BROOKE, Sir John (1575-1660), of Heckington, Lincs.

Brooke was the last of a long and distinguished line of Kentish gentlemen. His father – a younger son of the 9th Baron Cobham – had represented Kent on several occasions in the Elizabethan period (as had several of Brooke’s uncles and cousins) and had endured four years as the queen’s ambassador in Paris.45HP Commons 1558-1603. Brooke began his career as a soldier, serving as a captain in France, the Netherlands and in Ireland during the last years of Elizabeth’s reign.46CSP Dom. 1595-7, pp. 445, 528; 1598-1601, pp. 51, 149, 156, 167; CSP Ire. 1598-9, pp. 487, 497; 1599-1600, p. 78; Chamberlain Lttrs. ed. McClure, i. 65-6. He was probably knighted with his elder brother and fellow soldier, Calisthenes, in 1597, and by 1599 he had secured a minor office at court.47LC2/4/4, f. 47v; Shaw, Knights of Eng. ii. 94; Chamberlain Lttrs. ed. McClure, i. 65-6.

With Sir Robert Cecil† (1st earl of Salisbury) as his likely patron, Brooke continued to enjoy the crown’s favour under James I, and as a gentleman of the privy chamber he was well placed to capitalise on the king’s largesse, receiving several annuities by royal letters patent.48SP23/193, p. 504; HMC Hatfield, vi. 477; xvii. 335; xxiv. 63; CSP Dom. 1611-18, p. 33. An enterprising and profit-hungry individual, he applied his energies to a variety of colonial ventures and acquired a stake in the mining and working of alum, the monopolies on soap and saltpetre and in the drainage of the fens.49E403/2985, p. 10; HMC Downshire, ii. 251; HMC Various, viii. 14; CSP Dom. 1623-5, p. 256; 1627-8, pp. 2, 303; 1634-5, p. 29; 1637, pp. 312, 365; 1638, p. 138; A Breviate of the Cause Depending (1655), 3, 4 (669 f.19.63); Brown, Genesis of the United States, ii. 834; A. F. Upton, Sir Arthur Ingram (1961), 122; HP Commons 1604-29, ‘Sir John Brooke’. In the alum works alone he claimed that he had invested £10,000, receiving an annuity of £800 from the crown that was apparently £11,000 in arrears by the 1650s.50Burton’s Diary, i. 186. It was probably to help fund this and other investments that he mortgaged his estate at Heckington for £7,000 to the countess of Rutland in June 1638.51C9/41/70; SP23/193, p. 503.

Brooke was a confirmed carpetbagger and generally secured a seat at Westminster through the influence of powerful aristocratic patrons, among them George Villiers, 1st duke of Buckingham.52HP Commons 1604-29, ‘Sir John Brooke’; Scarborough Recs. 1600-40 ed. M. Y. Ashcroft (N. Yorks. RO Publications xlvii), 141, 186. Brooke’s main residence during the 1630s seems to have been his manor of Heckington, in Lincolnshire.53E115/47/80; E115/49/110; E134/9CHAS1/EAST34; E134/12CHAS1/EAST2; Lincs. RO, 1-FANE/3/1/A/1. He continued to enjoy royal favour under Charles I, receiving a host of court related offices and an annuity upon the king’s letters patent of £100.54SP23/193, p. 504. His support for Charles’s Scottish policy was amply demonstrated during the first bishops’ war, when, at the age of almost 65, he served as standard-bearer of the king’s army.55CSP Dom. 1639, p. 99.

In the elections to the Long Parliament in the autumn of 1640, Brooke and the Irish peer Richard Boyle, Viscount Dungarvan were returned for the Westmorland constituency of Appleby. Dungarvan and very probably Brooke were returned on the interest of the Cliffords, who owned Appleby Castle, although the nature of Brooke’s connection with the family is not entirely clear.56Supra, ‘Appleby’. He was a kinsman and, it seems, either an acquaintance or friend of William Cecil*, 2nd earl of Salisbury, whose sister had married Henry Lord Clifford – which suggests that Brooke had been returned on the Clifford interest as a favour to Salisbury.57Infra, ‘William Cecil’; SP19/155, ff. 208, 210.

Although Brooke was residing in his house on King Street, Covent Garden – just a short walk from the Palace of Westminster – by 1641 at the latest, he does not appear to have attended the Commons on the regular basis.58E115/47/80; E115/49/110; Survey of London, xxxvi. 152, 305. He was named to just one committee during the opening session of the Long Parliament – that set up on 18 December 1640 to consider a petition from the Virginia adventurers and planters.59CJ ii. 54a. On 4 May 1641, the day after he took the Protestation, he complained to the Commons that he ‘had like to have been pulled apieces’ by the crowds outside Westminster Palace on the rumour that he had voted against the earl of Strafford’s attainder.60CJ ii. 133b; Procs LP iv. 191, 194. In fact, he had not voted with the Straffordians and desired that the Commons issue a declaration to satisfy the ‘vulgar’ on this score. Nevertheless, it is revealing of his political sympathies that the crowd had supposed him a supporter of the doomed courtier. Whereas Brooke kept a very low profile at Westminster after mid-May 1641 and may not have attended the Commons for over a year, his appointment as captain of Holy Island, Northumberland, on 4 January 1642 – which at his advanced age was virtually a sinecure – is evidence that he was regarded favourably at court.61CSP Dom. 1641-3, p. 237. His only appointment in the Commons in 1642 occurred on 18 July, when he was named to a committee to consider a petition from the nascent royalist faction in Lincolnshire.62CJ ii. 678a. Within a month he had abandoned his seat, for on 23 August, the Commons summoned him to attend the service of the House.63CJ ii. 733a.

Brooke was disabled by the Commons on 15 March 1643 for signing a warrant of the Lincolnshire commissioners of array, requiring the common people to give no assistance to the county’s parliamentary committee.64CJ iii. 1b-2a. His long association with the court and the many favours that he had received from the crown probably constituted his principal grounds for siding with the king during the civil war, although another possible motive was his apparent hostility towards the Scottish Covenanters. That he was no faint-hearted cavalier is evident from two letters that he wrote to the royalist and courtier Sir William Killigrew from Newark in March and April 1643, which were intercepted by Parliament and published.65CJ iii. 68b. In its preface to these letters, Parliament described Brooke as ‘great projector and monopolist’ and one of the king’s ‘evil counsellors’.66A Declaration of the Commons…upon Two Letters Sent by Sir John Brooks, sigs. A2, A4v. What particularly angered his erstwhile colleagues at Westminster was his opposition to the king concluding the treaty that was then being negotiated with Parliament’s commissioners at Oxford without first insisting on the re-admission of royalist MPs to the Commons.67Add. 31116, p. 94. It would not be possible, argued Brooke, for the king to receive right and honour ‘from the sixth or seventh part of the House who, as all the world knows, have traitorously plotted his ruin’ and the overthrow of ‘our religion, laws and liberties’.68A Declaration of the Commons…upon Two Letters Sent by Sir John Brooks, sig. B. Brooke’s advice was conveyed to the king by Killigrew, and it was regarded as sinister at Westminster that Charles had consequently done exactly as Brooke had urged and demanded the re-admission of the disabled Members – although if this was the work of evil counsellors then Brooke was probably too distant and obscure a figure to have been one of them. Much was also made of his notion that Charles should appoint commissioners to draw up lists of ‘rich notorious traitors’ who were to have their estates confiscated in order to pay the king’s debts ‘and recompense those that have adventured their lives and have spent their fortunes and have been undone by their plunderings’.69Add. 31116, p. 94; A Declaration of the Commons…upon Two Letters Sent by Sir John Brooks, sigs. B-Bv. Brooke evidently counted himself among this number, given that his wife had informed him that their house in London had been ‘plundered from the garrets to the cellar and all taken away to the bigness of a nut’.70A Declaration of the Commons…upon Two Letters Sent by Sir John Brooks, sig. B2. The London sequestrators had indeed seized goods worth £104 from Brooke’s Covent Garden residence and, in the process, had discovered in Lady Brooke’s closet ‘divers libels ... against the Parliament and some of the members thereof’.71SP20/1, ff. 10, 13, 19. Lady Brooke had also denounced Parliament verbally, and it was only after Sir Martin Lister* had interceded on her behalf that a few necessary household items were returned to her. When Brooke’s cousin Sir William Brooke died fighting for Parliament in the autumn of 1643, Parliament quickly passed an ordinance for sequestering his estate to prevent it descending to Sir John, his nearest male relative.72CJ iii. 257a, 269a; LJ vi. 248.

With the death of Sir William Brooke, Sir John became the last male member of the Kentish family that had borne the title of Baron Cobham from 1313 until 1619.73CP. Mindful of his distinguished ancestry, Brooke signed himself ‘Lord Cobham’ on the letter that the royalist peers addressed to the Scottish privy council in November 1643, pointing out the ‘confusion and desolation which must follow the unjust invasion of this kingdom’ by the Covenanters.74Clarendon, Hist. iii. 288. He was styled Sir John Brooke, however, when his name was included among those royalist MPs who had been ‘disabled by several accidents to appear sooner’ but having since ‘attended the service’ had concurred with the other Members in their letter Robert Devereux, 3rd earl of Essex of 27 January 1644, urging him to compose a peace.75Rushworth, Hist. Collns. v. 575. Brooke’s loyalty to the king was rewarded on 3 January 1645, when by royal letters patent at Oxford he was created Baron Cobham. This was a new creation – the old barony of Cobham having become extinct in the male line in 1619 – and was not recognised by the House of Lords.76LJ x. 72b, 157b.

Brooke was living in Oxford by the time it surrendered in June 1646 and petitioned to compound on the Oxford articles.77CCC 1230. He denied that he had ever borne arms against Parliament, and the Committee for Compounding* adjudged his delinquency to consist of residing at Oxford while it was a royalist garrison.78SP23/193, p. 503; CCC 1231. His estate in Lincolnshire and Kent was reckoned to be worth about £2,200 a year, but it was charged with rents of more than £600 a year and an annuity of £252 and was encumbered with debts of £13,827. His personal estate amounted to £640 and he was owed the same sum in ‘good debts’, including £500 in unpaid rents.79SP23/193, pp. 503-4, 509-17; CJ v. 194a. The committee fined him at a tenth of his estate – that is, £1,300.80CJ v. 194a. He spent most of the period 1648-50 at Wallingford House, Westminster, and Cobham Hall, Kent – both residences of the royalist grandee James Stuart, 2nd duke of Richmond. Brooke’s widow later alleged that Richmond and his secretary Thomas Webb* had ‘prevailed with’ her husband to abandon her and his friends and relations, and that they had then persuaded him to sell a ‘great part’ of his estate in Kent to the duke ‘at a cheap rate’ (Sir Martin Lister* was named among Brooke’s co-parties to this sale). It is not clear that Brooke had compounded for these Kentish properties, which were reportedly worth as much as £1,400 a year.81C6/106/139; C9/41/70; SP19/155, ff. 208, 210; Cust, ‘James Stuart’, 96, 101; Robertson, ‘Six wills relating to Cobham Hall’, 206-7.

Brooke presented a private bill to the second protectoral Parliament that would allow him to break the entail on his estate at Cooling, in Kent, so that it could be sold to satisfy his creditors. The bill’s passage through the Commons was halted on petition from the claimants to the estate in reversion – who included the wife of the former New Model army officer Matthew Thomlinson* – and after hearing counsel for both parties on 20 December 1656 the House debated the bill and then rejected it. One of the facts that appears to have influenced its decision was that Brooke had ‘contracted his debts in the king’s service’, whereas the claimants were the daughters of Sir William Brooke†, who had died fighting for Parliament. Nevertheless, the dispute had divided leading figures among the army interest in the House, with Major-general John Lambert and his close confederate Captain Adam Baynes having spoken in the bill’s favour and Major-general Thomas Kelsey and Major-general William Boteler having urged its rejection.82Infra, ‘Matthew Thomlinson’; CJ vii. 459a, 462b, 471b; Burton’s Diary, i. 184-190; HP Commons 1604-29, Sir William Brooke’.

According to his widow’s memorial tablet, Brooke died in the autumn of 1659, but that seems unlikely given that he was buried on 20 May 1660 at Wakerley, Northamptonshire, where his wife’s mother had been interred in 1657.83Allen, Lincs. i. 347; ‘Wakerley par. regs.’, Northants. N and Q, iii. 211; Robertson, ‘Six wills relating to Cobham Hall’, 208. He died without surviving children and apparently intestate; no will or letters of administration have been found.84CP.