Nationality | Greville, Robert, second Baron Brooke of Beauchamps Court (1607–1643), parliamentarian army officer and religious writer, was born in May 1607, the son of Fulke Greville (1575–1632) of Thorpe Latimer, Lincolnshire, and his wife, Mary, daughter of Christopher Copley of Wadsworth, Yorkshire. Mary's first husband was another Yorkshire gentleman, Ralph Bosvile, and Godfrey—her son from this marriage—was to be closely associated with his half-brother in his colonial, political, and military endeavours of the 1630s and 1640s.
Inheritance and marriage Brooke's father was the first cousin of his namesake Fulke Greville, first Baron Brooke of Beauchamps Court (1554–1628). Lord Brooke had no wish to marry and Robert was adopted early in life as his heir, and named as his successor in the patent granting the barony in January 1621. The Laudian polemicist Peter Heylyn, smarting from Robert Greville's attack on low-born bishops, claimed that the second lord's father had acted as the first lord's gamekeeper and had not been allowed to sit at table with him. The second lord's contemporary biographer was, conversely, concerned to stress he was 'no new man, or gentleman of the first head, but stockt in a long race of worthie Ancestors' (Spencer, 173). Robert Greville was given an intellectually demanding and cosmopolitan education supervised by the first lord, with a Dutch tutor and with three years' foreign travel between 1624 and 1627 which included attendance at the universities of Leiden and Paris and visits to Geneva and Venice.
The bulk of the first lord's extensive estates was settled on Robert Greville in February 1628 and through the Greville influence he sat as MP for Warwick borough in the first session of the 1628 parliament. After the first lord's murder in September he succeeded to the title and was thus in the Lords for the stormy session of 1629. He had inherited a landed income of more than £4000 p.a. with lands in twelve counties and London, and managed his fortune efficiently so that his widow and children enjoyed increased revenues in the 1650s despite the very large sums that he had expended in colonial enterprises and on raising forces for parliament. Brooke's marriage, about 1631, to Katherine Russell (c.1618–1676), daughter of Francis Russell, fourth earl of Bedford, connected him with networks of puritan aristocratic critics of Charles I's personal rule. His wife was some ten years his junior and their first son, Francis, was not born until 1637. Four more sons came in rapid succession between 1638 and 1643. The youngest, Fulke, born posthumously, ultimately inherited the title.
Political dissent and colonial ventures, 1630–1640 Brooke was an active Warwickshire JP from 1631 but divided his time between his seat at Warwick Castle and his Holborn residence. He had uneasy relationships with Warwick borough and was regarded as an arriviste by some of the county gentry. Many shared the resentment of the first lord's close kin (such as his nephews the Verneys of Compton Verney) at the largess shown to a more distant cousin. In 1640–41 Brooke had only limited success in obtaining parliamentary seats in Warwickshire for his political allies. His radical religious and political stance, as much as his ambiguous origins, however, distanced Brooke from mainstream provincial opinion. He worked most closely with ideologically committed figures from the minor local gentry and clergy, and with the national networks of godly opponents of Charles, such as John Pym, Oliver St John, Robert Rich, earl of Warwick, and especially William Fiennes, Lord Saye and Sele.
Brooke was heavily involved in godly colonial enterprises and made probably the largest financial commitment to the Providence Island Company, which established in 1630 a small volcanic island in the Caribbean as a base for puritan colonizing and anti-Spanish privateering. In 1632 Brooke, with Saye and Sele, Pym, Knightley, and others, acquired a patent to found a settlement at SayeBrooke in Connecticut. Brooke's despair at developments in England led him, with Saye and Sele, to contemplate emigration. The two peers wrote to John Winthrop of Massachusetts late in 1635 to seek clarification on political and religious arrangements in New England. They sought a commonwealth with a two-house legislative assembly made up of a hereditary order of gentlemen and a second rank of freeholders. The answers from New England left them unsatisfied, but it seems that they were less alarmed by the lack of an aristocracy in New England, than about the theocratic requirement that political rights should be confined to full church members. Saye and Sele and Brooke feared the potential for religious tyranny in Massachusetts, and consistently rejected clerical involvement in civil affairs in both old and new England.
Brooke was none the less a consistent supporter of the New England colonies in their disputes with the crown in the 1630s and a zealous promoter of settlement in New England. Close associates from Warwickshire went to Connecticut including gentry like George Willis and clerics like Ephraim Huitt. Brooke owned the land on which John Davenport and others from St Stephen, Coleman Street, London, founded New Haven. Brooke's colonial activities forged contacts with city figures, notably Maurice Thompson, that were to be crucial to parliamentarian mobilization in the 1640s.
Besides his plans to emigrate Brooke's irreconcilable opposition to the king was paraded in his conspicuous absence from Warwick when Charles himself visited the town in August 1636. He was an early and predictable supporter of the Scots. In early 1639 he refused to attend the king against the Scots, 'unless it be adjudged he should by parlyment' (TNA: PRO, SP 16/413/92). In April Brooke and Lord Saye and Sele—'twoe hereticall Lords', according to one newsletter; 'two popular men, and most undevoted to the Church, and in truth to the whole government' according to Clarendon (TNA: PRO, SP 16/418/30; Clarendon, Hist. rebellion, 1.154)—were briefly imprisoned at York for refusing to fight or swear loyalty to Charles. It is likely that Brooke was already in close, treasonable contact with the Scots, and a Scots preacher, probably Samuel Rutherford, was entertained at Warwick Castle in December 1639. After the failure of the Short Parliament Brooke was briefly arrested and among his papers seized by the authorities were found several petitions of grievances and 'discourses' on the liturgy—probably copies of the exchanges on church government between John Cotton and English clergy such as John Ball and Simeon Ashe. In August 1640 he was one of the twelve peers who petitioned the king to call a parliament, and he was one of the commissioners appointed to treat with the Scots at Ripon after their successful invasion.
Religious radical Richard Baxter claimed that Brooke (like Sir Henry Vane the younger) was a 'noted gross sectary' before the civil war (Reliquiae Baxterianae, ed. M. Sylvester, 1696, part 1, 63). Certainly Brooke's patronage of ministers, and his own published writings, reveal an extraordinarily open-minded intellectual and practical radicalism. 'A deare foster-father he was to manie Ministers and Schoole-Masters, allowing them yeerlie pensions or salaries', wrote the moderate puritan Warwickshire minister Thomas Spencer in his life of Brooke: 'Not only those that went his way, but also such as did conforme to the Church-government were his Beneficiaries' (Spencer, 173). By the early 1640s Brooke's main personal chaplain was the Independent Peter Sterry, whose interests in neo-Platonic and Behemist ideas were shared by his patron, but throughout the 1630s he supported men of a more mainstream stamp such as Simeon Ashe, Samuel Clarke, Thomas Dugard, and George Hughes. He also promoted the schemes of Samuel Hartlib and John Drury for educational reform and religious unity. At another extreme a notorious London separatist of the early 1640s, John Spencer, had been Brooke's coachman.
Brooke's 'way' extended to arguing for broad toleration of protestants and sympathy for radical separatists. Sterry's influence may be present in Brooke's first publication, The Nature of Truth, a platonic treatise written in the summer of 1640 and licensed for the press in November. It has affinities also with the views of the younger Sir Henry Vane, who had acted as an agent for Brooke and Saye and Sele in New England. For Brooke truth was conformity with God, but could take a variety of forms. Brooke argued for goodness within all existence: 'all things are but one emanation from the divine power' (Greville, Nature of Truth, 115) and concluded with millenarian hopes that humanity would come to comprehend the unity of truth and that 'wee might see how Christ is one with God, and wee one with Christ, so wee in Christ, one with God' (ibid., 170).
In this work Brooke denounced the 'cringings, crouchings, all those ceremonies of will-worship' within the established church (Greville, Nature of Truth, 155). As truth took diverse forms, no one should be compelled to worship against their conscience or reason. His second tract developed these views for a wider audience: A Discourse Opening the Nature of that Episcopacie was a vividly written contribution to the ‘Smectymnuan’ debate on episcopacy in 1641, more radical than most of the broadly presbyterian responses to Joseph Hall's defence of episcopacy. Brooke denied there was any basis in scripture or the practice of the early church for episcopacy as practised in England, where bishops had authority over many congregations and wielded secular power:
There are three sorts of Bishops, as Beza saith. There are of God's Institution, and they are those who have a power over their proper flock, with the rest of the Church and no other. There are also of mans Institution and this ever overfloweth into the Neighbour Parish. And lastly, there is a demonicall Bishop, and this is he who challengeth the sword as well as the keyes.
Greville, Episcopacie, 68 Brooke expected that God would free England from 'Tyrannicall Prelates' as Scotland had been freed (ibid., 87).
This second tract demonstrated an 'aristocratic constitutionalism' shared with Saye and Sele, arguing that low-born bishops, desperate for money and office, were fawning buttresses of arbitrary power. A free, independent aristocracy, on the other hand, was a barrier to royal excesses. More startling was Brooke's matter-of-fact acceptance of religious diversity and error: 'Heresies must come', he wrote simply (Greville, Episcopacie, 86). The freedom of the United Provinces where religion flourished was to be preferred to the 'unity of Darknesse and Ignorance' found in Spain (ibid., 91). You could no more force people to choose their 'spiritual friends' than you could compel them 'to marry such or such a woman, to take such a servant, to dwell with such a friend' (ibid., 99). By refusing to condemn them and presenting their own arguments sympathetically, Brooke in effect defended the 'Brownists', Baptists, separatists, and lay preachers who were almost always condemned by parliamentarians in the early 1640s. Why, asked Brooke, was a tradesman preaching to be condemned before a civil lawyer or a bishop who also had a cure of souls (ibid., 106)? Brooke also noted that reformation had not been begun by the authorities, but by groups like the Albigensiens, the 'Church-lesse' (ibid., 116). Where churches were established all power to choose officers or decide controversial issues should lie in the church as a whole, not with the clergy or elders.
Brooke was a prominent and determined opponent of royal government from the first meeting of the Long Parliament. His fears of a royal coup d'état were demonstrated when he purchased arms in May 1641 following the first army plot of March–April 1641. He agitated, predictably, for the exclusion of bishops from the House of Lords as the crisis deepened in December 1641.
The outbreak of the civil war As lord lieutenant of Warwickshire, appointed under parliament's militia ordinance of March 1642, Brooke worked energetically to rally forces to the godly cause. He spent large sums entertaining the militia from late June and seized the county magazine at Coventry, depositing it at Warwick Castle for safety. From early in the year Brooke had been fortifying this stronghold. Although Clarendon claimed that the area of south Warwickshire and north Oxfordshire, around Edgehill, was through the influence of Saye and Sele and Brooke 'the most eminently corrupted of any country in England' (Clarendon, Hist. rebellion, 2.359), Brooke's support seems to have come mainly from the urban and industrial areas of the county. His closest associates in the parliamentarian leadership were long-standing friends and kin such as William Purefoy and Godfrey Bosvile along with many of his own estate officials. The royalists led by the earl of Northampton made much headway in the county later in the summer. An attempt to indict Brooke and Purefoy at the assizes for raising forces against the king fell when they claimed parliamentary authority for their actions. Northampton gained possession of the artillery that Brooke had brought to the midlands from London and turned it against Warwick Castle itself. While Brooke sought reinforcements in London his second in command, Sir Edward Peyto, hung a Bible and a winding sheet from the ramparts indicating their readiness to perish in the cause of God and parliament. A large army from London commanded by Brooke, John Hampden, and Nathaniel Fiennes forced the lifting of the siege and secured parliamentarian control of Warwickshire on 22/23 August 1642.
The Providence Island investors, merchants and peers alike, were strongly represented among Irish adventurers raising money for the suppression of the Irish rising and in June 1642 Brooke was nominated commander of the expedition intended against the Irish. This plan was overtaken by events in England where Brooke was, besides his local role, commander of a foot regiment in the earl of Essex's army. This regiment fought at Edgehill though Brooke himself missed the battle and suffered severe losses in the royalist attack on Brentford. In the Lords, Brooke remained a militant supporter of the war. He opposed an early peace and was very active in the promotion of measures to establish a more effective war effort. In both activities he effectively mobilized previous connections with city merchants like Maurice Thompson, and with radical Independent clergy such as Jeremiah Burroughs and Hugh Peter. In city and country Brooke proved an astute popular leader. The Warwickshire forces were raised with feasting, bell ringing, and the collective signing of petitions; and the officers of his volunteer companies were elected with rank and file consent. In a 1643 speech to his midland troops he anticipated Oliver Cromwell's views by rejecting the recruitment of mercenaries: 'we must rather employ men who will fight merely for the cause sake' (A Worthy Speech, 7).
Death and reputation Brooke was made commander of the west midland association of Staffordshire and Warwickshire under an ordinance of 31 December 1642, and spent the winter raising men and money through his London contacts as well as in Warwickshire. In February 1643 he mustered his forces at Warwick Castle, then disarmed Stratford upon Avon to prevent its becoming a royalist stronghold, and marched to Lichfield where the cathedral close had been garrisoned for the king.
Here, on 2 March 1643, in a heavy blow to parliament, Brooke was killed, through a lucky shot from the central spire of the cathedral from one ‘Dumb Dyott’, a deaf and dumb younger son of a local gentry family. The death of a religious radical, who had denounced cathedrals as the haunts of Antichrist, at such hands, and on the festival day of St Chad, the patron saint of Lichfield, was regarded as a providential judgement by royalists. For parliamentarians, particularly radical parliamentarians, he was a lost leader, an enduring influence and memory. London pamphlets lamented the loss of an Abner struck down by 'idolatrous Enemies'. They cursed Lichfield as a 'sinke of iniquity': 'let the remembrance of thee be hatefull; and thy name blotted out from among the Townes of the Province' (Englands Losse and Lamentation, sig.A3v). Brooke was buried a few days after his death in the tomb of his cousin, Fulke Greville, at St Mary's, Warwick.
John Milton wrote that he had never 'read or heard words more mild and peaceful' than those on sectaries in Brooke's Discourse on Episcopacy, and claimed that Brooke would have supported his arguments in Areopagitica 'had he not sacrificed his life and fortunes to the Church and Commonwealth' (Milton, Complete Prose Works, 2, ed. E. Sirluck, 1959, 560–61). Many of the men he recruited to parliament's cause remained prominent radical activists. The future Leveller John Lilburne was second-in-command of his foot regiment; and the future republican soldier John Okey also served Brooke. The treasurer of the west midland association was the radical city Independent Rowland Wilson (a partner of Maurice Thompson), while his friend Purefoy and his half-brother Bosvile became prominent members of the Rump Parliament. Among obscurer figures the receiver of his widow's Lincolnshire estates in the 1650s was Major Alex Tulidah, a veteran of the Leveller agitation of 1647. By the later 1640s an inn in Adwalton, West Riding of Yorkshire, was apparently named Brooks or Lord Brook in memory of this remarkable man, intellectual, popular leader, and zealous ideologue (Eyre, 82). |