CROKE, Unton I (c.1594-1671), of the Old Palace, St Aldate’s, Oxford and Marston, Oxon.

The scion of a leading legal dynasty, Croke’s contribution to the House of which his father had been Speaker was probably negligible, and certainly less than that of his two elder sons, Richard* and Unton II*, who both sat in his lifetime. Nonetheless, he was a significant, if discreet player both in the administration of the city and county of Oxford, and in the implementation of justice under the protectorate.

With only a modest inheritance, the year he was called to the bar Croke married the heiress of a yeoman from Marston, a village a mile and a half north east of Oxford across the River Cherwell, and close to his father’s seat at Studley and that of his uncle, Sir George Croke†, at Waterstock. Within a few years he built a handsome house which still stands.37MI St Nicholas, Marston; Vis. Oxon (Harl. Soc. v), 280-1; A. Croke, Genealogical Hist. of the Croke Family (1823); Wood, Life and Times, i. 195; VCH Oxon. v. 217; ‘Cromwell House’, Marston. On the nomination of William Herbert, 3rd earl of Pembroke, in February 1620 he was made sub-steward of Oxford University.38Reg. Univ. Oxford, ii. pt i. 242. By 1624-5 he had acquired the lease of part of the Old Palace in the city parish of St Aldate’s, opposite Christ Church and the Guildhall; by 1642 he had bought the major part of the property, including a grand house built by his former landlords, the brewing family of Smith.39Toynbee, Young, Strangers in Oxford, 138-9; VCH Oxon. iv. 97. Made a justice of the peace while still young, he also became a commissioner for sewers and for Thames navigation.40C231/4, f. 119; C181/3, f. 200; C181/4, f. 179; Oxon. RO, city archives, F.5.9, ff. 54-55v. Elected for Wallingford to the 1626 Parliament, he was absent through illness for part of its proceedings, and appears to have been noticeable to fellow MPs chiefly because of the breach of privilege committed by his neighbour Sir Thomas Whorwood of Headington in commencing a suit against him in chancery over his estates.41Procs. in Parliament 1626 ed. W.M. Bidwell and M. Janson (1991-1996), ii. 158, 431; iii. 89-90, 92-3; HP Commons 1604-1629.

In the meantime Croke’s legal career was progressing. By May 1626 he was a master extraordinary in Chancery, taking its affidavits and recognisances.42C181/3, f. 200. Called to the bench at the Inner Temple in 1635, thereafter he regularly took on related duties.43CITR ii. 224 seq. As sub steward of the university, in practice its highest ranking legal officer, he worked with city officials and gained varied experience ranging from giving counsel in debt and defamation cases to presiding over the preliminaries in murder trials.44Bodl. Oxford Univ. Archives, WPβ/C/18-23, 25-27, 29-36; WPβ/Q/22; Chancellor’s court, 1639/302: 7, 9, 10; 1640/156. The nature of his relationship with the chancellor in this period, Archbishop William Laud, is unknown; it may have helped that his brother Dr Charles Croke, rector of Amersham, was a chaplain to the king.45‘Charles Croke’, Oxford DNB.

The influence of the university’s steward, Thomas Howard, 1st earl of Berkshire, who was also high steward of Wallingford, was probably critical in Croke’s election to Parliament in spring 1640 to represent the borough for a second time.46Supra, ‘Wallingford’. Insofar as the earl was prepared to assist the city of Oxford in pursuing to the privy council its complaints against the Laudian establishment of the university, such patronage should not be interpreted as a clear indicator of Croke’s support for royal policies.47Wood, Hist. Univ. Oxford (1786), ii. 421-2; CSP Dom. 1640, pp. 340-1; HMC Lords, n.s. xi. 404. Whatever his precise views at this date, he made no recorded contribution to proceedings at Westminster in what proved to be his last session in the House.

Croke’s allegiances over the next few years are difficult to track. He was not re-elected in autumn 1640, being replaced by the new recorder of Wallingford, Anthony Barker*, for reasons which may have been at least as much practical as ideological. Named as a subsidy commissioner that year, Croke was not among those perceived opponents of the king’s policies who were omitted from the Oxfordshire commission of the peace in June 1642, but neither was Laud’s most visible critic in Oxford city, John Nixon*.48SR. Nor does Croke appear in accounts of town-gown confrontations over this period, or feature among the many named perpetrators or victims of the supposed outrages committed during the first occupation of Oxford by a royalist force under Sir John Byrom in August and September 1642.49HMC Portland i. 56-60; HMC Lords n.s. xi. 322. Assessed at £10 16s as of the south-west ward which included St Aldate’s in the subsidy returns for 1641, he was not listed for the remainder of the 1640s.50Toynbee, Young, Strangers in Oxford, 138. One the other hand, once Oxford had become the royalist capital, he responded to demands for arms (as had the city’s MPs John Whistler* and John Smith*, who were both originally critical of the government): he gave a musket, as of All Saints (a northern parish), on 12 March 1643 and another, as of St Aldate’s, on 24 April.51Royalist Ordnance Pprs. ed. Roy, 70, 79. He had already been included by the king on 2 February among commissioners ordered to investigate the non-attendance of officers of the court of wards.52Docquets of Letters Patent ed. Black, 2. That year he was also party to an agreement between the city and the king that the latter might take hay from Port Meadow, the flood plain to the north west of the city which was common land, in order to supply his cavalry.53Oxon. RO, N1/11. Like the city MPs, Croke may simply have been trapped by his property and professional interests. However, it seems doubtful that his tenure as the university’s sub steward could have survived the replacement of Philip Herbert*, 4th earl of Pembroke, as chancellor by William Seymour, 2nd earl of Hertford, in October 1643; no mention was made of him when Convocation subsequently considered whether clerical deputies of the new chancellor could hear and determine causes.54Bodl. Oxford Univ. Archives, NEP/supra/RegSb. To an extent this function may already have been rendered redundant by the existence in the city of royal justice and martial law.

When parliamentarian troops arrived to besiege Oxford in May 1645, Sir Thomas Fairfax* and Oliver Cromwell* (a distant kinsman of Croke) made their rendezvous at Croke’s Marston home.55The copie of a letter of an eminent commander in Sir Thomas Fairfax army (1645), (E.285.17). In May 1646 ‘Mr Crook’s house at Marston where the general quartered the last year’ was the meeting place for the commissioners to discuss the treaty which culminated in the city’s surrender.56The passage of the treatie for the surrender of Oxford (1646), 3 (E.337.30). It is conceivable that he had meanwhile absented himself in London. While he was present at Inner Temple meetings from at least November 1647, and one of the most regular attenders from 1649, in this period he was a much less visible presence in Oxfordshire than his two eldest sons.57CITR ii. esp. pp. cxii, 279. In 1649 he was elected recorder of Wallingford, and at the end of the year rejoined the Oxfordshire commission of the peace; by 1656 he was also a justice in Wallingford, and in 1653 had been named a subsidy commissioner.58Berks. RO, W/AC al, ff. 137, 146; C181/6, ff. 136, 329; J.K. Hedges, The History of Wallingford (1881), ii. 242. Meanwhile he seems to have resumed unobtrusively his duties as sub steward of Oxford University, probably after the reinstatement of the earl of Pembroke in April 1648.59Bodl. Oxford Univ. Archives, NEP/supra/RegT, f. 11. On the evidence of a letter relating to a rape case which he sent on 11 August 1653, probably to the vice chancellor, he was capable of a realistic but humane approach; he was certainly keen that justice should not be seen to ‘fail to the great scandal of the government’.60Bodl. Oxford Univ. Archives, WPα/23/12.

Croke implemented its legislation by initiating a parish register at Marston in September 1653 ‘according to the statute’; he performed marriages from 1654.61St Nicholas, Marston par. reg. esp. f. 1. Appointed with his son Richard* to the Oxfordshire commission to assist Charles Fleetwood* as major-general for the region, he signed the commissioners’ letter to the protector of 10 March 1656, declaring their commitment to ‘that righteous cause’.62Bodl. Rawl. A.36, f. 340; TSP iv. 595. If Anthony Wood was not entirely accurate in attributing Croke’s creation as serjeant-at-law in June 1655 to ‘the perfidious service his son’ Unton II ‘did at Salisbury against the cavaliers’ that spring, the latter’s exploit does seem to have reminded the government in Whitehall of the family’s usefulness.63Wood, Hist. Univ. Oxford, ii. pt. ii, 695. Having been sounded out about his ‘worthy neighbour’, probably by John Thurloe*, vice chancellor John Owen* testified on 29 May to Croke’s ‘worth, and integrity, and repute in his country’.64Bodl. Rawl. A.26, f. 413. In October Owen appealed directly to Cromwell’s expressed ‘good intentions’ towards Croke to seek for him promotion to judge, promising ‘an upright administration of justice’.65TSP iii. 65-6. He did indeed serve as a judge of assize – on occasion at least a merciful one – and in 1656 was not only named as a commissioner for the security of the protector but also encountered by Richard Boyle, 2nd earl of Cork, in County Cork, where there was ‘some rumour’ that Croke and Judge Jerome Sankey* had ‘an authority … to enquire after church lands for the lord protector’.66CJ vii. 718a; C181/6, ff. 113, 162; Chatsworth, CM/29, 18 Aug. 1656. Croke was again named as a subsidy commissioner for Oxfordshire in 1657, but preoccupation with circuits in the later 1650s may account for the fact that it was his sons rather than he who served as MPs and sheriff; in 1658 Unton II surpassed his father’s attendance record on the commission of the peace.67A. and O.; Bodl. Rolls Oxon. 61. Croke senior also gave some attention to improving his lands in Marston, damaged by civil war fortifications, being the leading participant in enclosure by agreement beginning in 1655.68Bodl. Top. Oxon. c.405.

Despite the qualifier ‘junior’ in the record, it seems much more likely that it was Croke himself rather than his son Unton II (who had been sent with his regiment to the west country), who was named as a judge to administer Scotland in March 1660; the commission never took effect.69Acts of Parliament of Scotland vi. pt. ii. 788n. Croke appears to have weathered the Restoration by keeping his head down, although in December he was obliged to enter a £4,000 bond to guarantee Unton II’s loyalty to the new regime.70CSP Dom. 1660-1, p. 426. He lived for another decade, and died without leaving a will.71St Nicholas, Marston par. reg.; Wood, Life and Times, i. 195. His son Richard sat in the Cavalier Parliament.