Sir Richard Croft’s career spanned the entirety of the Wars of the Roses; he was able to adapt and maintain his prominence under each new political rule. Simon Payling from our Commons 1461-1504 project takes a look at his remarkable career and his commemoration in Croft Church.

The tomb of Sir Richard Croft, MP for Herefordshire in the Parliament of 1478, and his wife, Eleanor, dominates the small church of Croft, a few miles to the north of the Herefordshire market town of Leominster.  With the church itself, which Sir Richard was responsible for rebuilding, it stands as a memorial to a remarkable career sustained over a period of profound and sudden political fluctuations. That career spanned the Wars of the Roses in their entirety, and, at every turn in that long conflict, he was able to adapt and maintain his prominence under each new political dispensation. Most remarkably, he held high office in the households of the young prince of Wales, eldest son of Edward IV, of his deposer, Richard III, and then of Richard’s supplanter, Henry VII. If this is taken to show that he was a skilled political trimmer motivated only by self-interest, that would be unfair. He could commit himself wholeheartedly, as he did, most notably, when he took up arms for the house of York in the civil war of 1459-61 and fled into exile with Edward IV in 1470. It is best to see him as an able, if calculating, man who bowed to the inevitable when change came. In that he may stand as an unusually successful example, but such adaptability was a characteristic of the age in which he lived

Buried alongside him was his wife of some 50 years, Eleanor, a daughter of one of the leading Shropshire families, the Cornwalls of Burford, about ten miles from Croft. The couple married in 1460 when she was a young widow with two children. The match was an important factor in the success of Richard’s early career, for she had a life interest in the bulk of the lands of her first husband, Sir Hugh Mortimer of Kyre Wyard and Martley in Worcestershire.

This raised her new husband, even leaving aside the benefits that were soon to come to him through royal patronage in Edward IV’s reign, to the ranks of the leading gentry of the marcher counties. Their marriage was to be as fruitful as it was long.  They had eight children who lived long enough to make an impression in the historical record. 

Despite the troubled times in which he lived, Croft died a very old man (by the standards of the time).  He was about 80 when he drew up his will in the summer of 1509, leaving instructions for burial in the chancel of Croft church before the high altar and the image of St. Michael, to whom the church was dedicated. Whether the tomb had been completed by that date can only be a matter of speculation. The fact that his widow lived to be yet older suggests that it may not have been.  She survived until 1519, when she was in her mid-eighties (her first surviving child, Sir John Mortimer, had been born in about 1457 so she was probably born in about 1435), and it may be that the tomb was not completed until after her death.  If this was not the case, she would, assuming that both effigies were completed at the same time, have had the unnerving experience of being commemorated by an effigy for the last ten years or so of her life.  More speculatively, it is possible that the tomb chest and the effigies were not made at the same time, with the chest originally installed before the effigies.

Aside from the effigies, the most notable part of the tomb is its elaborately-decorated head with it four large images of saints, St. Sitha, St, Margaret, St. Roche and St. Anthony. 

Whether these were the choice of the commemorated cannot be known, but there are indications that they may have been.  The saint’s day of St. Sitha, the patron saint of maidservants, identified by the keys and purse hanging from her waist, fell on 27 April, which may have had a particular significance for Sir Richard.  He had been steward of the household of Prince Arthur at Ludlow, and, on that day in 1502, he had taken a prominent part in the prince’s funeral in Worcester cathedral. The two male saints may also have had some connexion to his service to the prince.  St. Anthony (traditionally represented, as here, with a pig), the patron a saint of animals amongst other things, also appears among the iconography of Arthur’s chantry chapel at Worcester.  He was one of the principal saints invoked as protection against the plague, as was St. Roche, represented with an angel pointing to a plague spot on his thigh.  Both may reference the ‘sweating sickness’, the probable cause of the prince’s death, and the survival of the Crofts through the visitations of that plague.  The fourth saint, St. Margaret of Antioch, shown with a dragon at her feet, was perhaps the choice of Dame Eleanor, who, as the mother of at least ten children, may have had a particular reverence for Margaret as the patron saint of child birth.

Further reading

C.S.L. Davies, ‘The Crofts’, Historical Research, lxviii. 241-65.