John Wilson Croker (December 20, 1780 –
August 10, 1857) was a British statesman and author.
He was born at Galway, the only son of John Croker, the surveyor-general of customs and excise
in Ireland. He was educated at Trinity College,
Dublin, where he graduated in 1800. Immediately afterwards he entered Lincoln's Inn, and in 1802 he was called to the Irish bar. His interest in
the French Revolution led him to collect a large number of valuable documents on the
subject, which are now in the British Museum. In 1804 he published anonymously
Familiar Epistles to J. F. Jones, Esquire, on the State of the Irish Stage, a series of caustic criticisms in verse on the
management of the Dublin theatres. The book ran through five editions in one year. Equally successful was the Intercepted
Letter from Canton (1805), also anonymous, a satire on Dublin society. In 1807 he published a pamphlet on The State of
Ireland, Past and Present, in which he advocated Catholic emancipation.
The following year he entered parliament as member for Downpatrick, obtaining the seat on petition, though he had been unsuccessful at
the poll. The acumen displayed in his Irish pamphlet led Spencer Perceval to recommend
him in 1808 to Sir Arthur Wellesley, who had just been
appointed to the command of the British forces in the Iberian Peninsula, as his deputy
in the office of chief secretary for Ireland. This connection led to a friendship which remained unbroken till Wellington's
death.
The notorious case of the Duke of York in connexion with
his abuse of military patronage furnished him with an opportunity for distinguishing himself. The speech which he delivered on
March 14, 1809, in answer to the charges of Colonel Wardle, was
regarded as the most able and ingenious defence of the duke that was made in the debate; and Croker was appointed to the office
of secretary to the Admiralty, which he held without interruption under various administrations for more than twenty years. He
proved an excellent public servant, and made many improvements which have been of permanent value in the organization of his
office. Among the first acts of his official career was the exposure of a fellow-official who had misappropriated the public
funds to the extent of £200,000.
In 1827 he became the representative of Dublin University, having previously sat successively for the boroughs of
Athlone, Yarmouth, Bodmin and Aldeburgh. He was a determined opponent of the Reform Bill, and vowed that he
would never sit in a reformed parliament; he left parliament in 1832. Two years earlier he had retired from his post at the
admiralty on a pension of £1500 a year. Many of his political speeches were published in pamphlet form, and they show him to have
been a vigorous and effective, though somewhat unscrupulous and often virulently personal, party debater. Croker had been an
ardent supporter of Robert Peel, but finally broke with him when he began to advocate the
repeal of the Corn Laws.
Croker is said to have been the first to use (Jan. 1830) the term "conservative". He was for many years one of the leading
contributors on literary and historical subjects to the Quarterly Review, with
which he had been associated from its foundation. The rancorous spirit in which many of his articles were written did much to
embitter party feeling. It also reacted unfavourably on Croker's reputation as a worker in the department of pure literature by
bringing political animosities into literary criticism.
He had no sympathy with the younger school of poets who were in revolt against the artificial methods of the 18th century, and he was responsible for the famous Quarterly article on John Keats's Endymion. Shelley and
Byron erroneously blamed this article for bringing about the death
of the poet, 'snuffed out', in Byron's phrase, 'by an article'.(They, however, attributed the article to William Gifford.
Croker was criticised by Macaulay for his magnum opus,
his edition of Boswell's Life of Johnson (1831). With all its defects the work had merits which Macaulay was not concerned
to point out, and Croker's researches have been of the greatest value to subsequent editors. There is little doubt that Macaulay
had personal reasons for his attack on Croker, who had more than once exposed in the House the fallacies that lay hidden under
the orator's brilliant rhetoric. Croker made no immediate reply to Macaulay's attack, but when the first two volumes of the
History appeared he took the opportunity of pointing out the inaccuracies in the work. Croker was occupied for several
years on an annotated edition of Alexander Pope's works. It was left unfinished at the
time of his death, but it was afterwards completed by the Rev. Whitwell Elwin and Mr WJ Courthope. He died at St Albans Bank,
Hampton.
Croker was generally supposed to be the original from which Disraeli drew the character of "Rigby" in Coningsby, because he had for many years had the sole management of the estates of the Marquess of
Hertford, the "Lord Monmouth" of the story.
The chief works of Croker not already mentioned were:
- Stories for Children from the History of England (1817), which provided the model for Scott's Tales of a Grandfather
- Letters on the Naval War with America
- A Reply to the Letters of Malachi Malagrowther (1826)
- Military Events of the French Revolution of 1830 (1831)
- a translation of Bassompierre's Embassy to England (1819)
He also wrote several lyrical pieces of some merit, such as the Songs of Trafalgar (1806) and The Battles of
Talavera (1809). He edited the Suffolk Papers (1823), Hervey's Memoirs of the Court of George II (1817), the
Letters of Mary Lepel, Lady Hervey (1821-1822), and Walpole's
Letters to Lord Hertford (1824). His memoirs, diaries and correspondence were edited by Louis J Jennings in 1884 under the
title of The Croker Papers (3 vols.).
References
External links
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