Boundaries

The Calvert family was very familiar with boundaries and their restrictions. Even before his birth, in 1579, religious boundaries controlled George Calvert’s life. His parents, Leonard and Alicia, were Roman Catholics. For them, worshipping publicly in England was illegal. As a little boy, George Calvert saw the Protestant authorities of Yorkshire force his father to conform to the Anglican Church. Had he refused, government jobs would have been closed to him and English society would have ostracized his family. He could even have faced imprisonment. Four years after his mother’s death, George Calvert watched the same authorities similarly pressure his stepmother, who did refuse to conform. In reprisal, the authorities ordered Leonard to send twelve-year-old George and his younger brother, Christopher, to a village miles away from home, where a Protestant tutor would educate them.

When he was a teenager, George Calvert was, as his father had been, ordered to conform to the Anglican Church. The pressure was intense. If George failed to cross this religious boundary, certain futures would become impossible. He could never attend university — that was forbidden to Catholics. Nor could he hold a government job. Yet English society expected a boy with the Calvert family’s status to do both. George understood that, like his father, he had little choice. He complied and attended Anglican services. He never spoke publicly about how this made him feel.

IN THE EARLY PART of the sixteenth century, the Roman Catholic Church festered with dissension about religious beliefs and practices. A group called Protestants split from the Roman Catholic Church and established Protestant denominations. For political and personal reasons, England’s King Henry VIII renounced the Catholic Church and in 1534 established the Protestant Anglican Church — also called the Church of England — as the country’s official church. Religious and political matters were not separated. English Protestants believed a person could be a loyal British subject only if he or she was a member of the Anglican Church. According to them, Catholics, such as the Calverts, placed loyalty to their religious leader, the pope, above loyalty to England. As a result, most Protestants regarded Catholics with mistrust and suspicion. Just ten years before George Calvert was born, one Englishman described the Calverts’ predominantly Catholic neighborhood in Yorkshire as “evil in religion.”

George Calvert graduated from Oxford University, studied law in London, and began his political career in 1603 as the private secretary to Sir Robert Cecil, secretary of state to King James I. The following year, George married Anne Mynne, and a year later, their son Cecil was born. He and the many siblings who followed were all baptized into the Anglican Church.

As a discreet, skilled diplomat, Calvert quickly earned King James’s respect. He was knighted in 1617 and two years later was named one of England’s two secretaries of state. He bought a country estate in Yorkshire and planned the construction of his home there, Kiplin Hall. In 1621, Calvert thought beyond English boundaries and bought land in the New World, in Newfoundland, today a province of Canada. He expected that business ventures importing fish, timber, and other natural resources from Newfoundland would further enrich him and raise the Calvert family’s status.

Kiplin Hall, George Calvert’s country house, reflected his increasing power and wealth.

George Calvert and other Englishmen weren’t alone in purchasing land in the New World. French explorers had navigated the Saint Lawrence River. Spain and Portugal had established settlements in the Caribbean and Mexico in the fifteenth century. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Spanish and Portuguese slave traders took African captives to the New World. In August 1619 — the same year George Calvert became a secretary of state — the first Africans arrived in the Virginia colony, in America, when two planters traded food supplies for the “20. and odd Negroes” on board Captain Jope’s ship the White Lion. But in 1620, when George Calvert purchased his Newfoundland property, people living in Virginia were not on his mind.

Juggling business ventures, construction, and politics consumed all Calvert’s time. In London, he was King James’s advocate for a political alliance called the Spanish Match. The king sought a political advantage by having his son, Prince Charles, marry the youngest daughter of Spain’s king Philip III. But King Philip and his family were Catholics. Fearing that this connection to Catholicism might threaten Anglican boundaries and influence British policies, the Spanish Match was highly unpopular with Parliament, England’s governing body.

In August 1622, tragedy struck the Calvert family: Anne died in childbirth. Losing Anne, who was “the dear companion and only comfort” of his life, devastated George. Yet his ten children needed love and care; he had no choice but to carry on.

The alabaster sculpture on the tomb of Anne Mynne Calvert, the first Lady Baltimore, is a richly detailed likeness of her. She died giving birth to her eleventh child, who also died.

The following year, when King James granted him a royal charter for a large tract of land in Newfoundland, Calvert’s ambitions grew. A royal charter gives certain rights and privileges to a person or a company. The charter granted Calvert the right to establish his own colony, the Province of Avalon. As Avalon’s lord proprietor, Calvert swore allegiance to the king but had the power to rule his colony independently — to set his own boundaries. Even as Calvert received the Avalon charter, he lost favor with Parliament over the Spanish Match and his friendship with Spanish Catholics. In February 1625, he resigned his position as secretary of state.

And then, making no public explanation, George Calvert converted back to Catholicism. His decision shocked his former colleagues. Yet King James did not withdraw his personal support. He publicly acknowledged his continuing regard for Calvert by granting him a manor in Ireland and the title Lord Baltimore. After King James’s death, in March 1625, his son, King Charles I, acceded to parliamentary pressure and approved increasingly anti-Catholic policies. This may be why Calvert soon moved his family to Ireland, which was predominantly Catholic.

Good reports from his agents in Newfoundland convinced Calvert that his family’s future was in the New World. In Avalon, he would make money, enriching his family, the king, and England. But Calvert sought more than riches and power. He wanted to change the boundary between politics and religion. He intended to prove to Protestant doubters that a Roman Catholic could also be a loyal British subject.

In June 1627, when the Calverts visited Avalon, they found the colony deserted. George’s agents had lied about the colony’s progress and left. Still, Calvert remained hopeful that the colony would be successful, particularly if he assumed on-site control. He also pushed England’s religious boundary with a daring move: he let the Catholic priests who accompanied him to Avalon hold Mass in one end of his house while allowing Protestants to hold services in the other. This never would have been permitted in England. In Avalon, however, Calvert had the authority to do so.

Calvert moved his family to Avalon permanently in 1628. Twenty-three-year-old Cecil, George’s oldest son and heir, remained in England with his bride, Anne Arundell. While the rest of the family struggled in Avalon, Cecil managed the family’s English properties and, in his own right, gained the respect of King Charles I and other members of government.

Despite George’s hard work and high hopes, Avalon did not live up to his dreams. In a letter to King Charles, he wrote despairingly of the winter of 1628 to 1629: “from the middst of October to the middst of May there is a sadd face of wynter upon all this land. . . . My house hath beene an hospital all this wynter . . . of 100 persons, 50 [are] sick at a tyme, my self being one and nyne or ten of them dyed.”

Unwavering in his dream of a New World colony, Calvert ended his letter, “I am determined . . . to remove my self with some 40 persons to your Majesty’s dominion of Virginia, where if your Majesty will please to grant me a precinct of land with such privileges as the King your father my gracious master was pleased to grant me here [in Newfoundland], I shall endevor to the utmost of my power to deserve it.”

In the seventeenth century, smoking was the new rage in England. By the time the Calverts arrived in Virginia, in September 1629, English planters in the Virginia colony were already growing tobacco — a New World plant as profitable as gold.

George Calvert liked what he saw as he sailed toward Chesapeake Bay. By October 1629, he was on his way to England to persuade King Charles I to grant him a second royal charter, this time for a colony on Chesapeake Bay. In establishing this colony, though, Calvert had even more ambitious boundaries in mind. In his new colony, religion and politics would be separate.

For three years, George Calvert, his son Cecil, and influential government friends meticulously crafted and negotiated the terms of Calvert’s colonial charter with King Charles I. Recognizing the benefits — goods from Calvert’s colony would fatten not only England’s purse but also his own — King Charles I approved. He declared George Calvert, Lord Baltimore, the colony’s lord proprietor. This meant that when George died, his heirs would inherit the title and the colony. By the spring of 1632, the charter for the Province of Maryland — named in honor of King Charles’s wife, Queen Henrietta Maria — needed only final approval and official seals. There was one major difference between the charters for Avalon and Maryland: the stated intent to bring Christianity to the Indians living there. Ironically, even as Calvert removed a religious boundary and granted religious freedom to his colonists, he was required to convert the local native people to the Christian faith.

And then, with his colonial dream on the verge of reality, George Calvert fell seriously ill. He died on April 15, 1632, before the charter was passed. Achieving George’s dream of a Maryland colony was left to his son Cecil, who became the second Lord Baltimore upon his father’s death.