Calvert family

Source: Wikipedia. Pages: 44. Chapters: George Calvert, 1st Baron Baltimore, Benedict Swingate Calvert, Charles Calvert, 3rd Baron Baltimore, Belair Mansion, Frederick Calvert, 6th Baron Baltimore, Charles Calvert, 5th Baron Baltimore, Elizabeth Calvert, Cecilius Calvert, 2nd Baron Baltimore, Benedict Calvert, 4th Baron Baltimore, Riversdale, Woodcote Park, Eleanor Calvert, Charlotte Lee, Lady Baltimore, Rosalie Stier Calvert, Benedict Leonard Calvert, Rosaryville State Park, Charles Benedict Calvert, Henry Harford, Anne Arundell, George Henry Calvert, Woodstock, Phillip Calvert, Kiplin Hall. Excerpt: Sir George Calvert, 1st Baron Baltimore, 8th Proprietary Governor of Newfoundland (1579 - 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 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 granted the title of 1st Baron Baltimore in the Irish peerage upon his resignation. Calvert took an interest in the colonisation of the New World, at first for commercial reasons and later to create a refuge for English Catholics. He became the proprietor of Avalon, the first sustained English settlement on the island of Newfoundland. Discouraged by the climate and the sufferings of the settlers there, Calvert looked for a more suitable spot further south and sought a new royal charter to settle the region that was to 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 Cecilius. His son Leonard Calvert was the first colonial governor of Maryland. Historians have long recognized George Calvert as the founder of Maryland, in spirit if not in fact. Little is known of the extraction of the Yorkshire Calverts, although at George Calvert's knighting it was claimed that his family originally came from Flanders. Calvert's father, Leonard, was a country gentleman who had achieved some prominence as a tenant of Philip Lord Wharton, and was wealthy enough to marry a gentlewoman, Alicia or Alice Crossland, and establish his family on the estate of Kiplin, near Catterick in Richmondshire, North Yorkshire. George Calvert was born at Kiplin in late 1579. His mother died on 28 November 1587, when he was eight years old. H