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George Calvert, 1st Baron Baltimore (; 1580 – 15 April 1632) was an English peer and 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 (off the eastern coast of modern Canada). 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 (1605–1675). His second son Leonard Calvert (1606–1647) 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 (a Dutch-speaking area today across the English Channel in modern Belgium). Calvert's father, (an earlier) 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 (sometimes spelt "Crosland"). He 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 (sometimes spelt: "Crosland"), 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 Queen Elizabeth I, continuing the changes wrought earlier in the century by her father King 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 (then Pope Paul IV) 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 (king/kingdom). 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 (or Mayne), daughter of George Mynne (b. 14 February 1530) of Hertingfordbury and his wife Elizabeth Wroth, daughter of Sir Thomas Wroth. George Mynne was the son of John Mynne (d.14 December 1542), Auditor of the Exchequer, Clerk to the Surveyor General and Master of the Woods to Henry VIII, and the grandson of Nicholas Mynne of Little Francham and London (d. 1530). George Mynne was also a first cousin of Nicholas Mynn. George Mynne's mother was Alice (d. c. 1560), daughter of William Standish, who married secondly Francis Southwell. The wedding was 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 (died young), and Philip. Political success Calvert named his son "Cecilius" (1605–1675) for Sir Robert Cecil, first Earl of Salisbury (1563–1612), 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 (wh.... Discover the Calvert Long popular books. Find the top 100 most popular Calvert Long books.