Episode Details

In the summer of 1689, a rumor ran through Maryland that the Catholics had hired the native nations to murder the Protestants in their beds. It was false. It did not matter. The colony had been founded as a refuge from exactly that fear — the old English conviction that a papist plots in the dark — and now that fear walked into the refuge, picked up a gun, and ended it.

This is the finale of the season: the story of how Maryland's experiment died. By the 1670s the colony was three-quarters Protestant but ruled by a Catholic few, its tobacco economy sliding, its grievances piling up — John Yeo calling it "a Sodom of uncleanness," Bacon's Rebellion burning next door, the first risings put down. Then England overthrew its Catholic king in the Glorious Revolution, and John Coode's Protestant Association took the colony in a single summer. The Calverts lost Maryland. The Church of England was established. Catholic worship was outlawed — in the one colony founded so that Catholics could worship — and would not return for a century.

The refuge did not merely fail. It inverted — becoming by law the thing it was built to escape. Because it had never rested on a right, only on one family's grip. And a freedom that depends on the powerful is not a freedom. It is a favor.