Between 1630 and 1645 the Catholic proprietor of Maryland, Cecil Calvert, Second Lord Baltimore, became embroiled in a long and bitter dispute with the Society of Jesus.Footnote ¹ Baltimore had given the Jesuits permission to organize a mission in Maryland, but he and they disagreed over the terms on which the Jesuits held land, as well as their obligations to the secular government. Cecil Calvert's clash with the Society of Jesus has been discussed in the context of religious liberty in America, the history of the Society of Jesus itself, and lay-clerical relations among English Catholics.Footnote ² What these analyses have missed are the ties between the increasingly autocratic tendencies of Charles I during the 1630s and Calvert's interpretation of his charter vis-à-vis the Jesuits. This controversy, in other words, allows us to explore two important issues. The first is how English authority moved to the New World. The second is the way in which this process of exporting authority revealed the strains and tensions within the English political system itself. As a result, this particular dispute offers new insight into some of the most heavily contested issues of early Stuart politics. The article will argue that Baltimore's dispute with the Society of Jesus reveals the extent to which an absolutist view of English law and government was part of Charles I's political program during the 1630s. More broadly, we will use the Baltimore-Jesuit dispute to explore the complex relationship between confessional identity and political allegiance in early Stuart England.

Baltimore's Catholic religion has led historians of early Maryland to focus on how Baltimore's understanding of his charter contributed to the history of religious toleration, rather than the history of the law and politics of Caroline England. Catholics in early modern England labored under serious disabilities. They could not hold office, they were fined for absenting themselves from the state church, and Catholic worship was, at least in theory, forbidden by law.Footnote ³ In contrast, the government in Maryland did not establish a church, nor did it restrict worship or office holding for any variety of Trinitarian Christian. Historians of early Maryland have often argued that the colony's politically moderate Catholic leaders thus wanted to remove Maryland from a fairly nasty English confessional fray.Footnote ⁴ It is rather the opposite. To take such a position in the 1630s was in effect to place oneself at the center of one of the most contentious debates in early Stuart politics.

Charles I was known to be friendly to Catholics. He was not a Catholic, but his spiritual style did not preclude the possibility of salvation through the Roman church. Politically, the king believed, by the early 1630s, that his authority was threatened by Puritan elements in the House of Commons who were courting “popularity” in order to gain power for themselves.Footnote ⁵ These men, not all of whom were Protestant nonconformists, often used arguments about the nature and antiquity of the English common law and the “ancient constitution” to curb what they saw as unlawful excesses of monarchical power. Charles believed that his prerogative preceded and limited the common law—not, as his political opponents would have it, the other way around.Footnote ⁶ To criticize his power was to undermine monarchical authority and was ipso facto evidence of disloyalty. Increasingly obsessed with loyalty and disloyalty as the years progressed, Charles I appeared willing to tolerate Catholics, at least when they demonstrated their worthiness as subjects.Footnote ⁷ He noted several years later that some of his Catholic subjects were more loyal to him than certain sorts of Protestants.Footnote ⁸ The king's attitude offered Catholics like Cecil Calvert the opportunity to demonstrate their loyalty and worth as subjects and, through such a demonstration, to argue for a reversal of the restrictions on Catholics. Baltimore's treatment of the Jesuits in Maryland was a demonstration that he was the right sort of Catholic and that he respected Charles's view of the law. Baltimore's offer of religious toleration in Maryland was part of this broader effort to argue for the importance of loyalty over religious identity, but the Jesuit controversy provides the most interesting example of it.

At bottom, the Baltimore-Jesuit controversy was a controversy over order and authority. Baltimore thought that all authority in Maryland reached the colony through him and his charter, meaning that the Jesuits, like other colonists, had no rights and privileges other than what he was pleased to allow and could not make claims based on laws or legal systems he had not explicitly acknowledged or imposed. They had emigrated to Maryland under the same conditions as lay colonists, and thus they were subject to the same rules. The Jesuits, in contrast, believed that church law was universal and operated automatically in Maryland and thus that Baltimore, by refusing to recognize the privileges and exemptions this provided them, was acting unjustly. In making his claim, Baltimore was implicitly arguing that the king was the ultimate source of law and authority in English dominions.Footnote ⁹ The Maryland charter, granted through the royal prerogative, was the only legitimate source of law in Maryland. Those who claimed noncharter (and, implicitly, nonroyal) sources for legal claims were seditious and dangerous. In other words, Jesuits, like Puritans, threatened order, and Cecil Calvert and Charles I took the same side of the argument.

Thus, an unpacking of the Baltimore-Jesuit controversy offers a significant contribution to the debate on early Stuart absolutism.Footnote ¹⁰ What emerged in Maryland was a version of royal authority in which the prerogative power of the monarch was the basic source for all legal claims within the polity. The Jesuits made claims in Maryland that paralleled claims made in Parliament in the 1620s about the presence of other traditions that might shape or limit the power of the crown; Baltimore emphatically rejected such claims and looked for royal favor in doing so. The proprietor of Maryland thus promoted an absolutist theory of law in England, which he assumed his monarch shared. Moreover, what the Maryland material shows is that his particular position about the role of Catholics in English political life was closely tied to absolutist theories of English law. Ironically, to modern eyes, high views of the royal prerogative went hand in hand with an argument, although a limited one, for religious liberty.

These ideas emerge so clearly in the case of Baltimore and the Jesuits, moreover, precisely because the dispute did not occur in England. The colonial world was a new space, in terms of law and administration, where the rules were still being worked out. Disagreement and controversy naturally followed, and the result was that those involved in American colonization had to think through, and argue over, some of the deepest and most interesting political problems of Stuart England.

More broadly, then, this study offers additional evidence for the need to write the history of the early modern English state and the early colonial world as a single story.Footnote ¹¹ Work on the English Atlantic thus far has tended to focus on the development of empire and on the Atlantic world of administration, commerce, and cultural exchange. It has as yet made little impact upon the still fairly insular historiography of early Stuart politics. Here, in a small and focused study, I will attempt an “Atlantic” intervention in both the historiography of early Maryland and that of early Stuart England.

A full understanding of events in Maryland begins with the internal politics of the English Catholic community in the 1620s and 1630s, specifically, the Approbation Controversy. This was a dispute between regular clergy, including the Jesuits, and the recently appointed secular head of English Catholics, Richard Smith, the Bishop of Chalcedon, and the Calverts played a key role in it. Richard Smith was appointed as Bishop of Chalcedon in 1624, after the office's first incumbent died after only a year. The bishopric had been created in 1623 after decades of agitation on the part of the secular clergy. The regulars, however, had grown accustomed to the absence of episcopal supervision. But Bishop Smith demanded that all priests, regular and secular, within his diocese were required to receive his approval, or approbation, before hearing confessions. This was a mild demand and in accordance with church law, but it touched on some fairly serious issues, particularly the role the secular hierarchy would play in a country whose government for all intents and purposes banned the exercise of Catholic episcopal jurisdiction. The various orders had developed their own internal structures of administration and patronage, which would have been severely disrupted by the reimposition of episcopal control. Thus, Smith's request set off the firestorm of the Approbation Controversy, which soon eclipsed the original issue of episcopal approval of confessions.

The controversy hinged upon whether England would remain essentially a missionary field, in which case the regulars would retain their independence and flexibility, or whether the traditional organization of parishes and bishoprics with the attached powers, perquisites, and responsibilities of the priests and bishops would be reimposed.Footnote ¹² Significantly, although allegiances were often far from clear or permanent, some prominent Catholic lay gentry emerged as partisans of the regulars, opposed themselves to the reinstituting of the episcopacy.Footnote ¹³

Lay support for the regulars was partly the result of Smith's expansive claims. Smith was not always clear or consistent as to his powers, but his conception of what might be included in the spiritual jurisdiction he claimed over laypeople frightened many.Footnote ¹⁴ A list of concerns drawn up around 1627 indicates that many lay Catholics were afraid of being punished by the church for refusing to submit to the ecclesiastical courts that Smith seemed to want to erect. They feared that they would have to pay to support the bishop and that they would not be able to remove household priests they found objectionable. They envisioned frightening episcopal visitations of private houses in which the bishop's “officers … [would] give notice to the Bishop of such defects as they shall observe in the persons of the family, in the chapel, altar, etc.”Footnote ¹⁵ The interests of prominent lay Catholics and regular clergy, in other words, lay on the same side of the issue.

Smith, however, argued that he was not claiming anything to which bishops were not usually entitled.Footnote ¹⁶ England was no longer a Catholic country, however, and it was not clear what a bishop assigned there was entitled to. The country was neither a settled Catholic state nor an ecclesiastical tabula rasa, like the mission fields of America or Asia. As a result, the dispute became increasingly vicious, with accusations of malice, immorality, and conspiracy coming from all sides.Footnote ¹⁷

Historians of the Calvert-Jesuit dispute in Maryland typically note the Calverts’ involvement in this controversy but have not offered any substantive connection between the political alignments of the 1620s and the controversy of the 1630s and 1640s.Footnote ¹⁸ Here, however, the Approbation Controversy is indeed closely tied to the Baltimore-Jesuit controversy of the 1630s and 1640s, revealing the Calvert family's long-standing connection to the Jesuits and the origins of the arguments that Cecil Calvert would later use against them. Most important, we also see Cecil's father, George Calvert, engaging in the same type of political positioning, regarding loyalty and the political status of Catholics, that Cecil would attempt in the 1630s.

As noted, George Calvert, along with several other prominent lay Catholics, entered this long and bitter argument on the side of the Jesuits.Footnote ¹⁹ His partisanship was well known. One writer termed him one of the “chief opposers of episcopal authority.”Footnote ²⁰ Another described him as “the Jesuits’ chief instrument in this business.”Footnote ²¹ Moreover, Calvert was concerned to let the political world know of his opposition to Smith's authority. A French tract, General desadveu des Catholiques lais d’Angleterre, had claimed that the French ambassador reported that many English lay Catholics, including Baltimore, supported the Bishop of Chalcedon's jurisdictional claims. In a letter, Baltimore recounts that he protested to the ambassador and tried to discover from him precisely whom he had spoken to and what, if anything, he had reported about lay opinion on the controversy.Footnote ²²

This controversy was more than an internal Catholic dispute over ecclesiastical jurisdiction. It was also part of a larger argument about whether Catholics were or could be loyal subjects of the crown. One reason that some lay Catholics supported the Jesuits and the other regulars was the fear that if they consented to the erection of Catholic episcopal jurisdiction in England, they could be found guilty of praemunire or treason. The other side of this claim was that if they pointedly opposed the bishop and his jurisdictional claims, as George Calvert did, they could avoid unpleasant taxes, legal requirements, and visitations and make a claim for their own loyalty as English subjects and their respect for the integrity of the English state.

There was also, of course, a loyalty case to be made on Smith's side. As Michael Questier has shown, a significant portion of the conflict surrounding Smith's powers in the 1620s involved making cases for loyalty. The bishop and his partisans noted the parallels between their claims to authority over the regulars and the Laudians’ arguments about authority within the Church of England. They then cast the Jesuits as Puritans, who according to the Laudians were a disorderly sect that desired power for itself instead of working to support the legitimate authority of the institution as a whole. Charles I disliked Puritans, and therefore, they claimed, he should support Smith and accept the bishop's partisans as loyal subjects.Footnote ²³

The ultimate goal for both sides of the dispute was tolerance for Catholics and the revocation of the legal disabilities under which they lived. As the 1620s and 1630s progressed, such a situation seemed nearer at hand than it had for decades. This prospect explains George Calvert's willingness to play politics with the Approbation Controversy in the 1620s, and this prospect was also, crucially, why his son Cecil did the same with the Jesuits and the Maryland Charter in the 1630s. Charles I's willingness to patronize Catholics, including his grant of a colonial charter to the Calverts, offered Cecil an opportunity to display his loyalty and demonstrate his and other Catholics’ worthiness as subjects and his adoption of his monarch's political principles. The Society of Jesus in Maryland, unfortunately, got caught in the middle of the political positioning.

The Jesuits admitted that the liberties and privileges of the church had been compromised by necessity in England, but they believed that these privileges were nevertheless universal, and Catholics were bound to respect them. They assumed that because the constraints on Catholicism in England had not been recreated in Maryland, and because Baltimore was Catholic, Maryland would be a “Catholic country,” and its government, unlike the government in England, would recognize the rights of the Church of Rome. The Jesuits, in other words, inadvertently placed themselves on the wrong side of the loyalty argument. They were thinking of the colony as a mission field, not as an extension of the royal power of the English state. Baltimore, however, in order to maintain his position as loyal subject and bulwark of royal authority (not to mention protect his own privileges and powers), asserted that the king's charter was the only source of law and jurisdiction in Maryland, and the charter did not give any particular privileges to the Jesuits. Baltimore and the Jesuits, in other words, had two very different views of what government ought to look like when conducted by Catholics, probably because they had different audiences in mind. Baltimore focused on the relationship between himself and Charles I. The Jesuits were more concerned with universal liberties of the church and wanted to ensure that, unlike in England (or even some parts of Europe), Catholics did not ignore basic points of doctrine for political reasons. For the Jesuits the privileges of the church trumped whatever privileges Charles I might have given to Baltimore; for them, Baltimore's requirements were not political adiaphora, or things indifferent.Footnote ²⁴

It was at Baltimore's request that two Jesuit priests accompanied the first expedition to the Chesapeake in 1633.Footnote ²⁵ At this time there were no signs of conflict between the Jesuits and the proprietor. The Jesuit general consulted with the English provincial as to whether a mission in this area might offend a Catholic power (most likely Spain) with claims in the region, but neither seems to have anticipated any conflict with the colony's magistrates.Footnote ²⁶ The general was far more concerned about upsetting delicate relations with European princes.Footnote ²⁷ By all accounts, the two priests, Andrew White and John Altham, joined the expedition on the understanding that they did so with the same expectations and under the same rules as the other colonists.

Some outside the Society expressed reservations about the Jesuit presence in Maryland and the possible political consequences. Papal representative Gregorio Panzani indicated to Cardinal Barberini of the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith (Congregatio de Propaganda Fide) that Baltimore had sent Jesuits to Maryland and intended to send only Jesuits in the future. Panzani feared that the Jesuits would get so comfortable in the colony that they might pose a political threat.Footnote ²⁸ His concern, though, was not any conflict between Baltimore and the Jesuits but between the Jesuits and the English state.Footnote ²⁹ By the 1630s, it was a common charge, even in Catholic Europe, that Jesuits undermined the power of princes. Ironically, Panzani was probably concerned that the Jesuits in Baltimore's colony would threaten the apparent rapprochement between Charles I and the Roman church.

By 1636 one more Jesuit priest had joined White and Altham. The following year marked the arrival of Thomas Copley as mission superior.Footnote ³⁰ During Copley's tenure as superior, the first signs emerged of a potentially serious conflict over rights and privileges between the Society of Jesus and Lord Baltimore. Under the Conditions of Plantation, which awarded land grants proportional to the number of colonists a given planter transported with him, Copley applied for and the Jesuits were granted St. Inigo's manor, a large tract of land near St. Mary's City. Not long afterward, they received from the Patuxent Indians an area called Mattapany, located on the Patuxent river near St. Mary’s.Footnote ³¹ The purchase of this land directly from the Indians rather than through Baltimore's government would cause the Jesuits difficulties several years later. A letter from 1642 revealed what Copley and the others were probably thinking in 1637: they believed that “colony” meant the areas of actual settlement, while Baltimore equated the colony of Maryland with everything indicated within the geographical boundaries of the patent, settled or not. Furthermore, Jesuits recognized the natural property rights of the Indians, while Baltimore consistently refused to do so.Footnote ³²

The Jesuits acquired St. Inigo's under the same terms as other colonists, so they were placed in the category of ordinary planters rather than ecclesiastical persons. Accordingly, when the colony's assembly met in January 1637/8, they were expected to attend with the other planters. When they did not appear the first day, a writ directed specifically to “Mr. Thomas Copley, esq., Mr. Andrew White, gent. [and] Mr. John Altham, gent.” was sent. One Robert Clerke appeared on their behalf and explained that they could not appear because of sickness. The following day, Copley, White, and Altham were summoned again. Again, Clerke answered for them, this time reporting that “they desired to be excused from giving voices in this assembly.”Footnote ³³ Neither summons had given any indication of the Jesuits’ clerical status.

Copley, however, writing to Baltimore after the assembly had been dissolved in March, made no mention of the request for exclusion. Instead, he implied that he, White, and Altham had attempted to send proxies and had been rebuffed. “Our proxies would not be admitted in that manner, as we could send them,” he explained, “and therefore as we were excluded thence, so we did not intermeddle with them there.”Footnote ³⁴ It should be noted that sending proxies was common in early Maryland assemblies. Technically, all the freemen were required to attend, and those who could not because of distance, ill health, or other reasons usually sent someone in their stead. The system for who was sent, and how many, was not systematic or tightly regulated.Footnote ³⁵ If the Jesuits, who had been summoned like other planters, had truly sent proxies, there would probably have been little difficulty in getting the proxies admitted.

Significantly, the 1637/8 assembly addressed in slightly different form the problem that would within just a few years give rise to controversy between Baltimore and the Jesuits: the question of how law was to be made in Maryland and from what sources it might derive. Lord Baltimore had sent a list of the laws for the province to which he wished the assembly to consent, but when the list was put to a vote near the end of January, only Governor Leonard Calvert (the proprietor's brother) and provincial Secretary of State John Lewgar, who between them had fourteen votes, voted to affirm it. This meant, for the present, that the colony had no laws. Some in the assembly suggested that they all “might do well to agree upon some laws till we could hear from England again,” but Calvert refused, “denying [that the lower house had] any such power” to enact legislation of their own proposing. Nevertheless, the assembly decided to form committees to propose a new list of laws for Baltimore's perusal, which, if he approved, they could then adopt. By the end of the session in late March, the assembly had drawn up a list of laws, which both they and the governor signed and sent on to Baltimore. There is no description of the acts’ contents in the assembly's records, merely a list of the laws.Footnote ³⁶ For the rest we have to rely on accounts of men who either were in the assembly, such as Calvert or Lewgar, or read the laws afterward, as Copley did. Leonard Calvert wrote to his brother about the assembly about a month after it had dissolved but said only that he had been unable to convince the assembly to pass “the body of laws you sent over … there was [sic] so many things unsuitable to the people's good and no way conducing to your profit.” Calvert did not specify the assembly's objections, noting only that Lewgar would write to Baltimore about it.Footnote ³⁷ In the end, Baltimore did not approve the laws the 1637/8 assembly proposed, since he did not believe that the assembly had the right to initiate legislation. Cecil Calvert would eventually give ground on this position and allow the lower house of the assembly to draw up laws for the governor's and his approval, but the extent of the assembly's legislative power and the ultimate source of law in Maryland would remain contentious issues for much of the century. The Jesuits were not the only people to dispute with the proprietor over where Maryland law came from and what the rules were for making and interpreting it.

Although he had not attended the assembly, Copley had heard that the laws Baltimore had sent for the assembly's approval would not be approved; he noted that even Leonard Calvert and John Lewgar (who had voted for their adoption in the assembly) thought that they were not appropriate for the colony. Copley had not actually read these laws, seeing the “many inconveniences that I might run into by intermeddling,” but he had at least skimmed the laws the assembly had sent back to Baltimore for his approval.Footnote ³⁸ Following this, he wrote a long letter to Baltimore detailing his position on the recent round of legislation.

The thrust of Copley's letter was that the Catholic Church, “which should have been regarded in the first place … was not thought of, as it seemeth by the law.” First, there had not been “any care at all taken, to promote the conversion of the Indians.” More ominously, in Copley's view, the lawmakers had also failed “to provide or to show any favor to ecclesiastical persons, or to preserve for the church the immunity and privileges which she enjoyeth everywhere else. But rather Mr. Lewgar seemeth to defend opinions here, that she hath no privileges iure divino … that privilege[s] are not due to the church till the commonwealth in which the church is grant them.”Footnote ³⁹

Copley's assertion that the Catholic Church had privileges iure divino was not surprising in and of itself. It is striking, however, that Copley felt himself entitled to complain to Baltimore, at length, that the church was being denied its traditional liberties and exemptions. Presumably Copley knew that there was no church established in Maryland at that point. Nor is there any clear indication in this letter that Baltimore had privately promised the Jesuits something more favorable to Catholic ecclesiastical law and was now going back on the bargain. Copley's assumption genuinely seems to have been that “while the government is Catholic,” by which he meant composed of Catholics, it followed without question that the church would get its traditional perquisites, at least as far as the stability and resources of the new colony allowed.Footnote ⁴⁰

Specifically, Copley objected to the idea that the Jesuits were subject to the same obligations as other landholders. These included contributing men and money for the militia and planting the required two acres of corn and setting aside one hundred acres of each manor as glebe land. Copley's objection to a glebe was that it would restrict the Jesuits’ freedom of action by forcing them to undertake, or hire others to undertake, duties more fitting for parish priests than for missionaries. It would, in a certain sense, impose on them in Maryland some of the same restrictions the Jesuits had balked at accepting from Smith back in England. Copley ranged his second area of objections against those laws that seemed to him to contradict the laws and freedoms of the church. Indian converts were not allowed to give the Jesuits land, women could not profess religion without giving up any land they owned or were to inherit, and the system of payment for debts departed from church law, which placed the church farther up on the list of claimants to a debtor's estate than did Maryland law. Furthermore, a law had been put into place in Maryland that looked much like the English statutes that forbade the exercise of papal jurisdiction within the realm. As Copley understood it, this Maryland law prohibited “exercising jurisdiction and authority without lawful power and commission derived from the lord proprietary. Hereby even by Catholics a law is provided to hang any Catholic bishop that should come hither and also every priest, if the exercise of his functions be interpreted jurisdiction or authority.”Footnote ⁴¹ Finally, Copley objected to a “new law” that appeared to threaten a kind of land lottery, in which all planters would give up their land, “cast lots” to determine an order of assignment of new grants, and then choose new grants in order by lottery. Copley's objection to this law was not only that it was unfair but that it was an infringement of clerical rights because it allowed laymen to arbitrarily alter or confiscate ecclesiastical property.Footnote ⁴²

Copley requested tax exemption for the Jesuits themselves, their household servants, “and half at least of our planting servants.” The rest of the Jesuits’ servants and tenants would be nominally under the authority of the secular government, but as much as possible they would observe the laws, duties, and customs appropriate to tenants of a church establishment in a Catholic country. In addition, Copley was willing to “suffer our cause to be heard and tried by the public magistrates” but only with the understanding that “they do it but as arbitrators and defenders of the church because ecclesiastical jurisdiction is not yet here settled.” The Jesuits were to be allowed to go among the Indians when they chose, without having to ask permission from the civil government. Finally, it was to be understood that “though we relinquish the use of many ecclesiastical privileges when we judge it convenient for satisfaction of the state at home, yet that it be left to our discretion to determine when this is requisite.” Copley was aware that full ecclesiastical privileges would have caused difficulties with the home government, but he did not give up the right to them in the abstract and argued that it was for the clerics, not Baltimore, the council, or the assembly, to determine when they should be allowed. If Baltimore did not comply, he might be excommunicated, per the papal bull In coena domini. This bull reserved to the pope the absolution for certain sins, including unlawful confiscation of church goods and moving to secular courts cases rightfully decided under the jurisdiction of church courts. Copley's requirements irked the proprietor, who noted on the letter that these were “demands for very extravagant privileges.”Footnote ⁴³

The Society of Jesus and the Catholic Church more generally did not always speak with one voice, but Copley's letter touches on all the important points of conflict between the Jesuits and Maryland's proprietor. Underlying all of them was the assumption made by the Jesuits that the Catholic faith of the proprietor and most of the governing council implied that the ecclesiastical liberties the church enjoyed in Catholic countries were due to clerics in Maryland, and if circumstances did not permit their full exercise now, they would eventually be given. Copley wanted to make the point that good Catholics could not simply pick and choose, based on political expedience, what points of church law and doctrine to obey. This sort of failure of uniformity could have no good end.

Some laymen shared this assumption. Thomas Cornwaleys, a member of the governor's council, voiced discomfort about the treatment of the churchmen, in a letter to Baltimore written not long after Copley’s. Cornwaleys expressed hope for Baltimore's approval of the laws the assembly had sent for his signature but at the same time suggested that Baltimore not give his final consent to any law that had not been “thoroughly scanned and resolved by wise, learned and religious divines to be no ways prejudicial to the immunities and privileges of that church, which is the only true guide to all eternal happiness.”Footnote ⁴⁴ Others shared Cornwaleys’ perspective. By the early 1640s Baltimore had had a “bitter falling out” with his sister and brother-in-law when they pressured him to compromise with the Jesuits.Footnote ⁴⁵

The question about the Jesuits’ ecclesiastical privileges had not been settled by the next meeting of the assembly in February and March 1638/9. By then, Father Ferdinand Poulton had arrived to replace Copley as mission superior. Copley remained in the colony, however, and resumed duties as mission superior in 1641 when Poulton was accidentally shot.Footnote ⁴⁶ Not long before the meeting of the assembly, Lewgar had written to Baltimore that although he had informed Poulton of Baltimore's demands, Poulton had “made strange at most of them, as if he had received no instructions touching any of the particulars.” Poulton then asked for a summary of the proprietor's requirements, so “that they might conform themselves to it in all points so far as in conscience they might.” Poulton also told Lewgard that he doubted anyone within the Society of Jesus “should give that resolution, that a Catholic magistrate may in discretion proceed here, as well-affected magistrates in the like cases do in England.”Footnote ⁴⁷ Poulton was clearly doing his best not to refuse Baltimore's requests outright, but his stated wish to conform to the proprietor's demands “in all points so far as in conscience they might,” while it began well from Baltimore's point of view, left a great deal of room for maneuver. Like Copley, Poulton considered certain points beyond the realm of compromise. Lewgar, it seems, was somewhat at a loss as to what to do, with regard to the Jesuits. In this same letter to Baltimore, he mentioned a list of hypothetical cases he had sent over before and expressed a desire to have some resolution on them, “though without anyone's hand to it, because it would much have directed me in diverse occurrences and difficulties which we meet with here.”Footnote ⁴⁸

Lewgar's problem was that it was not clear how Catholic a country Maryland was. In Spain's colonies, for example, the entire Catholic apparatus, from ecclesiastical exemptions to canon law, had been imported whole from Europe. What Lewgar wanted to know was whether this sort of wholesale importation happened automatically or only with the permission of the civil government. Were laymen “bound to accept or admit all of the canon law” and the rules of the Council of Trent, and did that law bind “in this country afore it be accepted by some [local] law or custom”? Were clerical exemptions “due to them [clerics] of divine right … [or did] they hold them of the free and voluntary gift … of pious princes and states, so that in a country newly erected or becoming Christian, a grant or charter from the prince thereof of such liberties and exemptions is necessary before the clergy of such a country can claim them as their right and due in point of conscience”?Footnote ⁴⁹ The Jesuits having made property claims on the basis of being planters like other planters further complicated the issue. Because they had been summoned to the assembly, but had chosen not to go, it was not clear whether they had given up their rights as planters to preserve their liberties as churchmen or whether their holding of the land under the Conditions of Plantation obligated them, if they wanted any rights at all, to get them the same way as the other freemen and planters—via participation in the assembly. It should be noted, moreover, that Lewgar's concerns about church law were pertinent not only in Maryland but in much of Catholic Europe. France, for example, saw a resurgence of gallicanism in the seventeenth century; Baltimore's opinions would not have been out of place in many seventeenth-century French circles. There are also striking parallels between Baltimore's Jesuit controversy and the circumstances that led to the Venetian Interdict of 1606–7.Footnote ⁵⁰ Significantly, then, the religion of Maryland's governing circle led them into not only an English debate about loyalty and confessional identity but also a European debate over the proper balance of papal and princely authority in a polity with a Catholic head. What Lewgar seems to have been asking, in other words, was not only how Catholic was Maryland but how Catholic was any Catholic country, and what did that term “Catholic” mean? Copley, as noted earlier, was sure of the answer to this question. Lewgar was not.

Lewgar was also concerned about issues that traditionally had fallen to the jurisdiction of the ecclesiastical courts, such as wills and marriages. In Maryland, as in England, the civil government had assumed power over these things, and in neither case was this in strict accordance with canon law. Lewgar wanted to know, specifically, “whether the cognizance of causes testamentary belong to the spiritual court out of the nature of the causes themselves, and of the church's proper right … or whether” rules “did of their voluntary election sever their causes from their crown, and commit them to the spiritual ordinaries.” Was the law of the church, in other words, or the power of the secular magistrate, the more fundamental? Was church law automatically in operation in Maryland, or was it up to the proprietor to indicate that it might, or might not, be in effect? Similarly, Lewgar wished to know whether Catholic magistrates could prove wills if empowered solely by the civil government or whether it was necessary to get papal permission for this “or else incur the censure of Bulla Coena.” Copley had suggested in his letter that if Baltimore did not mend his ways he would incur the penalty of the papal bull In coena domini. Lewgar, too, was concerned that he and others might be excommunicated under this bull if they chose the wrong course.Footnote ⁵¹

Finally, Lewgar wanted to know how Catholic magistrates and assembly members in Maryland ought to regard the civil government. If the importation of Catholic law was not automatic and other rules about property, debts, wills, and so on could be voted in by the assembly or imposed by the proprietor, and Catholic authorities nevertheless deplored the laws as illegitimate, what position was a good Catholic to take? Was it possible to participate in taxation of ecclesiastical persons, or trial of them under secular law, without incurring excommunication? Again, the question turned on what kind of law and authority could be assumed to be in place in Maryland—was it a blank slate handed to the proprietor, who could then choose which systems might operate, or did some systems operate whether Baltimore liked it or not?Footnote ⁵²

No doubt Lewgar's questions were not entirely ingenuous. Lewgar would have known, or was educated enough at least to guess, what answers the church would give to most of them. He knew Baltimore, too, well enough not to be surprised at the proprietor's erastianism. Baltimore was simply taking the same position his father and others had taken in the 1620s when it had seemed that Bishop Smith, rather than the Society of Jesus, was the party making demands both inconvenient and, possibly, treasonous. But Lewgar's sense of the responses his “cases” would elicit did not mean that the issues his questions articulated were unimportant or that the problems they indicated were not real. He did, after all, want something in writing to which he could point if it were necessary to justify one of his actions. Moreover, even if Lewgar regarded the issue of Baltimore's power over the Jesuits as settled and was merely requesting an authorization to wave, others were not. Cornwaleys's letter, mentioned earlier, betrays real concern about this issue. Baltimore's sister and brother-in-law evidenced similar misgivings.Footnote ⁵³ Neither Baltimore's line nor the Jesuits’ struck anyone else as self-evident.

The problem of integrating the proprietor's authority and the priests’ claims of exemption and privilege remained in the assembly of 1638/9. This assembly drew up an ambiguously worded bill that asserted, “holy church [sic] within this province shall have all her rights liberties and immunities safe whole and inviolable in all things … till the end of the next general assembly and then with the consent of the Lord Proprietary to be perpetual.”Footnote ⁵⁴ The bill gestured toward protecting the liberties of the church but did not define what those might be or even which church. Moreover, such an act depended on Baltimore's consent, which he was not likely to give if he thought the bill prejudiced his own rights as proprietor. In addition, the assembly considered laws that forbade “exercising within the province any jurisdiction or authority which ought to be derived from the Lord Proprietary without lawful power or commission from or under him” and made it illegal to purchase land directly from the Indians without proper warrant from the proprietor. Finally, those colonists who could claim land under the Conditions of Plantation, which would include the Jesuits, had to settle their claims within three years, or their land would revert to the proprietor.Footnote ⁵⁵

During this session, the assembly also considered the rights of the colony's freemen. The proposed law drawn up in the course of this discussion paralleled, in effect, the bill that would have guaranteed the liberties of “holy church.” The settlers of Maryland, except for slaves, were to have all the liberties of “any natural born subject of England … saving in such cases as the same are or may be altered or changed by the laws and ordinances of this province” and could not be imprisoned or dispossessed except by due process of the laws of the province “saving to the Lord Proprietary … all his rights and prerogatives.” A section of one of the few acts passed by the assembly, that for “ordaining certain laws for the government of this province,” included the statement that “the inhabitants of this province shall have all their rights and liberties according to the Great Charter of England.”Footnote ⁵⁶ Both the bill and the act indicated that the freemen, like the Jesuits, enjoyed their English liberties because the proprietor, via his brother and Deputy Governor Leonard Calvert, agreed to allow them. The liberties provided by Magna Carta were granted to Maryland colonists via legislative act, and as Baltimore had indicated by letter to his brother the previous summer, acts of the legislature could be revoked at the lord proprietor's pleasure.Footnote ⁵⁷ Unlike in England, the colonists in Maryland could not claim a common-law tradition that stretched back to time immemorial and that could be used to limit the powers of the head of government. They had, according to the 1638/9 bill that outlined their liberties, the same rights as English people would have had if they had remained in England but with a crucial difference. In Maryland, the settlers would have those rights only if Baltimore assented to the law that granted them. Baltimore could give them the privileges they sought, as he might similarly allow the claims of the Jesuits, but only if he chose to. If he did not so choose, they had no remedy.

When news of the Maryland legislature's 1638/9 session reached Europe several months later, the Jesuits’ concerns about their privileges in the colony were not allayed. The unpassed bills touching on legal questions and issues of land tenure held out little promise. The act passed “for ordaining certain laws for the government of this province” that had given the colonists their Magna Carta rights also indicated that “holy churches within this province shall have all her rights and liberties,” but the text of the act also asserted that “the lord proprietary shall have all his rights and prerogatives,” which was more a restatement of the problem than a solution to it.Footnote ⁵⁸ The general of the Society of Jesus, Muzio Vitelleschi, assured Copley that he was very much affected by his difficulties and that it was to be hoped that Baltimore, who wished to call himself a Catholic, would not make judgments about things ecclesiastical without the pope's consent. To the English provincial, Edward Knott, Vitelleschi expressed concern for the missionaries’ welfare and suggested that the papal representative George Conn, who had replaced Panzani in 1636, might refer the matter to the pope.Footnote ⁵⁹

A new element was added to the controversy in July 1641, when papal representative Carlo Rossetti forwarded to the Congregatio de Propaganda Fide a petition requesting that secular priests be given the appropriate faculties and sent to “l’isola di Mariland.”Footnote ⁶⁰ It is not clear where this request originated. Contrary to the wording of the petition, the number of lay Catholics in Maryland was not large and not growing, and they were not, as far as sources from the colony itself indicate, clamoring for more clerical support. Whatever the petition's origin, the Congregatio de Propaganda Fide considered it, and ordered that more information about Maryland, as well as names of English priests suitable for the mission, be requested from Rossetti, who duly complied with a list of such priests.Footnote ⁶¹

However, by early 1642 the priests had still not left for Maryland.Footnote ⁶² In July, an English priest named George Gage fired off a letter to the Bishop of Chalcedon in which he complained that Rossetti was hindering their departure. Gage blamed the Jesuits, “who use all means possible not only to oppose the clergy in this business, but even to suppress and keep under the temporal lord of that province, that they may there have the more absolute rule and power.”Footnote ⁶³ Gage here was clearly playing on Smith's dislike of the Jesuits, and the equation of Jesuits with a threat to civil authority would have been a familiar one. Baltimore by this stage probably found such rhetoric congenial and would have welcomed any seculars who promised to be as obedient to proprietary orders as Gage implied.Footnote ⁶⁴ Certainly, in the letter he wrote to his brother in late November 1642, Cecil Calvert told Leonard to make sure that Mr. Gilmett, a secular priest mentioned in Gage's letter, and Gilmett's companion Mr. William Territt were well taken care of.Footnote ⁶⁵

The Jesuits were not entirely inflexible, but there were some points on which the Jesuits and the church at large were not willing to compromise, such as giving back land that had already passed, through whatever channels, into church ownership. In a letter to Baltimore written in September 1641, the English provincial stressed the Indians’ ownership of their own land and their right to alienate it when and to whom they chose and suggested to the proprietor that his title and dominion to his lands might be more secure, not less, if he honored the privileges of the church.Footnote ⁶⁶ In November, Baltimore drew up new conditions of plantation that made the Jesuits’ situation even more uncomfortable. These conditions specifically forbade any group or corporation from holding lands in any form or receiving the profits from them without a special license from the proprietor. The new conditions also forbade anyone from giving, donating, or bequeathing any lands to any such group for any use prohibited by the English statutes of mortmain, without a prior license from the proprietor. Mortmain referred literally to the “dead hand” of the church. When land passed into church ownership, it passed out of the jurisdiction of the state and could not be taxed in the same way that laypeople's estates could. The statutes of mortmain were medieval laws that required the king's consent for estates to pass to the church; Baltimore was merely one more in a long line of secular magistrates who wished to limit or prevent such transfers. Along with these conditions went an oath, to be taken by all colonists, that they would not purchase or take any land from the Indians. Land was to be acquired only through the proprietor. Baltimore, in other words, was forbidding mortmain and clearly intended to control very closely the transfer of land to the Jesuits or any other religious body. If the Jesuits had to get his special permission to own land, it was not likely they would receive any. Baltimore was willing to borrow pieces of English law to serve his own purposes, but clearly, statutes did not automatically cross the ocean with the colonists. Baltimore held himself the sole source of law within the province. Unlike the Jesuits, he gave no indication that he thought any form of law, whether church or common law or English statute, appeared in America automatically with the presence of English colonists. Baltimore further stressed this point by including a statement to be signed by the English provincial indicating that nothing in the conditions incurred any penalty under In coena domini for the proprietor or his officials.Footnote ⁶⁷

To others, though, a prohibition on mortmain did not seem quite so simple. Lewgar and Leonard Calvert discussed the new rules with “the good men” in an attempt to alleviate the difficulties that seemed likely to appear. To circumvent the one problem, that the new conditions implied that “all grants already passed” were “charged with the Statute of Mortmain,” Calvert proposed that this not be understood as retroactive. Instead, the governor suggested that “no man should have benefit by these new conditions, unless he would put all his land, both that already granted and that to be granted, under that condition of not alienating it” to religious or other bodies or corporations. The “good men” decided that this restriction did not come under In coena domini and was thus acceptable. A second question concerned whether “it incurred not mortal sin to be the active instrument of publishing … such a proposition or contract, as contained obligations against piety and good manners,” an issue the good men, at that point, declined to resolve. The oath devised for everyone who wished to take land, though, provoked a clear response. It was “evidently against conscience,” and anyone who published or administered it would incur excommunication under In coena domini.Footnote ⁶⁸ Again, it appears that Baltimore's hard line against the Jesuits provoked misgivings even among his most immediate circle. Lewgar and Leonard Calvert were clearly not as sure as Baltimore that sweeping away ecclesiastical privileges and customs was not a serious transgression. The sense persisted that Maryland was somehow a “Catholic country” where ecclesiastical law had to be taken into account.

New conditions of plantation did not end the matter. Earlier in 1641, Baltimore had sent to the English provincial four numbered points to which he wished the provincial to agree, with regard to Maryland. First, “notwithstanding any former pretences whatsoever,” the Jesuits were not to trade with or buy land from the Indians. Moreover, any such purchase of land “is void in itself,” and the provincial was to “disavow and disannul all purchase or acceptance whatsoever of any such land made or to be made by any of our community or society there,” except purchases made properly through the lord proprietor. The “made or to be made” clause would effectively cancel the Jesuits’ acquisition of the Mattapany farm. Baltimore also required that all cases that in Catholic countries would have fallen under the jurisdiction of church courts be, in Maryland, heard by whatever courts he or the assembly with his consent chose to erect. There would be no competing jurisdictions in his colony.

In his most lengthy point, Baltimore used the colony's relation to England to argue that the Jesuits were obligated to submit to secular law. Although he claimed in other cases that no law was valid in his colony without his express consent, in this case he implied that the Englishness of the colony implied a certain position with regard to Catholic jurisdictional claims. “All persons whatsoever as well spiritual as lay inhabiting or being within the said province” were to submit to the laws made by the assembly and proprietor. Furthermore, considering the dependency which the government of Maryland hath upon the State of England, unto which it must be (as near as may be) conformable, no ecclesiastical person whatsoever, inhabiting or being within the said province, ought to pretend or expect, nor is the Lord Baltimore or any of his officers (although they be Roman Catholics) obliged in conscience to allow unto the said ecclesiastical persons … any more or other privileges, exemptions or immunities for their persons, lands or goods within the said province, then what is allowed by his majesty or any of his officers or magistrates to the like persons in England.Footnote ⁶⁹

Baltimore, in other words, was using the colony's ties to the English government, and its status as a royal grant, to refute the Jesuits’ claims. Refusal to admit church law was an issue of obedience to the English state, not an issue of conscience or the spiritual obligations of a Catholic. Baltimore's stance here indicated his respect for royal power and his loyalty, even as a Catholic, to the crown rather than the church.

The English provincial did not meet these points with enthusiasm. In a set of notes sent to Rossetti about Baltimore's points, Knott implied that the Jesuits had not wanted to join the colony on the same terms as other settlers. Rather, they had been pressured into it because they saw no other way of maintaining themselves, given that Baltimore would not support them himself or disperse public funds to them. But despite the fact that the Jesuits had been granted land, like lay colonists, through the conditions of plantation, Knott maintained that their goods and property fell under ecclesiastical jurisdiction. Moreover, Knott claimed that Baltimore could not forbid the Indians from giving or selling land to the Jesuits. He argued that the Indians’ land belonged to them alone, whatever Baltimore might claim. Both the natural title of the Indians and ecclesiastical law were there by right, and it was Baltimore whose claims outstretched his proper authority.

In this context, the Jesuits’ place or lack of place in the colony's assembly was a problem. Knott claimed that it was openly known that the Jesuits did not attend the assembly meetings and that their participation had not been asked for. As a result, he argued, the Jesuits’ rights could not be altered by any resolution made by the assembly. The Jesuits, in other words, were not ordinary freemen. They had not been invited to the assembly, would no doubt have recused themselves if they had, and as a result were not bound by laws passed by that body. Despite holding some of their land under Maryland law, they were not to be bound by or subject to that law, at least the portion of it drawn up by the provincial assembly.

Like Copley several years before, Knott laid the blame for the Jesuits’ difficulties on John Lewgar. Lewgar, he wrote, was behind these points of Baltimore’s. He was a man of poor education and dubious principles, an ex-Protestant who could cheerfully undermine all the rights and privileges of the church. He manipulated the assembly, which in any case—according to Knott—was made up of ex-servants and persons of no account, with the result that Lewgar was able to put into law anything he chose. Knott waxed particularly indignant that anyone who claimed to be a Catholic could argue that ecclesiastical immunities and exceptions existed not a priori but only with the permission of the state or that it was forbidden to exercise any form of ecclesiastical jurisdiction without the permission of the civil government. On a similar note, the provincial found it completely unreasonable for Baltimore to claim that Catholics in Maryland could expect no more exemptions and privileges than they had in England and that Maryland law allowed Catholics to ignore ecclesiastical jurisdiction and immunities without committing any sin.Footnote ⁷⁰ Baltimore and Knott, in other words, had completely different understandings of how European law moved to America and the nature of the ties between colonies and metropolises. Baltimore maintained that there were no preexisting laws in Maryland and that his royal charter not only superseded the Indians’ claims to their own land but allowed him to decide whether and to what extent church law would be applied. All power in an English colony, in other words, derived from the English king, who had given it to Baltimore. This would put Baltimore in line with the stance taken by James I and Charles I that the prerogative powers of the king were not defined and limited by the common law but rather preceded all forms of law. The dominion of the king over his territories and the presence of the law there were separate.Footnote ⁷¹ Thus, Charles was able to give Baltimore ownership of land in America that fell under the dominion of the British crown, without any other form of law operating in England or elsewhere necessarily being included in the package. Knott, in contrast, regarded church law as universal. It applied in Maryland whether Baltimore liked it or not, and the proprietor would deserve the censure of the church if he failed to acknowledge it. In England, perhaps, the legal game had been lost. Knott clearly regarded the English anti-Catholic laws as illegitimate, but there was little he could do about them. In Maryland, however, there was a chance to set the terms anew.

Douai theology professor Francis Silvius had been asked to analyze Maryland land rights. He concluded in late 1641, just weeks after Knott sent Rossetti his notes on Baltimore's points, that although Baltimore had complete jurisdiction over land unsettled by others, territory already occupied by others, Indians included, belonged to those occupiers, and they could dispose of it as they pleased.Footnote ⁷² The Jesuits, in other words, continued to maintain that the Indians could give their land to the Society of Jesus if they wished, and once that land was given it belonged to the Jesuits and fell under the law and jurisdiction of the church. Neither Baltimore nor the Jesuits had given ground.

Over the next several years, Baltimore continued to insist that the Jesuits give up all the land they had acquired without his express permission, particularly those tracts such as Mattapany that they had bought directly from the Indians.Footnote ⁷³ As Baltimore complained to his brother Leonard, he had difficulty convincing Andrew White and others that the land around the northern part of the Chesapeake was his in the first place. “I understood lately from a member of that body politic,” he wrote in November 1642, “that Mr. White had a great deal of land given him … by [Piscatoway king] Kittamaquund, before his [Kittamaquund’s] death, which he told me by accident, not conceiving that that place was within my province, or that I had anything to do with it, for so he said that he had been informed, and I had some difficulty to satisfy him that it was within my province. By this you may daily perceive what ways these men go, and of what dangerous consequence their proceedings are to me.”Footnote ⁷⁴ The Jesuits continued to protest that these demands to return the land were impossible to fulfill. They had, moreover, apparently been given official grants by the governor to some of their landholdings. In the same letter, Baltimore professed himself unpleasantly surprised that Leonard would do this, even though “I am informed you conceived [it] in justice due unto them, and therefore thought yourself obliged to grant them although it were contrary to my directions.” Baltimore reminded his brother in no uncertain terms that it was fully within his power to revoke all Leonard's authority in an instant, which he might well do if faced with another “great breach of trust in you.”Footnote ⁷⁵ The Jesuits offered compromises on several occasions. They would not give up what they already owned since it was now church property and they could not relinquish it without papal permission, but they would refrain from acquiring any more land if Baltimore did not wish it. By early 1644/5, when other events put the dispute on hold, the Jesuits and the proprietor were no closer to a solution than they had been several years before.Footnote ⁷⁶

The controversy between Lord Baltimore and the Jesuits is most often discussed as an internal dispute relating to the Jesuit mission in Maryland or in the context of lay-clerical relations among English Catholics. To figure it as a mere ecclesiastical dispute, though, is to lose sight of the larger issues at stake. The controversy between Baltimore and the Jesuits arose from the same questions that were behind the many political convulsions of seventeenth-century Maryland. Was Baltimore's charter the basis for all legal claims in Maryland, or did English subjects (either Protestant laypeople or Jesuit missionaries) bring with them the right to other types of law as well? What were the obligations of a Catholic with political power over Protestants—or, as some of Baltimore's political opponents understood the question, could a Catholic ever be trusted with such power? How did confessional identity shape or determine political allegiance?

In Maryland, the dispute would prove to be the first in a long series of controversies over the proprietary charter. The Jesuits were not the only ones to argue that other varieties of law might limit Baltimore's authority. When the Jesuits were the ones making such a claim, Baltimore could and did use this to his advantage, to show his loyalty to the personal power of the king. In different cases, as the events of the 1640s, 1650s, and 1680s would show, others would use arguments parallel to those employed by the Society of Jesus to claim that Baltimore was a threat to the English state. As his exchange with the Jesuits reveals, Baltimore had chosen a political strategy closely intertwined with the politics of the 1630s, which relied on some fairly sweeping claims about the prerogative power of the monarch. When such views became controversial, as in the 1640s and 1650s and again in the 1670s and 1680s, instability in Maryland soon followed. Indeed, it is possible to argue that much of the political trouble that plagued seventeenth-century Maryland derived from Cecil Calvert's decision to read the politics of the 1630s as normative. Baltimore's own claim to loyalty to the state became more difficult to defend when those making this sort of claim were Protestants, as in 1689, and the law that they alleged limited Baltimore's charter powers was the English common law or, broadly, the native rights of English subjects.

This brings us to the question of absolutism in early Stuart England. Cecil Calvert's mixed success with the political strategy outlined above suggests that Charles I was doing something relatively new, and controversial, in terms of his view of the prerogative powers of the crown. In fact, if not in name, there was such a thing as Caroline absolutism. Finally, Maryland's history reveals the usefulness of early American history more generally for historians of Stuart England. Moving English law, authority, and politics to America exposed the points of tension and conflict in the system. Revisionist scholarship on the early Stuart period has stressed the extent to which the political ideal was harmony and unanimity and the notion that few to none wanted to lay stress on controversial issues or force difficult decisions to a vote. The historiographical argument over whether there was a single unified political culture in which different emphases were appealed to at different times, or over whether there was real ideological conflict, reflects this question.Footnote ⁷⁷ The history of early America suggests the latter view, with its stress on conflict. Reconstructing English law and government in America had a way of forcing confrontation over precisely the issues that, back in England, would eventually threaten to tear the polity apart.