d he was
promoted to the clerkship of the council. In 1618 he was knighted, and
in the succeeding year he was made a secretary of state, and one of the
committee of trade and plantations, with a pension of one thousand
pounds. Through the influence of Sir Thomas Wentworth, afterwards Earl
of Strafford, he was chosen a member of Parliament. Receiving a patent
for the southeastern peninsula of Newfoundland, he undertook to
establish, in 1621, the plantation of Ferryland, which he called the
Province of Avalon--a name derived from some mediaeval legend. In 1624 he
professed the Romish faith, and resigned his place of secretary of
state; but James the First still retained this strenuous defender of
royal prerogative as a member of his privy council, and created
him[183:A] Baron of Baltimore, in the County of Longford, in Ireland,
he being at this time the representative of the University of Oxford in
the House of Commons. Still bent upon establishing a colony in America,
for the promotion of his private interests, and to provide an asylum for
the unmolested exercise of his religion, embarking in a ship lent him by
King Charles the First, he came over to Virginia in the year 1629.

Virginia was founded by men devoted to the principles of the
Reformation, amid vivid recollections of the persecutions of Mary, the
Spanish armada, and the recent gunpowder plot, and when horror of
papists was at its height. The charter of the colony expressly required
that the oaths of allegiance and supremacy should be taken for the
purpose of guarding against "the superstitions of the Church of
Rome."[184:A]

The assembly being in session at the time of Lord Baltimore's arrival,
proposed these oaths to him and those with him. He declined complying
with the requisition, submitting, however, a form which he was ready to
accept, whereupon the assembly determined to refer the matter to the
privy council. The virtues of this able and estimable nobleman did not
secure him from personal indignity. In the old records is found this
entry: "March 25th, 1630, Thomas Tindall to be pilloried two hours for
giving my Lord Baltimore the lie, and threatening to knock him
down."[184:B]

Finding the Virginians unanimously averse to the very name of papist, he
proceeded to the head of Chesapeake Bay, and observing an attractive
territory on the north side of the Potomac River unoccupied, returned to
England, and, in violation of the territorial rights of Virgin