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The Catholic Refuge - Give No Offense · American Political History

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to season four of American Political History The Catholic Refuge.
• 0:05
  SPEAKER_00: Give no offense.
• 0:08
  SPEAKER_00: In late November of sixteen thirty three, two ships lay at anchor off the Isle of Wright, on the southern coast of England, waiting for a wind.
• 0:16
  SPEAKER_00: The larger was the Ark, a merchant ship around three hundred and fifty tons, carrying somewhere near two hundred passengers.
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_00: The smaller one, the Dove, a pinnacle, about sixty tons, built to hug the coast once they reached the other side.
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_00: They had already had trouble leaving.
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_00: Weeks earlier, the Crown's officers had stopped the Ark, suspecting exactly what she was, a ship carrying Catholics out of England.
• 0:44
  SPEAKER_00: They had hauled her back and made the passengers swear the oath of allegiance before they let them go.
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_00: The Oath the same instrument that had broken George Culvert's career and turned him away at Jamestown.
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_00: It reached into the deck of the very ship meant to carry his family's dream away.
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_00: And so the most important passengers were not aboard when the officers came through.
• 1:06
  SPEAKER_00: Three Jesuit priests, Catholic clergymen, the men whose mere presence on the English soil or ship was a capital crime.
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_00: They were waiting at the cows, a little further along the coast.
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_00: The ship took them on quietly, after the oath had been administered, after the officers had gone.
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_00: The priests came aboard last, and came unsworn.
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_00: Think about how this voyage began.
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_00: A colony founded so that Catholics could worship in the open, had to begin by smuggling its own priests past the king's men.
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_00: The refuge started in concealment.
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_00: It started by giving no offense.
• 1:46
  SPEAKER_00: The man who wrote the order was not on the ship.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_00: Cecil Calvert, the second Lord Baltimore, the owner of the whole enterprise, stayed in England as he always would.
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_00: But before the ship sailed, he would put into his brother's hands a letter of instructions, dated november thirteenth, sixteen thirty three.
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_00: It was the founding document of the colony, the rules by which Maryland was to be built, and the very first thing it dealt with was not land or trade or government, it was how the Catholics were to behave.
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_00: His lordship requires the said governor and commissioners that they be very careful to preserve unity and peace amongst all passengers on shipboard, and that they suffer no scandal, nor offence to be given to any of the Protestants, and then a specific command, and that, for that end, they cause all acts of Roman Catholic religion to be done as privately as may be, and that they instruct all Roman Catholics to be silent upon all occasions of discourse concerning matters of religion.
• 2:51
  SPEAKER_00: Do your faith in private, say nothing about religion in public, and one more instruction in the same breath.
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_00: That the said governor and commissioner treat the Protestants with as much mildness and favor as justice will permit.
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_00: This is the strategy for the entire colony.
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_00: Set down before a single acre, the Catholics, the people whom the refuge existed for, were ordered to make themselves invisible inside of it.
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_00: Cecil Calvert understood something about his own colony that he never let himself forget.
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_00: Even in Maryland, even in the one place in the English world built for them, the Catholics were gonna be a minority.
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_00: The reason for this was money.
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_00: Cecil had sunk most of his family fortune into the venture, and the only way to make it back was to fill the colony with settlers.
• 3:41
  SPEAKER_00: There were not enough English Catholics willing to cross the ocean to fill it, so the colony would have to be mostly Protestant.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_00: It would have to recruit the very people whose church had spent a century treating Catholics as traitors, which meant that the refuge had a problem built into its foundation.
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_00: The Catholics owned it, through Lord Baltimore, but the Protestants would outnumber them in it, almost from the start.
• 4:04
  SPEAKER_00: A Catholic colony that paraded its Catholicism would frighten off the Protestant settlers it needed, and hand its enemies in England the proof they wanted, that Lord Baltimore was running a popish operation across the sea.
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_00: The denunciation that the chaplain Stroughton had thrown at his family back in Newfoundland was always one complaint away from being thrown back again and louder.
• 4:27
  SPEAKER_00: So the order to give no offense was not generosity, it was survival.
• 4:31
  SPEAKER_00: The Catholics had to stay quiet because they could not afford to be seen.
• 4:35
  SPEAKER_00: Toleration in Maryland began as a careful behavior of a minority that knew exactly how exposed it was.
• 4:41
  SPEAKER_00: Cecil even put his argument to the public.
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_00: Before the ships left he circulated a pamphlet answering the objections to his colony, making the case in print that the province of mixed faith could work, that Protestants had nothing to fear from a Catholic proprietor.
• 4:55
  SPEAKER_00: He was selling the idea of toleration to a country that did not believe in it.
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_00: It was the same principle his father had set down years before, in a line that could have served as the colony's motto.
• 5:05
  SPEAKER_00: That we papists want not charity towards you Protestants.
• 5:10
  SPEAKER_00: Whatsoever the less understanding part of the world think of us.
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_00: Papists did not lack charity towards Protestants, the whole experiment wrote on whether that could be made true on the ground, and on whether the Protestants would believe in it.
• 5:23
  SPEAKER_00: So who sailed?
• 5:25
  SPEAKER_00: A small number of Catholic gentlemen, men of means, younger sons of good families, the sort who had money to invest and reason to want a place where their faith was not a liability.
• 5:36
  SPEAKER_00: These were the leaders, and most of them were Catholic.
• 5:39
  SPEAKER_00: And beneath them the bulk of the passengers, laborers, and servants, many of them Protestant, bound by contracts of indenture, years of work owed in exchange for passage and, at the end, land of their own, the people who would actually clear the ground and plant the crops.
• 5:54
  SPEAKER_00: A Catholic gentry on top, a largely Protestant working population beneath, the whole uneasy arithmetic of the colony was already aboard the two ships before they cleared the English coast.
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_00: Leading them was Leonard Culvert, Lord Baltimore's younger son, around twenty seven, now the governor of a colony.
• 6:12
  SPEAKER_00: He was carrying his brother's written instructions and the authority to build a world from them, and among them a man whose pen would give us the voyage, a Jesuit named Father Andrew White.
• 6:21
  SPEAKER_00: Father Andrew White was a scholar and a missionary, a man who had wanted four years to carry his faith to the New World.
• 6:28
  SPEAKER_00: He kept an account of the voyage, and it is the closest thing we have to standing on the deck besides them.
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_00: They sailed on november twenty second, sixteen thirty three.
• 6:38
  SPEAKER_00: They were three days out when the weather turned, and on november twenty fifth a storm came up and the two ships were driven apart.
• 6:45
  SPEAKER_00: From the deck of the ark they watched the little dove signal her distress, lanterns hung in her mast heads, the lights swinging in the dark to say she was in trouble, and then the lights went out, and the dove was gone, swallowed by the storm.
• 6:58
  SPEAKER_00: Those aboard the Ark believed she had gone down with every soul on her.
• 7:02
  SPEAKER_00: They sailed for six weeks carrying that grief, certain that a third of their company and one of their two ships lay at the bottom of the Atlantic.
• 7:10
  SPEAKER_00: She had not sunk.
• 7:12
  SPEAKER_00: The dove had turned and run for an English harbor, waited out the worst, and crossed after them.
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_00: Six weeks later, in the warm waters of the Caribbean, the two ships found each other again.
• 7:22
  SPEAKER_00: The dead had come back to life.
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_00: But for a month and a half the people carrying Maryland to America had grieved half of themselves and sailed away.
• 7:31
  SPEAKER_00: They took the southern route, the long way, down to the Caribbean, a stop in Barbados for supplies and seeds, then north along the coast.
• 7:39
  SPEAKER_00: After roughly three months they reached the mouth of the Chesapeake, and put in at Jamestown for resupply.
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_00: Jamestown, the same Virginia capital that had turned George Culvert away with the oath four years ago.
• 7:50
  SPEAKER_00: This time the Virginians were under direct orders from the king to receive the newcomers civilly, and they did, coldly, but civilly.
• 7:57
  SPEAKER_00: It was courtesy, that would not last.
• 7:59
  SPEAKER_00: William Claiborne and the Virginians had not given up their claim to the lands these ships were sailing toward.
• 8:05
  SPEAKER_00: Then the ships sailed north, up the Chesapeake, into the wide mouth of the Potomac River.
• 8:10
  SPEAKER_00: After four months at sea, they had reached the edge of the land George Culvert had drawn on a map in Latin and never lived to see.
• 8:18
  SPEAKER_00: On march twenty fifth, sixteen thirty four, they put ashore on a small island of the Potomac, and they named it Saint Clemens, and the first act of the colony was not to build or plant or to claim, it was to give thanks.
• 8:29
  SPEAKER_00: They cut a great cross from a tree, they carried it ashore, and they raised it on the island, and Father Andrew White said mass, out loud, in the open on American ground, for a safe arrival after months at sea and the loss they had grieved and gotten back.
• 8:46
  SPEAKER_00: White recorded the moment himself.
• 8:49
  SPEAKER_00: We celebrated mass for the first time.
• 8:52
  SPEAKER_00: This had never been done before in this part of the world.
• 8:56
  SPEAKER_00: Hold these two images together, because the colony lives in the space between them, an order written in Lord Baltimore's hand that the Catholics keep their religion as private as may be, and a Catholic mass sung in the open air on the first day around a cross raised against the sky.
• 9:12
  SPEAKER_00: The difference was who is in the audience.
• 9:14
  SPEAKER_00: On the ship, among Protestant servants in the eyes of the Virginians, the faith stayed hidden.
• 9:20
  SPEAKER_00: Here, on an empty island among their own, they could breathe.
• 9:23
  SPEAKER_00: The refuge was becoming real.
• 9:25
  SPEAKER_00: It was just conditional, permitted in private, in safety, and put away the moment anyone was watching.
• 9:31
  SPEAKER_00: The island was a landing and not their home.
• 9:34
  SPEAKER_00: The colony needed real ground, defensible and arable, and the river it had sailed into was not empty country.
• 9:40
  SPEAKER_00: The land along the lower Potomac was held by the Piscatoe, a paramount chiefdom of Allied native towns, led by a ruler in English they would call the Tayak.
• 9:51
  SPEAKER_00: Lord Culvert did not simply seize the site, he went up the river to negotiate with the Tayak to ask to settle.
• 9:57
  SPEAKER_00: The Tayak did not hand him the land, but he did not turn him away with a spear either.
• 10:03
  SPEAKER_00: He sent the English back down the river, towards the bay, to a smaller people living near the river's mouth, the Yokomiko, separate in their own leadership, but under the Piscatoes' shadow.
• 10:13
  SPEAKER_00: The Yokomiko were, as it happens, already half leaving.
• 10:17
  SPEAKER_00: They were under pressure from the Susquehannock, a powerful people to the north who had raided down to the Chesapeake, and they were in the process of moving away from that danger.
• 10:26
  SPEAKER_00: Leonard Culvert traded cloth, axes, hose, and knives for the right to the Yakimiko's land.
• 10:32
  SPEAKER_00: They called the place Saint Mary's City, the capital of the new Providence of Maryland.
• 10:37
  SPEAKER_00: For a time, the two peoples shared the land.
• 10:39
  SPEAKER_00: The Yakimiko had not all gone at once.
• 10:42
  SPEAKER_00: The English settled next to the remaining Yakimiko, living close by one another, the colonists learning the land from the people who were preparing to leave it, allowing for the unusually fast and successful initial settlement for Maryland.
• 10:55
  SPEAKER_00: They built the fort and added a palisade of timber, half a mile in from the river, the defensive heart of the settlement, inside and around it, the colony took its first shape.
• 11:05
  SPEAKER_00: There were the Catholic gentlemen and the priests, there were the Protestant servants who did most of the labor, and there was a man named Matthias Souza.
• 11:13
  SPEAKER_00: The records called him a mulatto, the term used for a person of mixed African and European descent.
• 11:18
  SPEAKER_00: He had come as an indentured servant with the Jesuits, and within a few years he would be a free man and would cast a vote in the colony's assembly.
• 11:26
  SPEAKER_00: By the record we have, the first man of African descent to sit in a legislative body anywhere in colonial America.
• 11:33
  SPEAKER_00: And that assembly began almost immediately.
• 11:35
  SPEAKER_00: It began pushing back.
• 11:37
  SPEAKER_00: Cecil Colvert, governing from England, had sent detailed edicts of how the colony was to be run, including that the settlers lived close packed and regimented inside the fort, under his eye and his rules.
• 11:48
  SPEAKER_00: The free men of Maryland, gathered in their first assembly, had a different idea.
• 11:53
  SPEAKER_00: They wanted to spread out, to take up the abundant land and farm it, to live as they judged best on the ground three thousand miles away from a man who owned it.
• 12:02
  SPEAKER_00: They did not challenge Lord Baltimore's proprietorship.
• 12:05
  SPEAKER_00: They did not challenge the religious toleration, but on how the colony would actually be governed, who decided the rules of daily life.
• 12:12
  SPEAKER_00: They began from the first session to press, and Leonard Culvert standing on the ground and seeing what the colony actually needed, quietly took their side in his letters home.
• 12:22
  SPEAKER_00: The fight over who truly held power in Maryland, the proprietor in London, or the free men of the land, would not be fully settled for a very long time.
• 12:31
  SPEAKER_00: The Catholic refuge built with the settlement.
• 12:34
  SPEAKER_00: There was just one condition.
• 12:36
  SPEAKER_00: Catholics had to practice quietly.
• 12:38
  SPEAKER_00: The first English colony where a Catholic could practice his faith in peace was also a colony where he was instructed to practice it privately as he could.
• 12:45
  SPEAKER_00: The freedom and the silence arrived together, signed in the same hand.
• 12:50
  SPEAKER_00: That was the bargain at the heart of Maryland.
• 12:52
  SPEAKER_00: Toleration brought with discretion.
• 12:55
  SPEAKER_00: A door held open by a powerful family, on the condition that no one walk through it too loudly.
• 13:01
  SPEAKER_00: And this would hold for a while.
• 13:03
  SPEAKER_00: Catholics and Protestants would share a single chapel at St.
• 13:07
  SPEAKER_00: Mary's.
• 13:09
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you for listening to this episode of American Political History.
• 13:12
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• 13:17
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you again, and until next time.