Croker, JOHN WILSON

Croker, JOHN WILSON, politician and man of letters, was born at Galway, 20th December 1780, the son of the surveyor-general of customs and excise in Ireland. After four years at Trinity College, Dublin, in 1800 he entered Lincoln's Inn, but in 1802 was called to the Irish bar. Two satires on the Irish stage and on Dublin society (1804-5) proved brilliant hits; so did his Sketch of Ireland Past and Present (1807), a pamphlet advocating Catholic emancipation. In 1809 he published a poem on the battle of Talavera, which Wellington pronounced 'entertaining,' and during the same year helped to found the Quarterly, to which up to 1854 he contributed 260 articles. He had entered parliament for Downpatrick in 1807; and now in 1809 he was rewarded with the lucrative post of Secretary of the Admiralty for his warm defence of the Duke of York, who was charged with conniving at and sharing in the sale of army commissions by his mistress. That post he held till 1830, and then retired with a pension of £1500 a year. On the passing of the Reform Bill (1832), he refused to re-enter parliament, unable 'spontaneously to take an active share in a system which must subvert the church, the peerage, and the throne—in one word, the constitution of England.' He would not even take office under Peel, his old friend (1834); and with Peel he broke utterly on the repeal of the Corn Laws (1846). He died 10th August 1857. Among the seventeen works that he wrote or edited were his Stories for Children from English History (1817), which suggested to Scott the Tales of a Grandfather; the Suffolk Papers (1823); his Boswell's Johnson (1831); and Essays on the Early Period of the French Revolution (1857). By some Croker is chiefly remembered for his onslaught on Keats, and Macaulay's onslaught on him (Macaulay 'detested him more than cold boiled veal'); or as the originator of the term Conservative (q.v.); a founder of the Athenæum Club, and the 'Rigby' of Disraeli's Coningsby—the jackal of 'Lord Monmouth' (the Marquis of Hertford). But in Sir Theodore Martin's nine-page eulogy in the Dictionary of National Biography (vol. xiii. 1888), he figures as a 'debater of the first rank,' a master of 'rhetoric that eclipsed Macaulay's,' the 'friend and confidant of many of the best and ablest men of his time,' a pattern of 'sincerity,' 'consistency,' 'devoted loyalty and unselfishness.' See also his Memoirs, Diaries, and Correspondence, edited by Louis J. Jennings (3 vols. 1884).