![]() His father was eventually forced to sell off his meagre estate to settle debts ‘he was no ways liable to’, obliging Craggs to make his own way in the world. The future MP’s family were thus impoverished minor gentry, socially only a little superior to the yeomanry. Thomas Craggs’s elder son John settled in Ireland, leaving Anthony in possession of the small and scattered Wolsingham lands. Vital ‘deeds and principal writings’ relating to the family’s past were said to have been destroyed or lost. In the Civil Wars his grandfather Thomas Craggs, ‘a great stickler in the royal cause’, apparently suffered grievously from the plunderings of Scots forces. Craggs’s forebears were only properly traceable back to mid-Tudor times, a minor gentry family ‘anciently’ situated in the parish of Wolsingham, county Durham. It suggested, but did not prove, his descent from the ancient Scottish family of Craig or Cragg. The pedigree drawn up for him and registered at the College of Arms in 1691 cannot entirely be taken on trust. In the later 1680s, even before his rise to fortune and prominence, he was at pains to establish his gentility and right to bear arms. 5Ĭraggs’s penchant for money-making may well have been nurtured by the financial decay which had overcome his family by the last decades of the 17th century. He rubbed shoulders with politicians of the first rank but was not overtly ambitious, seeming to be content with the conscientious servitude demanded by his role as the Duke of Marlborough’s (John Churchill†) principal intermediary, a position which in any event raised him in the echelons of Whig leadership in the final years of Anne’s reign, and yielded its own opportunities for the further acquisition of wealth. Beneath his gruff charm lay acute discernment, a ‘talent in reading men’ and for ‘gaining on the minds of those he dealt with’. Even his detractors acknowledged his superiority in matters of business and finance. He was remembered by his friend Arthur Onslow† as ‘a great instance of the force of natural talents’ and as a man of great facility in everything he undertook. A shrewd financial operator, he had amassed a considerable fortune by the time of his death. 4 BiographyĬraggs was one of the ablest self-made men of his generation. rebuilding Chatham, Harwich and Portsmouth 1709. stating debts due to army 1700 trustee, receiving loan to Emperor 1706 commr. of Jacob Richards, corn chandler, of Westminster, 3s. Ferdinando Morcroft, DD, of Goswich, Lancs., rector of Stanhope-in-Wardell, co.
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