.

[Sidenote: Note 11, page 289.]

Cotton's Answer to Williams, 29. Compare also Massachusetts Records of 4th March, 1633, where a mercenary inducement to take the oath is offered by making the regulations for recording the lands of freemen apply also to the lands of "residents" presumably not church members and ineligible to the franchise, but only to the residents "that had taken or shall hereafter take their oathes." Backus supposes that Williams saw some incidental result from the oath that would be prejudicial to religious freedom. This is to suppose that Williams needed a practical consideration to stir him to action--it is to suppose that Williams was not Williams. Practical men were afraid the independence of Massachusetts would be lost; Roger Williams was only afraid that Massachusetts would commit a public sin in trying to escape the impending evil. A conscience undefiled was his objective point in private and public life; safety, public or private, was secondary.

[Sidenote: Note 12, page 292.]

There has been much ingenious and rather uncandid effort by Cotton first of all, and by other defenders of the General Court since, to prove that Williams's views on toleration were not a cause of his banishment. If those views had been the sole cause, the decree would have been more comprehensible and defensible in view of the opinions of the age. But the question about the validity of the patent, the question of the protest written against the course of the magistrates in blackmailing Salem into a refusal to support him, the question of the freeman's oath, and, what seems to have been deemed of capital importance, the question of grace after meat, are all involved at one time or another. The formal charges in what may be considered the beginning of the banishment proceedings, the trial in July, as given by Winthrop, our most trustworthy authority, are: 1. That the magistrates ought not to punish for a religious offense--"the breach of the first table"--except where it disturbed the civil peace. 2. That the magistrate ought not to tender an oath to an unregenerate man. 3. That a man ought not to pray with an unregenerate person. 4. That thanks were not to be given after the sacrament and after meat. Savage's Winthrop, i, 193, 194. In the final proceedings in October, the letters growing out of the refusal to confirm to Salem its outlying land entered into and embittered the controversy. Winthrop, i, 204. The recorded verdict makes the divulging "of dyvers newe and dangerous opinions against the aucthoritie of the magistrate" the first offense, and the "letter of defamacion" the second. Williams says that a magistrate, who appears to have been Haynes, the governor, summed up his offenses at the conclusion of the trial under four heads: 1. The denial of the authority of the patent. 2. The denial of the lawfulness of requiring a wicked person to take an oath or pray. 3. The denial of the lawfulness of hearing the parish ministers in England. 4. The doctrine "that the Civill Magistrates' power extends only to the Bodies and Goods and outward State of men." Against the evidence of Williams, Winthrop, and the records, I can not attach any importance to the halting accounts given years afterward, for controversial purposes, by Cotton, from what he thought was his memory.

[Sidenote: Note 13, page 292.]

"Whereas Mr. Roger Williams, one of the elders of the church at Salem, hath broached and dyvulged dyvers newe and dangerous opinions, against the aucthoritie of magistrates, as also writt letters of defamacion both of the magistrates & Churches here, & that before any conviccion, & yet maintaineth the same without retraccion, it is therefore ordered that the said Mr. Williams shall departe out of this jurisdiccion within sixe weekes now nexte ensueing, which if hee neglect to performe it shall be lawfull for the Gouernour & two of the magistrates to send him to some place out of this jurisdiccion, not to returne any more without license from the Court." Massachusetts Records, i, 161.

[Sidenote: Note 14, page 293.]

Neal's History of New England, i, 143. "Sentence of banishment being read against Mr. Williams, the whole town of Salem was in an uproar; for such was the Popularity of the Man and such the Compassion of the People ... that he would have carried off the greatest part of the Inhabitants of the Town if the Ministers of Boston had not interposed." Neal appears to derive these facts, which wear a countenance of probability, from an authority not now known.

[Sidenote: Note 15, page 293.]

The phrase occurs in Williams's noble letter to Major Mason, 1st Massachusetts Historical Society Collections, i, 275 and following. The magnanimity shown toward those opposed to him in this letter is probably without a parallel in his age; it has few in any age.

[Sidenote: Note 16, page 294.]

"The increase of the concourse of people to him on the Lord's days in private, to the neglect or deserting of publick Ordinances and to the spreading of the Leaven of his corrupt imaginations, provoked the Magistrates rather than to breed a winters Spirituale plague in the Countrey, to put upon him a winter's journey out of the Countrey." Master John Cotton's Answer to Master Roger Williams, 57.

[Sidenote: Note 17, page 297.]

The main original authorities on the banishment of Williams are Winthrop's Journal and the Massachusetts Records of the period. Some facts can be gathered from the writings of Williams, whose autobiographical passages always have an air of truth while they are sometimes vague and often flushed by his enthusiastic temper. Cotton's memory is less to be trusted; some of his statements are in conflict with better authorities. He no doubt believed himself to be truthful, but his ingenious mind was unable to be precise without unconscious sophistication. Hubbard was of Presbyterian tendencies and totally opposed to all forms of Separatism. He appears to have recorded every exaggerated rumor cherished by Williams's antagonists to his discredit. Neither in this nor in other matters can we rely much on Hubbard's testimony. No critical student of history puts unquestioning confidence in Cotton Mather. His strange mind could never utter truth unvarnished. In a case like this, where family pride, local feeling, and sectarian prejudice were all on one side, and where he had a chance to embroider upon traditions already two generations old, it is better to disregard the author of the Magnalia entirely. Bentley's Historical Account of Salem, in 1st Massachusetts Historical Society Collections, vi, is a paper that excites admiration for its broadmindedness. It contains information not elsewhere to be found, but it is impossible to tell how far Bentley depended upon sources not now accessible and how far he relied on ingenious inferences drawn from his large knowledge of local history. The publications of the Narragansett Club contain the whole controversy between Cotton and Williams and all the letters of the latter now known to be extant. I have in some cases referred to the originals, in others I have used these careful reprints. Williams has been rather fortunate in his biographers. Mr. Oscar S. Straus, approaching the subject from a fresh standpoint, has produced the latest Life of Williams, written in a judicial temper and evincing a rare sympathy with its subject. The character of Williams has never been better drawn than by Mr. Straus, pp. 231-233. The life by T. D. Knowles is perhaps the best of the older biographies, Arnold's History of Rhode Island contains a sketch of Williams, and Elton's brief biography has a value of its own. Gammell's Life in Sparks's Biography is generally fair. "As to Roger Williams," by the late Dr. Henry Martyn Dexter, is, what it pretends to be, a partisan statement of the case against Williams. It shows characteristic thoroughness of research, it clears up many minor points, and is as erudite as it is one-sided.

[Sidenote: Note 18, page 298.]

Baylie's Sermon before the House of Lords, on Errours and Induration, accuses the Dutch of mere worldly policy in toleration. Williams alludes to the charge, Bloudy Tenent yet more Bloudy, p. 8. But the toleration of Holland may rather be traced to that decay of bigotry and that widening of view which are beneficent results of an extended trade. Williams in the Bloudy Tenent yet more Bloudy, p. 10, complains of the exclusion of Catholics and Arminians from toleration in the Netherlands. It would carry us beyond the range of the present work to inquire how far the toleration of Amsterdam was related to that "meridian glory" which Antwerp reached as early as 1550 by making itself a place of refuge for the persecuted of England, France, and Germany. The Articles of Union, adopted at Utrecht in 1579, which have been often called the Magna Charta of the Dutch, go to show that political and commercial considerations counted in favor of toleration, but they also show that some notion of the sacredness of the free conscience had been adopted among the Dutch. Article XIII of the Union provides that the states of Holland and Zealand shall conduct their religious affairs as they think good. More qualified arrangements are made for the other states, as that they may restrict religious liberty as they shall find needful for the repose and welfare of the country. But this significant provision is added, that every man shall have freedom of private belief without arrest or inquisition: "Midts dat een yder particulier in syn Religie vry zal moghen blyven, ende dat men niemandt, ter cause van de Religie, zal moghen achterhalen, ofte ondersoecken." Pieter Paulus Verklaring der Unie van Utrecht, i, 229, 230. Compare Van Meteren, Nederlandsche Historie etc., iii, 254, 255, and Hooft Nederlandsche Historie, etc.,