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Stone not to fight, lest the cry against the papists, if any hurt were done, would be so great that many mischiefs would ensue, wholly referring themselves to the will of God and the lord protector's determination." Yielding to their advice against that of his Protestant friends, Stone surrendered his commission into their hands, and, under compulsion, pledged himself in writing to submit to such government as should be set over the province by the commissioners in the name of the lord protector. Two days after his resignation, Bennett and Clayborne appointed Captain William Fuller and nine others commissioners for governing Maryland. They were enjoined to summon an assembly for which all who had borne arms against the parliament or professed the Roman Catholic religion were disabled to vote or to be elected.

Parties became identified with religious sects, and Maryland itself was the prize for which they contended. The new assembly, representing a faction, not the whole people, coming together at Patuxent in October, acknowledged the authority of Cromwell, but it disfranchised the whole Romish party. Following the precedent established by an ordinance of the Long Parliament, it confirmed the liberty of religion, provided the liberty were not extended to "popery, prelacy, or licentiousness" of opinion. The cedar and the myrtle and the oil-tree might no longer be planted in the wilderness together.

When the proprietary heard of these proceedings, he reproved his lieutenant for want of firmness. The pretended assembly was esteemed "illegal, mutinous, and usurped," and his officers, under the powers which the charter conferred, prepared to vindicate his supremacy. Toward the end of January, 1655, on the receipt of news from London, it was noised abroad that his patent was upheld by the protector, and Stone, pleading that his written resignation to the ten commissioners was invalid, because extorted from him by force, began to issue orders for the restoration of his authority. Papists and friendly Protestants received authority to levy men, and the leaders of this new appeal to arms were able to surprise and get possession of the provincial records. In the last week in March, they moved from Patuxent toward Anne Arundel, the chief seat of the republicans. The inhabitants of Providence and

their partisans gathered together with superior zeal and courage. Aided by the Golden Lyon, an English ship which happened then to be in the waters of the Severn, they attacked and discomfited the party of Stone. After the skirmish, the governor, upon quarter given him, yielded himself and his company as prisoners; but, two or three days after, the victors, by a council of war, condemned him, his councillors, and some others-in all, ten in number-to be shot. Eltonhead, one of the condemned, appealed to Cromwell, but in vain, and sentence was presently executed upon him and three others. Of the four, three were Roman Catholics. The remaining six, some on the way to execution, were saved "by the begging of good women and friends" who chanced to be there, or by the soldiers; it was to the intercession of the latter that Governor Stone owed his life. Rushing into the houses of the Jesuits, men demanded "the impostors," as they called them, but the fathers escaped to hiding-places in Virginia.

A friend to Lord Baltimore, then in the province, begged of the protector no other boon than that he would "condescend to settle the country by declaring his determinate will;" and yet the same causes which led Cromwell to neglect the internal concerns of Virginia compelled him to pay but little attention to the disturbances in Maryland. On the one hand, he respected the rights of property of Lord Baltimore; on the other, he "would not have a stop put to the proceedings of the commissioners who were authorized to settle the civil government." The right to the jurisdiction of Maryland remained, therefore, a disputed question.

In July, 1656, Lord Baltimore commissioned Josiah Fendall as his lieutenant, and, before the end of the year, sent over his brother Philip as councillor and principal secretary of the province. The ten men none the less continued to exercise authority, and, "for his dangerousness," they held Fendall under arrest, until, in the face of the whole court, he took an oath not to disturb their government, but to await a final decision from England. To England, therefore, he sailed the next year, that he might consult with Baltimore, leaving Barber, a former member of Cromwell's household, as his deputy. Still the protector, by reason "of his great affairs," had not leisure to

consider the report of the commissioners for trade on the affairs of Maryland. At last, in November, 1657, Lord Baltimore, by "the friendly endeavors of Edward Digges," negotiated with Bennett and Matthews, all being then in England, an agreement for the recovery of his province. The proprietary covenanted so far to waive his right of jurisdiction as to leave the settlement of past offences and differences to the disposal of the protector and his council; to grant the land claims of "the people in opposition," without requiring of them an oath of fidelity, but only some engagement for his support; and, lastly, he promised for himself never to consent to a repeal "of the law whereby all persons professing to believe in Jesus Christ have freedom of conscience there."

Returning to his government with instructions, Fendall, in the following March, held an interview with Fuller, Preston, and the other commissioners, at St. Leonards, when the agreement was carried into effect. The Puritans were further permitted to retain their arms, and were assured of indemnity. The proceedings of the assemblies and the courts of justice since the year 1652, in so far as they related to questions of property, were confirmed.

Wearied with the convulsions of ten years, a general assembly, on the death of Cromwell, saw no security but in asserting the power of the people, and constituting the government on the expression of their will. Accordingly, on the twelfth of March, 1660, just one day before that memorable session of Virginia, when the people of the Ancient Dominion adopted a similar system of independent legislation, the representatives of Maryland, meeting in the house of Robert Slye, voted themselves a lawful assembly, without dependence on any other power in the province. The burgesses of Virginia assumed to themselves the election of the council; the burgesses of Maryland refused to acknowledge the rights of the body claiming to be an upper house. In Virginia, Berkeley yielded to the popular will; in Maryland, Fendall permitted the power of the people to be proclaimed. The representatives of Maryland having settled the government, independent of their proprietary and of his governor and council, and hoping for tranquillity after years of storms, passed an act

making it felony to disturb the order which they had established.

Maryland, like Virginia, at the epoch of the restoration, was in full possession of liberty, by the practical exercise of the sovereignty of the people. Like Virginia, it had so nearly completed its institutions that, till the epoch of its final separation from England, it hardly made any further advances toward freedom and independence.

Men love liberty, even if it be turbulent, and the colony had increased, and flourished, and grown rich, in spite of domestic dissensions. Its population, in 1660, is variously estimated at twelve thousand and at eight thousand; the latter number is probably nearer the truth. The country was dear to its inhabitants. There they desired to spend the remnant of their lives-there to make their graves.

CHAPTER XI.

PRELATES AND PURITANS.

THE settlement of New England was a result of implacable differences between Protestant dissenters in England and the established Anglican church.

Who will venture to measure the consequences of actions by the humility or the remoteness of their origin? The Power which enchains the destinies of states, overruling the decisions of sovereigns and the forethought of statesmen, often deduces the greatest events from the least considered causes. A Genoese adventurer, discovering America, changed the commerce of the world; an obscure German, inventing the printing-press, rendered possible the universal diffusion of ever-increasing intelligence; an Augustine monk, denouncing indulgences, introduced a schism in religion which changed the foundations of European politics; a young French refugee, skilled alike in theology and civil law, in the duties of magistrates and the dialectics of religious controversy, entering the republic of Geneva, and conforming its ecclesiastical discipline to the principles of republican simplicity, established a party of which Englishmen became members, and New England the asylum.

In Germany, the reformation, which aimed at the regeneration of the world in doctrine and in morals, sprung from the son of a miner of the peasant class-from Martin Luther-of whom Leibnitz says: "This is he who, in later times, taught the human race hope and free thought." Trained in the school of Paul of Tarsus through the African Augustine, Luther insisted that no man can impersonate or transmit the authority of God; that power over souls belongs to no order;

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