Episode Details

He had been one of the most powerful men in England — Secretary of State to King James, knighted, wealthy, trusted at the King's right hand. Then George Calvert became a Catholic, refused the oath, and walked out of the center of English power to chase a single idea: a place across the ocean where a Catholic could worship without the law closing around him.

This is the story of what that idea cost him. A frozen colony on the edge of Newfoundland, where half his people sickened and the winter ran from October to May. A chaplain's denunciation that foreshadowed a revolt sixty years off. The oath waiting for him at Jamestown, three thousand miles from the council chamber it had already cost him. A wife lost to the sea. And a charter he wrote in his own hand, in Latin, for a province named Maryland — and died five weeks before it was sealed.

George Calvert never saw the refuge he imagined. He left it to a son who had never seen it either. The question of whether it could be built at all now belonged to Cecil Calvert, the second Lord Baltimore.