Robert Cruttenden

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Robert Cruttenden (1690–1763) was a London merchant, a lay Methodist, and a hymn-writer. He was the son of Joseph Cruttenden, a wholesale apothecary. Although he was educated to follow his uncle, Rev Robert Bragge, into the Dissenting ministry, he left that path because of his Arian beliefs. In 1717 he started a bookselling and brokerage business in Cheapside, London, near the Mercers' Chapel. He speculated in the South Sea Bubble, built and then lost a fortune, and went bankrupt in 1721, moving to Finsbury.

Cruttenden was friends with Philip Doddridge and wrote poems. He translated a French version of Pindar’s Ode to Prosperina (1738) and published The Principles and Preaching of the Methodists Considered (1753). In 1742 he befriended the Methodist preacher George Whitefield after hearing John Cennick preach at the wooden Tabernacle. He rejoined the Lime Street Independent chapel near Leadenhall Market, where Bragge had been pastor, and became a lay elder. He experienced a spiritual conversion that Whitefield publicly described.

Cruttenden wrote several hymns, published after his death. He married Sarah Cliff on 3 September 1716 at the chapel of Saint Aske’s Hospital in Hoxton. They had three children: Edward Holden Cruttenden (1717–1771), who became a director of the East India Company; Joseph Cruttenden, an attorney and Clerk to the Royal College of Surgeons (1745–80); and Sarah Elizabeth Cruttenden (1725–1811), who married the surgeon Sir Percivall Pott. Some of his grandchildren were painted by Sir Joshua Reynolds.

Cruttenden died on 23 June 1763 and was buried in Bunhill Fields on 1 July 1763.