While the first English Civil War rages, Leonard Calvert returns to the Chesapeake in September 1644, after having been away for a bit more than a year. He carries commissions from Charles I to seize “London” assets in Virginia and collect a duty on tobacco for the Crown. The Royalists who run the royal colony of Virginia refuse to support Calvert and their king because they are too busy fighting the Powhatans to divide their own ranks. Meanwhile, Richard Ingle and his ship Reformation return to the Chesapeake, where he learns that Leonard Calvert has threatened to hang him if he comes to Maryland. Ingle, however, bears a letter of marque from Parliament that he interprets as a license to steal from Catholics.

So, naturally, this means war. A comical war, to be sure, and almost bloodless except for three Jesuits who end up in the wrong place at the wrong time. But a war nonetheless.

Ingle recruits some “rascally fellows,” and essentially conquers Maryland with the support of the colony’s Protestants. Leonard Calvert flees, and the Protestants install their own government at St. Mary’s City. To all appearances, the Calverts had been expelled from Maryland. All appearances, it would turn out, would be deceiving. The Calverts would recover Maryland within 18 months, and Ingle would die a pauper.

And so it is that the University of Maryland football team bears the Calvert family crest on its helmets.

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Selected references for this episode

The “Plundering Time” of Maryland Part 1

Timothy B. Riordan, The Plundering Time: Maryland and the English Civil War, 1645–1646

Podcast: Rejects and Revolutionaries, “English Civil War 7: The Plundering Time”