In Virginia and in Maryland the Commonwealth and the Lord Protector stand where stood the Kingdom and the King. Many are far better satisfied than they were before; and the confirmed royalist consumes his grumbling in his own circle. The old, exhausting quarrel seems laid to rest. But within this wider peace breaks out suddenly an interior strife. Virginia would, if she could, have back all her old northward territory. In 1652 Bennett's Government goes so far as to petition Parliament to unseat the Catholic Proprietary of Maryland and make whole again the ancient Virginia. The hand of Claiborne, that remarkable and persistent man, may be seen in this.
In Maryland, Puritans and Independents were settled chiefly about the rivers Severn and Patuxent and in a village called Providence, afterwards Annapolis. These now saw their chance to throw off the Proprietary's rule and to come directly under that of the Commonwealth. So thinking, they put themselves into communication with Bennett and Claiborne. In 1654 Stone charged the Commissioners with having promoted "faction, sedition, and rebellion against the Lord Baltimore." The charge was well founded.
Claiborne and Bennett assumed that they were yet Parliament Commissioners, empowered to bring "all plantations within the Bay of Chesapeake to their due obedience to the Parliament and Commonwealth of England." And they were indeed set against the Lord Baltimore. Claiborne would head the Puritans of Providence; and a troop should be raised in Virginia and march northward.
The Commissioners actually advanced upon St. Mary's, and with so superior a, force that Stone surrendered, and a Puritan Government was inaugurated.
A Puritan Assembly met, debarring any Catholics. Presently it passed an act annulling the Proprietary's Act of Toleration. Professors of the religion of Rome should "be restrained from the exercise thereof." The hand of the law was to fall heavily upon "popery, prelacy, or licentiousness of opinion. "Thus was intolerance alive again in the only land where she had seemed to die!
In England now there was hardly a Parliament, but only the Lord Protector, Oliver Cromwell. Content with Baltimore's recognition of the Protectorate, Cromwell was not prepared to back, in their independent action, the Commissioners of that now dissolved Parliament. Baltimore made sure of this, and then dispatched messengers overseas to Stone, bidding him do all that lay in him to retake Maryland. Stone thereupon gathered several hundred men and a fleet of small sailing craft, with which he pushed up the bay to the Severn. In the meantime the Puritans had not been idle, but had themselves raised a body of men and had taken over the Golden Lyon, an armed merchantman lying before their town. On the 24th of March, 1655, the two forces met in the Battle of the Severn. "In the name of God, fall on!" cried the men of Providence, and "Hey for St. Mary's!" cried the others.
The battle was won by the Providence men. They slew or wounded fifty of the St. Mary's men and desperately wounded Stone himself and took many prisoners, ten of whom were afterwards condemned to death and four were actually executed.
Now followed a period of up and down, the Commissioners and the Proprietary alike appealing to the Lord Protector for some expression of his "determinate will." Both sides received encouragement inasmuch as he decided for neither. His own authority being denied by neither, Cromwell may have preferred to hold these distant factions in a canceling, neutralizing posture. But far weightier matters, in fact, were occupying his mind. In 1657, weary of her "very sad, distracted, and unsettled condition," Maryland herself proceeded--Puritan, Prelatist, and Catholic together--to agree henceforth to disagree. Toleration viewed in retrospect appears dimly to have been seen for the angel that it was. Maryland would return to the Proprietary's rule, provided there should be complete indemnity for political offenses and a solemn promise that the Toleration Act of 1649 should never be repealed. This without a smile Baltimore promised. Articles were signed; a new Assembly composed of all manner of Christians was called; and Maryland returned for a time to her first allegiance.
