Nathaniel Crew was the only bishop in this period who was also a peer. Indeed, he is thought to have been the first holder of both a peerage and a bishopric.
The bishopric of Durham, one of the wealthiest in the country, brought Crew considerable wealth. Though reduced over the Interregnum, it was still thought in 1660 to be worth nearly £4,000 a year gross, though the abolition of feudal tenures was said to have had some impact on it. In 1707 Elizabeth Burnet estimated the see to be worth some £5,000 per annum; other uninformed estimates went as far as £6,000. These may have been overestimates, as there were also considerable costs associated with the see. Certainly, however, its value was steadily enhanced by the commercial benefits of a fast developing coal industry across the diocese.
Crew’s ecclesiastical career has been examined at length but with the exception of his open letter to James II in November 1688 calling for a free Parliament, he left no publications of his own.
Early career and elevation to Oxford
Crew’s father had been a prominent member of the Long Parliament, one of the Presbyterian leadership involved in bringing about the Restoration in 1660. As a reward he was elevated to the peerage. Nathaniel Crew was by then an Oxford fellow: quick to respond to the changing state of affairs he was, so he claimed, the first to adopt the surplice and hood in Lincoln College chapel, before any orders had been issued commanding their use. By 1663, he had come to the attention of the king and was said to have been offered a knighthood, though this was declined, on the grounds that he intended to enter the Church. Nevertheless he put off his ordination for a further two years, until 1665. A year later he was appointed a chaplain in ordinary and by the age of 30 he had become a ‘thorough courtier’.
There were rumours of Crew’s imminent elevation to the episcopate at least two years before his eventual promotion to the bishopric of Oxford. In October 1669, only a few months after his appointment as dean, a newsletter reported erroneously that he had been made bishop of Chichester.
Within six months of his elevation, Crew had presided at the controversial marriage of Charles Fitzroy, duke of Southampton, to Sir Henry Wood’s daughter. Both parties were underage: according to Sir Ralph Verney‡, their combined ages only amounted to about 16. Crew conducted his primary visitation in September 1672. He finally received his writ of summons on 23 October, a few days after he resigned the rectorship.
In advance of the spring 1673 session of Parliament, Crew received the proxy of former Presbyterian Edward Reynolds, bishop of Norwich. He held the proxy throughout the session and assured colleagues that he would use it to ensure that Reynolds voted ‘right’.
Crew’s association with York continued to develop during this period and by the close of 1673 he was closely identified with the duke. According to Smith’s memoir of Crew, at Easter 1672 Crew had spoken to York about his absence from the royal chapel but had managed to do so without sacrificing the duke’s good opinion of him.
Translation to Durham
As early as March 1674 it was rumoured that the bishopric of Durham, vacant since January 1672, was at last to be disposed of. Crew, it was thought, ‘stands fair for it’. He appears to have approached York about being translated there some time before. Croft seems again to have used his interest on Crew’s behalf to secure the place.
Translation improved Crew’s financial standing dramatically and also offered him additional opportunities to assist family members. His nephews Charles Montagu‡ and Sidney Wortley Montagu‡ would benefit from mining leases on preferential terms from Crew. Crew also profited from the grant of coal transportation rights across his property and over the time of his episcopate would initiate unprecedented claims for mines under enclosed grounds in his copyhold manors.
Crew evidently came under pressure over the lucrative appointments available in the cathedral of Durham: it was apparently with the agreement of Crew that on 19 Dec. 1674, at the instance of John Granville, earl of Bath, the king promised the deanery of Durham at the next vacancy to Bath’s brother, Archdeacon Denis Granville (the vacancy would not occur until 1684, on Dean Sudbury’s death). Crew was evidently a friend of the Granvilles, for he solemnized the marriage in March 1675 between Lady Grace Granville and George Carteret, Baron Carteret, when both were underage. Crew’s had to defend his rights of appointment to various posts, particularly prebends, a right established in the bishop since the reign of Queen Mary, but recently exercised by the king during the vacancy. In January 1675 the king attempted to make effective a promise during the vacancy made to Thomas Cartwright, later bishop of Chester, of the deanery of Ripon; Crew seems to have deftly avoided it. Crew was said in April to be intending to confer Durham prebends on the son of Arthur Annesley, earl of Anglesey, and another on the brother of his own nephew, Edward Montagu, 2nd earl of Sandwich (the latter was successful, but the young Annesley seems not to have secured the hoped-for place); but Cartwright was said to have secured the king’s recommendation ‘for the first of five of the best livings that shall fall in the bishop’s gift’.
Crew sat in the House of Lords as bishop of Durham for the first time on 10 Nov. 1674, a prorogation day. In January 1675 he was one of the signatories to the ‘bishops’ advice’ to the king on the suppression of Catholicism.
By 13 Oct. 1675 he was back at Westminster for the start of the new parliamentary session. He attended two-thirds of all sittings and was named to eight select committees. On 18 Oct., perhaps surprisingly given their usually poor relations, he registered his proxy in favour of Compton, his successor at Oxford. It was vacated with Crew’s attendance on 8 November. On 10 Nov. he was named as one of the conference managers on the address to the king for recalling soldiers and he continued to attend until the prorogation later in the month. Meanwhile, a by-election had taken place for the county of Durham on 25 October. Crew backed Christopher Vane, later Baron Barnard, brother of the former member, but also someone who shared Crew’s Presbyterian antecedents.
Crew undertook his primary visitation of the see of Durham in the summer of 1676, ‘which was very solemn and pompous’: he preached at Newcastle, and was met by the clergy at Alnwick, received by the corporation and the garrison at Berwick (some of the alderman asking to be excused from attending the Church because they were ‘of different principles from the Church of England’. He also conducted a visitation of the cathedral, apparently to the chagrin of the dean.
That summer, Crew joined with John Maitland, duke of Lauderdale [S], and ‘other persons of quality’ in defence of the postmaster at Doncaster, whom Sir John Reresby‡ hoped to eject from his office and replace with one of his own circle. Despite their backing the postmaster was put out after Reresby secured York’s backing for his own man.
Crew took his place in the House when it resumed on 15 Jan. 1678, although it then adjourned for almost two weeks. On 29 Jan. he dissented from the resolution to address the king for the release of Philip Herbert, 7th earl of Pembroke, who had been imprisoned on a charge of blasphemy. He attended until the close on 13 May and was then once more in his place at the opening of the following session on 23 May. On 13 July he was one of those named to report the conference with the Commons on methods and proceedings in Parliament. Two days later he attended for the prorogation and returned to Durham. Four months earlier, in March, the first election had been held for the Durham City constituency although the act providing for its enfranchisement had been passed five years earlier. Crew had originally recommended Wentworth Dillon, 4th earl of Roscommon [I], ‘yet the people do utterly dislike him, and have desired the bishop to name another, and they express a kindness for ... Parkhurst’. John Parkhurst‡, Crew’s cousin, had been appointed by the bishop in 1674 as steward of his estates and on 27 Mar. he was, with Crew’s backing, successfully elected with Sir Ralph Cole‡, 2nd bt.
Crew was back in London by the end of September when he was present at the council meeting held on the afternoon of 28 Sept. to hear the testimony of Titus Oates relating to the Popish plot.
On 6 Dec., as part of the enquiry into the Popish Plot, the House considered the case of John Jennison, father of the Jesuit Thomas Jennison, a prisoner in Newgate. Crew was ordered to summon the elder Jennison to London and informed the House on the 19th of his arrival; the Lords subsequently permitted Jennison free access to his son and ordered Crew to examine Mr Smith, one of the Jennisons’ relations (and a convert from Catholicism) to ascertain the veracity of Smith’s conversion. Smith’s memoir of Crew tells a story about Crew asking Titus Oates, when he was dining at the chaplains’ table, Crew being there as clerk of the closet, who was supposed to replace him as bishop of Durham if the Plot had been successful; Oates’s answer—providing a name—was supposed to have protected Crew from any subsequent imputation of having been involved in the Plot himself.
On 3 Mar. Crew witnessed the affidavit in which the king denied that he had been involved in a previous marriage.
By the spring of 1679 Crew’s position at court appears to have been weakening, no doubt on account of his close identification with York. In April he was omitted from the remodelled privy council. It was also rumoured that he was one of five bishops to be impeached for complicity in the Plot (the others being Peter Gunning, Peter Mews, bishop of Bath and Wells, John Pritchett, bishop of Gloucester, and Isaac Barrow, bishop of St Asaph), though no impeachments were forthcoming.
On 20 Oct. Crew responded to Sancroft’s urging to ‘hasten up’ to London with an undertaking to make preparations ‘for a sudden journey’. Although a further prorogation was anticipated, he reckoned that travelling then would be preferable to delaying to January. His plans changed on 7 Nov. when, after spending five days travelling south, he turned back when he heard that York was travelling by land to Scotland. He returned in time to entertain the duke and duchess and was seen being kissed by York, a mark of particular favour. Sir Ralph Verney was unsurprised that Crew afforded York such a welcome in Durham, ‘because he made that bishop’.
Parliament did not, in the end, meet again for until the following autumn. Crew was back in the House on 21 Oct. 1680 for the opening of the second Exclusion Parliament. He attended 83 per cent of sittings and was named to four select committees. On the matter of exclusion Arthur Capell, earl of Essex, was said to have claimed that Crew was so lacking in principle that he would have voted for the measure if the vote had been close. Crew, though, opposed the bill and summarily dismissed his cousin Parkhurst from his employment after the latter spoke against York in the Commons. On 15 Nov. he voted to reject the exclusion bill on its first reading and on the 23rd he voted against the appointment of a committee of both houses to examine the state of the kingdom. On 7 Dec. Crew and his brother were in rare agreement in both voting William Howard, Viscount Stafford, guilty of treason.
On 7 Jan. 1681 Crew and his brother were in the House for the division on the committal for high treason of Lord Chief Justice Sir William Scroggs, the two men again on opposite sides of the political divide.
In 1681 Crew succeeded to the estates of his brother, John, at Newbold, Leicestershire, valued at between £500 and £600 a year. The following year he stood godparent (with Anglesey and Lady Gifford) to the son of Lady Temple and preached the Lenten sermon on 5 March.
Crew’s activities in hunting potential conspirators coincided with his summer visitation.
The Accession of James II
Crew, as clerk of the closet, was in regular attendance on Charles II during the last days of his life.
On 23 Apr. Crew attended the king at his coronation as one of his supporters under the canopy of state.
Present for the prorogation on 20 Nov., Crew attended the House for four further prorogations between 10 May 1686 and 28 Apr. 1687. In late 1685 he was credited with helping to procure the see of Bristol for Jonathan Trelawny, later bishop of Winchester.
’Tis the sweetest man, the meekest person, so full of courtesy and empty of sense, that either his good nature or his ignorance must needs make way for his perversion. And truly I cannot blame it in a man who is willing to please and scarce knows the difference between one religion and another.Add. 72481, f. 109.
It did nothing for his reputation that in July 1686 he was appointed to the ecclesiastical commission. The extent of his participation has been questioned, but in the absence of Sancroft he was the senior cleric in attendance.
Crew’s perceived association with James’s Catholic favourites was hinted at in November 1686, when he was observed prompting William Powis, earl of Powis, Henry Arundell, 3rd Baron Arundell of Wardour, and Henry Jermyn, Baron Dover, at a ceremony at which they were made commissioners of the peace. The following year, when the ecclesiastical commission was renewed, Crew remained on the board while Sancroft was dropped. With the suspension of the archbishop predicted on a daily basis, Crew’s translation to Canterbury seemed equally probable.
At the start of 1687, Crew was listed as one of the lords who would support a repeal of the Test Act. Roger Morrice observed that the repeal of the Tests had ‘gained the concurrence of several temporal lords, and ... of seven bishops’, of whom Crew was one, and under February reported an interview between Crew and Robert Byerley‡ on the subject, in which Crew argued that the repeal was necessary to secure toleration for Catholics in the event of a Protestant successor to the throne, ‘that those laws may not be turned upon them who have been such loyal persons’. Crew went on that ‘the king was a most just and gracious and merciful prince, and did desire nothing more, but that all his subjects might stand upon an equal level and we might all live in peace and perfect ease ... and it was very fit that those laws should be taken off’.
The Revolution, 1687-90
By November 1687 Crew was still thought to be in favour of a repeal of the Test Act, but (for all the rumours of his sympathies with Rome) he was increasingly isolated and unhappy about the king’s ecclesiastical policy. After Father Petre had been sworn in at the Privy Council on 11 Nov. 1687 (placed between Crew and Sir Nicholas Butler) Crew ceased to attend its meetings, prompting the king to accuse him of desertion. Crew was nevertheless said to have continued to rebuke the more vehement anti-Catholic preachers, including Simon Patrick, later bishop of Ely, whom he refused to introduce to the king.
Crew was one of only a few bishops who was said to have tried, unsuccessfully, to enforce the reading of the second Declaration of Indulgence, issued at the end of April with orders for it to be read in churches outside London on the first two Sundays in June. According to one newsletter, he stripped a number of vintners and victuallers of their licences for refusing to subscribe a paper supporting the policy. Although it was claimed in several newsletter reports in July, Crew’s biographer denied the claim that he had suspended a number of clergy at his visitation for their refusal to read the indulgence read, explaining the suspension of Dr Morton as relating to his non-appearance (a version of events that receives some support from a correspondent of Thomas Hearne nearly fifty years later), and retold a story about a local Catholic, Sir Thomas Haggerson, hearing that Crew had not ‘taken care’ to have the king’s orders obeyed. Crew did hosted lavish celebrations following the birth on 10 June of the Prince of Wales and preached a loyal sermon, the corporation of Durham sending up an address welcoming the news of the royal birth.
By the time of the invasion in November 1688 Crew was in London.
On 5 Dec. the city of Durham surrendered to a detachment commanded by Richard Lumley, Viscount Lumley [I], later earl of Scarbrough, who took up quarters at Crew’s palace.
Dismissed from his positions at court, Crew nevertheless appeared at Westminster on 25 Jan. 1689, the fourth day of the Convention. He would attend only 12 sittings (six per cent) in the first session of the Convention, voting in favour of a regency on 29 January. On 4 Feb. it was reported that Crew (not noted as being present in the Journal) and Thomas Belasyse, Viscount (later earl of) Fauconberg, ‘retired between the hanging and the door next to the bishops’ room’ during the main division on the abdication question. By the 6th Crew appears to have resolved to abandon James and was one of only two bishops, according to some lists, to vote that the king had abdicated and that the throne was vacant, the other being Compton. In other lists Crew was the only bishop to do so. Clarendon remarked bitterly that Crew, who had been to the House only twice before that session ‘came today to give his vote against the king, who had raised him’. Anthony Wood accused Crew of deserting the king ‘in hopes to keep his bishopric’.
The Reign of William and Mary
On 18 Feb. Crew attended the House for the last time for eight months. He was one of three bishops named by Gilbert Burnet as being untrustworthy; being careful to ensure that he had a witness to any conversation, it was no doubt out of concern for his security under the new regime that he resolved to depart for the continent with his nephew James Montagu, one of the sons of the earl of Sandwich.
During July the Commons had ordered that Crew be excepted from the bill of Indemnity. The Crew memoirs attributed his inclusion to Danby, now marquess of Carmarthen, as an act of revenge.
On 19 Oct. 1689 Crew attended the Lords and, with Simon Patrick, took the oaths.
Crew attended the House on 20 Mar. 1690 for the start of the new Parliament and attended the session for 48 per cent of sittings. Rather than being cowed by his near escape at the Revolution, Crew seems to have resumed an active role in the House. On 5 May, with Bishop Watson of St Davids, he visited Clarendon, ‘rejoicing at the victory they had received … the peers having passed a vote that no oath nor subscription should be imposed upon peers, whereby they should lose their seats in Parliament in case of refusal’.
My lords … I am very far from envying the happiness of those who are thus pardoned: nay, rather I heartily congratulate them upon it, for God forbid that when the king’s eye is good mine should be evil. I remember when an act of this kind was sent down to this House in [Lord] Treasurer Clifford’s time ... in that Act there was no exception of persons, only crimes were excepted. If the same form had been observed in this, I humbly conceive there would have been more room for justice: I am sure there would have been less reasons for so long a debate as this. My lords, I am very far from going about to justify my own conduct: nay rather I am heartily sorry for it, and beg pardon of heaven, pardon of all your lordships, and more particularly I ask this reverend prelate’s pardon (laying his hand on the bishop of London’s [Compton’s] shoulder) …No, my lords, I resolve for the future, to make the laws the standard of my actions, according to the royal example … My lords: seeing that this pardon is so necessary for preserving the public peace of this nation, and that you may see how much I am a well-wisher to the good of my own country, rather than I should give any further delay to the passing of it, I will throw myself up for a sacrifice, and am willing the bill should pass.Whiting, Nathaniel Lord Crewe, 202-3; ‘Mems. of Nathaniel Lord Crewe’, 29-30.
According to his memoirist, Aubrey de Vere, 20th earl of Oxford, later observed that Crew ‘spoke like an angel’ and Edward Stillingfleet, bishop of Worcester, commending ‘the most natural piece of oratory’ he had ever heard. Even Roger Morrice reported the speech as being ‘very well-tempered ... confessing his faults and miscarriages, submitting himself entirely to the wisdom of the nation’. Crew escaped further formal censure.
Crew remained in London during the recess, attending the House between 31 Mar. and 30 June 1691 on four days for prorogations. There was still speculation that he would be threatened with prosecution ‘to be frightened into a resignation to make way for the preferment of [the bishops of] London and Worcester’.
In January 1692 it had been falsely rumoured that the 57-year-old bishop was to be married to his distant relation Anne, daughter of John Crew of Crewe Hall and widow of John Offley. At the end of the year he did marry after a number of unsuccessful courtships in the course of the previous 20 years.
Crew attended the House sporadically until 23 Feb. 1692, the day before an adjournment. By August political tensions ensured that he was under constant surveillance. A report in May had suggested that he was one of a number of prominent figures who had been sent for to be taken into custody. Carmarthen was sent intelligence by the ‘strenuous revolutioner’ dean of Durham, Thomas Comber (who had replaced the nonjuring dean Granville) that sedition was rife in the bishopric and that Crew was responsible for packing juries and for undermining royal justice.
On 4 Nov. he attended the House for the start of the 1692-3 parliamentary session and attended 66 per cent of sittings. On 3 Jan. 1693 he voted on the other side to his brother on the passage of the place bill. On 9 Mar. Crew was given leave to be absent from the House that day. He returned on the 10th and attended until the prorogation on the 14th. He had returned to Westminster within two weeks of the start of the November 1693 session, attending thereafter for 68 per cent of sittings. On 17 Feb. 1694 he voted to reverse chancery’s dismission in the cause Montagu v. Bath, a case in which he was related to participants on both sides. Present for the prorogation on 25 Apr. he almost certainly returned to Durham during the recess. He was back in the Lords a fortnight after the start of the 1694-5 session in November. He attended 47 per cent of sittings. Following the death of Queen Mary, to whom he owed his survival at the Revolution, Crew attended her funeral in Westminster Abbey.
Parliament was dissolved on 11 October. Robert Harley, later earl of Oxford, predicted accurately that Crew would back his nephew Charles Montagu and Sir Henry Liddell for the Durham city seats although both candidates were Whigs. In the Northallerton election, Carmarthen pressed Crew and John Sharp, archbishop of York, to agree on a replacement candidate for the Dissenter Thomas Lascelles‡; either they refused or made an unsuccessful attempt as Lascelles was returned unopposed.
Crew took his seat in the House on 23 Nov. 1695, the second day of the new Parliament, attending the session for 76 per cent of sittings. He joined his fellow bishops on 10 Apr. 1696 in signing the ‘repugnance’ at the absolution by two non-jurors of Sir William Parkyns and Sir John Friend‡, the conspirators in the Assassination Plot.
Succession to the peerage
In November 1697, on the death of his older brother, Crew succeeded to the barony of Crew. Although the fifth son of the 1st baron, none of Crew’s older brothers had produced heirs, and he had been regarded as the heir to the barony for some time. The death of his younger brother, Waldegrave, in the summer of 1694 also made more likely the title’s extinction after Crew’s own death. He inherited the Northamptonshire patrimony (and electoral influence in the tiny corporation of Brackley), but in 1700 contested in chancery his brother’s financial arrangements that had placed several of the manors in trust for the latter’s daughters. Crew arrived at Westminster on 14 Dec. 1697, 11 days after the start of the new session, and attended for only 20 per cent of sittings. On the 15th he received his writ of summons as 3rd Baron Crew of Stene. He took his seat on the barons’ bench two days later, ‘not being in his bishop’s habit’.
After his succession to the barony, Crew resided far less in his diocese and attended the House on fewer occasions, now dividing his time between his four residences, Steane, Newbold Verdon, Auckland and Durham.
Crew missed the entirety of the 1699-1700 parliamentary session, and it was not until 6 Feb. 1701, the opening day of the new Parliament, that he once again took his place in the House, after which he was present for 58 per cent of sittings. His relations with his old adversaries had not improved. When in March 1701 the countess of Anglesey petitioned the House for a bill of separation, Crew supported the bill and was attacked by Burnet for lending encouragement to ‘whores’. According to Crew’s biographer, Burnet was forced to apologize.
The reign of Anne
Crew became one of the more prominent Tory bishops under the more congenial circumstances brought by the new reign. On 3 Dec. 1702 Crew joined Compton and Sharp to vote against the wrecking amendment to the occasional conformity bill proposed by John Somers, Baron Somers. The following day Crew again joined with Archbishop Sharp and Bishop Compton and other Tory bishops to oppose an amendment proposed in committee of the whole House requiring office holders to take the sacrament four times a year and to attend church every week. On the 9th, once more with Sharp and Compton, Crew opposed the motion that the tack was unparliamentary. On the 17th, with the Commons demanding a conference on occasional conformity, the Lords divided on an adjournment; Crew voted with the minority for the delay. Correctly forecast by Daniel Finch, 2nd earl of Nottingham, as a supporter of the occasional conformity bill, Crew continued to vote with the Tories in the new year, opposing the clause relating to the Corporation Act on 16 Jan. 1703. On the 19th, he voted with the Tories in favour of post office and excise grants to the royal dukes, sons of Charles II, and on 22 Jan. he protested against the resolution to dismiss the petition of Robert Squire and John Thompson in their appeal against Thomas Wharton, 5th Baron (later marquess of) Wharton.
Following the prorogation on 27 Feb. Crew absented himself from the House for the following year. In November, he was forecast by Charles Spencer, 3rd earl of Sunderland, as a supporter of the next attempt to legislate against occasional conformity. Missing the first ten weeks of business in the 1703-4 session, Crew attended for only 29 per cent of sittings, missing the division of 14 Dec. when the occasional conformity bill was again thrown out. He was nevertheless listed as having given his vote (presumably by proxy); proxy records do not, however, survive for this session. On 4 Jan. 1704 the House ordered that Crew be contacted about his continuing absence and he was ordered to attend at 11 in the morning on 12 January. He did not appear until 21 Feb., shortly before he was due to preach the Lenten sermon at court. His sermon met with approval from Charles Montagu, Baron (later earl of) Halifax, Francis Newport, earl of Bradford, and the queen herself.
Crew attended for the prorogation on 3 Apr. 1704. By the beginning of May he was in Bath.
No longer regular in his attendance, Crew was missing from the opening of the new Parliament on 25 Oct. 1705. He was again noted as excused at a call of the House. He took his seat on 8 Jan. 1706 and was present at only 31 per cent of sittings over the 1705-6 session, having missed the ‘Church in danger’ debate on 6 Dec. 1705. This may have been a diplomatic absence given that he usually remained in London over the winter months. He was certainly in London by Christmas when he received the sacrament from William Wake, later archbishop of Canterbury. In the division on the regency bill of 31 Jan. 1706 both Crew and George Hooper, bishop of Bath and Wells, voted with the minority against Somers’ motion to replace the place clause in the 1701 Act of Settlement. On 11 Mar. he was named to both conferences on the matter of privilege of both Houses. Attending the House until 14 Mar. he returned to Durham for the summer, in July forwarding to Harley a loyal address from the grand jury of Durham. He again missed the start of the session that assembled in December 1706, taking his seat on 13 Jan. 1707 in time for debates on the union with Scotland and attending thereafter for 46 per cent of sittings. Crew for the most part supported the Union, but on two occasions joined with other Tory bishops to attempt to ameliorate aspects of the treaty that he thought damaging to the Church. On 3 Feb. he supported Sharp’s amendment that the Test Act be an integral part of the Union, registering his protest when the amendment was rejected. On the 15th, in a debate in committee of the whole House on the articles of Union, Crew, Sharp and Sprat deserted their Tory colleagues and voted for the Union.
Crew arrived at the first Parliament of Great Britain (the final session of the 1705 Parliament) three weeks after the start of business (on 23 Oct. 1707) and attended 64 per cent of the session’s sittings. He attended the St Stephen’s dinner at Lambeth and in March 1708 was invited to take part in the procession headed by James Butler, 2nd duke of Ormond, to address the queen.
He next attended the House four weeks after the opening of Parliament on 16 Nov. 1708, attending the session for 45 per cent of sittings. On 21 Jan. he voted against permitting Scots peers with British titles to vote in the elections for Scots representative peers. He resumed his normal Tory stance in the vote of 15 Mar. 1709 on the general naturalization bill, and was one of 10 Tory bishops to seek to retain the requirement that subjects attend their Anglican parish church and not an unspecified Protestant gathering.
The Harley Ministry and afterwards
Crew’s support for Sacheverell increased his own popularity in the diocese. He was met by 5,000 Sacheverell enthusiasts at Elvet Moor on his return home after the prorogation, possibly the same occasion referred to by Lady Clavering, who criticized her husband for taking part in the ‘cavalcade’.
Crew, reckoned by Harley a certain supporter of the new ministry, attended the opening of the new Parliament on 25 Nov. 1710 and attended the session for 53 per cent of sittings. He was one of only two bishops to avoid the annual St Stephen’s dinner at Lambeth. According to Crew’s nephew, the bishop was unwell.
In the autumn of 1711, with the approach of a new parliamentary session and Oxford, as Harley had become, expecting struggles over the peace negotiations against strongly entrenched Whigs in the Lords, Crew’s support was of enhanced significance to the ministry. He avoided attending the start of the session, though, informing Oxford that his summons:
should oblige me to a ready obedience, if old age and the depth of winter would allow me trying the experiment of such a hasty journey ... my own heart ... is brim full of loyalty and fidelity to the queen, of unfeigned sincerity for the Church, and of a steady adhering to the constitution… though I cannot so suddenly give my personal attendance in Parliament, yet that I may not seem, in such a critical juncture, to decline a service I have hitherto espoused with a more than ordinary zeal, I will presume to appear by proxy at the time desired; in order to which I have here enclosed a temporal one, with a space in it, for your lordship, if you please, to insert the name of such a peer as you shall judge most proper. By this your lordship sees how great a confidence I have in your integrity for the public good.HMC Portland, v. 121.
Crew’s proxy was duly registered in favour of John Poulett, Earl Poulett, and was very likely one of four lodged by Tory prelates used in favour of the adjournment vote on 2 Jan. 1712 after the introduction of the 12 new peers.
Crew and his wife were expected at Lutterworth towards the end of November on their way to Steane. By February 1713 he was back in London and he attended the House on 9 Apr. for the first day of the new session. He attended one third of all sittings. On 15 May he reported from the select committee on the bill to create a parish from the Stockton chapelry in his own diocese. Listed by Oxford as a probable supporter of the bill confirming the eighth and ninth articles of the French commercial treaty, Crew attended the House for the last time that session on 15 June. He appears to have registered his proxy with William North, 6th Baron North, as North requested that Oxford would transfer the proxy when he also quit the session at the beginning of July.
Despite the protection and warmth extended by friends such as John Sharp, Crew appears to have accepted his widespread lack of popularity in the establishment. When Crew and the duke of Leeds (the former earl of Danby and marquess of Carmarthen) met at court, their mutual attempts at civility did not disguise the fact that, as Crew acknowledged, Leeds had had his sights on Crew since the impeachment attempt in 1679.
Despite reaching his 80th birthday the previous month, Crew returned to Westminster on the third day of the new Parliament, attending one third of sittings. He was present on 5 Apr. 1714 for the vote on the perceived danger to the Protestant succession and on the 13th when the Lords considered the queen’s reply on the danger posed by the pretender. Of the bishops then in the House, only Crew and Francis Atterbury, bishop of Rochester, voted with the court.
The resignation of Oxford and the death of the queen spelled the end of Crew’s political revival. He was in Durham when the queen died, where he proclaimed the new king. He was thus absent for the entirety of the brief August session that met in the wake of the queen’s death. He travelled south shortly afterwards and attempted to wait on the new king. He was not admitted at court; he left the message that he came only to pay his duty but had nothing to ask of the new king. Once again he lost the lord lieutenancy. He attended the coronation on 20 October. The following day he finally waited on the king where they discussed Crew’s similar role in two previous coronations. With the earl of Wharton present, he also waited on the Prince and Princess of Wales that autumn, apparently with a favourable reception.
Crew lived on for a further six years after the Hanoverian accession and continued to play a role in Parliament. He died at Steane on 18 Sept. 1721. According to one possibly apocryphal account, his dying words were ‘don’t you go over to them’, which the writer took to mean the Hanoverians. His lengthy will and codicil bequeathed his considerable estates in trust for charitable and educational uses and secured his name for posterity as a great benefactor.