Charles Calvert (governor)
Captain Charles Calvert was the 14th Proprietary Governor of Maryland in 1720, at a time when the Calvert family had recently regained control of their proprietary colony. He was appointed governor by his cousin Charles Calvert, 5th Baron Baltimore, who in 1721 came into his inheritance. Calvert worked to reassert the Proprietary interest against the privileges of the colonists as set out in the Maryland Charter, and to ease tensions between the Lords Baltimore and their subjects. Religious tension, which had been a source of great division in the colony, was much reduced under his governorship. Captain Calvert was replaced as governor in 1727 by his cousin Benedict Leonard Calvert, though he continued to occupy other colonial offices. He suffered from early senility and died in 1734.
Captain Charles Calvert, Governor of Maryland. Painting by John Wollaston. Collection of the Baltimore Museum of Art.
Benedict Leonard Calvert replaced his cousin Captain Calvert as Governor of Maryland in 1727.
Charles Calvert's daughter Elizabeth Calvert, painted by John Wollaston. Baltimore Museum of Art.
Charles Calvert, 5th Baron Baltimore
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.
Portrait by Allan Ramsay, c. 1740.
Charles was succeeded by his eldest son Frederick Calvert, 6th Baron Baltimore.
Benedict Swingate Calvert, painted by John Wollaston c. 1754
Woodcote Park in an engraving by John Hassell circa 1816