Edward Crowley

Born: 17 August 1829.^[1]

Died:   5 March 1887.

View Edward Crowley's writings.

The father of Aleister Crowley. Edward Crowley was born on 17 August 1829 and although he is described in the 1851 census as an engineer like his older brother Jonathan, Aleister Crowley noted that his father “was educated as an engineer, but never practised his profession.” Indeed, one wonders if he ever worked at all: Edward Crowley appears in postal directories and membership lists as “esquire,” indicating that he was upper gentry. The 1861 census lists his occupation/social status as “freeholder, householder,” while in 1881 he was “receiving income from houses and dividends.”

Around 1853, the brothers Edward and Jonathan partnered with Robert White, a zinc oxide manufacturer of King William Street, to form the company Crowley, White & Crowley. According to a notice in the Times, Robert White’s business partner, Langston Scott, had a patented process for manufacturing zinc oxide, which was a safe and economical substitute for white lead in the manufacture of paint; on his retirement on 13 October 1853, Scott vested the rights with Crowley, White & Crowley. Despite having won prizes at the Great Exhibition in Hyde Park in 1851 and securing the prestigious patronage of the Admiralty and the French government, the partnership dissolved in 1855. It is possible that Aleister Crowley alluded to his father’s business venture when he wrote in his commentary on The Book of the Law, “ ‘white’ is ‘what champaks, zinc oxide, sugar, etc., report to our eyesight.’ ”

Shortly after dissolving this partnership, Edward Crowley, aged twenty-six, retired to devote himself to religion. He had been a devout Quaker from childhood, the dying utterance of the family’s servant Anne—“Lost, lost, lost”—demonstrating to him the fate of those souls not saved by Jesus. Breaking from his family’s traditional Quaker roots, he became an Anglican clergyman, but eventually converted to the fundamentalist evangelical sect known as the Plymouth Brethren or Darbyists. By April 1861, he authored the tracts Letters Stating Sundry Reasons for Not Returning to the Church of England and Cease to do Evil; Learn to do Well. These were but the first of over one hundred that Edward Crowley would publish over the years as a preacher for the Brethren, earning him a mention in Knapp’s 1932 History of the Brethren.

Notorious for frequent internal schisms, the Brethren movement ironically began with one man’s protest against denominationalism. Edward Cronin (d. 1882), a Roman Catholic, moved to Dublin in 1825 and declined to affiliate with the local Anglican Church of Ireland. At a time when society judged men by their congregational membership, Cronin found himself ostracized by his neighbors. Citing Matthew 18:20 (“Where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them”), Cronin claimed anyone could celebrate the Lord’s supper, and thus began breaking bread with other religious outcasts. He claimed clerics, ministers, and priests were not only superfluous but also contrary to the will of God, since Matthew 18:20 clearly instructed worshipers to gather in the name of God, not of a priest.

Within two years (1827), his meetings attracted a follower in John Nelson Darby (1800–1882), who became so influential that his name was synonymous with the movement. In 1830, Darby left the Anglican priesthood to devote himself to the group, and his tract The Nature and Unity of the Church of Christ helped spread their message. In 1832, B. W. Newton invited Darby to organize his assembly in Plymouth and share its ministry. This he did, and Plymouth quickly became the movement’s center.

While Darby spent much of his time traveling to support the Brethren, Plymouth attracted 1,200 members by 1845, including generals and admirals, scholars and linguists, and even English lords and other nobility—including a cousin of Queen Victoria. When he returned to Plymouth in 1845, Darby discovered Newton attempting to establish an independent church with himself as pastor. This contradicted the nondenominational and nonclerical ethos of the Brethren, and ultimately, Darby excommunicated Newton and his followers.

Within two years, the Brethren split into two factions: the Open Brethren, who broke bread with good people of other faiths, and the Exclusive Brethren, led by Darby, who shunned all non-Brethren as sinners. It was but the first of a series of schisms that led the Exclusive Brethren to refuse friendship with adherents of other Brethren variants, earning them the distinction of being “the narrowest and most bigoted sect on earth.” In 1879, the Exclusive Brethren went so far as to excommunicate their founder, Edward Cronin. Today, various branches are known by the names Darbyites, Newtonites, Mullerites, Grantites, Kellyites, Stuartites, Ravenites, Taylorites, etc.

The Brethren believed the Bible—particularly the translation made by Darby—was divinely inspired and literally true. The faith was also pretribulational and premillenial: believers expected Jesus to return at any moment to rescue the faithful from the period of darkness about to begin. Long-term plans—including retirement and life insurance—disclosed lack of faith in Jesus’ imminent arrival. All answers lurked within the Bible, the inevitable “It is written” or “Thus saith the Lord” with which they settled disputes, earning the Brethren the sarcastic designation of “walking Bibles.”

Edward Crowley was a devout Exclusive Brother and a fiery, articulate clergyman. He distributed thousands of copies of his tracts through the mail and on the streets. He routinely took walking tours throughout England, where he would preach to the masses and draw large crowds for whom, at the time, proselytizing was a respected fad. At other times, he would simply stop unsuspecting fellows on the street and ask what they were doing; after they answered, he would reply, “and then?” This question would repeat until the other inevitably answered with something like, “Well, I suppose I shall die.” This was the opening Crowley waited for, when he would interject the phrase he was known for: “Then you’d better get right with God!” He would then add the wretched soul’s name and address to his book and for years afterward send religious literature. Edward Crowley traveled so extensively that he could tell a person’s hometown from his accent.

Eventually, he sold his shares in both the railway and the family brewery, reinvesting them in Amsterdam’s waterworks. This move was evidently prompted by his religious convictions: Aleister Crowley reported that “my father would refuse to buy railway shares because railways were not mentioned in the Bible” and later quoted his father as quipping sardonically that “he had been an abstainer for nineteen years, during which he had shares in a brewery. He had now ceased to abstain for some time, but all his money was invested in a waterworks.” The specific waterworks investments are unknown, but a likely contender is the highly successful Amsterdam Water Works Company, founded by English businessmen in 1865 and whose 1872 expansion drew thousands of workers to the company.

His new investment interests were quite likely what first brought him to the baths, spas, and waterworks of Leamington.

1—[Plymouth Brethren Archive: https://www.brethrenarchive.org/people/edward-crowley/]