0.

Other troubles besides the demands of the people for self-government,
were gathering around the sturdy Dutch governor. The English were
pressing him from the east, and in New Netherland itself they were
aggressive and defiant in their attitude toward Dutch authority. Charles
II. granted New Netherland to his brother, the Duke of York, and an
English flotilla under Richard Nicholls appeared in front of New
Amsterdam and demanded the surrender of the province. Stuyvesant refused
to submit, but the people of New Amsterdam were more than willing to come
under English rule, and their doughty governor was made to understand
that he would be virtually alone in resisting the invaders. After a week
of fuming and raging against the inevitable, Stuyvesant yielded, and the
English took possession of New Amsterdam. The place was recaptured and
held by the Dutch for a few months in 1673, but with the exception of
this brief period the English remained thenceforth masters of the
Atlantic coast of North America from the St. Lawrence in the north to the
Spanish possessions in the south.

* * *

The planting of a Roman Catholic colony in Maryland was almost
contemporary with the Puritan settlement of New England. The first steps
toward the establishment of the colony had been taken under James I., but
it was in the reign of Charles I. that Cecil Calvert, the second Lord
Baltimore, obtained the charter which made him almost an independent
sovereign over one of the fairest regions of North America. The charter
granted civil and religious liberty to Christians who believed in the
Trinity. The Ark and the Dove, two vessels fitted out by Lord Baltimore,
bore about two hundred Roman Catholic immigrants to the banks of the
Potomac, where they landed on March 25, 1634. The cross was planted as
the emblem of the new colony, and Governor Leonard Calvert opened
negotiations with the Indians for the purchase of their lands. The first
assembly met in 1635, and another in 1638. Question having arisen as to
whether the lord proprietor or the colonists had the right to propose
laws, that right was at length conceded to the colonists. Of course the
settlers would not have been allowed to persecute non-Catholics, even had
they so desired; but they showed no such desire, and laws were enacted
securing freedom of worship to all professing to believe in Jesus Christ;
with the important limitation, however, of s