Richard Croke (or Crocus) (c. 1489–1558) was an English classical scholar and a royal tutor and agent.
Early life and education He was educated at Eton College.Concise Dictionary of National Biography. He took his BA at King's College, Cambridge in 1510 and proceeded to travel. He studied Greek with William Grocyn in London and Oxford and then with Erasmus and Aleander in Paris in 1511. In 1514, he was called to the University of Leipzig, where he remained for some years. Among his pupils were Joachim Camerarius, Hieronymus Dungersheim,M. A. Screech, Erasmus: Ecstasy and The Praise of Folly (1980), p. 25 who had studied with Croke in Dresden, and Caspar Creuziger. He was replaced by Petrus Mosellanus. As a young man, he was identified as a follower of Erasmus, who was then constructing his editio princeps of the New Testament in Greek (Basel, 1516).
Career He was recalled by John Fisher in 1519 to teach Greek at Cambridge. It had been in abeyance since Erasmus's time (1511–1513), and he was Cambridge's second lecturer in Greek.: "In 1519 Richard Croke was named Greek reader in Cambridge. He had been a pupil of Erasmus and of Grocyn, and, by the liberality of Archbishop Warham, had studied and taught for twelve years in the universities of Paris, Louvain, and Leipzig, thus meeting the Renaissance revival half-way to Italy. His Latin inaugural oration is one of the most curious documents we possess in illustration of English classical study during its first days. It is a splendid, if rhetorical, eulogy of Greek literature and of Greek intellect". He became Public Orator at Cambridge in 1522, Fellow of St John's College, Cambridge in 1523, and Doctor of Divinity in 1524. He quarrelled with Fisher over college matters in the later 1520s.Mentioned in Catholic Cambridge (1983) by M. N. L. Couve de Murville and Philip Jenkins.
In 1529 and 1530, he acted for Henry VIII in Italy in the matter of the king's intended divorce from Catherine of Aragon; he had earlier tutored Henry in Greek. Croke later tutored the illegitimate Duke of Richmond and Somerset, his son. While seeking canon lawyers to support Henry's side of the argument, he also contacted humanists (such as Girolamo Ghinucci) and sought manuscripts.
On his return to England, he in 1531 became deputy vice-chancellor of Cambridge and vicar of Long Buckby, Nottinghamshire. A year later he moved to the University of Oxford.
He was a witness at the 1555 trial of Thomas Cranmer.
Works Ausonius (1515) Orationes Richardi Croci duos (1520)
Notes
References
Sources J. Przychocki, "Richard Croke's search for patristic mss in connexion with the divorce of Catherine", Theol. Studies. 1911; os-XIII: 285–295 J. T. Sheppard (1919), Richard Croke, a sixteenth century don: being the Croke Lecture for the May Term, 1919 Jonathan M. Woolfson (2000), "A 'remote and ineffectual Don'? Richard Croke in the Biblioteca Marciana". Bulletin of the Society for Renaissance Studies, 17:2, 1–11