This charter, according to internal evidence and concurrent opinion, was drawn up by Lord Baltimore himself, but owing to his death before it received the royal assent, was ultimately made out in the name of his son Cecil. The territory thus granted was comprised between the ocean and the 40th degree of latitude. The meridian of the western fountains of the Potomac, the river itself from its source to its mouth, and a line drawn due east from Watkin’s Point to the ocean, were the boundaries of this grant, which was erected into a separate province, under the name of Maryland, from Henrietta Maria, wife of Charles I. The country thus bestowed on Lord Baltimore, his heirs and assigns, as absolute lord and proprietary, was to be held by the tenure of fealty only, paying a yearly rent of two Indian arrows and a fifth of all gold and silver which it might yield; and the charter, unlike any which had hitherto obtained the royal assent, secured to the colonists equality in religious and civil rights, and an independent share in the legislation of the province. The laws of the colony were to be established with the advice and approval of a majority of the freemen or their deputies; nor could the authority of the absolute proprietary extend to the life, freehold, or estate of any emigrant. “These,” says Bancroft, “were the features which endeared the proprietary government to the people of Maryland;” and he adds, “it is a singular fact, that the only proprietary charters productive of considerable emolument to their owners were those which conceded popular liberty. Lord Baltimore was a Roman Catholic; yet, far from guarding his territory against any but those of his own persuasion, as he had taken from himself and his successors all arbitrary power by establishing the legislative franchises of the people, so he took from them the means of being intolerant in religion, inasmuch as, while Christianity was made the law of the land, no preference whatever should be given to sect or party.” To avoid dispute on the subject of the fisheries, all claim to these was expressly renounced by the charter; Maryland was also carefully separated from Virginia, the necessity of which Lord Baltimore had clearly foreseen from his former visit to Virginia, when the oaths of supremacy and allegiance were tendered to him in a form which he, as a Catholic, could not subscribe; now, therefore, when about to establish his colony within the jurisdiction of Virginia, he provided against every possible cause of contention with the neighbour state. He also provided, as far as was in his power, against any future aggressions of the English monarch, who covenanted in the charter, by an express stipulation, “that neither he, nor his heirs, nor successors, should ever set any imposition, custom, or tax whatever, upon the inhabitants of the province.” Maryland was by this means exempted from English taxation for ever.