All these embarrassments threw a heavy shadow over the latter years of Lord Baltimore’s life, and now drove him to the necessity of making a visit to England for the purpose of personal explanation and defence before the King.  He accordingly took his departure in the month of June, 1684, intending to return in a few months; but a tide of misfortune that now set in upon him prevented that wish, and he never saw Maryland again.

In about half a year after Calvert’s arrival in England, King Charles the Second was gathered to his fathers, and his brother, the Duke of York, a worse man, a greater hypocrite, and a more crafty despot, reigned in his stead.

James the Second was a Roman Catholic, and Calvert, on that score alone, might have expected some sympathy and favor:  he might, at least, have expected justice.  But James was heartless and selfish.  The Proprietary found nothing but cold neglect, and a contemptible jealousy of the prerogatives and power conferred by his charter.  James himself claimed to be a proprietary on this continent by virtue of extensive royal grants, and was directly interested with William Penn in defeating the claims of the Baltimore family to the country upon the Delaware; he was, therefore, in fact, the secret and prepossessed enemy of Calvert.  Instead of protection from the Crown, Calvert found proceedings instituted in the King’s Bench to annul his charter, which, but for the abrupt termination of this short, disgraceful reign in abdication and flight, would have been consummated under James’s own direction.  The Revolution of 1688 brought up other influences more hostile still to the Proprietary; and the Province, which was always sedulous to follow the fashions of London, was not behindhand on this occasion, but made, also, its revolution, in imitation of the great one.  The end of all was the utter subversion of the Charter, and a new government of Maryland under a royal commission.  How this was accomplished our historians are not able to tell.  From 1688 to 1692 is one of our dark intervals of which I have spoken.  It begins with a domestic revolution and ends with the appointment of a Royal Governor, and that is pretty nearly all we know about it.  After this, there was no Proprietary dominion in Maryland, until it was restored upon the accession of George the First in 1715, when it reappears in the second Charles Calvert, a minor, the grandson of the late Proprietary.  This gentleman was the son of Benedict Leonard Calvert, and was educated in the Protestant faith, which his father had adopted as more consonant with the prosperity of the family and the hopes of the Province.