CRAGGS, JAMES (1657–1721), English politician, was a son of Anthony Craggs of Holbeck, Durham, and was baptized on the 10th of June 1657. After following various callings in London, Craggs, who was a person of considerable financial ability, entered the service of the duchess of Marlborough, and through her influence became in 1702 member of parliament for Grampound, retaining his seat until 1713. He was in business as an army clothier and held several official positions, becoming joint postmaster-general in 1715; and, making the most of his opportunities in all these capacities, he amassed a great deal of money. Craggs also increased his wealth by mixing in the affairs of the South Sea Company, but after his death an act of parliament confiscated all the property which he had acquired since December 1719. He left an enormous fortune when he died on the 16th of March 1721. It is possible that Craggs committed suicide.
His son, James Craggs the younger (1686–1721), was born at Westminster on the 9th of April 1686. Part of his early life was spent abroad, where he made the acquaintance of George Louis, elector of Hanover, afterwards King George I. In 1713 he became member of parliament for Tregoney, in 1717 secretary-at-war, and in the following year one of the principal secretaries of state. Craggs was implicated in the South Sea Bubble, but not so deeply as his father, whom he predeceased, dying on the 16th of February 1721. Among Craggs’s friends were Pope, who wrote the epitaph on his monument in Westminster Abbey, Addison and Gay.
CRAIG, JOHN (1512?–1600), Scottish reformer, born about 1512, was the son of Craig of Craigston, Aberdeenshire, who was killed at Flodden in 1513. After an education at St Andrews, and acting as tutor to the children of Lord Darcy, the English warden of the North, he became a Dominican, but was soon in trouble as a heretic. In 1536 he made his way to England, but failing to obtain the preferment he desired at Cambridge, he went on to Italy, where the influence of Cardinal Pole, who was himself accused of heresy, secured him the post of master of the novices in the Dominican convent at Bologna. For some years he was busy travelling in the Levant in the interests of his order, but a perusal of Calvin’s Institutes revived his heretical tendencies, and he was condemned to be burnt. Like the English scholar and statesman, Thomas Wilson, he owed his escape to the riot which broke out on the death of Paul IV. on the 18th of August 1559, when the mob burst open the prison of the Inquisition. After various adventures he reached Vienna, where he preached, and was protected by the semi-Lutheran archduke (afterwards the emperor) Maximilian II.
In 1560 he returned to Scotland, where in 1561 he was ordained minister of Holyrood, and in 1562 Knox’s colleague in the High Church. His defence of church property and privilege against the predatory instincts of the nobles and the pretensions of the state brought him into conflict with Lethington and others; but he seems to have condoned, if he was not privy to, Riccio’s murder. At first he refused to publish the banns of marriage between Mary and Bothwell, though in the end he yielded with a protest that he “abhorred and detested the marriage.” He had been associated with Knox in various commissions for the organization of the church, but he wished to compromise between the two extreme parties. From 1571–1579 Craig was in the north, whither he had been sent to “illuminate those dark places in Mar, Buchan and Aberdeen.” In 1579 he was appointed chaplain to the young James VI., and returned to Edinburgh. In 1581 episcopacy was abolished as a result of the report of a commission on which Craig had sat; he also assisted at the composition of the Second Book of Discipline and the National Covenant of 1580, and in 1581 compiled “Ane Shorte and Generale Confession” called the “King’s Confession,” which was imposed on all parish ministers and graduates and became the basis of the Covenant of 1638. He approved of the Ruthven raid, and admonished James in terms which made him weep, but produced no alteration in his conduct, and before long Craig was denouncing the supremacy of Arran. But he was averse from the violence of Melville, and was willing to admit the royal supremacy “as far as the word of God allows.” James VI., like Henry VIII., accepted this compromise, and the oath in this form was taken by Craig, the royal chaplains and some others. In 1592 was published Craig’s Catechism. He died on the 12th of December 1600.
See T. G. Law’s Pref. to Craig’s Catechism (1885); Bain’s Cal. Scottish State Papers; Reg. P. C. Scotl.; Hew Scott’s Fasti Eccles. Scot.; Knox’s, Calderwood’s and Grub’s Eccles. Histories; McCrie’s Life of Melville; Hay Fleming’s Mary, Queen of Scots; Bannatyne’s Memorials. (A. F. P.)
CRAIG, SIR THOMAS (c. 1538–1608), Scottish jurist and poet, was born about 1538. It is probable that he was the eldest son of William Craig of Craigfintray, or Craigston, in Aberdeenshire, but beyond the fact that he was in some way related to the Craigfintray family nothing regarding his birth is known with certainty. He was educated at St Andrews, where he took the B.A. degree in 1555. From St Andrews he went to France, to study the canon and the civil law. He returned to Scotland about 1561, and was admitted advocate in February 1563. In 1564 he was appointed justice-depute by the justice-general, Archibald, earl of Argyll; and in this capacity he presided at many of the criminal trials of the period. In 1573 he was appointed sheriff-depute of Edinburgh, and in 1606 procurator for the church. He never became a lord of session, a circumstance that was unquestionably due to his own choice. It is said that he refused the honour of knighthood which the king wished to confer on him in 1604, when he came to London as one of the Scottish commissioners regarding the union between the kingdoms—the only political object he seems to have cared about; but in accordance with James’s commands he has always been styled and reputed a knight. Craig was married to Helen, daughter of Heriot of Lumphoy in Midlothian, by whom he had four sons and three daughters. His eldest son, Sir Lewis Craig (1569–1622), was raised to the bench in 1604, and among his other descendants are several well-known names in the list of Scottish lawyers. He died on the 26th of February 1608.
Except his poems, the only one of Craig’s works which appeared during his lifetime was his Jus feudale (1603; ed. R. Burnet, 1655; Leipzig, 1716; ed. J. Baillie 1732). The object of this treatise was to assimilate the laws of England and Scotland, but, instead of this, it was an important factor in building up and solidifying the law of Scotland into a separate system. Other works were De unione regnorum Britanniae tractatus, De jure successionis regni Angliae and De hominio disputatio. Translations of the last two have been published, and in 1910 an edition of the De Unione appeared, with translation and notes by C. S. Terry. Craig’s first poem, an Epithalamium in honour of the marriage of Mary queen of Scots and Darnley, appeared in 1565. Most of his poems have been reprinted in the Delitiae poëtarum Scotorum.
See P. F. Tytler, Life of Craig (1823); Life prefixed to Baillie’s edition of the Jus feudale.
CRAIGIE, PEARL MARY TERESA (1867–1906),
Anglo-American novelist and dramatist, who wrote under the pen-name of “John Oliver Hobbes,” was born at Boston, U.S.A., on the 3rd of November 1867. She was the elder daughter of John Morgan Richards, and was educated in London and Paris. When she was nineteen she married Reginald Walpole Craigie, by whom she had one son, John Churchill Craigie: but the marriage proved an unhappy one, and was dissolved on her petition in July 1895. She was brought up as a Nonconformist, but in 1892 was received into the Roman Catholic Church, of which she remained a devout and serious member. Her first little book, the brilliant and epigrammatic Some Emotions and a Moral, was published in 1891 in Mr Fisher Unwin’s “Pseudonym Library,” and was followed by The Sinner’s Comedy (1892), A Study in Temptations (1893), A Bundle of Life (1894), The Gods, Some Mortals, and Lord Wickenham. The Herb Moon (1896), a country love story, was followed by The School for Saints (1897), with a sequel, Robert Orange (1900). Mrs Craigie had already written a one-act “proverb,” Journeys end in Lovers Meeting, produced by Ellen Terry in 1894, and a three-act tragedy, “Osbern and Ursyne,” printed in the Anglo-Saxon Review (1899), when her successful piece, The Ambassador, was produced at the St James’s Theatre in 1898. A Repentance (one
