probably did not see this policy as the social experiment
we judge it to have been. The plan was born of political
necessity, not of Utopian dreams, and despite some
lapses, it worked until 1689.¹⁷

   Although the charter provided little accountability to
the crown, this fact did not enable the proprietor to be a
tyrant. He needed settlers and a successful enterprise re-
quired their cooperation. He could not treat Maryland
inhabitants in ways that seemed to them unreasonable
and hope to keep them in his colony. Consequently gov-
ernment in Maryland developed in much the same way
as it did in other colonies, with an assembly of freemen
who successfully acquired the power to initiate legisla-
tion and with courts of law that resembled those of con-
temporary England. Indeed, over the years the very fact
that the proprietor had such great powers led Maryland-
ers to insist on cleaving more closely to English law than
did the courts and legislatures of other colonies.¹⁸

   George Calvert's vision of a feudal society never came
into being and there is little evidence that his son tried to
force Maryland inhabitants to live under manorial juris-
dictions. In an unpeopled country land was cheap and
wages were high. Immigrants might start out first as ser-
vants and then become tenants of a manor lord, but
soon they could pay for land of their own. About sixty
lords of the manor were created over the first thirty
years, but they never played the role the Lords Balti-
more had planned for them. Seventeenth-century Mary-
land became a land of yeoman planters, not a land of
great lords of manors to whom all lesser inhabitants
owed obedience.¹⁹

   Cecil Calvert had the wisdom and skill to modify poli-
cies as necessary. When he died in 1676 his rule had sur-
vived years of English civil war and colonial disruption

                      [xxi]