great courtesy was shown; liberty was granted them to sell their estates and remove from the colony whither they pleased within a year; meanwhile their property was exempted from examination or seizure, and protection and "equal justice" were promised to them under the new government.

Besides the commissioners who sailed from England in the fleet Dennis, Stagg, and Curtis (or Courteis) were two others - Rich

Character of
Clayborne.

ard Bennett, a Virginia Puritan whom persecution, it is said, had driven to England, and William Clayborne, already distinguished in the history of the colony. Curtis probably soon returned in his ship to England, and the power and responsibility therefore devolved upon Bennett and Clayborne, who established a provisional government with Bennett at its head. That both men were highly esteemed by all the colonists seems evident in the ready acquiescence with which their rule was accepted.

No Virginian was more deserving of such esteem, or more fit to be entrusted by Parliament at this time with the conduct of affairs, than Clayborne. If his career had hitherto been turbulent, it was so in the maintenance of the rights of the colony; if he had been unfortunate, it was because of the injustice of the king. His William family, of the county of Westmoreland,1 was an ancient and influential one, and was zealous, perhaps distinguished in the north of England, in upholding the Protestant faith. It is neither improbable nor impossible that there should have been enmity between such a family and that of the Calverts, of the neighboring county of York, so devoted to the church of Rome. Clayborne certainly opposed the settlement of a colony of Catholics on Chesapeake Bay, before any question arose as to the possession of Kent Island. The desire to secure this small portion of his grant seems hardly an adequate motive for the hostility which Baltimore showed to Clayborne.

1 He was the second son of Sir Edmund- - not Edward as Neill says in his English Colonization of America - Cleiburne (or Clayborne) of Cleiburne Hall. The portrait is that of William or his son- it is not quite certain which.

1652.]

WILLIAM CLAYBORNE.

213

They may have simply hated each other with that fervor then thought so becoming to all good Christians travelling different roads to Heaven; but there is, besides, the suspicion of a tenderer influence in the conduct of Calvert. He had failed in his suit for the hand of Agnes, the lovely daughter of the rich and powerful Sir Richard Lowther of Lowther, where Thomas Clayborne, William's elder brother, was successful.

At any rate Clayborne's ancient grievance was well grounded. Kent Island was within the boundaries of the patent of the Virginia company; he, who was the secretary of the colony, and its surveyor general, had taken possession of this island and established there a trading-post by virtue of a royal commission for trade and discovery, and a similar permit from the Company. There was not only priority of date in his favor, but he could enforce that plea afterward used so successfully by the Dutch and the Pennsylvanians in relation to the region on Delaware Bay-that the grant to Lord Baltimore, whatever might be its nominal boundaries, limited him to the possession only of lands hitherto uncultivated— hactenus inculta. In the course of that long and bitter controversy the Governor and council of Virginia had declared in 1634 that they were in duty bound to maintain their right to the Isle of Kent, and a royal order had decided in Clayborne's favor and against Lord Baltimore. Whatever may have been his motives, the influence of Baltimore at court was strong enough to procure a reversal of this decision in spite of Clayborne's complaint that the royal order was disregarded, and his offer to pay a large rental for the lands which were his by right of discovery and occupation.1

It was not in Clayborne's nature to be a lukewarm partisan, even if he had not had the remembrance of such wrongs, extending over a period of nearly twenty years, to in

fluence him. But he was a Parlia

ment man both from religious mind Warborne Sew

political convictions, and not that

Signature of William Clayborne.

he might gain his personal ends. That he did not permit his private griefs to shape his public acts is clear from the moderation of his conduct now that Maryland was, in a measure, in his power. It was fortunate for both colonies that the conduct of affairs was entrusted to two such men as he and Bennett, for the latter, as Governor of Virginia, seems never, for his part, to have remembered that under Sir William Berkeley he had been compelled to escape persecution by flight.

1MS. notes upon Clayborne, collated in England by Mr. C. J. Hubbard of Portsmouth, N. H.-English State Papers.

The commission from Parliament empowered them to reduce “all the plantations within the Bay of Chesapeake," and there is nothing in all the negotiations to which the subsequent troubles gave rise to suggest that this commission was not meant to embrace Maryland. The commissioners assumed that it did, and after the submission of Jamestown they sailed on board the Guinea for Saint Mary's, the capital of Maryland, and demanded of Governor Stone (the successor of that Thomas Green whom Leonard Calvert had appointed on his death-bed), an oath of conformity to the laws of the Commonwealth. If this were given, they declared, they would not interfere in any way with the government of the Lord Proprietary or disturb his officers. This, at first, Stone refused, and the Commissioners deposed him and his council, and appointed a provisional council in their place. But on a subsequent visit of the Commissioners the Maryland governor reviewed his former decision, and was restored to office on condition that he should issue his writs and other official papers "in the name of the keepers of the liberties of England by authority of Parliament,' while he was still "to reserve and save to himself" his oath to Lord Baltimore as proprietor of the province, till "the pleasure of the state of England be further known."

It would have been impossible for the Commissioners to be more moderate and considerate, and to have obeyed at the same time, in any degree, the instructions, as they understood them, of Parliament. Indeed, the advantage was on Stone's side, so far at least as to gain time, for he held in reservation the right of Lord Baltimore. The expedient, as might have been foreseen, led in due season to inevitable trouble.

Before those troubles came, however, one act of tardy justice was done. At the first sitting of the court after the return of Stone to his office of governor, a commission was appointed — consisting entirely of residents of Maryland with the exception of Governor Bennett of Virginia to conclude a treaty of peace with the tribe of Susquehanocks. Its first article conveyed to the English the country from the Patuxent to the Susquehanna, on the west side of Chesapeake Bay, and from the Choptank to the Elke on the east side, with the islands, rivers, creeks, etc., etc., "and whatsoever else to the same belonging, excepting the Isle of Kent and Palmer's Island which belong to Captain Clayborne." The acknowledgment may have been an act of political expediency, but it was none the less one of simple justice.

There were grievances and differences enough still remaining. Lord Baltimore, when tidings of events in Maryland reached him, appeared

1 Vol. i., p. 514.

1652.]

LORD BALTIMORE PROTESTS.

tests.

215

by petition, in August, 1652, before the Long Parliament, setting forth his claims to the colony and asking for redress.1 From Lord Baltithat body he obtained little consideration, though he urged more proon his own behalf that while Virginia had adhered faithfully to the king, Maryland, like New England, had not declared against the Parliament. Humble as this submission was from one who had been so devoted a friend to the late king, it availed nothing; for nearly eighteen months later (January, 1654) the Governor and Assembly of Virginia are advised by the Council of State that the Lord Protector, to whom, with succes

sive parliaments, the government of the Commonwealth was now intrusted, had taken upon himself the settlement of the differences between Lord Baltimore and the Virginians.2

It may be that the hope of redress either from Parliament or Cromwell, induced Lord Baltimore to submit, for a while, to the compromise which Stone had made with the Parliamentary Commissioners. As late as November, 1653, the Governor of Maryland gives as the reason for not holding a general court that it was requisite that "some directions out of England touching the government here," should be

Oliver Cromwell.

received before there could be anything for a general court to do; 31 and, he says, there had been no arrival of English ships.

from Lord

Instructions from the proprietary were on the way. Satisfied, no doubt, that however much he might abase himself he Fresh incould gain nothing of the Long Parliament, nor of Cromwell structions himself, when he had dispersed that body and assembled its Baltimore. successor, Baltimore wrote to Stone, reproaching him for submitting to the Commissioners, accusing him of cowardice, ordering him to restore the proprietary government, to issue all public papers in the name of the lord proprietor, and to demand the oath of fidelity to him from the land-holders of the province. In January, 1654, Stone issued a decree in accordance with these instructions.

1 Sainsbury's Calendar of State Papers, p. 338. 2 Sainsbury's Calendar, p. 412.

The unhappy Governor found it hard to serve two masters. Not many weeks after he had thus reversed the order of affairs in obedience to Baltimore, tidings arrived of the dispersion by Cromwell of his second Parliament. Thereupon Stone issued, early in May, another proclamation acknowledging Cromwell as "the lord protector of the Commonwealth of England, Scotland, and Ireland, and the dominions thereunto belonging," and declaring the government of Maryland under the lord proprietary to be therefore "subordinate unto and dependent upon" that commonwealth. In commemoration of this solemn event he proclaimed a general pardon for all offences committed in the province with certain exceptions. But these exceptions he declared, before the month had expired, were beside murder, treason, and unsatisfied forfeitures "rebellion, conspiracy, combination, or endeavour used at any time heretofore by any person against the lord proprietary's right and dominion over this province."

Such a declaration could only have been meant to be a defiance of Bennett and Clayborne, the Parliamentary Commissioners. That there should be no doubt, however, on this point, Stone issued, a few weeks later, another proclamation relating to affairs in Calvert County, where, by Lord Baltimore's express order, he had removed the Puritan sheriff from office, in which he charged the Commissioners with leading the people into "faction, sedition, and rebellion against the lord proprietor.

Bennett and Clayborne, however, were not men to be frightened by proclamations. They in their turn issued a manifesto, and by authority of commands which, they declared, they had "lately received" from Cromwell, brushed away with little ceremony all that Stone had lately done on behalf of the proprietary government, removed the Catholic officers, and appointed a board of commissioners to govern Maryland in the name of the Protector.1 Stone yielded without resistance, though not without some "opprobrious and uncivil language," and resigned his office,

Under the new Commissioners there followed some months of undisputed Puritan rule, and of that peace which Puritans so often secured by tolerating no religious faith but their own. Lord Baltimore again protested, however, when the tidings reached England, against this infringement of his rights, again reproached Stone with faithlessness and cowardice, and sent an agent to the colony to make this protest and these reproaches the more emphatic. Stone, yielding as usual to the influence last brought to bear upon him, resolved upon another revolution.

In January, 1655, he issued military commissions and rallied his

1 Neill's Terra Mariæ, p. 121.