Tudor-Stuart society could be transplanted. Prospective
investors could foresee orderly settlement in which land
development would bring profits.⁹

   Plans of this type for English colonies went back as
far as the last third of the 1500s. Some aimed at restor-
ing in the New World an older English political struc-
ture based on the powers of great nobles who owed
allegiance to the king, but ruled within their own do-
mains without crown interference in internal affairs. It
is significant for the history of Maryland that some of
these projects hoped to resettle English Catholics, who
were severely treated in Elizabethan England. For exam-
ple, Sir Humphrey Gilbert's plan for colonizing much
of eastern North America relied on attracting Catholic
gentlemen who would move to his territory with their
tenants. He envisioned himself as Lord Paramount with
powers to subgrant land to be held of him, not the
crown. This practice had been forbidden in most of
England since the thirteenth century. The investors who
received these grants in turn were to create subgrants
and so on down the line of subdivision. Each would
acknowledge submission to the next landholder above
him in a feudal pyramid, but exercise jurisdiction over
his own tenants. Included would be rights for each land-
holder to hold courts in his own name. To us such a col-
onization project seems fanciful, but before Gilbert's
death in 1583 a number of prospective English Catholic
investors showed serious interest in his feudal Utopia. In
1605, Sir Thomas Arundel of Wardour briefly pro-
moted a similar project. He was a friend of Calvert's—
his daughter Anne married Calvert's son Cecil—and
Arundel may well have introduced Calvert to the history
of early plans for Catholic resettlement based on feudal
hierarchies.¹⁰

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