The early history of Annapolis is itimately bound to that of Maryland, and it is with the planting of the first colony at St. Mary's City in 1634 that the story of Annapolis begins.  George Calvert, the founder of Maryland, served as secretary of state and member of the privy souncil during the reigh of James I.  Although born an Anglican, Calvert converted to Catholicism sometime during his career; since Catholics were legally disabled from holding public office.  Calvert kept his religious beliefs private until 1625 when he disclosed his conversion to the King.  He resigned as secretary of state soon after but James I, in compensation for his services and as a measure of his continued esteem, created him Baron Baltimore in the Irish peerage.

With the death of James I in 1625 Baltimore retired from public life.  In 1623 he had received a patent to found a colony at Avalon in Newfoundland; in 1627 he visited the plantation but found the climate so severe that he applied to the new severegin, Charles I, for a grant of land in the warmer territories of Virginia.  The new patent was issued in June 1632; since Lord Baltimore had died in April of that year, the colony was granted instead to his eldes son and heir, Cecil, the second Lord Baltimore.

Under the leadership of Leonard Calvert, Cecil's brother, 150 settlers were dispatched to Maryland in November 1633 in two ships, the Ark and the Dove.  The party landed at St. Clement's Island in the Potomac on March 25,1634.  Although the Calverts had envisioned Maryland as a sanctuary for persecuted Catholics, more than half of the original settlers were communicants of the Anglican Church.  The new colony and its capital at St. Mary's prospered.  But despite the enactment of a staturt guaranteeing religious tolerantion in 1649, the animosities between Anglicans, Puritans, and Catholics that afficted England throughout the seventeenth century soon had their reverberations in the New World.

Despite this auspicious beginning, it was nearly a half-century before Annapolis began to assume the configuration we know today.  The streets were unpaved and unlite, pigs and cows roamed at will; tanneries rendered the air somewhat less than salubrious.  When the state house burned in 1704, the resulting loss of all land records touched off a legal crisis that brought buildings to a stop. Ebenezer Cooke, the unofficial poet laureate of Maryland, described Annapolis in The Sot-Weed Factor (1708) as

A city situate on a plain
Where scarce a house will keep out rain;
The buildings framed with cypress rare
Resemble much our Southwick fair;
But strangers there will scarcely meet
With market place, exchange, or street;
And if the truth I may report,
It's not so large as Totenham Court.

( for more great reading about Annapolis please read Annapolis - A Walk Through History written by Elizabeth Anderson)