John D. Krugler. English and Catholic: The Lords Baltimore in the Seventeenth Century. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004. xiii + 319 pp. $46.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8018-7963-0.

Reviewed by Carla Pestana (Department of History, Miami University)
Published on H-Albion (June, 2005)

Baltimores Anticipating Thomas Jefferson: Or, Why the Lords Baltimore(Especially the First and Second) Were Men Before Their Time

I must confess that the second Lord Baltimore has recently become something of a hero of mine. By the middle of the seventeenth century, when revolutionary events in England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland had helped to drive away most of the elite men with an interest in the Americas, only one still maintained his position. The Earl of Warwick, once Governor General of all the colonies by order of Parliament, was displaced; Sir Ferdinando Gorges lost his grip on his colony in the region now known as Maine prior to his death in 1647; the Earl of Carlisle made a valiant attempt to retain his Caribbean colonies, shifting sides in the civil wars in order to shelter his inheritance, but to no avail. Alone among them, Cecil, Lord Baltimore clung to his Maryland proprietary. That he should have done so, despite the fact that he was a Catholic and without substantial personal connections to any of the revolutionaries in power in his native England by the mid-1650s, strikes me as remarkable. Clearly a man of great personal ability, he was adept at navigating the treacherous political waters that engulfed both England and Ireland (the two kingdoms where his interests lay) during his middle years. It was often a near thing for him in his struggle to retain his proprietary province, and control of it temporarily slipped from his grasp on a number of occasions. I emerged from researching a recently published book on the English Atlantic during these dramatic years with an unexpected respect for Baltimore and his achievement.

In this composite biography of three generations of heads of the Calvert family, the middle Lord Baltimore (1605-1675) looms large. John D. Krugler's book devotes much attention to the first Baltimore, more to the second, and very little to the third. This imbalance might be explained by the way in which subsequent generations seem lesser luminaries in contrast to the fathers. Certainly the two third-generation Winthrops, whose lives were chronicled in Richard Dunn's Puritans and Yankees: The Winthrop Dynasty of New England, 1630-1717 paled by comparison to their forbearers, John Winthrop and John Jr. The third Lord Baltimore, like the younger Winthrops, disappoints, all three seeming to lose the sense of purpose and to suffer from a dearth of talent. Krugler's account bears some resemblance to Dunn's 1962 volume: both cover three generations of a family that included important first and second generation colonial leaders and both concentrate on the colonial aspects of these lives even for those with extensive involvement elsewhere. Yet a key difference distinguishes Krugler's work from Dunn's. Krugler pursues one specific aspect of the Baltimores' story and of their engagement in New World settlement; his focus is on religious policies within the policy, and that focal point becomes stronger as the volume proceeds.

Krugler finds this religious policy embodied in what he calls the "Maryland design" and subordinates most of the other facets of this story to exploring the gestation, launching, tortured history and ultimate failure of this design. The "Maryland design" had a somewhat flexible meaning over the course of Krugler's book, since at first it refers in a general way to the planting of a proprietary province in the Chesapeake region (as on p. 130). In its fullest manifestation, however, the design refers to the goal of creating a colony dedicated to liberty of conscience. According to Krugler, the first two Baltimores believed that it was possible to be both English and Catholic. In contrast to the logic of the penal laws, they hoped to use their demonstrable loyalty to promote a settlement in which Catholics could have a commanding role and could live free of the legal restrictions that Catholics struggled under in England. Krugler deems this a new conceptualization of the relationship of church and state; loyalty to monarch and to state church would no longer be equated and a stable social and political order would be erected without reference to religious uniformity. Although his view on this shifts somewhat, Krugler mostly avers that the first lord had this vision in mind from the outset and that the second lord understood his mandate in Maryland as the pursuit of that vision.

Pursuing this argument presents Krugler with a number of challenges. For one, the records to document the thinking of either the first or the second lord at key moments are scanty. We cannot even know for sure what the first lord, George Calvert, believed while he was conforming to the state church and serving in high office--did he hold silently to his original Catholicism through that period so that his public embrace of that view did not denote a conversion but rather a change in public position? In other cases, Krugler has to argue backwards from what Maryland became, especially with the passage of the 1649 Act concerning Religion, to make the case for a clear set of policies with an accompanying theory articulated in advance of colonization. At the same time, Krugler knows that the Baltimores were astute political players, able to respond creatively to setbacks and unexpected twists, and he describes them as doing so at pivotal moments. This line of reasoning suggests not a clearly limned out plan but rather a set of goals (such as the creation of a profitable New World settlement) pursued through a shifting set of policies. With the case for this political creativity so clearly made, the contrasting case for an early and firmly held blueprint for the whole design is undermined somewhat. The fact of their ingenuity at least points to the difficulty of arguing backward, as Krugler is forced at times to do.

A different interpretation of the Baltimores' religious policies has been floated, and it is one that Krugler may not quite manage to sink, despite vigorous efforts to do so. It has been argued that the Baltimores sought a haven for their fellow Catholics in Maryland, but had to bend to political realities by leaving the "Romish" religion un-established; unable to people an entire colony with their coreligionists, they offered religious liberty to Protestant and Catholic alike as the surest way to shelter Catholics while also attracting the necessary complement of Protestants. This argument might seem to be potentially compatible with Krugler's main thesis of a design that was fully thought through in advance, but he largely avoids any effort to reconcile the two. His Baltimores are principled rather than pragmatic on this score, pursuing diversity as an explicit goal. In order to bolster this view, he makes an impassioned argument against the idea that Catholics in England and the Baltimores in particular were victims driven to take refuge in America. Rather they were forward looking visionaries re-imagining civil order resting on a new secular basis.

In keeping with seeing the Baltimores as innovators, Krugler repeatedly refers to their agenda as nationalist and capitalist. Neither term is defined nor is the prodigious literature on both in the early modern era referenced. By "capitalist," Krugler seems to mean simply striving for prosperity. How the use of this term squares with the claim made by others that the Baltimore colony was organized along quasi-feudal lines is not directly addressed (nor does Krugler tackle head on what that feudal model might mean for his effort to depict the Baltimores as forward looking). He does account for the feudal tendencies by explaining that the manorial organization was intended to place support for religion in the hands of local leaders within the colony as a way to keep it somewhat separated from official colonial policy. When the manor as a shelter for unobtrusive Catholic worship failed, however, Baltimore retained the manorial scheme, a fact that Krugler notes without addressing its implications for his argument. By "nationalist" Krugler apparently means simply loyal to the government of England and promoting its expansionist goals. Use of modern terms increases the impression that these seventeenth-century aristocrats were ahead of their time but it does so without building a case upon them. Along the same lines, the Baltimores themselves are dubbed "liberals" (pp. 190, 231).

Krugler's own sensibilities about religious matters are disconcertingly modern. He seems unable to enter imaginatively into the religious bigotries of an earlier age. Those who feared the encroachments of popery are dismissed as "crassly" exploiting unjustified fears (p. 133). This inability seriously to engage anti-Catholicism occasionally mars Krugler's analysis. For instance, he explores the early Stuart willingness to grant a proprietary charter and great powers to a Catholic noble as a sign of the openness to Catholics in England in the 1620s and 1630s. He goes so far as noting that "No one held a gun to the king's head" to force him to support Baltimore's scheme (p. 127). On the contrary, Charles I's puritan opponents would have liked to hold a gun to his head to stop him from showing such favoritism to papists, among other failings of his that they viewed as related. Countenancing a Baltimore was just one more sign of their king's lack of commitment to the cause of Protestantism, and it contributed to the later breach between him and some of his subjects. Anti-Catholicism may appear to us a silly prejudice, but it was a motivating force in English politics throughout the seventeenth century. A failure to understand it as such makes it far easier to see Catholics as other than victims. At the same time, however, it undermines the audacity of the Baltimores' goals and therefore the extent of their achievement. The second lord Baltimore looks more impressive still when we appreciate the strength of the forces arrayed against him, and perhaps we could even forgive his son for his inability to hang on to his province during the virulently anti-Catholic 1680s. The Baltimores may have anticipated Jefferson but they lived in a different age than his own.

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Citation: Carla Pestana. Review of Krugler, John D., English and Catholic: The Lords Baltimore in the Seventeenth Century. H-Albion, H-Net Reviews. June, 2005.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=10655

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