Herbert Croft’s father converted to Catholicism in 1617 and retired to a Benedictine monastery in France. The young Croft joined him and also became a Catholic. After a decade of study abroad, Herbert returned to the Church of England from what he described in his will as the ‘errors and gross superstitions’ of the Church of Rome. His career in the Anglican Church was then facilitated by the patronage of William Laud†, archbishop of Canterbury from 1633.
After the fall of Hereford to parliamentarian forces, Croft preached vigorously against vandalism but his audacity almost cost him his life. In a celebrated confrontation in Hereford cathedral, soldiers held their fire only when dissuaded by John Birch‡.
Bishop of Hereford
Within weeks of the Restoration, Croft hectored the king over his Civil War engagement with the Presbyterian Scots, claiming that the royalist defeat at Worcester was providential comment on the king’s desertion of the established Church. Although the king expressed his dislike of the sermon, calling Croft ‘a passionate preacher’, when Nicholas Monck, of Hereford, died prematurely in 1662, Croft, who was familiar with political configurations in the region, filled the vacancy.
Croft was far more concerned with ecclesiastical than parliamentary affairs, bringing order to cathedral life and music to its liturgy, and ensuring weekly doles to the poor. In the decade after 1660, in a bishopric worth £900 a year, he claimed to have spent over £8,000 on public and charitable uses, but £5,000 of that represented the value of leases transferred to George Monck, duke of Albemarle, for the benefit of Nicholas Monck’s widow and children (and which Croft confirmed by order of the king), and a further £2,000 was to remove the encumbrances created by interregnum leases issued to Albemarle’s ally, John Birch. Only £400 was spent on building and repairs, with a further £700 to augment livings. In 1681 William Sancroft, archbishop of Canterbury, made it clear that he expected rather more to have been done in the way of augmentations but Croft excused himself on the grounds of the ‘hard terms’ on which he had accepted the bishopric, its low value and the lack of a commendam.
As a private landowner, Croft had extensive dealings with the local gentry and nobility. In his capacity as bishop, he could neither ignore the Presbyterian presence in his diocese nor conceal his distaste for the schism generated by the Act of Uniformity. He was active in the committee stages of the legislation and on 8 Apr. was one of those appointed to draw up the abortive proviso that would allow the king to provide for the ejected clergy.
Croft seems to have been able to make a clear distinction between personal and theological failings, one that was probably not appreciated by others. Christian charity, he claimed, obliged the churchwardens of Greet to forgive their ‘drunken, brawling’ but contrite and conformable minister.
In his first three sessions in the House, Croft was named to numerous select committees on disparate pieces of legislation. He was present for the debates on the Act of Uniformity and it may have been on one of these occasions (or perhaps more probably for the debate on a possible amendment to the act in the summer of 1663) that he told the House that unity in the Church was so important that ‘he should not only be content to part with any of the ceremonies and much more to leave them all as indifferent in their use as they were in their nature but even to dispense with the belief of some things in the creed itself’.
On 24 July 1663 Croft was named to the committee that framed the contentious and ultimately unsuccessful amendment to the Act of Uniformity stating that the declaration of ‘assent and consent’ should be understood ‘only as to the practice and obedience to the said Act, and not otherwise’. He attended the House throughout the passage of the first Conventicle Act in April 1664. At the 1665 session in Oxford he was named to the committee for further provision for the plague; then, on 27 Oct., together with nine of his fellow bishops, he was named to the select committee on what was to become the Five Mile Act, attending until the legislation received the royal assent on 31 October. During the next (1666–7) session, Croft was present for only 27 per cent of sittings, registering his proxy in favour of George Hall, of Chester, on 15 Dec. 1666 (vacated at the end of the session).
The fall of Clarendon and the Cabal, 1667-8
Croft’s position as a trusted courtier was tested to the full when Edward Hyde, earl of Clarendon, was ousted from power. On 12 Nov. 1667 the chancellor was impeached at the bar of the House of Lords. Four days later the king, particularly ‘concerned’ at levels of support for Clarendon, claimed that he had ‘one bishop on his side [Croft] and but one’ and was left with George Villiers, 2nd duke of Buckingham, and George Digby, 2nd earl of Bristol, as his ‘only cabinet council’.
In his autobiography Clarendon complained bitterly that Croft had behaved towards him with ‘very signal ingratitude’ and recounted the bishop’s attempt to mediate. The king authorized Croft to guarantee Clarendon safe passage abroad and to promise that ‘he should not be in any degree prosecuted, or suffer in his honour or fortune by his absence’. Directed to avoid mentioning the king by name, Croft became increasingly ‘more involved and perplexed’. Clarendon refused the offer outright and the king in turn refused to grant a written pass, each message conveyed via the agitated bishop. Only when James Stuart, duke of York, intervened to confirm Croft’s offer did Clarendon leave for France.
It was a sign of Croft’s continuing favour with the king that he was invited to preach on Christmas day 1667 in place of Gilbert Sheldon, archbishop of Canterbury. Then, in February 1668, Croft replaced another Clarendon ally, George Morley, bishop of Winchester, as dean of the chapel royal. His influence at court was nevertheless limited: in the autumn of 1668 he joined forces with Sheldon in an unsuccessful attempt to oppose the appointment of the natural philosopher, John Wilkins, to Chester and to secure the appointment of William Sancroft instead.
Retirement from court, 1669–75
In April 1669, less than 18 months after his appointment, Croft resigned his position at the chapel royal. No one was quite sure why. Humphrey Henchman, bishop of London, reported that Croft intended to lead ‘a retired life’ in Herefordshire. He was perhaps more inclined to such a life because of his grief at the recent death of his daughter. There was also speculation that his decision was prompted by having his last sermon ‘evil spoken of’, which suggests that there may have been some truth in the explanation offered by Gilbert Burnet, later bishop of Salisbury, that the bishop had ‘lost ground quickly’ by using ‘much freedom with the king … in the wrong place, not in private, but in the pulpit’.
Croft attended Parliament for the adjournment on 1 Mar. 1668 but was then absent, apart from an appearance at the prorogation on 9 May 1669 and at the opening of the brief 1673 session on 27 Oct., until he began to attend regularly again in 1674. His presence on 27 Oct. 1673 was almost certainly a by-product of a visit to London, during which, together with Morley, he had made a concerted attempt to reclaim the duke of York for the Church of England.
Within days of Croft’s sermon, the Lords were occupied with another bill to invite into the Church ‘sober and peaceably-minded Dissenters’. Although he attended the House more regularly during this session, Croft was not present for the bill’s first or second readings and the proposed legislation was lost with prorogation on 24 February. In April he preached before the king, delivering not a lecture but a classic statement of Protestant faith.
Croft attended the opening of the 1675 session but was present for only three days, making his final appearance in the House on 26 Apr., the day on which the House debated the contentious ‘no alteration’ oath proposed by Thomas Osborne, earl of Danby (later marquess of Carmarthen and duke of Leeds). At a call of the House on 29 Apr. 1675 he was excused attendance.
The Naked Truth
As Danby’s alliance with the bishops became more entrenched and the embryonic Whig party made political capital out of anti-clericalism, Croft worked assiduously for Protestant unity. Addressed directly to the Lords and Commons, his pamphlet The Naked Truth appeared anonymously in 1675 ‘like a comet’. This plea for unity and his willingness to abolish the more controversial Church ceremonies fell foul of churchmen and laity alike. The book was distributed at Westminster in advance of the brief session in autumn 1675, carefully timed to create support for a bill for the relief of nonconformists that Buckingham tried to introduce. Anglican hardliners, including Peter Gunning, bishop of Ely, and Francis Turner, who would succeed Gunning at Ely, were appalled. It was even rumoured that if his authorship could be proved Croft would be suspended from his bishopric.
Locally this encouraged the renascent country party to seek Croft’s support by offering his son, Sir Herbert Croft‡, a seat in the Commons at the next election as Member for Leominster. The offer was refused, perhaps because of a desire to avoid further factional entanglement, especially as political uncertainties seem to have been encouraging anti-clerical sentiments in his own diocese. The chaplain to local country party supporter Paul Foley‡ found himself under investigation and bound over to appear at the assizes for saying ‘that the bishops should be excluded, that they were a dead weight, and that, whenever they gave their voices for themselves or by proxies, for the most part they were on the crown side’. Such a view is supported by Croft’s decision to register his proxy in favour of Henry Compton, bishop of London, on 9 Feb. 1677. It is however rather more likely that, as a territorial magnate in his own right, Croft was affronted by arrangements that were intended to secure election for the county for Sir Edward Harley‡ and to fob Croft off with the offer of a mere borough seat for his son.
From the Popish Plot to 1688
When Parliament reconvened on 21 Oct. 1678 its business was dominated by the revelations made over the previous summer about a supposed Popish Plot. These included claims that Croft was an assassination target because of his apostasy from Rome.
Although absent from the House, Croft nevertheless became engaged in parliamentary business. On 7 Dec. 1678 the Lords learned that a property in Combe (Cwm), Herefordshire, was being used as a college for Jesuits and ordered Croft to investigate. On 26 Dec., excusing his absence on account of ‘his great age and infirmities’, he informed the Lords that he had indeed discovered a Jesuit college and would investigate further. Two days later, the Lords committee for examinations heard that the library at Combe had been seized, and required Croft to dispose of the offending material. Writing to Henry Compton in the immediate aftermath of the raid, Croft was anxious about reactions in the House, especially the likely displeasure of Henry Somerset, 3rd marquess of Worcester (later duke of Beaufort).
Croft’s desire to avoid public (and potential parliamentary) criticism resulted in particular difficulty in 1682 when he had to handle competing demands about how to deal with Lady Scudamore’s adultery with Thomas Coningsby†, the future earl of Coningsby. Fully aware of ‘the great clamour of the country and … of the kingdom’, he commenced a prosecution against the couple in the Church courts, insisting that the Church was ‘bound to prosecute such notorious wickedness in great persons as well as in mean’. In his eyes, Lady Scudamore was the more guilty of the two: ‘For both by the laws of God and man adultery is more punishable in the woman than the man.’ Sancroft disagreed: he considered Coningsby to be more worthy of punishment and wanted the matter settled by a private reconciliation in Croft’s chapel. Anxious to avoid responsibility, Croft told Sancroft in August that ‘I heartily wish your grace would make use of your court of the arches and take it out of mine’. By December he was trying to wash his hands of the whole affair, suggesting that Sancroft persuade Lady Scudamore ‘to acknowledge her crime and submit herself to the Church’s discipline before such witnesses as your grace should think fit and perform such other things in your chapel there as your grace proposed to be done in mine here’.
As the Scudamore/Coningsby affair demonstrated, living a retired life did not mean freedom from personal and political dilemmas. In May 1684, Croft had to defend himself to Sancroft for the delay in sending the Hereford address to the king; the clergy had not appeared to subscribe previous addresses and he wished to avoid being ‘singular’ in the matter.
After the accession of James II to the throne, Croft’s anti-catholicism gave way in the face of the need to demonstrate loyalty to the new king. An exchange of letters between Sancroft and William Lloyd, then bishop of Llandaff, suggests that this engendered a considerable level of distrust. Discussing a letter recently sent by Croft to Beaufort, Lloyd accused the former of having moved from ‘naked truth to barefaced flattery’ and feared that he had paved the way for the new king to ‘cancel the obligation of that most gracious … royal promise’ to protect the Church of England.
to recommend unto all persons their loyalty and special duty they owe unto our sovereign for his gracious inclinations to us by god’s particular providence and dispensation to suffer us so freely to enjoy our religion which is so contrary to the general inclination of those men of his own persuasion …
NLW, Ottley Corresp. 1634, 1727.
Croft’s name is absent from the various lists compiled in 1687–8 of those who supported the king’s religious policies; but nor was he listed as an opponent. When James II instructed the bishops to disseminate his second Declaration of Indulgence on the first two Sundays in June 1688, there was a widespread expectation that Croft would comply. Indeed, early in June 1688 Croft told the king that
It hath been my great good fortune that I have found no trouble at all in conscience by obeying your Majesty’s commands … A true Church of England man can never rebel or be disloyal in the least, his religion commanding him absolutely to obey, either by acting or by suffering, and to lay himself as a worm under your majesty’s feet …
Add. 70113, Croft to James II, June 1688.
Sir Edward Harley, assisted by his son Robert Harley, the future earl of Oxford, spent several weeks, beginning in mid May, attempting to dissuade Croft, pointing out that ‘whatsoever is read in the Church is by law required to be warranted by the king or the bishop, so that whatsoever is read there, is not merely narrative or rehearsal, but authoritative, consequently implies consent’. Croft nevertheless instructed his clergy to read it ‘on their obedience canonical’. He told Harley that refusing to read the declaration was unnecessarily antagonistic and that the clergy could and should rely on the king’s promise to preserve the Anglican religion.
Croft was appalled to find that he was now suspected of being a Catholic sympathizer and rushed into print to defend his actions, claiming that he had spent a sleepless night in ‘a perfect agony’ as he tried to reconcile his duty to his king with that to his fellow bishops and the Church.
Final years
At a call of the House on 25 Jan. 1689, Croft’s absence was attributed to age and he was again excused parliamentary duty. He was clearly too frail to travel to London but he was also unable to reconcile himself to the Revolution. In his will, composed the same month, he wrote of ‘these evil days wherein we have lived to see such sad revolutions and dismal catastrophes’. He failed to take the new oaths and on 22 Apr. 1691 Gilbert Ironside, bishop of Bristol, was nominated to the see of Hereford in Croft’s place. Early in May Croft’s dislike of the new regime was underlined when he refused to assist local celebrations for the safe return to England of William III. His windows were broken in revenge.
Ironside was not formally translated until October 1691 so Croft was still technically bishop of Hereford when he died on 18 May 1691 and is thus not normally counted among the non-jurors. He bequeathed Croft Castle to his only son, Sir Herbert Croft; his final arrangements were otherwise concerned primarily with charitable donations, including the establishment of a £1,200 trust to provide for the widows of poor ministers. He was buried between the communion rails of his cathedral, to be joined within 15 months by his dean, George Benson. Their conjoined memorial tablets, with two hands intertwined, commemorated a deep and lasting friendship.