This volume addresses a series of crucial political questions in seventeenth-century English history, not the least of which is the extraordinary oddness of a large residual Catholic presence both within the aristocracy and within the Stuart regime. Relatively few historians have taken the period's Catholic peers (about 20 percent of the total on the eve of the civil war) seriously; this study does. Its focus is the North American colonial adventure of the Calvert family. The origins of the English colony of Maryland are located directly within the unusual career of the crypto-Catholic, and latterly recusant, secretary of state Sir George Calvert, whose fortunes and misfortunes are the backdrop for the events described in this book. Indeed, the underlying theme that holds together the narrative of the founding of Maryland (after Calvert's misadventures in Newfoundland) and the Calvert family's attempts to retain and rule it during this period is the extent to which it was possible to be both English (i.e., loyal and politically acceptable) and Catholic. For some contemporaries this was obviously true; for others it was obviously false. The first chapter rightly points to the irony of the shifting patterns of later Jacobean foreign policy, which called into question exactly how far Catholicism was, or could be, proscribed when a dynastic marriage with the Habsburgs was on the cards. It might have been worth stressing even more, perhaps, how many English Catholics had always regarded themselves as supporters of the Stuart dynasty and of their (Calvinist) king, James, a support on which the king was increasingly inclined to rely, as, later on, was his son Charles.

Sir George Calvert must have been phenomenally capable to have been promoted so far without patronage. His career came to grief because he so loyally continued to represent the royal line when royal policy (toward Spain) was becoming so visibly unstuck. His conversion to Catholicism (well described here) was undoubtedly in part a reaction to the rather miserable way in which he was treated by Charles and Buckingham.

So great were the difficulties encountered by the Calvert family in both Newfoundland and Maryland that one rather wonders whether, financially, it was worth the effort. The reduced circumstances of Cecil Calvert, the second Lord Baltimore, in the 1630s, dependent almost entirely, it seems, on his Arundell relatives in Wiltshire, certainly demonstrate that colonial enterprises were commercially as well as politically risky. However, the political and religious significance of the venture was considerable. It is, admittedly, sometimes a little difficult to make sense of the Calverts’ clerico-ecclesiastical allegiances. The first baron, Sir George, appears to have envisaged the Maryland venture as an enterprise that, although not an exclusively Catholic project, would employ the Society of Jesus. In the late 1620s and very early 1630s he became a patron of the religious orders’ opposition to Richard Smith, the recently appointed bishop of Chalcedon. But subsequently, when Cecil Calvert succeeded to the title, there seems to have been a certain amount of acrimony between the family and some of the Jesuits. This may have had something to do with the second baron's marriage into the Arundell family; the first Baron Arundell was a vigorous supporter of Smith. In the end, the relationship between the family and the religious orders remains difficult to decipher. By the end of the 1630s the second baron was again supporting the Jesuits in the colony; in the early 1640s he had reversed his position and tried to prevent Jesuits traveling there.

Yet the way in which the Maryland colony was constructed, legally and constitutionally, made a clear case to the regime and to English Protestants about the place of Catholicism in contemporary English society. As John Krugler stresses, the lord proprietor of the colony regarded it as essentially a landed manor, a private fiefdom under the crown. Within this fiefdom there would be no overt and offensive missionary goals. But the way in which English Catholics lived and wielded authority in Maryland could not but inflect the debates in England about the place that Catholics occupied in contemporary society. Cecil Calvert's well-known composition of an oath of allegiance for his colony (incorporated into colonial legislation in 1639), a variant on the 1606 statutory oath that many Catholics found exceedingly offensive, was promoted as a model for Catholics as an attempt to negotiate and discuss this issue with the regime on behalf of the entire English Catholic community, not just those Catholics who lived in Maryland. There is no reason not to believe the nonresident lord proprietor's professed view that the colony should allow considerable diversity of opinion and that no man should be troubled for his conscience. On the other hand, the operation of this ideal commonwealth-in-miniature must surely have been intended to teach a lesson to skeptics in England that Catholics were sincere in what they had said ever since the Elizabethan restoration of Protestantism about the sincerity of their petitions for toleration, and in their claims (which many Protestants did not believe) that toleration would not act as a Trojan horse for them to lord it over Protestants. (In fact, the Catholics in the colony were in a distinct minority.) At the same time, the “irenic” pose of the colonial administration in Maryland, disciplining both refractory Protestants and Catholics, would not have appeared, for example, in the case of the godly Protestant William Lewis, as acceptable to those in either the colony or in England who thought that the purpose of established statute law on religion was to bar Catholics and Catholic influence from public office.

In the 1630s the second Lord Baltimore tried to become governor of Virginia. A key part of his strategy was his assertion that he could increase the king's revenues from the colony significantly. Here Baltimore was reiterating Catholic declarations, for example, those during the Forced Loan experiment of the 1620s, that they were more willing and able to address the king's revenue problems than a Protestant parliament could.

The political logic of the Calvert family's colonial venture was played out in Civil War, Interregnum, Restoration, and then finally in 1688–89. The second baron battled to prevent a parliamentary invasion of his territory and only with exceeding difficulty in the 1640s and 1650s fought off a rescission of the charter by which he held the colony. In 1655 Virginian Protestants secured control of the territory, and Baltimore was left negotiating a deal with Cromwell by which he might be restored to authority in Maryland. Unsurprisingly, the Restoration regime came down firmly on Baltimore's side, and conditions for Catholics there improved greatly. Though they remained a small proportion of the population, they dominated life there in the 1660s. Many English Protestants would undoubtedly have perceived “toleration” turning into “alteration,” as so many antipapists had warned would happen. Indeed, the wider Catholic community's fantasy of the reestablishment of their religion under the Stuarts seemed to have come true in Maryland, as much through the exercise of lay and loyal Catholic patronage (though the third Lord Baltimore was the first resident proprietor there) as through clerical zeal. It certainly explains the determination of the “Protestant Associators” to topple the Calvert administration after James II was dethroned and to reabsorb the colony into the church of England.

The significance, therefore, of this well-written book (so much so that there could have been more detail on the way the colony worked, and more on the nuts and bolts of colonial life, as also on the Calverts’ political position in England during this period), is that it is a major addition to our understanding of how Catholicism functioned in Stuart society; it was technically prohibited but constantly infiltrating itself into political and commercial issues. To some extent the book takes the Calverts' colonial model as a forward-looking instance of a political experiment before its time, looking forward in fact to the secularist and tolerant values of the American war of independence. And yet it was also a sharp commentary on aspects of seventeenth-century political culture, a culture in which, with the church of England under Stuart stewardship, Protestants could not but see families such as the Calverts as a distinct threat.