BRETT, Henry (1589-1674), of Cowley and Down Hatherleigh, Glos.

The Bretts were settled in Ansty in Warwickshire, to the east of Coventry, from the thirteenth century. Their eponymous home, Bret Hall, was dismissed by Sir William Dugdale four centuries later, as ‘of mean consideration’, and by then the family had long migrated to Rotherby in Leicestershire.20Dugdale, Warws. ii. 1039; Vis. Leics. 1619, 206. A connection with Ansty persisted, however: Henry Brett certified information about the church living there in 1628.21CSP Dom. 1628-9, p. 402. By the late sixteenth century, the Bretts seemed destined to marry into other parish gentry families. William, Henry’s father, made a typical alliance, with Anne Beaumont - the daughter of a knight, admittedly, but a woman whose sister Mary was a maid-in-waiting to Lady Beaumont of Cole Orton. Henry was the first-born of this marriage. William Brett was described as ‘gentleman’ in the parish register entry of his burial.22Rotherby par. reg. The fortunes of the Bretts were transformed very soon after Henry’s birth, however, when his aunt was taken up and married by Sir George Villiers, of Brooksby, the adjacent parish to Rotherby. The second son of this union was George Villiers, elevated to the peerage in 1616 and from 1623 1st duke of Buckingham. A critic of the culture of the court of James I described Buckingham’s parents, not inaccurately: ‘his father of an ancient family, his mother of a mean, and a waiting gentlewoman, whom the old man fell in love with and married’.23A. Weldon, Court and Character of King James (1817), 28; Oxford DNB, ‘George Villiers, 1st duke of Buckingham’.

By 1616, Buckingham was gaining an ascendancy over the king, and Henry Brett could only have benefited from his position in the penumbra of Buckingham’s family. His failure to complete a university degree suggests no particular aptitude for study on his part, and when they made their visitation of Gloucestershire in the 1680s, the heralds thought Brett became a chancery officeholder. Any appointment he may have had in that court eluded the chronicler of its various posts.24Al. Cant.; Vis. Glos. 1682-3, 25; T.D. Hardy, Principal Officers of Chancery (1843). Soon after his marriage to Margaret Rudd, Brett found himself caught in the flood tide of another spectacular rise at court. His sister Anne, ‘one of Buckingham’s needy relatives’, married Lionel Cranfield on 11 January 1621, as part of the strategy of the latter to rise to the highest offices and honours.25Old DNB, ‘Lionel Cranfield’; Gardiner, Hist. of Eng. iii. 213. In 1622, Cranfield was given the earldom of Middlesex and the lord treasurership.

Arthur Brett, Henry’s younger brother, was an immediate recipient of patronage from Cranfield’s apotheosis. By July 1622 he had become a gentleman of the privy chamber to the king, was reported in 1623 (incorrectly) as having received a knighthood, and between 1625 and 1641 furnished the by then disgraced Cranfield with news of court and Parliament.26CSP Dom. 1619-23, pp. 428, 495; Cent. Kent. Stud. U269/1/ON7748; HMC 4th Rep. app. 278, 289, 292, 295. One of the causes of Cranfield’s downfall centred on Arthur Brett himself, whom Cranfield apparently intended to promote as a rival to Buckingham:

The treasurer would have brought a darling Mr Arthur Bret, his countess’s brother, into the king’s favour in the great lord’s absence.27J. Hacket, Scrinia Reserata (1693), 189; CSP Dom. 1623-5, pp. 207, 212, 244, 302, 308, 310, 312, 332, 334.

Certainly, Arthur Brett was a witting and willing participant in his own advancement.28Cent. Kent Stud. U269/1/ON245. The benefits to Henry Brett by his sister’s marriage seem harder to calculate than those of his siblings. His wife may well have been the Margaret Brett whose household accounts remain among the Cranfield papers, to suggest that she enjoyed a significant position in the Cranfield retinue.29Cent. Kent Stud. U269/1/A450, A465. One of Cranfield’s estate stewards wrote to Henry Brett at Westminster in 1630, reporting a sale of wool - and thereby suggesting that Henry held office in Lord Treasurer Cranfield’s household. He certainly had a house at Westminster, where he lived by 1626, and his wife wrote to Cranfield in the mid-1630s, ten years after his downfall, to thank him for kindnesses towards her sons.30Cent. Kent Stud. U269/1/E186, CP 18; Westminster City Archives, E 152.

Brett’s marriage to the daughter of a Gloucester alderman, widow of the son of a former bishop of St David’s (Anthony Rudd, d. 1615), brought him into Gloucestershire property, and particularly Gloucestershire church property. It was surely by these means, and by his connections in the city of Westminster that Brett acquired a lease of Cowley manor in 1630, from the dean and chapter of Westminster Abbey, a lease that he retained until his death.31WAM 8393; Glos. Shire Hall deeds, DC/E88/16. Brett’s name no longer appears as a Westminster householder after 1627, and he seems then to have removed to Gloucestershire, leaving his son George to represent the family in London in the 1630s.32Westminster City Archives, E152, E153. Henry was drawing on his links with Westminster Abbey as a farmer of one of its more distant manors, through his wife’s Gloucester city ancestry, and through the Cranfields, who enjoyed extensive estates in Gloucestershire and Warwickshire. It was really the achievement of his alderman late father-in-law that was honoured when Brett was made a freeman of Gloucester in 1629, and he only became a county magistrate in February 1641, after his first appearance in Parliament. Despite this, his election to the first Parliament of 1640 for Gloucester was probably on his own interest, as he could command an impressive range of metropolitan contacts. The four-way contest for the two city seats suggest that the burgesses were seeking to balance a local man with one with London credentials. Brett must have benefited from the news circulating on election day that William Lenthall* had already been chosen for Woodstock.33CSP Dom. 1639-40, p. 582. He made no discernible impact at all on that assembly. He was selected again for Gloucester, to sit in the Parliament that met on 3 November that year. Brett’s name did not appear in the Commons Journal until 3 May 1641, when he was recorded as having taken the Protestation.34CJ ii. 133b. The slowness with which he and his fellow burgess, Thomas Pury I, made their appearances may suggest that they were biding their time for the outcome of the complaint by Lenthall (2 Dec. 1640) about the conduct of the Gloucester election.35Procs. LP i. 417-8, 426.

On 16 July 1641, Brett and Pury were both named to a committee charged with auditing the accounts of collectors for the king’s army in the north, and on 6 August Brett served on a committee to draft a bill to allow Sir James Thynne* to disforest lands in Somerset. Brett’s inclusion was probably prompted by the connection of the Thynne family with Gloucestershire, where they held extensive estates.36CJ ii. 214a, 239b. During 1641, Brett was named to a local commission to disarm recusants, and in January 1642, he and Pury were required to attend Lord Keeper Littleton (Sir Edward Littleton*) to request commissions to administer to suspected persons in Gloucester and surrounding counties. This followed a warning by Pury that Gloucester was becoming a centre for troublemakers. He had the family and followers of Henry Somerset, 5th earl of Worcester in mind, and there seems little doubt that Brett was being carried along in Pury’s wake.37CJ ii. 387a, PJ i. 120. On 22 June 1642, Brett was given leave to go to the country, on a motion by Pury.38CJ ii. 635b, PJ ii. 114. He was not named to the commission of array that summer, being regarded perhaps as under the sway of Pury. By 16 September, Brett was back in the House, declaring himself in favour of the army of Robert Devereux, 3rd earl of Essex. Three days later, under some pressure from those more actively partisan on the side of Parliament in its quarrel with the king, he committed himself to giving £50 in money or plate to the parliamentary cause.39CJ ii. 769a, 772b; PJ iii. 478. His reluctance to endorse Parliament’s war effort against the king must have been evident despite his gestures of support, not least because of his complete inactivity in the Commons. On 12 May 1643 he was again given leave of absence, and although he was back to take the oath to maintain an army as long as Catholics remained in power over the king (6 June 1643) in August he once more left with permission, this time never to return.40CJ iii. 81a, 118a, 221a.

After leaving Westminster with the consent of his colleagues, Brett probably made his way to Oxford, to join the king’s party there. He was certainly there by January 1644, as a member of the Oxford Parliament. He signed the letter from that assembly that month to the earl of Essex, calling on him to negotiate a peace.41Rushworth, Hist. Collns. v. 573. The Commons at Westminster gave him 14 days to re-appear, but Brett had burned his boats. A letter from Edward Massie*, governor of Gloucester, confirmed that he had changed sides, and the House resolved (1 Feb. 1644) that Brett should be disabled from sitting and forfeit his estate, which should be employed for the benefit of Gloucester garrison.42CJ iii. 374a, 384a. Later that year the garrison received £100 from that source.43SP28/129/5, f. 73v. On 28 July 1644, his estate was assessed by the Committee for Advance of Money* as worth £1,000.44CCAM 422. With the benefit of hindsight, Brett’s defection seems predictable. As one of a family of courtiers and as a beneficiary of cathedral patronage, Brett had little in common with the puritans of Gloucester or with his fellow burgess, Pury, scourge of the deans and chapters. With his estate under sequestration, Brett evidently judged that he had little choice other than to remain in Oxford. He was still there when the city surrendered to Parliament in June 1646, and was afforded the benefit of the articles of surrender. In December, he was fined £873 13s 8d, and claimed later to have paid the whole of the fine.45CCC 1447-8. By September 1647, he was regarded by Parliament as having cleared his account for his delinquency, and he lived quietly through the 1650s. Indeed, in Gloucester he was still well-regarded. The common council saw nothing untoward in inviting him to a civic election breakfast in August 1647; two months earlier they had fêted the countess of Middlesex, which suggests that the Cranfield interest remained powerful locally.46Glos. RO, GBR/G3/SO2, ff. 45v, 50. In 1652, Brett petitioned to recover goods worth over £100, including hangings and a ‘bed with yellow silk lace’, detained by one who had taken them when Brett was under sequestration.47CCC 86, 91, 523, 581, 3051; CSP Dom. 1652-3, p. 185. He was not on the list of those regarded in 1655 as hostile to the commonwealth.48Glos. RO, Smyth of Nibley MSS vol. III, f. 71. Brett kept his farm of Cowley manor, accounting for its annual profit of a little over £20 in the 1650s to the governors of Westminster School.49A. and O. ii. 261.

Brett’s first wife, Margaret, died in 1645, and was buried at Cowley. At some point before 1665, Brett remarried, to Mary Pudsey, widow of Richard Pudsey, lord of the manor of Elsfield, Oxfordshire. Elsfield became Brett’s home, at least until his second wife died in 1672.50Parochial Colls. ed. Davis, ii. 130; Hearth Tax Returns Oxon, 1665, 66. The Henry Brett who lived in Gloucester after 1660 was his son, who predeceased him in 1671.51Glos. RO, GDR will 1670/230. Henry Brett took another lease of Cowley from Westminster Abbey in 1673, but after the death of his second wife retired to Gloucester, describing himself as of that city when he made his will in March of that year. When he died in 1674, he was buried at Cowley with his first wife. In 1712, the antiquary Richard Atkins noted his grandson’s ‘handsome house and a good estate’ at Down Hatherleigh, which became Brett’s legacy.52Glos. Shire Hall deeds DC/E88/16; Bigland, Collections ed. Frith, i. 448; Atkins, Glos. 404. His granddaughter, Henrietta, became the second wife of William Brownlow†, MP for Peterborough in the 1690s.53Bigland, Collections ed. Frith, i. 448.