Michael Pease Calvert

Calvert was the youngest of eight children of Charles Calvert and Elizabeth Holliday, born on 15 March 1798.^[1][2]

Charles Calvert the elder, a London-born Catholic and amateur landscape painter, was a steward for the Duke of Norfolk at Glossop Hall in Derbyshire.^[3][4][5] The elder Calvert was a man of means, able to purchase a large plot of land at 82 Oldham Street in Manchester and build a house there for his family; they lived in the city during the winter and Derbyshire during the summer.^[6][7][8] Michael and some of his other siblings were born back in Glossop, but all of them were baptised at a Catholic chapel on Rook Street in Manchester; Michael was born seven months after Charles' death.^[9][10][11] He was partly named after Elizabeth Colegrave (née Pease), a close family friend who was godmother to two of his sisters.^[11]

Charles Calvert the elder claimed that he and his children were members of the noble Calvert family, descended from Lord Baltimore—a Secretary of State for James I and the founder of the Maryland colony in the 17th century—and he was even attempting to legally prove his claim to the defunct baronetcy at the time of his death.^[7] Sources are inconsistent as to the exact nature of the claim: Thomas Letherbrow, a close family friend, wrote in 1878 that Charles Calvert the elder believed his grandfather to be one of the many illegitimate children of Frederick Calvert, the sixth and final Calvert governor of Maryland before the American Revolution who died in disgrace after a controversial rape trial; however, he was only two decades older than Charles and cannot have been his grandfather, let alone his great-grandfather.^[7] An encyclopaedia of prominent alumni of Manchester Grammar School, published in 1874 and based on information from the students' families, includes a biography of Michael Pease Calvert which states that the family were descended from "a younger brother" of the first Lord Baltimore.^[8]

Similarly, many sources claim that Charles Calvert the elder's brother was Raisley Calvert, a sculptor from Cumberland who was a benefactor of the poet William Wordsworth (and whose father was also a steward for the Duke of Norfolk, at Greystoke Castle), but this appears to be another family claim taken at face value—in reality, Charles the elder was born nearly two decades before his alleged "brother", their parents have different names on their birth certificates, and other than the Duke of Norfolk there is no documentary or geographical connection between the two men.^{[12][13][14][3]}

Letherbrow is clear that the family did sincerely believe both their father's claims of noble descent and of having a brother who was "a bosom friend of Wordsworth"—however, they thought his name was "Randolph" rather than Raisley.^[7] Michael Pease Calvert's son, John Raphael Calvert, also reaffirmed the claim in a letter to the Manchester City News in 1914, asserting that "the particulars of the Baltimore estates" were lost when his grandfather died.^[15] The exact nature of both claims may have been distorted over time as younger generations of the family retold them to later acquaintances and biographers like John Howard Nodal, whose Art in Lancashire and Cheshire: a List of Deceased Artists (1884) is a source relied upon for the younger Charles Calvert's entry in the 1895 edition of the Dictionary of National Biography.^[16][17]

Many posthumous sources also mistakenly assume that the Lancashire-based animal painter Henry Calvert was one of Charles Calvert the elder's children—in reality, he was from an unrelated family in Nottinghamshire who coincidentally happened to work and exhibit in Manchester during the same period as Charles and Michael Pease Calvert.^{[16][3][18][19]}