needed each other. The Jesuits opposed the impending
establishment in England of a competing Catholic clergy
to be headed by a bishop. Jesuit priests had been mis-
sionaries in England, despite many dangers, for sixty
years. In fighting this threat to their position, they
sought the support of the English Catholic nobility,
whose households had been the Jesuits' refuge and the
centers of their work. Lord Baltimore needed mission-
aries to serve his colony and the active support of a
Catholic hierarchy if Catholics were to be persuaded to
join a risky adventure. The two struck a bargain.
George Calvert helped to kill the plan for a Catholic
English bishop and Blount began the long process neces-
sary to secure permission to send out priests and estab-
lish a Maryland mission.²¹

   There were many reasons besides this marriage of
convenience for the Jesuit interest in Maryland. The
idea of a mission to the Indians attracted men of the
Jesuit temperament. They had, in the words of historian
John Bossy, "a thirst for grand spiritual adventures...
and for the opportunities of traveling to far away
places." The French Jesuits were already active in
Canada, and their English counterparts welcomed the
possibility of following the French example.²² The
Jesuits may also have hoped that in Maryland they
could exercise some of the privileges that the Catholic
church enjoyed in Catholic countries. At the very least,
the Jesuits would be serving an English Catholic com-
munity in which concealment was no longer necessary.

   The question of how to maintain the Jesuit mission in
Maryland presented an early obstacle. The Jesuits failed
to persuade Lord Baltimore to support it either from his
own pocket or by taxation of his colonists. The first