consent, she making him an annual allowance. The cause of the rupture was said to be an intimacy which had sprung up between the Prince of Wales and Mrs. Crouch, though this was indignantly denied by her defenders. However, the friendship with Kelly still continued, and they lived and acted together until her retirement.
During the season of 1792 Mrs. Crouch and Kelly were living in Pall Mall, where they gave brilliant receptions after the theatre, to which she would come in her stage costume. Here the Prince of Wales, Madame Mara, Mrs. Billington, Sheridan, and the Storaces were frequent visitors. For the next ten years Mrs. Crouch continued to sing and act at Drury Lane, both in opera and oratorio, besides appearing occasionally at provincial music festivals. One of her last performances was that of Celia in ‘As you like it,’ which she played for the first time, for Kelly's benefit, on 14 May 1801. During her later years she devoted herself much to training singers for the stage; she had also bought a cottage at Chelsea, where she gave entertainments in the sham-rural fashion of the day. In 1801 she retired: her health, which was never very strong, rapidly failed, and she died at Brighton 2 Oct. 1805. She was buried in the old churchyard, where Kelly put up a stone to her memory. The cause of her death was variously stated to be an internal injury and excessive drinking, but the latter allegation is probably unfounded. Her life was not blameless, but she was a devoted daughter, and charitable to excess. Her singing seems never to have created so much impression as her beauty; ‘her appearance was that of a meteor, it dazzled, from excess of brilliancy, every spectator,’ and Kelly declared that ‘she seemed to aggregate in herself all that was exquisite and charming.’ The principal portraits of Mrs. Crouch are two mentioned in Evans's ‘Catalogue,’ one of which is by Bartolozzi after Romney; an oval by Ridley after Lawrence, published 2 Jan. 1792; an oval (prefixed to her ‘Memoirs’), ‘printed for James Asperne, 17 June 1806;’ a three-quarter length mezzotint, in which she is represented holding up a rose, said to be in the character of Rosetta, but more probably in that of Mandane; and a full-length by E. Harding, jun., without inscription or date.
[M. J. Young's Memoirs of Mrs. Crouch; Clayton's Queens of Song, i. 186; Busby's Musical Anecdotes, iii. 178; Thespian Dict.; T. J. Dibdin's Reminiscences; Pohl's Mozart und Haydn in London, vol. ii.; Genest's Hist. of Stage; Georgian Era, iv. 287; Gent. Mag. lxxv. pt. ii. 977; European Mag. xlviii. 319; Kelly's Reminiscences; Morning Chronicle, 11 Nov. 1780; Bromley and Smith's Catalogues of Portraits.]
CROUCH or CROWCH, HUMPHREY (fl. 1635–1671), ballad-writer and pamphleteer, probably belonged to the family of publishers named Crouch, who traded largely in popular literature in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Mr. Halliwell-Phillipps has suggested that Humphrey was brother of John Crouch, the royalist verse-writer [q. v.] It is equally likely that he stood in the same relation to Edward Crouch or Crowch, John Crouch's publisher, and that he was father or uncle of Nathaniel Crouch [see Burton, Robert or Richard] and of Samuel Crouch, the proprietor of a newspaper entitled ‘Weekly Intelligence’ in 1679, who received high commendation as an honest publisher from John Dunton (Dunton, Life and Errors, 1705). Humphrey was himself the publisher of a folio broadside in verse, entitled ‘A Whip for the back of a backsliding Brownist,’ issued about 1640, of which a copy is in the Roxburghe collection of ballads. Other broadsides, dated 1641, bear his imprint (‘printed for H. Crouch, London’). Although he wrote tracts at the beginning of the civil war, Crouch held himself aloof from all parties, and deplored from a religious point of view the resort to active hostilities. His ballads, on general topics, ran fluently, and were exceptionally popular. In most cases they appeared as broadsides, illustrated with woodcuts, and the copies of them in the Roxburghe and Bagford collections are the only ones known to be extant. The following publications bear his name as author: 1. ‘Love's Court of Conscience, written upon two several occasions, with New Lessons for Lovers,’ London (by Richard Harper), 1637. The song of Dido is stolen from ‘The Ayres … that were sung at Brougham Castle in Westmoreland,’ 1618. Mr. J. P. Collier reprinted the poem in his ‘Illustrations of Old English Literature,’ vol. ii. 1866. 2. ‘The Madman's Morris,’ Lond. (by Richard Harper) n. d. (Roxb. Coll. ii. 362). 3. ‘The Industrious Smith,’ Lond. n. d. (Roxb. Coll. i. 158). 4. ‘The Heroic History of Guy, Earl of Warwick,’ Lond. n. d. (Roxb. Coll. iii. 150). 5. ‘An Excellent Sonnet of the Unfortunate Loves of Hero and Leander,’ Lond. n. d. (Roxb. Coll. iii. 150). These four undated ballads were all probably written about 1640. 6. ‘A Godly Exhortation to this Distressed Nation, shewing the true cause of this Unnaturall Civill War’ (broadside in verse), Lond. 9 Nov. 1642. 7. ‘The Parliament of Graces, briefly showing the banishment of Peace, the farewell of Amity, the want of Honesty’ (prose tract), Lond. 12 Dec. 1642.
