GREVILLE, Robert (c.1607-43)

The son of a minor Lincolnshire squire, Greville had his prospects transformed at the age of four, when his cousin, the wealthy but childless Fulke Greville^* (later 1st Lord Brooke), adopted him as his heir. In keeping with his new-found status, he received a thorough education, which reputedly included a spell at Cambridge University, and certainly encompassed three years of foreign travel. His early exposure to both Dutch Calvinism and Italian Catholicism evidently influenced his subsequent religious outlook. A staunch puritan throughout his adult life, Greville came to view Catholics with deep suspicion, but regarded almost all strains of Protestant opinion as essentially valid. While at Leiden, he may also have met the separatist pastor, John Robinson, who helped to organize the earliest puritan settlements in America. Such an encounter in his formative years conceivably helped spark his later interest in colonizing schemes.21 ‘Genealogie’, 170-1; Ath. Ox. ii. 432; Strider, 6-7; Hughes, 123-4.

In 1628, while perhaps still a minor, Greville was elected to Parliament as a Member for Warwick, through Lord Brooke’s influence. However, on 31 May, following a Commons inquiry into the borough’s franchise, his return was declared void. No by-election was called until the following January. In the interim, Greville succeeded to his cousin’s peerage, thus becoming ineligible for re-election.

Although no longer able to sit in the Commons, the new Lord Brooke, having achieved his majority by the start of the 1629 session, was entitled to attend the Lords instead. However, he did not do so. His absence initially went unremarked, but eventually, during a call of the House on 9 Feb., it was announced that Brooke ‘hath not his writ as yet’. That same day Secretary of State Sir John Coke^‡, a trustee of his estates, procured a licence for Brooke to remain absent. Given that another peer of similar age, William Sandys^*, 4th Lord Sandys, also failed to receive a writ for this session, the most likely explanation in both cases is clerical oversight. By this date, the Lords routinely challenged the deliberate withholding of writs from peers, but no such concerns were raised on this occasion, and Coke’s intervention evidently pre-empted any calls for the mistake to be rectified.22 HP Commons, 1604-29, ii. 426; LJ, iv. 25a; SO3/9, unfol. (9 Feb. 1629); PROB 11/154, f. 286.

Brooke did not gain full control over his inheritance until his 24th birthday, since the Greville estates had been placed in trust prior to the 1st Lord Brooke’s murder in September 1628. In the interim, he enjoyed an annual income of just £600. Moreover, since he was not his cousin’s closest blood relation, lands worth perhaps £1,000 per annum passed by entail to the old baron’s sister Margaret, and her son Sir Greville Verney^‡, significantly reducing his revenues in the longer term.23 PROB 11/154, ff. 286, 290v; C142/514/55; T. Birch, Ct. and Times of Chas. I, i. 410. That said, Brooke’s right to the barony itself was unchallengeable, due to a special reversionary clause in the original patent of creation, while the property which he did eventually inherit probably brought him around £4,500 a year, and included the palatial Warwick Castle and a fashionable London mansion, Brooke House. On that basis, he was able, in February 1630, to agree a marriage with the daughter of another wealthy puritan peer, Francis Russell^*, 4th earl of Bedford.24 C66/2228/1; PROB 11/154, ff. 286-9; Hughes, 24; WARD 7/99/81.

Under these circumstances, Brooke might have been expected to take a leading role in Warwickshire society, but in fact he remained something of an outsider. Although he became a magistrate, and regularly attended the summer assizes at Warwick, he made little effort to mix with the county gentry, preferring to spend the bulk of his time in London. His attitude was probably influenced by the local popularity of his Verney relatives, in contrast to whom he was viewed as an interloper. However, there was also a religious dimension to his behaviour. When he was at Warwick, he preferred to mix with a narrow group of fellow puritans, such as Sir Thomas Puckering^‡, Sir Thomas Lucy^‡, and William Purefoy^‡. A ‘great frequenter of sermons’, he became a notable patron of radical clergy, presenting unconformable ministers to his Warwickshire livings, and providing accommodation for others who had been sequestered. The nonconformist divine Richard Baxter later classed Brooke as a ‘noted gross sectary’, though he is said to have also supported conforming clerics, provided that they were ‘laborious in their places’.25 Hughes, 25, 72-3, 121-2; ‘Genealogie’, 173-4.

Unsurprisingly, given Charles I’s promotion of Arminians within the Church of England, Brooke largely avoided the court when in London, though there was also a political dimension to his stance. The 1st Lord Brooke had been a staunch opponent of arbitrary government, and had no doubt instilled the same principles in his heir. By 1630 there were already signs that Brooke himself was unwilling to compromise over this issue. The old baron had founded a history chair at Cambridge three years earlier, probably as a way of promoting his own political outlook. His chosen lecturer, the Dutch scholar Isaac Dorislaus, immediately sparked controversy by attacking arbitrary rule, whereupon the king banned him from public speaking.26 R. Cust, Chas. I and the Aristocracy, 81; K. Sharpe, ‘Foundation of the Chairs of History at Oxford and Cambridge’, Hist. of Universities, ii. 139-41, 143-4. The 1st Lord Brooke’s will provided money for the lectures to resume, but on condition that his heirs nominated the speakers and controlled the funding. The university, understandably wary, tried to persuade the 2nd Lord Brooke to relinquish management of the chair, but he refused. The award of a Cambridge MA in 1629 failed to sway him, and by the following year the vice chancellor was starting to panic, since the bequest would lapse if not implemented within three years. In April 1630 Charles himself intervened, appointing arbiters to resolve the dispute, while in 1631 Secretary Coke attempted to broker a settlement. However, Brooke would not budge, and the whole project was eventually abandoned.27 Strider, 13-14; HMC Cowper, i. 427, 449.

In the meantime, the baron developed an interest in trading ventures. In November 1630 he became a founding member of the Providence Island Company, along with other notable puritans such as Robert Rich^*, 2nd earl of Warwick, William Fiennes^*, 1st Viscount Saye and Sele, and John Pym^‡, a leading client of his father-in-law, Bedford. Brooke and Saye were distantly related through their mutual kinsman Sir Robert Harley^‡. The initial impetus for the settlement of Providence Island, off the coast of modern-day Nicaragua, came from Warwick, but the board normally met at Brooke House, and the baron was consistently one of the company’s principal investors.28 CSP Col. 1574-1660, pp. 122-3, 180, 222; Strider, 18-20; J. Eales, Puritans and Roundheads, 61; CO124/2, ff. 166-7, 228-9, 247. Brooke’s hopes of getting a decent return on his money were to be disappointed, but he was also motivated by the desire to challenge Spanish control of the Caribbean. Moreover, the island offered a potential escape route from the crown’s anti-puritan policies at home. In March 1632 a number of the Providence Island leadership, including Warwick, Brooke, Saye and Pym, launched a second project to found a settlement on the coast of Connecticut, which three years later evolved into a new company for trading on the American coast. Operations were intended to centre on a new town, tellingly named Saybrook, and in late 1635 Brooke and Saye actively explored the possibility of emigrating there themselves. However, while the prevailing religious ethos at Saybrook was very much to their liking, their enthusiasm waned sharply when they discovered that their hereditary privileges as peers would not be automatically respected.29 Strider, 19-24; Coventry Docquets, 266. Brooke instead turned his attention back to Providence Island, which had come under attack by Spain. In 1637 the company retaliated through privateering, and captured a Spanish prize ship worth £15,000. Buoyed up by this success, in March 1638 Brooke and Warwick announced their intention to move to Providence Island themselves, and engage in further privateering ventures, but in the event this plan was also dropped.30 Strider, 20; Strafforde Letters (1739) ed. W. Knowler, ii. 141; CSP Col. 1574-1660, p. 263.

Brooke’s interest in moving abroad undoubtedly reflected his growing disenchantment with the Caroline regime. Newsletters sent to him in 1632, and presumably tailored to his interests, painted a gloomy picture of the king’s growing cooperation with Spain, and his persecution of the ‘patriot’ Sir John Eliot^‡, who had been imprisoned since 1629 for attacking arbitrary rule. In July 1633 the baron was reported to the government for entertaining the Dutch ambassador at Brooke House, an action which could be interpreted as criticism of the Spanish alliance. A year later, he acquired another radical puritan connection, when his sister married the future republican, Sir Arthur Hesilrige^‡.31 Birch, ii. 184-7, 195-9, 204-7; CSP Dom. 1633-4, p. 164; All Hallows, Bread Street, London (Harl. Soc. Reg. xliii), 108. In February 1635 Brooke came under pressure from the Privy Council to bestow one of his properties on a cousin, Sir Fulke Greville, who accused him of reneging on an earlier promise. He predictably dug his heels in, but apparently reached a settlement with Greville in the following year.32 CSP Dom. Addenda, 1625-49, p. 740; PC2/44, ff. 189-90; SO3/11, unfol. (June 1636).

Relations between Brooke and the king were not uniformly bad. In 1638 Brooke gave Charles a new year’s gift, and the monarch later that year upheld the baron’s objections when the master of ceremonies attempted to commandeer Brooke House for the use of the Spanish ambassador.33 Cust, 83, 88. Nevertheless, the mounting crisis in Scotland after 1637 forced him to choose between a king whose policies he despised, and the Covenanter cause with which he strongly sympathized. Brooke was almost certainly one of the two anonymous peers who, in July 1638, tried to organize a petition urging Charles to address the Scots’ grievances. In the following February, he initially declined to attend the king at York ahead of the First Bishops’ War, arguing that he was not obliged to support the military campaign unless instructed by Parliament. Finding himself isolated, he soon backed down, but he and Saye thereafter stuck to the legalistic position that, by precedent, they were required as peers only to resist an invasion of England, not to participate in a war of aggression.34 C. Russell, Fall of the British Monarchies, 61-2; CSP Dom. 1638-9, pp. 506, 516; HMC Buccleuch, iii. 381; Cust, 181, 184, 188. By this time the government knew that Brooke was engaging in treasonable correspondence with Scotland, and Charles refrained from detaining him only because of his rank and a paucity of damning evidence.35 CSP Dom. 1638-9, p. 518; Russell, 62.

In April 1639, having finally reached York, both Brooke and Saye refused to take a new oath of loyalty to the king, carefully drafted to expose Scots allies in the English camp. They were promptly arrested and interrogated, Brooke conceding that he must attend Charles in the event of a rebellion, but questioning whether the Covenanters were actually rebels.36 CSP Dom. 1639, pp. 67, 103; HMC 4th Rep. 23; Stowe 531, f. 180. The French ambassador, describing the two peers as ‘gens d’esprit puritains et désireux de Parlement’, predicted that their detention would arouse sympathy, and so it proved. By the end of the month, they were being described as ‘martyrs’ even at court in London, while in early May the Privy Council baulked at the king’s instruction to insert a record of the two interrogations in its register. Thus thwarted in his attempt to make an example of Brooke and Saye, and advised that their refusal of the oath was not actually illegal, Charles opted instead to remove them from York, and sent them back to their own homes. Undeterred by his treatment, Brooke apparently continued to communicate with the Scots over the summer.37 K. Sharpe, Personal Rule of Chas. I, 822-3; Clarendon, Hist. of the Rebellion, i. 155; CSP Dom. 1639, pp. 105, 119, 154; Russell, 62.

When the Short Parliament was summoned in the spring of 1640, Brooke was initially denied a summons for the second time. The king eventually backed down, whereupon the baron sided in the Lords with those peers who argued that redress of grievances should take precedence over supply. Following the dissolution of this fractious session, he was again arrested and had his papers confiscated, but he was probably unperturbed by the Parliament’s demise, since this played into the hands of the Scots and their allies.38 CSP Dom. 1639-40, p. 522; 1640, pp. 33-4, 66, 152-3; Russell, 98-9. During the summer, he penned a pamphlet, The Nature of Truth, arguing the case for toleration of all shades of Protestant opinion.39 Strider, 34; Hughes, 123. One of the twelve noblemen who petitioned the king in August 1640 to summon a new Parliament, Brooke attended the Great Council of Peers in the following month, and was appointed a commissioner to treat with the Scots at Ripon, Yorkshire.40 CSP Dom. 1640, pp. 639-40; HMC 8th Rep. ii. 57. In the early stages of the Long Parliament, his close alliance with Saye and Bedford obliged the king to treat him with greater consideration, and in July 1641 it was even rumoured that he was about to join the Privy Council. Nevertheless, he was one of the most prominent advocates of a ‘root and branch’ reform of the Church, writing another pamphlet, his Discourse Opening the Nature of … Episcopacie, which denounced the functions and legitimacy of English bishops.41 Clarendon, ii. 263; CSP Dom. 1641-3, p. 63; Strider, 41, 149-50, 153-4; Hughes, 123. Upon the outbreak of the Civil War, Brooke took charge of parliamentarian forces in Warwickshire and Staffordshire, but after some initial successes he was killed by a sniper while besieging the cathedral close at Lichfield in March 1643. His infant son Francis (Greville)^† succeeded him as 3rd Lord Brooke.42 Collins, Peerage, iv. 353; HMC 5th Rep. 161; J. Rushworth, Historical Collections, v. 147-8; S. Shaw, Hist. and Antiqs. of Staffs. i. 237-8; CP, ii. 334.