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.

1656.

In July, 1656, Lord Baltimore commissioned Josiah July 10. 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. Το England, therefore, he sailed the next year, that he

1657.

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."

1658.

March.

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 for their actions. 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.

The death of Cromwell left the condition of England uncertain, and might well diffuse gloom through the counties of Maryland. For ten years the unhappy province had been distracted by dissensions, of which the root had consisted in the claims that Baltimore had always asserted, and had never made good. Did new revolutions await the colony, new strifes with Virginia, the protector, the proprietary, the king? Wearied with long convulsions, a general assembly 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

1660.

Mar. 12.

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 public will; in Maryland, Fendall permitted the power of the people to be proclaimed. The representatives of Maryland, having thus 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.

Thus was Maryland, like Virginia, at the epoch of the restoration, 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 towards freedom and independence.

Men love liberty, even if it be turbulent; and the colony

had increased, and flourished, and grown rich, in spite 1660. 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 VIII.

THE PILGRIMS.

THE settlement of New England was a result of the Reformation; not of the contest between the new opinions and the authority of Rome, but of implacable differences between Protestant dissenters 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 increased intelligence; an Augustine monk, denouncing indulgences, introduced a schism in religion, and 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. The enfranchisement of the mind from religious despotism led directly to inquiries into the nature of civil government; and the doctrines of popular liberty, which sheltered their infancy in the wildernesses of the newly discovered continent, within the short space of two centuries have infused themselves into the life-blood of every rising state from Labrador to Chili; have erected outposts on the Oregon and in Liberia; and, making a proselyte of enlightened France, have dis

turbed all the ancient governments of Europe, by awakening the public mind to resistless action, from the shores of Portugal to the palaces of the czars.

1606.

Before the joint incorporation of the London and Plymouth companies for Virginia, Sir Ferdinando Gorges, the governor of Plymouth, and Sir John Popham, the chief justice of England, had agreed together to send out each a ship to begin a plantation in the region which Waymouth had explored. Chalons, the captain employed by Gorges, in violation of his instructions, took the southern passage, and was carried by the trade-winds even to Porto Rico. As he turned to the north, he was captured by the Spanish fleet from Havana. The tall and well-furnished ship provided by Popham sailed from the river of Severn, under the command of Martin Pring. The able mariner, now on his second voyage to the west, disappointed of meeting Chalons, busied himself in the perfect discovery of all the rivers and harbors along our northeastern coast; and, on his return, he made the most exact and most favorable report of the country which he had explored.

Out of his report sprung the first great effort to occupy the region then known as Northern Virginia; and, like that of Southern Virginia, it was made under the auspices of the king and of the church of England. The chief justice was no novice in schemes of colonization, having "labored greatly in the last project touching the plantation of Munster" in Ireland; Gorges, the younger associate, still clung to the hope of acquiring domains and fortune in America. Under the charter to the Plymouth company, now fourteen months old, and six months after the departure of the first colony for the Chesapeake Bay, one hundred and twenty persons for planters sailed from Plymouth in the good ship "Mary and John," of London, with Raleigh Gilbert for its captain, and in a fly-boat called the "Gift of God," commanded by a kinsman of the chief justice, George Popham, who was "well strickened in years and infirm, yet willing to die in acting something that might be serviceable to God and honorable to his country."

1607.