George Calvert, 1st Baron Baltimore

George Calvert, 1st Baron Baltimore, was an English politician and coloniser. He achieved domestic political success as a member of parliament and later Secretary of State under King James I. Calvert took an interest in the British colonisation of the Americas, at first for commercial reasons and later to create a refuge for persecuted English Catholics. In 1625 he resigned all of his political offices in 1625 except for his position on the Privy Council and declared his Catholicism publicly. He was created Baron Baltimore in the Peerage of Ireland upon his resignation.

About George Calvert, 1st Baron Baltimore in brief

George Calvert, 1st Baron Baltimore, was an English politician and coloniser. He achieved domestic political success as a member of parliament and later Secretary of State under King James I. Calvert took an interest in the British colonisation of the Americas, at first for commercial reasons and later to create a refuge for persecuted English Catholics. He became the proprietor of Avalon, the first sustained English settlement on the southeastern peninsula on the island of Newfoundland. In 1625 he resigned all of his political offices in 1625 except for his position on the Privy Council and declared his Catholicism publicly. He was created Baron Baltimore in the Peerage of Ireland upon his resignation. He died five weeks before the new Charter was sealed, leaving the settlement of the Maryland colony to his son Cecil. His second son Leonard Calvert was the first colonial governor of the Province of Maryland. The Calvert household suffered the intrusion of the Elizabethan-era religious laws. George Calvert was born at Kiplin in late 1579. His mother AliciaAlice died on 28 November 1587, when he was eight years old. In 1592, when George was twelve, the authorities denounced one of his tutors for teaching “from a popish primer” and instructed Leonard and Grace to send George and his brother Christopher to a Protestant tutor. As the oath of allegiance was compulsory after the age of sixteen, he would almost certainly have pledged conformity while at Oxford. After Oxford, he moved in 1598 to London, where he studied municipal law at Lincoln’s Inn for three years.

In November 1604 he married Anne Anne Mynne, a non-communicant, and they had three children. The same pattern of conformity continued through Calvert’s early life, whether pretended or sincere, whether he pretended or not. He went on to become a barrister and later a judge. His son Cecil Calvert became the first British colonial governor in Maryland. His daughter Anne Anne Calvert later became a judge in the United States. She was married to a Catholic, and the couple had two children, one of whom was a son-in-law to the Archbishop of Canterbury, William Eustace. The couple had a daughter, Anne Anne, who died in 1803. The family moved to Yorkshire and lived on the estate of the later-built Kiplin Hall, near Catterick in Yorkshire. George’s father, Leonard, was a country gentleman who had achieved some prominence as a tenant of Lord Wharton, and was wealthy enough to marry a “gentlewoman” of a noble line, Alicia or Alice Crossland. He established his family on the Estate of Kiplin. In the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, the Royal Government exerted authority over the matters of religious faith, practices and the Church. Acts mandating compulsory religious uniformity were enacted by Parliament and enforced through penal laws. The Acts of Supremacy and the Uniformity Act of 1559 also included an Oath of allegiance to the Queen and an implicit denial of the Pope’s authority.

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