page_title: Frederick Calvert, 6th Baron Baltimore
section_title: European travels
hierarchical_section_title: Frederick Calvert, 6th Baron Baltimore / Adulthood and inheritance / European travels
caption_attribution_description: English: Engraving of Frederick Calvert, 6th Lord Baltimore
context_page_description: Frederick Calvert, 6th Baron Baltimore, styled The Hon. Frederick Calvert until 1751, was an English nobleman and last in line of the Barons Baltimore. Although he exercised almost feudal power in the Province of Maryland, he never once set foot in the colony, and unlike his father, he took little interest in politics, treating his estates, including Maryland, largely as sources of revenue to support his extravagant, often scandalous lifestyle. In 1768 he was accused of abduction and rape by Sarah Woodcock, a noted beauty who kept a milliner's shop at Tower Hill. The jury acquitted Calvert, but he left England soon afterwards, and never recovered from the public scandal that surrounded the trial. Dogged by the criticism and poor health, he contracted a fever and died in Naples at the age of 40.
context_section_description: Calvert's reputation for exotic living spread quickly. In 1764 James Boswell (1740–1795) began his Grand Tour of Europe, having heard that Baltimore was "living at Constantinople like a Turk, with his seraglio all around him"." Boswell also observed that Baltimore "... lived luxuriously and inflamed his blood, then he became melancholy and timorous, and was constantly taking medicines... he is living a strange, wild, life, useless to his country, except when raised to a delirium, and must soon destroy his constitution".
  Calvert spent a good deal of time in Italy, where the German art historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717–1768) described him as being "one of those worn-out beings, a hipped Englishman, who had lost all physical and moral taste".
  Such was Calvert's fascination with the Ottoman Turks that in 1766, on his return to England, he pulled down part of his London house, rebuilding it in the style of a Turkish harem. In 1767 Calvert published an account of his travels in the East, titled A tour to the East, in the years 1763 and 1764: with Remarks on the City of Constantinople and the Turks. Also Select Pieces of Oriental Wit, Poetry and Wisdom. The book, said Horace Walpole, "deserved no more to be published than his bills on the road for post-horses", adding that it demonstrated how "a man may travel without observation, and be an author without ideas". It gains a mention from a character in Tobias Smollett's epistolary novel The Expedition of Humphry Clinker.
  Calvert's spending was prodigious, and he spent considerable sums of money on his family estate at Woodcote Park. According to Walpole, Calvert spent a great deal of money making the interior of the house "tawdry" and "ridiculous" in the "French" style.
caption: Engraving of Frederick Calvert, 6th Lord Baltimore
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