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The Catholic Refuge - The Refuge Closed · American Political History

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to Season four of American Political History The Catholic Refuge The Refuge Closed In the summer of sixteen eighty nine a rumor ran through the colony of Maryland that the great men of Maryland, the Catholic rules, had hired the Seneca, a nation of Iroquois, to murder the Protestants in their beds.
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_00: It was not true.
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  SPEAKER_00: There was no plot, no alliance, no army of warriors paid in Catholic coin to fall upon the Protestant farms.
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  SPEAKER_00: It was a rumor.
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  SPEAKER_00: The kind that catches in a frightened population and spreads faster than any denial can follow.
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_00: It even reached a Virginia courtroom, where a man swore to it on the record The great men of Maryland hath hired the Seneca Indians to kill the Protestants.
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  SPEAKER_00: But it did not need to be true.
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  SPEAKER_00: It only needed to be believed.
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  SPEAKER_00: And it was believed because the people of Maryland had been taught to believe exactly this kind of thing that the Catholic was a secret traitor, that his loyalty lay in Rome, that he plotted in the dark, that behind his quiet loyalty was a knife meant for the Protestant throat.
• 1:19
  SPEAKER_00: We began this season with that fear, the penal laws, the priest holes, the Englishman who could have ruined or hanged for the way he worshipped, the deep, old, English conviction that a papist was never quite to be trusted.
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  SPEAKER_00: The culverts had crossed an ocean to build a place where that fear did not rule, a refuge.
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  SPEAKER_00: Everything the culverts built, the toleration, and the proprietorship and the strange Catholic led peace turned out to rest on a single thing their grasp of power.
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  SPEAKER_00: And in sixteen eighty nine their grip was broken.
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  SPEAKER_00: To understand how it ended, you have to see what Maryland had quietly become by the sixteen seventies, because the colony of sixteen seventy was not the colony of sixteen thirty four.
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  SPEAKER_00: It had been founded as a Catholic refuge, but Catholics had never been more than a minority in it, and over forty years that minority had shrunk to a sliver.
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  SPEAKER_00: The Protestants had done what populations do, they had multiplied.
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  SPEAKER_00: Charles III of Baltimore commented The great part of the inhabitants of the province, three of four at least, do consist of Presbyterians, independents, antibaptists, and Quakers, those of the Church of England, as well as those of the Romish being the fewest.
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  SPEAKER_00: Three out of four, at least.
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  SPEAKER_00: By the proprietor's own count, three quarters of his colony were Protestant dissenters.
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  SPEAKER_00: The Catholics, the people the whole colony existed for, were among the very fewest in it.
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  SPEAKER_00: And yet, the Catholics ran it.
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  SPEAKER_00: The culverts appointed the governor, stacked the council, handed the offices and the great manners to Catholic relatives and friends.
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  SPEAKER_00: A Catholic family and a small Catholic gentry sat at the top of a colony that was, by headcount, overwhelmingly Protestant.
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  SPEAKER_00: A Protestant majority growing every year, a Catholic minority holding the power, the land, and the offices.
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  SPEAKER_00: The refuge had become a place where a few ruled the many, and the few were of the faith, the many had been raised to fear.
• 3:35
  SPEAKER_00: And by the sixteen seventies the grievances were piling up.
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  SPEAKER_00: The Church of England resented that Maryland had no established church.
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  SPEAKER_00: The official Anglican religion supported by laws and taxes, as Virginia had.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_00: To a proper Englishman of the Church, a colony with no established church was not free, it was godless.
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  SPEAKER_00: In 1676, an Anglican minister named John Yo wrote to the Archbishop of Canterbury.
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  SPEAKER_00: The province of Maryland is in a deplorable condition for want of an established ministry.
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  SPEAKER_00: It is become a sodom of uncleanliness and a pest house of inquiry.
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  SPEAKER_00: This was how the Anglican clergyman described the colony's toleration, not as freedom, but as filth.
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  SPEAKER_00: Underneath the religious resentment ran a harder, simpler grievance, money.
• 4:25
  SPEAKER_00: The colony lived and died on the price of tobacco, and across these decades the price was dying.
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  SPEAKER_00: By the 1680s, the price of tobacco had fallen by half over thirty years.
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  SPEAKER_00: The planters were growing more and earning less, sliding into debt, watching the great proprietary families collect their rents and their custom duties, while the small farmer leaf brought less every season.
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  SPEAKER_00: A shrinking income, a Catholic ruling class taking its cut, a Protestant majority with no established church, and a deep inherent suspicion of the men in charge.
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_00: The colony was a dry field in a long summer.
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  SPEAKER_00: It only needed a spark.
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  SPEAKER_00: The spark came in 1676.
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  SPEAKER_00: In Virginia that year a planter named Nathaniel Bacon raised an army of discontents, landless former servants and debted farmers, men with grievances much like Maryland's.
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  SPEAKER_00: Maryland watched it happen across the Potomac.
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  SPEAKER_00: They watched a Chesapeake colony's ordinary people take up arms against a government they had decided was serving itself instead of them.
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  SPEAKER_00: And in that same year, 1676, Maryland had its own rising.
• 5:34
  SPEAKER_00: Two men named Davies and Pete led an armed gathering of Protestants, issuing a proclamation that denounced the Catholic proprietary government, demanding its extinction, and calling for a royal governor in its place.
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  SPEAKER_00: It was put down.
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  SPEAKER_00: The governor, Thomas Notley, suppressed the gathering and hanged the two ringleaders.
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  SPEAKER_00: In that moment the proprietorship had held.
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  SPEAKER_00: But the call down with the Catholic proprietary, up with the Royal Protestant government could not be silenced.
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  SPEAKER_00: Protestants went round in those years carrying the same charges to England.
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  SPEAKER_00: A complaint from Maryland and Virginia both, listing the colony's wrongs, sharpening the case against the proprietorship.
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  SPEAKER_00: The grievance was no longer just muttered in the tobacco fields, it started to become organized in writing and aimed at the proprietary family.
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  SPEAKER_00: Then, in sixteen eighty one, Josiah Findal, a former governor of Maryland who had turned against the culverts, and a man named John Code, were accused of stirring up rebellion against the proprietary family.
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  SPEAKER_00: Findal was tried, convicted, fined forty thousand pounds of tobacco and banished from the colony.
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  SPEAKER_00: John Code, an apostate Catholic, a man who had once been of the very faith he would spend his life fighting, became a loud and bitter enemy of the culverts.
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  SPEAKER_00: In sixteen eighty one he was a failed conspirator who got away.
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  SPEAKER_00: In sixteen eighty nine, he would be the man who took the colony.
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  SPEAKER_00: By this point, the colony was visibly coming apart.
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  SPEAKER_00: The governor of Virginia, looking across the river, sent a report on the state of Maryland.
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  SPEAKER_00: Maryland is now in torment, and in great danger of falling in pieces.
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  SPEAKER_00: That was the colony by the sixteen eighties, the proprietors' council and the people's assembly at each other's throats, the tobacco prices falling.
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_00: The Protestant majority simmering, the Catholic government holding on by authority and not much else.
• 7:31
  SPEAKER_00: In sixteen eighty eight, English changed kings.
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  SPEAKER_00: It changed them over exactly the thing Maryland had been built around religion.
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_00: The King of England was James II, a Catholic, and England, after a century of fearing precisely that, would not have him.
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  SPEAKER_00: In what became known as the Glorious Revolution, King James II was driven from the throne and in his place, England installed his Protestant daughter Mary and her Dutch Protestant husband, William of Orange.
• 7:59
  SPEAKER_00: The Catholic King was out, Protestant monarchs were in, and every Protestant in England understood that God had reached down and pulled a papist off the throne in England.
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  SPEAKER_00: In Maryland, ruled by Catholics, held by a charter in the name of a king who had just been overthrown for being Catholic, the men who governed in St.
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  SPEAKER_00: Mary's were suddenly the local representatives of exactly the thing England had just risen up to destroy.
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  SPEAKER_00: When word came that William and Mary were to be proclaimed the new sovereigns, every English colony moved to proclaim them.
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  SPEAKER_00: Maryland's Catholic government did not.
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  SPEAKER_00: The delay was almost certainly not treasonous in motive, but to a Protestant population primed to see treason in every Catholic act, a Catholic government that would not proclaim the Protestant monarchs looked like a government waiting for a Catholic king to come back.
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  SPEAKER_00: And into that suspicion walked the rumor we began with.
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  SPEAKER_00: The rumor that the Catholic leadership had armed the native population and meant to slaughter the Protestants.
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  SPEAKER_00: In April of 1689, John Code and his allies formed what they called an association in arms for the defense of the Protestant religion, and for asserting the right of King William and Queen Mary to the Providence of Maryland.
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  SPEAKER_00: Read what they claimed to be defenders of the Protestant religion and of the new Protestant monarch's rightful claim to the colony.
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  SPEAKER_00: Around seven hundred men gathered under Code Standard.
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  SPEAKER_00: They marched on the capital of St.
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  SPEAKER_00: Mary's City.
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  SPEAKER_00: The proprietor himself, Charles Calvert, was in England.
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  SPEAKER_00: His deputies and his Catholic Chancellor, Colonel Henry Gennar, gathered what men they could and fell back to the proprietary stronghold at Matapenny, the government's own arsenal on the Patuxet River.
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  SPEAKER_00: Darnall tried to raise the countryside to defend the proprietor.
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  SPEAKER_00: Almost no one came.
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  SPEAKER_00: Surrounded at Mattapenny, with no colony support, Darnall did the only thing left.
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  SPEAKER_00: We being in this condition and no hope left of quieting the people thus enraged, to prevent a fusion of blood, capitulated and surrendered.
• 9:59
  SPEAKER_00: The Catholic government of Maryland surrendered on july twenty seventh, sixteen eighty nine, with almost no blood spilled, which tells you how thin the Calvert's grip had worn.
• 10:08
  SPEAKER_00: When the final test came, the refuge had no defenders but the handful who ran it.
• 10:13
  SPEAKER_00: The thing that George Culvert had dreamed on a frozen rock in Newfoundland, that his sons had carried across the ocean and defended for fifty five years through oath and storm and the plundering time in the Severn fell in a single summer to a few hundred armed Protestants and a rumor.
• 10:30
  SPEAKER_00: Codesmen sent to England to ask the new Protestant king and queen to take the colony for the crown.
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  SPEAKER_00: King William and Queen Mary, Protestant monarchs with no love of a Catholic proprietor, agreed.
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  SPEAKER_00: The culverts lost the government of Maryland.
• 10:45
  SPEAKER_00: In 1692, the new government established the Church of England as the official Church of Maryland.
• 10:51
  SPEAKER_00: The colony that had been founded with no established church, now had an Anglican church written into its laws.
• 10:57
  SPEAKER_00: The Act concerning religion, the 1649 law that had been the high watermark of the whole experiment, was over.
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  SPEAKER_00: Over the years that followed, the mass that Father Andrew White had sung on St.
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  SPEAKER_00: Clement's Island in the open air on the first day, was driven back into hiding.
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  SPEAKER_00: And step by step the colony's Catholics were stripped of their rights, barred from public office, pushed out of public life, and at last forbidden to worship openly.
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  SPEAKER_00: The Catholics who remained?
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  SPEAKER_00: By then perhaps a tenth of the colony's population lived on as disfavored, watched, disenfranchised minority in a province their ancestors had crossed an ocean to build.
• 11:36
  SPEAKER_00: They would hold their masses in private rooms and hidden chapels, exactly as their great grandfathers had in England.
• 11:43
  SPEAKER_00: We began this season with the world that made a refuge necessary, the England where a man's faith could cost him his property, his freedom, his life, the penal laws and the priest holes, and the long English fear of the papists in the dark.
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  SPEAKER_00: We followed George Culvert out of that world, a secretary of state who gave up his office for his conversion, who froze on a rock in Newfoundland chasing a refuge, and who died with a charter for the next colony still unsigned.
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  SPEAKER_00: We crossed the ocean on the Ark and the Dove, and watched the first mass rise from St.
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  SPEAKER_00: Clemens Island, and the order go out to the Catholics to keep the faith in private, to give no offense.
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  SPEAKER_00: We sat in the assembly as the free men forced the right to make their own laws from the proprietor three thousand miles away, and learned how much of the colony's government was built in those first fights.
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  SPEAKER_00: We met the Teak of the Piscatoway, who killed his brother and bet his nation on the English, and we watched the bet come due as the shield he picked grew up into the thing that buried his people.
• 12:46
  SPEAKER_00: We walked the tobacco fields and saw the leaf that was the colony's money grown by bound hands, the English servant, the native slave, then at the end of the century the African slave.
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  SPEAKER_00: We stood on the bank of the Severn whishmen fired on Englishmen over whose god the law would protect, and watched the toleration repealed by the very men it sheltered, then demanded back when the winds shifted.
• 13:10
  SPEAKER_00: And we have ended here in the summer of sixteen eighty nine, when the refuge closed.
• 13:15
  SPEAKER_00: The proprietors cast down, the mass outlawed, the Catholics of Maryland made strangers in the country their family built for them.
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  SPEAKER_00: The refuge was never safe, because it was protected by the power of a proprietor Catholic family granting toleration.
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  SPEAKER_00: That is the hard lesson of Maryland, and the founders of the next century learned it.
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  SPEAKER_00: A liberty that depends on the good will of the powerful is not a right, it is a favor.
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  SPEAKER_00: It can be granted, and it can be taken back, and the people who live on it live at the mercy of whoever holds that power.
• 13:50
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you for listening to this season of American Political History.
• 13:53
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• 13:59
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you again, and until next time.