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The Maryland Toleration Act, also known as the Act Concerning Religion, was the first law in North America requiring religious tolerance for Christians. It was passed on April 21, 1649, by the assembly of the Maryland colony, in St. Mary's City in St. Mary's County, Maryland. It created one of the pioneer statutes passed by the legislative body of an organized colonial government to guarantee any degree of religious liberty. Specifically, the bill, now usually referred to as the Toleration Act, granted freedom of conscience to all Christians. Historians argue that it helped inspire later legal protections for freedom of religion in the United States. The Calvert family, who founded Maryland partly as a refuge for English Catholics, sought enactment of the law to protect Catholic settlers and those of other religions that did not conform to the dominant Anglicanism of Britain and her colonies.
Cecil Calvert, 2nd Baron Baltimore was an English politician, peer and lawyer who was the first proprietor of Maryland. Born in Kent in 1605, he inherited the proprietorship after the death of his father, George Calvert, 1st Baron Baltimore, for whom it had been intended. Calvert proceeded to establish and manage the Province of Maryland as a proprietary colony for English Catholics from his English country house of Kiplin Hall in North Yorkshire.
Baron Baltimore, of Baltimore, County Longford, was a title in the Peerage of Ireland. It was created in 1625 and ended in 1771, upon the death of its sixth-generation male heir, aged 40. Holders of the title were usually known as Lord Baltimore for short.
St. Mary's City is a former colonial town that was founded in March 1634, as Maryland's first European settlement and capital. It is now a state-run historic area, which includes a reconstruction of the original colonial settlement and a designated living history venue and museum complex. Half the area is occupied by the campus of St. Mary's College of Maryland. The entire area contains a community of about 933 permanent residents and some 1,400 students living in campus dorms and apartments.
The Province of Maryland was an English and later British colony in North America from 1634 until 1776, when the province was one of the Thirteen Colonies that joined in supporting the American Revolution against Great Britain. In 1781, Maryland was the 13th signatory to the Articles of Confederation. The province's first settlement and capital was in St. Mary's City, located at the southern end of St. Mary's County, a peninsula in the Chesapeake Bay bordered by four tidal rivers.
George Calvert, 1st Baron Baltimore 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.
Charles Calvert, 3rd Baron Baltimore was an English peer and colonial administrator. He inherited the province of Maryland in 1675 upon the death of his father, Cecil Calvert, 2nd Baron Baltimore. He had been his father's Deputy Governor since 1661 when he arrived in the colony at the age of 24. However, Charles left Maryland for England in 1684 and would never return. The events following the Glorious Revolution in England in 1688 would cost Calvert his title to Maryland; in 1689 the royal charter to the colony was withdrawn, leading to direct rule by the British Crown. Calvert's political problems were largely caused by his Roman Catholic faith which was at odds with the established Church of England.
Benedict Leonard Calvert, 4th Baron Baltimore was an English peer and politician. He was the second son of Charles Calvert, 3rd Baron Baltimore (1637–1715) by Jane Lowe, and became his father's heir upon the death of his elder brother Cecil in 1681. The 3rd Lord Baltimore was a devout Roman Catholic, and had lost his title to the Province of Maryland shortly after the events of the Glorious Revolution in 1688, when the Protestant monarchs William III and Mary II acceded to the British throne. Benedict Calvert made strenuous attempts to have his family's title to Maryland restored by renouncing Roman Catholicism and joining the Church of England.
Charles Calvert, 5th Baron Baltimore, was a British nobleman and Proprietary Governor of the Province of Maryland. He inherited the title to Maryland aged just fifteen, on the death of his father and grandfather, when the colony was restored by the British monarchy to the Calvert family's control, following its seizure in 1688. In 1721 Charles came of age and assumed personal control of Maryland, travelling there briefly in 1732. For most of his life, he remained in England, where he pursued an active career in politics, rising to become Lord of the Admiralty from 1742 to 1744. He died in 1751 in England, aged 52.
Leonard Calvert was the first proprietary governor of the Province of Maryland. He was the second son of The 1st Baron Baltimore (1579–1632), the first proprietor of Maryland. His younger brother Cecil (1605–1675), who inherited the colony and the title upon the death of their father George, April 15, 1632, appointed Leonard as governor of the Colony in his absence.
Maryland Day is a legal holiday in the U.S. state of Maryland. It is observed on the anniversary of the March 25, 1634, landing of the first European settlers in the Province of Maryland, the third English colony to be settled in British North America. On this day settlers from The Ark and The Dove first set foot onto Maryland soil, at St. Clement's Island in the Potomac River. The settlers were about 150 in number, departed from Gravesend on the Thames River downstream from London. Three Jesuit priests were collected from Cowes on the Isle of Wight in England where they avoided having to give the oath of allegiance and supremacy to the King. The colony's grant was renewed to Cecil Calvert, 2nd Baron Baltimore, (1605-1675), two years prior by Charles I of England, after first being given to his father Sir George Calvert, 1st Baron Baltimore, (1574-1632), along with the title of "Lord Baltimore", and a first grant of the Province of Avalon, in the Newfoundland Colony,, who had served the King in many official and personal capacities as Secretary of State, 1619-1625. In thanksgiving for the safe landing, Jesuit Father Andrew White celebrated the Mass for the colonists led by the younger brother of Lord Baltimore, Leonard Calvert, (1606-1647), who served as the first governor, and perhaps for the first time ever in this part of the world on the first landing at Blackistone Island, later known as St. Clement's Island off the northern shore of the Potomac River, which was the new border between the new colony and the earlier English settlements in Virginia) and erected a large cross. The landing coincided with the Feast of the Annunciation, a holy day honoring Mary, and the start of the new year in England's legal calendar. Maryland Day on 25 March celebrates the 1634 landing at St Clements. Later the colonists and their two ships sailed further back down river to the southeast to settle a capital at St. Mary's City near the point where the Potomac flows into the Chesapeake Bay.
Anne Calvert, Baroness Baltimore was an English noblewoman, the daughter of Thomas Arundell, 1st Baron Arundell of Wardour by his second wife Anne Philipson, and wife of Cecil Calvert, 2nd Baron Baltimore, who founded the Province of Maryland in 1634. She was also the namesake of Anne Arundel County, Maryland, and the US Navy transport ship USS Anne Arundel, that was named after the county.
Margaret Brent, was an English immigrant to the Colony of Maryland, settled in its new capitol, St. Mary's City, Maryland. She was the first woman in the English North American colonies to appear before a court of the common law. She was a significant founding settler in the early histories of the colonies of Maryland and Virginia. Leonard Calvert, Governor of the Maryland Colony, appointed her as the executrix of his estate in 1647, at a time of political turmoil and risk to the future of the settlement. She helped ensure soldiers were paid and given food to keep their loyalty to the colony, thereby very likely having saved the colony from violent mutiny, although her actions were taken negatively by the absentee colonial proprietor in England, Cecil Calvert, the second Lord Baltimore, and so ultimately she paid a great price for her efforts and was forced to leave the colony.
Josias Fendall(c. 1628 – c. 1687) was an English colonial administrator who served as the Proprietary Governor of Maryland. He was born in England, and came to the Province of Maryland. He was the progenitor of the Fendall family in America.
Robert Brooke Sr. (1602–1655) was a Colonial Governor of Maryland for several months in 1652. He is also the grandfather of later colonial Governor of Maryland Thomas Brooke Jr.
Richard Bennett was an English planter and Governor of the Colony of Virginia, serving 1652–1655. He had first come to the Virginia colony in 1629 to represent his merchant uncle Edward Bennett's business, managing his plantation known as Bennett's Welcome in Warrascoyack. Two decades later, Bennett immigrated to the Maryland colony with his family, and settled on the Severn River in Anne Arundel County.
The Battle of the Severn was a skirmish fought on March 25, 1655, on the Severn River at Horn Point, across Spa Creek from Annapolis, Maryland, in what at that time was referred to as the Puritan settlement of "Providence", and what is now the neighborhood of Eastport. It was an extension of the conflicts that formed the English Civil War, pitting the forces of Puritan settlers against forces aligned with Lord Baltimore, then Lord Proprietor of the colony of Maryland. It has been suggested by Radmila May that this was the "last battle of the English Civil War."
Colonel Edward Hill was a Virginia planter, soldier and politician. In addition to representing Charles City County for many terms in the House of Burgesses, fellow members three times selected him as its Speaker, and he sat in the Virginia General Assembly's upper house, the Virginia Governor's Council in 1651 as well as from 1660 to 1663. Burgesses also sent Hill to Maryland to put down Richard Ingle's 1646 rebellion, and he acted as the colony's temporary governor before ceding to the proper governor, Leonard Calvert, but later contested nonpayment of monies promised to him and Virginia militia troops for that action. Col. Hill also led the Charles County and Henrico County militia and Pamunkey Native Americans against other tribes in Hanover County in 1656, with less success.
Philip Darnall, was an English barrister. His son Henry Darnall, (1645–1711), emigrated to North America, where he became the Proprietary Agent of George Calvert, the first Lord Baltimore, (1579–1632), and George Calvert's son, Cecilius Calvert, second Lord Baltimore, (1605–1675) and the founder of Maryland.
The Ark was a 400-ton English merchant ship hired in 1633 by Cecil Calvert, 2nd Baron Baltimore to bring roughly 140 English colonists and their equipment and supplies to the new colony and Province of Maryland, one of the original Thirteen Colonies of British North America on the Atlantic Ocean eastern seaboard. On the historic trans-oceanic voyage from England in late 1633 and early 1634, The Ark was accompanied by the smaller 40-ton pinnace Dove.
References
- 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 Transactions of the Annual Meeting of the Maryland State Bar Association, vol. 2. Maryland State Bar Association. 1897. p. 29.
- 1 2 3 4 5 6 "Archives of Maryland (Biographical Series) John Lewger (1602–1665)". Maryland State Archives. Retrieved 24 October 2014.
- 1 2 3 4 "John Lewger (1602–1665)". Historic St. Mary's City. Historic St. Mary’s City. Retrieved 24 October 2014.
- ↑ Mullett, Michael. "Lewgar, John". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online ed.). Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/16563.(Subscription or UK public library membership required.)
