John Crook, 1617-1699 : a Bedfordshire Quaker

Summary

On 26 April, 1699, at the age of eightyone years, John Crook died at Hertford and was laid to rest on 30 April in the Friends’ burial ground at Sewell, near Dunstable. Thus passed one of the most prominent of the early Quaker teachers and authors, of whom the Quaker historian Sewel wrote “This John Crook had been a man of note in the world, not only because he had been a justice of peace … but also because he was a man of good intellects; and yet his zeal for what he believed to be truth was such, that he became willing to bear the reproach of the world, that so he might enjoy peace with God.”

In his own story of his life Crook writes, “I was born in the North-Country, of Parents that were for Religion of the common Profession of the Times in which they lived” : later he says “About Ten or Eleven Years of Age I went to London, and there went to several Schools, until I was about Seventeen Years of Age” and again “I went to be an Apprentice about the 17th Year of my Age. About this time I was placed in a Parish in London, where was a Minister, who was in those Days called a Puritan.”

Crook served with the Parliamentary army during the Civil War and reached the rank of captain and on 27 April, 1647, at Tottenham High Cross, married Margaret, daughter of John Mounsell (born at Weymouth in 1586) and Mary Mercer. The Mounsells were Parliamentarian in their sympathies and Crook took action with the Committee for the Advance of money in the interests of his wife and her sister Mary, to procure for them the arrears of pay due to their brother, Captain Peter Mounsell, who had died on active service. In 1648 a child, John, was born to Crook and his wife at Cheapside, London, and another child, Peter, was born in the following year.

In 1649 an Act was passed for the sale of Crown Lands and the members of the Parliamentary army to whom arrears of pay were due made purchases of some of these.