CROFT, John (d. 1674), of Lower Swell and Gotherington, Bishop’s Cleeve, Glos.

John Croft was probably descended from the family of Croft of Sutton-under-Brailes, a parish in Gloucestershire until the nineteenth century, when it was transferred to Warwickshire. It is possible that this parish gentry family, clinging on to gentility quite tenuously, was descended from Hugh Croft, of the eminent Herefordshire Crofts of Croft Castle: he had acquired the manor of Stanley Pountlarge, near Bishop’s Cleeve, in the early sixteenth century.15Robinson, Manors and Mansions, 81-2. The senior member of the family in 1600 was Edward Croft, who although he did not describe himself as either esquire or gentleman when he made his will in 1605, was wealthy enough to leave gifts of silver to his children.16PROB11/105/409; Shakespeare Birthplace Trust RO, DR 41/92; Warws. RO, Sutton-under-Brailes bishops’ transcripts. His eldest son, Richard, counted himself a gentleman, and paid £14 instead of accepting a knighthood in 1631. He was under-steward to the Catholic Lords Petre, lords of the manor of Sutton.17PROB11/191/356; E178/5310 m.1; Glos. RO D 1099/E5. Members of the family married into minor gentry in Warwickshire and Gloucestershire.18Vis. Warws. 1682-3 (Harl. Soc. lxii), 18; Vis. Glos. 1682-3, 65. Edward Croft’s third son, John Croft, held a lease of Westcote, near Stow-on-the-Wold from the Catholic Sheldon family of Broadway, Worcestershire. He was a sheep farmer, and in 1602 found himself before the consistory court at Gloucester in a dispute with the rector of Westcote over tithes there. Given that Westcote is but a few miles from Lower Swell, it is likely that our John Croft was the son of this man and his wife, Katherine, but in the absence of heraldic pedigrees or a continuous run of surviving parish registers, it seems impossible to establish the parentage of John Croft with certainty.19PROB11/105/409; Glos. RO, GDR/B4/3/1304.

It was his marriage with Anne Leigh, which took place before April 1652, that brought Croft out of the shadows and into the well-documented ranks of the Gloucestershire gentry. She was the daughter of Sir William Leigh of Longborough, who represented the senior branch of his family, even though the younger branch of the Leighs, seated at Stoneleigh, Warwickshire, became more eminent. Croft was probably Anne Leigh’s second husband, but may have been her third. She was a younger daughter, and in July 1642 was betrothed to William Hodges of Broadwell with a marriage portion from her widowed mother of £1600. There is considerable doubt as to whether the marriage ever took place, but it is certain that she married one Robert Waterworth, with whom she had three children. By April 1652, Waterworth was dead and she had married Croft.20Glos. RO, D610/T14, T3; Shakespeare Birthplace Trust RO, DR18/8/21; Burke’s Commoners, iii. 225.

At the time of his marriage Croft was living at Lower Swell, near Stow-on-the-Wold, but was never the proprietor of the manor as a modern commentator has implied; he simply held lands there until his death.21Oxon. RO, Chap/IX/ii/1; Woolrych, Commonwealth to Protectorate, 185. He was evidently a member of the Stow congregation, whose minister, John Beale, had inclined towards Presbyterianism in 1648, but was by 1653 a Congregationalist.22Original Letters ed. Nickolls, 125-6; Calamy Revised, 41. Through his marriage, Croft acquired relatives who were closely involved with the parliamentarian cause in Gloucestershire. His wife’s brother, William Leigh, served on the county committee from 1644, and Leigh’s own wife, Joan, was the daughter of Thomas Pury I*, among the most powerful parliamentarians in the county.23Shakespeare Birthplace Trust RO, DR671/57; E113/8 (William Leigh). It was probably by means of either Thomas Pury I, or Croft’s brother-in-law, Thomas Pury II*, that John Croft became involved in public affairs, in 1653. His first appointment was probably as militia captain, and then as a justice of the peace. It was as a captain and magistrate that he was listed near the top of those recommended by the Gloucestershire Congregationalist churches for service in the Parliament intended by the army officers to succeed the Rump.24Original Letters ed. Nickolls, 125-6. Croft and William Neast were selected for service in the Nominated Assembly, and stayed together during the summer of 1653 when their accommodation arrangements in Whitehall kept changing.25CSP Dom. 1653-4, pp. 44, 71, 73, 76, 88, 92.

During the Nominated Assembly, Croft served on the important committee for receiving petitions, but otherwise was confined largely to committees with a Gloucestershire focus. He was the prime architect of legislation to regulate the county’s embryonic tobacco industry. By this measure, published on 3 September 1653, growers were allowed the benefit of their crops for one year, subject to a 3d per pound levy payable to the Gloucester excise office.26CJ vii. 287a, 301a, 301b; A. and O. ii. 718-9. The implication was that this measure was a staging post on the road to abolition. Croft was therefore a natural choice for inclusion in a committee on the abuses in the regulation of drink, tobacco and gaming trades, given the brief of reducing licensing procedure to a single code (29 Sept.).27CJ vii. 430a. He was naturally a promoter of the bill to secure land grants in Ireland for those Adventurers who had put up funds for the reduction of Ireland back in 1641-2, because there was much interest in Gloucester in this topic. He was a teller in support of a clause to secure Gloucester citizens’ interests when it was subject to a division. Croft also sat on committees dealing with the regulation of the timber trade in the Forest of Dean.28CJ vii. 323a, 337b, 340a. According to the contemporary observer of the collapse of this Parliament, Croft was one of the radicals who opposed moves to secure a state-funded church.29A Catalogue, quoted in Woolrych, Commonwealth to Protectorate, 414-5. Although no direct corroborative evidence can be found in support of this conclusion, Croft’s continued membership of the Stow church, sometimes critical of the protectoral government, seems to confirm that he was indeed a religious radical for some years after 1653.30Original Letters ed. Nickolls, 145-7.

Croft was not named as an ‘ejector’ under the Cromwellian church arrangements of 1654, but was appointed a commissioner to secure the peace of the commonwealth under Major-general John Disbrowe*. Unlike his former colleague in the Nominated Assembly, William Neast, Croft was active as a commissioner, involved in July 1655 in managing despatches on behalf of Disbrowe. In January 1656, he was one of three Gloucestershire commissioners holding military rank to receive instructions from the major general, and had evidently retained his militia captaincy.31CSP Dom. 1655, p. 504; 1655-6, p. 102. It was thus as one of the local military interest that he served in the second Parliament of Oliver Cromwell’s* protectorate. His committee appointments in this assembly followed a similar pattern to his earlier ones. Again, he was named to committees for the exploitation of forests, and for compensation in lands for the Gloucester Irish Adventurers (23 Oct., 22 Dec. 1656, 19 Feb. 1657).32CJ vii. 444b, 473a, 494a. On 22 December he and Attorney-general Edmund Prideaux I expressed their exasperation at how the legislation authorising Irish lands worth £10,000 to Gloucester could not be enforced.33Burton’s Diary, i. 203. He considered the cases of three petitioners, including Edward Lister, whose inheritance occupied so many pages of Thomas Burton’s* parliamentary journal.34CJ vii. 434b, 472a, 539a. On 22 November 1656, Croft was named to the committee for a bill to transfer Gloucester cathedral to the ownership of the city corporation, and a week later was included in committees to prevent royalists and other enemies of the government from holding civic office.35CJ vii. 457a, 461a. His other committees with a wider public significance were those for bills on the probate of wills (27 Oct.), the recovery of small debts (1 Nov.) and for measuring the public debt (1 Jan. 1657).36CJ vii. 446a, 449a, 477b. These last appointments suggest that he was developing skills and interests which extended beyond the merely local.

Back in Stow-on-the-Wold, Croft’s pastor, William Beale, signed the petition warning Cromwell against taking the crown, and John Croft himself subscribed a further petition around the same time. He lent his support to the Gloucestershire congregations’ jeremiad, a catalogue of shortcomings in religious affairs. These ranged from the continuing ‘corrupt, ungifted and scandalous ministry’, through the persistence of ranters and blasphemers to widespread spiritual deadness. A number of points related to secular government and the law. There was a corrupt and dilatory administration of justice, many supposed servants of God were hypocrites, those who had contributed on the ‘public faith’ were not properly recompensed, many were obsessed with acquiring the property of royalists.37Original Letters ed. Nickolls, 139-41, 145-7. Croft himself sat on a committee on the public faith, so it is possible that his perspectives directly fed into the petition. As for Beale’s opposition to proposals that Cromwell should become king, presumably shared by Croft, the latter was well enough reconciled to the eventual compromise of the Humble Petition and Additional Petition and Advice to serve as a commissioner administering the oath of loyalty to MPs as they returned for the short final session of this Parliament: he was no republican.38CJ vii. 578a.

After the closure of this Parliament, Croft was asked to arbitrate with William Neast in the dispute between John Wells, minister of Tewkesbury, and some of the corporation there.39CSP Dom. 1658-9, p. 117. He played no active role in the protectorate of Richard Cromwell* save as a magistrate. With his brother-in-law Thomas Pury II and John Stephens* he petitioned the protectoral council in December 1658 on behalf of Stow-on-the-Wold, seeking a new church steeple.40SP18/184, ff. 81, 81v. Croft served as a militia officer and commissioner under the revived Rump.41CJ vii. 772a. During the emergency of the rising of Sir George Boothe* in the summer of 1659, Croft’s horse troop was kept on alert, and he was ordered to question Thomas Overbury of Bourton-on-the-Hill, later noted for his writing, about an alleged arms cache.42CSP Dom. 1658-9, pp. 360, 362, 353, 365, 588; Oxford DNB, ‘Thomas Overbury’. Among his other notable detainees that summer were Sir Hugh Myddelton, in league with his relative Sir Thomas Myddelton* in the rising, and Edward Massie*, former governor of Gloucester. Croft arrested Massie on his way to take Gloucester, after his plan was betrayed by Sir Richard Willis. On the stormy night of 31 July, while he was being taken by the troop to a secure prison, Massie and the trooper with whom he was riding fell from their shared horse on Nympsfield Hill, and the general escaped.43CSP Dom. 1659-60, pp. 16, 41, 112; Clarendon, Hist. vi. 112, 115, 118. Croft was finally stood down in September, and spent the final months of the interregnum as a militia and assessment commissioner.44CSP Dom. 1659-60, pp. 172, 579.

With the Restoration of the monarchy, Croft’s public career was over. He was arrested in April 1660, and subsequently disappeared completely and permanently from public life.45Mercurius Publicus no. 17 (19-26 Apr. 1660), 271 (E.183.6). He moved away from Stow, to an estate at Gotherington in Bishop’s Cleeve, lands of the earl of Craven, one whose property had been sequestered during the civil war. Doubt has been cast on whether Croft of Gotherington was the former MP, as Gotherington and Lower Swell are quite far apart.46Woolrych, Commonwealth to Protectorate, 185. Croft of Gotherington was certainly the Croft who married Ann Leigh, as his will makes clear: he left bequests to his ‘son-in-law’ (stepson), John Waterworth. And as Lower Swell and Longborough, home of the Leighs, are virtually adjacent parishes, it is surely probable that Croft of Lower Swell was the husband of Ann Leigh. There remains the question of whether Croft of Lower Swell and Gotherington was the man ejected from the corporation of Tewkesbury in 1662, but this is quite plausible. Another of Croft’s step-children married Henry Collett of Tewkesbury, providing a link between Croft and that town, and suggesting the probable means by which Croft secured a valuable lease of Gotherington: Lord Craven was a major landlord in Tewkesbury. After Croft’s death in July 1674, the lease on Gotherington was renewed by Collett, his executor. Croft had no children of his own.47PROB11/347/67; Glos. RO, D184/T62.