BROKEMAN, John

Brokeman came from a minor gentry family established in Essex, a considerable distance away from the borough he represented in Parliament. His mother had inherited the manor of Fryers in Bocking, and also (through her own mother) Powers Hall in Witham, and he himself was to retain an interest there.7 Morant, ii. 107-8, 386; Essex Feet of Fines, iv. 72. However, he first appears in the records as a ‘gentleman’ living at Ashford in Kent, who along with a kinsman, William Brokeman, also described as a ‘gentleman’, purchased a royal pardon on 7 July 1450. This was in the immediate aftermath of Cade’s rebellion, and it may be speculated that the Brokemans obtained their pardons as an insurance against prosecution for misdemeanours committed in the county prior to that event.8 CPR, 1446-52, p. 366.

Brokeman’s election to the Parliament of 1453-4, for the Dorset borough of Wareham, came about almost certainly as a consequence of his links with Edmund Beaufort, duke of Somerset, who held the nearby lordship and castle at Corfe. The borough itself belonged to Richard, duke of York, Somerset’s rival for power at the centre of government, but it may be that pressure was brought to bear on the burgesses to return MPs acceptable to the Lancastrian court and demonstrably loyal to Henry VI. Alternatively, the local tenants of Duke Richard may have been reluctant to become involved in national politics then weighted so heavily against their lord. This was the first Parliament to meet after York, backed by a sizeable army at Dartford, had failed to persuade the King to bring Somerset to account for his failure to defend the English possessions in Normandy. Elections resulted in a House of Commons heavily dominated by the royal household and men linked to York’s opponents. That Brokeman was a retainer of the Beauforts finds confirmation in his later activities. As ‘of Ashford, esquire’ he stood surety at the Exchequer on 5 Nov. 1457 for Edmund’s successor in the dukedom, the young Henry Beaufort, when he was given the keeping of the Isle of Wight and Carisbrooke castle (replacing his mother Eleanor, dowager duchess of Somerset, as custodian). The grant, marking Beaufort’s first military command, also reflects on the rivalry between him and York, for York had once been lord of the Isle of Wight. As Brokeman again stood surety for Duke Henry on 20 Mar. 1458 when he was awarded keeping of the lordships of Cookham and Bray, in Berkshire, it seems clear that he was a member of his personal entourage.9 CPR, 1452-61, pp. 390, 423.

At that time Brokeman himself was holding office as escheator in Kent and Middlesex. Further royal appointments were to follow after Somerset was made captain of Calais in the autumn of 1459. On 26 Nov., in a grant made at Coventry, where Parliament was sitting, Brokeman received a licence to collect the taxes called ‘sandgelt’ levied on all carts laden with goods passing through Mark and Oye in the march of Calais. Although this was a potentially lucrative grant (a successor was to be allowed to charge 7d. on every cart entering the town),10 DKR, xlviii. 439. owing to the military situation at Calais he probably never collected a penny. He may have been with Duke Henry’s forces which tried in vain to wrest Calais from the earl of Warwick in the course of the next six months. It is not recorded whether, having failed in the attempt, he then followed Somerset to France and back to England in the autumn of 1460, and went on to serve under his command in the Lancastrian forces in the crucial battles of 1460-1.Somerset was attainted in the first Parliament of Edward IV’s reign, but surrendered Bamburgh castle to the Yorkists in December 1462 and came to terms with the King soon afterwards. Edward restored him to favour with a speed that shocked contemporaries, granting him a full pardon and reversing his attainder in the Parliament which sat from 29 April to 17 June 1463.11 Oxf. DNB, ‘Beaufort, Henry’. Crucially, it was then that Brokeman too formally made his peace with the new regime. On 28 May he secured a pardon, as ‘esquire alias gentleman’ and former escheator, of all offences committed by him and all forfeitures, debts and accounts due to the King before the previous October.12 CPR, 1461-7, p. 267.

Duke Henry was not to remain reconciled to the Yorkist King for long, and his rebellion led to his execution at Hexham in May 1464. Yet, remarkably, his retainer Brokeman survived his fall. Among the estates which the duke had held at the time of his attainder were a messuage, dovecote and 450 acres of land worth £5 p.a. in Birchington and Monkton, on the Isle of Thanet. By virtue of a grant for life made by Edward IV on 2 Mar. 1466, Brokeman occupied the same and also took the revenues accrued over the previous two years. Furthermore, on 18 July 1468 this grant was confirmed to him and his male issue.13 CIMisc. viii. 358, 448; CPR, 1461-7, pp. 445-7; 1467-77, p. 108. Yet despite the King’s generosity Brokeman made the political miscalculation in the spring of 1470 of supporting the duke of Clarence and his ally the earl of Warwick in their rebellion, and on 25 Apr. an order went out to John Roger III* to seize his landed possessions and moveable goods. Brokeman hastened to secure a general pardon, which was granted just 11 days later,14 CPR, 1467-77, pp. 208, 218. and although his kinsman, William Brokeman of Ashford, evidently supported the Readeption of Henry VI (and was fined accordingly when Edward IV regained his throne in 1471),15 CPR, 1467-77, p. 301. he himself emerged unscathed from the turmoil of those years of civil war.

That he did so may perhaps be attributed to his marriage to one of the sisters of Thomas St. Leger, the lover and eventual husband of Edward IV’s sister Anne, duchess of Exeter. Precisely when Brokeman’s marriage took place is uncertain, although it happened before the chancellorship of the bishop of Bath and Wells, for it was to this chancellor (either in the years 1467-70 or 1471-3), that St. Leger’s sisters, Margaret, Lady Clinton (now married to Walter Hungerford), and Florence Brokeman addressed petitions concerning the will which their father, John St. Leger, had made some 30 years earlier in 1441. At that time Florence, Margaret and their sister Alice had all been aged under 16 and unmarried: their father instructed his executors to give each of them 100 marks as a dowry, with provision that if one of them died the survivors should share her portion. Alice had died unwed, but their father’s executor, Laurence Miller, who retained goods worth £100 or more in his possession, refused to make payment to her sisters. The case continued in the summer of 1475, the petitioners then insisting that the bequest had been made ‘in the presens and hieryng’ of Miller, in whom St. Leger placed ‘gret trust and confidence’.16 Reg. Chichele, ii. 611-15; C1/10/287, 47/109, 71/138; C4/48/175. As the widow of John Clifford, Florence must have brought to her second marriage a dower portion of lands in Kent, but their precise location has not been discovered. Brokeman long remained on good terms with his wife’s brothers, three of whom acted as feoffees of his holdings in Essex.17 Essex Feet of Fines, iv. 72.

In 1474 Brokeman’s tenure of the former Beaufort estate granted him by Edward IV came under challenge from John Davy and Robert Drope, who alleged that before Edward’s accession it had been held by Davy, and that his feoffees had been wrongfully expelled when inquisitions found that it belonged to the duke of Somerset. An inquiry conducted on 20 Sept. that year found for the petitioners, although noted that the duke had indeed received the profits of the estate, by an undisclosed title; the matter was still unresolved in May 1477.18 CPR, 1467-77, pp. 445-6; CIMisc. viii. 448. Even so, Brokeman managed to keep hold of the property. His activities during the remainder of the reign were those to be expected of a landed gentleman, and although he was never appointed to royal commissions, he was named in positions of trust as a feoffee of property in Kent, and (on behalf of Sir William Fynderne†), in Cambridgeshire and Suffolk.19 CCR, 1468-76, no. 1586; CAD, v. A10788. A further political crisis came with the usurpation of Richard III in 1483. Brokeman’s brother-in-law Sir Thomas St. Leger rose in rebellion and was beheaded, but Brokeman himself and another brother-in-law, James St. Leger, were more circumspect in their dealings with the new King. On 24 Dec. that year they and Richard Feldyng, the London merchant, managed to obtain the wardship of Richard Warre, heir to lands in the West Country previously held by his kinsman Richard Warre* of Hestercombe, for which they paid 200 marks,20 CFR, xxi. no. 782. They retained the wardship until Warre came of age in 1491: CIPM Hen. VII, i. 616. and Brokeman was granted a royal pardon on 1 Mar. following.21 C67/51, m. 26. He was described as an esquire or gentleman, formerly of Witham and London. There is no hint of his movements around the time of the battle of Bosworth.

Brokeman had been named with Bartholomew and John St. Leger as an executor of their brother Sir Thomas, whose attainder was reversed in Henry VII’s first Parliament, and in February 1494 they made a quitclaim of £78 due to them by judgement of the chancellor from the abbot and convent of St. Peter’s abbey at Chertsey, for a chest containing various silver vases, which sum was to be paid to the King’s mother (Margaret Beaufort, countess of Richmond) to hold to the use of Sir Thomas’s daughter Anne.22 CCR, 1485-1500, no. 713. Otherwise, Brokeman was engaged in lawsuits arising from his trusteeship of the manor of Hale on the Isle of Thanet for John Septvans, and of other manors in Kent for Richard Lovelace. In both cases the claimants asserted that he had failed to deliver seisin as required. He expressed his willingness to do as the court of Chancery awarded.23 C1/65/128; C4/14/22.

Brokeman lived to old age, eventually dying on 23 Sept. 1500, nearly 50 years after he had sat in Parliament. He was buried in the church near the family home at Witham, where his widow joined him in due course.24 CFR, xxii. nos. 686, 694; CIPM Hen. VII, ii. 432. Morant, ii. 108, gives his date of death as 22 Aug., presumably from the inscription on the tomb. Their son, Thomas, aged 23, inherited the family manors at Witham and Fryers in Bocking, and also the property at Birchington and Monkton granted to our MP in tail-male by Edward IV. However, he decided to sell the latter estate in 1534.25 Morant, ii. 108, 386; CAD, vi. C7486.