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George Calvert, 1st Baron Baltimore (1579 – 15 April 1631) was an English politician and colonizer. 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 Irish peerage 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 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, Sir George 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. Historians have long recognized George Calvert as the founder of Maryland, in spirit if not in fact, along with the role of Leonard with his intimate relationship with his older brother back in England, plus being on the site as the Colony was first settled as extremely advantageous. ==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-day Kingdom of Belgium).〔Browne, p. 2.〕 Calvert's father, (an earlier) Leonard was a country gentleman who had achieved some prominence as a tenant of Lord Wharton,〔Krugler, p. 28.〕 and was wealthy enough to marry a "gentlewoman" of a noble line, Alicia or Alice Crossland (or sometimes spelled: "Crosland"). He established his family on the estate of the later-built Kiplin Hall, near Catterick in Richmondshire, of Yorkshire.〔Browne, p. 3.〕 George Calvert was born at Kiplin in late 1579 (birth month and day yet to be researched).〔 His mother Alicia/Alice died on 28 November 1587, when he was eight years old. His father then married Grace Crossland (or sometimes spelled: "Crosland"), Alicia's first cousin. In 1569, Sir Thomas Gargrave had described Richmondshire 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 in the previous century by her father, King Henry VIII making the Monarch, the supreme authority of the Christian Church in England, continuing the pace 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, therefore 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.〔Krugler, p. 12–16; From 1571, graduated fines were imposed on anyone attending Mass in the Roman Catholic Church, and generous rewards were offered to informers of the said crime. Middleton, p. 95.〕 The Acts of Supremacy and the Uniformity Act of 1559 also included an oath of allegiance to the Queen (Henrietta Maria, wife of Charles I) and an implicit denial of the Pope's (then Pope Paul IV) authority over the English Church. This oath was required of any common "subject" (synamous for citizen), who wished to hold high office, attend university, or take advantage of opportunities controlled by the state (king/kingdom).〔Krugler, p. 12–16.〕 The Calvert household suffered the intrusion of the Elizabethan-era religious laws. From the year of George's birth onwards, 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.〔Krugler, p. 28–30.〕 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 Mr. 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 "ly 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 to London in 1598, where he studied municipal law at Lincoln's Inn for three years.〔Krugler, p. 30.〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「George Calvert, 1st Baron Baltimore」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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