Did Envy have a role in Maryland's Founding?

Introduction

The journey of founding an English Catholic colony in the British Atlantic during the seventeenth century has been a tumultuous tale. It has been a product of a larger global story that has played out since the century previous when dominant politico-religious structures were confronted by "enlightenment" thinking, dynamic market forces, and heterodoxy.

This post is not intended to come away with answers or even proof, but is a musing about how envy as an emotion might have played a role in Maryland's founding and whether it may help more fully synthesize a false dichotomy that has long stood in the historiography of Maryland and the Chesapeake about the Calverts' motives for founding the colony--was it religiously motivated or economically motivated?

Most historians since the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have not argued for one or other, but they have either prioritized one over the other. Others have provided additional rationales and contexts for the colony's founding.

Emotional Motives

Before digging in, most historians have casted the decisions of the Calvert family as rational, detached, and dispassionate calculations that fit within the context of Early Modern England. Seeing George Calvert as a land speculator or as a someone pursuing a utopian religious vision is to see a narrow version of the Calvert story that is "limited to 'rational' calculations and motives." (Matt and Stearns, 2014). This post wants to challenge that notion with a first step in "mapping and analyzing the particular mutual relationships between emotions and the social, ranging from the experiences of everyday life to extraordinary political actions in the public sphere." (Matt and Stearns, 2014).

That does not invalidate the work of historians past and present. Emotions history is not an attempt to revise or replace previous histories, but is intended to augment existing histories. The argument here, then, is to advance existing arguments and bring more focus to previous arguments. We can think of those "rational" calculations as cognitions that are interwoven in a tapestry that include more personal, interior motives to Calvert. The danger, of course, is finding ourselves in a place that centers conjecture over evidence; however, we will save that for another post in the future.

Envy: A Two-Headed Snake in Early Modern England

Generalized Envy: A "Bitter Stream of this Troubled Fountain of Hate"

Early Modern England saw the emergence of a new type of envy beginning to form in the seventeenth century that was more specific and positive. Historically, envy had long been associated as an evil emotion that looked more like our more contemporary versions of hate, malice, and odium (Irish 2021, 846). Envy was seen as a more generalized emotion or miserableness that looked like schaudenfraude. What made it generalized was that it was not targeted at anyone specific. It represented an overall mood, disposition, or way of being as many seventeenth century writers frequently cited Plutarch's essay that "envy is a thing indefinite...whereas hatred is determinate..." (Irish 2021, 846).

Covetous Envy and Emulation: "The Eye of Envy Looks Every Upward"

The seventeenth century began to see shifting definitions of envy that shaped it into a positive emotion. Samuel Otes wrote that the "eye of envy looks ever upward, who is above, who riseth, who prospereth, who is well spoken of, well thought of, or favoured of God." (Irish 2021, 849). Pierre La Primaudaye, a French-English translator, shared that "envy is very good, when we...not grieved at the prosperity and virtues which we see in others, but are moved by their example to desire and seek after the self same goods." (Irish, 865).

Unsurprisingly, covetous envy became a sanctified emotion that oriented one's self every closer to god. That it could be a "good, holy, and Christian envy" meant that worshippers should look to the example of others, especially in a world of contested religious meaning, and emulate them as a sign of true devotion. Some writers preferred the use of the world emulation, but defined it often as "envy without malice." (Irish, 867).

A complication with the idea of emulation and covetous envy was that it was in a period of transition moving from an association with its negative predecessors toward a more positive valence; however, it took much of the century for the definitions of covetous envy and emulation to have more stable footing.

A positive valence of envy, however, was differentiated from ambition that had a much more disapproving connotations. As one observer shared, "ambition...had devoured the fruits of former labours." (Johnson 1612). In contemporary dramas, ambition is pejoratively used as a contrast to virtuous English nation, casting a shadow on Catholic Spaniards as tyrannical, treacherous, and ambitious. (Wrightson 2021, 71).

Early Modern England's Social Transformation Contributed to the Rise of Covetous Envy and Emulation

Emulation certainly began to mirror economic and social trends that began to emerge in the seventeenth century. “Increasingly also wealthier yeomen began to style themselves ‘gentlemen’ or even ‘esquire’ to denote the expansive lifestyles and civil behaviour that gave them acceptability among county elites as non-titled gentry.” (Wrightson, 614).

The idea of "improvement" took shape as the formation of a middling class who availed themselves of growing market opportunities. Land began to take on new definitions as a form of capital to be maximized rather than a patchwork of open fields that served as residential spaces and allowed farming access through a byzantine set of customary laws.

These ideas all needed the promotion of wealthy households as desirable ends, but it was a different ethic than that of great and especially titled landlords, who frequently preferred to maintain paternalistic postures from a distance. The result was the creation of a distinctive middling sort in a rural society in which selling grain became like selling beer or drapery, and the poor were sorted from the rich in the sieve of reputation. Improvement took some time to increase employment, and the loss of rights and land by the poor created dependence on more variable and competitive day labour markets, adding pressure to abandon the ‘idleness’ of the cottage economy and become ‘industrious’.

Envy began to take shape at many levels of the social dimension, so much so that an additional category of envy, representing a diminution or loss of position began to take hold in the English emotional imagination.

The Maryland Colonial Project and Envy

George Calvert's Early Life and Formation

In the early 17th century, when the world was still a patchwork of uncharted lands and contested faiths, George Calvert, the first Baron of Baltimore, stood at the crossroads of ambition and piety. His story is not one of dispassionate calculation, as some historians have suggested, but of a man woven into the emotional tapestry of his time—a tapestry threaded with envy, emulation, and the quiet ache of belonging. To understand Calvert’s colonial project in Maryland is to peer into the churning waters of Early Modern England, where envy had historically been seen as a sin but its definition was growing into a force that could propel a man toward virtue, status, and even salvation.

Born into a Yorkshire family with a lineage stretching back to the 1400s, Calvert was shaped by a world where competitive assertiveness and the fear of shame were paramount. His father, a man of modest means but high aspirations, insisted on religious conformity, sending young George to Oxford University, where he stood among the common students, his Catholicism a quiet undercurrent in a Protestant sea. This duality—of public conformity and private faith—would define much of Calvert’s life.

Envy, in its many forms, was the silent companion of Calvert’s ambitions. Not the generalized envy of malice or hatred, but the covetous envy that Samuel Otes described as looking “ever upward.” It was an envy that sought not to destroy but to emulate, to rise through the ranks of society while maintaining a veneer of piety. When Calvert entered the service of Robert Cecil, he navigated the royal court with a careful balance of Protestant personality and Catholic feeling. His letters to the king and others reveal a man acutely aware of the stakes, a man who understood that to be envied was to be seen, and to be seen was to survive.

The question of Calvert’s public conversion to Catholicism in 1624 is a puzzle wrapped in the emotional fabric of his time. Was it a spontaneous act of faith, or the calculated move of a man who feared exposure? Perhaps it was both. In a world where Catholicism was neither extinct nor dominant, Calvert’s conversion was a declaration of identity, a claim to a faith that had long been a private refuge. Yet it was also a gamble, a bid for a status that would secure his family’s future in a society increasingly defined by improvement and industry.

Calvert’s colonial ambitions in Maryland were not born of blind ambition but of a moderated desire for security and legacy. The Maryland project was, in many ways, an extension of his emotional world—a world where envy and emulation were not opposites but partners. The colony was to be a haven for Catholics, a place where faith and status could coexist without the constant threat of persecution. Yet it was also a venture shaped by the economic and social transformations of Early Modern England. The rise of the middling class, the redefinition of land as capital, and the ideology of improvement all found echoes in Calvert’s vision.

In Ireland, where Calvert adopted a pre-existing castle as his residence, the choice was both practical and symbolic. The medieval edifice, steeped in history and tradition, legitimized his standing as a new arrival in the peerage. In Maryland, his brother Leonard’s modest timber-framed house reflected the colony’s humble beginnings, while Philip Calvert’s later brick mansion, St. Peter’s, stood as a testament to the family’s rising fortunes. These architectural choices were not merely functional but emotional statements, declarations of a family’s place in a changing world.

The Calverts’ story is one of envy tempered by piety, of ambition constrained by faith. It is a story that challenges the binary narratives of economic and religious motivations, revealing instead a complex interplay of emotions and aspirations. George Calvert’s Maryland was not just a colony; it was a reflection of his inner world—a world where envy looked ever upward, not to destroy, but to build.

In the end, the Maryland colonial project was a testament to the power of emotions in shaping history. It was a venture born of envy, yes, but also of hope—a hope for a future where faith and status could coexist, where the chivalric traditions of Northern England could find new life in the forests of the New World. And in that hope, we find not just the story of George Calvert, but the story of an age.