Colonel Mitford Crowe (18 April 1669 – 15 December 1719) was an English diplomat, merchant, politician and colonial administrator who sat in the Parliament of England from 1701 to 1702 and served as the governor of Barbados from 1707 to 1710.

[1] On 18 March 1705, Crowe was appointed by the English Crown as a diplomatic envoy to the Principality of Catalonia to promote support there for the Habsburg candidate to the Spanish throne, Archduke Charles.

[6] At the Santa Eulàlia de Riuprimer, Crowe and a group of Austracists negotiated a military alliance between the Kingdom of England and Principality of Catalonia known as the "Pact of Genoa" on 17 May 1705.

[7][8] The alliance, which was signed in the local church, stipulated that (among other terms) the English would deploy an army of 10,000 men to Catalonia, supply Catalonian forces with military equipment, and the Catalans would recognise Archduke Charles as the King of Spain.

[10] In the same month, a Royal Navy fleet led by Sir Cloudesley Shovell (carrying on board a large English Army force commanded by Charles Mordaunt, 3rd Earl of Peterborough) set sail for Catalonia to lay siege to Barcelona.

Shovell was ordered by his superiors to remain in contact with Crowe to determine when to attack the city, who dispatched reports to the fleet claiming that the Catalonians were eager to rebel.

[1] These actions made him extremely unpopular among the Barbadian establishment, who accused him of "siding with factions, possessing an arbitrary attitude, and acting as the supreme legal authority of the island."

Further complaints were lodged that Crowe accepted bribes, imprisoned people without trial, committed indecent assault against the wife and sister of a prominent planter, and employed a Catholic as a personal servant; British historian J. D. Davies noted that the final charge was "perhaps most damning of all" given the dominance of Protestantism in Barbados.

[16] After the Privy Council hearing, Crowe "virtually... retired from public life" and began associating with a group of individuals which included Anglo-Irish clergyman and satirist Jonathan Swift.

According to an English army officer and author Henry Manners Chichester, Crowe appeared to have been on "terms of intimacy" with Swift, whose letters published in London from 1710 to 1712 make numerous references to him.

[1][19] According to historian Chris Taylor, Crowe also adopted new tactics in dealings with the Caribs which marked a noticeable shift from previous English colonial policies towards indigenous Caribbeans.

[20] In 1707, Crowe persuaded seven Carib chiefs from St. Vincent to sign a treaty with the Crown through gift-giving, which Taylor claims was unlike previous colonial administrations in the West Indies, who had sought to impose their will on indigenous peoples by force.