Cecilius Calvert 2d Baron Baltimore

Baltimore, George Calvert, 1st Lord (c.1580–1632). Royal servant, MP, and secretary of state from 1619 to 1625, Calvert relinquished office when he openly declared his conversion to catholicism. He shared with his catholic father-in-law, Lord Arundell of Wardour, a wish for an American lordship, beginning a settlement at Ferryland, in his short-lived Province of Avalon, in Newfoundland. Calvert, who visited the Chesapeake, obtained from Charles I in 1632 proprietary rights to land carved out of Virginia north of the Potomac. The Maryland (named after Charles I's catholic wife) charter gave the Baltimore family palatinate powers of government and has been characterized as representing Charles's ‘idealized picture of a restored monarchical authority in England’. Calvert died in 1632; his sons, Cecilius, the second baron, and Leonard, the first governor, introduced religious toleration in order to encourage Roman catholic settlement but protestants later became numerous and dominant.

Richard C. Simmons

Cecilius Calvert, 2d Baron Baltimore , c.1605-75, first proprietor of the colony of Maryland . He received the province in 1632 as a grant from the king, in place of his father, George Calvert, who died as the charter was being issued. Cecilius Calvert never visited the province himself, but governed it by deputies until his death, his last deputy being his only son, Charles Calvert, who succeeded to his title.

Bibliography: See W. H. Browne, George Calvert and Cecilius Calvert (1890); C. C. Hall, The Lords Baltimore and the Maryland Palatinate (1902).

Cecilius Calvert Baltimore, 2d Baron see Calvert, Cecilius .