Thomas Notley was the 8th Proprietary Governor of Maryland from 1676 through 1679.  He was appointed to succeed Jesse Wharton by the colony's proprietor, Charles Calvert, 3rd Baron Baltimore.  Calvert arrived in the colony in January 1678 or 1679, but appears to have allowed Notley to retain his title until Notley's death in April, 1679, when Calvert assumed the mantle of governor himself.

Quotes

  • The last public levy was 297 lbs. (of tobacco) per poll, and the great levy the year before has given occasion for malignant spirits to mutter, and may cause some to mutiny, "for the common people will never be brought to understand the just reason of a public charge, or will they ever believe that the expense is for their own preservation."  Since General Davis and Pate were hanged the rabble have been much appalled.  Now enjoy peace among themselves, though never body was more replete with malignancy and frenzy than our people were about August last, and they wanted but a monstrous head to their monstrous body.  The greatest revolution has occurred in Virginia affairs, for as their rebellion was grounded upon madness and folly, so the wheel has turned again as wonderfully and swiftly in the submission of all the chief rebels…
    • Letter to Charles Calvert, 3rd Baron Baltimore (22 January 1677).

Quotes about Notley

  • In 1667 a Maryland slave who had come from Barbados lived on the plantation of Barbadian immigrant and Maryland governor Thomas Notley.  John Batten, agent of Barbadian planter William Bushey, identified the man as belonging to Bushey and having been illegally brought to Maryland.  When faced with the possibility of being parted from his wife and returned to Barbados, the man convinced Notley and Batten that "If he had not been prevented, he would have hanged himself."  Notley bought the man from Bushey for one thousand pounds of tobacco, double the market value according to Batten.
    • April Lee Hatfield, "Chesapeake Slavery in Atlantic Context," ch. 6 of Atlantic Virginia: Intercolonial Relations in the Seventeenth Century (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), p. 163.
  • At the height of Bacon's Rebellion, in September 1676, sixty persons, led by William Davyes and John Pate, assembled in Calvert County, Maryland, to declare their opposition to crushing taxation and to Lord Baltimore's disfranchisement of the freemen.  They also declared their refusal to swear to a new loyalty oath proposed by the proprietor.  They refused to obey the governor's order to disband on promise to consider their grievances in the next Assembly, pointing out that the manipulated Assembly no longer represented the people.  But the death of Bacon caused the quick collapse of the embryo Davyes-Pate rebellion, and Davyes and Pate were hanged after being denounced as traitors.  The governor observed with satisfaction that the people were now suitably "terrified."  The threat was over, but the governor wrote in warning to Lord Baltimore that never had a people been "more replete with malignancy and frenzy."  Apparently, the Maryland regime had had a close call.  The result increased the bitterness in the colony against the proprietor.
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