In 1643, Parliament, dominated by Puritans, could not let the distant Maryland province rest in peace. It passed an ordinance making the Earl of Warwick Governor in Chief and Lord High Admiral of all the plantations in America. This act contained covert allusions to papists, Spaniards, and governors recently appointed by the king. Baltimore met the rising tempest in a way characteristic of him. If he could settle a portion of his province with Puritans they might serve to shield him from the storm. Besides, the Catholic emigration had not proved large, and his province needed inhabitants. He wrote to a Captain Gibbons, of Boston, sending him a commission under the Maryland government, and offering "free liberty of religion and all other privileges" to such of the New England people as were willing to remove to Maryland. There were those in New England in that day who longed for a more genial climate, but to settle under the authority of a papist was to them much like pitching a tent on the confines of perdition. [Sidenote: Puritans from Virginia.] [Sidenote: 1643.] Though Puritans could not be induced to move from New England, it happened that the Puritans living in Virginia were persecuted in this same year by that stanch cavalier and retrograde churchman, Sir William Berkeley, who wanted his parsons to read prayers, but did not like preaching ministers of any sort. He was new to his government, and had brought over with him plenty of hostility to the party that had affronted his royal master in England. Virginia Puritans had no choice but to suffer or depart, and Maryland was convenient. They began soon after this to seek a refuge under the protection of a proprietary who was a papist and who practiced toleration--two things almost equally hateful to the Puritans. Mr. James, a Puritan minister, tarried in Maryland a short time, as early as 1643; he was probably the only Protestant minister that set foot on Maryland soil before 1650. But the Puritan was never easy unless he was uneasy, and he was sure to be uneasy within when there was none to molest from without. To take an oath of fidelity to a papist was to him swearing fealty to antichrist; but so desirous was Baltimore of Puritan settlers that even the Maryland oath of fidelity was modified, and a saving clause was inserted for the ease of the Puritan conscience. The coming of Puritans who were in sympathy with the Parliament in England and who abhorred a tolerant papist, contributed something to the multifarious turmoils of the following years. XX. [Sidenote: Maryland turmoils.] [Sidenote: Note 24.]