The Calvert Vision:
A New Model for Church-State Relations

by
John D. Krugler,
Associate professor of history, Marquette University

The struggle to liberate the human mind from governmentally imposed
restraints in religion escalated in seventeenth-century England and Eng-
lish America. The first two Catholic Lords Baltimore, George Calvert (?1580–1632) and his son Cecil Calvert (?1605–1675) challenged existing church-state norms when they established colonies in English North America. They created societies in Avalon and Maryland that guaranteed liberty of conscience to all Christians. Shunning the concept of an established church, they openly embraced pluralism and denied the need for religious uniformity. George and Cecil Calvert believed that their colonists should not be denied political office because of their religion. Only individual abilities and loyalty to the proprietary family, and not religious beliefs, limited the inhabitants’ chances to prosper. The Calverts further rejected the magistrate’s role as the protector of the “true religion.” This left individuals free to create their own religious institutions on a voluntary basis. In a bold experiment that lasted for more than a half-century, the Calverts erected a barrier between religious and civil institutions. They based their model on a vision for a society where religious practices remained private and outside the guardianship or interference of civil authorities. What circumstances led these two English Catholics to embrace such radical concepts and to challenge long-accepted ones? How were they able to pursue their material interests in a malevolent Protestant world and maintain their loyalty to the state while pledging their spiritual allegiance to the pope, a foreign prince?1

George Calvert seems an unlikely person to have challenged some of his culture’s fundamental tenets of church-state relations. He spent the greater part of his life (1603–1625) in government service. His cautious nature, language skills, administrative abilities, lack of financial independence, and willingness to work within the idiosyncratic structure of court politics suited him well for advancement. Knighthood in 1617 and appointment as a secretary of state and a privy councillor in 1619 advanced him beyond his status and exceeded his highest expectations. For more than five years he negotiated the king’s major foreign policy objectives and administered the government from London. His diligence in serving the king notwithstanding, Calvert left no significant imprint as a courtier. Ironically, he made his mark after he resigned from government service.2

Two related developments permitted this to happen. First, Calvert’s unwillingness to reverse his position on the Spanish match (the pending alliance between England and Spain) and his uncordial relationship with the royal favorite, the duke of Buckingham, forced his resignatino as secretary of state. However unwelcome these circumstances were, Calvert negotiated a favorable settlement. He retired without disgrace, a rich man with an Irish title—Baron of Baltimore—and extensive land holdings in England, Ireland, and America. More important, he left on good terms with his many friends in the government. After he resigned as a privy councillor, he had the time, money, and interest to pursue his colonial enterprises. Second, during the crisis that led to his resignation, Calvert resolved a long-standing personal religious controversy by converting to Catholicism. His life illustrates some of the disruptive and contentious characteristics of the English Reformation. Those Catholics who survived, generally members of the nobility and gentry, demonstrated remarkable adroitness in avoiding the full impact of the penal laws.3

The penal legislation defined George Calvert’s life. These laws, which tried to separate the English from the Catholic, doomed Calvert and his descendants to live in two worlds, one English and one Catholic. His childhood provided him with two examples for responding to these laws. One, that of his stepmother, modeled tenacious loyalty to the ancient faith. The other, that of his father, modeled conformity in the face of governmentally imposed prosecution. As a youthful Catholic, George experienced government harassment, followed his father’s example in 1592, and conformed to the state religion. He maintained this outward conformity until he chose to convert to his childhood religion in the fall of 1624. During the remaining years of his life, Baltimore lived openly as a Catholic. His family likewise ended its conformity and remained faithful Catholics for the rest of the century.4

George Calvert’s commitment to Catholicism conspicuously changed his life and that of his family. Why did he end his conformity to the state religion? Simon Stock, a Discalced Priest who reclaimed Calvert for Rome, wrote of the one “whom I here converted to our Holy Faith.” His use of the word convert implies something more that mere recidivism. The lack of a window to peer into Calvert’s soul means that the process by which he became convinced that his salvation lay in the Roman Church must remain unknown, but in making his decision he did not act precipitously. Nor did he act without consideration of his worldly interests. He did not seek martyrdom by identifying with the legally proscribed Catholic minority. Indeed, he did not see that his new religious commitment in any way sullied his loyalty to king and country. Although no longer a secretary of state, he fully expected that his position as a privy councillor would allow him to participate in the government and put him outside the reach of the penal laws. He joined a vibrant, if small, community of influential families whose status and wealth he knew and admired.5

His commitment to the condemned faith did raise questions about secular allegiance. In the seventeenth century, religion was not a separate and distinct category. Religious concerns permeated all aspects of English culture. Most “contemporaries were intellectually unable to separate politics and religion.” From at least the 1570s, Protestants believed that it was “impossible for any one to be at once a good Roman Catholic and a good subject.” They saw English and Catholic as contradictory. By giving their first allegiance to Rome, as Protestants assumed they did, Catholics forfeited their status as English.6

After 1625, the now Catholic Lord Baltimore acted boldly and confidently as an English subject in pursuing his colonial interests. The foundation of his early success was his willingness to accept his situation as a conforming member of the Church of England. The cornerstone of his later success was his willingness to accept his situation as an English Catholic and to make the most of it. Declaring allegiance to Catholicism did not necessarily define him as a conservative or a traditionalist. It neither required that he risk his worldly interests to create a religious haven nor compelled him to implement Catholic thinking or Utopian concepts.7

Beginning in the mid-sixteenth century, a few Englishmen saw the unlimited possibilities in, and risked life and capital to take advantage of, their sovereign’s expanding domain. George Calvert joined a growing but select company of adventurers who saw an opportunity to gain wealth, enhance their status, and enlarge the king’s dominions. He invested in overseas enterprises such as the Virginia and East India Companies for very practical reasons—to assert his national loyalty and to prosper. As his wealth increased, the Protestant Calvert diversified his holdings by purchasing or securing grants for land in Yorkshire, Newfoundland, and Ireland.8

In pursuing his colonial interests, Calvert acted from a complex set of motives that did not change after his conversion. As a Catholic entrepreneur, he wanted to exploit the new world’s potential for economic, personal, and nationalistic reasons. Like their Protestant contemporaries, Catholics embraced capitalist concepts and acted on them. Both Newfoundland and Maryland were investments. His 1627 excursion to Avalon clearly reflected Calvert’s commitment to recouping the considerable investment made between 1623 and 1625. He returned to the island in 1628 to reside permanently and to supervise personally the exploitation of the area’s natural resources. By “deare bought experience,” the first Lord Baltimore learned some of the hardships inflicted upon his predecessors, who also found the Newfoundland winter beyond endurance. Those lessons notwithstanding, he did not abandon his economic objectives when he left that colony in 1629 and journeyed to the Chesapeake. Indeed, these considerations loomed ever larger in the Maryland enterprise. Not only did Avalon fail to produce any profits, the estimated £20,000 and £25,000 he risked left him with a depleted fortune. As he put it, he had “engaged” in the enterprise at “great expense” and “lost.”9

Starting over in a warmer climate would not be easy for a man whose first futile enterprise had sapped his energy and his fortune. To begin anew, Baltimore had to find a better location, secure still another grant of land and authority from the government, rewrite the Newfoundland charter, seek funds to supplement his depleted reserves, and attract individuals willing to venture forth under his leadership. After a brief visit to Virginia in September, he returned to England in October determined to accomplish his goals. As the new charter neared final approval in April 1632, Baltimore died. That left management of the enterprise to his young and inexperienced son, who had to administer the enterprise and implement the new model. Cecil, who shared his father’s ambitions, sought a place where he could prosper and enjoy the privileges and status that came as proprietor of his own domain.10

The Maryland charter and the documents produced to attract prospective adventurers (investors) and planters (colonists) emphasized national or imperial goals and a “pious zeale for the propagation of the Christian faith.” This emphasis served two purposes. First, to achieve their objectives, the Catholic Calverts had to have the support of the Protestant government. Without that encouragement, they would not have the opportunity to succeed. King Charles I (1625–49) encouraged these Catholics to colonize his North American dominions. The expansion of the king’s dominions, the need to establish a buffer between the English colonies and those established by other European rivals, and a missionary commitment justified the lucrative grant to this Catholic family. To be certain, the monarch profited, at little direct cost, from the Calverts’ willingness to bear the expense and pain of enlarging his domain. Their commitment to bring Christianity to the native population further pleased the English government, while expansive nationalism served a deep-seated need of the Calverts.11

Although King Charles I, as well as some of his subordinates, knew that George Calvert and his sons were loyal, their religious affiliation notwithstanding, most of his Protestant subjects did not share their monarch’s confidence. Because they were Catholics, Calvert and his heirs challenged the dominant cultural characteristic that their religious practices must conform to those of the crown. As Catholics, they forged far ahead of contemporary thinking that defined identity and political allegiance in religious terms. They believed, rightly or wrongly, that they could overcome that Protestant view of Rome, which associated it with “a ritual-based vision of ignorance [and] superstition” involving allegiance to a foreign ruler (the pope) and the acceptance of reprehensible doctrines such as the right to excommunicate and depose sovereigns.12

George and Cecil Calvert assumed that they could find ways to bridge the gap between the competing loyalties of politics (English) and religion (Catholic). Their actions would demonstrate that English and Catholic were not mutually exclusive loyalties and that Catholics could act in the best interests of the English nation. Here they acted boldly, almost as if their Catholicism was not a factor in what they did to enhance the empire and their own well-being. Pride in England was not the exclusive domain of Protestants. In common with Protestant colonizers, Catholic colonizers wanted to further national goals. Charles’s government generously granted land along the Chesapeake to the Catholic Calverts because they implemented these goals. Either the king and his closest advisers did not know of his entente with the Jesuits, which was relatively public, or they did not consider it a matter of consequence. Either way, the government-granted charter in effect sanctioned a Catholic mission to the Indians.13

As English Catholics, Calvert and his family brought a unique perspective to colonization and a unique set of problems that complicated those efforts. The Calverts’ decision to maintain allegiance to Roman Catholicism remains central to understanding what they attempted. Indeed, nothing makes sense without seeing that they acted to secure their religious freedom and the right of other Catholics to worship without fear of the penal laws. Here was the paradox: How to pursue that (Catholic) goal without seeming too Catholic. The brilliance of their vision, to say nothing of its execution, allowed them to resolve this paradox.

Their colonial enterprises mirrored the Calverts’ minority status in Stuart England. The family’s commitment to and affiliation with Catholicism after early 1625 both restricted and amplified their opportunities. The Calverts did not flee government persecution. Instead, they moved toward the positive goal of founding a viable English colonial enterprise. Whether in Newfoundland or Maryland, the Calverts never separated their capitalistic pursuits from their commitment to enlarging the king’s dominions and to fostering liberty of conscience. Simply put, they intended to foster national interests along with their own material and spiritual enhancement.

Entrepreneurs George and Cecil  Calvert were practical visionaries. Religious decisions made in England compelled them to be recklessly innovative as they conceived their colonial enterprises in Newfoundland and in Maryland. They carefully considered how individuals of different faiths could live together peacefully and prosper. To succeed, these English Catholic colonizers knew they could neither use religion as a unifying principle nor let religious differences spoil the effort. In an era characterized by religious strife and warfare, they believed that they could build prosperous colonial societies only if they privatized religion and reduced its prominence in the public sphere. More important, father and son understood that most men acted on the basis of their material interests, and they proposed to satisfy them.

Cecil, the new Lord Baltimore, intended to build a society on three foundation blocks—land, loyalty, and liberty of conscience. Land was his most valuable resource. The modest quit-rents paid by those who received land, along with the development of commercial enterprises, provided the opportunity to recoup the depleted Calvert fortune. The distribution of land played another significant role—it encouraged others to prosper. Given their commitment to Catholicism, the Calverts understood that religion could not be used as a means to ensure political loyalty. In writing the Maryland charter, George Calvert envisioned using the land he controlled to build his second pillar, loyalty. He reached deep into the English past for his method to accomplish this end. The manorial system offered a number of advantages. The liege men, lords of the manors who received the largest grants of land, would provide the needed stability for the colony’s peaceful growth, produce a much needed income for him, and create a group of men who recognized that their interests were best served by remaining loyal to the proprietor. Equally important, their manorial courts would deal with issues such as religion to keep them from disrupting the community. 14

To see either Calvert as only championing an anachronistic feudal system of land distribution misses the ingenuity of the vision. George Calvert knew that the self-contained manorial system had been instrumental for Catholic survival outside of London. He relied upon it as a means of keeping religious concerns as private as possible. By adopting the manorial system, he was looking forward, not backward. Only hindsight revealed that system’s limitations. In 1632 or even 1657, a manorial society appeared to be ideally suited to accomplish two main goals: generating revenue for the Calverts and ensuring the loyalty of the manorial lords. The third foundation block, a laissez-faire approach to the religious conscience, related closely to the others and seemed remarkably well suited to the manorial system. 15

Cecil Calvert sought a place where he and his coreligionists could worship without the threat of the vexatious penal laws. He understood that he could not effectively guarantee liberty to Catholics without guaranteeing it to all who came to his colonies. His vision was simple. He offered the colonists liberty of conscience, that is, the opportunity to worship as they pleased without interference or assistance from the government and an opportunity to pursue worldly goals unimpeded by the usual religious restraints. This, he reasoned, would ensure the cooperation and loyalty of both Protestants and Catholics who now had a material stake in the enterprise and a reason to work for its success. He was no social leveler or political democrat. By dissolving the traditional ties between church and state, he sought to build a stable body politic by ensuring that religious practices, essentially a private matter, would neither privilege one group nor disadvantage another.

Traditional hostility toward Catholics naturally complicated the effort to separate religious considerations from secular ones. For one thing, recruiting colonists proved vexing. Although ably assisted by Father Andrew White of the Society of Jesus, the second Lord Baltimore attracted only a few Catholics for leadership roles. This meant he had fewer than twenty Catholics with whom to build the manorial system and that the majority of recruits were Protestant. In seeking worldly success in America with a religiously diverse group of colonists, the Calverts surely knew that they sailed in treacherous waters.16

George Calvert was no stranger to the problems of governing a religiously diverse population. As the king’s secretary and as a privy councillor, he had witnessed the entanglements that occurred when his Protestant monarch moved, however hesitantly, toward toleration of loyal Catholics. All the king’s eloquence could not change how the majority of English Protestants viewed even the most limited concessions to Catholics. For another, to satisfy their own spiritual needs (and those of their Catholic colonists), the Calverts had to introduce priests, agents of the pope, who were guilty of treason by their very presence in England. The priests paid their own costs and came under the same conditions as the other freemen. The uncertainty for the proprietor was the Protestant majority’s ability to coexist with these papal agents. Priests, a religiously diverse population, and Catholic leadership made for a volatile situation that required extraordinary management skills on the part of the proprietor and his surrogates. 17

To overcome some of the problems they faced as Catholic colonizers, the Calverts embraced freedom of conscience as their modus operandi. If they accepted the concept because no better alternative existed, it was a concept that was not inimical to their beliefs. As Catholics and as a small minority of the population, they willingly abandoned the concept of religious uniformity and its concomitant belief that it was the magistrates’ duty to protect the true faith. Given their peculiar circumstances, this radical departure seemed an obvious solution.

The second Lord Baltimore may have lacked his father’s long experience in government and direct involvement in managing a colonial enterprise, but he demonstrated great skill in fending off the many threats to the colony’s existence. Untested as a leader, in some ways he became the most remarkable of the three Catholic Lords Baltimore. He had to attract investors and recruit parties interested in risking their lives and fortunes with him. Challenges, couched in the most virulent anti-Catholic language possible, emanating from supporters of the defunct Virginia Company delayed the expedition’s sailing, escalated its costs beyond the limits of the young proprietor’s diminished inheritance, and forced him to remain in England. These events created formidable obstacles for the absentee proprietor, who was forced to govern through surrogates.18

Most of the difficulties he faced in Maryland stemmed from four sources: The Virginians, who never forgave George Calvert for his role in the dissolution of the Virginia Company or for claiming land they thought theirs; the political authority, which was situated in the person of the (absentee) proprietor and the assembly of freemen; the religious faith of the founding family (Roman Catholic); and the religiously mixed population (Catholic, Church of England, “Puritan,” indifferent, and atheist) that ventured to Maryland. These impediments notwithstanding, Baltimore sent forth his expedition in November 1633 with great expectations.19

The “Maryland designe,” as one of Baltimore’s associates styled it, was an audacious attempt to prosper from a colonial enterprise by creating a new model for church-state relations. Lord Baltimore’s Instructions, issued on November 13, 1633, placed responsibility for civil peace squarely on the shoulders of his Catholic relatives and friends. By executive fiat he required them to be very careful “to preserve unity & peace amongst all the passengers on Shipp-board, and that they suffer no scandall nor offence to be given to any of the Protestants, whereby any just complaint may hereafter be made, by them, in Virginia or in England.” To prevent discord, he ordered his officers to “cause all Acts of Romane Catholique Religion to be done as privately as may be,” and to “instruct all Roman Catholiques to be silent upon all Occasions of discourse concerning matters of Religion.” Finally, Baltimore, who wanted no repetition of his father’s Avalon experience, ordered that government officials treat the Protestants with as much mildness and favor as justice would permit. He expected his injunctions to be observed “at Land as well as at Sea.” This strategy was intended to curb disputes and prevent potentially contentious religious issues from destroying the project before it had a chance to succeed. 20

What the second Lord Baltimore sought in his 1633 Instructions was too novel, too radical, to have unfolded without wrinkles. Events in the first twenty-seven years, from 1634 to 1661, severely tested the second Lord Baltimore’s skills, resources, and patience. Time after time, his colonists challenged the basic vision. Not even his coreligionists fully grasped the “Maryland designe” and the constraints under which the proprietor labored as an English Catholic. Many of his liege lords sided with the Jesuits, who sought privileges for the Church enjoyed in Catholic countries and subverted his land claims. An exasperated proprietor came close to expelling the Jesuits as a threat to his colony’s existence. 21

Changing circumstances in England in the late 1640s forced the ever flexible proprietor to foster a revolution in his own government. His appointment of Protestants as governor and councillors necessitated further changes. He first sought to protect his coreligionists through a series of oaths that he required of his officials. The Protestant governor, for example, had to swear not to trouble, molest, or discountenance any person professing to believe in Jesus Christ and in particular no Roman Catholic for or in respect of his or her Religion nor in his or her free exercise thereof as long as they remained faithful to the proprietor and did not disturb or conspire against his government. Equally important, the governor attested that he would not discriminate in conferring offices, rewards, or favors on the basis of religion but would confer them on inhabitants found “faithful and well deserving of his said Lordship.” To complete his revolution, Baltimore initiated the Act Concerning Religion in 1649. This law concluded his effort to alleviate tensions in an increasingly pluralistic society and to mute the potential for calamitous religious wrangling. Through this Act he sought to enlist the support of the remainder of the inhabitants. The assembly, the first under a Protestant governor, only needed to accept his wisdom.

The freemen, a majority of whom were still Catholic, balked at approving the proprietor’s body of sixteen laws, which he had sent on “three Sheets of Parchment.” They rejected his code that would have replaced all existing laws for the colony and reasserted the proprietor’s prerogative to initiate legislation. They argued and debated and finally wrote their own version of the bills. Then, having made their point, they passed a code of twelve laws that incorporated their laws and the proprietor’s. The Act Concerning Religion was an amalgam that juxtaposed the assembly’s bill with the proprietor’s. 22

This act, which made formal the policies initiated by his Instructions, responded to a variety of concerns. To contain civil strife, the ordinance restrained freedom of expression by outlawing the use of derogatory religious terms. Marylanders could no longer call any other inhabitant “an Heretick, schismatick, idolater, Puritan, Independent, Presbyterian, Antenomian, Barrowist, Roundhead, Separatist, Popish Priest, Jesuit, Jesuited Papist, Lutheran, Calvenist, Anabaptist, Brownist” or any other name or term in a reproachful manner relating to religion without incurring a penalty. To satisfy the newly arrived Virginia radical Protestants, the law penalized those who profaned “the Sabbath or Lords Day Called Sunday by frequent swearing drunkenness or by any uncivill or disorderly recreation by working on that day when absolute necessity doth not require it.” Finally, to satisfy the proprietor this act guaranteed that no one who professed “to believe in Jesus Christ shall from henceforth be any ways troubled molested or discountenanced for or in respect of his or her Religion nor in the free exercise thereof within this Province.” Moreover, it assured Christians that they would not be compelled to “the Belief or exercise of any other Religion against his or her consent so as they be not unfaithful to the Lord Proprietary or molest or Conspire against the Civil Government established or to be established in this Province.” 23

Protestant leadership, protective oaths, and the new Act brought no immediate relief. Despite his best efforts, Baltimore’s implacable enemies from Virginia, who enjoyed the support of the new parliamentary government in England, triumphantly occupied his colony in 1652. Their conquest forced the plundered proprietor to recover his colony by skillfully manipulating the political and imperial bureaucracy in Cromwellian England. Beyond the legitimacy of his claim to his colony, the Act Concerning Religion served Baltimore well in his negotiations with Cromwell’s government. Both the Protestant Lord Protector and the Catholic Lord Proprietor came down squarely in favor of liberty of conscience. 24

The next twenty-seven years, from 1661 to 1688, proved remarkably tranquil and peaceful in comparison. The defeat of the Virginians in the late 1650s, the restoration of Charles II in 1660, and the appointment of Philip Calvert, the proprietor’s half-brother, as governor helped to stabilize the fragile situation. When Charles Calvert, the proprietor’s son, arrived to assume the governor’s post in 1661, the Calverts were at long last ready to enjoy the fruits of their long labor. The government enforced the Act Concerning Religion to ensure that religious disputes did not interfere with the planters’ chances to flourish. The new era proved most beneficial to the colony’s Catholic minority. The brick chapel they built at St. Mary’s in the late 1660s testified to their increasing prosperity and success. The irony is that the success of the Calverts and the Maryland Catholics sowed the seeds of their failure. 25

Charles Calvert, as governor and then as the third Lord Baltimore and second proprietor after 1675, enjoyed a position denied to his father: He lived and ruled in Maryland. He was indeed the “the prynce” of Maryland, a term employed earlier to describe the proprietorship. He proved incapable of sustaining the new model and eventually lost the colony. Why he failed is critically important to understanding what the Calverts attempted. Certainly human frailties played a part. Success in colonization and survival as Catholics depended on the political and managerial skills of the proprietors. The third Lord Baltimore lacked his father’s consummate political skills and blundered at critical junctures. To him, the defense of his proprietary land claims against the encroachments of William Penn took precedence over other, more pressing, matters. Perhaps because he never lived as a Protestant, he lacked the sensitivity that his father and grandfather displayed. Indeed, actions taken, and, more importantly, actions not taken, indicated that he did not understand the simple proposition on which the colony had been founded, namely, that he had to adjust to ever-changing circumstances. His conviction that toleration was something forced on his father obscured the brilliance of the Calvert vision. Faced with an influx in the 1680s of Church of England immigrants who coupled traditional views of church and state with malignant anti-Catholic sentiments, the third Lord Baltimore failed to accommodate them into his unique society. Beyond these considerations, Charles was a terrible judge of character; those he left in charge when he departed the colony only exacerbated an already tense situation. 26

Catholics, always a minority of the population, represented a success story while the Episcopal Protestants faced an uncertain future. When two groups compete for scarce resources such as access to office, the success of one group becomes the other group’s failure and creates a breeding ground for conflict. When groups compete within a relatively small community as Maryland was, two important changes sometimes occur: increased hostility between groups, and an intensification of group loyalty. In the face of an alienated group (unchurched Episcopal Protestants who saw only continued exclusion from political appointments and diminished chances to prosper) and their increased hostility, the successful group (proprietary Catholics and their associates) closed their ranks. As proprietor, Charles alone had the opportunity to stem the tide. Instead of reaching out, he retracted. He left those in opposition little choice but to take up arms against a government closed to all but a few proprietary cronies. 27

The failure of the “Maryland designe,” however, went beyond the actions of a few individuals. The Calverts had challenged some fundamental tenets of their age. To maintain civil peace they dictated that religious practices be kept as private as possible. They established neither religious institutions nor their handmaiden, educational ones. The Calverts offered planters freedom to fend for themselves when it came to religion and education, reasoning that if religion remained an essentially private matter, Catholics would enjoy the same rights as other planters and not be penalized for their choice. This marked a significant departure from the status quo and exposed the experiment to attacks from those who wanted to continue the traditional intimate relationship between church and state that existed in England.Many of the English men and women that the Calverts invited into their colony demonstrated that they were not yet ready to put aside religious differences to build a prosperous and tranquil society under Catholic leadership. Beyond the third Lord Baltimore’s inept responses lurked the forces of tradition, and in 1692 those forces triumphed. The Maryland Assembly, now led by a Protestant royal governor, ratified the rebellion and established the Church of England by a law that deliberately mocked the 1649 Act Concerning Religion. Freedom of conscience for Catholics and Quakers came to a crashing end. 28

In the wake of Coode’s Rebellion, which destroyed Calvert proprietary rule in 1689, royal governor Nathaniel Blakiston stated an accepted English conviction regarding church-state relations. He assumed that the assembled members of the legislature were sensible as to how useful “Religion is in the Good Government of a Nation or a province.” Religion not only united the inhabitants, it restrained their evil tendencies. His 1700 statement repudiated the Catholic Calvert’s bold attempt to establish religious freedom in their Maryland. Protestant critics, who believed that Maryland’s only salvation lay in establishing a church that conformed to the English model, had triumphed. 29

By attempting to separate Marylanders’ religious concerns from the political sphere, the Calverts pointed to the future. Whether intended or not, the Catholic Lords Baltimore moved toward the creation of a more secular society, one in which religious practices were to be kept as private as possible. For better or worse, they contributed to “one of the major social processes which have shaped Western society in the past five hundred years.” Secularization was an extremely complex development and the process “was not always obvious to the clergy and laity who participated in it.” Their circumstances as English Catholics led the Calverts to challenge two accepted theological tenets of their world—uniformity and the state’s responsibility to protect the “true” religion. The corollary, however, was a society that was too secular for many of its inhabitants. 30

When it came to the creation of a new society based on a fresh relationship between religious and political institutions, the Catholic Calverts’ vision ranged too far ahead of their contemporaries. That they eventually lost their enterprise is perhaps not surprising. That they held it for almost sixty years is remarkable. Nor must their failure sully their effort. The first and second Lords Baltimore were neither priests nor theologians. They embraced the concept of freedom of conscience for temporal reasons. They rightly understood that a publicly supported religion in a pluralistic society could corrupt the body politic. The new relationship between church and state, the new thinking on freedom of conscience and political allegiance, and the move to a more secular society that the Catholic Lords Baltimore envisioned and struggled diligently to implement was not for their times. In attempting to create a stable society by removing religion from the public realm, they stood closer to Thomas Jefferson than to their contemporaries. The unfortunate result was that, with exception of a small, legally restricted Catholic community, Marylanders dumped the 1649 Act Concerning Religion and the Catholic proprietary family responsible for it into the dustbin of history. 31

James Wilson, a prominent patriot during the American Revolution and a distinguished jurist, recognized the visionary nature of the Calvert enterprise and decried the “ungracious silence” that denied recognition to the second Lord Baltimore for his part in fostering American understanding of religious toleration. The Calvert family may have lost its place in the history of religious liberty, but the first amendment to the Constitution affirmed the radical concepts advanced by George and Cecil Calvert. The establishment clause of that amendment (“Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion”) does more than buttress freedom of religion, which the same amendment separately protects. Its authors sought to defuse potentially explosive situations by uncoupling religion and politics. For contemporary Americans, the “establishment clause separates government and religion so that we can maintain civility between believers and unbelievers as well as among the several hundred denominations, sects, and cults that thrive in our nation, all sharing the commitment to liberty and equality that cements us together.” George and Cecil Calvert would have agreed with a statement that prohibited the legislature from passing any laws abridging freedom of religion or establishing an exclusive form of worship. 32

The lack of recognition (Wilson’s “ungracious silence”) of the Catholic Calverts as radicals and innovators resulted from a number of factors. Among them are the pervasive anti-Catholicism that long dominated American historiography, the continuity of Protestant radicals to the present, the overstatements made by Catholic apologists, the absence of any learned treatises on religious freedom by the Calverts, and the failure of Charles Calvert to sustain their great experiment. But these factors should no longer obscure the brilliance of their vision or the contribution that they made to advance human freedom during the seventeenth century. 33