Courtiers and Politics in Elizabethan Herefordshire: Sir James Croft, his Friends and his Foes

Abstract

For well over a decade studies in local history have occupied a significant position in the historiography of early modern England. In particular, the study of the ‘county community’ as the most significant English political and governmental unit and as the primary sphere of social and affectional loyalties for the greater number of those Englishmen constituting the political nation has become securely established. Within this wide and fruitful field for continuing research the theme of the ‘points of contact’ or reciprocal communication between the court and the county, Westminster and the provinces, which Sir Geoffrey Elton raised not so long ago and which Kevin Sharpe more recently attempted to apply to the problems of government in early Stuart England, suggests that investigations of the gentry of a particular county might illustrate how this interchange between the centre and the localities functioned. For such a study to prove fruitful, however, one prerequisite would appear to be necessary: a member of a prominent county family, perhaps its head, who also holds a major office of state or position at court. Such a man was Sir James Croft whose eminent position in Herefordshire was founded on the contacts he made and the patronage he attracted in the last years of Henry VIII's reign. Although this position was threatened in the years of his disgrace during Queen Mary's reign, it gathered strength again in the 1560s, and reached its apogee during the following two decades. Between 1570 and his death in 1590, he served at court as comptroller of the household.