Page images
PDF
EPUB

one-half was applied to public expenses, and the other half went into the pocket of the Proprietor.1 The Act of Navigation passed in 1662 had, amongst other clauses, imposed a duty of a penny a pound on all tobacco exported from the plantations and not imported direct to England. The duty of collecting this was entrusted to a separate officer, appointed by the crown. Difficulties almost of necessity arose between this collector and the local authorities, appointed by and responsible to the Proprietor. Another subject of conflict was the precise boundary line which separated the waters of Maryland from those of Virginia, a question which, in the case of shipping dues, became a fertile source of dispute.

In 1681 an order of Council was issued commanding Baltimore to make good two thousand five hundred pounds lost to the crown through his refusal to assist the tax-collector. He was furthermore accused of having illegally imprisoned the tax-collector to prevent his own misdeeds being reported to the English government. In the following year the matter became still more serious. Rousby, the king's tax-collector, had made himself specially obnoxious to Baltimore and his adherents as a zealous Exclusionist. His duties made it necessary that he should have a conference with the Proprietor's representative, and accordingly they met on ship-board.

If Baltimore meditated no violence, his choice of a spokesman was singularly unfortunate. He was represented by one Colonel George Talbot, an Irish Papist, certainly akin, if not in blood, at least in temper, to his namesake and fellow countryman, Tyrconnel. He was well received and hospitably treated on board. After pouring forth a succession of drunken blasphemies varied by drunken expressions of friendship, he broke into a violent altercation with Rousby, and suddenly pulling out a dagger wounded him mortally. Talbot was at once arrested, and as the affair had happened in Virginian waters, he was sent off to Jamestown for trial. Before he could be tried, he escaped from prison and fled to some outlying settlements where he remained undetected. The Governor of Virginia then brought the matter before the Privy Council. Talbot himself received the royal pardon without, so far as we can see, any valid grounds. But the severity with which the Privy Council censured Baltimore, and the plain intimations given him that any disregard of govern

1 Bacon.

THE REVOLUTION OF 1689.

319

ment would imperil his charter, showed how insecure was his position and how little he had to hope from the favor of the

court.

In reality it may well be that the severity, or at least the coldness, of the king stood Baltimore in good stead at a later day. If his fortunes had been more closely bound up with the house of Stuart, they must have been far more wholly overthrown in the retribution which befell it. The proprietary rights of Baltimore were in part suspended, in part destroyed, by the revolution of 1688. If he had been a prominent supporter of the fallen house, it is scarcely possible that any portion of those rights would have been suffered to survive.

A revolu

tion threat

In 1683 Baltimore left his colony never to revisit it. His presence had apparently acted as some check on the aggressive designs of the Papists. During the five years which ened. followed, the bitterness of religious and political parties grew more intense, till it was brought to a head by the state of affairs in England. The revolution in Maryland followed a course not unlike that which it took in the mother country. During 1688 and the early part of 1689, the revolutionary party remained quiet. In October, 1688, a circular from James II. warned the colonists of the intended attack from Holland. From that time forward no official communications seem to have passed between the inhabitants of Maryland and either the de jure or de facto government, until the colonists had fully identified themselves with the latter.

of hostili

Meanwhile rumors ran through the colony of wholesale preparations for a massacre of the Protestants, of invasions concerted Outbreak with the French Jesuits, and of prayers openly put up ties.1 in the churches for the success of the Jacobite arms in Ireland. The Protestants during this time seem to have been quietly and successfully organizing their forces. They were fortunate in their leader. Coode had been implicated thirty years before in the strange and abortive revolution headed by Fendall. During the interval, though no definite act of treason was alleged against him, he seems to have incurred the name of a plotter and an agitator. Yet his conduct in the great crisis of the Revolution shows him to have been a man of capacity and decision,

1 Our knowledge of these proceedings is mainly derived from the ex parte statements made by the persons concerned. Each of course assigns very different temper and motive to the actors, but in substance there is little discrepancy.

while the offenses with which he is charged are those which are hardly to be avoided in time of revolution.

In July, 1689, the insurgents took up arms in various parts of the colony. Their principal force was directed against the Proprietor's official residence near St. Mary's. In his absence this was occupied by the Governor, Colonel Quarry. He surrendered at once, satisfying himself with a formal protest that he yielded to superior force. It is significant that in this instance, as indeed throughout the whole of the contest, the issue seems to have been, not between James and William, but between the Proprietor and his Protestant subjects. The colonists seem with sound judg. ment to have taken up the ground of silently acquiescing in the Revolution established in England, as a measure which bound them without any voluntary act of adhesion on their part.

Throughout the whole colony the Revolution was effected with the same ease and completeness as at St. Mary's. In every county save one the Protestants rose, and were suffered to obtain a complete and unchallenged victory. Strange to say, the single instance of loyalty to the Proprietor was in Ann Arundel, formerly the stronghold of Puritanism. No explanation of this is given. in any contemporary documents. That county, we are more than once told, was now the richest and most important in the colony, and it is possible that increasing prosperity had dulled the edge of religious zeal and predisposed the inhabitants to a quiet acquiescence in the rule of the established powers.

Proceed

victorious

In analogy to the procedure adopted in the mother country, a Convention was now elected. The defeated party loudly accused the Revolutionists of employing unfair influence ings of the at the election, and depriving their opponents of their party. rights alike of speaking and voting. Yet a number of addresses were sent from the supporters of the Proprietor to the English government, a step which could hardly have been carried out had the victorious party really wished to repress freedom of speech. Like its prototype in England, the Maryland Convention wisely abstained from claiming any of the formal powers of a legislature beyond those which the state of affairs made absolutely needful. It voted that the existing laws of the province should stand good for three years. Its principal, apparently indeed its only, important measure, was to appoint a committee to inquire into the truth of the alleged intrigues between the Maryland Papists and the French settlers in Canada. No details of

BALTIMORE DEPRIVED OF POLITICAL AUTHORITY. 321

their procedure are extant beyond a curt report, declaring that the charges were proved. This statement, however, cannot be looked on as having much value, seeing that it was drawn up within less than a fortnight after the appointment of the committee.

The dispute now entered on a new phase. Was the Proprietor to retain his power, or was the colony to pass under the direct Baltimore rule of the crown? From all the counties two sets of deprived of his politaddresses were sent in to the English government, ical authority. pleading one for, one against, the retention of the proprietary system. In every county, save Ann Arundel, Baltimore's opponents outnumbered his supporters.

If the new sovereign had adopted the principles of his predecessors, there would have been little doubt of the result. Sixty years before, when the Puritan colonists had discussed the expediency of obtaining a charter from the king, one of their leaders had used the pregnant words: "If there should be a purpose or desire to wrong them, though they had a seal as broad as the house-floor, it would not serve the turn, for there would be means enough found to recall or reverse it." The dissolution of the Virginia Company and that attack on the chartered rights of Massachusetts which was only frustrated by the Revolution, were the best comment on the sagacious words of the Puritan prophet. Looked at merely as a matter of procedure, the conduct of William was fully as arbitrary as that of his predecessors. The destruction of the Virginia Company and the attack on Massachusetts observed the technical formalities of law. William took the government of Maryland into his own hands by an exercise of irresponsible power, in which he was fortified only by the opinion of Chief Justice Holt as to the lawfulness of the proceeding.' That opinion, too, though explicit as to the right of the crown, was certainly not explicit as to the expediency of exercising that right. Yet here, as in so many cases, the seemingly arbitrary conduct of William was, in truth, better and fairer than the seemingly lawful conduct of either James. The Virginia Company was overthrown with a ruthless disregard for the pecuniary interest of the members, and with a disregard even more cruel for those higher aims and aspirations which had furnished the leaders of the Company with so noble an incentive to action. The

1 Holt's written opinion in the form of a letter to the Lord President of the Council ia mong the Colonial Papers.

members of it were loyal and devoted citizens, whose labor and money had been laid out for no mere hope of personal gain, but for objects with which every true Englishman sympathized. Baltimore had never shown that his position as Proprietor had for him anything but a money value, and in the overthrow of his political power his pecuniary rights were strictly recognized and respected. The form of deprivation may have been, as Holt evidently thought, ill-chosen, but no one can doubt the substantial necessity of the measure. Coode may have been an unscrupulous agitator, his followers may have represented a narrow and repulsive form of fanaticism, yet no one can doubt that a Papist garrison planted in the very heart of our English settlements would have been an ever-increasing source of danger.

The

Even during the course of procedure events occurred which showed how unsatisfactory was the system which gave a Roman Catholic virtual sovereignty over Protestants, and which preserved an isolated and almost independent principality among a group of dependent colonies. Tidings came from Maryland that Paine, the new collector, had shared the fate of his predecessor, Rousby. There is nothing to show that Baltimore was even as much implicated in this as he was in Talbot's crime. murder had been committed by certain disaffected Marylanders, and had apparently risen out of a private quarrel.1 Yet even so it illustrates the unsatisfactory nature of the extant system. At the same time there came an address from the Assembly so bitter in tone towards Baltimore, and so laden with charges that the crown could hardly, in the face of such a display of feeling, have been justified in maintaining his proprietary rights. This document not only brought up the stock charges of intriguing with the Canadian Papists against the English colonies, but also accused Baltimore of imitating the policy of the deposed king, by dispensing with statutes, packing Assemblies, imposing illegal dues, and interfering with the courts of justice. These charges may have been exaggerated, and Baltimore's absence from the colony shows that the guilt, if guilt there was, attached rather to his supporters than to himself. But the attitude of the Assembly towards the Proprietor goes far to justify the crown in refusing to perpetuate a state of things which could only have led to fresh dissensions.

2

1 This is stated in a letter written by Coode to the authorities in England. Baltimore's partisans in their reply admit the fact, but try to extenuate it.

This document is copied in Entry Book, No. liii.

« PreviousContinue »