Immortal diarist
ROBERT BLAKE
John Wilson Croker (1780-1857) should be remembered for one thing even if all else about 4im is forgotten: he invented the name of onservative' which was adopted by Peel at the time of the Reform Bill crisis and has been the official title of the party ever since. But in fact Croker is usually remembered for less favourable reasons. He had the misfortune to incur the enmity of the two most articulate Persons of the day, Macaulay and Disraeli; and the fact that they belonged to opposite political parties seemed to make their joint censure all the more conclusive.
Macaulay privately described him as 'a bad, a very bad man : a scandal to politics and letters,' and publicly trounced his edition of Boswell's Life of Johnson with unmitigated ferocity in one of his best-known essays. Disraeli made no direct attack, but his portrait of Rigby, Lord Monmouth's toady, creature and factotum in Coningsby, is unmistakable. Croker, though not involved in the more scan- dalous side of the life of the Marquess of Hertford (the real Monmouth), did act as his political agent, and inherited £20,000 in his will: it would have been a far larger sum but for some legal irregularities.
It is clear that neither Macaulay nor Dis- raeli was being either objective or fair. Macaulay was influenced by the bitter battle which he had with Croker during the Reform Bill debates, and Disraeli believed, perhaps ',correctly, that Croker had blackballed him for the Athenaeum, a club which had been founded by—among others—Isaac D'Israeli and Croker himself.
In fact, Croker, though a rigid Tory in certain matters—he and Peel parted irrevo- cably over the Corn Laws—was by no means a total reactionary. He supported Catholic emancipation, a decimal currency, and a uniform world temperature scale. If he was in favour of rotten boroughs, he was also in favour of gas lighting and railways.
No doubt he was narrow and sarcastic, but he was honourable and efficient; and he began his long tenure as First Secretary of the Ad- miralty, which he held from 1809 to 1830, by refusing to sign the monthly requisition for cash from the Paymaster of the Marines because of what turned out to be a well-justi- fied suspicion of major defalcations. The worst thing that Croker did was his review of Keats's Endymion in the Quarterly and. as Mr Poole says, this was 'a grossly unfair attack even by the standards of the age.'
What matters about Croker is none of these things. He goes down to posterity not as an essayist, orator, or second-eleven Tory poli- tician, but as a diarist and letter-writer. His is the immortality of Wraxall, Creevey. Greville —and Harold Nicolson. He knew everyone— anyway in the Tory world. He was on the inside of many a political crisis and intrigue. He was on intimate terms with the Duke, Peel, Liverpool, Canning, Stanley, Graham, Bentinck and a host of others. He observed and he recorded. The Croker Papers were first published in 1884, in three volumes edited by Louis Jennings, whose friendship with Lord Randolph Chur- chill and its tragic ending was vividly described
by Sir Winston in his great life of his father.
Those who possess the Jennings edition, long out of print, will remain content with it, for Mr Poole's new abridged version contains nothing not published before. But for new readers Mr Poole's book is admirable, beauti- fully produced with an excellent introduction, and including all the best things. Croker's Wellingtoniana alone would make it a pleasure to read. Perhaps, too, this book will bring people back, as it has brought one reader, to the best thing ever written on Croker, Sir Keith Feiling's essay in his Sketches in Nine- teenth Century Biography, a little masterpiece of its genre.
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