The colony of Maryland began as a proprietary grant from King Charles I of England to the first Baron Baltimore, George Calvert. Baltimore had been an important official in the reign of Charles's father, James I, but he had been forced to leave most of his political offices in 1625. For his services, Charles granted Baltimore lands to the north of the Potomac River on the Atlantic coast of the Americas. Baltimore had openly declared himself a Catholic in 1625, a politically dangerous thing to do in seventeenth-century England, and he determined to make the new colony a refuge for Catholics fleeing persecution in Protestant-controlled England.