The Calvert Family

Kiplin Hall was built by George Calvert, 1st Lord Baltimore, and proprietary founder of the colony of Maryland in the United States of America. Calvert was born at Kiplin in 1580, where his father leased land. He graduated from Trinity College, Oxford at the age of seventeen, with a degree in municipal law, followed by an MA.

Under the patronage of Sir Robert Cecil, last chief minister of Elizabeth I, George Calvert rose to become one of the two principal Secretaries of State under James I in 1619. In the same year, he bought the estate of Kiplin in North Yorkshire, where he built a country house.

In 1621 and 1622, he was granted land in Newfoundland which he named Avalon, but the colony failed due to harsh weather and rocky soil and Calvert returned to England. He then declared his Catholicism, resigned from government, and was created Baron of Baltimore in County Longford, Ireland, just before the death of James I in 1625.

In 1627 he sailed for Virginia to take up his land there. He was rebuffed by the Virginia House of Burgesses when he would not swear allegiance to the king as head of the true church. In 1629 he petitioned Charles I for lands in a more congenial climate. Two months after George Calvert’s death in April 1632, his son Cecil, 2nd Lord Baltimore, received the founding charter for the new colony of Maryland. Under the leadership of his brother, Leonard Calvert, the first colonists sailed from Cowes on the Isle of Wight on two small ships, the Ark and the Dove, on 22 November 1633 and arrived on 25 March 1634.

George Calvert, 1st Lord Baltimore. The original by Daniel Mytens of 1625 hangs in the Enoch Pratt Free Library in Baltimore, Maryland, USA. A fine copy was commissioned for Kiplin Hall in 2001 by a direct descendant of George Calvert.

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The following Lords Baltimore lived mostly in London, making occasional visits to Kiplin. In 1722 Charles, 5th Lord Baltimore, sold the estate to his mother’s second husband, Christopher Crowe.