George Calvert, 1st Baron Baltimore
George Calvert, 1st Baron Baltimore | |
|---|---|
 The Lord Baltimore | |
| Secretary of State | |
| In office 1619–1625 | |
| Proprietor of the Avalon Colony | |
| In office 1620–1632 | |
| Personal details | |
| Born | c. 1580 Kiplin, Richmondshire |
| Died | 15 April, 1632 Baltimore Hall, County Longford |
| Height | 300px |
George Calvert, 1st Baron Baltimore (c. 1580 – 15 April, 1632) 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, though he lost much of his political power after his support for a failed marriage alliance between Prince Charles and the Spanish royal family. Rather than continuing in politics, he declared his Catholicism publicly in 1825 and resigned his political offices, though he was granted the title of the 1st Baron Baltimore upon his retirement.
Calvert took an interest in the colonization of the new world, partly as a result of his conversion to Catholicism and his ensuing interest in creating a refuge for English Catholics. He became the proprietor of the first succesful English settlement on the island of Newfoundland, Avalon. Dismayed by the conditions of the Newfoundland settlers, his dreams took him south along the coast, and he eventually sought a new royal charter to settle the region that was to become the state of Maryland. Two months before the charter was granted, Calvert passed away, and the settlement of the Maryland colony was left to his son, Cecilius Calvert.
Early life and political success
Little is known of the extraction of the Yorkshire Calverts, although upon George's knighting the claim would be made that his family derived originally from Flanders.[1] Calvert's father Leonard was a country gentleman comfortable enough to take a gentlewoman, Alicia Crossland, for a wife and to establish his family on the estate of Kiplin near Catterick in Richmondshire.[2] George Calvert was born around 1580 at Kiplin and was later educated as a commoner at Trinity College, Oxford, receiving his bachelor's degree in 1597.Cite error: A <ref> tag is missing the closing </ref> (see the help page).
There followed a busy few years for Calvert. In 1604, he was married to his first wife, Anne Mynne.[3] The following year, he received a master's degree from Oxford in the midst of an elaborate ceremony where the Duke of Lennox, the Earls of Oxford and Northumberland, and Sir Cecil were also receiving degrees.[3] In 1606, Anne gave birth to their first son, Cecilius, named for Sir Cecil.[3][4] That same year, he became private secretary to Cecil, and was soon after made Clerk of the Crown and of Assize in County Clare, Ireland.[3]
With Cecil's support, Calvert came into his own as an advisor and supporter of King James, being appointed an ambassador to the French court during the coronation of Louis XIII in 1610.[5] By 1612, Calvert's star had risen enough in the King's eye that the death of Sir Cecil did no harm to his political career, and he was made a Clerk of the Privy Council in 1613.[6] In his new position, Calvert was assigned by the King to go to Ireland and review the results of English policies there, the failures of which Calvert blamed on the Jesuits.[5] Calvert was knighted in 1617 for his service to the King and only two years later he completed his remarkable rise to power when he was appointed one of two Secretaries of State, a position similar to the modern role of Prime Minister.[7][4]
Titles were not enough to maintain the residence of a powerful English politician, but Calvert's personal fortune was secured when he was appointed to yet another role in government, this attached to a £1,000 pension and a subsidy of raw silk, the latter of which would later be converted to an additional £1,000 pension.[8] Meanwhile, a political crisis was developing around the question of who the Prince of Wales, who would become King Charles I, was to marry.[8] Calvert, who at the time held a seat in Parliament representing Yorkshire, supported the King's interest in an alliance with the now declining power of Spain against the majority of Parliament who wanted to assure a protestant succession.[9] As a reward for his loyalty, Calvert was granted a 2,300 acre estate in County Longford, Ireland, though this triumph was outwieghed somewhat by the death of his wife Anne the following year.[10] Her death on August 8, 1622, left Calvert as the single father of ten children, the oldest of whom, Cecilius, was only 16 years old.[10]
Calvert had, however, reached the apex of his political career. Much of his reputation had been staked on the success of a marriage alliance with the Spanish royal family, which failed upon the empty-handed return of Prince Charles from Spain.[11] The King finally caved to popular support for a French match, and Calvert very quickly fell out of favor.[12] Whether as a way to save face upon exiting the political arena or due to a true turn of faith, Calvert in 1624 or 1625 claimed to be a convert to Catholicism and resigned from his Secretaryship.[13][4] The King, who had suddenly remembered his fondness of Calvert, raised him to the peerage in Ireland as the 1st Baron Baltimore of Baltimore Manor in County Longford.[13] Just a few weeks later, King James died, but the newly crowned King Charles maintained Calvert's Baronet and his honored place on the Privy Council.[14][15]
The colony in Newfoundland
Calvert had long maintained an interest in the exploration and settlement of the new world, beginning with his participation in the second Virginia Company in 1609 and his later participation in the New England Company in 1622.[16] In 1620, Calvert purchased a tract of land in Newfoundland from one Sir William Vaughan and named it Avalon after the mythical legendary spot where Christianity was introduced to Britain.[17] The plantation lay between the modern towns of Fermeuse and Aquaforte on what is now known as the Avalon Peninsula.[15] In 1621, Calvert sent Captain Edward Wynne and a group of Welsh colonists to found a settlement, and received good reports from them concerning the local fisheries and the success of the saltworks, the latter of which were necessary to preserve fish for export.[17] Seeking greater control over the settlement, Calvert was granted a Royal Charter in 1622 for the entirety of Newfoundland, though this land grant was reduced in 1623.[18] The final charter made the province a palatinate under Calvert's rule named the Province of Avalon and which stretched across much of the Avalon Peninsula.[18]Cite error: A <ref> tag is missing the closing </ref> (see the help page). He first arrived in July of 1627 and stayed for only two months before returning to Europe.[19] The land he saw there was not the paradise that had been described by some early settlers, but was a marginally productive rocky island that had, unknown of course to Baltimore, been too difficult for even Viking settlers from Greenland to stay.[20] In 1628 he returned with his new wife, his children, and 40 more settlers to take over as Proprietary Governor of Avalon from his agent.[21][22]
Baltimore soon became disenchanted by conditions in the settlement, and wrote to his old acquaintances in England of his troubles.[23] Among those torubles were the depradations of French cruisers who regularly attacked English settlements and the smaller fishing stations scattered along the Newfoundland coast.[24][22] Trying to defend his lands, Baltimore sent two ships, the Ark and the Dove, against one French raider.[25] He also suffered the insults of a Puritan minister named Stourton who went to the Privy Council to accuse Baltimore of harboring the practice of Catholicism, though the Council dismissed the charges[26][22] Soon after, he was deprived of his wife's company as she fled south to Virginia.[27] Further, the winter of 1628-1629 was a disaster, and like many early settlers the residents of Avalon suffered terribly from cold and malnutrition.[27][22]
Attempt to found a mid-Atlantic colony
In response to what he saw as the failure of the Avalon settlement, Baltimore wrote King Charles to complain of his depradations at the hands of the French and mother nature and request a new charter further to the south.[28] Before he received a response from the King, he sailed south to the Virginia colony in search of new and fertile lands to settle on.[29] Arriving in Jamestown in October of 1629, Baltimore did not receive a very warm welcome from the Virginians, who suspected that he was interested in assuming control over some of their territory and vehemently opposed Catholicism.[29][30] The Virginians happened upon a cunning way to force him out; they asked him to take the Oath of Supremacy swearing fealty to the King of England as the supreme ecclesiatical power, an oath which he could not take as a good Catholic.[29][31] But the Virginian suspicions were unfounded in any case, for Baltimore's interest lay in creating an entirely new colony but in creating a colony which would be a haven for English Catholics who may have felt persecuted in England or in the other colonies.[32][33] Spurned by Virginia, he returned to England, unaccountably leaving his wife and children in Jamestown to follow him later.[34]
His health declining, Baltimore continued to pursue his dream of a Catholic colony in the new world at the opening of the 1630's.[35] The King first granted him a spot south of Jamestown, but in response to opposition from other investors interested in turning the new land of Carolina into a sugar plantation, Baltimore asked the King to reconsider.[36] He was instead granted the lands to either side of the Chesapeake Bay including the western shore as far south as the Potomac River and the entirety of the eastern shore.[18] Tragically, before the grant could become official, Baltimore's health gave out, and he died on April 15th, 1632.[37] Cecilius inherited all estates, the title of Lord Baltimore, and received the grant of Maryland in his stead.[37][38] Perhaps more importantly, he left to his sons Cecilius, Leonard, and George the dream of a Catholic refuge along the shores of the Chesapeake Bay.
Legacy
Baltimore's two colonies in the new world continued under the proprietorship of his family.[39] Avalon, which remained a prime spot for the salting and export of fish, was finally absorbed into Newfoundland in 1754.[40] Maryland, as the colony along the shores of the Chesapeake would come to be called, would become a prime tobacco exporting colony in the mid-Atlantic. It would also, for a time, become just the refuge for Catholic settlers that George Calvert had hoped.[41] Under the rule of the Lords Baltimore, thousands of British Catholics emigrated to the tobacco plantations of Maryland and established some of the oldest Catholic communities in what would become the United States.[41] Although Catholic rule in Maryland was eventually nullified by the re-assertion of royal control over the colony, only a few decades following that event Maryland joined twelve other British colonies along the Atlantic coast in declaring their independence from British rule and the right to freedom of religion of all citizens of the new United States.[42]
Notes
- ^ Browne, Page 2
- ^ Browne, Page 3
- ^ a b c d Browne, Page 4
- ^ a b c Fiske, Page 255
- ^ a b Browne, Page 5
- ^ Browne, Pages 4-5
- ^ Browne, Page 6
- ^ a b Browne, Page 8
- ^ Browne, Pages 8-10
- ^ a b Browne, Page 11
- ^ Browne, Pages 11-12
- ^ Browne, Page 12
- ^ a b Browne, Page 13
- ^ Browne, Page 14
- ^ a b Fiske, page 256
- ^ Browne, Page 15
- ^ a b Browne, Page 16
- ^ a b c Browne, Page 17
- ^ Browne, Page 18
- ^ Browne, Page 18-19
- ^ Browne, Page 19
- ^ a b c d Fiske, page 261
- ^ Browne, Pages 19-20
- ^ Browne, Page 20
- ^ Browne, Page 23
- ^ Browne, Page 23-24
- ^ a b Browne, Page 24
- ^ Browne, Page 24-25
- ^ a b c Browne, Page 27
- ^ Fiske, page 263
- ^ Fiske, page 264
- ^ Browne, Pages 27-28
- ^ Fiske, pages 263-264
- ^ Browne, Page 28
- ^ Browne, Page 30
- ^ Fiske, page 265
- ^ a b Browne, Page 31
- ^ Fiske, pages 265-266
- ^ Browne, Page 31-32
- ^ Browne, Page 32
- ^ a b Hennesey, 36-45
- ^ Hennesey, 55-68
References
- Browne, William Hand (1890). George Calvert and Cecilius Calvert: Barons Baltimore of Baltimore. New York: Dodd, Mead, and Company.
- Fiske, John (1897). Old Virginia and Her Neighbors. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
- Hennesey, James (1981). American Catholics: A History of the Roman Catholic Community in the United States. Oxford University Press. [ISBN 0195032683]
See also
External links
- Government House The Governorship of Newfoundland and Labrador
- Biography at the Dictionary of Canadian Biography Online
- Kiplin Hall, Yorkshire
| Proprietary Governors (1610–1660) | |
|---|---|
| French Governors of Plaisance (1655–1713) | |
| Lieutenant-governors of Placentia (1713–1770) | |
| Commodore-Governors (1729–1825) |
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| Civil Governors (1825–1855) | |
| Colonial Governors (1855–1907) | |
| Dominion Governors (1907–1934) | |
| Commission Governors (1934–1949) | |
| Lieutenant Governors (1949–present) | |
