THE ENCYCLOPÆDIA BRITANNICA

A DICTIONARY OF ARTS, SCIENCES, LITERATURE AND GENERAL INFORMATION

ELEVENTH EDITION

VOLUME VII SLICE VII
Crocoite to Cuba

Articles in This Slice

CROCOITE, a mineral consisting of lead chromate, PbCrO4, and crystallizing in the monoclinic system. It is sometimes used as a paint, being identical in composition with the artificial product chrome-yellow; it is the only chromate of any importance found in nature. It was discovered at Berezovsk near Ekaterinburg in the Urals in 1766; and named crocoise by F. S. Beudant in 1832, from the Greek κρόκος, saffron, in allusion to its colour, a name first altered to crocoisite and afterwards to crocoite. It is found as well-developed crystals of a bright hyacinth-red colour, which are translucent and have an adamantine to vitreous lustre. On exposure to light much of the translucency and brilliancy is lost. The streak is orange-yellow; hardness 2½-3; specific gravity 6.0. In the Urals the crystals are found in quartz-veins traversing granite or gneiss: other localities which have yielded good crystallized specimens are Congonhas do Campo near Ouro Preto in Brazil, Luzon in the Philippines, and Umtali in Mashonaland. Gold is often found associated with this mineral. Crystals far surpassing in beauty any previously known have been found in the Adelaide Mine at Dundas, Tasmania; they are long slender prisms, 3 or 4 in. in length, with a brilliant lustre and colour.

Associated with crocoite at Berezovsk are the closely allied minerals phoenicochroite and vauquelinite. The former is a basic lead Chromate, Pb3Cr2O9, and the latter a lead and copper phosphate-chromate, 2(Pb, Cu)CrO4. (Pb, Cu)3(PO4)2. Vauquelinite forms brown or green monoclinic crystals, and was named after L. N. Vauquelin, who in 1797 discovered (simultaneously with and independently of M. H. Klaproth) the element chromium in crocoite.

(L. J. S.)

CROCUS, a botanical genus of the natural order Iridaceae, containing about 70 species, natives of Europe, North Africa, and temperate Asia, and especially developed in the dry country of south-eastern Europe and western and central Asia. The plants are admirably adapted for climates in which a season favourable to growth alternates with a hot or dry season; during the latter they remain dormant beneath the ground in the form of a short thickened stem protected by the scaly remains of the bases of last season’s leaves (known botanically as a “corm”). At the beginning of the new season of growth, new flower- and leaf-bearing shoots are developed from the corm at the expense of the food-stuff stored within it. New corms are produced at the end of the season, and by these the plant is multiplied.

These crocuses of the flower garden are mostly horticultural varieties of C. vernus, C. versicolor and C. aureus (Dutch crocus), the two former yielding the white, purple and striped, and the latter the yellow varieties. The crocus succeeds in any fairly good garden soil, and is usually planted near the edges of beds or borders in the flower garden, or in broadish patches at intervals along the mixed borders. The corms should be planted 3 in. below the surface, and as they become crowded they should be taken up and replanted with a refreshment of the soil, at least every five or six years. Crocuses have also a pleasing effect when dotted about on the lawns and grassy banks of the pleasure ground.

Some of the best of the varieties are:—Purple: David Rizzio, Sir J. Franklin, purpureus grandiflorus. Striped: Albion, La Majestueuse, Sir Walter Scott, Cloth of Silver, Mme Mina. White: Caroline Chisholm, Mont Blanc. Yellow: Large Dutch.

The species of crocus are not very readily obtainable, but those who make a specialty of hardy bulbs ought certainly to search them out and grow them. They require the same culture as the more familiar garden varieties; but, as some of them are apt to suffer from excess of moisture, it is advisable to plant them in prepared soil in a raised pit, where they are brought nearer to the eye, and where they can be sheltered when necessary by glazed sashes, which, however, should not be closed except when the plants are at rest, or during inclement weather in order to protect the blossoms, especially in the case of winter flowering species. The autumn blooming kinds include many plants of very great beauty. The following species are recommended:—

Spring flowering:—Yellow: C. aureus, aureus var. sulphureus, chrysanthus, Olivieri, Korolkowi, Balansae, ancyrensis, Susianus, stellaris. Lilac: C. Imperati, Sieberi, etruscus, vernus, Tomasinianus, banaticus. White: C. biflorus and vars., candidus, vernus vars. Striped: C. versicolor, reticulatus.

Autumn flowering:—Yellow: C. Scharojani. Lilac: C. asluricus, cancellatus var., cilicicus, byzantinus (iridiflorus), longiflorus, medius, nudiflorus, pulchellus, Salzmanni, sativus vars. speciosus, zonatus. White: caspius, cancellatus, hadrialicus, marathonisius.

Winter flowering:—C. hyemaeis, laevigatus, vitellinus.

CROESUS, last king of Lydia, of the Mermnad dynasty, (560-546 B.C.), succeeded his father Alyattes after a war with his half-brother. He completed the conquest of Ionia by capturing Ephesus, Miletus and other places, and extended the Lydian empire as far as the Halys. His wealth, due to trade, was proverbial, and he used part of it in securing alliances with the Greek states whose fleets might supplement his own army. Various legends were told about him by the Greeks, one of the most famous being that of Solon’s visit to him with the lesson it conveyed of the divine nemesis which waits upon overmuch prosperity (Hdt. i. 29 seq.; but see [Solon]). After the overthrow of the Median empire (549 B.C.) Croesus found himself confronted by the rising power of Cyrus, and along with Nabonidos of Babylon took measures to resist it. A coalition was formed between the Lydian and Babylonian kings, Egypt promised troops and Sparta its fleet. But the coalition was defeated by the rapid movements of Cyrus and the treachery of Eurybatus of Ephesus, who fled to Persia with the gold that had been entrusted to him, and betrayed the plans of the confederates. Fortified with the Delphic oracles Croesus marched to the frontier of his empire, but after some initial successes fortune turned against him and he was forced to retreat to Sardis. Here he was followed by Cyrus who took the city by storm. We may gather from the recently discovered poem of Bacchylides (iii. 23-62) that he hoped to escape his conqueror by burning himself with his wealth on a funeral pyre, like Saracus, the last king of Assyria, but that he fell into the hands of Cyrus before he could effect his purpose.[1] A different version of the story is given (from Lydian sources) by Herodotus (followed by Xenophon), who makes Cyrus condemn his prisoner to be burnt alive, a mode of death hardly consistent with the Persian reverence for fire. Apollo, however, came to the rescue of his pious worshipper, and the name of Solon uttered by Croesus resulted in his deliverance. According to Ctesias, who uses Persian sources, and says nothing of the attempt to burn Croesus, he subsequently became attached to the court of Cyrus and received the governorship of Barene in Media. Fragments of columns from the temple of Attemis now in the British Museum have upon them a dedication by Croesus in Greek.

See R. Schubert, De Croeso et Solone fabula (1868); M. G. Radet, La Lydie et le monde grec au temps des Mermnades (1892-1893); A. S. Murray, Journ. Hell. Studies, x. pp. 1-10 (1889); for the supposition that Croesus did actually perish on his own pyre see G. B. Grundy, Great Persian War, p. 28; Grote, Hist. of Greece (ed. 1907), p. 104. Cf. [Cyrus]; [Lydia].

[1] This is probably a Greek legend (cf. the Attic vase of about 500 B.C. in Journ. of Hell. Stud., 1898, p. 268).

CROFT, SIR HERBERT, Bart. (1751-1816), English author, was born at Dunster Park, Berkshire, on the 1st of November 1751, son of Herbert Croft (see below) of Stifford, Essex. He matriculated at University College, Oxford, in March 1771, and was subsequently entered at Lincoln’s Inn. He was called to the bar, but in 1782 returned to Oxford with a view to preparing for holy orders. In 1786 he received the vicarage of Prittlewell, Essex, but he remained at Oxford for some years accumulating materials for a proposed English dictionary. He was twice married, and on the day after his second wedding day he was imprisoned at Exeter for debt. He then retired to Hamburg, and two years later his library was sold. He had succeeded in 1797 to the title, but not to the estates, of a distant cousin, Sir John Croft, the fourth baronet. He returned to England in 1800, but went abroad once more in 1802. He lived near Amiens at a house owned by Lady Mary Hamilton, said to have been a daughter of the earl of Leven and Melville. Later he removed to Paris, where he died on the 26th of April 1816. In some of his numerous literary enterprises he had the help of Charles Nodier. Croft wrote the Life of Edward Young inserted in Johnson’s Lives of the Poets. In 1780 he published Love and Madness, a Story too true, in a series of letters between Parties whose names could perhaps be mentioned were they less known or less lamented. This book, which passed through seven editions, narrates the passion of a clergyman named James Hackman for Martha Ray, mistress of the earl of Sandwich, who was shot by her lover as she was leaving Covent Garden in 1779 (see the Case and Memoirs of the late Rev. Mr James Hackman, 1779). Love and Madness has permanent interest because Croft inserted, among other miscellaneous matter, information about Thomas Chatterton gained from letters which he obtained from the poet’s sister, Mrs Newton, under false pretences, and used without payment. Robert Southey, when about to publish an edition of Chatterton’s works for the benefit of his family, published (November 1799) details of Croft’s proceedings in the Monthly Review. To this attack Croft wrote a reply addressed to John Nichols in the Gentleman’s Magazine, and afterwards printed separately as Chatterton and Love and Madness ... (1800). This tract evades the main accusation, and contains much abuse of Southey. Croft, however, supplied the material for the exhaustive account of Chatterton in A. Kippis’s Biographia Britannica (vol. iv., 1789). In 1788 he addressed a letter to William Pitt on the subject of a new dictionary. He criticized Samuel Johnson’s efforts, and in 1790 he claimed to have collected 11,000 words used by excellent authorities but omitted by Johnson. Two years later he issued proposals for a revised edition of Johnson’s Dictionary, but subscribers were lacking and his 200 vols. of MS. remained unused. Croft was a good scholar and linguist, and the author of some curious books in French.

The Love Letters of Mr H. and Miss R. 1775-1779 were edited from Croft’s book by Mr Gilbert Burgess (1895). See also John Nichols’s Illustrations ... (1828), v. 202-218.

CROFT, SIR JAMES (d. 1590), lord deputy of Ireland, belonged to an old family of Herefordshire, which county he represented in parliament in 1541. He was made governor of Haddington in 1549, and became lord deputy of Ireland in 1551. There he effected little beyond gaining for himself the reputation of a conciliatory disposition. Croft was all his life a double-dealer. He was imprisoned in the Tower for treason in the reign of Mary, but was released and treated with consideration by Elizabeth after her accession. He was made governor of Berwick, where he was visited by John Knox in 1559, and where he busied himself actively on behalf of the Scottish Protestants, though in 1560 he was suspected, probably with good reason, of treasonable correspondence with Mary of Guise, the Catholic regent of Scotland; and for ten years he was out of public employment. But in 1570 Elizabeth, who showed the greatest forbearance and favour to Sir James Croft, made him a privy councillor and controller of her household. He was one of the commissioners for the trial of Mary queen of Scots, and in 1588 was sent on a diplomatic mission to arrange peace with the duke of Parma. Croft established private relations with Parma, for which on his return he was sent to the Tower. He was released before the end of 1589, and died on the 4th of September 1590.

Croft’s eldest son, Edward, was put on his trial in 1589 on the curious charge of having contrived the death of the earl of Leicester by witchcraft, in revenge for the earl’s supposed hostility to Sir James Croft. Edward Croft was father of Sir Herbert Croft (d. 1622), who became a Roman Catholic and wrote several controversial pieces in defence of that faith. His son Herbert Croft (1603-1691), bishop of Hereford, after being for some time, like his father, a member of the Roman church, returned to the church of England about 1630, and about ten years later was chaplain to Charles I., and obtained within a few years a prebend’s stall at Worcester, a canonry of Windsor, and the deanery of Hereford, all of which preferments he lost during the Civil War and Commonwealth. By Charles II. he was made bishop of Hereford in 1661. Bishop Croft was the author of many books and pamphlets, several of them against the Roman Catholics; and one of his works, entitled The Naked Truth, or the True State of the Primitive Church (London, 1675), was very celebrated in its day, and gave rise to prolonged controversy. The bishop died in 1691. His son Herbert was created a baronet in 1671, and was the ancestor of Sir Herbert Croft (q.v.), the 18th century writer.

Bibliography.—See Richard Bagwell, Ireland under the Tudors, vol. i. (3 vols., London, 1885); David Lloyd, State Worthies from the Reformation to the Revolution (2 vols., London, 1766); John Strype, Annals of the Reformation (Oxford, 1824), which contains an account of the trial of Edward Croft; S. L. Lee’s art. “Croft, Sir James,” in Dict. of National Biography, vol. xiii.; and for Bishop Croft see Anthony à Wood, Athenae Oxonienses (ed. Bliss, 1813-1820); John Le Neve, Fasti Ecclesiae Anglicanae (ed. by T. D. Hardy, Oxford, 1854).

CROFT (or Crofts), WILLIAM (1678-1727), English composer, was born in 1678, at Nether Ettington in Warwickshire. He received his musical education in the Chapel Royal under Dr Blow. He early obtained the place of organist of St Anne’s, Soho, and in 1700 was admitted a gentleman extraordinary of the Chapel Royal. In 1707 he was appointed joint-organist with Blow; and upon the death of the latter in 1708 he became solo organist, and also master of the children and composer of the Chapel Royal, besides being made organist of Westminster Abbey. In 1712 he wrote a brief introduction on the history of English church music to a collection of the words of anthems which he had edited under the title of Divine Harmony. In 1713 he obtained his degree of doctor of music in the university of Oxford. In 1724 he published an edition of his choral music in 2 vols. folio, under the name of Musica Sacra, or Select Anthems in score, for two, three, four, five, six, seven and eight voices, to which is added the Burial Service, as it is occasionally performed in Westminster Abbey. This handsome work included a portrait of the composer and was the first of the kind executed on pewter plates and in score. John Page, in his Harmonia Sacra, published in 1800 in 3 vols. folio, gives seven of Croft’s anthems. Of instrumental music, Croft published six sets of airs for two violins and a bass, six sonatas for two flutes, six solos for a flute and bass. He died at Bath on the 14th of August 1727, and was buried in the north aisle of Westminster Abbey, where a monument was erected to his memory by his friend and admirer Humphrey Wyrley Birch. Burney in his History of Music devotes several pages of his third volume (pp. 603-612) to Dr Croft’s life, and criticisms of some of his anthems. During the earlier period of his life Croft wrote much for the theatre, including overtures and incidental music for Courtship à la mode (1700), The Funeral (1702) and The Lying Lover (1703).

CROFTER, a term used, more particularly in the Highlands and islands of Scotland, to designate a tenant who rents and cultivates a small holding of land or “croft.” This Old English word, meaning originally an enclosed field, seems to correspond to the Dutch kroft, a field on high ground or downs. The ultimate origin is unknown. By the Crofters’ Holdings (Scotland) Act 1886, a crofter is defined as the tenant of a holding who resides on his holding, the annual rent of which does not exceed £30 in money, and which is situated in a crofting parish. The wholesale clearances of tenants from their crofts during the 19th century, in violation of, as the tenants claimed, an implied security of tenure, has led in the past to much agitation on the part of the crofters to secure consideration of their grievances. They have been the subject of royal commissions and of considerable legislation, but the effect of the Crofters Act of 1886, with subsequent amending acts, has been to improve their condition markedly, and much of the agitation has now died out. A history of the legislation dealing with the crofters is given in the article [Scotland].

CROKER, JOHN WILSON (1780-1857), British statesman and author, was born at Galway on the 20th of December 1780, being 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 was entered at 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.

In 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 Peninsula, as his deputy in the office of chief secretary for Ireland. This connexion 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 the 14th of March 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 the university of Dublin, having previously sat successively for the boroughs of Athlone, Yarmouth (Isle of Wight), Bodmin and Aldeburgh. He was a determined opponent of the Reform Bill, and vowed that he would never sit in a reformed parliament; his parliamentary career accordingly terminated 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 Peel, but finally broke with him when he began to advocate the repeal of the Corn Laws. He is said to have been the first to use (Jan. 1830) the term “conservatives.” 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 Keats. It is, nevertheless, unjust to judge Croker by the criticisms which Macaulay brought against his magnum opus, his edition of Boswell’s Life of Johnson (1831). With all its defects the work had merits which Macaulay was of course 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 that abounded in the work. Croker was occupied for several years on an annotated edition of 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 W. J. Courthope. He died at St Albans Bank, Hampton, on the 10th of August 1857.

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; but the comparison is a great injustice to the sterling worth of Croker’s character.

The chief works of Croker not already mentioned were his 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); and several lyrical pieces of some merit, such as the Songs of Trafalgar (1806) and The Battles of Talavera (1809). He also 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.).

CROKER, RICHARD (1843-  ), American politician, was born at Blackrock, Ireland, on the 24th of November 1843. He was taken to the United States by his parents when two years old, and was educated in the public schools of New York City, where he eventually became a member of Tammany Hall and active in its politics. He was an alderman from 1868 to 1870, a coroner from 1873 to 1876, a fire commissioner in 1883 and 1887, and city chamberlain from 1889 to 1890. After the fall of John Kelly he became the leader of Tammany Hall (q.v.), and for some time almost completely controlled the organization. His greatest political success was his bringing about the election of Robert A. van Wyck as first mayor of greater New York in 1897, and during van Wyck’s administration Croker is popularly supposed to have dominated completely the government of the city. After Croker’s failure to “carry” the city in the presidential election of 1900 and the defeat of his mayoralty candidate, Edward M. Shepard, in 1901, he resigned from his position of leadership in Tammany, and retired to a country life in England and Ireland. In 1907 he won the Derby with his race-horse Orby.

CROKER, THOMAS CROFTON (1798-1854), Irish antiquary and humorist, was born in Cork on the 15th of January 1798. He was apprenticed to a merchant, but in 1819, through the interest of John Wilson Croker, who was, however, no relation of his, he became a clerk in the Admiralty. Moore was indebted to him in the production of his Irish Melodies for “many curious fragments of ancient poetry.” In 1825 he produced his most popular book, the Fairy Legends and Traditions of the South of Ireland, which he followed up by the publication of his Legends of the Lakes (1829), his Adventures of Barney Mahoney (1852), and an edition of the Popular Songs of Ireland (1839). In 1827 he was made a member of the Irish Academy; in 1839 and 1840 he helped to found the Camden and Percy Societies, and in 1843 the British Archaeological Association. He wrote Narratives Illustrative of the Contests in Ireland in 1641 and 1688 (1841), for the Camden Society, Historical Songs of Ireland, &c. (1841), for the Percy Society, and several other works. He was also a member of the Hakluyt and the Antiquarian Society. He died in London on the 8th of August 1854.

CROLL, JAMES (1821-1890), Scottish man of science, was born of a peasant family at Little Whitefield, in the parish of Cargill, in Perthshire, on the 2nd of January 1821. He was regarded as an unpromising boy, but a trifling circumstance aroused a passion for reading, and he made great progress in self-education. He was apprenticed to a wheelwright at Collace in Perthshire, but being debarred by ill-health from manual labour, he became successively a shop-keeper and an insurance agent. In 1859 he was made keeper of the Andersonian Museum in Glasgow, a humble appointment, which, however, gave him congenial occupation. In 1857, being deeply impressed by the metaphysics of Jonathan Edwards, he had published an anonymous volume entitled The Philosophy of Theism; but his connexion with the Museum induced him to take up physical science, and from 1861 onwards he studied with such perseverance that he was enabled to contribute papers to the Philosophical Magazine and other journals. For that magazine in 1864 he wrote his celebrated essay “On the Physical Cause of the Changes of Climate during Geological Epochs.” This led to his receiving an appointment on the Scottish Geological Survey in 1867, and for thirteen years he took charge of the Edinburgh Office. In 1875 he summed up his researches upon the ancient condition of the earth in his Climate and Time, in their Geological Relations, in which he contends that terrestrial revolutions are due in a measure to cosmical causes. This theory excited warm controversy. Croll’s replies to his opponents are collected in his Climate and Cosmology (1885). He had been compelled by ill-health to withdraw from the public service in 1880; yet, working under the greatest difficulties, and harassed by the inadequacy of his retiring pension, he managed to produce Stellar Evolution, discussing, among other things, the age of the sun, in 1889; and The Philosophical Basis of Evolution, partly a critique of Herbert Spencer’s philosophy, in 1890. He died on the 15th of December 1890. The soundness of Croll’s astronomical theory regarding the glacial period has since been criticized by E. P. Culverwell in the Geological Magazine for 1895, and by others; and it is now generally abandoned. Nevertheless it must be admitted that his character as a scientific worker under great discouragements was nothing less than heroic. The hon. degree of LL.D. was conferred on him in 1876 by the university of St Andrews; and he was elected F.R.S. in the same year.

An Autobiographical Sketch of James Croll, with Memoir of his Life and Work, was prepared by J. C. Irons, and published in 1896.

CROLY, GEORGE (1780-1860), British divine and author, son of a Dublin physician, was born on the 17th of August 1780. He was educated at Trinity College, Dublin, and after ordination was appointed to a small curacy in the north of Ireland. About 1810 he came to London, and occupied himself with literary work. A man of restless energy, he claims attention by his extraordinary versatility. He wrote dramatic criticisms for a short-lived periodical called the New Times; he was one of the earliest contributors to Blackwood’s Magazine; and to the Literary Gazette he contributed poems, reviews and essays on all kinds of subjects. In 1819 he married Margaret Helen Begbie. Efforts to secure an English living for Croly were frustrated, according to the Gentleman’s Magazine (Jan. 1861), because Lord Eldon confounded him with a Roman Catholic of the same name. Excluding his contributions to the daily and weekly press his chief works were:—Paris in 1815 (1817), a poem in imitation of Childe Harold; Catiline (1822), a tragedy lacking in dramatic force; Salathiel: A Story of the Past, the Present and the Future (1829), a successful romance of the “Wandering Jew” type; The Life and Times of his late Majesty George the Fourth (1830); Marston; or, The Soldier and Statesman (1846), a novel of modern life; The Modern Orlando (1846), a satire which owes something to Don Juan; and some biographies, sermons and theological works.

Croly was an effective preacher, and continued to hope for preferment from the Tory leaders, to whom he had rendered considerable services by his pen; but he eventually received, in 1835, the living of St Stephen’s, Walbrook, London, from a Whig patron, Lord Brougham, with whose family he was connected. In 1847 he was made afternoon lecturer at the Foundling hospital, but this appointment proved unfortunate. He died suddenly on the 24th of November 1860, in London.

His Poetical Works (2 vols.) were collected in 1830. For a list of his works see Allibone’s Critical Dictionary of English Literature (1859).

CROMAGNON RACE, the name given by Paul Broca to a type of mankind supposed to be represented by remains found by Lartet, Christy and others, in France in the Cromagnon cave at Les Eyzies, Tayac district, Dordogne. At the foot of a steep rock near the village this small cave, nearly filled with debris, was found by workmen in 1868. Towards the top of the loose strata three human skeletons were unearthed. They were those of an old man, a young man and a woman, the latter’s skull bearing the mark of a severe wound. The skulls presented such special characteristics that Broca took them as types of a race. Palaeolithic man is exclusively long-headed, and the dolichocephalic appearance of the crania (they had a mean cephalic index of 73.34) supported the view that the “find” at Les Eyzies was palaeolithic. It is, however, inaccurate to state that brachycephaly appears at once with the neolithic age, dolichocephaly even of a pronounced type persisting far into neolithic times. The Cromagnon race may thus be, as many anthropologists believe it, early neolithic, a type of man who spread over and inhabited a large portion of Europe at the close of the Pleistocene period. Some have sought to find in it the substratum of the present populations of western Europe. Quatrefages identifies Cromagnon man with the tall, long-headed, fair Kabyles (Berbers) who still survive in various parts of Mauritania. He suggests the introduction of the Cromagnon from Siberia, “arriving in Europe simultaneously with the great mammals (which were driven by the cold from Siberia), and no doubt following their route.”

See A. H. Keane’s Ethnology (1896); Mortillet, Le Préhistorique (1900); Sergi, The Mediterranean Race (1901); Lord Avebury, Prehistoric Times, p. 317 of 1900 edition.

CROMARTY, GEORGE MACKENZIE, 1st Earl of (1630-1714), Scottish statesman, was the eldest son of Sir John Mackenzie, Bart., of Tarbat (d. 1654), and belonged to the same family as the earls of Seaforth. In 1654 he joined the rising in Scotland on behalf of Charles II. and after an exile of six years he returned to his own country and took some part in public affairs after the Restoration. In 1661 he became a lord of session as Lord Tarbat, but having been concerned in a vain attempt to overthrow Charles II.’s secretary, the earl of Lauderdale, he was dismissed from office in 1664. A period of retirement followed until 1678 when Mackenzie was appointed lord justice general of Scotland; in 1681 he became lord clerk register and a lord of session for the second time, and from 1682 to 1688 he was the chief minister of Charles II. and James II. in Scotland, being created viscount of Tarbat in 1685. In 1688, however, he deserted James and soon afterwards made his peace with William III., his experience being very serviceable to the new government in settling the affairs of Scotland. From 1692 to 1695 Tarbat was again lord clerk register, and having served for a short time as a secretary of state under Queen Anne he was created earl of Cromarty in 1703. He was again lord justice general from 1704 to 1710. He warmly supported the union between England and Scotland, writing some pamphlets in favour of this step, and he died on the 17th of August 1714. Cromarty was a man of much learning, and among his numerous writings may be mentioned his Account of the conspiracies by the earls of Gowry and R. Logan (Edinburgh, 1713).

The earl’s grandson George, 3rd earl of Cromarty (c. 1703-1766), succeeded his father John, the 2nd earl, in February 1731. In 1745 he joined Charles Edward, the young pretender, and he served with the Jacobites until April 1746 when he was taken prisoner in Sutherlandshire. He was tried and sentenced to death, but he obtained a conditional pardon although his peerage was forfeited. He died on the 28th of September 1766.

This earl’s eldest son was John Mackenzie, Lord Macleod (1727-1789), who shared his father’s fortunes in 1745 and his fate in 1746. Having pleaded guilty at his trial Macleod was pardoned on condition that he gave up all his rights in the estates of the earldom, and he left England and entered the Swedish army. In this service he rose to high rank and was made Count Cromarty. The count returned to England in 1777 and was successful in raising, mainly among the Mackenzies, two splendid battalions of Highlanders, the first of which, now the Highland Light Infantry, served under him in India. In 1784 he regained the family estates and he died on the 2nd of April 1789. Macleod wrote an account of the Jacobite rising of 1745, and also one of a campaign in Bohemia in which he took part in 1757; both are printed in Sir W. Fraser’s Earls of Cromartie (Edinburgh, 1876).

Macleod left no children, and his heir was his cousin, Kenneth Mackenzie (d. 1796), a grandson of the 2nd earl, who also died childless. The estates then passed to Macleod’s sister, Isabel (1725-1801), wife of George Murray, 6th Lord Elibank. In 1861 Isabel’s descendant, Anne (1829-1888), wife of George, 3rd duke of Sutherland, was created countess of Cromartie with remainder to her second son Francis (1852-1893), who became earl of Cromartie in 1888. In 1895, two years after the death of Francis, his daughter Sibell Lilian (b. 1878) was granted by letters patent the title of countess of Cromartie.

CROMARTY, a police burgh and seaport of the county of Ross and Cromarty, Scotland. Pop. (1901) 1242. It is situated on the southern shore of the mouth of Cromarty Firth, 5 m. E. by S. of Invergordon on the opposite coast, with which there is daily communication by steamer, and 9 m. N.E. of Fortrose, the most convenient railway station. Before the union of the shires of Ross and Cromarty, it was the county town of Cromartyshire, and is one of the Wick district group of parliamentary burghs. Its name is variously derived from the Gaelic crom, crooked, and bath, bay, or ard, height, meaning either the “crooked bay,” or the “bend between the heights” (the high rocks, or Sutors, which guard the entrance to the Firth), and gave the title to the earldom of Cromarty. The principal buildings are the town hall and the Hugh Miller Institute. The harbour, enclosed by two piers, accommodates the herring fleet, but the fisheries, the staple industry, have declined. The town, however, is in growing repute as a midsummer resort. The thatched house with crow-stepped gables in Church Street, in which Hugh Miller the geologist was born, still stands, and a statue has been erected to his memory. To the east of the burgh is Cromarty House, occupying the site of the old castle of the earls of Ross. It was the birthplace of Sir Thomas Urquhart, the translator of Rabelais.

Cromarty, formerly a county in the north of Scotland, was incorporated with Ross-shire in 1889 under the designation of the county of Ross and Cromarty. The nucleus of the county consisted of the lands of Cromarty in the north of the peninsula of the Black Isle. To this were added from time to time the various estates scattered throughout Ross-shire—the most considerable of which were the districts around Ullapool and Little Loch Broom on the Atlantic coast, the area in which Ben Wyvis is situated, and a tract to the north of Loch Fannich—which had been acquired by the ancestors of Sir George Mackenzie (1630-1714), afterwards Viscount Tarbat (1685) and 1st earl of Cromarty (1703). Desirous of combining these sporadic properties into one shire, Viscount Tarbat was enabled to procure their annexation to his sheriffdom of Cromarty in 1685 and 1698, the area of the enlarged county amounting to nearly 370 sq. m. (See [Ross and Cromarty].)

CROMARTY FIRTH, an arm of the North Sea, belonging to the county of Ross and Cromarty, Scotland. From the Moray Firth it extends inland in a westerly and then south-westerly direction for a distance of 19 m. Excepting at the Bay of Nigg, on the northern shore, and Cromarty Bay, on the southern, where it is about 5 m. wide (due N. and S.), and at Alness Bay, where it is 2 m. wide, it has an average width of 1 m. and a depth varying from 5 to 10 fathoms, forming one of the safest and most commodious anchorages in the north of Scotland. Besides other streams it receives the Conon, Peffery, Skiack and Alness, and the principal places on its shores are Dingwall near the head, Cromarty near the mouth, Kiltearn, Invergordon and Kilmuir on the north. The entrance is guarded by two precipitous rocks—the one on the north 400 ft., that on the south 463 ft. high—called the Sutors from a fancied resemblance to a couple of shoemakers (Scotice, souter), bending over their lasts. There are ferries at Cromarty, Invergordon and Dingwall.

CROME, JOHN (1769-1821), English landscape painter, founder and chief representative of the “Norwich School,” often called Old Crome, to distinguish him from his son, was born at Norwich, on the 21st of December 1769. His father was a weaver, and could give him only the scantiest education. His early years were spent in work of the humblest kind; and at a fit age he became apprentice to a house-painter. To this step he appears to have been led by an inborn love of art and the desire to acquaint himself by any means with its materials and processes. During his apprenticeship he sometimes painted signboards, and devoted what leisure time he had to sketching from nature. Through the influence of a rich art-loving friend he was enabled to exchange his occupation of house-painter for that of drawing-master; and in this he was engaged throughout his life. He took great delight in a collection of Dutch pictures to which he had access, and these he carefully studied. About 1790 he was introduced to Sir William Beechey, whose house in London he frequently visited, and from whom he gathered additional knowledge and help in his art. In 1805 the Norwich Society of Artists took definite shape, its origin being traceable a year or two further back. Crome was its president and the largest contributor to its annual exhibitions. Among his pupils were James Stark, Vincent, Thirtle and John Bernay (Barney) Crome (1794-1842), his son. J. S. Cotman, too, a greater artist than any of these, was associated with him. Crome continued to reside at Norwich, and with the exception of his short visits to London had little or no communication with the great artists of his own time. He first exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1806; but in this and the following twelve years he exhibited there only fourteen of his works. With very few exceptions Crome’s subjects are taken from the familiar scenery of his native county. Fidelity to nature was his dominant aim. “The bit of heath, the boat, and the slow water of the flattish land, trees most of all—the single tree in elaborate study, the group of trees, and how the growth of one affects that of another, and the characteristics of each,”—these, says Frederick Wedmore (Studies in English Art), are the things to which he is most constant. He still remains, says the same critic, of many trees the greatest draughtsman, and is especially the master of the oak. His most important works are—“Mousehold Heath, near Norwich,” now in the National Gallery; “Clump of Trees, Hautbois Common”; “Oak at Poringland”; the “Willow”; “Coast Scene near Yarmouth”; “Bruges, on the Ostend River”; “Slate Quarries”; the “Italian Boulevards”; and the “Fishmarket at Boulogne.” He executed a good many etchings, and the great charm of these is in the beautiful and faithful representation of trees. Crome enjoyed a very limited reputation during his life, and his pictures were sold at low prices; but since his death they have been more and more appreciated, and have given him a high place among English painters of landscape. He died at Norwich on the 22nd of April 1821. His son, J. B. Crome, was his assistant in teaching, and his best pictures were in the same style, his moonlight effects being much admired.

A collection of “Old” Crome’s etchings, entitled Norfolk Picturesque Scenery, was published in 1834, and was re-issued with a memoir by Dawson Turner in 1838, but in this issue the prints were retouched by other hands.

CROMER, EVELYN BARING, 1st Earl (1841-  ), British statesman and diplomatist, was born on the 26th of February 1841, the ninth son of Henry Baring, M.P., by Cecilia Anne, eldest daughter of Admiral Windham of Felbrigge Hall, Norfolk. Having joined the Royal Artillery in 1858, he was appointed in 1861 A.D.C. to Sir Henry Storks, high commissioner of the Ionian Islands, and acted as secretary to the same chief during the inquiry into the Jamaica outbreak in 1865. Gazetted captain in 1870, he went in 1872 as private secretary to his cousin Lord Northbrook, Viceroy of India, where he remained until 1876, when he became major, received the C.S.I., and was appointed British commissioner of the Egyptian public debt office. Up to this period Major Baring had given no unusual signs of promise, and the appointment of a comparatively untried major of artillery as the British representative on a Financial Board composed of representatives of all the great powers was considered a bold one. Within a very short time it was recognized that the Englishman, though keeping himself carefully in the background, was unmistakably the predominant factor on the board. He was mainly responsible for the searching report, issued in 1878, of the commission of inquiry that had been instituted into the financial methods of the Khedive Ismail; and when that able and unscrupulous Oriental had to submit to an enforced abdication in 1879, it was Major Baring who became the British controller-general and practical director of the Dual Control. Had he remained in Egypt, the whole course of Egyptian history might have been altered, but his services were deemed more necessary in India, and under Lord Ripon he became financial member of council in June 1880. He remained there till 1883, leaving an unmistakable mark on the Indian financial system, and then, having been rewarded by the K.C.S.I., he was appointed British agent and consul-general in Egypt and a minister plenipotentiary in the diplomatic service.

Sir Evelyn Baring was at that time only a man of forty-two, who had gained a reputation for considerable financial ability, combined with an abruptness of manner and a certain autocracy of demeanour which, it was feared, would impede his success in a position which required considerable tact and diplomacy. It was a friendly colleague who wrote—

When he arrived in Cairo in 1883 he found the administration of the country almost non-existent. Ismail had ruled with all the vices, but also with all the advantages, of autocracy. Disorder in the finances, brutality towards the people, had been combined with public tranquillity and the outer semblance of civilization. Order, at least, reigned from the Sudan to the Mediterranean, and such trivial military disturbances as had occurred had been of Ismail’s own devising and for his own purposes. Tewfik, who had succeeded him, had neither the inclination nor character to be a despot. Within three years his government had been all but overthrown, and he was only khedive by the grace of British bayonets. Government by bayonets was not in accord with the views of the House of Commons, yet Ismail’s government by the kourbash could not be restored. The British government, under Mr Gladstone, desired to establish in Egypt a sort of constitutional government; and as there existed no single element of a constitution, they had sent out Lord Dufferin (the first marquess of Dufferin) to frame one. That gifted nobleman, in the delightful lucidity of his picturesque report, left nothing to be desired except the material necessary to convert the flowing periods into political entities.[1] In the absence of that, the constitution was still-born, and Sir Evelyn Baring arrived to find, not indeed a clean slate, but a worn-out papyrus, disfigured by the efforts of centuries to describe in hieroglyph a method of rule for a docile people.

From that date the history of Sir Evelyn Baring, who became Baron Cromer in 1892, G.C.B. in 1895, viscount in 1897, and earl in 1901, is the history of Egypt, and requires the barest mention of its salient points here. From the outset he realized that the task he had to perform could only be effected piecemeal and in detail, and his very first measure was one which, though severely criticized at the time, has been justified by events, and which in any case showed that he shirked no responsibility, and was capable of adopting heroic methods. He counselled the abandonment, at least temporarily, by Egypt of its authority in the Sudan provinces, already challenged by the mahdi. His views were shared by the British ministry of the day and the policy of abandonment enforced upon the Egyptian government. At the same time it was decided that efforts should be made to relieve the Egyptian garrisons in the Sudan and this resolve led to the mission of General C. G. Gordon (q.v.) to Khartum. Lord Cromer subsequently told the story of Gordon’s mission at length, making clear the measure of responsibility resting upon him as British agent. The proposal to employ Gordon came from the British government and twice Sir Evelyn rejected the suggestion. Finally, mistrusting his own judgment, for he did not consider Gordon the proper person for the mission, Baring yielded to pressure from Lord Granville. Thereafter he gave Gordon all the support possible, and in the critical matter of the proposed despatch of Zobeir to Khartum, Baring—after a few days’ hesitation—cordially endorsed Gordon’s request. The request was refused by the British government—and the catastrophe which followed at Khartum rendered inevitable.

The Sudan crisis being over, for the time, Sir Evelyn Baring set to work to reorganize Egypt itself. This work he attacked in detail. The very first essential was to regulate the financial situation; and in Egypt, where the entire revenue is based on the production of the soil, irrigation was of the first importance. With the assistance of Sir Colin Scott Moncrieff, in the public works department, and Sir Edgar Vincent, as financial adviser, these two great departments were practically put in order before he gave more than superficial attention to the rest. The ministry of justice was the next department seriously taken in hand, with the assistance of Sir John Scott, while the army had been reformed under Sir Evelyn Wood, who was succeeded by Sir Francis (afterwards Lord) Grenfell. Education, the ministry of the interior, and gradually every other department, came to be reorganized, or, more correctly speaking, formed, under Lord Cromer’s carefully persistent direction, until it may be said to-day that the Egyptian administration can safely challenge comparison with that of any other state. In the meantime the rule of the mahdi and his successor, the khalifa, in the temporarily abandoned provinces of the Sudan, had been weakened by internal dissensions; the Italians from Massawa, the Belgians from the Congo State, and the French from their West African possessions, had gradually approached nearer to the valley of the Nile; and the moment had arrived at which Egypt must decide either to recover her position in the Sudan or allow the Upper Nile to fall into hands hostile to Great Britain and her position in Egypt. Lord Cromer was as quick to recognize the moment for action and to act as he had fifteen years earlier been prompt to recognize the necessity of abstention. In March-September 1896 the first advance was made to Dongola under the Sirdar, Sir Herbert (afterwards Lord) Kitchener; between July 1897 and April 1898 the advance was pushed forward to the Atbara; and on the 2nd of September 1898, the battle of Omdurman finally crushed the power of the khalifa and restored the Sudan to the rule of Egypt and Great Britain. In the negotiations which resulted in the Anglo-French Declaration of the 8th of April 1904, whereby France bound herself not to obstruct in any manner the action of Great Britain in Egypt and the Egyptian government acquired financial freedom, Lord Cromer took an active part. He also successfully guarded the interests of Egypt and Great Britain in 1906 when Turkey attempted by encroachments in the Sinai Peninsula to obtain a strategic position on the Suez Canal. To have effected all this in the face of the greatest difficulties—political, national and international—and at the same time to have raised the credit of the country from a condition of bankruptcy to an equality with that of the first European powers, entitles Lord Cromer to a very high place among the greatest administrators and statesmen that the British empire has produced. In April 1907, in consequence of the state of his health, he resigned office, having held the post of British agent in Egypt for twenty-four years. In July of the same year parliament granted £50,000 out of the public funds to Lord Cromer in recognition of his “eminent services” in Egypt. In 1908 he published, in two volumes, Modern Egypt, in which he gave an impartial narrative of events in Egypt and the Sudan since 1876, and dealt with the results to Egypt of the British occupation of the country. Lord Cromer also took part in the political controversies at home, joining himself to the free-trade wing of the Unionist party.

Lord Cromer married in 1876 Ethel Stanley, daughter of Sir Rowland Stanley Errington, eleventh baronet, but was left a widower with two sons in 1898; and in 1901 he married Lady Katherine Thynne, daughter of the 4th marquess of Bath.

[1] In 1892 Lord Dufferin wrote to Lord Cromer: “These institutions were a good deal ridiculed at the time, but as it was then uncertain how long we were going to remain, or rather how soon the Turks might not be reinvested with their ancient supremacy, I desired to erect some sort of barrier, however feeble, against their intolerable tyranny.” In 1906 Lord Cromer bore public testimony to the good results of the measures adopted on Lord Dufferin’s “statesmanlike initiative.” Such results were, however, only possible in consequence of the continuance of the British occupation.

CROMER, a watering-place in the northern parliamentary division of Norfolk, England, 139 m. N.E. by N. from London by the Great Eastern railway; served also by the Midland and Great Northern joint line. Pop. of urban district (1901) 3781. Standing on cliffs of considerable elevation, the town has repeatedly suffered from ravages of the sea. A wall and esplanade extend along the bottom of the cliffs, and there is a fine stretch of sandy beach. There is also a short pier. The church of St Peter and St Paul is Perpendicular (largely restored) with a lofty tower. On a site of three acres stands the convalescent home of the Norfolk and Norwich hospital. There is an excellent golf course. The herring, cod, lobster and crab fisheries are prosecuted. The village of Sheringham (pop. of urban district, 2359), lying to the west, is also frequented by visitors. A so-called Roman camp, on an elevation overlooking the sea, is actually a modern beacon.

CROMORNE, also CRUMHORNE[1] (Ger. Krummhorn; Fr. tournebout), a wind instrument of wood in which a cylindrical column of air is set in vibration by a reed. The lower extremity is turned up in a half-circle, and from this peculiarity it has gained the French name tournebout. The reed of the cromorne, like that of the bassoon, is formed by a double tongue of cane adapted to the small end of a conical brass tube or crook, the large end fitting into the main bore of the instrument. It presents, however, this difference, that it is not, like that of the bassoon, in contact with the player’s lips, but is covered by a cap pierced in the upper part with a raised slit against which the performer’s lips rest, the air being forced through the opening into the cap and setting the reed in vibration. The reed itself is therefore not subject to the pressure of the lips. The compass of the instrument is in consequence limited to the simple fundamental sounds produced by the successive opening of the lateral holes. The length of the cromornes is inconsiderable in proportion to the deep sounds produced by them, which arises from the fact that these instruments, like all tubes of cylindrical bore provided with reeds, have the acoustic properties of the stopped pipes of an organ. That is to say, theoretically they require only half the length necessary for the open pipes of an organ or for conical tubes provided with reeds, to produce notes of the same pitch. Moreover, when, to obtain an harmonic, the column of air is divided, the cromorne will not give the octave, like the oboe and bassoon, but the twelfth, corresponding in this peculiarity with the clarinet and all stopped pipes or bourdons. In order, however, to obtain an harmonic on the cromorne, the cap would have to be discarded, for a reed only overblows to give the harmonic overtones when pressed by the lips. With the ordinary boring of eight lateral holes the cromorne possesses a limited compass of a ninth. Sometimes, however, deeper sounds are obtained by the addition of one or more keys. By its construction the cromorne is one of the oldest wind instruments; it is evidently derived from the Gr. aulos[2] and the Roman tibia, which likewise consisted of a simple cylindrical pipe of which the air column was set in vibration, at first by a double reed, and, we have reason to believe, later by a single reed (see [Aulos] and [Clarinet]). The Phrygian aulos was sometimes curved (see Tib. ii. i. 85 Phrygio tibia curva sono; Virgil, Aen. xi. 737 curva choros indixit tibia Bacchi).[3]

Notwithstanding the successive improvements that were introduced in the manufacture of wind instruments, the cromorne scarcely ever varied in the details of its construction. Such as we see it represented in the treatise by Virdung[4] we find it again about the epoch of its disappearance.[5] The cromornes existed as a complete family from the 15th century, consisting, according to Virdung, of four instruments; Praetorius[6] cites five—the deep bass, the bass, the tenor or alto, the cantus or soprano and the high soprano, with compass as shown. A band, or, to use the expression of Praetorius, an “accort” of cromornes comprised 1 deep bass, 2 bass, 3 tenor, 2 cantus, 1 high soprano = 9.

Mersenne[7] explains the construction of the cromorne, giving careful illustrations of the instrument with and without the cap. From him we learn that these instruments were made in England, where they were played in concert in sets of four, five and six. Their scheme of construction and especially the reed and cap is very similar to that of the chalumeau of the musette (see [Bag-pipe]), but its timbre is by no means so pleasant. Mersenne’s cromornes have ten fingerholes, Nos. 7 and 8 being duplicates for right and left-handed players. They were probably sometimes used, as was the case with the hautbois de Poitou (see [Bag-pipe]), without the cap, when an extended compass was required.

The cromornes were in very general use in Europe from the 14th to the 17th century, and are to be found in illustrations of pageants, as for instance in the magnificent collection of woodcuts designed by Hans Burgmair, a pupil of Albrecht Dürer, representing the triumph of the emperor Maximilian,[8] where a bass and a tenor Krumbhorn player figure in the procession among countless other musicians. In the inventory of the wardrobe, &c., belonging to Henry VIII. at Westminster, made during the reign of Edward VI., we find eighteen crumhornes (see British Museum, Harleian MS. 1419, ff. 202b and 205). The cromornes did not always form an orchestra by themselves, but were also used in concert with other instruments and notably with flutes and oboes, as in municipal bands and in the private bands of princes. In 1685 the orchestra of the Neue Kirche at Strassburg comprised two tournebouts or cromornes, and until the middle of the 18th century these instruments formed part of the court band known as “Musique de la Grande Écurie” in the service of the French kings. They are first mentioned in the accounts for the year 1662, together with the tromba-marina, although the instrument was already highly esteemed in the 16th century. In that year five players of the cromorne were enrolled among the musicians of the Grande Écurie du Roi;[9] they received a yearly salary of 120 livres, which various supplementary allowances brought up to about 330 livres. In 1729 one of the cromorne players sold his appointment for 4000 francs. This was a sign of the failing popularity of the instrument. The duties of the cromorne and tromba-marina players consisted in playing in the great divertissements and at court functions and festivals in honour of royal marriages, births and thanksgivings.

Cromornes have become of extreme rarity and are not to be found in all collections. The Paris Conservatoire possesses one large bass cromorne of the 16th century, the Kgl. Hochschule für Musik,[10] Berlin, a set of seven, and the Ambroser Sammlung, Vienna, a cromorne in E♭.[11] The museum of the Conservatoire Royal de Musique at Brussels has the good fortune to possess a complete family which is said to have belonged to the duke of Ferrara, Alphonso II. d’Este, a prince who reigned from 1559 to 1597. The soprano (cantus or discant) has the same compass as above, while those of the alto, the tenor (furnished with a key) and the bass are as shown.

The bass (see figure), besides having two keys, is distinguished from the others by two contrivances like small bolts, which slide in grooves and close the two holes that give the lowest notes of the instrument. The use of these bolts, placed at the extremity of the tournebout and out of reach of the fingers of the instrumentalist, renders necessary the assistance of a person whose sole mission is to attend to them during the performance. E. van der Straeten[12] mentions a key belonging to a large cromorne bearing the date 1537, of which he gives a large drawing. A cromorne appears in a musical scene with a trumpet in Hermann Finck’s Practica Musica.[13]

The “Platerspil,” of which Virdung gives a drawing, is only a kind of cromorne. It is characterized by having, instead of a cap to cover the reed, a spherical receiver surrounding the reed, to which the tube for insufflation is adapted. The Platerspiel is also frequently classified among bagpipes. In the Cantigas di Sante Maria,[14] a MS. of the 13th century preserved in the Escorial, Madrid, two instruments of this type are represented. One of these has two straight, parallel pipes, slightly conical; the other is frankly conical with wide bore turned up at the end.

Other instruments belonging by their most important characteristics of cylindrical bore and double reed to the same family as the cromorne, although the bore was somewhat differently disposed, are the racket bassoon and the sourdine or sordelline. The latter was introduced into the orchestra by Cavaliere in his opera Rappresentazione di anima e di corpo, and is described by Giudotto[15] in his edition of the score as “Flauti overo due tibie all’ antica che noi chiamiamo sordelline,” a description which tallies with what has been said above concerning the aulos and tibia.

(V. M. and K. S.)

[1] Crumhorne need not be regarded as a corruption of the German, since the two words of which it is composed were both in use in medieval England. Crumb = curved; crumbe = hook, bend; crome = a staff with a hook at the end of it. See Stratmann’s Middle English Dictionary (1891), and Halliwell, Dictionary of Archaic and Provincial Words (London, 1881).

[2] See A. Howard, “Aulos or Tibia,” Harvard Studies, iv. (Boston, 1893).

[3] See also A. A. Howard, op. cit., “Phrygian Aulos,” pp. 35-38.

[4] Musica getutscht und auszgezogen (Basel, 1511).

[5] See Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie (Paris, 1751-1780), t. 5, “Lutherie,” pl. ix.

[6] Organographia (Wolfenbüttel, 1618).

[7] L’Harmonie universelle (Paris, 1636-1637), book v. pp. 289 and 290. Cf. “Musette,” pp. 282-287 and 305.

[8] See “Triumphzug des Kaisers Maximilian I.” Beilage zum II. Band des Jahrb. der Sammlungen des Allerhöchsten Kaiserhauses (Vienna, 1884-1885), pl. 20. Explanatory text and part i. in Band i. of the same publication, 1883-1884. A French edition with 135 plates was also published in Vienna by A. Schmidt, and in London by J. Edwards (1796). See also Dr August Reissmann, Illustrierte Geschichte der deutschen Musik (Leipzig, 1881), where a few of the plates are reproduced.

[9] See J. Écorcheville, “Quelques documents sur la musique de la grande écurie du roi,” Sammelband d. Intern. Musik. Ges. Jahrg. ii., Heft 4 (1901, Leipzig, London, &c.), pp. 630-632.

[10] Oskar Fleischer, Führer (Berlin, 1892), p. 29, Nos. 400 to 406.

[11] For an illustration see Captain C. R. Day, Descriptive Catalogue (London, 1891), pl. iv. E. and p. 99.

[12] Histoire de la musique aux Pays-Bas avant le XIXe siècle (Brussels, 1867-1888), vol. vii. p. 336, and description, p. 333 et seq.

[13] Wittenberg, 1556; reproduced by A. Reissmann, op. cit., pp. 233 and 226.

[14] Reproduced in Riaño’s Notes on Early Spanish Music (London, 1887), pp. 119-127.

[15] See Hugo Goldschmidt, “Das Orchester der italienischen Oper im 17. Jahrh.” Sammelband der Intern. Musikgesellschaft, Jahrg. ii., Heft 1 (Leipzig, 1900), p. 24.

CROMPTON, SAMUEL (1753-1827), English inventor, was born on the 3rd of December 1753 at Firwood near Bolton-le-Moors, Lancashire. While yet a boy he lost his father, and had to contribute to the family resources by spinning yarn. The defects of the spinning jenny imbued him with the idea of devising something better, and for five or six years the effort absorbed all his spare time and money, including what he earned by playing the violin at the Bolton theatre. About 1779 he succeeded in producing a machine which span yarn suitable for use in the manufacture of muslin, and which was known as the muslin wheel or the Hall-in-the-Wood wheel (from the name of the house in which he and his family resided), and later as the spinning mule. After his marriage in 1780 a good demand arose for the yarn which he himself made at Hall-in-the-Wood, but the prying to which his methods were subjected drove him, in the absence of means to take out a patent, to the choice of destroying his machine or making it public. He adopted the latter alternative on the promise of a number of manufacturers to pay him for the use of the mule, but all he received was about £60. He then resumed spinning on his own account, but with indifferent success. In 1800 a sum of £500 was raised for his benefit by subscription, and when in 1809 Edmund Cartwright, the inventor of the power-loom obtained £10,000 from parliament, he determined also to apply for a grant. In 1811 he made a tour in the manufacturing districts of Lancashire and Scotland to collect evidence showing how extensively his mule was used, and in 1812 parliament allowed him £5000. With the aid of this money he embarked in business, first as a bleacher and then as a cotton merchant and spinner, but again without success. In 1824 some friends, without his knowledge, bought him an annuity of £63. He died at Bolton on the 26th of June 1827.

CROMPTON, an urban district of Lancashire, England, 2½ m. N. of Oldham, within the parliamentary borough of Oldham. Pop. (1901) 13,427. At Shaw, a populous village included within it, is a station on the Lancashire & Yorkshire railway. Cotton mills and the collieries of the neighbourhood employ the large industrial population.

CROMWELL, HENRY (1628-1674), fourth son of Oliver Cromwell, was born at Huntingdon on the 20th of January 1628, and served under his father during the latter part of the Civil War. His active life, however, was mainly spent in Ireland, whither he took some troops to assist Oliver early in 1650, and he was one of the Irish representatives in the Little, or Nominated, Parliament of 1653. In 1654 he was again in Ireland, and after making certain recommendations to his father, now lord protector, with regard to the government of that country, he became major-general of the forces in Ireland and a member of the Irish council of state, taking up his new duties in July 1655. Nominally Henry was subordinate to the lord-deputy, Charles Fleetwood, but Fleetwood’s departure for England in September 1655 left him for all practical purposes the ruler of Ireland. He moderated the lord-deputy’s policy of deporting the Irish, and unlike him he paid some attention to the interests of the English settlers; moreover, again unlike Fleetwood, he appears to have held the scales evenly between the different Protestant sects, and his undoubted popularity in Ireland is attested by Clarendon. In November 1657 Henry himself was made lord-deputy; but before this time he had refused a gift of property worth £1500 a year, basing his refusal on the grounds of the poverty of the country, a poverty which was not the least of his troubles. In 1657 he advised his father not to accept the office of king, although in 1634 he had supported a motion to this effect; and after the dissolution of Cromwell’s second parliament in February 1658 he showed his anxiety that the protector should act in a moderate and constitutional manner. After Oliver’s death Henry hailed with delight the succession of his brother Richard to the office of protector, but although he was now appointed lieutenant and governor general of Ireland, it was only with great reluctance that he remained in that country. Having rejected proposals to assist in the restoration of Charles II., Henry was recalled to England in June 1659 just after his brother’s fall; quietly obeying this order he resigned his office at once. Although he lost some property at the Restoration, he was allowed after some solicitation to keep the estate he had bought in Ireland. His concluding years were passed at Spinney Abbey in Cambridgeshire; he was unmolested by the government, and he died on the 23rd of March 1674. In 1653 Henry married Elizabeth (d. 1687), daughter of Sir Francis Russell, and he left five sons and two daughters.

CROMWELL, OLIVER (1599-1658), lord protector of England, was the 5th and only surviving son of Robert Cromwell of Huntingdon and of Elizabeth Steward, widow of William Lynn. His paternal grandfather was Sir Henry Cromwell of Hinchinbrook, a leading personage in Huntingdonshire, and grandson of Richard Williams, knighted by Henry VIII., nephew of Thomas Cromwell, earl of Essex, Henry VIII.’s minister, whose name he adopted. His mother was descended from a family named Styward in Norfolk, which was not, however, connected in any way, as has been often asserted, with the royal house of Stuart. Oliver was born on the 25th of April 1599, was educated under Dr Thomas Beard, a fervent puritan, at the free school at Huntingdon, and on the 23rd of April 1616 matriculated as a fellow-commoner at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, then a hotbed of puritanism, subsequently studying law in London. The royalist anecdotes relating to his youth, including charges of ill-conduct, do not deserve credit, the entries in the register of St John’s, Huntingdon, noting Oliver’s submission on two occasions to church censure being forgeries; but it is not improbable that his youth was wild and possibly dissolute.[1] According to Edmund Waller he was “very well read in the Greek and Roman story.” Burnet declares he had little Latin, but he was able to converse with the Dutch ambassador in that language. According to James Heath in his Flagellum, “he was more famous for his exercises in the fields than in the schools, being one of the chief match-makers and players at football, cudgels, or any other boisterous game or sport.” On the 22nd of August 1620 he married Elizabeth, daughter of Sir James Bourchier, a city merchant of Tower Hill, and of Felstead in Essex; and his father having died in 1617 he settled at Huntingdon and occupied himself in the management of his small estate. In 1628 he was returned to parliament as member for the borough, and on the 11th of February 1629 he spoke in support of puritan doctrine, complaining of the attempt by the king to silence Dr Beard, who had raised his voice against the “flat popery” inculcated by Dr Alabaster at Paul’s Cross. He was also one of the members who refused to adjourn at the king’s command till Sir John Eliot’s resolutions had been passed.

During the eleven years of government without parliament very little is recorded of Cromwell. His name is not connected with the resistance to the levy of ship-money or to the action of the ecclesiastical courts, but in 1630 he was one of those fined for refusing to take up knighthood. The same year he was named one of the justices of the peace for his borough; and on the grant of a new charter showed great zeal in defending the rights of the commoners, and succeeded in procuring an alteration in the charter in their favour, exhibiting much warmth of temper during the dispute and being committed to custody by the privy council for angry words spoken against the mayor, for which he afterwards apologized. He also defended the rights of the commoners of Ely threatened by the “adventurers” who had drained the Great Level, and he was nicknamed afterwards by a royalist newspaper “Lord of the Fens.” He was again later the champion of the commoners of St Ives in the Long Parliament against enclosures by the earl of Manchester, obtaining a commission of the House of Commons to inquire into the case, and drawing upon himself the severe censure of the chairman, the future Lord Clarendon, by his “impetuous carriage” and “insolent behaviour,” and by the passionate vehemence he imparted into the business. Bishop Williams, a kinsman of Cromwell’s, relates at this time that he was “a common spokesman for sectaries, and maintained their part with great stubbornness”; and his earliest extant letter (in 1635) is an appeal for subscriptions for a puritan lecturer. There appears to be no foundation for the statement that he was stopped by an order of council when on the point of abandoning England for America, though there can be little doubt that the thoughts of emigration suggested themselves to his mind at this period. He viewed the “innovations in religion” with abhorrence. According to Clarendon he told the latter in 1641 that if the Grand Remonstrance had not passed “he would have sold all he had the next morning and never have seen England more.” In 1631 he converted his landed property into money, and John Hampden, his cousin, a patentee of Connecticut in 1632, was on the point of emigrating. Cromwell was perhaps arrested in his project by his succession in 1636 to the estate of his uncle Sir Thomas Steward, and to his office of farmer of the cathedral tithes at Ely, whither he now removed. Meanwhile, like Bunyan and many other puritans, Cromwell had been passing through a trying period of mental and religious change and struggle, beginning with deep melancholy and religious doubt and depression, and ending with “seeing light” and with enthusiastic and convinced faith, which remained henceforth the chief characteristic and impulse in his career.

He represented Cambridge in the Short and Long Parliaments of 1640, and at once showed extraordinary zeal and audacity in his opposition to the government, taking a large share in business and serving on numerous and important Cromwell’s first parliamentary efforts. committees. As the cousin of Hampden and St. John he was intimately associated with the leaders of the parliamentary party. His sphere of action, however, was not in parliament. He was not an orator, and though he could express himself forcibly on occasion, his speech was incoherent and devoid of any of the arts of rhetoric. Clarendon notes on his first appearance in parliament that “he seemed to have a person in no degree gracious, no ornament of discourse, none of those talents which use to reconcile the affections of the standers by; yet as he grew into place and authority his parts seemed to be renewed.” He supported stoutly the extreme party of opposition to the king, but did not take the lead except on a few less important occasions, and was apparently silent in the debates on the Petition of Right, the Grand Remonstrance and the Militia. His first recorded intervention in debate in the Long Parliament was on the 9th of November 1640, a few days after the meeting of the House, when he delivered a petition from the imprisoned John Lilburne. He was described by Sir Philip Warwick on this occasion:—“I came into the House one morning well clad and perceived a gentleman speaking whom I knew not, very ordinarily apparelled; for it was a plain cloth suit which seemed to have been made by an ill country tailor; his linen was plain and not very clean; ... his stature was of a good size; his sword stuck close to his side; his countenance swollen and reddish; his voice sharp and untunable and his eloquence full of fervour ... I sincerely profess it much lessened my reverence as to that great council for he was very much hearkened unto.” On the 30th of December he moved to the second reading of Strode’s bill for annual parliaments. His chief interest from the first, however, lay in the religious question. He belonged to the Root and Branch party, and spoke in favour of the petition of the London citizens for the abolition of episcopacy on the 9th of February 1641, and pressed upon the House the Root and Branch Bill in May. On the 6th of November he carried a motion entrusting the train-bands south of the Trent to the command of the earl of Essex. On the 14th of January 1642, after the king’s attempt to seize the five members, he moved for a committee to put the kingdom in a posture of defence. He contributed £600 to the proposed Irish campaign and £500 for raising forces in England—large sums from his small estate—and on his own initiative in July 1642 sent arms of the value of £100 down to Cambridge, seized the magazine there in August, and prevented the king’s commission of array from being executed in the county, taking these important steps on his own authority and receiving subsequently indemnity by vote of the House of Commons. Shortly afterwards he joined Essex with sixty horse, and was present at Edgehill, where his troop was one of the few not routed by Rupert’s charge, Cromwell himself being mentioned among those officers who “never stirred from their troops but fought till the last minute.”

During the earlier part of the year 1643 the military position of Charles was greatly superior to that of the parliament. Essex was inactive near Oxford; in the west Sir Ralph Hopton had won a series of victories, and in the north Beginning of Civil War. Newcastle defeated the Fairfaxes at Adwalton Moor, and all Yorkshire except Hull was in his hands. It seemed likely that the whole of the north would be laid open and the royalists be able to march upon London and join Charles and Hopton there. This stroke, which would most probably have given the victory to the king, was prevented by the “Eastern Association,” a union of Norfolk, Suffolk, Essex, Cambridgeshire and Hertfordshire, constituted in December 1642 and augmented in 1643 by Huntingdonshire and Lincolnshire, of which Cromwell was the leading spirit. His zeal and energy met everywhere with conspicuous success. In January 1643 he seized the royalist high sheriff of Hertfordshire in the act of proclaiming the king’s commission of array at St Albans; in February he was at Cambridge taking measures for the defence of the town; in March suppressing royalist risings at Lowestoft and Lynn; in April those of Huntingdon, when he also recaptured Crowland from the king’s party. In May he defeated a greatly superior royalist force at Grantham, proceeding afterwards to Nottingham in accordance with Essex’s plan of penetrating into Yorkshire to relieve the Fairfaxes; where, however, difficulties, arising from jealousies between the officers, and the treachery of John Hotham, whose arrest Cromwell was instrumental in effecting, obliged him to retire again to the association, leaving the Fairfaxes to be defeated at Adwalton Moor. He showed extraordinary energy, resource and military talent in stemming the advance of the royalists, who now followed up their victories by advancing into the association; he defeated them at Gainsborough on the 28th of July, and managed a masterly retreat before overwhelming numbers to Lincoln, while the victory on the 11th of October at Winceby finally secured the association, and maintained the wedge which prevented the junction of the royalists in the north with the king in the south.

One great source of Cromwell’s strength was the military reforms he had initiated. At Edgehill he had observed the inferiority of the parliamentary to the royalist horse, composed as it was of soldiers of fortune and the dregs Cromwell’s soldiers. of the populace. “Do you think,” he had said, “that the spirits of such base, mean fellows will ever be able to encounter gentlemen that have honour and courage and resolution in them? You must get men of a spirit that is likely to go as far as gentlemen will go or you will be beaten still.” The royalists were fighting for a great cause. To succeed the parliamentary soldiers must also be inspired by some great principle, and this was now found in religion. Cromwell chose his own troops, both officers and privates, from the “religious men,” who fought not for pay or for adventure, but for their faith. He declared, when answering a complaint that a certain captain in his regiment was a better preacher than fighter, that he who prayed best would fight best, and that he knew nothing could “give the like courage and confidence as the knowledge of God in Christ will.” The superiority of these men—more intelligent than the common soldiers, better disciplined, better trained, better armed, excellent horsemen and fighting for a great cause—not only over the other parliamentary troops but over the royalists, was soon observed in battle. According to Clarendon the latter, though frequently victorious in a charge, could not rally afterwards, “whereas Cromwell’s troops if they prevailed, or though they were beaten and routed, presently rallied again and stood in good order till they received new orders”; and the king’s military successes dwindled in proportion to the gradual preponderance of Cromwell’s troops in the parliamentary army. At first these picked men only existed in Cromwell’s own troop, which, however, by frequent additions became the nucleus of a regiment, and by the time of the New Model included about 11,000 men.

In July 1643 Cromwell had been appointed governor of the Isle of Ely; on the 22nd of January 1644 he became second in command under the earl of Manchester as lieutenant-general of the Eastern Association, and on the 16th of February 1644 a member of the Committee of Both Kingdoms with greatly increased influence. In March he took Hillesden House in Buckinghamshire; in May was at the siege of Lincoln, when he repulsed Goring’s attempt to relieve the town, and subsequently took part in Manchester’s campaign in the north. At Marston Moor (q.v.) on the 2nd of July he commanded all the horse of the Eastern Association, with some Scottish troops; and though for a time disabled by a wound in the neck, he charged and routed Rupert’s troops opposed to him, and subsequently went to the support of the Scots, who were hard pressed by the enemy, and converted what appeared at one time a defeat into a decisive victory. It was on this occasion that he earned the nickname of “Ironsides,” applied to him now by Prince Rupert, and afterwards to his soldiers, “from the impenetrable strength of his troops which could by no means be broken or divided.”

The movements of Manchester after Marston Moor were marked by great apathy. He was one of the moderate party who desired an accommodation with the king, and was opposed to Cromwell’s sectaries. He remained at Lincoln, did nothing to prevent the defeat of Essex’s army in the west, and when he at last advanced south to join Essex’s and Waller’s troops his management of the army led to the failure of the attack upon the king at Newbury on the 27th of October 1644. He delayed supporting the infantry till too late, and was repulsed; he allowed the royal army to march past his outposts; and a fortnight afterwards, without any attempt to prevent it, and greatly to Cromwell’s vexation, permitted the moving of the king’s artillery and the relief of Donnington Castle by Prince Rupert. “If you beat the king ninety-nine times,” Manchester urged at Newbury, “yet he is king still and so will his posterity be after him; but if the king beat us once we shall all be hanged and our posterity be made slaves.” “My lord,” answered Cromwell, “if this be so, why did we take up arms at first? This is against fighting ever hereafter. If so let us make peace, be it ever so base.” The contention brought to a crisis the struggle between the moderate Presbyterians and the Scots on the one side, who decided to maintain the monarchy and fought for an accommodation and to establish Presbyterianism in England, and on the other the republicans who would be satisfied with nothing less than the complete overthrow of the king, and the Independents who regarded the establishment of Presbyterianism as an evil almost as great as that of the Church of England. On the 25th of November Cromwell charged Manchester with “unwillingness to have the war prosecuted to a full victory”; which Manchester answered by accusing Cromwell of having used expressions against the nobility, the Scots and Presbyterianism; of desiring to fill the army of the Eastern Association with Independents to prevent any accommodation; and of having vowed if he met the king in battle he would as lief fire his pistol at him as at anybody else. The lords and the Scots vehemently took Manchester’s part; but the Commons eventually sided with Cromwell, appointed Sir Thomas Fairfax general of the New Model Army, and passed two self-denying ordinances, the second of which, ordering all members of both houses to lay down their commissions within forty days, was accepted by the lords on the 3rd of April 1645.

Meanwhile Cromwell had been ordered on the 3rd of March by the House to take his regiment to the assistance of Waller, under whom he served as an admirable subordinate. “Although he was blunt,” says Waller, “he did not bear himself with pride or disdain. As an officer he was obedient and did never dispute my orders or argue upon them.” He returned on the 19th of April, and on the 23rd was sent to Oxfordshire to prevent a junction between Charles and Prince Rupert, in which he succeeded after some small engagements and the storming of Blechingdon House. His services were felt to be too valuable to be lost, and on the 10th of May his command was prolonged for forty days. On the 28th he was sent to Ely for the defence of the eastern counties against the king’s advance; and on the 10th of June, upon Fairfax’s petition, he was named by the Commons lieutenant-general, joining Fairfax on the 13th with six hundred horse. At the decisive battle of Naseby (the 14th The battle of Naseby. of June 1645) he commanded the parliamentary right wing and routed the cavalry of Sir Marmaduke Langdale, subsequently falling upon and defeating the royalist centre, and pursuing the fugitives as far as the outskirts of Leicester. At Langport again, on the 10th of July 1645, his management of the troops was largely instrumental in gaining the victory. As the king had no longer a field army, the war after Naseby resolved itself into a series of sieges which Charles had no means of raising. Cromwell was present at the sieges of Bridgwater, Bath, Sherborne and Bristol; and later, in command of four regiments of foot and three of horse, he was employed in clearing Wiltshire and Hampshire of the royalist garrisons. He took Devizes and Laycock House, Winchester and Basing House, and rejoined Fairfax in October at Exeter, and accompanied him to Cornwall, where he assisted in the defeat of Hopton’s forces and in the suppression of the royalists in the west. On the 9th of January 1646 he surprised Lord Wentworth’s brigade at Bovey Tracey, and was present with Fairfax at the fall of Exeter on the 9th of April. He then went to London to give an account of proceedings to the parliament, was thanked for his services and rewarded with the estate of the marquess of Worcester. He was present again with Fairfax at the capitulation of Oxford on the 24th of June, which practically terminated the Civil War, when he used his influence in favour of granting lenient terms. He then removed with his family from Ely to Drury Lane, London, and about a year later to King Street, Westminster.

The war being now over, the great question of the establishment of Presbyterianism or Independency had to be decided. Cromwell, without naming himself an adherent of any denomination, fought vigorously for Independency as a policy. In 1644 he had remonstrated at the removal by Crawford of an anabaptist lieutenant-colonel. “The state,” he said, “in choosing men to serve it, takes no notice of their opinions. If they be willing faithfully to serve it, that satisfies. Take heed of being sharp ... against those to whom you can object little but that they square not with you in every opinion concerning matters of religion.” He had patronized Lilburne and welcomed all into his regiment, and the Independents had spread from his troops throughout the whole army. But while the sectarians were in a vast majority in the army, the parliament was equally strong in Presbyterianism and opposed to toleration. The proposed disbandment of the army in February 1647 would have placed the soldiers entirely in the power of the parliament; while the negotiations of the king, first with the Scots and then with the parliament, appeared to hazard all the fruits of victory. The petition from the army to the parliament for arrears of pay was suppressed and the petitioners declared enemies of the state. In consequence the army organized a systematic opposition, and elected representatives styled Agitators or Agents to urge their claims.

Cromwell, though greatly disliking the policy of the Presbyterians, yet gave little support at first to the army in resisting parliament. In May 1647 in company with Skippon, Ireton and Fleetwood, he visited the army, inquired Parliament and the army. into and reported on the grievances, and endeavoured to persuade them to submit to the parliament. “If that authority falls to nothing,” he said, “nothing can follow but confusion.” The Presbyterians, however, now engaged in a plan for restoring the king under their own control, and by the means of a Scottish army, forced on their policy, and on the 27th of May ordered the immediate disbandment of the army, without any guarantee for the payment of arrears. A mutiny was the consequence. The soldiers refused to disband, and on the 3rd of June Cromwell, whom, it was believed, the parliament intended to arrest, joined the army. “If he would not forthwith come and lead them,” they had told him, “they would go their own way without him.” The supremacy of the army without a guiding hand meant anarchy, that of the Presbyterians the outbreak of another civil war.

Possession of the king’s person now became an important consideration. On the 31st of May 1647 Cromwell had ordered Cornet Joyce to prevent the king’s removal by the parliament or the Scots from Holmby, and Joyce by his own authority and with the king’s consent brought him to Newmarket to the headquarters of the army. Cromwell soon restored order, and the representative council, including privates as well as officers chosen to negotiate with the parliament, was subordinated to the council of war. The army with Cromwell then advanced towards London. In a letter to the city, possibly written by Cromwell himself, the officers repudiated any wish to alter the civil government or upset the establishment of Presbyterianism, but demanded religious toleration. Subsequently, in the declaration of the 14th of June, arbitrary power either in the parliament or in the king was denounced, and demand was made for a representative parliament, the speedy termination of the actual assembly, and the recognition of the right to petition. Cromwell used his influence in restraining the more eager who wished to march on London immediately, and in avoiding the use of force by which nothing permanent could be effected, urging that “whatsoever we get by treaty will be firm and durable. It will be conveyed over to posterity.” The army faction gradually gathered strength in the parliament. Eleven Presbyterian leaders impeached by the army withdrew of their own accord on the 26th of June, and the parliament finally yielded. Fairfax was appointed sole commander-in-chief on the 19th of July, the soldiers levied to oppose the army were dismissed, and the command of the city militia was again restored to the committee approved by the army. These votes, however, were cancelled later, on the 26th of July, under the pressure of the royalist city mob which invaded the two Houses; but the two speakers, with eight peers and fifty-seven members of the Commons, themselves joined the army, which now advanced to London, overawing all resistance, escorting the fugitive members in triumph to Westminster on the 6th of August, and obliging the parliament on the 20th to cancel the last votes, with the threat of a regiment of cavalry drawn up by Cromwell in Hyde Park.

Cromwell and the army now turned with hopes of a settlement to Charles. On the 4th of July Cromwell had had an interview with the king at Caversham. He was not insensible to Charles’s good qualities, was touched by the paternal affection he showed for his children, and is said to have declared that Charles “was the uprightest and most conscientious man of his three kingdoms.” The Heads of the Proposals, which, on Charles raising objections, had been modified by the influence of Cromwell and Ireton, demanded the control of the militia and the choice of ministers by parliament for ten years, a religious toleration, and a council of state to which much of the royal control over the army and foreign policy would be delegated. These proposals without doubt largely diminished the royal power, and were rejected by Charles with the hope of maintaining his sovereign rights by “playing a game,” to use his own words, i.e. by negotiating simultaneously with army and parliament, by inflaming their jealousies and differences, and finally by these means securing his restoration with his full prerogatives unimpaired. On the 9th of September Charles refused once mere the Newcastle Propositions offered him by the parliament, and Cromwell, together with Ireton and Vane, obtained the passing of a motion for a new application; but the terms asked by the parliament were higher than before and included a harsh condition—the exclusion from pardon of all the king’s leading adherents, besides the indefinite establishment of Presbyterianism and the refusal of toleration to the Roman Catholics and members of the Church of England.

Meanwhile the failure to come to terms with Charles and provide a settlement appeared to threaten a general anarchy. Cromwell’s moderate counsels created distrust in his good faith amongst the soldiers, who accused him of “prostituting the liberties and persons of all the people at the foot of the king’s interest.” The agitators demanded immediate settlement by force by the army. The extreme republicans, anticipating Rousseau, put forward the Agreement of the People. This was strongly opposed by Cromwell, who declared the very consideration of it had dangers, that it would bring upon the country “utter confusion” and “make England like Switzerland.” Universal suffrage he rejected as tending “very much to anarchy,” spoke against the hasty abolition of either the monarchy or the Lords, and refused entirely to consider the abstract principles brought into the debate. Political problems were not to be so resolved, but practically. With Cromwell as with Burke the question was “whether the spirit of the people of this nation is prepared to go along with it.” The special form of government was not the important point, but its possibility and its acceptability. The great problem was to found a stable government, an authority to keep order. If every man should fight for the best form of government the state would come to desolation. He reproached the soldiers for their insubordination against their officers, and the army for its rebellion against the parliament. He would lay hold of anything “if it had but the force of authority,” rather than have none. Cromwell’s influence prevailed and these extreme proposals were laid aside.

Meanwhile all hopes of an accommodation with Charles were dispelled by his flight on the 11th of November from Hampton Court to Carisbroke Castle in the Isle of Wight, his object being to negotiate independently with the Flight of the king. Scots, the parliament and the army. His action, however, in the event, diminished rather than increased his chances of success, owing to the distrust of his intentions which it inspired. Both the army and the parliament gave cold replies to his offers to negotiate; and Charles, on the 27th of December 1647, entered into the Engagement with the Scots by which he promised the establishment of Presbyterianism for three years, the suppression of the Independents and their sects, together with privileges for the Scottish nobles, while the Scots undertook to invade England and restore him to his throne. This alliance, though the exact terms were not known to Cromwell—“the attempt to vassalize us to a foreign nation,” to use his own words—convinced him of the uselessness of any plan for maintaining Charles on the throne; though he still appears to have clung to monarchy, proposing in January 1648 the transference of the crown to the prince of Wales. A week after the signing of the treaty he supported a proposal for the king’s deposition, and the vote of No Addresses was carried. Meanwhile the position of Charles’s opponents had been considerably strengthened by the suppression of a dangerous rebellion in November 1647 by Cromwell’s intervention, and by the return of troops to obedience. Cromwell’s difficulties, however, were immense. His moderate and trimming attitude was understood neither by the extreme Independents nor by the Presbyterians. He made one attempt to reconcile the disputes between the army and the politicians by a conference, but ended the barren discussion on the relative merits of aristocracies, monarchies and democracies, interspersed with Bible texts, by throwing a cushion at the speaker’s head and running downstairs. On the 19th of January 1648 Cromwell was accused of high treason by Lilburne. Plots were formed for his assassination. He was overtaken by a dangerous illness, and on the 2nd of March civil war in support of the king broke out.

Cromwell left London in May to suppress the royalists in Wales, and took Pembroke Castle on the 11th of July. Meanwhile behind his back the royalists had risen all over England, the fleet in the Downs had declared for Charles, and the Scottish army under Hamilton had invaded the north. Immediately on the fall of Pembroke Cromwell set out to relieve Lambert, who was slowly retreating before Hamilton’s superior forces; he joined him near Knaresborough on the 12th of August, and started next day in pursuit of Hamilton in Lancashire, placing himself at Stonyhurst near Preston, cutting off Hamilton from the north and his allies, and defeating him in detail on the 17th, 18th and 19th at Preston and at Warrington. He then marched north into Scotland, following the forces of Monro, and established a new government of the Argyle faction at Edinburgh; replying to the Independents who disapproved of his mild treatment of the Presbyterians, that he desired “union and right understanding between the godly people, Scots, English, Jews, Gentiles, Presbyterians, Anabaptists and all; ... a more glorious work in our eyes than if we had gotten the sacking and plunder of Edinburgh ... and made a conquest from the Tweed to the Orcades.”

The incident of the Second Civil War and the treaty with the Scots exasperated Cromwell against the king. On his return to London he found the parliament again negotiating with Charles, and on the eve of making a treaty which Cromwell supports the Remonstrance. Charles himself had no intention of keeping and regarded merely as a means of regaining his power, and which would have thrown away in one moment all the advantages gained during years of bloodshed and struggle. Cromwell therefore did not hesitate to join the army in its opposition to the parliament, and supported the Remonstrance of the troops (20th of November 1648), which included the demand for the king’s punishment as “the grand author of all our troubles,” and justified the use of force by the army if other means failed. The parliament, however, continued to negotiate, and accordingly Charles was removed by the army to Hurst Castle on the 1st of December, the troops occupied London on the 2nd; while on the 6th and 7th Colonel Pride “purged” the House of Commons of the Presbyterians. Cromwell was not the originator of this act, but showed his approval of it by taking his seat among the fifty or sixty Independent members who remained.

The disposal of the king was now the great question to be decided. During the next few weeks Cromwell appears to have made once more attempts to come to terms with Charles; but the king was inflexible in his refusal to part with the essential powers of the monarchy, or with the Church; and at the end of December it was resolved to bring him to trial. The exact share which Cromwell had in this decision and its sequel is obscure, and the later accounts of the regicides when on their trial at the Restoration, ascribing the whole transaction to his initiation and agency, cannot be altogether accepted. But it is plain that, once convinced of the necessity for the king’s execution, he was the chief instrument in overcoming all scruples among his judges, and in resisting the protests and appeals of the Scots. To Algernon Sidney, who refused to take part in proceedings on the plea that neither the king nor any man could be tried by such a court, Cromwell replied, “I tell you, we will cut off his head with the crown upon it.”

The execution of the king took place on the 30th of January 1649. This event, the turning-point in Cromwell’s career, casts a shadow, from one point of view, over the whole of his future statesmanship. He himself never repented The execution of Charles I. of the act, regarding it, on the contrary, as “one which Christians in after times will mention with honour and all tyrants in the world look at with fear,” and as one directly ordained by God. Opinions, no doubt, will always differ as to the wisdom or authority of the policy which brought Charles to the scaffold. On the one hand, there was no law except that of force by which an offence could be attributed to the sovereign, the anointed king, the source of justice. The ordinance establishing the special tribunal for the trial was passed by a remnant of the House of Commons alone, from which all dissentients were excluded by the army. The tribunal was composed, not of judges—for all unanimously refused to sit on it—but of fifty-two men drawn from among the king’s enemies. The execution was a military and not a national act, and at the last scene on the scaffold the triumphant shouts of the soldiery could not overwhelm the groans and sobs raised by the populace. Whatever crimes might be charged against Charles, his past conduct might appear to be condoned by the act of negotiating with him. On the other hand, the execution seemed to Cromwell the only alternative to anarchy, or to a return to despotism and the abandonment of all they had fought for. Cromwell had exhausted every expedient for arriving at an arrangement with the king by which the royal authority might be preserved, and the repeated perfidy and inexhaustible shiftiness of Charles had proved the hopelessness of such attempts. The results produced by the king’s execution were far-reaching and permanent. It is true that Puritan austerity and the lack of any strong central authority after Oliver’s death produced a reaction which temporarily restored Charles’s dynasty to the throne; but it is not less true that the execution of the king, at a later time when all over Europe absolute monarchies “by divine right” were being established on the ruins of the ancient popular constitutions, was an object lesson to all the world; and it produced a profound effect, not only in establishing constitutional monarchy in Great Britain after James II., with the dread of his father’s fate before him, had abdicated by flight, but in giving the impulse to that revolt against the idea of “the divinity that doth hedge a king” which culminated in the Revolution of 1789, and of which the mighty effects are still evident in Europe and beyond.

The king and the monarchy being now destroyed in England, Cromwell had next to turn his attention to the suppression of royalism in Ireland and in Scotland. In Ireland Ormonde had succeeded in uniting the English and the Cromwell in Ireland. Irish in a league against the supporters of the parliament, and only a few scattered forts held out for the Commonwealth, while the young king was every day expected to land and complete the conquest of the island. Accordingly in March 1649 Cromwell was appointed lord-lieutenant and commander-in-chief for its reduction. But before starting he was called upon to suppress disorder at home. He treated the Levellers with some severity and showed his instinctive dislike to revolutionary proposals. “Did not that levelling principle,” he said, “tend to the reducing of all to an equality? What was the purport of it but to make the tenant as liberal a fortune as the landlord, which I think if obtained would not have lasted long.” Equally characteristic was his treatment of the mutinous army, in which he suppressed a rebellion in May. He landed at Dublin on the 13th of August. Before his arrival the Dublin garrison had defeated Ormonde with a loss of 5000 men, and Cromwell’s work was limited to the capture of detached fortresses. On the 10th of September he stormed Drogheda, and by his order the whole of its 2800 defenders were put to the sword without quarter. Cromwell, who was as a rule especially scrupulous in protecting non-combatants from violence, justified his severity in this case by the cruelties perpetrated by the Irish in the rebellion of 1641, and as being necessary on military and political grounds in that it “would tend to prevent the effusion of blood for the future, which were the satisfactory grounds of such actions which otherwise cannot but work remorse and regret.” After the fall of Drogheda Cromwell sent a few troops to relieve Londonderry, and marched himself to Wexford, which he took on the 11th of October, and where similar scenes of cruelty were repeated; every captured priest, to use Cromwell’s own words, being immediately “knocked on the head,” though the story of the three hundred women slaughtered in the market-place has no foundation.

The surrender of Trim, Dundalk and Ross followed, but at Waterford Cromwell met with a stubborn resistance and the advent of winter obliged him to raise the siege. Next year Cromwell penetrated into Munster. Cashel, Cahir and several castles fell in February, and Kilkenny in March; Clonmel repulsing the assault with great loss, but surrendering on the 10th of May 1650. Cromwell himself sailed a fortnight later, leaving the reduction of the island, which was completed in 1652, to his generals. The re-settlement of the conquered and devastated country was now organized on the Tudor and Straffordian basis of colonization from England, conversion to Protestantism, and establishment of law and order. Cromwell thoroughly approved of the enormous scheme of confiscation and colonization, causing great privations and sufferings, which was carried out. The Roman Catholic landowners lost their estates, all or part according to their degree of guilt, and these were distributed among Cromwell’s soldiers and the creditors of the government; Cromwell also invited new settlers from home and from New England, two-thirds of the whole land of Ireland being thus transferred to new proprietors. The suppression of Roman Catholicism was zealously pursued by Cromwell; the priests were hunted down and imprisoned or exiled to Spain or Barbados, the mass was everywhere forbidden, and the only liberty allowed was that of conscience, the Romanist not being obliged to attend Protestant services.

These methods, together with education, “assiduous preaching ... humanity, good life, equal and honest dealing with men of different opinion,” Cromwell thought, would convert the whole island to Protestantism. The law was ably and justly administered, and Irish trade was admitted to the same privileges as English, enjoying the same rights in foreign and colonial trade; and no attempt was made to subordinate the interests of the former to the latter, which was the policy adopted both before and after Cromwell’s time, while the union of Irish and English interests was further recognized by the Irish representation at Westminster in the parliaments of 1654, 1656 and 1659. These advantages, however, scarcely benefited at all the Irish Roman Catholics, who were excluded from political life and from the corporate towns; and Cromwell’s union meant little more than the union of the English colony in Ireland with England. A just administration, too, did not compensate for unjust laws or produce contentment; the policy of conversion and colonization was unsuccessful, the descendants of many of Cromwell’s soldiers becoming merged in the Roman Catholic Irish, and the union with England, political and commercial, being extinguished at the Restoration. Cromwell’s land settlement—modified by the restoration under Charles II. of about one-third of the estates to the royalists—survived, and added to the difficulties with which the English government was afterwards confronted in Ireland.

Meanwhile Cromwell had hurried home to deal with the royalists in Scotland. He urged Fairfax to attack the Scots at once in their own country and to forestall their invasion; but Fairfax refused and resigned, and The battles of Dunbar and Worcester. Cromwell was appointed by parliament, on the 26th of June 1650, commander-in-chief of all the forces of the Commonwealth. He entered Scotland in July, and after a campaign in the neighbourhood of Edinburgh which proved unsuccessful in drawing out the Scots from their fortresses, he retreated to Dunbar to await reinforcements from Berwick. The Scots under Leslie followed him, occupied Doon Hill commanding the town, and seized the passes between Dunbar and Berwick which Cromwell had omitted to secure. Cromwell was outmanœuvred and in a perilous situation, completely cut off from England and from his supplies except from the sea. But Leslie descended the hill to complete his triumph, and Cromwell immediately observed the disadvantages of his antagonist’s new position, cramped by the hill behind and separated from his left wing. A stubborn struggle on the next day, the 3rd of September, gave Cromwell a decisive victory. Advancing, he occupied Edinburgh and Leith. At first it seemed likely that his victories and subsequent remonstrances would effect a peace with the Scots; but by 1651 Charles II. had succeeded in forming a new union of royalists and presbyterians, and another campaign became inevitable. Some delay was caused in beginning operations by Cromwell’s dangerous illness, during which his life was despaired of; but in June he was confronting Leslie entrenched in the hills near Stirling, impregnable to attack and refusing an engagement. Cromwell determined to turn his antagonist’s position. He sent 14,000 men into Fifeshire and marched to Perth, which he captured on the 2nd of August, thus cutting off Leslie from the north and his supplies. This movement, however, left open the way to England, and Charles immediately marched south, in reality thus giving Cromwell the wished-for opportunity of crushing the royalists finally and decisively. Cromwell followed through Yorkshire, and uniting with Lambert and Harrison at Evesham proceeded to attack the royalists at Worcester; where on the 3rd of September after a fierce struggle the great victory, “the crowning mercy” which terminated the Civil War, was obtained over Charles.

Monk completed the subjugation of Scotland by 1654. The settlement here was made on more moderate lines than in Ireland. The estates of only twenty-four leaders of the defeated cause were forfeited by Cromwell, and the national church was left untouched though deprived of all powers of interference with the civil government, the general assembly being dissolved in 1653. Large steps were made towards the union of the two kingdoms by the representation of Scotland in the parliament at Westminster; free trade between the two countries was established, the administration of justice greatly improved, vassalage and heritable jurisdictions abolished, and security and good order maintained by the council of nine appointed by the Protector. In 1658 the improved condition of Scotland was the subject of Cromwell’s special congratulation in addressing parliament. But as in Ireland so Cromwell’s policy in Scotland was unpopular and was only upheld by the maintenance of a large army, necessitating heavy taxation and implying the loss of the national independence. It also vanished at the Restoration.

On the 12th of September 1651 Cromwell made his triumphal entry into London at the conclusion of his victorious campaigns; and parliament granted him Hampton Court as a residence with £4000 a year. These triumphs, however, had all been obtained by force of arms; the more difficult task now awaited Cromwell of governing England by parliament and by law. As Milton wrote:—

Cromwell’s moderation and freedom from imperiousness were acknowledged even by those least friendly to his principles. Although the idol of his victorious army, and in a position enabling him to exercise autocratic power, he laboured unostentatiously for more than a year and a half as a member of the parliament, whose authority he supported to the best of his ability. While occupied with work on committees and in administration he pressed forward several schemes of reform, including a large measure of law reform prepared by a commission presided over by Matthew Hale, and the settlement of the church; but very little was accomplished by the parliament, which seemed to be almost exclusively taken up with the maintenance and increase of its own powers; and Cromwell’s dissatisfaction, and that of the army which increased every day, was intensified by the knowledge that the parliament, instead of dissolving for a new election, was seeking to perpetuate its tenure of power. At length, in April 1653, a “bill for a new representation” was discussed, which provided for the retention of their seats by the existing members without re-election, so that they would also be the sole judges of the eligibility of the rest. This measure, which placed the whole powers of the state—executive, legislative, military and judicial—in the hands of one irresponsible and permanent chamber, “the horridest arbitrariness that ever was exercised in the world,” Cromwell and the army determined to resist at all costs. On the 15th of April they proposed that the parliament should appoint a provisional government and dissolve itself. This compromise was refused by the parliament, which proceeded on the 20th to press through its last stages the “bill for a new representation.” Cromwell hastened to the House, and at the last moment, on the bill being put to the vote, whispering to Harrison, “This is the time; I must do it,” he rose, and after alluding to the Cromwell expels the Long Parliament. former good services of the parliament, proceeded to overwhelm the members with reproaches. Striding up and down the House in a passion, he made no attempt to control himself, and turning towards individuals as he hurled significant epithets at each, he called some “whoremasters,” others “drunkards, corrupt, unjust, scandalous to the profession of the Gospel.” “Perhaps you think,” he exclaimed, “that this is not parliamentary language; I confess it is not, neither are you to expect any such from me.” In reply to a complaint of his violence he cried, “Come, come, I will put an end to your prating. You are no parliament, I say you are no parliament. I will put an end to your sitting.” By his directions Harrison then fetched in a small band of Cromwell’s musketeers and compelled the speaker Lenthall to vacate the chair. Looking at the mace he said, “What shall we do with this bauble?” and ordered a soldier to take it away. The members then trooped out, Cromwell crying after them, “It is you that have forced me to this; for I have sought the Lord night and day that He would rather slay me than put me upon the doing this work.” He then snatched the obnoxious bill from the clerk, put it under his cloak, and commanding the doors to be locked went back to Whitehall. In the afternoon he dissolved the council in spite of John Bradshaw’s remonstrances, who said, “Sir, we have heard what you did at the House this morning...; but you are mistaken to think that the parliament is dissolved, for no power under heaven can dissolve them but themselves; therefore take you notice of that.” Cromwell had no patience with formal pedantry of this sort; and in point of strict legality “The Rump” of the Long Parliament had little better title to authority than the officers who expelled it from the House. After this Cromwell had nothing left but the army with which to govern, and “henceforth his life was a vain attempt to clothe that force in constitutional forms, and make it seem something else so that it might become something else.”[2]

By the dissolution of the Long Parliament Cromwell as commander-in-chief was left the sole authority in the state. He determined immediately to summon another parliament. This was the “Little” or “Barebones Parliament,” consisting of one hundred and forty persons selected by the council of officers from among those nominated by the congregations in each county, which met on the 4th of July 1653. This assembly, however, soon showed itself impracticable and incapable, and on the 12th of December the speaker, followed by the more moderate members, marched to Whitehall and returned their powers to Cromwell, while the rest were expelled by the army.

Cromwell, who had no desire to exercise arbitrary power and whose main object therefore was to devise some constitutional limit to the authority which circumstances had placed in his hands, now accepted the written constitution drawn up by some of the officers, called the Instrument of Government, the earliest example of a “fixed government” based on “fundamentals,” or constitutional guarantees, and the only example of it in English history. Its authors had wished Oliver to assume the title of king, but this he repeatedly refused; and in the instrument he was named Protector, a parliament was established, limited in powers but whose measures were not restricted by the Protector’s veto unless they contravened the constitution, the Protector’s executive power being also limited by the council. The Protector and the council together were given a life tenure of office, with a large army and a settled revenue sufficient for public needs in time of peace; while the clauses relating to religion “are remarkable as laying down for the first time with authority a principle of toleration,”[3] though this toleration did not apply to Roman Catholics and Anglicans. On the 16th of December 1653 Cromwell was installed in his new office, dressed as a civilian in a plain black coat instead of in scarlet as a general, in order to demonstrate that military government had given place to civil; for he approached his task in the same spirit that had prompted his declaration to the Little Parliament of his wish “to divest the sword of all power in the Civil administration.”

In the interval between his nomination as Protector and the summoning of his first parliament in September 1654, Cromwell was empowered together with his council to legislate by ordinances; and eighty-two were issued in all, dealing The government of the Protector. with numerous and various reforms and including the reorganization of the treasury, the settlement of Ireland and Scotland and the union of the three kingdoms, the relief of poor prisoners, and the maintenance of the highways. These ordinances in many instances showed the hand of the true statesman. Cromwell was essentially a conservative reformer; in his attempts to purge the court of chancery of its most flagrant abuses, and to settle the ecclesiastical affairs of the nation, he showed himself anxious to retain as much of the existing system as could be left untouched without doing positive evil. He was out-voted by his council on the question of commutation of tithes, and his enlightened zeal for reforming the “wicked and abominable” sentences of the criminal law met with complete failure. Most of these ordinances were subsequently confirmed by parliament, and, “on the whole, this body of dictatorial legislation, abnormal in form as it is, in substance was a real, wise and moderate set of reforms.”[4] His ordinances for the “Reformation of Manners,” the product of the puritan spirit, had but a transitory effect. The Long Parliament had ordered a strict observance of Sunday, punished swearing severely, and made adultery a capital crime; Cromwell issued further ordinances against duelling, swearing, race-meetings and cock-fights—the last as tending to the disturbance of the public peace and the encouragement of “dissolute practices to the dishonour of God.” Cromwell himself was no ascetic and saw no harm in honest sport. He was exceedingly fond of horses and hunting, leaping ditches prudently avoided by the foreign ambassadors. Baxter describes him as full of animal spirits, “naturally of such a vivacity, hilarity and alacrity as another man is when he hath drunken a cup of wine too much,” and notes his “familiar rustic carriage with his soldiers in sporting.” He was fond of music and of art, and kept statues in Hampton Court Gardens which scandalized good puritans. He preferred that Englishmen should be free rather than sober by compulsion. Writing to the Scottish clergy, and rejecting their claim to suppress dissent in order to extirpate error, he said, “Your pretended fear lest error should step in is like the man who would keep all wine out of the country lest men should be drunk. It will be found an unjust and unwise jealousy to deprive a man of his natural liberty upon a supposition he may abuse it. When he doth abuse it, judge.” It is probable that very little of this moral legislation was enforced in practice, though special efforts were made under the government of the major-generals. Cromwell expected more results from the effects of education and culture. A part of the revenue of confiscated church lands was allotted to the maintenance of schools, and the question of national education was seriously taken in hand by the Commonwealth. Cromwell was especially interested in the universities. In 1649 he had been elected D.C.L. at Oxford, and in 1651 chancellor of the University, an office which he held till 1657, when he was succeeded by his son Richard. He founded a new readership in Divinity, and presented Greek MSS. to the Bodleian. He appointed visitors for the universities and great public schools, and defended the universities from the attacks of the extreme sectaries who clamoured for their abolition, even Clarendon allowing that Oxford “yielded a harvest of extraordinary good and sound knowledge in all parts of learning.” In 1657 he founded a new university at Durham, which was suppressed at the Restoration. He patronized learning. Milton and Marvell were his secretaries. He allowed the royalists Hobbes and Cowley to return to England, and lived in friendship with the poet Waller.

Cromwell’s religious policy included the maintenance of a national church, a policy acceptable to the army but much disliked by the Scots, who wanted the church to control the state, not the state the church. He Cromwell’s church policy. improved the incomes of poor livings by revenues derived from episcopal estates and the fines of delinquents. An important feature of his church government was the appointment on the 20th of March 1654 of the “Triers,” thirty-eight clerical and lay commissioners, who decided upon the qualifications of candidates for livings, and without whose recommendation none could be appointed; while an ordinance of August 1654 provided for the removal of the unfit, the latter class including besides immoral persons those holding “popish” or blasphemous opinions, those publicly using the English Prayer Book, and the disaffected to the government. Religious toleration was granted, but with the important exception that some harsh measures were enacted against Anglicans and Roman Catholics, to neither of whom was liberty of worship accorded. The acts imposing fines for recusancy, repealed in 1650, were later executed with great severity. In 1655 a proclamation was issued for administering the laws against the priests and Jesuits, and some executions were carried out. Complete toleration in fact was only extended to Protestant nonconformists, who composed the Cromwellian established church, and who now meted out to their antagonists the same treatment which they themselves were later to receive under the Clarendon Code of Charles II.

Cromwell himself, however, remained throughout a staunch and constant upholder of religious toleration. “I had rather that Mahommedanism were permitted amongst us,” he avowed, “than that one of God’s children should His religious toleration. be persecuted.” Far in advance of his contemporaries on this question, whenever his personal action is disclosed it is invariably on the side of forbearance and of moderation. It is probable, from the absence of evidence to the contrary, that much of this severe legislation was never executed, and it was without doubt Cromwell’s restraining hand which moderated the narrow persecuting spirit of the executive. In practice Anglican private worship appears to have been little interfered with; and although the recusant fines were rigorously exacted, the same seems to have been the case with the private celebration of the mass. Bordeaux, the French envoy in England, wrote that, in spite of the severe laws, the Romanists received better treatment under the Protectorate than under any other government. Cromwell’s strong personal inclination towards toleration is clearly seen in his treatment of the Jews and Quakers. He was unable, owing to the opposition of the divines and of the merchants, to secure the full recognition of the right to reside in England of the former who had for some time lived in small numbers and traded unnoticed and untroubled in the country; but he obtained an opinion from two judges that there was no law which forbade their return, and he gave them a private assurance of his protection, with leave to celebrate their private worship and to possess a cemetery.

Cromwell’s policy in this instance was not overturned at the Restoration, and the great Jewish immigration into England with all its important consequences may be held to date practically from these first concessions made by Cromwell. His personal intervention also alleviated the condition of the Quakers, much persecuted at this time. In an interview in 1654 the sincerity and enthusiasm of George Fox had greatly moved Cromwell and had convinced him of their freedom from dangerous political schemes. He ordered Fox’s liberation, and in November 1657 issued a general order directing that Quakers should be treated with leniency, and be discharged from confinement. Doctrines directly attacking Christianity Cromwell regarded, indeed, as outside toleration and to be punished by the civil power, but at the same time he mitigated the severity of the penalty ordained by the law. In general the toleration enjoyed under Cromwell was probably far larger than at any period since religion became the contending ground of political parties, and certainly greater than under his immediate successors. Lilburne and the anabaptists, and John Rogers and the Fifth Monarchy men, were prosecuted only on account of their direct attacks upon the government, and Cromwell in his broad-minded and tolerant statesmanship was himself in advance of his age and his administration. He believed in the spiritual and unseen rather than in the outward and visible unity of Christendom.

In foreign policy Cromwell’s chief aims appear to have been to support and extend the Protestant faith, to promote English trade, and to prevent a Stuart restoration by foreign aid—the religious mission of England in the world, Foreign policy. her commercial interests, and her political independence being indissolubly connected in his mind. The beginning of his rule inherited a war with France and Holland; the former consequent on Cromwell’s failure to obtain terms for the Huguenots or the cession of Dunkirk, and the latter—for which he was not responsible—the result of commercial rivalry, of disputes concerning the rights of neutrals, of bitter memories of Dutch misdeeds in the East Indies, and of dynastic causes arising from the stadtholder, William II. of Orange, having married Mary, daughter of Charles I. In 1651 the Dutch completed a treaty with Denmark to injure English trade in the Baltic; to which England replied the same year by the Navigation Act, which suppressed the Dutch trade with the English colonies and the Dutch fish trade with England, and struck at the Dutch carrying trade. War was declared in May 1652 after a fight between Blake and Tromp off Dover, and was continued with signal victories and defeats on both sides till 1654. The religious element, however, which predominated in Cromwell’s foreign policy inclined him to peace, and in April of that year terms were arranged by which England on the whole was decidedly the gainer. The Dutch acknowledged the supremacy of the English flag in the British seas, which Tromp had before refused; they accepted the Navigation Act, and undertook privately to exclude the princes of Orange from the command of their forces. The Protestant policy was further followed up by treaties with Sweden and Denmark which secured the passage of the Sound for English ships on the same conditions as the Dutch, and a treaty with Portugal which liberated English subjects from the Inquisition and allowed commerce with the Portuguese colonies. The two great Roman Catholic powers now both bid for Cromwell’s alliance. Cromwell wisely inclined towards France, for Spain was then a greater menace than France alike to the Protestant cause and to the growth of British trade in the western hemisphere; but as no concessions could be gained from either France or Spain, the year 1654 closed without a treaty being made with either. In December 1654 Penn and Venables sailed for the West Indies with orders to attack the Spanish colonies and the French shipping; and for the first time since the Plantagenets an English fleet appeared in the Mediterranean, where Blake upheld the supremacy of the English flag, made a treaty with the dey of Algiers, destroyed the castles and ships of the dey of Tunis at Porto Farina on the 4th of April 1655, and liberated the English prisoners captured by the pirates.

The incident of the massacre of the Protestant Vaudois at this time decided Cromwell’s policy in favour of France. In response to Cromwell’s splendid championship of the persecuted people—which has been well described as “one of the noblest memories of England”—France undertook to put pressure upon Savoy, in consequence of which the persecution ceased for a time; but Cromwell’s intervention had less practical effect than has generally been supposed, though “never was the great conception of a powerful state having duties along with interests more magnanimously realized.”[5] The treaty of Pinerolo withdrew the edict ordering the persecutions, but they were soon afterwards renewed, and in 1658 formed the subject of another remonstrance by Cromwell to Louis XIV. in his last extant public letter before his death. The treaty of Westminster (24th of October 1655) dealt chiefly with commercial subjects, and contained a clause promising the expulsion from France of political exiles. Meanwhile the West Indian expedition had been defeated at Hispaniola, and war was declared by Spain, who now promised help to Charles II. for regaining his throne. Cromwell sent powerful English fleets to watch the coast of Spain and to prevent communications with the West Indies and America; on the 8th of September 1656 a fleet of treasure ships was destroyed off Cadiz by Stayner, and on the 20th of April 1657 Blake performed his last exploit in the destruction of the whole Spanish fleet of sixteen treasure ships in the harbour of Santa Cruz in Teneriffe. These naval victories were followed by a further military alliance with France against Spain, termed the treaty of Paris (the 23rd of March 1657). Cromwell furnished 6000 men with a fleet to join in the attack upon Spain in Flanders, and obtained as reward Mardyke and Dunkirk, the former being captured and handed over on the 3rd of October 1657, and the latter after the battle of the Dunes on the 4th of June 1658, when Cromwell’s Ironsides were once more pitted against English royalists fighting for the Spaniards.

Such was the character of Cromwell’s policy abroad. The inspiring principle had been the defence and support of Protestantism, the question with Cromwell being “whether the Christian world should be all popery.” He desired England to be everywhere the protector of the oppressed and the upholder of “true religion.” His policy was in principle the policy of Elizabeth, of Gustavus Adolphus, and—in the following generation—of William of Orange. He appreciated, without over-estimating, the value of England’s insular position. “You have accounted yourselves happy,” he said in January 1658, “in being environed by a great ditch from all the world beside. Truly you will not be able to keep your ditch nor your shipping unless you turn your ships and shipping into troops of horse and companies of foot, and fight to defend yourselves on terra firma.” He did not regard himself merely as the trustee of the national resources. These were not to be employed for the advancement of English interests alone. “God’s interest in the world,” he declared, “is more extensive than all the people of these three nations. God has brought us hither to consider the work we may do in the world as well as at home.” In 1653 he had made the astonishing proposal to the Dutch that England and Holland should divide the habitable globe outside Europe between them, that all states maintaining the Inquisition should be treated as enemies by both the proposed allies, and that the latter “should send missionaries to all peoples willing to receive them, to inculcate the truth of Jesus Christ and the Holy Gospel.” Great writers like Milton and Harrington supported Cromwell’s view of the duty of a statesman; the poet Waller acclaimed Cromwell as “the world’s protector”; but the London tradesmen complained of the loss of their Spanish trade and regarded Holland and not Spain as the national enemy. But Cromwell’s dream of putting himself at the head of European Protestantism never even approached realization. War broke out between the Protestant states of Sweden, Denmark, Holland and Brandenburg, with whom religion was entirely subordinated to individual aims and interests, and who were far from rising to Cromwell’s great conceptions; while the Vaudois were soon subjected to fresh persecutions. On the other hand, Cromwell could justly boast “there is not a nation in Europe but is very willing to ask a good understanding with you.” He raised England to a predominant position among the Powers of Europe, and anticipated the triumphs of the elder Pitt. “It was hard to discover,” wrote Clarendon, “which feared him most, France, Spain or the Low Countries.” The vigour and success with which he organized the national resources and upheld the national honour, asserted the British sovereignty of the seas, defended the oppressed, and caused his name to be feared and respected in foreign courts where that of Stuart was despised and neglected, command praise and admiration equally from contemporaries and from modern critics, from his friends and from his opponents. “He once more joined us to the continent,” wrote Marvell, while Dryden describes him as teaching the British lion to roar. “Cromwell’s greatness at home,” said Clarendon, “was a mere shadow of his greatness abroad.” “It is strange,” wrote Pepys in 1667 under a different régime, “how everybody nowadays reflect upon Oliver and commend him, what brave things he did, and made all the neighbour princes fear him.” To Cromwell more than to any other British ruler belongs the credit of having laid the foundation of England’s maritime supremacy and of her over-sea empire.

Cromwell’s colonial policy aimed definitely at the recognition and extension of the British empire. By March 1652 the whole of the territory governed by the Stuarts had submitted to the authority of the Commonwealth, and the Navigation Cromwell and the empire. Act of the 9th of October 1651, by which colonial goods could only be imported to England in British ships and all foreign trade to the colonies was restricted to products of the exporting country, sought to bind the colonies to England and to support the interests of the shipowners and merchants, and therefore of the English maritime supremacy, the act being, moreover, memorable as the first public measure which treated the colonies as a whole and as an integral part of Great Britain. The hindrance, however, to the general development of trade which the act involved aroused at once loud complaints, to which Cromwell turned a deaf ear, continuing to seize Dutch ships trading in forbidden goods. In the internal administration of the colonies Cromwell interfered very little, maintaining specially friendly relations with the New Englanders, and showing no jealousy of their desire for self-government. The war with France, Holland and Spain offered opportunities of gaining additional territory. A small expedition sent by Cromwell in February 1654 to capture New Amsterdam (New York) from the Dutch was abandoned on the conclusion of peace, and the fleet turned to attack the French colonies; Major Robert Sedgwick taking with a handful of men the fort of St John’s, Port Royal or Annapolis, and the French fort on the river Penobscot, the whole territory from this river to the mouth of the St Lawrence remaining British territory till its cession in 1667. In December 1654 Cromwell despatched Penn and Venables with a fleet of thirty-eight ships and 2500 soldiers to the West Indies, their numbers being raised by recruits at the islands to 7000 men. The attack on Hispaniola, however, was a disastrous failure, and though a landing at Jamaica and the capture of the capital, Santiago de la Vega, was effected, the expedition was almost annihilated by disease; and Penn and Venables returned to England, when Cromwell threw them into the Tower. Cromwell, however, persevered, reminding Fortescue, who was left in command, that the war was one against the “Roman Babylon,” that they were “fighting the Lord’s battles”; and he sent out reinforcements under Sedgwick, offering inducements to the New Englanders to migrate to Jamaica. In spite of almost insuperable difficulties the colony took root, trade began, the fleet lay in wait for the Spanish treasure ships, the settlements of the Spaniards were raided, and their repeated attempts to retake the island were successfully resisted. In 1658 Colonel Edward Doyley, the governor, gained a decisive victory over thirty companies of Spanish foot, and sent ten of their flags to Cromwell. The Protector, however, did not live to witness the final triumph of his undertaking, which gave to England, as he had wished, “the mastery of those seas,” ensuring the English colonies against Spanish attacks, and being maintained and followed up at the Restoration.

Meanwhile, the first parliament of the Protectorate had met in September 1654. A scheme of electoral reform had been carried by which members were taken from the small and corrupt boroughs and given to the large hitherto Parliamentary difficulties. unrepresented towns, and which provided for thirty representatives from Scotland and from Ireland. Instead, however, of proceeding with the work of practical legislation, accepting the Instrument of Government without challenge as the basis of its authority, the parliament immediately began to discuss and find fault with the constitution and to debate about “Fundamentals.” About a hundred members who refused to engage not to attempt to change the form of government were excluded on the 12th of September. The rest sat on, discussing the constitution, drawing up lists of damnable heresies and of incontrovertible articles of faith, producing plans for the reduction of the army and demanding for themselves its control. Incensed by the dilatory and factious proceedings of the House, Cromwell dismissed the parliament on the 22nd of January 1655. Various dangerous plots against his government and person were at this time rife. Vane, Ludlow, Robert Overton, Harrison and Major Wildman, the head of the Levellers, were all arrested, while the royalist rising under Penruddock was crushed in Devonshire. Other attacks upon his authority were met with the same resort to force. The judges and lawyers began to question the legality of his ordinances, and to doubt their competency to convict royalist prisoners of treason. A merchant named Cony refused to pay customs not imposed by parliament, his counsel declaring their levy by ordinance to be contrary to Magna Carta, and Chief Justice Rolle resigning in order to avoid giving judgment. Cromwell was thus inevitably drawn farther along the path of arbitrary government. He arrested the persons who refused to pay taxes, and sent Cony’s lawyers to the Tower. Hitherto he had been scrupulously impartial in raising the best men to the judicial bench, including the illustrious Matthew Hale, but he now appointed compliant judges, and, alluding to Magna Carta in terms impossible to transcribe for modern readers, declared that “it should not control his actions which he knew were for the safety of the Commonwealth.” The country was now divided The major-generals. into twelve districts each governed by a major-general, to whom was entrusted the duty of maintaining order, stamping out disaffection and plots, and executing the laws relating to public morals. They had power to transport royalists and those who could not produce good characters, and supported themselves by a special tax of 10% on the incomes of the royalist gentry. Enormous numbers of ale-houses were closed—a proceeding which excited intense resentment and was probably no slight cause of the royalist reaction. Still more serious an encroachment upon the constitution perhaps even than the institution of the major-generals was Cromwell’s tampering with the municipal franchise by confiscating the charters, depriving the burgesses, now hostile to his government, of their parliamentary votes, and limiting the franchise to the corporation; thereby corrupting the national liberties at their very source, and introducing an evil precedent only too readily followed by Charles II. and James II.

It was in these embarrassed and perilous circumstances that Cromwell summoned a new parliament in the summer of 1656. In spite of the influence and interference of the major-generals a large number of members hostile to the Refusal of the crown. government were returned, of whom Cromwell’s council immediately excluded nearly a hundred. The major-generals were the object of general attack, while the special tax on the royalists was declared unjust, and the bill for its continuation rejected by a large majority. An attempt at the assassination of Cromwell by Miles Sindercombe added to the general feeling of anxiety and unrest. The military rule excited universal hostility; there was an earnest desire for a settled and constitutional government, and the revival of the monarchy in the person of Cromwell appeared the only way of obtaining it. On the 23rd of February 1657 the Remonstrance offering Cromwell the crown was moved by Sir Christopher Packe in the parliament and violently resisted by the officers and the army party, one hundred officers waiting upon Cromwell on the 27th to petition against his acceptance of it. On the 25th of March the Remonstrance, now termed the Petition and Advice, and including a new scheme of government, was passed by a majority of 123 to 62 in spite of the opposition of the officers; and on the 31st it was presented to Cromwell in the Banqueting House at Whitehall whence Charles I. had stepped out on to the scaffold. Cromwell replied by requesting a brief delay to ask counsel of God and his own heart. On the 8th of May about thirty officers presented a petition to parliament against the revival of the monarchy, and Fleetwood, Desborough and Lambert threatened to lay down their commissions. Accordingly Cromwell the same day refused the crown definitely, greatly to the astonishment both of his followers and his enemies, who considered his decision a fatal neglect of an opportunity of consolidating his rule and power. In particular, his acceptance of the crown would have guaranteed his followers, under the act of Henry VII., from liability in the future to the charge of high treason for having given allegiance to himself as a de facto king. Cromwell himself, however, seems to have regarded the question of title as of secondary importance, as merely (to use his own words) “a feather in the hat,” “a shining bauble for crowds to gaze at or kneel to.” “Your father,” wrote Sir Francis Russell to Henry Cromwell, “hath of late made more wise men fools than ever; he laughs and is merry, but they hang down their heads and are pitifully out of countenance.”

On the 25th of May the petition was presented to Cromwell again, with the title of Protector substituted for that of King, and he now accepted it. On the 26th of June 1657 he was once more installed as Protector, this time, however, with regal ceremony in contrast with the simple formalities observed on the first occasion, the heralds proclaiming his accession in the same manner as that of the kings. Cromwell’s government seemed now established on the firmer footing of law and national approval, he himself obtaining the powers though not the title of a constitutional monarch, with a permanent revenue of £1,300,000 for the ordinary expenses of the administration, the command of the forces, the right to nominate his successor and, subject to the approval of parliament, the members of the council and of the new second chamber now established, while at the same time the freedom of parliament was guaranteed in its elections. Difficulties, however, appeared immediately the parliament got to work. The republicans hostile to the Protectorate, excluded before, now returned, took the places vacated by strong supporters of Cromwell who had been removed to the Lords, and attacked the authority of the new chamber, opened communications with the disaffected in the city and army, protested against unparliamentary taxation and arbitrary imprisonment, and demanded again the supremacy of parliament. In consequence Cromwell summoned both Houses to his presence on the 4th of February 1658, and having pointed out the perils to which they were once more exposing the state, dissolved parliament, dismissing the members with the words, “let God be judge between me and you.”

During the period following the dissolution Cromwell’s power appeared outwardly at least to be at its height. The revolts of royalists and sectaries against his government had been easily suppressed, and the various attempts to assassinate him, contemptuously referred to by Cromwell as “little fiddling things,” were anticipated and prevented by an excellent system of police and spies, and by his bodyguard of 160 men. The victory at Dunkirk increased his reputation, while Louis XIV. showed his respect for the ruler of England by the splendid reception given to the Protector’s envoy, Lord Fauconberg, and by a complimentary mission despatched to England.

The great career, the incidents of which we have been following, was now, however, drawing to a close. Cromwell’s health had long been impaired by the hardships of campaigning. Now at the age of 58 he was already old, and his firm, strong signature had become feeble and trembling. The responsibilities and anxieties of government unassisted by parliament, and the continued struggle against the force of anarchy, weighed upon him and exhausted his physical powers. “It has been hitherto,” Cromwell said, “a matter of, I think, but philosophical discourse, that a great place, a great authority, is a great burthen. I know it is.” “I can say in the presence of God, in comparison of whom we are but like poor creeping ants upon the earth, I would have lived under my woodside to have kept a flock of sheep rather than undertook such a government as this.” “I doubt not to say,” declared his steward Maidston, “it drank up his spirits, of which his natural constitution afforded a vast stock, and brought him to his grave.”

Domestic bereavements added further causes of grief and of weakened vitality. On the 6th of February 1658 he lost his favourite daughter, Elizabeth Claypole, and he was much cast down by the shock of his bereavement and of her long sufferings. Shortly afterwards he fell ill of an intermittent fever, but seemed to recover. On the 20th of August George Fox met him riding at the head of his guards in the park at Hampton Court, but declared “he looked like a dead man.” The next day he again fell ill and was removed from Hampton Court to Whitehall, where his condition became worse. The anecdotes believed and circulated by the royalists that Cromwell died in all the agonies of remorse and fear are entirely false. On the 31st of August Death. he seemed to rally, and one who slept in his bedchamber and who heard him praying, declared, “a public spirit to God’s cause did breathe in him to the very last.” During the next few days he grew weaker and resigned himself to death. “I would,” he said, “be willing to be further serviceable to God and his people, but my work is done.” For the first time doubts as to his spiritual state seemed to have troubled him. “Tell me is it possible to fall from grace?” he asked the attendant minister. “No, it is not possible,” the latter replied. “Then,” said Cromwell, “I am safe, for I know that I was once in grace.” He refused medicine to induce sleep, declaring “it is not my design to drink or to sleep, but my design is to make what haste I can to be gone.” Towards the morning of the 3rd of September he again spoke, “using divers holy expressions, implying much inward consolation and peace,” together with “some exceeding self-debasing words, annihilating and judging himself.” He died on the afternoon of the same day, his day of triumph, the anniversary both of Dunbar and of Worcester. His body was privately buried in the chapel of Henry VII. in Westminster Abbey, the public funeral taking place on the 23rd of November, with great ceremony and on the same scale as that of Philip II. of Spain, and costing the enormous sum of £60,000. At the Restoration his body was exhumed, and on the 30th of January 1661, the anniversary of the execution of Charles I., it was drawn on a sledge from Holborn to Tyburn, together with the bodies of Ireton and Bradshaw, accompanied by “the universal outcry and curses of the people.” There it was hanged on a gallows, and in the evening taken down, when the head was cut off and set up upon Westminster Hall, where it remained till as late as 1684, the trunk being thrown into a pit underneath the gallows. According to various legends Cromwell’s last burial place is stated to be Westminster Abbey, Naseby Field or Newburgh Abbey; but there appears to be no evidence to support them, or to create any reasonable doubt that the great Protector’s dust lies now where it was buried, in the neighbourhood of the present Connaught Square.

As a military commander Cromwell was as prompt as Gustavus, as ardent as Condé, as exact as Turenne. These, moreover, were soldiers from their earliest years. Condé’s fame was established in his twenty-second year, Gustavus Cromwell’s military genius. was twenty-seven and Turenne thirty-three at the beginning of their careers as commanders-in-chief. Cromwell, on the other hand, was forty-three when he fought in his first battle. In less than two years he had taken his rank as one of the great cavalry leaders of history. His campaigns of 1648 and 1651 placed him still higher as a great commander. Worcester, his crowning victory, has been indicated by a German critic as the prototype of Sédan. Yet his early military education could have consisted at most of the perusal of the Swedish Intelligencer and the practice of riding. It is not, therefore, strange that Cromwell’s first essays in war were characterised more by energy than technical skill. It was some time before he realized the spirit of cavalry tactics, of which he was later so complete a master. At first he speaks with complacence of a mêlée, and reports that he and his men “agreed to charge” the enemy. But before long he came to understand, as no other commander of the age save Gustavus understood it, the value of true “shock-action.” Of Marston Moor he writes, “we never charged but we routed them”; and thereafter his battles were decided by the shock of closed squadrons, the fresh impulse of a second and even a third line, and above all by the unquestioning discipline and complete control over their horses to which he trained his men. This gave them not merely greater steadiness, but, what was far more important, the power of rallying and reforming for a second effort. The Royalist cavalry was disorganized by victory as often as by defeat, and illustrated on numerous fields the now discredited maxim that cavalry cannot charge twice in one day. Cromwell shares with Frederick the Great the credit of founding the modern cavalry spirit. As a horsemaster he was far superior to Murat. His marches in the eastern campaign of 1643 show a daily average at one time of 28 m. as against the 21 of Murat’s cavalry in the celebrated pursuit after Jena. And this result he achieved with men of less than two years’ service, men, too, more heavily equipped and worse mounted than the veterans of the Grande Armée. It has been said that his battles were decided by shock action; the real emphasis should be laid upon the word “decided.” The swift, unhesitating charge was more than unusual in the wars of the time, and was possible only because of the peculiar earnestness of the men who fought the English war. The professional soldiers of the Continent could rarely be brought to force a decision; but the English, contending for a cause, were imbued with the spirit of the modern “nation in arms”; and having taken up arms wished to decide the quarrel by arms. This feeling was not less conspicuous in the far-ranging rides, or raids, of the Cromwellian cavalry. At one time, as in the case of Blechingdon, they would perform strange exploits worthy of the most daring hussars; at another their speed and tenacity paralyses armies. Not even Sheridan’s horsemen in 1864-65 did their work more effectively than did the English squadrons in the Preston campaign. Cromwell appreciated this feeling at its exact worth, and his pre-eminence in the Civil War was due to this highest gift of a general, the power of feeling the pulse of his army. Resolution, vigour and clear sight marked his conduct as a commander-in-chief. He aimed at nothing less than the annihilation of the enemy’s forces, which Clausewitz was the first to define, a hundred and fifty years later, as the true objective of military operations. Not merely as exemplifying the tactical envelopment, but also as embodying the central idea of grand strategy, was Worcester the prototype of Sédan. The contrast between a campaign of Cromwell’s and one of Turenne’s is far more than remarkable, and the observation of a military critic who maintains that Cromwell’s art of war was two centuries in advance of its time, finds universal acceptance.

At a time when throughout the rest of Europe armies were manœuvring against one another with no more than a formal result, the English and Scots were fighting decisive battles; and Cromwell’s battles were more decisive than those of any other leader. Until his fiery energy made itself felt, hardly any army on either side actually suffered rout; but at Marston Moor and Naseby the troops of the defeated party were completely dissolved, while at Worcester the royalist army was annihilated. Dunbar attested his constancy and gave proof that Cromwell was a master of the tactics of all arms. Preston was an example like Austerlitz of the two stages of a battle as defined by Napoleon, the first flottante, the second foudroyante.

Cromwell’s strategic manœuvres, if less adroit than those of Turenne or Montecucculi, were, in accordance with his own genius and the temper of his army, directed always to forcing a decisive battle. That he was also capable of strategy of the other type was clear from his conduct of the Irish War. But his chief work was of a different kind and done on a different scale. The greatest feat of Turenne was the rescue of one province in 1674-1675; Cromwell, in 1648 and again in 1651, had two-thirds of England and half of Scotland for his theatre of war. Turenne levelled down his methods to suit the ends which he had in view. The task of Cromwell was far greater. Any comparison between the generalship of these two great commanders would therefore be misleading, for want of a common basis. It is when he is contrasted with other commanders, not of the age of Louis XIV., but of the Civil War, that Cromwell’s greatness is most conspicuous. Whilst others busied themselves with the application of the accepted rules of the Dutch, the German, and other formal schools of tactical thought, Cromwell almost alone saw clearly into the heart of the questions at issue, and evolved the strategy, the tactics, and the training suited to the work to which he had set his hand.

Cromwell’s career as a statesman has been already traced in its different spheres, and an endeavour has been made to show the breadth and wisdom of his conceptions and at the same time the cause of the immediate failure of his Cromwell’s statesmanship. constructive policy. Whether if Cromwell had survived he would have succeeded in gradually establishing legal government is a question which can never be answered. His administration as it stands in history is undoubtedly open to the charge that after abolishing the absolutism of the ancient monarchy he substituted for it, not law and liberty, but a military tyranny far more despotic than the most arbitrary administration of Charles I. The statement of Vane and Ludlow, when they refused to acknowledge Cromwell’s government, that it was “in substance a re-establishment of that which we all engaged against,” was true. The levy of ship money and customs by Charles sinks into insignificance beside Cromwell’s wholesale taxation by ordinances; the inquisitional methods of the major-generals and the unjust and exceptional taxation of royalists outdid the scandals of the extra-legal courts of the Stuarts; the shipment of British subjects by Cromwell as slaves to Barbados has no parallel in the Stuart administration; while the prying into morals, the encouragement of informers, the attempt to make the people religious by force, were the counterpart of the Laudian system, and Cromwell’s drastic treatment of the Irish exceeded anything dreamed of by Strafford. He discovered that parliamentary government after all was not the easy and plain task that Pym and Vane had imagined, and Cromwell had in the end no better justification of his rule than that which Strafford had suggested to Charles I.,—“parliament refusing (to give support and co-operation in carrying on the government) you are acquitted before God and man.” The fault was no doubt partly Cromwell’s own. He had neither the patience nor the tact for managing loquacious parliamentary pedants. But the chief responsibility was not his but theirs. John Morley (Oliver Cromwell, p. 297) has truly observed of the execution of Charles I., that it was “an act of war, and was just as defensible or just as assailable, and on the same grounds, as the war itself.” The parliamentary party took leave of legality when they took up arms against the sovereign, and it was therefore idle to dream of a formally legal sanction for any of their subsequent revolutionary proceedings. An entirely fresh start had to be made. A new foundation had to be laid on which a new system of legality might be reared. It was for this that Cromwell strove. If the Rump or the Little Parliament had in a business-like spirit assumed and discharged the functions of a constituent assembly, such a foundation might have been provided. It was only when five years had passed since the death of the king without any “settlement of the nation” being arrived at, that Cromwell at last accepted a constitution drafted by his military officers, and attempted to impose it on the parliament. And it was not until the parliament refused to acknowledge the Instrument as the required starting point for the new legality, that Cromwell in the last resort took arbitrary power into his hands as the only method remaining for carrying on the government. For much as he hated arbitrariness, he hated anarchy still more. While therefore Cromwell’s administration became in practice little different from that of Strafford, the aims and ideals of the two statesmen had nothing in common. It is therefore profoundly true, as observed by S. R. Gardiner (Cromwell, p. 315), that “what makes Cromwell’s biography so interesting in his perpetual effort to walk in the paths of legality—an effort always frustrated by the necessities of the situation. The man—it is ever so with the noblest—was greater than his work.” The nature of Cromwell’s statesmanship is to be seen rather in his struggles against the retrograde influences and opinions of his time, in the many political reforms anticipated though not originated or established by himself, and in his religious, perhaps fanatical, enthusiasm, than in the outward character of his administration, which, however, in spite of its despotism shows itself in its inner spirit of justice, patriotism and self-sacrifice, so immeasurably superior to that of the Stuarts.

Cromwell’s personal character has been inevitably the subject of unceasing controversy. According to Clarendon he was “a brave bad man,” with “all the wickedness against which damnation is pronounced and for which hell fire Personal character. is prepared.” Yet he cannot deny that “he had some virtues which have caused the memory of some men in all ages to be celebrated”; and admits that “he was not a man of blood,” and that he possessed “a wonderful understanding in the natures and humour of men,” and “a great spirit, an admirable circumspection and sagacity and a most magnanimous resolution.” According to contemporary republicans he was a mere selfish adventurer, sacrificing the national cause “to the idol of his own ambition.” Richard Baxter thought him a good man who fell before a great temptation. The writers of the next century generally condemned him as a mixture of knave, fanatic and hypocrite, and in 1839 John Forster endorsed Landor’s verdict that Cromwell lived a hypocrite and died a traitor. These crude ideas of Cromwell’s character were extinguished by Macaulay’s irresistible logic, by the publication of Cromwell’s letters by Carlyle in 1845, which showed Cromwell clearly to be “not a man of falsehoods, but a man of truth”; and by Gardiner, whom, however, it is somewhat difficult to follow when he represents Cromwell as “a typical Englishman.” In particular that conception which regarded “ambition” as the guiding motive in his career has been dispelled by a more intimate and accurate knowledge of his life; this shows him to have been very little the creator of his own career, which was largely the result of circumstances outside his control, the influence of past events and of the actions of others, the pressure of the national will, the natural superiority of his own genius. “A man never mounts so high,” Cromwell said to the French ambassador in 1647, “as when he does not know where he is going.” “These issues and events,” he said in 1656, “have not been forecast, but were providences in things.” His “hypocrisy” consists principally in the Biblical language he employed, which with Cromwell, as with many of his contemporaries, was the most natural way of expressing his feelings, and in the ascription of every incident to the direct intervention of God’s providence, which was really Cromwell’s sincere belief and conviction. In later times Cromwell’s character and administration have been the subject of almost too indiscriminate eulogy, which has found tangible shape in the statue erected to his memory at Westminster in 1899. Here Cromwell’s effigy stands in the midst of the sanctuaries of the law, the church, and the parliament, the three foundations of the state which he subverted, and in sight of Whitehall where he destroyed the monarchy in blood. Yet Cromwell’s monument is not altogether misplaced in such surroundings, for in him are found the true principles of piety, of justice, of liberty and of governance.

John Maidston, Cromwell’s steward, gives the “character of his person.” “His body was compact and strong, his stature under six foot (I believe about two inches), his head so shaped as you might see it a storehouse and a shop both of a vast treasury of natural parts.” “His temper exceeding fiery, as I have known, but the flame of it, ... kept down for the most part, was soon allayed with those moral endowments he had. He was naturally compassionate towards objects in distress even to an effeminate measure; though God had made him a heart wherein was left little room for fear, ... yet did he exceed in tenderness towards sufferers. A larger soul I think hath seldom dwelt in a house of clay than his was. I believe if his story were impartially transmitted and the unprejudiced world well possessed with it, she would add him to her nine worthies.” By his wife Elizabeth Bourchier, Cromwell had four sons, Robert (who died in 1639), Oliver (who died in 1644 while serving in his father’s regiment), Richard, who succeeded him as Protector, and Henry. He also had four daughters. Of these Bridget was the wife successively of Ireton and Fleetwood, Elizabeth married John Claypole, Mary was wife of Thomas Belasyse, Lord Fauconberg; and Frances was the wife of Sir Robert Rich, and secondly of Sir John Russell. The last male descendant of the Protector was his great-great-grandson, Oliver Cromwell of Cheshunt, who died in 1821. By the female line, through his children Henry, Bridget and Frances, the Protector has had numerous descendants, and is the ancestor of many well-known families.[6]

Bibliography.—A detailed bibliography, with the chief authorities for particular periods, will be found in the article in the Dict. of Nat. Biography, by C. H. Firth (1888). The following works may be mentioned: S. R. Gardiner’s Hist. of England (1883-1884) and of the Great Civil War (1886), Cromwell’s Place in History (1897), Oliver Cromwell (1901), and History of the Commonwealth and Protectorate (1894-1903); Cromwell, by C. H. Firth (1900); Oliver Cromwell, by J. Morley (1904); The Last Years of the Protectorate, 1656-1658, 2 vols., by C. H. Firth (1909); Oliver Cromwell, by Fred. Harrison (1903); Letters and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell, by T. Carlyle, ed. by S. C. Lomas, with an introd. by C. H. Firth (the best edition, rejecting the spurious Squire papers, 1904); Oliver Cromwell, by F. Hoenig (1887); Oliver Cromwell, the Protector, by R. F. D. Palgrave (1890); Oliver Cromwell ... and the Royalist Insurrection ... of March 1655, by the same author (1903); Oliver Cromwell, by Theodore Roosevelt (1900); Oliver Cromwell, by R. Pauli (tr. 1888); Cromwell, a Speech delivered at the Cromwell Tercentenary Celebration 1899, by Lord Rosebery (1900); The Two Protectors, by Sir Richard Tangye (valuable for its illustrations, 1899); Life of Sir Henry Vane, by W. W. Ireland (1905); Die Politik des Protectors Oliver Cromwell in der Auffassung und Tätigkeit ... des Staatssekretärs John Thurloe, by Freiherr v. Bischofshausen (1899); Cromwell as a Soldier, by T. S. Baldock (1899); Cromwell’s Army, by C. H. Firth (1902); The Diplomatic Relations between Cromwell and Charles X. of Sweden, by G. Jones (1897); The Interregnum, by F. A. Inderwick (dealing with the legal aspect of Cromwell’s rule, 1891); Administration of the Royal Navy, by M. Oppenheim (1896); History of the English Church during the Civil Wars, by W. Shaw (1900); The Protestant Interest in Cromwell’s Foreign Relations, by J. N. Bowman (1900); Cromwell’s Jewish Intelligencies (1891), Crypto-Jews under the Commonwealth (1894), Menasseh Ben Israel’s Mission to Oliver Cromwell (1901), by L. Wolf.

(P. C. Y.; C. F. A.; R. J. M.)

[1] Life of Sir H. Vane, by W. W. Ireland, 222.

[2] C. H. Firth, Cromwell, p. 324.

[3] John Morley, Oliver Cromwell, p. 393.

[4] Frederic Harrison, Oliver Cromwell, p. 214.

[5] John Morley, Oliver Cromwell, p. 483.

[6] Frederic Harrison, Cromwell, p. 34.

CROMWELL, RICHARD (1626-1712), lord protector of England, eldest surviving son of Oliver Cromwell and of Elizabeth Bourchier, was born on the 4th of October 1626. He served in the parliamentary army, and in 1647 was admitted a member of Lincoln’s Inn. In 1649 he married Dorothy, daughter of Richard Mayor, or Major, of Hursley in Hampshire. He represented Hampshire in the parliament of 1654, and Cambridge University in that of 1656, and in November 1655 was appointed one of the council of trade. But he was not brought forward by his father or prepared in any way for his future greatness, and lived in the country occupied with field sports, till after the institution of the second protectorate in 1657 and the recognition of Oliver’s right to name his successor. On the 18th of July he succeeded his father as chancellor of the university of Oxford, on the 31st of December he was made a member of the council of state, and about the same time obtained a regiment and a seat in Cromwell’s House of Lords. He was received generally as his father’s successor, and was nominated by him as such on his death-bed. He was proclaimed on the 3rd of September 1658, and at first his accession was acclaimed with general favour both at home and abroad. Dissensions, however, soon broke out between the military faction and the civilians. Richard’s elevation, not being “general of the army as his father was,” was distasteful to the officers, who desired the appointment of a commander-in-chief from among themselves, a request refused by Richard. The officers in the council, moreover, showed jealousy of the civil members, and to settle these difficulties and to provide money a parliament was summoned on the 27th of January 1659, which declared Richard protector, and incurred the hostility of the army by criticizing severely the arbitrary military government of Oliver’s last two years, and by impeaching one of the major-generals. A council of the army accordingly established itself in opposition to the parliament, and demanded on the 6th of April a justification and confirmation of former proceedings, to which the parliament replied by forbidding meetings of the army council without the permission of the protector, and insisting that all officers should take an oath not to disturb the proceedings in parliament. The army now broke into open rebellion and assembled at St James’s. Richard was completely in their power; he identified himself with their cause, and the same night dissolved the parliament. The Long Parliament (which re-assembled on the 7th of May) and the heads of the army came to an agreement to effect his dismissal; and in the subsequent events Richard appears to have played a purely passive part, refusing to make any attempt to keep his power or to forward a restoration of the monarchy. On the 25th of May his submission was communicated to the House. He retired into private life, heavily burdened with debts incurred during his tenure of office and narrowly escaping arrest even before he quitted Whitehall. In the summer of 1660 he left England for France, where he lived in seclusion under the name of John Clarke, subsequently removing elsewhere, either (for the accounts differ) to Spain, to Italy, or to Geneva. He was long regarded by the government as a dangerous person, and in 1671 a strict search was made for him but without avail. He returned to England about 1680 and lived at Cheshunt, in the house of Sergeant Pengelly, where he died on the 12th of July 1712, being buried in Hursley church in Hampshire. Richard Cromwell was treated with general contempt by his contemporaries, and invidiously compared with his great father. According to Mrs Hutchinson he was “gentle and virtuous but a peasant in his nature and became not greatness.” He was nevertheless a man of respectable abilities, of an irreproachable private character, and a good speaker.

Bibliography.—See the article in the Dict. of Nat. Biography, and authorities there cited; Noble’s Memoirs of the Protectoral House of Cromwell (1787); Memoirs of the Protector ... and of his Sons, by O. Cromwell (1820); The Two Protectors, by Sir R. Tangye (1899); Kebleland and a Short Life of Richard Cromwell, by W. T. Warren (1900); Letters and Speeches of O. Cromwell, by T. Carlyle (1904); Eng. Hist. Review, xiii. 93 (letters) and xviii. 79; Cal. of State Papers, Domestic, Lansdowne MSS. in British Museum.

(P. C. Y.)

CROMWELL, THOMAS, Earl of Essex (1485?-1540), born probably not later than 1485 and possibly a year or two earlier, was the only son of Walter Cromwell, alias Smyth, a brewer, smith and fuller of Putney. His grandfather, John Cromwell, seems to have belonged to the Nottinghamshire family, of whom the most distinguished member was Ralph, Lord Cromwell (1394?-1456), lord treasurer; and he migrated from Norwell, Co. Notts, to Wimbledon some time before 1461. John’s son, Walter, seems to have acquired the alias Smyth from being apprenticed to his uncle, William Smyth, “armourer,” of Wimbledon. He was of a turbulent, vicious disposition, perpetually being fined in the manor-court for drunkenness, for evading the assize of beer, and for turning more than his proper number of beasts on to Putney Common. Once he was punished for a sanguinary assault, and his connexion with Wimbledon ceased in 1514 when he “falsely and fraudulently erased the evidences and terrures of the lord.” Till that time he had flourished like the bay-tree.

Under these circumstances the absence of Thomas Cromwell’s name from the Wimbledon manor rolls is almost a presumption of respectability. Perhaps it would be safer to attribute it to Cromwell’s absence from the manor. He is said to have quarrelled with his father—no great crime considering the father’s character—and fled to Italy, where he served as a soldier in the French army at the battle of the Garigliano (Dec. 1503). He escaped from the battle-field to Florence, where he was befriended by the banker Frescobaldi, a debt which he appears to have repaid with superabundant interest later on. He is next heard of at Antwerp as a trader, and about 1510 he was induced to accompany a Bostonian to Rome in quest of some papal indulgences for a Boston gild; Cromwell secured the boon by the timely present of some choice sweetmeats to Julius II. In 1512 there is some slight evidence that he was at Middelburg, and also in London, engaged in business as a merchant and solicitor. His marriage must have taken place about the same time, judging from the age of his son Gregory. His wife was Elizabeth Wykes, daughter of a well-to-do shearman of Putney, whose business Cromwell carried on in combination with his own.

For about eight years after 1512 we hear nothing of Cromwell. A letter to him from Cicely, marchioness of Dorset, in which he is seen in confidential business relations with her ladyship, is probably earlier than 1520, and it is possible that Cromwell owed his introduction to Wolsey to the Dorset family. On the other hand, it is stated that his cousin, Robert Cromwell, vicar of Battersea under the cardinal, gave Thomas the stewardship of the archiepiscopal estate of York House. At any rate he was advising Wolsey on legal points in 1520, and from that date he occurs frequently not only as mentor to the cardinal, but to noblemen and others when in difficulties, especially of a financial character; he made large sums as a money-lender.

In 1523 Cromwell emerges into public life as a member of parliament. The official returns for this election are lost and it is not known for what constituency he sat, but we have a humorous letter from Cromwell describing its proceedings, and a remarkable speech which he wrote and perhaps delivered, opposing the reckless war with France and indicating a sounder policy which was pursued after Wolsey’s fall. If, he said, war was to be waged, it would be better to secure Boulogne than advance on Paris; if the king went in person and were killed without leaving a male heir, he hinted there would be civil war; it would be wiser to attempt a union with Scotland, and in any case the proposed subsidy would be a fatal drain on the resources of the realm. Neither Henry nor Wolsey was so foolish as to resent this criticism, and Cromwell lost nothing by it. He was made a collector of the subsidy he had opposed—a doubtful favour perhaps—and in 1524 was admitted at Gray’s Inn; but he now became the most confidential servant of the cardinal. In 1525 he was Wolsey’s agent in the dissolution of the smaller monasteries which were designed to provide the endowments for Wolsey’s foundations at Oxford and Ipswich, a task which gave Cromwell a taste and a facility for similar enterprises on a greater scale later on. For these foundations Cromwell drew up the necessary deeds, and he was receiver-general of cardinal’s college, constantly supervising the workmen there and at Ipswich. His ruthless vigour and his accessibility to bribes earned him such unpopularity that there were rumours of his projected assassination or imprisonment. All this constituted a further bond of sympathy between him and his master, and Cromwell grew in Wolsey’s favour until his fall. His wife had died in 1527 or 1528, and in July 1529 he made his will, in which one of the chief beneficiaries was his nephew, Richard Williams, alias Cromwell, the great-grandfather of the protector.

Wolsey’s disgrace reduced Cromwell to such despair that Cavendish once found him in tears and at his prayers “which had been a strange sight in him afore.” Many of the cardinal’s servants had been taken over by the king, but Cromwell had made himself particularly obnoxious. However, he rode to court from Esher to “make or mar,” as he himself expressed it, and offered his services to Norfolk. Possibly he had already paved the way by the pensions and grants which he induced Wolsey to make through him, out of the lands and revenues of his bishoprics and abbeys, to nobles and courtiers who were hard pressed to keep up the lavish style of Henry’s court. Cromwell could be most useful to the government in parliament, and the government, represented by Norfolk, undertook to use its influence in procuring him a seat, on the natural understanding that Cromwell should do his best to further government business in the House of Commons. This was on the 2nd of November 1529; the elections had been made, and parliament was to meet on the morrow. A seat was, however, found or made for Cromwell at Taunton. He signalized himself by a powerful speech in opposition to the bill of attainder against Wolsey which had already passed the Lords. The bill was thrown out, possibly with Henry’s connivance, though no theory has yet explained its curious history so completely as the statement of Cavendish and other contemporaries, that its rejection was due to the arguments of Cromwell. Doubtless he championed his fallen chief not so much for virtue’s sake as for the impression it would make on others. He did not feel called upon to accompany Wolsey on his exile from the court.

Cromwell had now, according to Cardinal Pole, whose story has been too readily accepted, been converted into an “emissary of Satan” by the study of Machiavelli’s Prince. In the one interview which Pole had with Cromwell, the latter, so Pole wrote ten years later in 1539, recommended him to read a new Italian book on politics, which Pole says he afterwards discovered was Machiavelli’s Prince. But this discovery was not made for some years: the Prince was not published until 1532, three years after the conversation; there is evidence that Cromwell was not acquainted with it until 1537 or 1539, and there is nothing in the Prince bearing on the precise point under discussion by Pole and Cromwell. On the other hand, the point is discussed in Castiglione’s Il Cortegiano which had just been published in 1528, and of which Cromwell promised to lend Bonner a copy in 1530. The Cortegiano is the antithesis of the Prince; and there is little doubt that Pole’s account is the offspring of an imagination heated by his own perusal of the Prince in 1538, and by Cromwell’s ruin of the Pole family at the same time; until then he had failed to see in Cromwell the Machiavellian “emissary of Satan.”

Equally fanciful is Pole’s ascription of the whole responsibility for the Reformation to Cromwell’s suggestion. It was impossible for Pole to realize the substantial causes of that perfectly natural development, and it was his cue to represent Henry as having acted at the diabolic suggestion of Satan’s emissary. In reality the whole programme, the destruction of the liberties and confiscation of the wealth of the church by parliamentary agency, had been indicated before Cromwell had spoken to Henry. The use of Praemunire had been applied to Wolsey; laymen had supplanted ecclesiastics in the chief offices of state; the plan of getting a divorce without papal intervention had been the original idea, which Wolsey had induced the king to abandon, and it had been revived by Cranmer’s suggestion about the universities. The root idea of the supreme authority of the king had been asserted in Tyndale’s Obedience of a Christian Man published in 1528, which Anne Boleyn herself had brought to Henry’s notice: “this,” he said, “is a book for me and all kings to read,” and Campeggio had felt compelled to warn him against these notions, of which Pole imagines that he had never heard until they were put into his head by Cromwell late in 1530. In the same way Cromwell’s influence over the government from 1529-1533 has been grossly exaggerated. It was not till 1531 that he was admitted to the privy council nor till 1534 that he was made secretary, though he had been made master of the Jewel-House, clerk of the Hanaper and master of the Wards in 1532, and chancellor of the exchequer (then a minor office) in 1533. It is not till 1533 that his name is as much as mentioned in the correspondence of any foreign ambassador resident in London. This obscurity has been attributed to deliberate suppression: but no secrecy was made about Cranmer’s suggestion, and it was not Henry’s habit to assume a responsibility which he could devolve upon others. It is said that Cromwell’s life would not have been safe, had he been known as the author of this policy; but that is not a consideration which would have appealed to Henry, and he was just as able to protect his minister in 1530 as he was in 1536. Cromwell, in fact, was not the author of that policy, but he was the most efficient instrument in its execution.

He was Henry’s parliamentary agent, but even in this capacity his power has been overrated, and he is supposed to have invented those parliamentary complaints against the clergy, which were transmuted into the legislation of 1532. But the complaints were old enough; many of them had been heard in parliament nearly twenty years before, and there is ample evidence to show that the petition against the clergy represents the “infinite clamours” of the Commons against the Church, which the House itself resolved should be “put in writing and delivered to the king.” The actual drafting of the statute, as of all the Reformation Acts between 1532 and 1539, was largely Cromwell’s work; and the success with which parliament was managed during this period was also due to him. It was not an easy task, for the House of Commons more than once rejected government measures, and members were heard to threaten Henry VIII. with the fate of Richard III.; they even complained of Cromwell’s reporting their proceedings to the king. That was his business rather than conveying imaginary royal orders to the House. “They be contented,” he wrote in one of these reports, “that deed and writing shall be treason,” but words were only to be misprision: they refused to include an heir’s rebellion or disobedience in the bill “as rebellion is already treason, and disobedience is no cause of forfeiture of inheritance.” There was, of course, room for manipulation, which Cromwell extended to parliamentary elections; but parliamentary opinion was a force of which he had to take account, and not a negligible quantity.

From the date of his appointment as secretary in 1534, Cromwell’s biography belongs to the history of England, but it is necessary to define his personal attitude to the revolution in which he was the king’s most conspicuous agent. He was included by Foxe in his Book of Martyrs to the Protestant faith: more recent historians regard him as a sacrilegious ruffian. Now, there were two cardinal principles in the Protestantism of the 16th century—the supremacy of the temporal sovereign over the church in matters of government, and the supremacy of the Scriptures over the Church in matters of faith. There is no room for doubt as to the sincerity of Cromwell’s belief in the first of these two articles: he paid at his own expense for an English translation of Marsiglio of Padua’s Defensor Pacis, the classic medieval advocate of that doctrine; he had a scheme for governing England by means of administrative councils nominated by the king to the detriment of parliament; and he urged upon Henry the adoption of the maxim of the Roman civil law—quod principi placuit legis habet vigorem. He wanted, in his own words, “one body politic” and no rival to the king’s authority; and he set the divine right of kings against the divine right of the papacy. There is more doubt about the sincerity of Cromwell’s attachment to the second article; it is true that he set up a Bible in every parish church, and regarded them as invaluable; and the correspondents who unbosom themselves to him are all of a Protestant way of thinking. But Protestantism was the greatest support of absolute monarchy. Hence its value in Cromwell’s eyes. Of religious conviction there is in him little trace, and still less of the religious temperament. He was a polished representative of the callous, secular middle class of that most irreligious age. Sentiment found no place, and feeling little, in his composition; he used the axe with as little passion as the surgeon does the knife, and he operated on some of the best and noblest in the land. He saw that it was wiser to proscribe a few great opponents than to fall on humbler prey; but he set law above justice, and law to him was simply the will of the state.

In 1534 Cromwell was appointed master of the Rolls, and in 1535 chancellor of Cambridge University and visitor-general of the monasteries. The policy of the Dissolution has been theoretically denounced, but practically approved in every civilized state, Catholic as well as Protestant. Every one has found it necessary, sooner or later, to curtail or to destroy its monastic foundations; only those which delayed the task longest have generally lagged farthest behind in national progress. The need for reform was admitted by a committee of cardinals appointed by Paul III. in 1535, and it had been begun by Wolsey. Cromwell was not affected by the iniquities of the monks except as arguments for the confiscation of their property. He had boasted that he would make Henry VIII. the richest prince in Christendom; and the monasteries, with their direct dependence on the pope and their cosmopolitan organization, were obstacles to that absolute authority of the national state which was Cromwell’s ideal. He had learnt how to visit monasteries under Wolsey, and the visitation of 1535 was carried out with ruthless efficiency. During the storm which followed, Henry took the management of affairs into his own hands, but Cromwell was rewarded in July 1536 by being knighted, created lord privy seal, Baron Cromwell, and vicar-general and viceregent of the king in “Spirituals.”

In this last offensive capacity he sent a lay deputy to preside in Convocation, taking precedence of the bishops and archbishops, and issued his famous Injunctions of 1536 and 1538; a Bible was to be provided in every church; the Paternoster, Creed and Ten Commandments were to be recited by the incumbent in English; he was to preach at least once a quarter, and to start a register of births, marriages and deaths. During these years the outlook abroad grew threatening because of the alliance, under papal guarantee, between Charles V. and Francis I.; and Cromwell sought to counterbalance it by a political and theological union between England and the Lutheran princes of Germany. The theological part of the scheme broke down in 1538 when Henry categorically refused to concede the three reforms demanded by the Lutheran envoys. This was ominous, and the parliament of 1539, into which Cromwell tried to introduce a number of personal adherents, proved thoroughly reactionary. The temporal peers were unanimous in favour of the Six Articles, the bishops were divided, and the Commons for the most part agreed with the Lords. Cromwell, however, succeeded in suspending the execution of the act, and was allowed to proceed with his one independent essay in foreign policy. The friendship between Francis and Charles was apparently getting closer; Pole was exhorting them to a crusade against a king who was worse than the Turk; and anxious eyes searched the Channel in 1539 for signs of the coming Armada. Under these circumstances Henry acquiesced in Cromwell’s negotiations for a marriage with Anne of Cleves. Anne, of course, was not a Lutheran, and the state religion in Cleves was at least as Catholic as Henry’s own. But her sister was married to the elector of Saxony, and her brother had claims on Guelders, which Charles V. refused to recognize. Guelders was to the emperor’s dominions in the Netherlands what Scotland was to England, and had often been used by France in the same way, and an alliance between England, Guelders, Cleves and the Schmalkaldic League would, Cromwell thought, make Charles’s position in the Netherlands almost untenable. Anne herself was the weak point in the argument; Henry conceived an invincible repugnance to her from the first; he was restrained from an immediate breach with his new allies only by fear of Francis and Charles. In the spring of 1540 he was reassured on that score; no attack on him from that quarter was impending; there was a rift between the two Catholic sovereigns, and there was no real need for Anne and her German friends.

From that moment Cromwell’s fate was sealed; the Lords loathed him as an upstart even more than they had loathed Wolsey; he had no church to support him; Norfolk and Gardiner detested him from pique as well as on principle, and he had no friend in the council save Cranmer. As lay viceregent he had given umbrage to nearly every churchman, and he had put all his eggs in the one basket of royal favour, which had now failed him. Cromwell did not succumb without an effort, and a desperate struggle ensued in the council. In April the French ambassador wrote that he was tottering to his fall; a few days later he was created earl of Essex and lord great chamberlain, and two of his satellites were made secretaries to the king; he then despatched one bishop to the Tower, and threatened to send five others to join him. At last Henry struck as suddenly and remorselessly as a beast of prey; on the 10th of June Norfolk accused him of treason; the whole council joined in the attack, and Cromwell was sent to the Tower. A vast number of crimes was laid to his charge, but not submitted for trial. An act of attainder was passed against him without a dissentient voice, and after contributing his mite towards the divorce of Anne, he was beheaded on Tower Hill on the 28th of July, repudiating all heresy and declaring that he died in the Catholic faith.

In estimating Cromwell’s character it must be remembered that his father was a blackguard, and that he himself spent the formative years of his life in a vile school of morals. A ruffian he doubtless was, as he says, in his youth, and he was the last man to need the tuition of Machiavelli. Nevertheless he civilized himself to a certain extent; he was not a drunkard nor a forger like his father; from personal immorality he seems to have been singularly free; he was a kind master, and a stanch friend; and he possessed all the outward graces of the Renaissance period. He was not vindictive, and his atrocious acts were done in no private quarrel, but in what he conceived to be the interests of his master and the state. Where those interests were concerned he had no heart and no conscience and no religious faith; no man was more completely blighted by the 16th century worship of the state.

The authorities for the early life of Cromwell are the Wimbledon manor rolls, used by Mr John Phillips of Putney in The Antiquary (1880), vol. ii., and the Antiquarian Mag. (1882), vol. ii.; Pole’s Apologia, i. 126; Bandello’s Novella, xxxiv.; Chapuys’ letter to Granvelle, 21 Nov. 1535; and Foxe’s Acts and Mon. From 1522 see Letters and Papers of Henry VIII., vols. iii.-xvi.; Cavendish’s Life of Wolsey; Hall’s Chron.; Wriothesley’s Chron. These and practically all other available sources have been utilized in R. B. Merriman’s Life and Letters of Thomas Cromwell (2 vols., 1902). For Cromwell and Machiavelli see Paul van Dyke’s Renascence Portraits (1906), App.

(A. F. P.)

CRONJE, PIET ARNOLDUS (c. 1840-  ), Boer general, was born about 1840 in the Transvaal and in 1881 took part in the first Boer War in the rank of commandant. He commanded in the siege of the British garrison at Potchefstroom, though he was unable to force their surrender until after the conclusion of the general armistice. The Boer leader was at this time accused of withholding knowledge of this armistice from the garrison (see [Potchefstroom]). He held various official positions in the years 1881-1899, and commanded the Boer force which compelled the surrender of the Jameson raiders at Doornkop (Jan. 2, 1896). In the war of 1899 Cronje was general commanding in the western theatre of war, and began the siege of Kimberley. He opposed the advance of the British division under Lord Methuen, and fought, though without success, three general actions at Belmont, Graspan and Modder River. At Magersfontein, early in December 1899, he completely repulsed a general attack made upon his position, and thereby checked for two months the northward advance of the British column. In the campaign of February 1900, Cronje opposed Lord Roberts’s army on the Magersfontein battleground, but he was unable to prevent the relief of Kimberley; retreating westward, he was surrounded near Paardeberg, and, after a most obstinate resistance, was forced to surrender with the remnant of his army (Feb. 27, 1900). As a prisoner of war Cronje was sent to St Helena, where he remained until released after the conclusion of peace (see [Transvaal]: History).

CROOKES, SIR WILLIAM (1832-  ), English chemist and physicist, was born in London on the 17th of June 1832, and studied chemistry at the Royal College of Chemistry under A. W. von Hofmann, whose assistant he became in 1851. Three years later he was appointed an assistant in the meteorological department of the Radcliffe observatory, Oxford, and in 1855 he obtained a chemical post at Chester. In 1861, while conducting a spectroscopic examination of the residue left in the manufacture of sulphuric acid, he observed a bright green line which had not been noticed previously, and by following up the indication thus given he succeeded in isolating a new element, thallium, a specimen of which was shown in public for the first time at the exhibition of 1862. During the next eight years he carried out a minute investigation of this metal and its properties. While determining its atomic weight, he thought it desirable, for the sake of accuracy, to weigh it in a vacuum, and even in these circumstances he found that the balance behaved in an anomalous manner, the metal appearing to be heavier when cold than when hot. This phenomenon he explained as a “repulsion from radiation,” and he expressed his discovery in the statement that in a vessel exhausted of air a body tends to move away from another body hotter than itself. Utilizing this principle he constructed the radiometer (q.v.), which he was at first disposed to regard as a machine that directly transformed light into motion, but which was afterwards perceived to depend on thermal action. Thence he was led to his famous researches on the phenomena produced by the discharge of electricity through highly exhausted tubes (sometimes known as “Crookes’ tubes” in consequence), and to the development of his theory of “radiant matter” or matter in a “fourth state,” which led up to the modern electronic theory. In 1883 he began an inquiry into the nature and constitution of the rare earths. By repeated fractionations he was able to divide yttrium into distinct portions which gave different spectra when exposed in a high vacuum to the spark from an induction coil. This result he considered to be due, not to any removal of impurities, but to an actual splitting-up of the yttrium molecule into its constituents, and he ventured to draw the provisional conclusion that the so-called simple bodies are in reality compound molecules, at the same time suggesting that all the elements have been produced by a process of evolution from one primordial stuff or “protyle.” A later result of this method of investigation was the discovery of a new member of the rare earths, monium or victorium, the spectrum of which is characterized by an isolated group of lines, only to be detected photographically, high up in the ultra-violet; the existence of this body was announced in his presidential address to the British Association at Bristol in 1898. In the same address he called attention to the conditions of the world’s food supply, urging that with the low yield at present realized per acre the supply of wheat would within a comparatively short time cease to be equal to the demand caused by increasing population, and that since nitrogenous manures are essential for an increase in the yield, the hope of averting starvation, as regards those races for whom wheat is a staple food, depended on the ability of the chemist to find an artificial method for fixing the nitrogen of the air. An authority on precious stones, and especially the diamond, he succeeded in artificially making some minute specimens of the latter gem; and on the discovery of radium he was one of the first to take up the study of its properties, in particular inventing the spinthariscope, an instrument in which the effects of a trace of radium salt are manifested by the phosphorescence produced on a zinc sulphide screen. In addition to many other researches besides those here mentioned, he wrote or edited various books on chemistry and chemical technology, including Select Methods of Chemical Analysis, which went through a number of editions; and he also gave a certain amount of time to the investigation of psychic phenomena, endeavouring to effect some measure of correlation between them and ordinary physical laws. He was knighted in 1897, and received the Royal (1875), Davy (1888), and Copley (1904) medals of the Royal Society, besides filling the offices of president of the Chemical Society and of the Institution of Electrical Engineers. He married Ellen, daughter of W. Humphrey, of Darlington, and their golden wedding was celebrated in 1906.

CROOKSTON, a city and the county-seat of Polk county, Minnesota, U.S.A., on the Red Lake river in the Red River valley, about 300 m. N.W. of Minneapolis, and about 25 m. E. of Grand Forks, North Dakota. Pop. (1890) 3457; (1900) 5359; (1905, state census) 6794, 2049 being foreign-born, including 656 from Norway (2 Norwegian weeklies are published), 613 from Canada, 292 from Sweden; (1910 U.S. census) 7559. Crookston is served by the Great Northern and the Northern Pacific railways. It has a Carnegie library, and the St Vincent and Bethesda hospitals, and is the seat of a Federal Land Office and of a state agricultural high school (with an experimental farm). Dams on the Red Lake river provide a fine water-power, and among the city’s manufactures are lumber, leather, flour, farm implements, wagons and bricks. The city is situated in a fertile farming region, and is a market for grain, potatoes and other agricultural products, and lumber. Crookston was settled about 1872, was incorporated in 1879, received its first city charter in 1883, and adopted a new one in 1906. It was named in honour of William Crooks, an early settler.

CROP (a word common in various forms, such as Germ. Kropf, to many Teutonic languages for a swelling, excrescence, round head or top of anything; it appears also in Romanic languages derived from Teutonic, in Fr. as croupe, whence the English “crupper”; and in Ital. groppo, whence English “group”), the ingluvies, or pouched expansion of a bird’s oesophagus, in which the food remains to undergo a preparatory process of digestion before being passed into the true stomach. From the meaning of “top” or “head,” as applied to a plant, herb or flower, comes the common use of the word for the produce of cereals or other cultivated plants, the wheat-crop, the cotton-crop and the like, and generally, “the crops”; more particular expressions are the “white-crop,” for such grain crops as barley or wheat, which whiten as they grow ripe and “green-crop” for such as roots or potatoes which do not, and also for those which are cut in a green state, like clover (see [Agriculture]). Other uses, more or less technical, of the word are, in leather-dressing, for the whole untrimmed hide; in mining and geology, for the “outcrop” or appearance at the surface of a vein or stratum and, particularly in tin mining, of the best part of the ore produced after dressing. A “hunting-crop” is a short thick stock for a whip, with a small leather loop at one end, to which a thong may be attached. From the verb “to crop,” i.e. to take off the top of anything, comes “crop” meaning a closely cut head of hair, found in the name “croppy” given to the Roundheads at the time of the Great Rebellion, to the Catholics in Ireland in 1688 by the Orangemen, probably with reference to the priests’ tonsures, and to the Irish rebels of 1798, who cut their hair short in imitation of the French revolutionaries.

CROPSEY, JASPER FRANCIS (1823-1900), American landscape painter, was born at Rossville, Staten Island, New York, on the 18th of February 1823. After practising architecture for several years, he turned his attention to painting, studying in Italy from 1847 to 1850. In 1851 he was elected a member of the National Academy of Design. From 1857 to 1863 he had a studio in London, and after his return to America enjoyed a considerable vogue, particularly as a painter of vivid autumnal effects, along the lines of the Hudson River school. He was one of the original members of the American Water Color Society. He continued actively in this profession until within a few days of his death, at Hastings-on-Hudson, New York, on the 22nd of June 1900. He made the architectural designs for the stations of the elevated railways in New York City.

CROQUET (from Fr. croc, a crook, or crooked stick), a lawn game played with balls, mallets, hoops and two pegs. The game has been evolved, according to some writers, from the paille-maille which was played in Languedoc at least as early as the 13th century. Under the name of le jeu de la crosse, or la crosserie, a similar game was at the same period immensely popular in Normandy, and especially at Avranches, but the object appears to have been to send the ball as far as possible by driving it with the mallet (see Sports et jeux d’adresse, 1904, p. 203). Pall Mall, a fashionable game in England in the time of the Stuarts, was played with a ball and a mallet, and with two hoops or a hoop and a peg, the game being won by the player who ran the hoop or hoops and touched the peg under certain conditions in the fewest strokes. Croquet certainly has some resemblance to paille-maille, played with more hoops and more balls. It is said that the game was brought to Ireland from the south of France, and was first played on Lord Lonsdale’s lawn in 1852, under the auspices of the eldest daughter of Sir Edmund Macnaghten. It came to England in 1856, or perhaps a few years earlier, and soon became popular.

In 1868 the first all-comers’ meeting was held at Moreton-in-the-Marsh. In the same year the All England Croquet Club was formed, the annual contest for the championship taking place on the grounds of this club at Wimbledon.[1] But after being for ten years or so the most popular game for the country house and garden party, croquet was in its turn practically ousted by lawn tennis, until, with improved implements and a more scientific form of play, it was revived about 1894-1895. In 1896-1897 was formed the United All England Croquet Association, on the initiative of Mr Walter H. Peel. Under the name of the Croquet Association, with more than 2000 members and nearly a hundred affiliated clubs (1909), this body is the recognized ruling authority on croquet in the British Islands. Its headquarters are at the Roehampton Club, where the championship and champion cup competitions are held each year.

The Game and its Implements.—The requisites for croquet are a level grass lawn, six hoops, two posts or pegs, balls, mallets, and hoop-clips to mark the progress of the players. The usual game is played between two sides, each having two balls, the side consisting of two players in partnership, each playing one ball, or of one player playing both balls. The essential characteristic of croquet is the scientific combination between two balls in partnership against the other two. The balls are distinguished by being coloured blue, red, black and yellow, and are played in that order, blue and black always opposing the other two.

The ground for match play measures 35 yds. by 28 yds., and should be carefully marked out with white lines. In each corner a white spot is marked 1 yd. from each boundary. The hoops are made of round iron, not less than ½ in. and not more than ¾ in. in diameter, and standing 12 in. out of the ground. For match play they are 3¾ or 4 in. across, inside measurement. They are set up as in the accompanying diagram, the numbers and arrows indicating the order and direction in which they must be passed. Each hoop is run twice, and each peg struck once. The pegs may be struck from any direction.

The pegs are 1½ in. in diameter and when fixed stand 18 in. above the ground. The balls were formerly made of boxwood (earlier still of beechwood); composition balls are now in general use for tournaments. They must be 35⁄8 in. in diameter and 15 oz. to 16½ oz. in weight. It will be seen that for match play the hoops are only 1⁄8 or at the most 3⁄8 in. wider than the diameter of the ball. The mallets may be of any size and weight, but the head must be made of wood (metal may be used only for weighting or strengthening purposes), and the ends must be parallel and similar. Only one mallet may be used in the course of a game, except in the case of bona fide damage.

The object of the player is to score the points of the game by striking his ball through each of the hoops and against each of the pegs in a fixed order; and the side wins which first succeeds in scoring all the points with both the balls of the side. A metal clip corresponding in colour with the player’s ball is attached to the hoop or peg which that ball has next to make in the proper order, as a record of its progress in the game. No point is scored by passing through a hoop or hitting a peg except in the proper order. Thus, if a player has in any turn or turns driven his ball successively through hoops 1, 2, and 3, his clip is attached to hoop 4, and the next point to be made by him will be that hoop; and so on till all the points (hoops and pegs) have been scored. Each player starts in turn from any point in a “baulk” or area 3 ft. wide along the left-hand half of the “southern” boundary, marked A on the diagram, of the lawn—till 1906, from a point 1 ft. in front of the middle of hoop 1. If he fails either to make a point or to “roquet”[2] (i.e. drive his ball against) another ball in play, his turn is at an end and the next player in order takes his turn in like manner. If he succeeds in scoring a point, he is entitled (as in billiards) to another stroke; he may then either attempt to score another point, or he may roquet a ball. Having roqueted a ball—provided he has not already roqueted the same ball in the same turn without having scored a point in the interval—he is entitled to two further strokes: first he must “take croquet,” i.e. he places his own ball (which from the moment of the roquet is “dead” or “in hand”) in contact with the roqueted ball on any side of it, and then strikes his own ball with his mallet, being bound to move or shake both balls perceptibly. If at the beginning of a turn the striker’s ball is in contact with another ball, a “roquet” is held to have been made and “croquet” must be taken at once. After taking croquet the striker is entitled to another stroke, with which he may score another point, or roquet another ball not previously roqueted in the same turn since a point was scored, or he may play for safety. Thus, by skilful alternation of making points and roqueting balls, a “break” may be made in which point after point, and even all the points in the game (for the ball in play), may be scored in a single turn, in addition to 3 or 4 points for the partner ball. The chief skill in the game perhaps consists in playing the stroke called “taking croquet” (but see below on the “rush”). Expert players can drive both balls together from one end of the ground to the other, or send one to a distance while retaining the other, or place each with accuracy in different directions as desired, the player obtaining position for scoring a point or roqueting another ball according to the strategical requirements of his position. Care has, however, to be taken in playing the croquet-stroke that both balls are absolutely moved or perceptibly shaken, and that neither of them be driven over the boundary line, for in either event the player’s next stroke is forfeited and his turn brought summarily to an end.

There are three distinct methods of holding the mallet among good players. A comparatively small number still adhere to the once universal “side stroke,” in which the player faces more or less at right angles to the line of aim, and strikes the ball very much like a golfer, with his hands close together on the mallet shaft. The majority use “front play,” in which the player faces in the direction in which he proposes to send the ball. The essential characteristic of this stroke is that eye, hand and ball should be in the same vertical plane, and the stroke is rather a swing—the “pendulum stroke”—than a hit. There are two ways of playing it. The majority of right-handed front players swing the mallet outside the right foot, holding it with the left hand as a pivot at the top of the shaft, while the right hand (about 12 in. lower down) applies the necessary force, though it must always be borne in mind that the heavy mallet-head, weighing from 3 to 3½ ℔ or even more, does the work by itself, and the nearer the stroke is to a simple swing, like that of a pendulum, the more likely it is to be accurate. Either the right or the left foot may be in advance, and should be roughly parallel to the line of aim, the player’s weight being mainly on the rear foot. Most of the best Irish and some English players swing the mallet between their feet, using a grip like that of the side player or golfer, with the hands close together, and often interlocking. It is claimed that the loss of power caused by the hampered swing—usually compensated by an extra heavy mallet—is more than counterbalanced by the greater accuracy in aim. The beginner is well advised to try all these methods, and adopt that which comes most natural to him. Skirted players, of course, are unable to use the Irish stroke; and, as one of the most meritorious features of croquet is that it is the only out-of-door game in which men and women can compete on terms of real equality, this has been put forward as a reason for barring it, if it is actually an advantage.

When a croquet ground is thoroughly smooth and level, the game gives scope for considerable skill; a great variety of strokes may be played with the mallet, each having its own well-defined effect on the behaviour of the balls, while a knowledge of angles is essential. Skilful tactics are at least as necessary as skilful execution to enable the player so to dispose the balls on the ground while making a break that they may most effectively assist him in scoring his points. The tactics of croquet are in this respect similar to those of billiards, that the player tries to make what progress he can during his own break, and to leave the balls “safe” at the end of it; he must also keep in mind the needs of the other ball of his side by leaving his own ball, or the last player’s ball, or both, within easy roqueting distance or in useful positions, and that of the next player isolated. Good judgment is really more valuable than mechanical skill. Croquet is a game of combination, partners endeavouring to keep together for mutual help, and to keep their opponents apart. It is important always to leave the next player in such a position that he will be unable to score a point or roquet a ball; a break, however profitable, which does not end by doing this is often fatal. Formerly this might be done by leaving the next player’s ball in such a position that either a hoop or a peg lay between it and all the other balls (“wiring”), or so near to a hoop or peg that there was no room for a proper stroke to be taken in the required direction. Under rule 36 of the Laws of Croquet for 1906, a ball left in such a position, provided it were within a yard of the obstacle (“close-wired”), might at the striker’s option be moved one yard in any direction. This rule left to the striker whose ball was “wired” more than a yard from the hoop or peg (“distance-wired”) the possibility of hitting his ball in such a way as to jump the obstacle. The jump-shot is, however, very bad for the lawn, and in 1907 a further provision was made by which the player whose ball is left “wired” from all the other balls by the stroke of an opponent may lift it and play from the “baulk” area. This practically means that “wiring” is impossible. The most that can be done is to “close-wire” the next player from two balls and leave him with a difficult shot at the third. If, however, the next player’s ball has not been moved by the adversary, the adversary is entitled to wire the balls as best he can.

The following is a specimen of elementary croquet tactics. If a player is going up to hoop 5 (diagram 1) in the course of a break, he should have contrived, if possible, to have a ball waiting for him at that hoop and another at hoop 6. With the aid of the first he runs hoop 5 and sends it on to the turning peg, stopping his ball in taking croquet close to the ball at 6. The corner hoops are the difficult ones, and after running hoop 6 the assisting ball is croqueted to 1 back, the peg being struck with the aid of the ball already there, which is again struck and driven to 2 back. If the player has been able to leave the fourth ball in the centre of the ground (known as a centre ball), he hits this after taking croquet, takes croquet, going off it to the ball at 1 back, and continues the break, leaving the centre ball where it will be useful for 3 back and 4 back. A first-class player should, however, be able to make a break with 3 balls almost as easily as with 4. A useful device, especially in a losing game, is to get rid of the opponent’s advanced ball if a “rover” (i.e. one which has run all the hoops and is for the winning peg) by croqueting it in such a way that it hits the peg and is thus out of the game. This can be done only by a ball which is itself also a rover. The opponent has then only one turn out of every three, and may be rendered practically helpless by leaving him always in a “safe” position. Inasmuch as a skilful player can cause an opponent’s ball to pass through the last two or even three hoops in the course of his turn and then peg it out, it is considered prudent to leave unrun the last three hoops until the partner’s ball is well advanced. There is a perennial agitation in the croquet world for a law prohibiting the player from pegging out his opponent’s ball. Many good players also think it desirable that the four-ball break should be restricted or wholly forbidden, e.g. by barring the dead ball.

To “rush” a ball is to roquet it hard so that it proceeds for a considerable distance in a desired direction. This stroke requires absolute accuracy and often considerable force, which must be applied in such a way as to drive the player’s ball evenly; otherwise it is very liable, especially if the ground be not perfectly smooth, to jump the object ball. The rush stroke is absolutely essential to good play, as it enables croquet to be taken (e.g.) close to the required hoop, whereas to croquet into position from a great distance and also provide a ball for use after running the hoop is extremely difficult, often impossible. To “rush” successfully, the striker’s ball must lie near the object ball, preferably, though not necessarily, in the line of the rush. By means of the rush it is possible to accomplish the complete round with the assistance of one ball only. To “cut” a ball is to hit it on the edge and cause it to move at some desired angle. “Rolling croquet” is made either by hitting near the top of the player’s ball which gives it “follow,” or by making the mallet so hit the ball as to keep up a sustained pressure. The first impact must, however, result in a distinctly audible single tap; if a prolonged rattle or a second tap is heard the stroke is foul. The passing stroke is merely an extension of this. Here the player’s ball proceeds a greater distance than the croqueted ball, but in somewhat the same direction. The “stop stroke” is made by a short, sharp tap, the mallet being withdrawn immediately after contact; the player’s ball only rolls a short distance, the other going much farther. The “jump stroke” is made by striking downwards on to the ball, which can thus be made to jump over another ball, or even a hoop. “Peeling” (a term derived from Walter H. Peel, a famous advocate of the policy) is the term applied to the device of putting a partner’s or an opponent’s ball through the hoops with a view to ultimately pegging it out.

The laws of croquet, and even the arrangement of the hoops, have not attained complete uniformity wherever the game is played. Croquet grounds are not always of full size, and some degree of elasticity in the rules is perhaps necessary to meet local conditions. The laws by which matches for the championship and all tournaments are governed are issued annually by the Croquet Association; and though from time to time trifling amendments may be made, they have probably reached permanence in essentials.

See The Encyclopaedia of Sport; The Complete Croquet Player (London, 1896); the latest Laws of Croquet, published annually by the Croquet Association, and its official organ The Croquet Gazette. For the principles of the game and its history in England, see C. D. Locock, Modern Croquet Tactics (London, 1907); A. Lillie, Croquet up to Date (London, 1900).

Croquet in the United States: Roque.—Croquet was brought to America from England soon after its introduction into that country, and enjoyed a wide popularity as a game for boys and girls before the Civil War (see Miss Alcott’s Little Women, cap. 12). American croquet is quite distinct from the modern English game. It is played on a lawn 60 ft. by 30, and preserves the old-fashioned English arrangement of ten hoops, including a central “cage” of two hoops. The balls, coloured red, white, blue and black, are 3¼ in. in diameter, and the hoops are from 3½ to 4 in. wide, according to the skill of the players. This game, however, is not taken seriously in the United States; the Official Croquet Guide of Mr Charles Jacobus emphasizes “the ease with which the game can be established,” since almost every country home has a grass plot, and “no elaboration is needed.” The scientific game of croquet in the United States is known as “roque.” Under this title a still greater departure from the English game has been elaborated on quite independent lines from those of the English Croquet Association since 1882, in which year the National Roque Association was formed. Roque also suffered from the popularity of lawn tennis, but since 1897 it has developed almost as fast as croquet in England. A great national championship tournament is held in Norwich, Conn., every August, and the game—which is fully as scientific as modern English croquet—has numerous devotees, especially in New England.

Roque is played, not on grass, but on a prepared surface something like a cinder tennis-court. The standard ground, as adopted by the National Association in 1903, is hexagonal in shape, with ten arches (hoops) and two stakes (pegs) as shown in diagram 2. The length is 60 ft., width 30, and the “corner pieces” are 6 ft. long. An essential feature of the ground is that it is surrounded by a raised wooden border, often lined with india-rubber to facilitate the rebound of the ball, and it is permissible to play a “carom” (or rebounding shot) off this border; a skilful player can often thus hit a ball which is wired to a direct shot. A boundary line is marked 28 in. inside the border, on which a ball coming to rest outside it must be replaced. The hoops are run in the order marked on the diagram, so that the game consists of 36 points. Red and white are always partners against blue and black, and the essential features and tactics of the game are, mutatis mutandis, the same as in modern English croquet—i.e. the skilful player goes always for a break and utilizes one or both of the opponent’s balls in making it. The balls are 3¼ in. in diameter, of hard rubber or composition, and the arches are 33⁄8 or 3½ in. wide for first- and second-class players respectively; they are made of steel ½ in. in diameter and stand about 8 in. out of the ground. The stakes are 1 in. in diameter and only 1½ in. above the ground. The mallets are much shorter than those commonly employed in England, the majority of players using only one hand, though the two-handed “pendulum stroke,” played between the legs, finds an increasingly large number of adherents, on account of the greater accuracy which it gives. The “jump shot” is a necessary part of the player’s equipment, as dead wiring is allowed; it is supplemented by the carom off the border or off a stake or arch, and roque players justly claim that their game is more like billiards than any other out-of-door game.

The game of roque is opened by scoring (stringing) for lead from an imaginary line through the middle wicket (cage), the player whose ball rests nearest the southern boundary line having the choice of lead and balls. The balls are then placed on the four corner spots marked A in diagram, partner balls being diagonally opposite one another, and the starting ball having the choice of either of the upper corners. The leader, say red, usually begins by shooting at white; if he misses, a carom off the border will leave him somewhere near his partner, blue. White then shoots at red or blue, with probably a similar result. Blue is then “in,” with a certain roquet and the choice of laying for red or going for an immediate break himself. The general strategy of the game corresponds to that of croquet, the most important differences being that “pegging out” is not allowed, and that on the small ground with its ten arches and two stakes the three-ball break is usually adopted, the next player or “danger ball” being wired at the earliest opportunity.

See Spalding’s Official Roque Guide, edited by Mr Charles Jacobus (New York, 1906).

[1] This was largely the work of W. T. Whitmore-Jones (1831-1872), generally known as W. Jones Whitmore, who subsequently formed the short-lived National Croquet Club, and was largely responsible for the first codification of the laws.

[2] The words “roquet” and “croquet” are pronounced as in French, with the t mute.

CRORE (Hindustani karor), an Anglo-Indian term for a hundred lakhs or ten million. It is in common use for statistics of trade and especially coinage. In the days when the rupee was worth its face value of 2s., a crore of rupees was exactly worth a million sterling, but now that the rupee is fixed at 15 to the £1, a crore is only worth £666,666.

CROSBY, HOWARD (1826-1891), American preacher and teacher, great-grandson of Judge Joseph Crosby of Massachusetts and of Gen. William Floyd of New York, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, was born in New York City on the 27th of February 1826. He graduated in 1844 from the University of the City of New York (now New York University); became professor of Greek there in 1851, and in 1859 became professor of Greek in Rutgers College, New Brunswick, New Jersey, where two years later he was ordained pastor of the first Presbyterian church. From 1870 to 1881 he was chancellor of the University of the City of New York; from 1872 to 1881 was one of the American revisers of the English version of the New Testament; and in 1873 was moderator of the general assembly of the Presbyterian Church. He took a prominent part in politics, urged excise reform, opposed “total abstinence,” was one of the founders and was the first president of the New York Society for the Prevention of Crime, and pleaded for better management of Indian affairs and for international copyright. Among his publications are The Lands of the Moslem (1851), Bible Companion (1870), Jesus: His Life and Works (1871), True Temperance Reform (1879), True Humanity of Christ (1880), and commentaries on the book of Joshua (1875), Nehemiah (1877) and the New Testament (1885).

His son, Ernest Howard Crosby (1856-1907), was a social reformer, and was born in New York City on the 4th of November 1856. He graduated at the University of the City of New York in 1876 and at Columbia Law School in 1878; served in the New York Assembly in 1887-1889, securing the passage of a high-licence bill; in 1889-1894 was a judge of the Mixed Tribunal at Alexandria, Egypt, resigning upon coming under the influence of Tolstoy; and died in New York City on the 3rd of January 1907. He was the first president (1894) of the Social Reform Club of New York City, and was president in 1900-1905 of the New York Anti-Imperialist League; was a leader in settlement work and in opposition to child labour, and was a disciple of Tolstoy as to universal peace and non-resistance, and of Henry George in his belief in the “single tax” principle. His writings, many of which are in the manner of Walt Whitman, comprise Plain Talk in Psalm and Parable (1899), Swords and Ploughshares (1902), and Broadcast (1905), all in verse; an anti-military novel, Captain Jinks, Hero (1902); and essays on Tolstoy (1904 and 1905) and on Garrison (1905).

CROSS, and CRUCIFIXION (Lat. crux, crucis[1]). The meaning ordinarily attached to the word “cross” is that of a figure composed of two or more lines which intersect, or touch each other transversely. Thus, two pieces of wood, or other material, so placed in juxtaposition to one another, are understood to form a cross. It should be noted, however, that Lipsius and other writers speak of the single upright stake to which criminals were bound as a cross, and to such a stake the name of crux simplex has been applied. The usual conception, however, of a cross is that of a compound figure.

Punishment by crucifixion was widely employed in ancient times. It is known to have been used by nations such as those of Assyria, Egypt, Persia, by the Greeks, Carthaginians, Macedonians, and from very early times by the Romans. It has been thought, too, that crucifixion was also used by the Jews themselves, and that there is an allusion to it (Deut. xxi. 22, 23) as a punishment to be inflicted.

Two methods were followed in the infliction of the punishment of crucifixion. In both of these the criminal was first of all usually stripped naked, and bound to an upright stake, where he was so cruelly scourged with an implement, formed of strips of leather having pieces of iron, or some other hard material, at their ends, that not merely was the flesh often stripped from the bones, but even the entrails partly protruded, and the anatomy of the body was disclosed. In this pitiable state he was reclothed, and, if able to do so, was made to drag the stake to the place of execution, where he was either fastened to it, or impaled upon it, and left to die. In this method, where a single stake was employed, we have the crux simplex of Lipsius. The other method is that with which we are more familiar, and which is described in the New Testament account of the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. In such a case, after the scourging at the stake, the criminal was made to carry a gibbet, formed of two transverse bars of wood, to the place of execution, and he was then fastened to it by iron nails driven through the outstretched arms and through the ankles. Sometimes this was done as the cross lay on the ground, and it was then lifted into position. In other cases the criminal was made to ascend by a ladder, and was then fastened to the cross. Probably the feebleness, or state of collapse, from which the criminal must often have suffered, had much to do in deciding this. It is not quite clear which of these two plans was followed in the case of the crucifixion of Christ, but the more general opinion has been that He was nailed to the cross on the ground, and that it was then lifted into position. The contrary opinion, has, however, prevailed to some extent, and there are representations of the crucifixion which depict Him as mounting a ladder placed against the cross. Such representations may, however, have been due to a pious desire, on the part of their authors, to emphasize the voluntary offering of Himself as the Saviour of the World, rather than as being intended for actual pictures of the scene itself. It may be noted, however, that among the “Emblems of the Passion,” as they are called, and which were very favourite devices in the middle ages, the ladder is not infrequently found in conjunction with the crown of thorns, nails, spear, &c.

From its simplicity of form, the cross has been used both as a religious symbol and as an ornament, from the dawn of man’s civilization. Various objects, dating from periods long anterior to the Christian era, have been found, marked with crosses of different designs, in almost every part of the old world. India, Syria, Persia and Egypt have all yielded numberless examples, while numerous instances, dating from the later Stone Age to Christian times, have been found in nearly every part of Europe. The use of the cross as a religious symbol in pre-Christian times, and among non-Christian peoples, may probably be regarded as almost universal, and in very many cases it was connected with some form of nature worship. Two of the forms of the pre-Christian cross which are perhaps most frequently met with are the tau cross, so named from its resemblance to the Greek capital letter

, and the svastika or fylfot[2]

, also called “Gammadion” owing to its form being that of four Greek capital letters gamma

placed together. The tau cross is a common Egyptian device, and is indeed often called the Egyptian cross. The svastika has a very wide range of distribution, and is found on all kinds of objects. It was used as a religious emblem in India and China at least ten centuries before the Christian era, and is met with on Buddhist coins and inscriptions from various parts of India. A fine sepulchral urn found at Shropham in Norfolk, and now in the British Museum, has three bands of cruciform ornaments round it. The two uppermost of these are plain circles, each of which contains a plain cross; the lowest band is formed of a series of squares, in each of which is a svastika. In the Vatican Museum there is an Etruscan fibula of gold which is marked with the svastika, but it is a device of such common occurrence on objects of pre-Christian origin, that it is hardly necessary to specify individual instances. The cross, as a device in different forms, and often enclosed in a circle, is of frequent occurrence on coins and medals of pre-Christian date in France and elsewhere. Indeed, objects marked with pre-Christian crosses are to be seen in every important museum.

The death of Christ on a cross necessarily conferred a new significance on the figure, which had hitherto been associated with a conception of religion not merely non-Christian, but in its essence often directly opposed to it. The Christians of early times were wont to trace, in things around them, hidden prophetical allusions to the truth of their faith, and such a testimony they seem to have readily recognized in the use of the cross as a religious emblem by those whose employment of it betokened a belief most repugnant to their own. The adoption by them of such forms, for example, as the tau cross and the svastika or fylfot was no doubt influenced by the idea of the occult Christian significance which they thought they recognized in those forms, and which they could use with a special meaning among themselves, without at the same time arousing the ill-feeling or shocking the sentiment of those among whom they lived.

It was not till the time of Constantine that the cross was publicly used as the symbol of the Christian religion. Till then its employment had been restricted, and private among the Christians themselves. Under Constantine it became the acknowledged symbol of Christianity, in the same way in which, long afterwards, the crescent was adopted as the symbol of the Mahommedan religion. Constantine’s action was no doubt influenced by the vision which he believed he saw of the cross in the sky with the accompanying words ἐν τούτῳ νίκα, as well as by the story of the discovery of the true cross by his mother St Helena in the year 326. The legend is that, when visiting the holy places in Palestine, St Helena was guided to the site of the crucifixion by an aged Jew who had inherited traditional knowledge as to its position. After the ground had been dug to a considerable depth, three crosses were found, as well as the superscription placed over the Saviour’s head on the cross, and the nails with which he had been crucified. The cross of the Lord was distinguished from the other two by the working of a miracle on a crippled woman who was stretched upon it. This finding, or “invention,” of the holy cross by St Helena is commemorated by a festival on the 3rd of May, called the “Invention of the Holy Cross.” The legend was widely accepted as true, and is related by writers such as St Ambrose, Rufinus, Sulpicius Severus and others, but it is discounted by the existence of an older legend, according to which the true cross was found in the reign of Tiberius, and while St James the Great was bishop of Jerusalem, by Protonice, the wife of Claudius.

In recent times an attempt has been made to reconcile the two accounts, by attributing to St Helena the rediscovery of the true cross, originally found by Protonice, and which had been buried again on the spot. A change was made in 1895 in the Diario Romano, when the word Ritrovamento was substituted for that of Invenzione, in the name of the festival of the 3rd of May. After St Helena’s discovery a church was built upon the site, and in it she placed the greater portion of the cross. The remaining portion she conveyed to Byzantium, and thence Constantine sent a piece to Rome, where it is said to be still preserved in the church of S. Croce in Gerusalemme, which was built to receive so precious a relic. It is exposed for the veneration of the faithful on Good Friday, 3rd of May, and the third Sunday in Lent, each year.

Another festival of the holy cross is kept on the 14th of September, and is known as the “Exaltation of the Holy Cross.” It seems to have originated with the dedication, in the year 335, of the churches built on the sites of the crucifixion and the holy sepulchre. The observance of this festival passed from Jerusalem to Constantinople, and thence to Rome, where it appears to have been introduced in the 7th century. By some it is thought that the feast of the Exaltation of the Cross had its origin in Constantine’s vision of the cross in the sky in the year 317, but whether it originated then, or, as is more generally supposed, at the dedication of the churches at Jerusalem, there is no doubt that it was afterwards kept with much greater solemnity in consequence of the recovery of the portion of the cross St Helena had left at Jerusalem, which had been taken away in the Persian victory, and was restored to Jerusalem by Heraclitus in 627. Pope Clement VIII. (1592-1604) raised the festival of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross to the dignity, liturgically known as that of a Greater Double.

Before leaving the story of St Helena and the cross, it may be convenient to allude briefly to the superscription placed over the Saviour’s head, and the nails, which it is said that she found with the cross. The earlier tradition as to the superscription is obscure, but it would seem that it ought to be considered part of the relic which Constantine sent to Rome. By some means it was entirely lost sight of until the year 1492, when it is said that it was accidentally found in a vault in the church of S. Croce in Gerusalemme at Rome. Pope Alexander III. published a bull certifying to the truth of this rediscovery of the relic, and authenticated its character.

As regards the nails, a question has arisen whether there were three or four. In the earliest pictures of the Crucifixion the feet are shown as separately nailed to the cross, but at a later period they are crossed, and a single nail fixes them. In the former case there would be four nails, and in the latter only three. Four is the number generally accepted, and it is said that one was cast by St Helena into the sea, during a storm, in order to subdue the waves, another is said (but the legend cannot be traced far back) to have been beaten out into the iron circlet of the crown of Lombardy, while the remaining two are reputed to be preserved among the relics at Milan and Trier respectively.

The employment of the cross as the Christian symbol has been so manifold in its variety and application, and the different forms to which the figure has been adapted and elaborated are so complex, that it is only possible to deal with the outline of the subject.

We learn from Tertullian and other early Christian writers of the constant use which the Christians of those days made of the sign of the cross. Tertullian (De Cor. Mil. cap. iii.) says: “At each journey and progress, at each coming in and going out, at the putting on of shoes, at the bath, at meals, at the kindling of lights, at bedtime, at sitting down, whatsoever occupation engages us, we mark the brow with the sign of the cross.” With so frequent an employment of the sign of the cross in their domestic life, it would be strange if we did not find that it was very frequently used in the public worship of the church. The earliest liturgical forms are comparatively late, and are without rubrics, but the allusions by different writers in early times to the ceremonial use of the sign of the cross in the public services are so numerous, and so much importance was attached to it, that we are left in no manner of doubt on the point. St Augustine, indeed, speaks of the sacraments as not duly ministered if the use of the sign of the cross were absent from their ministration (Hom. cxviii. in S. Joan.). Of the later liturgical use of the sign of the cross there is little need to speak, as a reference to the service books of the Greek and Latin churches will plainly indicate the frequency of, and the importance attached to, its employment. Its occasional use is retained by the Lutherans, and in the Church of England it is authoritatively used at baptism, and at the “sacring” or anointing of the sovereign at the coronation.

Passing from the sign to the material figures of the cross, a very usual classification distinguishes three main forms: (1) the crux immissa, or capitata

(fig. 3) known also as the Latin cross, or if each limb is of the same length,

(fig. 4) as the Greek cross; (2) the crux decussata, formed like the letter

, and (3) the crux commissa or tau cross, already mentioned. It was on a crux immissa that Christ is believed to have been crucified. The crux decussata is known as St Andrew’s cross, from the tradition that St Andrew was put to death on a cross of that form. The crux commissa is often called St Anthony’s cross, probably only because it resembles the crutch with which the great hermit is generally depicted.

The cross in one form or other appears, appropriately, on the flags and ensigns of many Christian countries. The English cross of St George is a plain red cross on a white ground, the Scottish cross of St Andrew is a plain diagonal white cross on a blue ground, and the Irish cross of St Patrick is a plain diagonal red cross on a white ground. These three crosses are combined in the Union Jack (see [Flag]).

The cross has also been adopted by many orders of knighthood. Perhaps the best known of these is the cross of the knights of Malta. It is a white cross of eight points on a black ground (fig. 5) and is the proper Maltese cross, a name which is often wrongly applied to the cross patée (fig. 6). The knights of the Garter use the cross of St George, as do those of the order of St Michael and St George, the knights of the Thistle use St Andrew’s cross, and those of St Patrick the cross of St Patrick charged with a shamrock leaf. The cross of the Danish order of the Dannebrog (fig. 7) affords a good example of this use of the cross. It is in form a white cross patée, superimposed upon a red one of the same form, and is surmounted by the royal cipher and crown, and has upon its surface the royal cipher repeated, and the legend, or motto, “Gud og Kongen” = “God and the King.” (For crosses of monastic orders see [Costume].)

Akin to the crosses of knightly orders are those which figure as charges on coats of arms. The science of heraldry evolved a wonderful variety of cross-forms during the period it held sway in the middle ages. The different forms of cross used in heraldry are, in fact, so numerous that it is only the larger works on that subject which attempt to record them all. For such crosses see [Heraldry].

In the middle ages the cross form, in one way or another, was predominant everywhere, and was introduced whenever opportunity offered itself for doing so. The larger churches were planned on its outline, so that the ridge line of their roofs proclaimed it far and wide. This was more particularly followed in the north of Europe, but when it was first introduced is not quite certain. All the ancient cathedral churches of England and Wales are cruciform in plan, except Llandaff.

The artistic skill and ingenuity of the medieval designer has produced cross designs of endless variety, and of singular elegance and beauty. Some of the most beautiful of these designs are the gable crosses of the old churches. Fig. 8 shows the west gable cross of Washburn church, Worcestershire; fig. 9 that of the nave of Castle Acre church, Norfolk; and fig. 10 the east gable cross of Hethersett church in that county. They may be taken as good examples of a type of cross which is often of great beauty, but it is overlooked, owing to its bad position for observation.

Fig. 8.	Fig. 9.	Fig. 10.

Other architectural crosses, of great beauty of design, are those which occur on the grave slabs of the middle ages. Instances of a plainer type occur in Saxon times, but it was not till after the 11th century that they were fashioned after the intricate and beautiful designs with which our ancient churches are, as a rule, so plentifully supplied. Sometimes these crosses are incised in the slab, and almost as often they are executed in low relief. The long shaft of the cross is most commonly plain, but there are a very large number of instances in which this is not so, and in which branches, with leaf designs, are thrown out at intervals the entire length of the shaft. In some cases the shaft rises from a series of steps at its base, and in such a case the name of a Calvary cross is applied to it. Fig. 11, from Stradsett church, Norfolk, and fig. 12 from Bosbury church, Herefordshire, are good examples of the designs at the head of sepulchral crosses. Often, by the side of the cross, an emblem or symbol is placed, denoting the calling in life of the person commemorated. Thus a sword is placed to indicate a knight or soldier, a chalice for a priest, and so forth; but it would be travelling beyond the scope of this article to enter into a discussion as to such symbols.

Fig. 11.	Fig. 12.

Of upright standing crosses, the Irish and Iona types are well known, and their great artistic beauty and elaboration and excellence of sculpture are universally recognized. These crosses are sometimes spoken of as “Runic Crosses”; and the interlacing knotwork design with which many of them are ornamented is also at times spoken of as “Runic.” This is an erroneous application of the word, and has arisen from the fact that some of these crosses bear inscriptions in Runic characters. Standing crosses, of different kinds, were commonly set up in every suitable place during the middle ages, as the mutilated bases and shafts still remaining readily testify. Such crosses were erected in the centre of the market place, in the churchyard, on the village green, or as boundary stones, or marks to guide the traveller. Some, like the Black Friars cross at Hereford, were preaching stations, others, like the beautiful Eleanor crosses at Northampton, Geddington and Waltham, were commemorative in character. Of these latter crosses, which marked the places where the funeral procession of Queen Eleanor halted, there were originally ten or more, erected between 1241 and 1294. They were placed at Lincoln, Northampton, Stony Stratford, Woburn, Dunstable, St Albans, Waltham and London (Cheapside and Charing Cross). The cross at Geddington differs in outline from those at Northampton and Waltham, and it is not recorded on the roll of accounts for the nine others, all of which are mentioned, but there is no real doubt that it commemorates the resting of the coffin of the queen in Geddington church on its way from Harby. These crosses, like the Black Friars cross at Hereford, are elaborate architectural erections, and very similar to them in this respect are the beautiful market crosses at Winchester, Chichester, Salisbury, Devizes, Shepton Mallet, Leighton Buzzard, &c. Of churchyard crosses, as distinguished from memorial crosses in churchyards, one only is believed to have escaped in a perfect condition the ravages of time, and the fanaticism of the past. It stands in the churchyard of Somerby, in Lincolnshire (Tennyson’s birthplace), and is a tall shaft surmounted by a pedimented tabernacle, on one side of which is the crucifixion, and on the other the figure of the Virgin and Child. Churchyard crosses may have been used as occasional preaching stations, for reading the Gospel in the Palm Sunday procession, and generally for public proclamations, made usually at the conclusion of the chief Sunday morning service, much in the same way that market crosses were used on market days as places for proclamations in the towns.

Of the ecclesiastical use of the sign of the cross mention has already been made, and it is desirable to mention briefly one or two instances of the ecclesiastical use of the cross itself. From a fairly early period it has been the prerogative of an archbishop or metropolitan, to have a cross borne before him within the limits of his province. The question urged between the archbishops of Canterbury and York about the carrying of their crosses before them, in each other’s province, was a fruitful source of controversy in the middle ages. The archiepiscopal cross must not be confused with the crozier or pastoral staff. The latter, which is formed with a crook at the end, is quite distinct, and is used by archbishops and bishops alike, who bear it with the left hand in processions, and when blessing the people. The archiepiscopal cross, on the contrary, is always borne before the archbishop, or during the vacancy of the archiepiscopal see before the guardian of the spiritualities sede vacante. The bishop of Dol in Brittany, of ordinary diocesan bishops, alone possessed the privilege of having a cross borne before him in his diocese. Good illustrations of the archiepiscopal cross occur on the monumental brasses of Archbishop Waldeby, of York (1397), at Westminster Abbey, and of Archbishop Cranley, of Dublin (1417) in New College chapel, Oxford.

The custom of carrying a cross at the head of an ecclesiastical procession can be traced back to the end of the 4th century. The cross was originally taken from the altar, and raised on a pole, and so borne before the procession. Afterwards a separate cross was provided for processions, but in poor churches, where this was not the case, the altar cross continued to be used till quite a late period. A direction to this effect occurs as late as 1829, in the Rituel published for the diocese of La Rochelle in that year. In England altar crosses were not very usual in the middle ages.

As a personal ornament the cross came into common use, and was usually worn suspended by a chain from the neck. A cross of this kind, of very great interest and beauty, was found about 1690, on the breast of Queen Dagmar, the wife of Waldemar II., king of Denmark (d. 1213). It is of Byzantine design and workmanship, and is of enamelled gold (fig. 13 shows both sides of it); on one side is the Crucifixion, and on the other side the half figure of our Lord in the centre, with the Virgin and St John the Evangelist on either side, and St Chrysostom and St Basil above and below. From the way in which such crosses were worn, hanging over the chest, they are called pectoral crosses. At the present day a pectoral cross forms part of the recognized insignia of a Roman Catholic bishop, and is worn by him over his robes, but this official use of the pectoral cross is not ancient, and no instance is known of it in England before the Reformation. The custom appears to have taken rise in the 16th century on the continent. It was not unusual to wear cruciform reliquaries, as objects of personal adornment, and such a reliquary was found on the body of St Cuthbert, when his tomb was opened in 1827, but it was placed under, and not over his episcopal vestments, and formed no part of his bishop’s attire. The custom of wearing a pectoral cross over ecclesiastical robes has, curiously enough, been copied from the comparatively modern Roman Catholic usage by the Lutheran bishops and superintendents in Scandinavia and Prussia; and in Sweden the cross is now delivered to the new bishop, on his installation in office, by the archbishop of Upsala, together with the mitre and crozier. Within the last generation the use of a pectoral cross, worn over their robes as part of the insignia of the episcopal office, has been adopted by some bishops of the Church of England, but it has no ancient sanction or authority.

Authorities.—Mortillet, Le Signe de la croix avant le Christianisme (Paris, 1866); Bingham, Antiquities of the Christian Church; Lipsius, De Cruce Christi; Lady Eastlake, History of our Lord, vol. ii.; Cutts, Manual of Sepulchral Slabs and Crosses; (Anon.) Handbook to Christian and Ecclesiastical Rome, part ii. (London, 1897); Veldeuer, History of the Holy Cross (reprint, 1863).

(T. M. F.)

[1] Derivatives of the Latin crux appear in many forms in European languages, cf. Ger. Kreuz, Fr. croix, It. croce, &c.; the English form seems Norse in origin (O.N. Krosse, mod. Kors). The O.E. name was rōd, rood (q.v.).

[2] The acceptance of this word as the English equivalent for this peculiar form of the cross rests only, according to the New English Dictionary, on a MS. of about 1500 in the Lansdowne collection, which gives details for the erection of a memorial stained-glass window, “... the fylfot in the nedermost pane under ther I knele ...”; in the sketch given with the instructions a cross occupies the space indicated. It is a question, therefore, whether “fylfot” is a name for any device suitable to “fill the foot” of any design, or the name peculiar to this particular form of cross. The word is not, as was formerly accepted, a corruption of the O. Eng. feowerfete, four-footed.

CROSSBILL (Fr. Bec-croisé, Ger. Kreuzschnabel), the name given to a genus of birds, belonging to the family Fringillidae, or finches, from the unique peculiarity they possess among the whole class of having the horny sheaths of the bill crossing one another obliquely,[1] whence the appellation Loxia (λοξός, obliquus), conferred by Gesner on the group and continued by Linnaeus. At first sight this singular structure appears so like a deformity that writers have not been wanting to account it such,[2] ignorant of its being a piece of mechanism most beautifully adapted to the habits of the bird, enabling it to extract with the greatest ease, from fir-cones or fleshy fruits, the seeds which form its usual and almost invariable food. Its mode of using this unique instrument seems to have been first described by Townson (Tracts on Nat. Hist., p. 116, London, 1799), but only partially, and it was Yarrell who, in 1829 (Zool. Journ., iv. pp. 457-465, pl. xiv. figs. 1-7), explained fully the means whereby the jaws and the muscles which direct their movements become so effective in riving asunder cones or apples, while at the proper moment the scoop-like tongue is instantaneously thrust out and withdrawn, conveying the hitherto protected seed to the bird’s mouth. The articulation of the mandible to the quadrate-bone is such as to allow of a very considerable amount of lateral play, and, by a particular arrangement of the muscles which move the former, it comes to pass that so soon as the bird opens its mouth the point of the mandible is brought immediately opposite to that of the maxilla (which itself is movable vertically), instead of crossing or overlapping it—the usual position when the mouth is closed. The two points thus meeting, the bill is inserted between the scales or into the pome, but on opening the mouth still more widely, the lateral motion of the mandible is once more brought to bear with great force to wrench aside the portion of the fruit attacked, and then the action of the tongue completes the operation, which is so rapidly performed as to defy scrutiny, except on very close inspection. Fortunately the birds soon become tame in confinement, and a little patience will enable an attentive observer to satisfy himself as to the process, the result of which at first seems almost as unaccountable as that of a clever conjuring trick.

The common crossbill of the Palaearctic region (Loxia curvirostra) is about the size of a skylark, but more stoutly built. The young (which on leaving the nest have not the tips of the bill crossed) are of a dull olive colour with indistinct dark stripes on the lower parts, and the quills of the wings and tail dusky. After the first moult the difference between the sexes is shown by the hens inclining to yellowish-green, while the cocks become diversified by orange-yellow and red, their plumage finally deepening into a rich crimson-red, varied in places by a flame-colour. Their glowing hues, are, however, speedily lost by examples which may be kept in confinement, and are replaced by a dull orange, or in some cases by a bright golden-yellow, and specimens have, though rarely, occurred in a wild state exhibiting the same tints. The cause of these changes is at present obscure, if not unknown, and it must be admitted that their sequence has been disputed by some excellent authorities, but the balance of evidence is certainly in favour of the above statement. Depending mainly for food on the seeds of conifers, the movements of crossbills are irregular beyond those of most birds, and they would seem to rove in any direction and at any season in quest of their staple sustenance. But the pips of apples are also a favourite dainty, and it is recorded by the old chronicler Matthew Paris (Hist. Angl. MS. fol. 252), that in 1251 the orchards of England were ravaged by birds, “pomorum grana, & non aliud de eisdem pomis comedentes,” which, from his description, “Habebant autem partes rostri cancellatas, per quas poma quasi forcipi vel cultello dividebant,” could be none other but crossbills. Notice of a like visitation in 1593 is recorded, but of late it has become evident that not a year passes without crossbills being observed in some part or other of England, while in certain localities in Scotland they seem to breed annually. The nest is rather rudely constructed, and the eggs, generally four in number, resemble those of the greenfinch, but are larger in size. This species ranges throughout the continent of Europe,[3] and occurs in the islands of the Mediterranean and in the fir-woods of the Atlas. In Asia it would seem to extend to Kamtschatka and Japan, keeping mainly to the forest-tracts.

Three other forms of the genus also inhabit the Old World—two of them so closely resembling the common bird that their specific validity has been often questioned. The first of these, of large stature, the parrot-crossbill (L. pityopsittacus), comes occasionally to Great Britain, presumably from Scandinavia, where it is known to breed. The second (L. himalayana), which is a good deal smaller, is only known from the Himalaya Mountains. The third, the two-barred crossbill (L. taenioptera), is very distinct, and its proper home seems to be the most northern forests of the Russian empire, but it has occasionally occurred in western Europe and even in England.

The New World has two birds of the genus. The first (L. americana), representing the common British species, but with a smaller bill, and the males easily recognizable by their more scarlet plumage, ranges from the northern limit of coniferous trees to the highlands of Mexico, or even farther. The other (L. leucoptera) is the equivalent of the two-barred crossbill, but smaller. It has twice occurred in England.

(A. N.)

[1] This peculiarity is found as an accidental malformation in the crows (Corvidae) and other groups; it is comparable to the monstrosities seen in rabbits and other members of the order Glires, in which the incisor teeth grow to an inordinate length.

[2] A medieval legend ascribes the conformation of bill and coloration of plumage to a divine recognition of the bird’s pity, bestowed on Christ at the crucifixion.

[3] Dr Malmgren found a small flock on Bear Island (lat. 74½° N.), but to this barren spot they must have been driven by stress of weather.

CROSSEN, or Krossen, a town of Germany, in the kingdom of Prussia, on the Oder, here crossed by a bridge, at the influx of the Bober, 31 m. S.E. of Frankfort-on-Oder by rail. Pop. (1900) 7369. Of the churches in the town three are Protestant and one Roman Catholic. Besides the modern school (Realprogymnasium), there are a technical school for viniculture and fruit-growing and a dairy school. There are manufactories of copper and brass ware, cloth, &c., while in the surrounding country the chief industries are fruit and grape growing. There is a brisk shipping trade, mainly in wine, fruit and fish. Crossen was founded in 1005 and was important during the middle ages as a point of passage across the Oder. It attained civic rights in 1232, was for a time the capital of a Silesian duchy, which, on the death of Barbara of Brandenburg, widow of the last duke, passed to Brandenburg (1482). In May 1886 the town was devastated by a whirlwind.

CROSSING, in architecture, the term given to the intersection of the nave and transept, frequently surmounted by a tower or by a dome on pendentives.

CROSSKEY, HENRY WILLIAM (1826-1893), English geologist and Unitarian minister, was born at Lewes in Sussex, on the 7th of December 1826. After being trained for the ministry at Manchester New College (1843-1848), he became pastor of Friargate chapel, Derby, until 1852, when he accepted charge of a Unitarian congregation in Glasgow. In 1869 he removed to Birmingham, where until the close of his life he was pastor of the Church of the Messiah. While in Glasgow his interest was awakened in geology by the perusal of A. C. Ramsay’s Geology of the Isle of Arran, and from 1855 onwards he devoted his leisure to the pursuit of this science. He became an authority on glacial geology, and wrote much, especially in conjunction with David Robertson, on the post-tertiary fossiliferous beds of Scotland (Trans. Geol. Soc. Glasgow). He also prepared for the British Association a valuable series of Reports (1873-1892) on the erratic Blocks of England, Wales and Ireland. In conjunction with David Robertson and G. S. Brady he wrote the Monograph of the Post Tertiary Entomostraca of Scotland, &c. for the Palaeontographical Society (1874); and he edited H. Carvill Lewis’ Papers and Notes on the Glacial Geology of Great Britain and Ireland, issued posthumously (1894). He died at Edgbaston, Birmingham, on the 1st of October 1893.