Leonard Calvert

Leonard Calvert (1606–9 June 1647) was the First Proprietary Governor of Maryland. He was the second son of George Calvert, 1st Baron Baltimore (1579–1632), the first proprietary of the Province of Maryland. His elder brother Cecil (1605–1675), who inherited the colony and the title upon the death of their father George, 15 April 1632, appointed Leonard as governor of the Colony in his absence. Leonard was named after his grandfather, the father of George who was also "Leonard Calvert" of Yorksh

January 1, 1579January 1, 1632

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"In the mid-1640s, as the Puritan Revolution arose in England, Lord Baltimore sided with the king, and Leonard Calvert received privileges (or "letters of marque") from the king to capture vessels belonging to Parliament. On the other hand, the Protestant tobacco trader, Capt. Richard Ingle, a friend of Claiborne's, received a similar commission from Parliament. The governor ordered Ingle's arrest for high treason in denouncing the king, whereupon Ingle escaped and in 1645 mounted a successful attack on Maryland. Captain Ingle took the opportunity, "for conscience'" sake, to plunder and pillage "papists and malignants," seizing property and jailing his enemies. The venerable Father Andrew White, a Jesuit missionary who had arrived on the first ships to land in Maryland, was sent to England in irons to be tried for treason. Happily, the old missionary was acquitted.In the meanwhile, Claiborne took the opportunity to retrieve Kent Island from Maryland's seizure. Under Ingle's attack, Leonard Calvert escaped to Virginia, from where Berkeley helped him to recapture Maryland and Kent Island.Returning to England, Ingle almost succeeded in revoking Maryland's charter, but Calvert retained it by taking pains to placate Parliament. Calvert, for example, encouraged a group of Dissenters exiled from Virginia to settle in Maryland, a little further up the Chesapeake Bay from St. Marys, in what is now Annapolis. Furthermore, after Leonard Calvert died in 1648, Lord Baltimore appointed the Protestant William Stone as governor."

- Leonard Calvert

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