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.
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