Maryland State Coat of Arms

The shield at the center of the Maryland coat of arms is divided into four quarters. The first and fourth quarters show six vertical gold-and-black stripes crossed by a diagonal band. The second and third quarters show a silver-and-red checkered pattern crossed by a cross whose arms end in three balls. Both patterns come directly from the Calvert family heraldry of the seventeenth century.

A scarlet mantle lined with ermine surrounds the shield and supporters. The coat of arms appears on the reverse side of the state seal, on official documents, and on government buildings across Maryland. The same quartered design also forms the state flag, which was officially adopted by the General Assembly on March 9, 1904.

George Calvert, 1st Baron Baltimore, was born around 1580 in Yorkshire, England. He served in the English Parliament and as Secretary of State before converting to Roman Catholicism and resigning his offices. He then sought to establish a proprietary colony in North America. He died on April 15, 1632, five weeks before the Maryland charter was issued, so his son Cecil Calvert, 2nd Baron Baltimore, received the charter on June 20, 1632, and organized the colony.

The coat of arms George Calvert used combined two sets of family arms. The gold-and-black Calvert arms came from his father's family. The red-and-white Crossland arms came from his mother's family: his mother was Alice Crossland, a heraldic heiress, which gave George Calvert the right to quarter her family arms into his own. In December 1622, following the death of his wife Anne Mynne in childbirth, George Calvert added the Italian motto Fatti maschii, parole femine to his coat of arms.

The Calvert arms served as the official heraldry of the Maryland colony from its founding. In 1645, during Ingle's Rebellion, a privateer named Richard Ingle seized and destroyed the original Maryland seal. Cecil Calvert, 2nd Baron Baltimore, sent a replacement seal from England shortly after.

After the Revolutionary period, Maryland moved away from the proprietary Calvert heraldry. In 1794, painter Charles Willson Peale designed a new state seal with republican imagery. Various seal designs followed through the first half of the nineteenth century. In 1876, the General Assembly restored the Calvert coat of arms to the state seal. The current official rendering was adopted in 1969.

The Maryland coat of arms is built from two distinct heraldic families, combined into one shield and completed with supporters, a crest, and a motto that each carry specific historical meaning.

The quartered shield ties Maryland directly to the family that founded it. The Calvert arms represent George Calvert's paternal line; the Crossland arms represent his maternal line. Combining them in one shield was a standard heraldic practice for inheriting arms through both parents, but it also means Maryland's official emblem carries the history of two English families from the early seventeenth century.

The plowman and the fisherman add a layer of meaning that belongs specifically to Maryland, not to the Calvert family alone. They show the people who actually built and sustained the colony: farmers and watermen. Placing them on either side of the aristocratic shield connects the family's claim to the labor that made the land worth claiming.

The Italian motto was personal before it was official. George Calvert chose it in grief, after losing his wife. When Maryland inherited his arms, it inherited that motto too. The phrase has been on Maryland's coat of arms longer than any other element of the official design.

The Calvert arms have been associated with Maryland since the founding of the colony in 1632. However, Maryland did not always use the Calvert heraldry on its official seal. After independence, republican sentiment led the state to adopt designs without proprietary family imagery.

In 1794, Charles Willson Peale designed a new seal using a woman holding scales, reflecting the ideals of the new republic rather than the Calvert family's colonial authority. Eagle and patriotic imagery appeared in later seal designs from 1817 through 1854. The General Assembly restored the Calvert coat of arms in 1876, and the current official rendering was formally adopted in 1969.