George Calvert, 1st Baron Baltimore
George Calvert, 1st Baron Baltimore was an English politician. He achieved domestic political success as a member of parliament and later Secretary of State under King James I. He lost much of his political power after his support for a failed marriage alliance between Prince Charles and the Spanish House of Habsburg royal family. Rather than continue in politics, 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. Baltimore Manor was located in County Longford, Ireland.
Calvert took an interest in the British colonization of the Americas, at first for commercial reasons and later to create a refuge for persecuted Irish and English Catholics. He became the proprietor of Avalon, the first sustained English settlement on the southeastern peninsula on the island of Newfoundland. Discouraged by its cold and sometimes inhospitable climate and the sufferings of the settlers, he looked for a more suitable spot further south and sought a new royal charter to settle the region, which would become the state of Maryland. Calvert 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.
Family and early life
Little is known of the ancestry of the Yorkshire branch of the Calverts. At George Calvert's knighting, it was claimed that his family originally came from Flanders. Calvert's father, Leonard of Yorkshire, 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. Leonard established his family on the estate of the later-built Kiplin Hall, near Catterick in Yorkshire. George Calvert was born at Kiplin in late 1579. His mother Alicia/Alice died on 28 November 1587, when he was eight years old. His father then married Grace Crossland, Alicia's first cousin.In 1569, Sir Thomas Gargrave had described Richmond as a territory where all gentlemen were "evil in religion", by which he meant predominately Roman Catholic; it appears Leonard Calvert was no exception. During the reign of Elizabeth I, continuing the changes wrought earlier in the century by her father Henry VIII which made the monarch the supreme authority of the Christian Church in England, continuing the Protestant Reformation from the continent of Europe, with the political, spiritual and temporal separation from the Roman Catholic Church and the Pope/Papacy in Rome, 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 over the English Church. This oath was required of any subject who wished to hold high office, attend university, or take advantage of opportunities controlled by the state.
The Calvert household suffered the intrusion of the Elizabethan-era religious laws. From the year of George's birth onward, his father, Leonard Calvert, was subjected to repeated harassment by the Yorkshire authorities, who in 1580 extracted a promise of conformity from him, compelling his attendance at the Church of England services. 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 and, if necessary, to present the children before the commission "once a month to see how they perfect in learning". As a result, the boys were sent to a Protestant tutor called Fowberry at Bilton. The senior Calvert had to give a "bond of conformity"; he was banned from employing any Catholic servants and forced to purchase an English Bible, which was to "lie open in his house for everyone to read".
In 1593, records show that Grace Calvert was committed to the custody of a "pursuivant", an official responsible for identifying and persecuting Catholics, and in 1604 she was described as the "wife of Leonard Calvert of Kipling, non-communicant at Easter last".
George Calvert went up to Trinity College at Oxford University, matriculating in 1593/94, where he studied foreign languages and received a bachelor's degree in 1597. As the oath of allegiance was compulsory after the age of sixteen, he would almost certainly have pledged conformity while at Oxford. The same pattern of conformity, whether pretended or sincere, continued through Calvert's early life. After Oxford, he moved in 1598 to London, where he studied municipal law at Lincoln's Inn for three years.
Marriage and family
In November 1604 he married Anne Mynne, daughter of George Mynne of Hertingfordbury and his wife Elizabeth Wroth, in a Protestant Church of England ceremony at St Peter's, Cornhill, Middlesex, where his address was registered as St Martin in the Fields. His children, including his eldest son and heir Cecil, who was born in the winter of 1605–06, were all baptised in the Church of England. When Anne died on 8 August 1622, she was buried at Calvert's local Protestant parish church, St Martin-in-the-Fields.Calvert had a total of twelve children: Cecil, who succeeded his father as the 2nd Baron Baltimore, Leonard, Anne, Dorothy, Elizabeth, Grace, who married Sir Robert Talbot, 2nd Baronet of Carton, County Kildare, Francis, George, Helen, Henry, John, and Philip.
Political success
Calvert named his son "Cecilius" for Sir Robert Cecil, first Earl of Salisbury, spymaster to Queen Elizabeth, whom Calvert had met during an extended trip to the European mainland between 1601 and 1603, after which he became known as a specialist in foreign affairs. Calvert carried a packet for Cecilius from Paris, and so entered the service of the principal engineer of King James VI of Scotland's succession to the English throne in 1603.King James rewarded Robert Cecil, whom he made a Privy Councillor and secretary of state, with the granting of the title of Earl of Salisbury in 1605 and Lord High Treasurer in 1608, making him the most powerful man at the royal court. As Cecil rose, Calvert rose with him. Calvert's foreign languages, legal training, and discretion made him an invaluable aide to Robert Cecil who, no lover of Catholics, seems to have accepted Calvert's conformity as beyond question. Working at the centre of court politics, Calvert exploited his influence by selling favours, an accepted practice for the times.
Calvert accumulated a number of small offices, honours, and sinecures. In August 1605, he attended the King at Oxford, and received an honorary master-of-arts degree in an elaborate ceremony at which the Duke of Lennox, the earls of Oxford and Northumberland, and Cecilius received degrees. Given the prestige of the other graduates, Calvert's was the last awarded, but his presence in such company signalled his growing stature.
In 1606 the king made Calvert "clerk of the Crown" and "Assizes in Connaught", County Clare, Ireland, his first royal appointment. In 1609, James appointed him a "clerk of the Signet office", a post which required the preparation of documents for the royal signature and brought Calvert into close contact with the king. Calvert also served in James's First Parliament as a member for the borough of Bossiney, in the county of Cornwall, installed there by Cecil to support his policies.
In 1610, Calvert was appointed a "clerk of the Privy Council". Each of these positions would have required an oath of allegiance.
With Robert Cecil's support, George Calvert came into his own as an adviser and supporter of King James. In 1610 and 1611, Calvert undertook missions to the continent on behalf of the King, visiting a number of embassies in Paris, Holland, and the Duchy of Cleves, and acting as an ambassador to the French Royal Court during the coronation of King Louis XIII in 1610. A correspondent from France reported that Calvert gave "everyone great contentment with his discreet conversation."
In 1615, James sent him to the continental Electorate of the Palatinate in the Holy Roman Empire, whose impoverished elector, Frederick V, had married James's daughter Elizabeth in 1613. Calvert had to convey the King's disapproval that Elizabeth, for lack of money, had given away expensive jewels to a gentlewoman leaving her employ. Elector Frederick's decision in 1619 to accept the throne of Bohemia triggered a war with the powerful neighbouring Habsburg dynasty of Austria to the southwest in Vienna, which James attempted to end through a proposed alliance with the Kingdom of Spain.
In 1611, James employed Calvert to research and transcribe his tract against the Dutch Protestant theologian Conrad Vorstius. The following year, Cecil died, and Calvert acted as one of the four executors of his will. The king's favourite, Sir Robert Carr, first Earl of Somerset, Viscount Rochester, assumed the duties of secretary of state and recruited Calvert to assist with foreign policy, in particular the Latin and Spanish correspondence.
Carr, soon raised to the earldom of Somerset, was not a success in the job, and fell from favour partly as a result of the murder of Thomas Overbury, to which Carr's wife Frances, the former Countess of Essex and later Somerset, pleaded guilty in 1615. Carr's place as James's principal favourite was now taken by the handsome George Villiers, 1st Duke of Buckingham, with whom James was said to have been infatuated.
In 1613 the King commissioned Calvert to investigate Roman Catholic grievances in Ireland, along with Sir Humphrey Wynch, Sir Charles Cornwallis and Sir Roger Wilbraham. The commission spent almost four months in Ireland, and its final report, partly drafted by Calvert, concluded that religious conformity should be enforced more strictly in Ireland, Catholic schools be suppressed, and bad priests removed and punished. The King resolved not to reconvene the Parliament of Ireland until the Catholics "shall be better disciplined". In 1616 James endowed Calvert with the manor of Danby Wiske in Yorkshire, which brought him into contact with Sir Thomas Wentworth, 1st Earl of Strafford, who became his closest friend and political ally. Calvert was now wealthy enough to buy the Kiplin Hall estate in his home parish. In 1617 his social status received a further boost when he was knighted, and then became Sir George Calvert.
In 1619, Calvert completed his rise to power when James appointed him as one of the two principal secretaries of state. This followed the dismissal of Sir Thomas Lake due to scandals, including his wife's indiscretions with state secrets. Not emerging as a candidate until the end of the selection process, Calvert's appointment surprised him and most observers. Assuming he owed his promotion to the king's increasingly powerful favourite George Villiers, he sent him a great jewel as a token of thanks. Villiers returned the jewel, saying he had had nothing to do with the matter. Calvert's personal fortune was secured when he was additionally appointed a "commissioner of the treasury" with a pension of £1,000 and a subsidy on imported raw silk, which would later be converted to another £1,000 pension.