BRERETON, William (1631-80), of Dean’s Yard, Westminster, and Brereton Hall, Brereton, Cheshire.

The Breretons had been lords of Brereton, in Cheshire, since at least the early thirteenth century, and by Tudor times they were one of the county’s most illustrious families.20Ormerod, Cheshire, iii. pt. 1, pp. 82, 88. Brereton’s great-great-grandfather Sir William Brereton† had represented Cheshire in the Parliaments of 1547 and 1559, and his great-grandfather, another Sir William Brereton†, had been returned for the county on three occasions between 1597 and 1621.21HP Commons 1509-58; HP Commons 1604-29. It was Brereton’s great-grandfather who had purchased an Irish barony in 1624, making him 1st Baron Brereton of Laghlin.22CP.

Brereton’s father, the 2nd baron, was a member of the so-called ‘barons’ faction in Cheshire that was instrumental in securing the return of Brereton’s kinsman Sir William Brereton and Sir Thomas Aston as knights of the shire in the Short Parliament.23Supra, ‘Cheshire’. In contrast to this Sir William, who spearheaded the parliamentarian war effort in Cheshire, Brereton’s father sided with the king during the civil war, raising men and arms against Sir William and garrisoning Brereton Hall with royalist troops.24Cheshire RO, ZP/Cowper/2, ff. 35, 40; Ormerod, Cheshire, iii. pt. 1, p. 86; CCC 1229. In 1644, he and his family, including the teenage Brereton, were taken prisoner when the parliamentarians captured Biddulph House in Staffordshire; and in 1646, Lord Brereton compounded on an estate estimated to be worth £1,400 a year.25Civil War in Cheshire, 122; CCC 1229.

That same year (1646), the young Brereton was placed by his maternal grandfather, the royalist exile George Goring, 1st earl of Norwich, in the prince of Orange’s recently founded ‘illustrious school’ at Breda.26Aubrey, Brief Lives, i. 121; ‘John Pell’, Oxford DNB. Under the tutelage of the mathematician John Pell, Brereton became not only a good algebraist, but also an accomplished all-round scholar, with (as his correspondence reveals) a good command of both Latin and Greek.27Add. 4278, ff. 104; 141; Add. 4280, ff. 100, 102, 260; Add. 4413, f. 52; Aubrey, Brief Lives, i. 121; Diary and Corresp. of Dr John Worthington ed. J. Crossley (Chetham Soc. o.s. xiii), 158. He also excelled as a musician.28Aubrey, Brief Lives, i. 122; ‘William, 3rd Baron Brereton of Leighlin’, Oxford DNB. It was probably through Pell that he entered the circle of the educational reformer and intelligencer Samuel Hartlib and made the acquaintance of the royalist exiles and natural philosophers Sir Charles Cavendysshe* and Thomas Hobbes.29Hartlib Pprs. Online, passim; Vaughan, Protectorate, ii. 383-4, 445; Worthington Diary ed. Crossley, 158, 181, 188, 189; ‘William, 3rd Baron Brereton of Leighlin’, Oxford DNB. Hartlib thought Brereton ‘a noble gentleman and of a much enlarged spirit to the good of mankind’.30Worthington Diary ed. Crossley, 188. After Hartlib’s death in 1662, his papers were purchased by Brereton and were last heard of at Brereton Hall in 1667, before being unearthed in 1933 in the archives of a London solicitors firm.31Add. 4474, f. 33v; ‘Samuel Hartlib’, Oxford DNB.

Brereton seems to have spent much of the mid-to-late 1650s in Cheshire in a state of ‘distraction’ that some people interpreted as madness.32The Works of the Hon. Robert Boyle ed. T. Birch (1772), vi. 125; Vaughan, Protectorate, ii. 445. In about 1658, he and his father were named for Cheshire on a list of possible leaders of a projected royalist uprising, but there is no evidence that Brereton was involved in cavalier conspiracies during the interregnum.33Bodl. Eng. hist. e.309, p. 19. He had evidently snapped out of his distracted state of mind by early 1659, when he was returned with Piers Legh for the Lancashire constituency of Newton. He probably owed his election to the influence of the Legh family, who were the borough’s principal electoral patrons.34Supra, ‘Newton’.

Brereton received only one appointment in Richard Cromwell’s* Parliament – on 18 March 1659, when he partnered the republican Sir Arthur Hesilrige as a teller against continuing a debate on whether the Members elected for Scottish constituencies should withdraw from the House.35CJ vii. 615b. The opposing tellers were the Cromwellian MPs Colonel Edward Rosseter and Arthur Annesley. When the main question was put, Sir Henry Vane II and his fellow republican John Lambert were defeated. Why Brereton should join forces on this issue with the commonwealthsmen is not clear – unless it was as a crypto-royalist opponent of the protectoral settlement. His name had figured on a government list of Cheshire royalists in the late 1650s. But unlike his father, he played no part in Sir George Boothe’s* Presbyterian-royalist rebellion during the summer of 1659.36SP18/205, f. 7; CCC 1230; ‘Hon. William Brereton’, HP Commons 1660-90.

Brereton was apparently more interested in the ‘new science’ than in restoring the old monarchy. He was one of the ‘prime virtuosi’ – a group of mainly royalist and episcopalian gentlemen which met at Gresham College, in London, during the later 1650s to discuss and dabble in ‘experimental philosophy’.37T. Sprat, The History of the Royal-Society of London (1667), 57; Worthington Diary ed. Crossley, 246-7, 257. Nevertheless, in the spring of 1660, Brereton joined many royalist nobility and gentry ‘now residing in and about the city of London’, in a declaration thanking General George Monck* for his courage in asserting ‘the public liberty’. The signatories also renounced any intention to take revenge upon their parliamentarian enemies and declared their loyalty ‘to the present power, as it now resides in the council of state’.38A Declaration of the Nobility and Gentry that Adhered to the Late King (1660, 669 f.24.69).

Following the summoning of the 1660 Convention, Brereton informed the Leghs of ‘his desire to be once more a burgess for Newton’, but for whatever reason his candidacy for that borough was not successful, and he was returned instead in a by-election for the Cornish constituency of Bossiney – almost certainly on the interest of his father-in-law’s friend, the Presbyterian grandee John Robartes†, 2nd Baron Robartes.39JRL, Legh of Lyme corresp. Lttrs. to Richard Legh*, folder 15: T. Legh to R. Legh, 1 Mar. 1660; HP Commons 1660-90. In the elections to the Cavalier Parliament in 1661, he lost out in a disputed return for the Cornish borough of Truro, where again he had enjoyed Robartes’s electoral patronage.40Worthington Diary ed. Crossley, 309; HP Commons 1660-90. Brereton’s father represented Cheshire in this Parliament until his death in April 1664.41HP Commons 1660-90.

Brereton was one of the founder members of the Royal Society established in 1663 and contributed liberally to its early proceedings – particularly on agricultural and mineralogical topics.42Birch, Royal Society, i-ii, passim; Worthington Diary ed. Crossley, 212-13. In 1664, he succeeded to his father’s title as well as his heavily encumbered estate; and being, as he put it, ‘in full power to sell the whole estate belonging to our family ... I am resolved to rid myself with all possible speed of all my debts and some land at once’. He hoped he would have to sell no more of his estate than was necessary to honour the bequest in his father’s will of £2,000 to each of his six sisters for their portions.43Add. 4280, f. 102. And having mortgaged the manor of Brereton in 1654 (by an indenture in which Sir William Brereton was one of the parties), he was apparently able to redeem some of this property in 1664.44Cheshire RO, DTD/1/2-6. But his debts eventually obliged him to sell one of the most prestigious parts of his patrimony, the barony of Malpas.45Cheshire RO, DTD/2/1; DTD/2/2-3; DTD/31/5-6; DTD/32/5-8; Ormerod, Cheshire, iii. pt. 1, p. 86. In 1667, he was appointed by the Commons to the chair of the public accounts commission, as ‘a man of great integrity ... not to be gained by the flatteries, hopes or threatenings of the court’.46CJ ix. 36b; HP Commons 1660-90. His debts were such, however, that in 1673 he accepted a court office – that of a gentleman of the privy chamber – as protection against his creditors.47Carlisle, Privy Chamber, 191; HP Commons 1660-90.

Brereton died on 17 March 1680 and was buried two days later at St Martin-in-the Fields, Wesminster.48CP. He died intestate. He was succeeded by his son, John, the 4th Baron Brereton [I].