Brooke’s father was twice lord mayor of York and MP for the city in 1584 and 1586; the MP claimed cousinage with Sir John Brooke*, but little else is known of his ancestry. He may have enrolled at Cambridge University, where he later recalled meeting the future bishop, Richard Neile. However, the encounter with Neile could have occurred during the course of a visit to his brother Samuel, a student, fellow and later master of Trinity College. Brooke certainly trained as a barrister at Lincoln’s Inn, where he shared chambers and literary interests with John Donne*. His brother officiated at Donne’s secret marriage in 1601, on which occasion Brooke gave the bride away. For this offence he was imprisoned in the Marshalsea, whence he complained that ‘I am held from the sitting at York [where] my profitablest practice lies’. He had financial troubles throughout his life, which probably stemmed from his investments in publishing and art, but these difficulties were either not known or not considered to be important at York, where he was returned to the Commons at six successive elections.
Brooke was first elected in 1604, defeating Sir John Bennet* and several other candidates in a contest for the junior seat. The corporation probably selected him for his legal expertise, but events were to show that he was also an able advocate of local causes. The precise extent of his involvement in his first Parliament is difficult to gauge accurately, as two near namesakes, the lawyers Thomas Brooke and William Brocke, were also returned in 1604. However, it seems likely that most citations of a ‘Mr. Brooke’ refer to the York MP.
Brooke’s first recorded speech, on 11 Apr. 1604, controversially claimed that the committee which had conferred with the king about the Buckinghamshire election dispute had exceeded its authority in agreeing to unseat both candidates and order a fresh election. However, his view was disregarded, for by ‘the acclamation of the House’, it was resolved to send the king a message of thanks instead.
While there is little surviving correspondence between the York corporation and its Members for the 1604 session, it is clear that Brooke pursued at least part of the lengthy agenda drafted by his constituents. He opposed the free trade bill at its third reading on 31 May, presumably with the encouragement of York’s merchants, and he twice moved to insert a proviso into the expiring laws continuance bill to repeal the 1581 Dover Harbour Act: the York corporation hoped to divert the revenues collected for the repair of Dover harbour to a local project, the maintenance of river navigation on the Yorkshire Ouse. He was also named to the committee for the weirs bill (23 June), which included a proviso for York sponsored by his fellow York Member, Robert Askwith.
Brooke was presumably present at the opening of the next session in November 1605, as only three days after the adjournment he was arrested ‘very despitefully in Westminster Hall’. He claimed privilege in the New Year, when it was formally resolved that parliamentary privilege would be limited to 16 days on either side of a session.
With Askwith absent during his mayoral year at York, it fell to Brooke to assist the passage of a bill conceding a 20 per cent customs discount on northern cloth, which he reported on 5 Mar.; it was later lost in the Lords, but the discount was granted by Privy Seal after the end of the session. He also reported the Welsh cottons bill (17 Mar.), and spoke, to unknown effect, at the third reading of the general cloth bill (19 May).
The session which opened in November 1606 was dominated by the Union, a project cherished by the king but disliked by almost everyone else. The Lords attempted to prod the Commons into action over the proposals contained in the Instrument of Union at a conference on 25 Nov., but Members indulged in lengthy arguments about procedure, during which Brooke supported Richard Martin’s motion to divide the issues under debate between Commons and Lords:
I like best that we entertain their bill of hostile laws and commerce, and to leave the other of highest nature [remanding and naturalization] to the Lords, for they in that matter can be furthest that stand in the bay window or near the king’s elbow, ... and have the oracles of the law to consult withal.
A consensus was eventually reached on this basis but, following objections from the Lords, it was resolved to establish a grand committee to debate each aspect of the Union in turn.
In the New Year the debate moved on to the question of whether a common allegiance to the person of King James meant that the inhabitants of England and Scotland were automatically naturalized citizens of each other’s country. The Instrument of Union claimed that the post-nati (Scots born after 1603) were naturalized in England, but the Commons disputed this fundamental point in a series of conferences; at one of these on 7 Mar. 1607, Brooke helped to present the Commons’ refutation of the judges’ ruling on this question. When a report of this conference was demanded on 13 Mar., William Holt, who had been assigned to perform this task, excused himself and nominated Brooke in his stead. However, the latter protested that he had seen Holt taking notes at the conference, and the original order was allowed to stand. Agreement on naturalization was delayed by negotiations over limits on the patronage that the Scots could expect to receive in England if they were naturalized. This meant that the Lords’ request for another conference ran into a wall of objections, particularly from Sir Edwin Sandys. Speaking on this subject on 28 Mar., Brooke opposed Sandys by welcoming just such a conference, provided that ‘our cautions [were] secured and exceptions [were] established’. He also urged that the Commons’ delegation be allowed to answer the Lords’ proposals. His motion was received with ‘a general and universal mislike’, however, and no conference was held before the Easter recess.
After Easter, Sandys proposed a new commission to plan for a ‘perfect Union’ of parliaments, laws and bureaucracy. As Brooke observed on 30 Apr., this was a thinly disguised attempt to filibuster the whole Union project: ‘we have spent so much time in another course, and the king, who hath a negative voice, will not like it’. Instead, he urged a direct confrontation over the judges’ ruling over the post-nati, either by bill or by conference, stating his preference for the latter. In light of earlier failures, the Commons was unlikely to agree to this motion, but the king’s patience ran out before any conclusion could be reached, as James put an end to the naturalization debate in an angry speech on 2 May.
On 31 Oct. 1606, shortly before the start of the third parliamentary session, the chamberlains of York were ordered to remit £50 to Brooke in repayment of an earlier loan he had raised ‘for the city’s occasions’ - perhaps the money needed to pay for the customs discount bill in March 1606. The York corporation failed to send Brooke any instructions for the new session, evidently preferring to wait instead until Askwith resumed his seat in April 1607, but the bill for explanation of the 1604 Tunnage and Poundage Act which Brooke tabled on 6 Dec. 1606 may have been intended for their benefit; it received only one reading (11 Dec.) before it was decided to let it sleep. Either because of this disappointment, or for lack of cash, his claim for parliamentary wages of £144 12s. 8d. to cover three sessions was reduced to £60, although he was appointed deputy recorder to make up the difference.
Throughout the third session Brooke continued to serve as a committee chairman, reporting bills to confirm the sale of lands for payment of debts owed by Sir Jonathan Trelawny* (25 Feb. 1607), to alter the 1604 Tanners’ Act (14 Mar.), and to reduce the use of wheat in starch-making (26 March). He was sufficiently well known in parliamentary circles to be included in the ‘Parliament Fart’ poem, and on 23 Mar. he informed the House that Speaker Phelips, who had pleaded sickness a week earlier, was still unable to take the chair.
Brooke played a more prominent part than he had so far in the spring session of 1610. He attended the conference of 15 Feb. 1610 at which lord treasurer Salisbury (Sir Robert Cecil†) outlined his plans for the Great Contract, and in debate four days later he summed up its purport as ‘not only to give supplies, but to deliver from fretting charge’. His proposal ‘to go to the oracles again’ was presumably intended as an endorsement of Sir Roger Owen’s motion to ask the Lords to name their price for the Contract before the Commons debated the offer in detail. On 12 Mar. he moved to defer all other business in order to prepare for a conference on wardship. Two days later, however, when the king agreed to allow the Commons to debate its terms for the abolition of the Court of Wards, Brooke opposed Speaker Phelips’s motion to join with the Lords in thanking James for this concession, as to do so might imply a dependence on the Upper House. On 23 Mar. the Commons debated feudal aids, such as the one then being levied for Prince Henry. While some Members were prepared to see these continue, Brooke argued that ‘if we fall into an evil king’s time it will be exceeding chargeable. For every £1,000 per annum the aid is £50; nay, they [evil kings] may come, and in a manner have what they list’. Thereafter, he only returned to the subject of the Contract on 3 May, when a bargain over its financing was provisionally agreed. He urged merely that the matter should be reported to the Lords, and that no negotiation should take place at the forthcoming conference.
The Commons subsequently turned from the Great Contract to a debate on the legality of impositions. However, this encountered royal disapproval in the form of a message conveyed to the House by the Speaker. Many Members thereupon questioned whether Phelips was entitled to deliver such a message, as he was the spokesman of the Commons rather than of the king. On 14 May Sir Henry Montagu claimed that Phelips had been acting in his private capacity as an MP rather than as Speaker, a distinction which Brooke ridiculed. Further reproaches from James followed on 18 May. When William Noye questioned this fresh message as an infringement of freedom of speech, he was seconded by Brooke:
The prerogative is great, yet it is not endless nor boundless, but justice and equity are the bounds and limits of it. I think fit we should return this answer, that as never subjects heretofore have been, nor hereafter shall be, more careful to maintain the prerogative of the king, so we hope that never king hath been or will be more careful than His Majesty to preserve the liberty of the subject.
A response was agreed the following morning, at which time Brooke successfully moved that it should not be delivered to the king by Phelips as his title implied he could only speak, not tender written messages.
As usual, Brooke was active during this session as a committee chairman. He seems to have taken a special interest in the game laws, reporting bills regulating deer and conies (21 Apr.), moor-burning (25 Apr., 2 May) and hawking and game birds (12 May).
Having consulted their constituents about the Great Contract over the summer, Members returned to Westminster in October 1610 with grave misgivings. On 2 Nov., when the king probed their resolve to continue negotiations, Brooke was one of many speakers who expressed unease, agreeing ‘to go forward only so that we may have security and that we can levy it’. James’s response was to remind Members of his original demand for a supply of £500,000 in addition to the annual payment already agreed, and to rule out any chance of abolishing impositions. This intervention effectively killed off the deal, and while Brooke pronounced himself willing to vote three subsidies and six fifteenths, lest a refusal drive the king to take more under the prerogative, he insisted
if the king will stand to ... three other points, he thinks the Contract cannot go forward. (1) Impossible for us to give an yearly recompense to the officers, for, as they fall, how shall the land be discharged? (2) It is impossible to raise £200,000 out of the land only, the rest out of merchandise and a running subsidy from the moneyed men. (3) Also it is not safe to bargain except the impositions be cast into it, and that the king be restrained from further imposing.
After the end of the session, his claim for parliamentary wages of £72 was met in full.
During the autumn of 1610 Brooke and Askwith negotiated the purchase of Crown lands in York on the corporation’s behalf, and in the following year Brooke assisted in securing another parcel of ex-chantry lands then leased by the city for charitable purposes. In 1613 Brooke was paymaster for the masque staged by his inn at the marriage of Princess Elizabeth, and advised the recorder of York about the new patent then being drafted for the Council in the North, to ensure that it did not infringe the city’s privileges. He also published an elegy on the death of Prince Henry, and dedicated his most substantial work, The Ghost of Richard III, to Sir John Crompton*.
Brooke’s return for York in 1614 was apparently unopposed. He played an active role in the Commons from the start of the session. On 12 Apr. secretary of state Sir Ralph Winwood’s call for a swift grant of supply was turned aside by indignant demands that the king exonerate the Commons from accusations of management by ‘undertakers’. Brooke moved to draft a Remonstrance asserting that Members intended to ‘proceed merely out of love, by no man’s undertaking’, and he was subsequently one of the committee appointed to perform this task (13 April).
When the impositions bill was reported on 5 May, several speakers recalled that a supply debate had been arranged for that day. However, Brooke was among those who warned that a subsidy vote might be tainted by any indication of controversy, and the impositions debate took precedence. On the previous day James had declared himself willing to refer the legality of impositions to the judges, but Brooke, clearly anticipating a verdict for the Crown, declared that the Commons should proceed with the bill and confer with the Lords, who would thus bear the blame for failure.
Brooke spoke in the debate of 20 May about Alderman Cockayne’s project for the export of dyed and dressed cloth. Having probably been briefed by his constituents, he drew attention to the chaos this upheaval was causing in the clothing industry, and pointedly referred to Cockayne’s Company as ‘the undertakers that troubled us’.
Brooke resigned his post as deputy recorder of York in 1618, and thereafter made his sole residence in London, where he leased a house in Drury Lane from the widow of Sir Robert Drury*. He was granted a second reversion to the secretaryship of the Council in the North as a trustee for the sons of the incumbent, (Sir) Arthur Ingram*, and served as counsel for Ingram’s erstwhile patron, the former lord treasurer, the 1st earl of Suffolk, at the latter’s trial for embezzlement in 1619. Despite his removal from York, Brooke was again returned at the general election of December 1620, and played a more prominent part in the subsequent Parliament than at any other time in his career, making 70 recorded speeches. The city drafted a substantial agenda for its Members, and received regular correspondence in return, including news of parliamentary debates and the progress of various bills. While Brooke signed most of these letters, it is likely that they were penned by his colleague, Alderman Askwith, as the one letter Brooke did not sign was couched in the same style as the others.
The 1621 session opened with a dispute over freedom of speech, arising from the arrest of several Members after the dissolution of 1614. A committee of the whole House initially resolved to draft a petition, but no agreement could be reached and, at Brooke’s motion, the decision was referred back to the floor of the House, where Sir Edward Coke reported the deadlock on 12 February. Brooke missed the start of this important debate, but when he arrived, full of apologies, he explained that the arrests, if uncontested, would set a precedent; he also urged that any petition be tendered in writing as it would require a written reply. This could then be copied into the Journal as a formal record of the resolution of the dispute. After much debate, it was resolved to draft both a petition and a bill for freedom of speech; Coke and Brooke were the first two named to the committee charged with this task (12 February). The dispute was eventually resolved by a message from the king on 15 Feb., which cleared the way for a supply debate, opened by Sir George More, who made an impassioned plea for the relief of the Palatinate. More was followed by two courtiers, Sir Edward Sackville and Sir Thomas Edmondes, but the first speaker to mention a specific figure was Brooke, who urged a grant of two subsidies. These, he added, should be paid as a free gift rather than to purchase the king’s consent to the investigation of monopolies, ‘for they (when their unlawfulness is laid open) will fall of themselves’. Two subsidies were duly voted. It seems likely that Brooke spoke to an official brief; the marquess of Buckingham certainly discussed the matter with Brooke’s wife.
A prompt grant of supply opened the way for an attack on monopolies, and on 23 Feb. Brooke was one of those who successfully urged that the alehouse patentee, Sir Francis Michell, should be shamed by being paraded through London’s streets. During the investigation of (Sir) Giles Mompesson*, promoter of several controversial patents, Brooke, among others, called to have Mompesson committed to the serjeant of the House (28 February). When Mompesson absconded four days later, Brooke seconded Sir Robert Phelips’s motion to inform the Lords and seek a Proclamation closing the ports; swift action was promised, but Coke and Brooke declined to read the draft Proclamation, observing that it was for the king to decide upon the wording.
Despite his keen opposition to many monopolies, Brooke was reluctant to see lord treasurer Mandeville (Sir Henry Montagu*) investigated for approving Michell’s patent (24 February). Indeed, he generally avoided participating in the attack on other referees. Nor was he any more enthusiastic about a motion to investigate allegations of corruption among Buckingham’s Irish clientele (25 Apr.); the king warned Members off this issue, and while some wished to proceed, Brooke urged that ‘sithence the king hath undertaken this himself, to leave it to him’.
As ever, Brooke was involved in a good deal of routine business during the Parliament. On 16 Feb. he tabled an apparel bill which was largely a revival of the 1614 draft, but despite attacking the fashion industry as ‘a principal cause of the inequality of trade’, and claiming that his bill would save £100,000 a year in imports, it did not receive a first reading until 19 April. He was named to the committee two days later, but the bill progressed no further.
It was doubtless with his constituents’ encouragement that Brooke became involved in debates over the economic slump. On 26 Feb. he supported Wentworth’s call for a standing committee on trade, but on 8 Mar. he opposed the bill to ban imports of foreign grain, arguing that the cause of declining prices was ‘not so much the plenty of corn, as the scarceness of money’. He also explained that Baltic merchants would suffer heavy losses unless they could exchange their cloth for Polish grain. The trade committee discussed a relaxation of the monopoly of white cloth exports held by the Merchant Adventurers, but Brooke, perhaps speaking to a brief from the York Adventurers, recalled the unhappy conclusion of a similar Elizabethan experiment in free trade. While initially hopeful of progress over trade issues, Brooke and Askwith eventually advised York’s corporation that ‘we have found a deep ocean of matter not to be waded through in a whole Parliament’.
While Brooke was unwilling to support an unrestrained attack on Buckingham’s affinity, neither was he prepared to countenance any erosion of the Commons’ privileges. As early as 16 Mar., when the Lords asked for permission to examine MPs about the inns patent under oath, Brooke was one of those who opposed this perceived slur upon Members’ probity. He also opposed conferring with the Lords about the date of the Easter recess (21 Mar.), as this might create a precedent, and when it was proposed to thank the Lords for their condemnation of Mompesson (27 Mar.), he observed that much of the credit actually lay with the Commons.
On 28 May Secretary Calvert informed the Commons of the king’s decision to adjourn the session in seven days time. While Members were initially inclined to acquiescence, opinion hardened later in the day. Brooke, for instance, considered ‘this is not so opportune, and it were the way to lose all’. By this he meant that the Commons faced the prospect of losing its entire legislative programme, as this could not possibly be competed by the deadline set by James. He urged his colleagues to give priority to the compilation of the grievances petition, but instead the House decided to confer with the Lords about drafting a joint petition to the king asking for more time. James quickly spurned such an approach, but on 30 May solicitor-general Heath urged the House to do what it could with the time remaining. Some advocated making a protest, but Brooke was for conciliation:
Not to forsake the king’s offer, tis both good for our country and our own honour; to go on to the passing of our bills. I wonder to see this distraction. There are 3 darling bills: monopolies, recusants, informers. If these pass not, yet others that may have an excellent virtue in them.
The Commons eventually accepted James’s original demand for a swift adjournment, whereupon Brooke reminded a forgetful Sir Dudley Digges that it would be necessary to consult the Lords about the continuation of standing committees during the adjournment. He was also chosen to pen an order to the warden of the Fleet prison, then under investigation, not to abuse his position during the vacation (2 June).
When the session resumed on 20 Nov., Phelips complained about the abuse of protections Members issued to their servants, and moved for a roll-call to highlight the absence of Sir Edwin Sandys, who had been arrested during the adjournment. Brooke, presumably wishing to avoid an early confrontation, seconded the complaint about protections, but opposed an early call of the House. Unlike many, Brooke remained silent during key debates about supply and a petition to the king, but when normal business resumed on 30 Nov. he welcomed a proviso exempting Berwick from the bill against the export of wool, and opposed the levying of purveyance on malt in London under a composition, which, he claimed, had only received the assent of some 20 brewers.
I was glad of this petition, that posterity might see we were not asleep, but foresaw the storm. We do not prescribe anything to the king. We only present a humble petition desiring His Majesty to think of the fittest course, less than which we cannot do. The prince is a public person, and every man hath his interest in him. Treaties and matters of war are not in the cognizance of ... subjects, but this motion had his original from those delegates the three lords which came from His Majesty [21 Nov.], which required the primum mobile of this war to be found out, which we hold to be the king of Spain.
CD 1621, ii. 494; Russell, 125-6; Zaller, 154-6.
The king, enraged at the Commons’ presumption, refused even to hear the petition, and on 5 Dec. the House pondered how best to answer his objections. Brooke, among others, insisted ‘that in the petition we had care on religion ... there was no arguments about the marriage used’. After adding that ‘I think we did well and are not faulty’, he moved to have the petition ‘mended, but in no means to be lost’. A fresh petition was drafted, but when this was reported to the House on 7 Dec. Brooke was one of those who insisted that a successful resolution of the quarrel required that James should receive the original petition.
Up to this point Brooke had, as in the spring, been a staunch defender of the Commons’ privileges. However, when William Noye moved for a cessation of business pending a satisfactory answer from the king, Brooke was one of those who demurred, on the technical grounds that an adjournment must be of a certain date, and none could know when the Speaker would return from seeing the king at Newmarket. The question of a cessation remained unresolved four days later, when the House considered another royal message prohibiting an attack on Lepton and Henry Goldsmith, then under investigation for bringing a malicious Star Chamber suit against Sir Edward Coke. Phelips urged that Lepton, then under royal protection at Newmarket, be summoned, but Brooke, while wishing ‘all the false reporters to the king to be in the bottom of the sea with a millstone about their necks’, advised against seeking another confrontation, and moved to release Goldsmith, then in the custody of the serjeant-at-arms.
I am somewhat satisfied by this letter. That we might be all of one mind, and we must not strive with a mightier man (saith Solomon) ... that we have privileges by grant and precedent, it is no matter how we have them, so we have them, as well as by inheritance. Let us make a protestation and we shall go away as well as we came.
Once again, he urged a resumption of business, with a short bill to continue all legislation then before the House in the same state after the prorogation, and consideration of the grievances. His plea might have swayed the House, but for the intervention of Phelips, who called for a Protestation similar to that of 1604; this view carried the day, and Brooke did not speak again in the closing days of the session.
Members of the 1621 Parliament came under heavy pressure to contribute to the Benevolence which replaced the subsidy lost when the Parliament collapsed. On 7 Feb. 1622, the day before the dissolution, Brooke paid the generous sum of £20 into the Exchequer. Any hopes he may have had of preferment from Buckingham in requital for his helpful attitude in the Commons came to nothing, however, but this did not discourage him from seeking election to the 1624 Parliament. On this occasion, the 3rd earl of Southampton, one of the directors of the Virginia Company, secured his return for an Isle of Wight borough, but he opted to sit for York, which once again returned him as one of its Members.
Notably less vociferous than he had been in 1621, with around 20 recorded speeches, Brooke was probably not one of the ‘patriots’ approached to manage the Commons on behalf of Prince Charles and Buckingham in advance of the session. However, he clearly supported their agenda of war with Spain abroad and enforcement of the recusancy laws at home. On 25 Feb., the third day of business, he joined in the clamour against the insolency of Catholics during the negotiations for a Spanish Match. While Richard Dyott complained about the public appearances of the Catholic bishop of Chalcedon in Staffordshire, Brooke warned that seminarists ordained in England would evade conviction under the 1584 Act against Jesuits and seminary priests as this applied only to those ordained abroad.
The foreign policy debate began in earnest on 1 Mar., when Sir Benjamin Rudyard surveyed the dismal situation in Germany and offered four propositions to strengthen England’s fortifications, the Navy, Ireland and the Low Countries. Brooke, speaking later the same day, offered four reasons to wage war on Spain. First of all, there was the need to stiffen resistance to Habsburg advances in Germany; secondly it was essential to support the Dutch, whom he described as ‘an army of frogs raised by God to support us’. The insults offered to Prince Charles during his stay in Madrid, and the threat posed by English Catholics (‘nobody loves Spanish papists but English papists’) completed his list of reasons. In his enthusiasm, Brooke ran slightly ahead of the day’s agenda, which was confined to the question of a diplomatic breach rather than the war that might ensue, but Phelips steered the debate back on course, and the motion for a breach with Spain was carried.
Once the Commons agreed in principle to supply the Crown’s needs, the king asked Members to put a figure on their generosity. The subsidy debate of 19 Mar. proved inconclusive, however, and by the following morning Brooke had grown impatient. There was no need for further lengthy debate, he argued, ‘for that were to press on the prerogative of the Crown, it being the inherent prerogative of the king to make war’.
After the Easter recess, while questions still remained about the king’s determination to pursue a war with Spain, Brooke chose to become involved in the investigation of allegations of corruption, particularly those concerning lord treasurer Middlesex (Sir Lionel Cranfield*), a longstanding acquaintance, both as a member of literary circle at the Mitre tavern, and as Ingram’s business partner. On 9 Apr. Brooke pronounced himself ‘sorry the treasurer was thus accused’, but supported Middlesex’s request for a hearing before the Commons, observing that the allegations under investigation amounted to ‘more than rewards or gratuities (nearest extortion), but less than bribery, for bribery must be corruption of justice’. Middlesex was allowed to make his case the following afternoon, but failed to appear, delegating Brooke to ask, twice, for another twenty-four hours’ grace, which was not granted.
During the 1624 session, as usual, Brooke assisted with more routine items of business. He reported the Hallamshire cutlers’ bill, sponsored by Sir John Savile* (12 Apr.), and also three private bills: for the estate of Sir Edward Herne (29 Apr.), for transferring the forfeited estate of the recusant Sir Henry James to a Scottish courtier, the earl of Holdernesse (22 Mar.), and for compensating Sir Charles Caesar* for the fraudulent conveyance of an estate (7 May).
Brooke played relatively little part in the 1625 Parliament, partly because the York corporation did not draft a legislative agenda for its Members, but perhaps also for fear of offending Buckingham. On the first day of business he was named to the privileges’ committee (21 June), successfully moved that the committee should be granted the usual powers to hear counsel and send for witnesses, and called for an early hearing about the return of Sir William Cope, elected while under outlawry. He was named to a committee to frame a petition on religion (24 June), which later scrutinized A New Gagg, a book by the Arminian cleric Richard Montagu, and when the results of this investigation were reported on 7 July he showed his willingness to espouse an unpopular cause by moving to read a petition from Montagu, which was done. There is no evidence that he was present at the Oxford sitting in August.
During the fraught 1626 session, in which many Members aspired to obscurity, Brooke was one of the few Members prepared to offer the government some support. One of the items on York’s parliamentary agenda was relief from the depredations of Dunkirk privateers, which had created havoc along the east coast shipping routes over the winter, and on 25 Feb. it was suggested that a duty of 12d. per chaldron should be imposed upon Tyneside coal to provide for convoys. Some opposed this levy as an imposition, but Brooke considered ‘the remedy must be either by giving subsidy ... [or] now in case of necessity to lay an imposition of 12d. for seven years for this very cause’.
In addition to his support for generous and prompt supply, Brooke was one of the few Members who attempted to defend the duke of Buckingham against those who aimed at his impeachment. On 23 Feb. the favourite came under indirect attack in a debate over the role of the Admiralty Court in detaining a French ship, which had caused a major diplomatic incident: Brooke advised Members ‘not to fall upon any rocks of state’, and moved that the French response, an embargo of English trade, be given first priority. This advice was ignored, but when the same issue was debated again on 11 Mar., he reiterated ‘that we should lay this aside’; the topic was dropped upon a vote. A week later, when the duke’s enemies proposed to investigate the loan of a squadron of English ships to the French, which had subsequently been used against the Huguenots, Brooke urged ‘that it should go no further than the detaining of our ships, not the sending of them’. This would have placed the blame upon the French rather than Buckingham, but a vote upheld the charge against the duke. Like most Members, Brooke remained silent during the debates over the impeachment charges after Easter. However, on 8 June, when Sir John Savile, another of the duke’s defenders, was attacked for criticizing the Commons in an open letter to the Yorkshire clothiers, Brooke opposed the imprisonment of one of Savile’s accomplices.
While Brooke was quick to raise the issue of coastal defence, his constituents realized that, as neither of the city’s MPs were corporation members, they would be better served by sending other representatives to lobby on their behalf, a plan Brooke apparently endorsed in March. He was, however, one of the delegation who attended the Privy Council during the Easter recess, when Savile obtained a 60 per cent reduction in the sums charged on Yorkshire for Privy Seal loans.
Brooke was among the first to pay the Forced Loan, remitting the modest sum of £4 directly to the Exchequer in October 1626, and in the following month he was appointed a judge of the Council in the North, a post which normally changed hands for £600. He may have struggled to raise this price, as in his will of 8 Dec. 1627 he confessed himself ‘so ill a husband of mine own fortunes’ that he was unable to afford mourning, or bequests to his siblings. His house in Drury Lane had been sub-let to Sir William Bampfield*, but he also held modest properties in Yorkshire, the Essex marshes, Chancery Lane, and his wife’s jointure estates in Southampton. Among a substantial collection of paintings, some hanging at Ingram’s house at York, he left Sir John Brooke portraits of the 3rd earl of Southampton and Richard Martin*, a Holy Family to his neighbour William Ravenscroft*, and two other pictures to his ‘dear, ancient and worthy friend’ John Donne. He was buried in Lincoln’s Inn chapel on 7 Feb. 1628, but it was a decade before his only son John proved the will. His son’s subsequent career has not been traced.