PROPRIETARY GOVERNMENT IN MARYLAND 169

lands throughout the whole area could be granted only through the colonial government and the province which later became known as the "Old Dominion" was one and indivisible. But these claims were disregarded, and in October 1629 the Crown acceded to a petition from Sir Robert Heath, the Attorney-General, for the grant of rights to establish colonies at his own expense in portions of the lands originally assigned under the Virginia charter of 1609. The area granted to Heath lay to the south of the settlements along the James River, and he projected a colony there to be called "Carolana", but nothing was done to carry his project into effect, and ultimately he disposed of his rights to certain London merchants. It was not until after the Restoration that any effective settlement took place in the region and then it was under fresh proprietary grants.

Calvert, who was created Lord Baltimore in 1625, had petitioned for a grant of unoccupied lands in Virginia while he was still in Newfoundland and visited James Town about the time when Heath received his patent. He was naturally regarded with hostility by the Virginians, and they got rid of him by tendering the oath of supremacy which as a recent convert to Roman Catholicism he refused to take. For three years they succeeded in preventing any grant to him and meanwhile the governor and council furthered the settlement of William Claiborne, one of their number, in the region for which Baltimore had applied. It was not until after his death in April 1632 that his suit was successful and a patent was issued to his son Cecilius Calvert, second Lord Baltimore, for the colonisation of Maryland including the lands on the north of the Virginia settlements up to the 40th parallel, the southern boundary of the territory granted to the Council of New England. The claims of Virginia were formally rejected in 1633, but a long contest began between Claiborne and Baltimore's colonists that embittered the relations of Virginia and Maryland for many years.

The proprietary patents that began with Calvert's Avalon grant in 1623 and continued down to 1629, when the province of Maine was granted to Sir Ferdinando Gorges, were generally similar in their provisions, and they may be most appropriately studied in Baltimore's Maryland patent of 1632 since that alone remained in effect until the eighteenth century.1 The colonies established by chartered companies were in a sense proprietary, but they derived from the precedents of trading corporations and the relations between the grantees and their colonists were only industrial and political. The essential features of the true proprietary colonies were on the other hand feudal. The rights of the grantees were expressly stated in the patents to be modelled on those of the Bishops of Durham in their county palatine. All land was to be held directly or indirectly of the lord proprietor as the feudal superior and he was endowed with full seignorial rights.

1 See Osgood, vol. ш, chaps. i-iv.

The detailed arrangements that were developed in each proprietorship naturally varied according to circumstances, and in no instance were they an exact reproduction of their English original. Their type was fundamentally the same, but each province, owing to diverse social and political forces, filled in the outline in its own way, and the development of government in the Caribbee Islands produced a result differing at least as widely from Maryland as that colony differed from its neighbour, Virginia. The lord proprietor was a tenant-inchief and held his province of the King like a private feudal estate. It was subject to the King's sovereign control and all the inhabitants owed allegiance to him, but titles to land were derived, not from the Crown as elsewhere, but from the proprietor. He was empowered to establish courts and appoint all officers necessary for the execution of the laws, and was authorised to legislate for the province through an assembly of freemen, to issue ordinances of government under his seal, to execute justice and to grant pardon. In fact in almost every respect the lord proprietor was a petty sovereign within his province which was imperium in imperio; his estate was heritable like any other fief, and since his powers were derived, not from the province or its inhabitants but from the overlord, it was theoretically impossible for him to be called to account by the settlers within his domain. This system was infinitely removed from the democracy of the New England commonwealths, but in practice its institutions rapidly developed in a democratic direction. The pioneer conditions of the New World were unfavourable to the exercise of aristocratic or autocratic power, and the lords proprietors both in Maryland and the Caribbees were more anxious to develop the material prosperity of their colonies and to attract settlers than to insist on legal forms. Thus from the first, as elsewhere in the outer Empire, the power of the elected Assemblies increased while that of the proprietor diminished. But while the rule of a chartered company could be terminated by a single act, the rights of a proprietor could not be extinguished without expropriation or revolution.

In one respect Maryland was unique among the colonies, for it was the only region in the Empire governed by a Roman Catholic proprietor and in which Roman Catholics were in the full exercise of political power. Toleration in Rhode Island had come as a matter of principle from the theological teaching of Roger Williams, but in Maryland it was adopted by Cecilius Calvert for practical convenience to assist the material progress of his colony by including any suitable emigrant whatever his religious beliefs. In the early years there was a Roman Catholic majority in the Assembly, but gradually the Protestants came to preponderate without any alteration of religious policy. At one time certain Jesuit zealots attempted to press restrictive measures upon the proprietor, but he refused pointblank to allow religious aims to interfere in civil affairs, and it was

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not until the Interregnum that invading Puritan zealots from New England were able to destroy the practice of toleration for a time and to exclude all Catholics and Anglicans from political power. With the Restoration the Independent bigots were expelled and the colony regained its original comprehensiveness.

We now return to Barbados and the Leeward Islands to consider the steps taken to establish the proprietary governments under the Earl of Carlisle's patent of 7 April 1628 procured in the circumstances mentioned earlier.1 The new grant largely increased the lord proprietor's opportunities of personal profit both at the expense of his rival Sir William Courteen and of the planters. His purpose of excluding other competitors achieved, he took no further active part but at once handed over to his merchant associates complete authority to manage the business, of which they availed themselves to the full. Captain Charles Wolverston, who had been one of the early planters in the Bermudas, was commissioned as Governor of Barbados and sent out with some eighty colonists. Since he professed entirely friendly intentions, Courteen's settlers made no objection to his landing, but when a couple of months later he had established himself securely, he suddenly produced his commission as governor for the Earl of Carlisle, nominated a council and demanded submission to his authority. After some show of force the original settlers surrendered, and trusting in the promise of the Carlisle party that they "should continue in their former freedom without being a colony", they agreed to pay the heavy dues upon their produce that were assigned to the lord proprietor under his new patent. As soon as the news of these proceedings reached England, Montgomery and Courteen resolved to despatch a new force to protect their rights. The command was entrusted to Henry Powell, the brother of the first commander in Barbados, and at the end of February 1629 he landed there, seized Wolverston and some of his officers and re-established his nephew, John Powell the younger, as governor. He confiscated the tobacco and stores of Carlisle's colonists and sailed back to England, taking with him Wolverston and others as prisoners in irons.

While this was happening in the colony, the rival claimants in England carried their dispute to the King. Since it was concerned with the interpretation of conflicting grants issued under the great seal, it ought properly to have been tried in the courts of law, but Charles arbitrarily exerted his authority in the interest of his favourite, and merely referred the matter for an informal hearing before the Lord Keeper Coventry. His report3 pronounced generally in favour of Carlisle's claims, but it bore indications that the decision was given under pressure and against the Lord Keeper's better judgment. Royal orders were at once despatched to Carlisle's representatives in Barbados to secure obedience, and the managers of the syndicate 1 Vide supra, p. 145. 2 September 1628. $ 28 April 1629.

sent out Captain Henry Hawley to recapture the island. Though the Courteen party refused to allow him to land, Hawley treacherously persuaded Powell to come aboard his ship for a conference and then seized and confined him. With the governor in his hands Hawley had no difficulty in bringing the planters to obedience, and in August 1629 the whole island passed finally under Carlisle's rule and the expropriation of Sir William Courteen was complete. For many years he and his heirs attempted to secure redress in the English courts and from Parliament, but they could get no more satisfaction than did many of the merchants who had incautiously expended money on behalf of the spendthrift earl.1

Things had at first gone more smoothly in the Leeward Islands, where Thomas Warner held the governorship for the lord proprietor. By 1629 there were about 3000 settlers in St Christopher and large cargoes of tobacco were sent home. The English occupied the middle of the island with the French at either end, while one Anthony Hilton had begun planting in the neighbouring island of Nevis. Some of the planters held leases from the Earl of Carlisle for which they paid rents in tobacco, but the best plantations were owned by absentee landlords who were wealthy London merchants like Maurice Thompson and Sir Samuel Saltonstall, who also had interests in Virginia and New England. The estates were cultivated by white indentured servants sent out and maintained at the merchants' expense, and by far the greater part of the profits on the magazines exported for sale to the planters and the cargoes sent home went into the pockets of English capitalists. There was thus from the beginning a radical difference between the islands and the selfcontained northern colonies who had no profits on their labours to pay to outside capitalists.

In the latter part of 1629 Warner received the reward of his services to the Crown and the lord proprietor by royal appointment as Governor of St Christopher for life with full power over the colony subject to ratification by the Earl of Carlisle. Many of the provisions of the grant seem to be modelled on those commonly included in the commission of the governor of a fortress, and this appears reasonable enough when we realise that such an outpost as St Christopher was regarded by the Spaniards as a patent menace to their Caribbean preserves. If Spain had had the power, there is no doubt that she would have used it earlier to clear out the English intruders, but her resources were so exhausted that it was not until six years after the first settlement that Philip III was able to give orders for the attack. France and England were at war, but in the West Indies their interests as intruders in territory claimed by Spain were identical, and repeated treaties were made between the French and English governors in St Christopher to preserve peace between their settlers. The long1 See Williamson, Caribbee Islands, pp. 62-3 seqq.

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expected blow fell in September 1629 while Warner was away in England. The heavily armed outward bound Mexican fleet under Don Fadrique de Toledo first appeared off Nevis and compelled its surrender. The crops were destroyed and the settlement burned, and the attack was then directed against St Christopher. The English and French joined forces to defend themselves, but they were outnumbered and could make only an ineffectual resistance. Some of the settlers fled to the hills, but many hundreds of prisoners were taken and both the English and French settlements and plantations were devastated. However the Spanish victory was barren of lasting results, for as soon as Toledo's fleet had departed, the fugitives came out of their hidingplaces and at once began to restore their ravaged plantations. Circumstances had entirely changed since Menendes's vindication of Spain's colonial monopoly in 1569, and now English, French and Dutch settlers streamed into every unguarded island and could not be dammed out. It was as though trickles were pouring in through a score of leaks between the opened seams of some outworn vessel, and though the Spaniards were able to stop here one leak and there another, they could not close them all, and as soon as they had finished anywhere and passed on, the intruders streamed back as fast as ever. Any effective defence required strong and well-armed squadrons cruising almost continuously, and these Spain could neither provide nor maintain. The period of Spanish monopoly in the islands was clearly over, and the West Indies became the cockpit of a struggle between the maritime Powers that was to last until the time of Nelson. Warner returned from England in 1630 to find St Christopher devastated, and he at once entered upon his difficult task of restoring the colony to prosperity. From thence onward until his death in 1649 he remained undisturbed in his governorship. To him is undoubtedly due the chief credit for establishing the English possession of the Leeward Islands on a firm basis. The French had suffered much more than the English in the Spanish raid, and for some years their quarters in St Christopher were only sparsely occupied, but Warner apparently thought it advisable not to attempt to dispossess them, and the island remained divided between the settlers of the two nations with only minor troubles. For many years Warner persistently followed the policy of planting unoccupied islands with English settlers, and St Christopher and Nevis thus became in a very real sense a seed-bed for colonising enterprises in the West Indies.1 Antigua was firmly planted between 1634 and 1636, and Montserrat about the same time, but those colonies remained very weak for more than twenty years. In other islands, notably Santa Cruz and St Bartholomew, Englishmen were competing with French and Dutch settlers for possession, but no permanent plantations were effected.

1 See Williamson, op. cit. pp. 94-5, 150-3.