BROOKE, Peter (1613-85), of Great Sankey, Prescot, Lancs., and Mere, Rostherne, Cheshire.

Brooke was the great-uncle of the leading Cheshire parliamentarian Henry Brooke* – although because Henry was a grandson of Thomas Brooke (Peter’s father) and his first wife, and Peter was a son with Thomas’s third wife, they were born within a few years of each other. The Brookes of Norton were a cadet branch of a minor Cheshire gentry family, the Brookes of Leighton.24Vis. Cheshire (Harl. Soc. lix), 45; Ormerod, Cheshire, iii. pt. 2, p. 680. Between the 1580s and the 1630s, the Brookes sold off a large part of their Cheshire estates, and it was perhaps the family’s declining fortunes that help to explain why neither Peter nor Henry appear to have attended university or the inns of court, or left any noticeable mark upon public life before the 1640s.25Supra, ‘Henry Brooke’.

Brooke served as an officer in the parliamentarian forces in Lancashire during the civil war, rising to the rank of major by late 1645.26Brereton Lttr. Bks. ii. 393, 401, 435, 436, 437. His motives in taking up arms against the king can only be surmised, although it is worth noting that he seems to have shared the Presbyterian religious sympathies of the area in southern Lancashire – the Sankey valley near Warrington – where he had taken up residence before the war. Having presumably resigned his commission in accordance with the Self-Denying Ordinance, he was returned as a ‘recruiter’ for the Lancashire borough of Newton on 26 March 1646. In what seems to have been a hotly contested election, a group of the freemen also returned another local Presbyterian gentleman, Colonel Richard Holland*. There is no record of this double return in the Commons Journal, but the man who emerged the victor was Brooke. As the owner of a house at Great Sankey, about five miles south of Newton, Brooke was probably no stranger to the freemen.27Lancs. RO, QSB/1/210/35; Cheshire RO, WS 1622, will of Thomas Brooke. Nevertheless, it is likely that he owed his return not to any proprietorial interest in the area but rather to his friendship with the Leghs of Lyme, who largely controlled the borough, and with the rector of the surrounding parish of Winwick, Charles Herle, who was one of England’s foremost Presbyterian divines.28Supra, ‘Newton’; infra, ‘Richard Legh’; JRL, Legh of Lyme corresp., Lttrs. to Richard Legh, folder 16: G. Bowdon to Legh, 23 Apr. 1651 [or 1659]; same to same, 30 Jan., 15 Apr. 1659; folder 19: C. Herle to Legh, 8 May 1657. In October 1646, Brooke was appointed (along with William Ashhurst*) one of four elders under Herle for the parish of Warrington in the fourth Lancashire Presbyterian classis.29LJ viii. 510. By the early 1650s, Brooke appears to have bought the rectory of Winwick, possibly to secure it for Herle.30CCC 2539; Pinckney, ‘Cheshire election of 1656’, 403.

Brooke’s eight committee appointments between taking the Solemn League and Covenant in the House, on 27 May 1646, and Pride’s Purge in December 1648, reveal no clear pattern as to his political priorities or allegiance in the House.31CJ iv. 625a; v. 15a, 28b, 51b, 90a, 278a, 336a; vi. 88b. The fact that he was granted leave of absence on three occasions during this period, once for the recovery of his health, tells its own story.32CJ iv. 663a; v. 90a, 285b. He was apparently too ill, or at least too far removed from Westminster, to participate in the Presbyterians’ struggles with the New Model army during the spring and summer of 1647. But he had recovered sufficiently to attend the House on 18 August, when he was named to a committee on an ordinance for revoking the legislation passed during the Presbyterian coup at Westminster between 26 July and 6 August and for punishing its ringleaders.33CJ v. 148b, 278a. He may have sought nomination to this committee in order to prevent it bearing too heavily upon the defeated Presbyterians, for on 20 August he was a teller with the Presbyterian grandee Sir Walter Erle in favour of limiting those proscribed under this ordinance to persons who had actually approved of the coup (a difficult fact to establish) and had not merely been present and been aware of the ‘force’ upon the Houses. Erle and Brooke lost this division to the Independent grandees Sir John Evelyn of Wiltshire and Sir Arthur Hesilrige.34CJ v. 280a.

Brooke was granted further leave of absence on 27 August 1647 and would be named to only one more committee that year, on 18 October. He was almost certainly away from Westminster when he was appointed, late in December, to oversee collection of assessment arrears in Cheshire and Lancashire.35CJ v. 285b, 336a, 400b. It is likely that he was still absent on 17 May 1648 when – with the second civil war looming – he, Raphe Assheton II* and Thomas Fell* were ordered to go down into Lancashire ‘to employ their best endeavours ... for the safety and preservation of that county’.36CJ v. 562b. His intermittent career as a Parliament-man stuttered into life again that autumn with his appointment on 1 November as a minority teller with the radical Independent MP Denis Bond against the question that the king’s answer to the proposition in the Newport treaty concerning the payment of public debts was satisfactory.37CJ vi. 67b. Brooke’s exclusion from the House at Pride’s Purge suggests that – in contrast to Bond – he was not averse to the treaty as such, and therefore his tellership is something of a puzzle, especially as the opposing tellers were the Presbyterian grandees Erle and Sir John Clotworthy. The mystery is compounded by his appointment to a five-man committee set up on 27 November for liaising with Sir Thomas Fairfax* in an effort to overturn orders for replacing Colonel Robert Hammond* with the radical officer, Colonel Ewer, as the king’s custodian on the Isle of Wight.38CJ vi. 88b; Gentles, New Model Army, 276-7. Whereas Bond doubtless welcomed the army’s increasingly belligerent stance towards the Newport treaty, Brooke’s appointment to this committee indicates that he himself was uneasy, to put it no more strongly, at the army’s menacing proceedings.

Brooke was among those Members secluded at Pride’s Purge in December 1648, although he had not offended the army sufficiently to warrant imprisonment.39A List of the Imprisoned and Secluded Members (1648, 669 f.13.62). Indeed, on 23 July 1649, having evidently taken the dissent to the 5 December 1648 vote – that the king’s answer to the Newport propositions was an acceptable basis for settlement – he was allowed to take his seat in the Rump.40CJ vi. 268a. He was active in the military administration of Lancashire under the Commonwealth.41SP28/211, ff. 629, 660. Moreover, he was willing to pass on information that his fellow Lancashire MP John Holcrofte had compared the commonwealth to the ancient tyrants of Athens.42Belvoir, PZ.2, f. 14. Brooke’s addition to the Cheshire bench in July 1652 is another sign of his political rehabilitation after Pride’s Purge.43C231/6, p. 244. However, he received only one appointment in the Rump – to a committee established on 12 November 1652 to decide the salaries of the judges at Westminster – which places him among the least enthusiastic of its Members.44CJ vii. 215a, 221b.

Brooke emerged during the 1650s as one of Cheshire’s electoral power-brokers. In about 1646 he had married the widow of one of the county’s leading gentlemen, William Marbury (brother of Thomas Marbury*); and in 1652, he purchased an estate at Mere, close to the main residence of perhaps Cheshire’s most illustrious parliamentarian family the Booths of Dunham Massey.45C6/41/32; Ormerod, Cheshire, i. pt. 2, p. 464. In 1655, he referred to himself as of Reddish, in the north-east of the county, where the Marburys owned a capital messuage.46Infra, ‘Thomas Marbury’; C6/41/32. In the summer of 1654, Brooke was one of the informal ‘caucus of gentlemen’ that agreed on the four candidates who were subsequently returned for the county in the elections to the first protectoral Parliament that July. Among the four men they selected was Brooke’s nephew Henry Brooke.47Supra, ‘Cheshire’; Cheshire RO, DDX/384/1, p. 173; Morrill, Cheshire, 287.

Although Brooke was one of the most active Cheshire magistrates under the protectorate, there are signs that he shared the suspicions of Sir George Boothe* and other leading county figures that the Cromwellian regime was merely a cover for military rule.48Morrill, Cheshire, 258, 289-90. John Griffith III* reported to Secretary of state John Thurloe* in March 1655 that at a meeting of the Cheshire militia commissioners for raising troops to secure the county in the wake of Penruddock’s royalist uprising, Brooke had ‘very much obstructed [proceedings] ... as far as in him lay, by declaring against raising any horse or foot at all and affirming his thoughts that his Highness [Oliver Cromwell*] had some other design therein than the late insurrections, with other aggravations’.49TSP iii. 304. Nevertheless, Brooke continued to serve on the commission; and in April 1655, he signed a declaration of the county’s JPs against ‘that dangerous design of late transacted by the old and grand enemies to the freedom and peace of this nation’.50CHES21/4, f. 327; TSP iii. 338. His troublemaking in March 1655 was probably a factor in his omission from the Cheshire commission for securing the peace of the commonwealth (whose task it was to assist the major generals) and what seems to have been his temporary removal from the county bench at some point in 1656-7.51C193/13/6, ff. 9v, 10.

But though Brooke was regarded with suspicion at Whitehall, he continued to play a central role in Cheshire politics. In the weeks preceding the elections to the second protectoral Parliament in August 1656, he was again one of the caucus of Cheshire gentry that met to choose suitable candidates for the county. The caucus had decided upon a strongly anti-militarist slate of John Bradshawe*, Richard Legh*, Thomas Marbury and Brooke himself, when Major-general Tobias Bridge* arrived in the county and presented four candidates of his own – and Bradshawe, Legh and Brooke were not among them. Bridge’s main concern, however, was to exclude the strongly anti-Cromwellian Bradshawe, and he agreed to accept the caucus’s other three candidates as long as they replaced the regicide with another gentleman. In the days immediately preceding the election, the ‘gentlemen confederates’, as the caucus became known, had several meetings at Richard Legh’s house at Lyme in order to firm up their electoral strategy, which included inviting Sir George Boothe to join them in place of Bradshawe. On election day, Boothe, Marbury, Legh and Brooke were returned for the county in that order, fending off a challenge from Bradshawe and Sir William Brereton*.52Supra, ‘Cheshire’; Cheshire RO, DDX/384/1, pp. 255, 257; Pinckney, ‘Cheshire election of 1656’, 404. It has been argued that Brooke was elected in 1656 largely on the basis of his supposed role as election manager for Richard Legh rather than through his own or his family’s interest in the county.53Pinckney, ‘Cheshire election of 1656’, 403, 410. Yet this seems a rather unflattering assessment of a man whose estate was not, it is true, among the largest in the county, but who had been at the centre of its political life since the early 1650s, when Legh was still a minor.

None of the four men returned for Cheshire in 1656 was among the 100 or so Members who were excluded from the House by the protectoral council as opponents of the government. Nevertheless, Boothe withdrew from the House in protest at the exclusions, and Brooke and Marbury voted against a motion on 22 September 1656 that the secluded Members apply to the council for ‘approbation’ to sit – which was interpreted as support for ‘the bringing in of the excluded Members into the House’ and was comprehensively defeated.54Bodl. Tanner 52, f. 166; CJ vii. 426b. Most of the MPs who voted with the noes have been accounted Presbyterians.55M.J. Tibbetts, ‘Parliamentary Parties under Oliver Cromwell’ (Bryn Mawr Univ. Ph.D. thesis, 1944), 127-9. Brooke would not let the issue of the secluded Members drop, declaring on 20 December – in support of a motion by the Presbyterian MP Thomas Bampfylde to admit ‘those that are left out’ – that ‘the restraint of Members may now be taken off; that, by a general consent, we may debate the business before us: all be admitted, else all go home’.56Burton’s Diary, i. 194.

Brooke was named to 16 committees in the second protectoral Parliament, and it is likely that he was by far the most active of the Cheshire MPs at Westminster.57CJ vii. 424a, 443a, 446a, 463b, 468a, 469a, 472a, 477a, 501a, 504a, 508b, 514a, 521b, 531b. Perhaps his most revealing appointment at Westminster before the spring of 1657 was to a committee set up on 22 December to consider a supplicatory petition from Charles Stanley, 8th earl of Derby.58CJ vii. 472a. The Stanleys had been the most powerful family in Lancashire until their royalism had undone them – it had been the 8th earl’s father who had presented Herle to the rectory of Winwick.59‘Charles Herle’, Oxford DNB. Brooke informed the House that the Stanleys were ‘in the most distressed condition of any [noble] family in England’ and required financial assistance to ensure that they did not ‘go a-begging’.60Burton’s Diary, ii. 80. If Brooke was speaking as a friend of the family here, rather than simply trying to win the 8th earl’s good opinion, it shows that the Leghs of Lyme were not his only influential connections in the north-west.

The issue that seems to have concerned Brooke most during his first few months back at Westminster was the perceived Quaker threat. He appears to have favoured the death penalty for the Quaker evangelist and alleged blasphemer James Naylor; and on 18 December 1656, he urged the House to pass a law against the sect as a whole, ‘else all the laws you make here will be to no purpose. They will overturn all laws and government unless you timeously strengthen the banks. They meet in thousands in our country [i.e. Cheshire] and certainly will overrun all, both ministers and magistrates.61Burton’s Diary, i. 89, 171. He also joined several Presbyterian Members in criticising a central plank of the Cromwellian religious settlement – that is, the ordinance for ejecting scandalous ministers. The triers and ejectors operated with too much severity, he insisted, and urged that a bill be brought in to remedy the ordinance’s defects.62Burton’s Diary, ii. 58, 60. Given his apparent desire to exclude the more extreme sects from toleration, his tellership on 18 March against retaining the word ‘recommended’ – as in ‘recommended to the people of these nations’ – in relation to the ‘confession of faith’ in the Remonstrance (the new protectoral constitution presented to the House early in 1657) is again something of a mystery.63CJ vii. 507a. The confession was intended by the Presbyterians to strengthen religious conformity.64Little and Smith, Cromwellian Protectorate, 43. Perhaps it was simply that Brooke favoured a more prescriptive term than ‘recommended’.

Several of Brooke’s committee appointments related to the Remonstrance and its offspring, the Humble Petition and Advice. He was included on the 27 March 1657 committee to attend the protector about presenting him with the new constitution, complete with an offer of the crown.65CJ vii. 514a. On 9 April, he was named to a committee for satisfying the protector’s scruples on the kingship question and explaining the House’s reasons for continuing to insist that he accept the crown.66CJ vii. 521b. According to one of Richard Legh’s correspondents, the people of Cheshire were thankful for Brooke’s and Legh’s ‘unwearied attendance’ in their places as MPs.67JRL, Legh of Lyme corresp., Lttrs. to Richard Legh, folder 16: G. Bowdon to Legh n.d. [but c.1657]. Both men were identified among the ‘kinglings’ at Westminster – that is, those MPs who had supported offering Cromwell the crown – and it was perhaps Brooke’s support for the Humble Petition which explains his restoration to the Cheshire bench by March 1658.68[G. Wharton], A Narrative of the Late Parliament (1658), 22 (E.935.5); C231/6, p. 388.

In the elections to Richard Cromwell’s Parliament of 1659, Legh and Brooke again stood as candidates for Cheshire, but this time they had only two seats to aim for rather than the four of earlier protectoral Parliaments. John Bradshawe also threw his hat in the ring, making for another hard fought contest, with Brooke reportedly offering to spend £1,000 towards defraying the charges of those that would vote for him.69Newton, House of Lyme, 199. Brooke’s and Legh’s leading supporters included not only parliamentarians – for example, Henry Brooke – but also a number of the county’s most prominent royalists.70Supra, ‘Cheshire’; Pinckney, ‘Cheshire election of 1656’, 423. Indeed, the two men’s opponents branded their electoral interest ‘the malignant party’.71Greater Manchester County RO, E17/89/26/1. Bradshawe, on the other hand, seems to have received strong backing from the county’s Quakers.72Supra, ‘Cheshire’; Newton, House of Lyme, 200. On the first day of the election, most of the county’s ‘ancient gentry’ appeared for Legh who duly secured the senior place.73Harl. 1929, f. 20. However, a contest then developed between Brooke and Bradshawe for the second place, in which tempers apparently ran very high. According to Bradshawe’s supporters, Brooke and his friends ‘forgot themselves by their passionate, spleenful and inconsiderate expressions and actions at the said election’.74Newton, House of Lyme, 201. With the sheriff on his side and willing to bend the rules in his favour, Bradshawe was declared the winner of the contest for the second place and was returned accordingly.75Supra, ‘Cheshire’; Pinckney, ‘Cheshire election of 1656’, 423. Addressing the voters, Bradshawe called Legh ‘a child’ and Brooke something even less complimentary (probably a bastard) and declared ‘it was not for the honour of the county to choose such’.76Harl. 1929, f. 20.

Brooke petitioned against Bradshawe’s return in 1659, and Legh helped to secure a prompt hearing of the case before the committee of privileges.77Legh, House of Lyme, 200; Greater Manchester Co. RO, E17/89/26/2. But when the election was debated in the committee of privileges on 14 April, the members voted by 17 to ten in favour of confirming Bradshawe’s return – although the parliamentary diarist Thomas Burton felt that ‘upon the whole, the opinion was that the whole election was void’ and that when the committee’s resolution was reported to the House ‘it will abide debate’ [i.e. stand a good chance of being overturned].78Burton’s Diary, iv. 430. But before the committee could report to the House, the army dissolved Parliament and brought down the protectorate.79Greater Manchester Co. RO, E17/89/26/1, 2.

The fear and resentment generated by the 1659 Cheshire election contributed significantly to the outbreak of Boothe’s Presbyterian-royalist rebellion that summer – particularly because Bradshawe’s victory seemed to suggest that the county’s Quakers and other radicals posed a threat to the traditional social and political order.80Supra, ‘Cheshire’. Brooke played a leading role in Boothe’s rising, as did the earl of Derby and Henry Brooke.81Clarke Pprs. iv. 32, 289; Nicholas Pprs. iv. 177; CJ vii. 778a. Richard Legh would doubtless have taken up arms too if he had not been imprisoned in May – possibly for his part in trying to overturn Bradshawe’s election.82Infra, ‘Richard Legh’. With the collapse of the rising after the rout of Boothe’s forces at Winnington bridge on 19 August, Brooke surrendered himself and was brought before the bar of the House on 13 September. He confessed his part in Boothe’s proceedings and was promptly disabled from sitting and committed to the Tower on charges of high treason ‘in levying war against the Parliament and Commonwealth’.83Clarke Pprs. iv. 293; CJ vii. 778a. On 1 October, he was removed from the Cheshire commission of peace.84C231/6, p. 442. He was released by Parliament on 25 February 1660 – four days after the secluded Members had been re-admitted to the House – and a few weeks later he was restored to the Cheshire bench.85CJ vii. 853a. His return to political favour did not please some former Rumpers, however, for when he resumed his seat in the Long Parliament shortly before it finally dissolved, in March

some of the Members had a mind to speak against him ... for his not owning himself a Member of the Parliament when he was called before them after the Cheshire business [Boothe’s rising]. But others (more modest and civil) spoke to their friends and so they to the rest, that he should be suffered to stay there without affront.86Nicholas Pprs iv. 200.

His services to the royal cause in 1659 were not forgotten after the Restoration. In July 1660, he was knighted, and in October, the earl of Derby appointed him one of his deputy lieutenants for Cheshire.87Cheshire RO, DLT/A11/102; Shaw, Knights of Eng. ii. 230. In 1676, the earl’s successor, William Stanley, 9th earl of Derby, appointed him a deputy lieutenant for both Cheshire and Lancashire.88Lancs. RO, DDTA 170, 171; Farington Pprs. ed. S.M. Farington (Chetham Soc. o.s. xxxix), 176-7.

Brooke died, intestate, on 30 November 1685 and was buried at Chorley on 3 December.89Harwood, ‘Brooke of Astley’, 223; Regs. of St Lawrence, Chorley ed. C.D. Rogers (Lancs. Par. Reg. Soc. cxxix), 68. The administration of his estate was granted to his son Richard on 15 July 1686.90Harwood, ‘Brooke of Astley’, 223. Brooke was the first and last of his line to sit in Parliament.