he 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
gath