CROWNE, William (c.1617-c.1683), of London, Shrewsbury, Penobscot, Nova Scotia and Mendon, Massachusetts.

The origins of the Crowne family are obscure, but most of the fleeting references to its members emerge from East Anglia, and suggest that they were descended from Suffolk yeomen who might when out of Suffolk lay claim to be considered minor gentry. The year of Crowne’s birth is thought to have been around 1617, as in a legal deposition of 1667 he declared his age to be ‘about 50 years’.20Recs. and Files of the Quarterly Cts. of Essex County, Mass. iii. 1662-1667, 442. The William Crowne who in the late 1630s was on hand to offer evidence at the court of chivalry, with its close links to the earl marshal and the College of Arms, seems likely to have been the one who was made Rouge Dragon pursuivant in 1638. William Crowne, the witness at the court of chivalry, told that court that he was born in Weybread, on the border with Norfolk, where a number of men bearing that surname were living in 1625.21College of Arms, Court of Chivalry Acta (5) f. 58; Wills of the Archdeaconry of Suff. 1620-1624 ed. Allen (Suff. Recs. Soc. xxxi), 341. By 1640, he had known Sir Henry Hungate† for ten years, and it may have been to the Norfolk courtier and MP that Crowne owed his introduction to Thomas Howard, 21st earl of Arundel. Hungate had been a client of George Villiers, 1st duke of Buckingham, and after the royal favourite’s assassination in 1628 continued to have access to the royal court. By whatever the means of patronage, Crowne accompanied Arundel on his diplomatic mission to Vienna in April 1636, when the earl’s task was to persuade the Holy Roman Emperor to support the return of the Rhine palatinate to Charles Louis, nephew of Charles I. The mission was unsuccessful diplomatically, but Crowne wrote up and published an account of his travels with Arundel. It provides a detailed itinerary and many a vivid traveller’s tale and vignette of rural life in the German states, but the author’s opinions, tastes and dispositions are entirely absent from it.22Crowne, True Relation. The published account of the journey does, however, reveal Crowne to have been well educated and a fluent writer, suggesting in turn a much more solid education than could be provided in any village school.

Crowne returned with Arundel to England at the end of December 1636, and probably sought business as an attorney in the court of common pleas.23College of Arms, Court of Chivalry Acta (5) f. 383. Casting around for employment, he may well have been the would-be patentee who in 1638 sought a grant to breed wildfowl on rivers and coasts.24CSP Dom. 1637-8, p. 363. Soon after the end of the Arundel mission, Crowne married Agnes Watts. She was the widow of Richard Watts, the 3rd son of a former lord mayor of London, Sir John Watts, who died in 1635.25Clutterbuck, Herts. iii. 305. Her brother was evidently Humphrey Mackworth I*, of Shrewsbury, although Mackworth is represented in the printed pedigree of his family as having no siblings.26T. Blore, Hist. and Antiquities of Rutland (1811), 129. William and Agnes Crowne settled in St Martin-in-the-Fields; their son, John, was baptised there in 1641.27St Martin-in-the-Fields par. reg. Humphrey Mackworth was best-known as an opponent in Shrewsbury of government policies, but like Crowne he was a legal practitioner, and the marriage must have introduced Crowne to a range of contacts in the legal world of London. Furthermore, Arundel’s patronage endured after the conclusion of the trip to Vienna. Not only was Arundel responsible for reviving the court of chivalry, where Crowne helped the parties in at least three cases (one of them involving his brother-in-law, Mackworth) but as earl marshal from 1621 enjoyed a jurisdiction over the College of Arms.28College of Arms, Court of Chivalry Acta (5), f. 58; 11/19; 2/111. It must have been by means of Arundel’s sponsorship that in September 1638 Crowne was appointed Rouge Dragon pursuivant, which carried a salary of £20 from the exchequer.29Coventry Docquets, 206; W.H. Godfrey, A. Wagner, The College of Arms (1963), 222-3. When, in the court of chivalry, Crowne was asked to provide an estimate of his income, it was the figure for his heraldic office that he volunteered. It was probably typical of his sure-footedness personal diplomacy that he should assert at the same time that for his part he wished ‘victory to them that hath right’.30College of Arms, Court of Chivalry Acta (5) f. 383. Crowne was not a mere placeman at the college. From December 1638, he did regular stints in the office, dealing with the various commissions that landed on the heralds’ desks, and participating in the regular share-outs of fees, called partitions.31College of Arms, Waiting Bks. 1633-1700, 2nd foliation, ff. 105v-119; Partition Bk. 3, ff. 254-267v; Partition Bk. 4, ff. 1-36v.

When the civil war broke out in 1642, the activities of the heralds fell largely into desuetude. The realm of heraldry, chivalry and honours depended entirely on the king for legitimacy and support. Cut off from its resources at the College of Arms in Parliament-dominated London, it began to wither as the king embarked on his peripatetic career during the war. Crowne attended his last partition on 2 March 1643, was in the office in the summer of 1644, when he borrowed some visitation records, and as late as 1646 provided a certificate to confirm the right of Sir Walter Devereux†, royalist turned parliamentarian, to the title of Viscount Hereford after the death of Robert Devereux, 3rd earl of Essex.32College of Arms, Partition Bk. 4, f. 36v; Waiting Bks. 1633-1700, 2nd foliation, f. 119; Add. 38140 f. 132; Add. 73524 f. 114. This must at best have been a minor employment for Crowne during the 1640s, however. By 1643 he was acting as secretary to Basil Feilding, 2nd earl of Denbigh. On 1 July of that year, Denbigh made him auditor of his army, the association for Shropshire, Staffordshire, Warwickshire and Worcestershire, two weeks after publication of the ordinance confirming Denbigh’s own appointment.33Warws. RO, CR2017/C9/15; CJ iii. 121b; LJ vi. 92a, b.

It is uncertain whether Crowne’s employment with Denbigh preceded Denbigh’s commission as commander-in-chief. The most likely means by which Crowne had abandoned his client relationship to the earl of Arundel (a voluntary exile in the Netherlands after 1642) and attached himself to Denbigh was Humphrey Mackworth I, his brother-in-law. The ordinance appointing Denbigh to his command was driven through Parliament by Richard More*, one of the Shropshire godly associates of Mackworth, and it is probable that Crowne’s emergence as a military administrator represented a move by the Shropshire men to gain influence in the higher counsels of the west midlands association. Crowne was active in signing warrants of the association in 1643 and 1644, but his relationship to Denbigh seems to have remained more personal than institutionally military. At this stage in the conflict, Crowne seems usually to have been called Denbigh’s secretary more often than he was given military rank; a commission of June 1644 for him to become commissary of horse may well have remained uncompleted.34SP28/131 pt 12; SP28/136 pt 34 f. 10; Warws. RO, CR2017/C9/119, 123.

In July 1644, Crowne took messages from the Committee of Both Kingdoms to Denbigh.35CSP Dom. 1644, p. 355. But he was also Denbigh’s emissary to Parliament in an effort to fight off challenges to the earl’s authority. Friction between Denbigh and the local committees had developed soon after his assumption of the command, and he lost no opportunity to blame the committees for problems in his army’s performance in the field. In London, Crowne attended the Committee of Both Kingdoms, and reported there on both the lukewarmness of the Staffordshire committee and the fickleness of the population of north Worcestershire. He left the Westminster committee perplexed as to how best to help Denbigh, and next lobbied some MPs, learning from a ‘Mr Chulmeley’ (which sounds more like Sir Henry Cholmley* than any other Member) about an ordinance which would have established a separate Worcestershire committee, and would thereby have limited Denbigh’s authority in that county. Crowne established that Col. John (‘Tinker’) Fox was behind it, and actively lobbied to discourage its progress, but it was a version of the same ordinance that Sir Simonds D’Ewes* noted in August as bestowing extensive powers on the new local committee.36Warws. RO, CR2017/C10/14; Harl. 483 f. 102.

Crowne worked to try to block a reward to Sir Thomas Myddelton* on his military successes in Shropshire, arguing that Denbigh deserved a share in any parliamentary largesse, but considered it beyond his brief to dispel disapproval at Westminster of Denbigh’s failure to commit a force to the battle of Marston Moor in July 1644.37Warws. RO, CR2017/C10/14. Crowne’s allies in successfully limiting the grant of delinquents’ lands to Myddelton and in slowing the progress of the Worcestershire ordinance through Parliament were the moderate William Jesson* and the more radical John Corbett*.38Warws. RO, CR2017/C10/15, 18. The unexpected arrival in London of another radical, William Purefoy I*, an enemy of Denbigh, put Crowne on his guard, but he was pleased to be able to report the willingness of the Scots commissioners to help Denbigh’s army.39Warws. RO, CR2017/C10/14, 18. Any financial assistance from that quarter would have been an impossibly Faustian bargain in the eyes of Denbigh’s committeemen critics, but Crowne’s despatches to his master reveal a capacity for political manoeuvring that went well beyond the work of most secretaries. He was in fact Denbigh’s man-of-business.

By September 1645, Crowne’s formal employment with Denbigh seems to have been over, although he continued to report Westminster events to the earl.40Warws. RO, CR2017/C10/88, 93. In the war of attrition that constituted Denbigh’s relations with the committee at Coventry, Crowne’s brother-in-law was an ambivalent figure. Mackworth is recorded as having been involved at one point in a fierce spat with Denbigh, at which Crowne had to restrain the earl, but at the end of October 1645 Crowne was keen to stress to Denbigh the family’s loyalty to him. Crowne’s wife sent Denbigh some Shrewsbury cakes, and as for Mackworth, Crowne offered assurances that ‘your honour shall find none more willing really to serve you in the public than he’.41Warws, RO, CR2017/C10/96; CSP Dom. 1649-50, p. 444. Crowne’s own standing in the west midlands committees must have been far from unproblematic because of his close relationship to Denbigh, and at the same time as he protested the Mackworth family’s loyalty, he had to report the ransacking of his own trunk in Stafford. In his assertion to Denbigh that ‘my life may be more serviceable to your honour than my death’, there creeps into his reports a somewhat importunate note.42Warws. RO, CR2017/C10/96.

In the later 1640s Crowne worked in Shropshire on behalf of Parliament as a receiver of revenues, probably as an undersheriff. Mackworth must have been responsible for his appointment and encouraged his removal from London to Shrewsbury. Other local paid offices followed: as a sequestration agent, and as a militia officer. The trial and execution of the king, his employer still, in theory – he had not resigned his place as Rouge Dragon – seems not to have inhibited his pursuit of place and income. His career as a sequestrator had begun with a grant to him in January 1648 as an informer, with a title to half his discoveries of delinquents’ estates; but that seems to have been withdrawn soon afterwards. Persistence on his behalf, with lobbying by Mackworth, recovered the post on a more firm footing in 1650.43CCAM 67, 69, 843; CSP Dom. 1648-9, 128; CCC 172, 180. In the reorganisation of the business of sequestration and compounding for estates that year, and supported by John Corbett, Crowne was quickly made chairman of the Shropshire sequestration body, and then its treasurer.44CCC 243, 256, 331. The date of Crowne’s initial appointment as a militia colonel is uncertain. He was being given the title lieutenant-colonel in January 1648, it seems, when he was active in making ‘discoveries’ of royalists’ estates in Shropshire and Staffordshire, and was given fresh commissions in 1650. Thereafter he was usually styled colonel. In 1650 his standing in Shropshire society was consolidated by his appointment to the commission of the peace.

Throughout the period of the Rump Parliament, Crowne continued to be active in managing sequestered estates, not solely in Shropshire.45Salop Archives, 465/702; Birmingham Archives, 3375/434090; CJ vii. 204b. He followed Humphrey Mackworth I in supporting the Cromwellian protectorate, and when Mackworth left his long tenure as governor of Shrewsbury to fill a place on the lord protector’s council, it was not many months before Crowne followed him to London. The brothers-in-law were returned for Shropshire seats in the first protectorate Parliament in 1654: Mackworth as knight of the shire, Crowne as burgess for Bridgnorth, under the Instrument of Government a single-Member constituency. Both sat very evidently in support of the government. With Humphrey Mackworth I and his second son, Humphrey Mackworth II, Crowne sat on the important committee for Irish affairs, where as an Adventurer, the elder Mackworth had a personal as well as a political interest. Crowne was also named to the committee of privileges formed to review elections in Ireland (5 Oct.) and the committee for probate of wills (14 Dec.), which also had a special extra brief to bring in legislation for Ireland on this topic. On the committee for chancery, where his original calling as an attorney might have been expected to provide him with some insights, he again sat with the two Mackworths.46CJ vii. 371b, 373b, 374a, 401a.

The death of Humphrey Mackworth I on Christmas Eve, 1654, robbed Crowne of his most reliable patron, and either by coincidence or as a consequence of Mackworth’s removal from the scene, he played no further part in this or any other Parliament. After returning to Shrewsbury, Crowne quickly found himself helping the younger Humphrey Mackworth run the Shrewsbury garrison. In the security alert there of March 1655, Crowne raised a troop of soldiers at his own expense on receiving a commission from the government.47CSP Dom. 1655, pp. 259-60; TSP iii. 215-6. His despatches to the lord protector were full of the need to bear down hard on the enemies of the regime, as befitted a former sequestrator: ‘‘Tis the desire of all the good people that those who cause our troubles and charges might bear the burden now’.48TSP iii. 216. His letters also made it plain that unlike all the other militia officers, Crowne had mobilised men without regard to his own personal finances; army officers despatched to the region were impressed by Crowne’s commitment.49TSP iii. 238, 265. Over several days in mid-March, Crowne took the lead from the younger Mackworth in examining a large number of those suspected of involvement in a plot against the protectoral government, travelling from Shrewsbury as far as Wrexham in order to do so. All the examinations were despatched to Secretary John Thurloe*, and must have created a very favourable impression at Whitehall.50TSP iii. 229-30, 254-5, 258-9, 266-72, 282- 90, 341-2, 355. He was naturally among the commissioners who assisted James Berry* in his task as major-general for the west midlands counties from the latter part of 1655 until into 1656.51The Publick Intelligencer no. 16 (14-21 Jan. 1656), 252-3 (E.491.16).

At the end of April 1656, Crowne was still petitioning for restitution of his outlay during the emergency of the previous year.52CSP Dom. 1655, pp. 259-60; CSP Dom. 1655-6, pp. 300, 588. A sense in government circles that Crowne had earned favourable treatment may have lain behind his next career change, into colonial government. In the summer of 1656 he, Thomas Temple and a French aristocrat, Charles La Tour, were granted by patent under the great seal the lands of Acadia and Nova Scotia.53CO1/13, ff. 8-18, 33-6; CSP Col. 1574-1660, pp. 441, 444-5, 447. These territories had been wrested from the French by Major Robert Sedgwick as a productive if unplanned use of military manpower; an intended assault on Manhattan had been aborted when peace was declared between England and the Dutch.54CSP Col. America and W. Indies, 1661-8, pp. 596-7. In his own narrative of events, Crowne presented his involvement as inspired by the other grantees’ perception that he would become banker to the scheme. Crowne said later that he advanced part of the £3,379 they were to pay for the grant, and pledged security for the remainder. How Crowne had amassed sufficient wealth to be able to finance this outlay is difficult to fathom. He had no known landed estate, and his only certain income derived from his discoveries of royalists’ lands: leases, in other words. Behind the grantees stood further guarantors: John Corbett for Crowne, Sir Richard Temple* for his kinsman Thomas Temple, and the situation was further complicated by Crowne standing surety for Temple when he borrowed money to set up his business there. The parlous state of Sir Richard’s own finances made him an unlikely backer of such a project, but the reappearance of Corbett’s name confirms the continuing association between Crowne and that powerful Shropshire figure.55CSP Col. 1574-1660, p. 447; CO1/13, f. 142.

Crowne went to North America in the spring of 1657.56A. MacMechan, ‘John Crowne, a biographical note’, Modern Language Notes, vi. no. 5, col. 280. By early July his son, John, was enrolled at Harvard College.57Harvard Coll. Recs. iii. (Publications of Col. Soc. of Mass. Collns. xxxi), 237. Even before the proprietors sailed to America, La Tour had given up his title to his partners, so in September 1657 Temple and Crowne were left to divide the territories among themselves.58CSP Col. 1574-1660, p. 453. Crowne’s was the smaller share, consisting of lands on and around the River Penobscot. He renamed a French fort ‘Crownespoint’ after himself, and apparently built up a profitable trade in beaver skins.59CSP Col. America and W. Indies, 1661-8, pp. 40-1; MacMechan, ‘John Crowne’, 280; F.H. Eckstorm, ‘Who was Paugus?’, New England Quarterly, xii. 213; Mass. Hist. Collns. ser. 4, v. 540. He and Temple quickly quarrelled, however, and by late 1658 Temple was evidently by far the more active of the two, reporting to his patron, Nathaniel Fiennes*, Lord Fiennes, on his successful efforts to repel the French.60CSP Col. 1574-1660, pp. 469-71, 472, 478. By 1659, Temple believed that Crowne was willing to part with his share, but the Restoration of the monarchy in England was an incentive for them to co-operate again. Crowne left the Nova Scotia territory for Boston by April 1659, and settled there with an air of permanence sufficient to make him a credible witness of deeds, a freeman of the town, and, on 20 June 1660, a member of the gathered Boston First Church.61Recs. First Church in Boston (3 vols. Publications of Col. Soc. of Mass.), i. 58. Political circumstances compelled his return to England, probably from that port, early in 1661. His purpose then was three-fold: to fight off the award to a supplicant of the king of his North American territories; to speak on behalf of the Massachusetts colonists to dispel government suspicions that they persecuted Quakers there; and to regularise his tenure of a heraldic office.

Crowne brought with him to England a petition he drafted jointly with Temple, beseeching a confirmation from the king of their patent.62CSP Col. 1574-1660, p. 496. At first sight, their claim seemed inauspicious, as Cromwellian patents were void at the Restoration, but the title was found to be stronger than the 1656 patent alone would have suggested, as they were heirs-at-law of pre-civil war grantees.63CSP Col. 1574-1660, pp. 453, 488, 497-8; CSP Col. America and W. Indies, 1661-8, pp. 596-7. He had retained his office of Rouge Dragon throughout the interregnum, and continued notionally to be included in partitions of fees, but only on 28 February 1661 can he be shown to have attended the college.64College of Arms, Partition Bk. 4, f. 51v. His attendance at the coronation of the king was unavoidable, and he seems duly to have appeared in the long procession which wound its way through London on 23 April.65J. Ogilby, The Entertainment of his Most Excellent Majestie Charles II ... to his Coronation (1662), 170; Godfrey and Wagner, College of Arms, 222-3. He resigned his post immediately afterwards, however, and it was granted to another on 25 May.66CSP Dom. 1660-1, p. 595. After speaking out for the colonists in a manner that impressed William Fiennes, 1st Viscount Saye and Sele, Crowne returned to America.67T. Hutchinson, Hist. of the Colony of Massachuset’s Bay (2nd ed. 1765), 220-1. His son was in Boston when the regicides William Goffe* and Edward Whalley* arrived as exiles, and John Crowne noted how they were received ‘as men dropped down from heaven’. Thomas Hutchinson, the governor and early historian of Massachusetts, records a meeting between William Crowne and Goffe and Whalley, but wrongly marks down Crowne as a royalist. Both the Crownes seem to have been less eager than Thomas Temple to report to Charles II’s government on the regicides’ subsequent whereabouts.68CSP Col. America and W. Indies, 1661-8, pp. 53, 54, 596-7; Hutchinson, Hist. Massachuset’s Bay, 214.

In 1667 Crowne and Temple became victims of the Anglo-French Treaty of Breda, which ceded Nova Scotia and Acadie to the French. John Crowne, later a published playwright, wrote bitterly in prefaces to his published dramas of the loss of his patrimony, ‘a great province of vast value given in [Charles II’s] reign to the French, half of which was my father’s rightful property and mine, as his heir’. He dilated elsewhere in print, back in England, on how he had

suffered severely ... the favour or rather authority which a mighty neighbouring kingdom had in our court ... got my inheritance which though it lay in the deserts of America, would have enabled me (if I could have kept it) to have lived at my ease in these beautiful parts of the world.69J. Crowne, The English Frier (1690), epistle dedicatory; Caligula (1698), epistle dedicatory, sig. A2(i).

William Crowne’s response to this loss was to move back to Suffolk County, Massachusetts, where in 1662 the general court of that commonwealth had granted him 500 acres near Sudbury, in gratitude for his efforts at representing the colony in favourable terms to the government in England.70Recs. of Massachusetts Bay ed. Shurtleff, iv. pt. 2, 60-1, 150-1. He was among the first settlers of the township of Mendon, where he was entrusted with legal work on behalf of the community and became its first register or registrar, a position that entitled him to solemnise marriages.71Recs. of Massachusetts Bay ed. Shurtleff, iv. pt. 2, 434; Massachusetts Archives Colln. vol. 112, p. 190; White, John Crowne, 18-19. The same general court that recognized his work in London on the colony’s behalf proved unable or unwilling to champion Crowne’s grievance over Nova Scotia.72Recs. of Massachusetts Bay ed. Shurtleff, iv. pt. 2, 61-2, 300, 324.

In 1674, for reasons that remain unclear, Crowne fell out with his fellow-citizens in Mendon. In April of that year, the Suffolk County court virtually ordered him to return to his wife in England, or face a penalty of £20.73Recs. Suff. County Ct. 1671-1680 Pt. 1 (Publns. of Colonial Soc. of Mass. Collns. xxix), 425. The order may have been connected with an action that Crowne had brought against a townsman for taking his horse without permission: a suit that despite its apparent triviality he was evidently reluctant to drop.74Recs. Suff. County Ct. Pt. 1, 156, 421, 475. Agnes Crowne was still living in England as late as August 1679, as was the Crownes’ only daughter, but Crowne chose not to obey the edict of the Suffolk court.75PROB11/360/120. He removed instead to Rhode Island, and then, soon afterwards, after his standing at Mendon had been restored, he was on the move again, to avoid becoming caught up in the conflict against the Native Americans in King Philip’s War of 1675. Back in Boston by August 1679, Crowne still sought compensation for the loss of his Acadian territory. In the last months of his life he acknowledged that his Mendon land grant was ‘of little worth’ to him; in the light of the stake he had once held in Nova Scotia the award to him in October 1682 by the Massachusetts general court of £15 must have seemed paltry.76Recs. of Massachusetts Bay ed. Shurtleff, v. 378; Massachusetts Archives Colln. vol. 3 p. 27. In December 1682 Crowne, ‘very weak in body’, drew up his will, mentioning two sons and the daughter who was still in England, but making no reference to his wife. One Sarah Covell and her two daughters were left bedding. Crowne died between then and 26 February 1683, when the will was proved. His place of burial is not known.77White, John Crowne, 20-1.