In the year 1642, the inhabitants of Maryland, from a grateful sense of Lord Baltimore’s “great charge and solicitude in maintaining the government, and protecting them in their persons, rights, and liberties, freely granted such a subsidy as the young and poor estate could bear.” This was a subsidy of fifteen pounds weight of tobacco for every person above twelve years of age. In the same year the peace and prosperity of the colony was again interrupted; firstly, by the bordering Indian tribes, who, alarmed at the rapid spread of the colonists, and embittered towards them by the suspicions with which the artful Clayborne had poisoned their minds, made divers warlike incursions, causing the death of some and the alarm of all. A fort was built on the Patuxent as a defence against the Susquehannahs, and peace at length re-established on the usual terms of Indian submission. A more formidable and annoying enemy in the meantime made his appearance, this being no other than the contumacious Clayborne. Clayborne, on the breaking out of civil war in England, had allied himself with the popular party, and now, in the absence of Calvert, the governor, who was then in England, and in connexion with one Ingle, already convicted of treason in the colony, took the opportunity of re-asserting his claims and exciting insubordination among the disaffected. It may appear strange, that, under a form of government so wise and liberal as that of Lord Baltimore, disaffection should exist; but it must be borne in mind that the religious contentions of England had been transported to America, and not even in the Old World did papacy and puritanism come to closer quarters than on the soil of Maryland. Whilst England herself was convulsed with the birth of liberty, and whilst the popular will was standing in stout array against the power of the monarch, it was not to be expected that the men of America, who had fled from their native land in the very spirit of this conflict, would abate one jot of it here. Besides this, the demand of puritanism was fierce dogmatism, which not even the noble toleration of Lord Baltimore’s government could appease, nay, which it was even a virtue to oppose. England had too much to do at home to care at this time about its colonies beyond the Atlantic, and New England and Virginia legislated for themselves almost without reference to the mother-country; and with the Puritans the same independent spirit had entered Maryland. Whilst England defied her king, Maryland began to question what were the rights of any human proprietary, who was in fact but a sort of petty sovereign; and this question once admitted into the heart of the colony, served as the leaven of disaffection.