Margaret Brent was an early colonist in Maryland, at the time an English colony where any Christian—Catholic, Anglican, or otherwise— could live freely. Brent's family was Catholic, arriving in 1638, and she, her sister, and two brothers worked to make a life for themselves as traders in St. Mary's City, deep in the Chesapeake Bay. Since there were so few colonists in the new colony, everyone knew everyone else, and Margaret made a name for herself quickly as a responsible businesswoman and landowner. She was very well known to the Calvert family, who owned the colony as a private, religiously tolerant concern. Though it was not the norm, it was hardly unusual in English North America—at the time a pestilential climate full of hostile Native inhabitants, unsafe water, and exceedingly hard work and living—for a single woman to hold an important role in maintaining her family and its profits; after all, anyone could die off at any time, so all hands were necessary. What was unusual was that Margaret (as opposed to one of her brothers) was the head of her household and a confidant of the Calvert family. When Leonard Calvert, the governor of Maryland, died in the middle of the English Civil War in 1647, he left Margaret as the executor of his will, charging her with using his family's fortune to pay his soldiers fighting for Charles I. Because Leonard Calvert's estate was not sufficient to pay his soldiers, Margaret Brent got the Maryland General Assembly to grant her control over his brother's estate too—that of George Calvert, the reigning Lord Baltimore. To pay the soldiers, she sold some of Lord Baltimore's cattle.