shire, and had issue four sons and five daughters. His third son, Herbert Croft [q. v.], became bishop of Hereford.
He wrote: 1. ‘Letters persuasive to his Wife and Children in England to take upon them the Catholic Religion.’ 2. ‘Arguments to shew that the Rom. Church is the true Church,’ written against R. Field's ‘Four Books of the Church.’ 3. ‘Reply to the Answer of his Daughter M. C. (Mary Croft), which she made to a Paper of his sent to her concerning the Rom. Church.’ At the end of it is a small piece entitled ‘The four Ministers of Charinton gagg'd by four Propositions made to the Lord Baron of Espicelliere of the Religion pretended; and presented on S. Martin's Day to Du Moulin in his House, & since to Durand and Mestrezat.’ All these were printed at Douay about 1619 in a 12mo volume of 255 pages. Wood, who had seen the work, states that only eight copies were printed, one for the author himself, another for his wife, and the rest for his children; but all without a title.
[Robinson's Mansions of Herefordshire, p. 82; Wood's Athenæ Oxon. ed. Bliss, ii. 317; Willis's Notitia Parliamentaria, vol. iii. pt. ii. pp. 126, 130, 137, 149, 160, 170; Nichols's Progresses of James I, i. 111; Addit. MS. 32102, f. 145 b; Dodd's Church Hist. ii. 365; Weldon's Chronological Notes, p. 164; Foley's Records, vi. 312; Lord Herbert of Cherbury's Autobiography, 1886; Gent. Mag. new. ser. xxvii. 485–8.]
CROFT, HERBERT, D.D. (1603–1691), bishop of Hereford, third son of Sir Herbert Croft (d. 1622) [q. v.], by Mary, daughter and coheiress of Anthony Bourne of Holt Castle, Worcestershire, was born on 18 Oct. 1603 at Great Thame, Oxfordshire, in the house of Sir William Green, his mother being then on a journey to London. After a preliminary education in Herefordshire, he is said, on doubtful authority, to have been sent to the university of Oxford about 1616, and to have been summoned thence to Flanders by his father, who had joined the Roman catholic church. Wood asserts that he was placed in the English college at St. Omer, ‘where, by the authority of his father, and especially by the persuasions of John Floyd, a jesuit, he was brought to the Roman obedience, and made a perfect catholic.’ He certainly pursued his humanity studies as far as poetry at St. Omer's College, and also studied a little rhetoric at Paris; but on 4 Nov. 1626, when he was admitted as a convictor into the English college at Rome, under the assumed name of James Harley, he attributed his conversion to meetings with a nobleman who was incarcerated in a London prison for the catholic faith. He applied to Father Ralph Chetwin, a jesuit, who reconciled him to the Roman church in 1626 (Foley, Records, iv. 468). He left Rome for Belgium on 8 Sept. 1628, having behaved himself well during his residence in the English college (ib. vi. 312). On the occasion of a visit to England, to transact some business relating to the family estates, he was induced by Morton, bishop of Durham, to conform to the established church. Soon afterwards, by desire of Dr. Laud, he went to Oxford, and was matriculated in the university as a member of Christ Church. In 1636 he proceeded B.D., by virtue of a dispensation granted in consideration of his having devoted ten years to the study of divinity abroad. About the same time he became minister of a church in Gloucestershire, and rector of Harding, Oxfordshire.
In the beginning of 1639 he was appointed chaplain to the Earl of Northumberland in the Scotch expedition, and on 1 Aug. in that year he was collated to the prebend of Major Pars Altaris in the church of Salisbury. In 1640 he was created D.D. at Oxford. About this period he became chaplain to Charles I, who employed him in conveying his secret commands to several of the great officers of the royal army. These commissions Croft faithfully executed, sometimes at the hazard of his life. On 17 July 1640 he was nominated a prebendary of Worcester, on 1 July 1641 installed canon of Windsor, and towards the end of 1644 installed dean of Hereford.
In the time of the rebellion he was deprived of all his preferments. Walker relates that soon after the taking of Hereford the dean inveighed boldly against sacrilege from the pulpit of the cathedral. Some of the officers present began to murmur, and a guard of musketeers prepared their pieces and asked whether they should fire at him, but Colonel Birch, the governor, prevented them from doing so (Sufferings of the Clergy, ii. 34). He received scarcely anything from his deanery between the time of his nomination and the dissolution of the cathedrals, and afterwards he would have been compelled to live upon charity had not the family estate devolved upon him by the death of his brother, Sir William Croft. During great part of the usurpation he resided with Sir Rowland Berkeley at Cotheridge, Worcestershire.
At the Restoration he was reinstated in his deanery and other ecclesiastical preferments. On 27 Dec. 1661 he was nominated by Charles II to the bishopric of Hereford, vacant by the death of Dr. Nicholas Monke. He was elected on 21 Jan. 1661–2, confirmed on 6 Feb., and consecrated at Lambeth on the 9th of the same month. ‘He became
