The Beginners of a Nation: A History of the Source and Rise of the Earliest English Settlements in America, with Special Reference to the Life and Character of the PeopleEggleston, Edward
History
The Beginners of a Nation: A History of the Source and Rise of the Earliest English Settlements in America, with Special Reference to the Life and Character of the People
Eggleston, Edward
United States -- History -- Colonial period, ca. 1600-1775
In 1627, and again in 1628, Lord Baltimore took Catholics with him to
Newfoundland and settled priests there. The English court was just
then sailing on a Protestant tack, and England had allied itself with
the Huguenots of La Rochelle. Another of the good works by which the
government of Charles and Buckingham was endeavoring to prove its
sanctification was the enforcement of the penal statutes against Roman
Catholics. It is notable that Baltimore sailed with the first Catholic
emigrants to Avalon about the time of the setting in of the movement
toward Massachusetts which swelled at length into the great Puritan
exodus. The five years of delay caused by the change from Avalon to
Maryland, and also perhaps by the exhaustion of Baltimore's resources
and his death, was unfavorable to the project of a Catholic province.
The English government by 1634 had grown more lenient toward
Romanists, the co-religionists of the queen. The work at which Laud
kept all hands busy just then was the suppression of Puritanism, and
thousands of Puritans were by this time shaking the dust of England
from their feet and seeking a home in the western wilderness,
persuaded that the Church of England under Laud had all sails set for
Rome. This illusion regarding the purposes of the archbishop and his
party, which alarmed the Puritans, heartened the Catholics, who
naturally preferred to stay at home where a flood tide seemed to be
setting toward Catholicism. The small Catholic migration to Maryland
was not to be compared with that stream of Puritan emigration that
about this time poured into New England twenty thousand people in a
decade. The fall of Laud and the rise of the Puritans to power put a
complete stop to the New England migration, but it failed to quicken
the Catholic movement, for Maryland herself had become sadly involved
in the civil commotions of the time.
[Sidenote: Baltimore's partners.]
[Sidenote: Note 13.]
Cecilius Calvert undoubtedly counted on a large migration of Catholic
recusants, and the documents show that the Jesuit order in England
took great interest in the movement. The second Lord Baltimore was
joined by partners in the financial risks of the venture, and though
we meet with more than one allusion to these adventurers whose
interest in the colony was apparently still active twenty years after
its beginning, they were profoundly silent partners; their names are
nowhere recorded, and we are left to conjecture the origin of their
interest in Maryland.
XIII.
[Sidenote: The religious aim.]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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