There grew up presently an unseemly quarrel between Nicholson and Coode, a reprobate ecclesiastic, who had earlier been a conspicuous character in Maryland history.[597] The breach scandalized everybody; and charge and counter-charge touching their respective morals contaminated the atmosphere. Indeed, the indictment of Nicholson by his enemies failed of effect by its excess of foulness. In face of all this the governor had the merit, and even the courage, to found schools. He also acquired with some a certain odor of sanctity, when he sent Bibles to the sick during an epidemic, and appointed readers of them to attend upon a sanitarium which had been established at a mineral spring in St. Mary’s county. There was not a little need of piety somewhere, for the church in Maryland as a rule had little of it. When Nicholson was in turn transferred to Virginia, Nathaniel Blakiston (1699) and John Seymour (1703) succeeded in the government. Under them there is little of moment to note, beyond occasional inroads of the French by land and of the pirates along the Chesapeake. Events, however, were shaping themselves to put an end to the proprietary sway. Charles, the third Lord Baltimore, died February 20, 1714-15, and his title and rights descended to Benedict, his son, who had already in anticipation renounced Catholicism. In becoming Protestant he had secured from the Crown and its supporters an increased income in place of the allowance that his Catholic father now denied him, out of the revenues of the province, which were still preserved to the family. Benedict had scarce been recognized when he also died (April 5, 1715), and his minor son, Charles, the fifth lord, succeeded. The young baron’s guardian, Lord Guilford, took the government, and finding to his liking John Hart, who was then ruling the province for the king, he recommissioned him as the representative of the Proprietary, who was now one in religious profession with the vast majority of his people. The return of the old master was to appearances a confirmation of the old charter; but an inevitable change was impending. Meanwhile the laws were revised and codified (1715), and a few years later (1722), by solemn resolution, the lower house of the assembly declared that the people of Maryland were entitled to all the rights and immunities of free Englishmen, and were of necessity inheritors of the common law of England, except so far as the laws of the province limited the application of that fundamental right.[598] This manifesto was the signal of a conflict between the ways that were and those that were to be. The Proprietary and the upper house made a show of dissenting to its views; but the old conditions were doomed. The methods of progress, however, for a while were gentle, and on the whole the rule of succeeding governors, Charles Calvert (1720), Benedict Leonard Calvert (1726), and Samuel Ogle (1731), was quiet.