BROOKE, Thomas (1614-58), of Great Oakley, Northants.

Having settled at Astwell, Northamptonshire, by the early fifteenth century, the Brookes exchanged their property there for the manors of Rushton and Great Oakley, about 20 miles north of Northampton, in 1471.1Leics. RO, 26D53/639, 646; Bridges, Northants. ii. 325. Brooke was a minor when he succeeded his father, who had assigned the supervision of his children’s education to his widow and the overseers of his will – of whom one was the godly Northamptonshire knight Sir Edward Montagu†, and another, his own father Sir Thomas Brooke.2PROB11/137, f. 189. Sir Thomas, too, was a prominent figure within the county’s godly community, but tended to sponsor a ‘more radical, nonconforming type of minister’ than those favoured by his friend Montagu.3J. Fielding, ‘Conformists, Puritans, and the Church Courts: the Diocese of Peterborough 1603-42’ (Birmingham Univ. PhD thesis, 1989), 24-6, 77, 79.

Although appointed to the Northamptonshire bench in 1641, Brooke was not trusted with local office by Parliament until 1647, and apparently played no part in the civil war. Appointed a colonel in the county militia in 1650, he was charged by the council of state with securing suspects and impounding weapons over the winter of 1650-1.4CSP Dom. 1650, pp. 505, 568; 1651, pp. 12, 25. In March 1651, the council ordered him to ready a troop of horse at Northampton in the event of Scottish invasion.5CSP Dom. 1651, p. 71.

Brooke was selected by the council of officers to represent Northamptonshire in the 1653 Nominated Parliament. He was one of 19, generally obscure, men who appear to have been nominated at a later stage than the majority of MPs, which may well indicate that they were chosen because some of the original nominees had been considered politically unreliable, or, more likely, because they had refused to sit.6Woolrych, Commonwealth to Protectorate, 139-40. He was named to only four committees in this Parliament, including that for Scottish affairs and a standing committee, set up on 20 July, for oversight of the poor and the commissions of peace.7CJ vii. 283b, 287a. As ‘Colonel Brooks’, he was added on 13 September to a bill for mulcting Catholic recusants.8CJ vii. 317b; Woolrych, Commonwealth to Protectorate, 306. An anonymous pamphleteer listed him among those members of the Nominated Parliament who favoured a publicly-maintained ministry – a claim supported by his appointment in August 1654 as a Cromwellian ejector for Northamptonshire.9Woolrych, Commonwealth to Protectorate, 412.

Brooke was returned for the county in the elections to the first protectoral Parliament in the summer of 1654 and was included (as were his five fellow county Members) on the list of Commons-men approved by the council early in September.10Severall Procs. of State Affaires, 258 (31 Aug.-7 Sept. 1654), 4093 (E.233.22). However, he made no recorded impression upon the proceedings of this Parliament, and it is not certain that he ever took his seat in the House. With his brother-in-law, the Cromwellian major-general William Boteler*, he was active during the mid-1650s in securing Northamptonshire against royalist insurrection, in suppressing ‘of all profaneness’ and in enforcing the decimation tax.11CSP Dom. 1655, p. 93; TSP, iv. 235.

Brooke died in the spring of 1658 and was buried at Great Oakley on 22 March of that year.12Vis. Northants. 1681, 28. He had drawn up his will three years earlier while in good health specifically to provide for his younger children; and had amended it in October 1657. He bequeathed £800 apiece to three of his daughters; £400 to each of his two younger sons; and charged his estate with annuities worth £545 a year.13PROB11/289, ff. 197-198v. Among his legatees was the minister of Great Oakley, and Brooke’s household chaplain, Francis Dandy, who would be ejected from the living in 1662 for his Presbyterian convictions.14Calamy Revised, 156. None of Brooke’s immediate descendants sat in Parliament.