harges. This was after the battle of Marston
Moor, and perhaps marks the moment when Lord Baltimore, conceiving the
king's cause desperate, began to trim his sails to the parliamentary
side. His request was granted, and Parliament, diverted from immediate
action, left Baltimore's authority unaffected for several years.[25]

In this interval Baltimore busied himself in reorganizing his
government on a Protestant basis. Leonard Calvert died in June, 1647,
not long after his _coup d'etat_ at St. Mary's, and upon his deathbed
he appointed Thomas Greene, a Catholic and royalist, as his successor.
Lord Baltimore removed him and appointed in his stead a Protestant,
Captain William Stone, of Northampton County, Virginia, giving him a
Protestant secretary and a Protestant majority of councillors. Yet
Baltimore took care not to surrender the cardinal principle of his
government. Before Stone and his chief officers were allowed to take
office they were required to swear not to "molest any person in the
colony professing to believe in Jesus Christ for or in respect of his
or her religion, and in particular no Roman Catholic."[26]

The famous Toleration Act of 1649 was passed at the first assembly
succeeding Stone's appointment. It was very probably in great part a
copy of a bill in the code of sixteen laws which Baltimore sent over
at this time, and it very nearly repeated the provisions of the oath
required of Governor Stone. While the terms of the act did not place
the right on that broad plane of universal principle stated later in
the Virginia Declaration of Rights, it proclaimed toleration, even if
it was a toleration of a very limited nature.[27]

Stone had recommended himself to Calvert by promising to lead five
hundred persons of British or Irish descent[28] into Maryland; and
this engagement he was soon able to perform through the Puritans,
whose story of persecution in Virginia has been already related. The
new emigrants called the country where they settled "Providence," from
feelings akin to those which led Roger Williams to give that
comforting name to his settlement on Narragansett Bay. They were to
prove a thorn in Baltimore's flesh, but for the moment they seemed
tolerably submissive. In January, 1650, soon after their arrival,
Governor Stone called an assembly to meet at St. Mary's in April, and
to this assembly the colony at "Providence" sent two representatives,
one of whom was made speaker.

Apprehension of