The British and Irish Catholics who came over seem to have been the men who came out to Newfoundland with the most honest intent of any,--to better themselves without injury to others, and to seek there "freedom to worship God" at a time when that freedom was denied in England, both to the Catholic and the Puritan. In 1620 Calvert had bought a patent conveying to him the lordship of all the south-eastern peninsula, which he called Avalon, the ancient name of Glastonbury in England. He proposed to found there an asylum for the persecuted Catholics; and at a little harbor on the eastern shore, just south of Cape Broyle, which he called Verulam, a name since corrupted to Ferryland, he built a noble mansion, and spent altogether some $150,000, a much larger sum in those days than it seems now. But the site was ill chosen; and the imbecility of King James encouraged the French to attack the colony, so that at last Calvert wrote to Burleigh, "I came here to plant and set and sow, but have had to fall to fighting Frenchmen." He went home, and in the last year of his life he obtained a grant of land, which is now occupied by the States of Delaware and Maryland; and to its chief city his son gave the name of the wild Irish headland and fishing village, whence he took his own name of Lord Baltimore in the Irish peerage. After Calvert's departure, the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland sent out a number of settlers; and in 1638 Sir David Kirke, one of the bravest of England's sea-captains, who had taken Quebec, received from Charles I. a grant of all Newfoundland, and settled at Verulam, or Ferryland, the place founded by Calvert. Under Kirke the colony prospered; but, as he took the part of Charles in the civil war, his possessions were confiscated by the victorious Commonwealth. At that time there were nearly two thousand settlers along the eastern shore of Avalon; and the great Protector, Oliver Cromwell, protected the rights of the Newfoundland settlers as he did those of the Waldensians. After his death came what Mr. Spearman calls the "blots in the English history known as the reigns of Charles II. and his deposed brother." Mr. Spearman continues, "Frenchmen must understand that no Englishman will for a moment accept as a precedent anything in those two reigns affecting the relations of France and of England."