A family at war – Lord and Lady Brooke of Warwick

Discussion between

Andy Hopper, Stewart Beale and Ann Hughes

[00.00]

In this podcast we delve into what life was like in a noble household during the years of Civil War. To do this we’ll be examining the household accounts of the Greville family, leading parliamentarians and owners of Warwick Castle during the Civil Wars.  

Robert Greville, Lord Brooke, is far from a household name, even among those keen on their civil-war history. Brooke is sometimes discussed as a forerunner of Oliver Cromwell, but is best known for his sudden and premature death during the first year of the Civil War. On 2 March 1643 during the siege of Lichfield Cathedral Close, he was unlucky enough to be shot in the head by a musket ball, fired from an extreme range by a royalist sharpshooter in the cathedral’s tower. 

As well as being a terrible shock to his family and household, Brooke’s premature death was a transformative setback for the parliamentarian cause. He was reviled by the Royalists, but lamented by parliamentarians as the foremost martyr in their cause. His widow, Katherine, became the most richly rewarded war widow of the entire conflict.

Back in 2020, a team of academics began work on a project to publish Lord and Lady Brooke’s household accounts during the 1640s. What they discovered has advanced our knowledge of the outbreak of Civil War and its impact on Warwick and Warwickshire.

To reflect about their work together on this project, Professor Andrew Hopper of the University of Oxford talked to his fellow co-editors of these accounts, Dr Stewart Beale, Editor of Public Policy at Palgrave Macmillan Publishers, and Professor Ann Hughes of Keele University.

[01.58]

Ann Hughes:  Some 50 years ago, I did a doctoral thesis on Warwickshire and the Civil War.  Lord Brooke, whose accounts, along with those of his widow, form the contents of the volume that we’re going to publish shortly, was at the centre of this thesis.  So I used these records to some extent a long time ago, but I’m the last person, I think, to join the team who’ve produced the volume, so I’d like to ask Andy and Stewart, how the project to publish the household accounts of Lord and Lady Brooke came about?

Stewart Beale:  Yes, when I first became aware of Lady Brooke during my PhD thesis at the University of Leicester, I was researching the experiences of war widows during the British Civil Wars, with particular on the Midlands.   With the Brooke family residing in the Midlands, I looked at some of Lady Brooke’s petitions to Parliament, which I think we will touch on later in this podcast, looking at some of her petitioning strategies.  I didn’t look at the accounts as much, but my supervisor, Andy – who I know had done a little bit of work on the accounts already as part of his wider project looking at war widows – had been studying them.  So that’s how we came to it.

Do you want to say a bit about your project, Andy?

[03.17]

Andy Hopper:  Sure.  I was the principal investigator of a project, the Civil War Petitions Project, which digitised and transcribed all the petitions and certificates for war widows and maimed soldiers during and after the Civil Wars.  I was very interested in Lady Brooke and I knew about the accounts in Warwick Record Office – the household accounts of Lord and Lady Brooke – and I kind of set them aside, thinking I could do them as a retirement project some years in advance.  And then we, Stewart and I met up for a fateful few beers and a curry in Oxford, and I think that must have been in 2019, and Stewart suggested that we bring forward the timetable somewhat and valiantly offered to help out with the transcription of the accounts as it was a big job.

[04.12]

Ann Hughes: So these accounts are kept in Warwick Record Office.  How extensive are they?

Andy Hopper:    The records are kept in Warwickshire County Record Office, in the Castle Records Collection. We’re covering them during the 1640s – from 1640 right up to 1649.  They run up to a year before Lady Brooke’s death in 1675 and actually go on beyond that. So it’s such an enormous collection that we just focus on the 1640s for this book.

[04.45]

Ann Hughes: So, in the published volume, apart from the accounts, what else will be included, and how long is the volume altogether?

Stewart Beale:  The volume we have prepared is around 130,000 words and that includes nine years of accounts from 1640 to 1649 and several appendices as well, including a copy of Lord Brooke’s will, an inventory of Brooke House in Holborn in 1643, just a couple of months after Lord Brooke’s death, and Warwick Castle in 1644.

So we’re going to discuss the Brooke account in a bit more detail shortly but, Ann, I wonder if we might start by saying why early modern historians should bother studying household accounts.

[05.29]

Ann Hughes:  Yes, elite noble and gentry households are enormously important to early modern England.  They are centres of political power, they are centres of employment and economic enterprise.  They are centres of cultural life, cultural patronage.  And accounts on the level can be seen as rather bald accounts of expenditure but actually, because they show what people are spending their money on, they illustrate the material culture, what people are buying.  They illustrate their sociability, as they have trips to their neighbours or presents from their neighbours, and they give us clues about how the elites ran their households, show where their money comes from to some extent – their sources of income – and they show how they spent it on their children, their servants, their entertainment, their books, food and drink, and so on.

[06.25]

Stewart Beale:  And moving on to these accounts specifically, are we able to say who wrote them and what the purpose was?

Ann Hughes:  Well, they are written by senior household servants.  In the case of Lord Brooke, the earliest accounts are kept by two men who they later feature in the Civil War – John Halford and Joseph Hawksworth.  Halford travelled with Brooke between London and Warwickshire.  Hawksworth, in the early stages of the accounts, was the chief receiver of money and organiser in the castle itself.   And then the later ones are overseen by William Bridges, who was the auditor of the accounts and a member of a family that dominated the estate administration of the Brookes, an Ulster family.  So they are written by officials: if you are a member of the landed elite, you don’t keep your own running totals of the money you spend.  But they are checked over, to some extent, by the head of the household which, for most of the time we are looking at, is of course Katherine, Lady Brooke, rather than Brooke himself who dies at a very early stage.

[07.47]

Stewart Beale:  Andy, what particular topics can these household accounts inform us about?

Andy Hopper:  Well, Ann’s touched on some of these already. They can tell us about their clothing, their apparel, their food and drink. They can tell us quite a bit about the servants – what the servants’ wages were, the kind of hierarchy of service in the household. Then they tell us a lot about their pastimes: it is interesting to see the sort of bowling, fencing, archery, hunting, the reading of particular books, the tuition of the children in languages, mathematics, arms and horsemanship.

And then also they tell us quite a bit about political events going on, too, so things like the Irish Rebellion and then the executions of the royal favourites such as Strafford and Laud are touched upon, because it seems that elements of the households were present to see those national political events.  And this was, of course, because they had two townhouses, two mansions – both called Brooke House – one at Holborn in London and one a little further out in Hackney.  And that gave them a base in the capital: they could participate in aristocratic sociability there and also it helped Lord Brooke attend parliamentary committees and the House of Lords of course, at Westminster.  So Parliament was within easy reach for them along the river, often by river boat.  So yes, all in all, the household accounts tell us a lot about the everyday business of the servants and sometimes, too, Lord and Lady Brooke as well.

[09.20]

Stewart Beale: And what do they tell us about record-keeping and the management of an aristocratic household on the eve of Civil War, Ann?

Ann Hughes:  Aristocratic households became more systematic and organised by the mid-later seventeenth century and you can almost see this happening through these accounts, as William Bridges and probably his father, John Bridges, as well, sort of sort them out.  And particularly, of course, they are disrupted by the Civil War.  The earliest accounts are the accounts of John Halford and Joseph Hawksworth who, in the early 1640s, are household officials but, from 1642, they are both very active as military commanders in the Civil War.  And it is clear that the accounts as we have them now, that they are copies made in 1648/9 and that they are tidied up, organised, checked over, much later than when the expenditure was actually made.

Charges for the right honourable the Lord Brooke at Stratford at the settling the militia, 30 June 1642

Inprimis delivered to Mr Whateley one pottle of sack to the Lion at	2s and 4p
Item to the Unicorn 2 gallons of claret	5s and 4p
Item sent thither one gallon of *lords* sack	4s and 8p
Item more 1 quart of white wine	8p
Item a 2 quart bottle broak	6p
Item more to goodman Lobkins by Mr Brooke for Stratford men, 6 quarts of claret	4s
Paid for 34 men’s dinners which sat at my Lord’s table at 2 shilling a man	£3 and 8s
Paid for 88 men’s dinners more at 12 pence a man	£4 and 8s
Paid for the baking of 5 pasties of venison	£1
Paid for beef and bread my Lord’s servants had to breakfast	3s
Paid for stabling for horses and oats	11s
Paid to the musicians	7s
Paid to a cook for helping ours	2s and 6p
To the poor given	4s

[11.39]

From 1643, they are much more systematic, but they are dealing with the aftermath of Brooke’s death and all the debts he had, and other aspects that we will come onto later.  But they’re checked by William Bridges, who is clearly the auditor, by the end – checking that they fit together.  And Lady Brooke also signs off on them – sometimes very rapidly and sometimes she gets round to it a bit later – but she is the guardian: her sons are under-age in this period, so she is the person who has ultimate authority over them and is ultimately the manager of the household, but with a whole complicated hierarchy of household servants underneath her.

[12.25]

Stewart Beale:  Are there any servants in the household who stand out or who are distinctive in some way?

Andy Hopper:  Well, there were some that I was very interested in.  There’s a Bohemian exile from what is now the Czech Republic – a chap called George Sadeskey, who appears to have been the master of horses and hounds for the household.  He later is a Major in Ireton’s regiment in the New Model Army.  There is Richard Cross, the senior servant in the household, who was a lieutenant in Brooke’s cavalry troop.  And then Peter Sterry, who’s a radical Congregationalist chaplain in the household; John Sadler is the secretary and tutor to Lord Brooke’s sons.  John Spencer is a coachman and lay preacher, and of particular interest is James Cooke, who is a surgeon – he becomes a surgeon at Warwick Castle during the Civil Wars and is later a Congregationalist minister who gets very close to Lady Brooke in her widowhood.

[13.23]

And then further down the hierarchy, there are some that stand out for their nicknames.  ‘Jack Indian’ was possibly from the Caribbean, given that Brooke had colonial interests there with the Providence Island Company.  And there’s a ‘Black Dick’, who’s possibly – possibly of African descent, who became the assistant coachman in 1643.  And my favourite – one of the laundry maids – who was nicknamed ‘Besse the Dwarf’.  There was also a postilion, William Ward, who the accounts record his skull being broken by a horse.  Quite a lot of money was spent trying to heal him: £3 were spent on surgeon’s fees in vain – he passed away.  And then there is William, the poor little kitchen boy, whose eye was hurt by a fox.  So there are these little lovely vignettes of everyday life – maybe there was a pet fox being kept in the kitchens – that we get from the accounts.

[14.25]

Ann Hughes:  Could I add, I think we’re coming onto Brooke’s sort of very distinctive character as a parliamentarian political leader.  He clearly had people like Peter Sterry, people like John Sadler who later becomes a very, very important parliamentarian, lawyer and journalist in London and in the Parliament in the 1640s and ‘50s.  He attracted a very interesting range of chaplains, state officials and so on.  But I think also the other way round, he also had local men who – through the Civil Wars – sort of struck out on their own.  Joseph Hawksworth and John Bridges, who both become, both become very significant military commanders in Warwickshire and, in Bridges case, later in Ireland during the Civil War.

I do want to say something about the Bridges family of Ulster, because their father, John Bridges, and something like six sons, including two teenagers by the end of these accounts, all serve the Grevilles of Warwick Castle, right through the  eighteenth century and make their fortunes really through service of the Bridges family.  John Bridges, senior and junior, are legally trained, so they act as stewards and they’re executors of Brooke’s will.  So he attracts these very interesting and distinctive people like Peter Sterry, but he also has these local people who sort of move on semi-independently through the Civil War to make their fortunes and become influential in their own right.

[16.07]

Stewart Beale:  Yes, and I think that leads us quite nicely onto our next section, which is looking a little bit more at Lord Brooke and his role during the Civil War.  Ann, I wonder if you could just give us a little bit of information about who Robert Greville, the second Lord Brooke, was?

Ann Hughes:  Yes. I’d say he’s a very distinctive, intellectual and radical popularising parliamentarian nobleman.  It’s important to say that he was not the obvious – or direct, or closest blood relation to the first Lord Brooke.  He was adopted, in effect, by Fulke Greville, the first Lord Brooke, who was also a very interesting person – a  poet, someone who had served Queen Elizabeth, who had served James I.  He was a rather austere and puritanical person himself.  And Robert Greville is the son of a distant cousin of, from a Lincolnshire gentry family.

He’s in effect adopted.  When Fulke Greville becomes Lord Brooke, through James I, he names Robert as the heir to the estate, and he clearly, I think, supervised some of his education.  He had been to the University of Leiden in the Protestant Dutch Republic, he’d toured Europe, so he’s an intellectual but he’s also not someone who is naturally part of the Warwickshire gentry.  Fulke Greville had nephews – the Verney family – who thought they should have done much better.   Fulke Greville became enormously wealthy, so there’s some rivalry and jealousy and legal cases that are indicated in the accounts are still going on in the 1640s.

[17.54]

But Fulke Greville never wanted to marry and had no children of his own so he named Robert as his heir and established him with a massive estate really, land in more than 12 counties, two London houses – Hackney and Holborn – and a very generous estate.  And the second Lord Brooke was a longstanding – for a youngish man – a longstanding and determined opponent of Charles I, from a very early stage.  He was very involved in colonial enterprises that were the great networks of Puritan opposition to the King.  When the Scots rebel against Charles I, Brooke is one of only two peers, along with his friend, Lord Saye and Sele from Oxfordshire, the only two peers willing to refuse to help the King against the Scots.  He is imprisoned briefly for his refusal to support the King against the Scots.  At the end of the Short Parliament, his London study is rifled because they are accused, probably quite rightly, of treasonous secret negotiations with the Scots.  So he’s a very determined Puritan, opponent of Charles’s religious policies and also a clearly worked out opponent of absolute, arbitrary monarchy.

[19.25]

Stewart Beale:  And Andy, can you say a bit about the part Brooke played in the outbreak of Civil War?

Andy Hopper:  At the beginning of summer, 1642, he was in London recruiting volunteers for the parliamentarian army.  He was initially given command of a force to be sent to Ireland to put down the Irish Rebellion, but that force never got there and ended up being recruited into the parliamentarian army of the Earl of Essex.  So Brooke’s regiment ended up fighting at Edgehill.

He’d also been refortifying Warwick Castle for some time with earthworks and with artillery sited on the mound and on the Guy’s Tower.  Townsmen and, later, Royalist prisoners, were made to labour on these earthworks and fortifications.

He also transferred the county magazine of arms and armour, which was held at Coventry – he transferred that to Warwick Castle for safekeeping on 1 July 1642, which turned out to be a good move because his enemy in the county, Spencer Compton, Earl of Northampton, was soon trying to mobilise forces for the King, and while Brooke was away further south, the Earl of Northampton came to besiege Warwick Castle in August 1642.  The governor there was Sir Edward Peyto, who famously responded to the summons to surrender by William Dugdale, the Royalist herald, by hanging a Bible and a winding sheet from the curtain wall.  The Royalists planted artillery in the tower of St Mary’s parish church in Warwick, and, from there, they were able to bombard the castle.  They also ransacked Lord Brooke’s deer park at Wedgnock, just on the outskirts of Warwick, destroying its pales and fences.  But probably owing to lacking sufficient artillery and force and time, the Royalist siege was unsuccessful and Northampton was forced to withdraw his forces.

[21.32]

Stewart Beale: And why was it that Lord Brooke returned to Warwick to recruit a volunteer army in the West Midlands in February 1643, Ann?

Ann Hughes:  Warwickshire, just by its geography as a Midlands county, was crucial to both sides in the Civil War and it was crucial for Parliament to seize, to dominate the area, to control the area.  But the first major battle of the Civil War, the Battle of Edgehill in October 1642, had been indecisive and Charles I’s army had approached London and, indeed, Brooke’s own regiment had been badly affected – decimated by Prince Rupert’s attack on Brentford on 12 November 1642.  So over the winter of 1642/3, there is a sort of stalemate.  The King establishes a headquarters in Oxford: both sides are seeking to raise provincial forces to control and hold down territory with a network of garrisons.  Warwick Castle is clearly an important potential garrison to control a wide area of South Warwickshire, Oxfordshire and so on.

[22.49]

Brooke is made commander of a Midlands Association, combining Staffordshire and Warwickshire, so Brooke returns to Warwick in 1643 to raise new volunteers into a new local  army that would hopefully dominate both Warwickshire and Staffordshire for the Parliament.  And I think it is important to say that Brooke seems to have been a very effective, popular leader.  As I said, his own perhaps particular inheritance as the heir of the first Lord Brooke meant that he wasn’t necessarily very successful in raising support amongst the gentry, though there were Puritan gentry who were his allies and supporters.  So he seems to have focused on what we historians generally call the ‘middling sorts’ – relatively ordinary, small landowners, industrial enterprise people from North Warwickshire around Birmingham.

And a pamphlet was published which reported a speech he gave, encouraging his men to go out ‘to fight the Lord’s battles, as in the time of King David’, in terms actually that we are familiar with much later, but taken up by Cromwell, of ordinary people – relatively ordinary people – fighting the Lord’s battles and fighting in godly cause, rather than accepting the support of mercenary soldiers.

And officers in Brookes’ army include some notable radical figures, including famously, the later Leveller leader, John Lilburne, the militant Baptist and regicide army officer prominent in the New Model Army, John Okey, as well as John Fox, later scorned as ‘the Jovial Tinker’ by Royalists, who was a metal worker from Walsall, and established a semi-independent garrison at Edgbaston during, later in the Civil War.

[24.58]

Stewart Beale:  And then, of course, it all came to a premature end for Lord Brooke.  So Andy, can you say a little bit about how it was that he came to be killed?

Andy Hopper:  Well, he was determined to move against the local Royalists.  He did that first by successfully capturing Stratford-upon-Avon and ejecting the Royalist force from the town, and then he turned north to the Cathedral city of Lichfield, where the Royalists had fortified themselves in the Cathedral Close.  And, whilst directing the siege of the close, from a house on Dam Street on 2 March 1643, he was shot through the head at extreme range by a freak shot from a sharpshooter, using probably a form of rifled musket that was often used for hunting from the Cathedral tower.  We have measured the distance now and it is 177 metres, so a very long way for such a precise shot.  And so it also occurred on St Chad’s day – and St Chad was the patron saint of Lichfield Cathedral – so you can imagine the Royalists’ newsbooks had an absolute field day, that the bullet had been guided by God.

[26.11]

Stewart Beale:  And how significant a parliamentarian leader was he?

Ann Hughes:  I think he was a very significant parliamentarian leader.  He was, as we have seen, a successful raiser of volunteers in the provinces but he was also a very significant figure in connecting Members of Parliament to City merchants, particularly colonial merchants.  It’s clear that he had recruited several of the officers in his regiment, for example, in his army, from City radicals.  He was very frequently used to liaise between the House of Commons and the House of Lords and also between Parliament itself and the Corporation in the City of London.

He’s also, I think, a very interesting example – and the Earl of Warwick might be another one – of a nobleman whose political power was based obviously to some extent on his wealth and his landed interests, but also on an ideological campaign to present himself as a leader of a cause, a religious cause. He was a very early supporter of religious liberty. He was praised by Milton as a great lost leader and, as we have said, he was conscious of his wealth and status but he was also conscious of the need to get committed volunteers of whatever social ranks they were.  And there are, I think, quite significant parallels with Oliver Cromwell.

[27.51]

I think what we don’t know, of course, and what is very interesting about the Civil War – and it applies to some of Brooke’s servants – is that people who had had no military training discovered through civil war that they were effective military leaders.  We don’t actually know whether Brooke would have been a significant military leader but, had he been, I think he would have been a very significant Parliamentarian leader.  And so his premature death is, I think, very significant for the nature of relationships between the House of Commons and the House of Lords, relationships with the City, and the tone of parliamentarianism through the 1640s.

[28.37]

Stewart Beale:  So, the accounts give us a good insight into the goings on in Warwick Castle during the Civil War.  We have already touched on the siege.  Andy, I wonder if you might say a little bit about how the castle was transformed from a home into a military garrison?

Andy Hopper:  In short, it was the blending of a noble household into parliamentarian state service and their war effort.  Many of the servants in the pre-war household became involved in the castle’s garrison, as paymasters, fuellers, gardeners, chaplains, cooks and clerks – transferring their service from the Greville family over to the parliamentary cause.

The garrison was most likely recruited locally.  It consisted of about 300 men, commanded first by Brooke’s half-brother, Godfrey Bosvile, who was an MP, and then by William Colemore.  This was a sizeable force: given the town’s population then was only about 3,000, a garrison of 300 soldiers was pretty big.  Some of its officers were provided by the Bridges family that Ann has talked about, such as John and Matthew Bridges, and then another one of Ann’s favourites, the gardener, George Medley, seems to have become the drummer in one of the companies.  And poor Medley must have lamented the destruction of the castle gardens, which had been established by the first Lord Brooke, which were ruined by the earthworks constructed at the bottom of the castle mound, while the mound itself served as an artillery platform and many fruit trees and plants were lost in that process.  You can imagine poor old George Medley despairing of all his handiwork being destroyed.

[30.20]

Stewart Beale:  And what can we learn from the accounts themselves about the condition of Warwick Castle during the Civil War?

Ann Hughes:  It’s not the accounts so much as the inventory of Brooke’s personal estate in Warwick, taken in January 1644.  Warwick Castle has over 70 rooms and it’s clear that most of them are given over to a garrison – it’s no longer a luxurious, noble household.  Indeed, most of the ‘good stuff’ is packed away in the wardrobe, locked away in the wardrobe for safekeeping.  The tapestries, the carpets, the best furniture, is locked away in the wardrobe, because the castle is full of soldiers.  And many important rooms are virtually empty: the great hall had two tables and a desk for books.  The new dining room had just a single plate, a single table, with no plate or linen.  Old beds were scattered around the tower rooms, rather than the elaborate beds that would have been used for elite visitors in normal times – presumably, the old beds were kept for use by weary soldiers.

[31.34]

Stewart Beale:  And what role did Warwick play in the campaign, before and after the first big battle, which was Edgehill?

Andy Hopper:  After the battle, the Earl of Essex withdrew the parliamentarian army to Warwick for safety.  It gave them a temporary breathing space for his army to recuperate.  And households in the town were used to nurse about 300 parliamentarian wounded from the battle, many of whom were brought in to Warwick to recover, and some of them, the worst-wounded, were remaining there a year later.

The castle is used to hold important Royalists prisoners, taken at the battle, so the Royalist general’s son, Montagu Bertie, Earl of Lindsey, who’d lost his father in the battle – he was imprisoned in Warwick Castle, along with Sir Thomas Lunsford and Sir Edward Stradling.

The King’s baggage train was plundered at Edgehill, about 38 cartloads of which were brought into custody at Warwick Castle and kept locked up in a pillage cellar, as it was referred to, which sparked a lot of scurrilous gossip and rumour in the garrison.  Perhaps Ann would like to tell us a bit more about that.

[32.50]

Ann Hughes:  Colonel John Bridges, who is the younger John Bridges, succeeds as the governor of Warwick Castle later in the war.  Over and over again he’s accused in the 1640s and 1650s and then again at the Restoration, of purloining of these jewels, plate, carpets, clothes from the royal baggage train captured at Edgehill.  To be fair, he is always acquitted but the same evidence comes up again and again, that he and his wife and her cousin, who is also an estate official, rummage in the pillage cellar and have apronfuls of plate, that his wife and daughter wear jewels, and it’s women giving evidence against women.  You know, jewels that people of their social status could never have afforded.

And I think it goes back to what we said about the transformation of the castle into a garrison, because some of the people who give evidence against Bridges, including for instance Joseph Hawksworth, and also John Bryan, who is one of the chaplains who also becomes a collector of revenue and donations for the Parliament, they give not precisely evidence against Bridges but certainly evidence that is not helpful to him.

And I think what’s interesting is what’s happening is the hierarchies that were settled in the household before the Civil War are shaken and transformed, partly obviously by Brooke’s death, in that the head of the hierarchy is gone.  Lady Brooke is basically in London and is managing the family and the estates, but is not in Warwick.  And, as the Civil War goes on, it’s probably the case that Joseph Hawksworth, for instance, who succeeds Bridges as governor of the castle, and is the cavalry commander – quite a significant cavalry commander around Warwick, but he’s probably a more radical parliamentarian than John Bridges, who’s a friend of Richard Baxter, a more moderate Puritan minister.

[35.09]

I think one of the real interests that these accounts are very helpful for is how a noble household of a particular kind, an intellectual, engaged household, parliamentarian household, is disrupted by the disputes within parliamentarianism and by the fact that people get their independence through parliamentarian service and are sort of not in the same hierarchies and straightforward relationships that being senior servants in a noble household would have given them.

[35.46]

Stewart Beale:  And Andy, in what ways did the parliamentarians utilise Warwick and the castle for the remainder of the first Civil War?

Andy Hopper:  Well, it remained an important parliamentarian garrison for the whole period.  As we have seen, the Bridges family provided a number of its officers and it really helped Parliament secure, control and extract revenue and supplies from a lot of the county during the war years.  We see historians talking about how Warwickshire was parliamentarian; it wasn’t that simple – it was divided, the county was divided, as every other county was.  But the Warwick County Committee – many of whose members had been friends of Lord Brooke – did a very good job of holding the county and extracting its resources for Parliament during the first Civil War.  And the garrison itself was part of an intelligence network, gathering news of troop movements and so on, for Parliament: they had watchmen and agents posted on the roads around Warwick and could convey messages very quickly to other parliamentarian garrisons.  And it remained a prison right up until the Restoration and there were Royalists captured at the Battle of Worcester in 1651 who were held in Warwick, too.

[53.05]

Stewart Beale:  And what became of the castle after the wars?

Ann Hughes:  Well, as Andy said, it remained a garrison until the Restoration – a smaller garrison through the 1650s.  And it remained a prison, housing Royalist prisoners in particular, again up until the Restoration.  It was not fully lived in by the Grevilles again until after the Restoration, although Katherine return briefly to the castle in 1652, carrying out a survey of the damage that had been done to the gardens, particularly, to the towers, and I think gaining significant support from the Interregnum government for repairs, and so they visited in the 1650s but they remained largely living in London.

Its fate could be contrasted with that of Kenilworth.  Kenilworth was a crown property.  It had been a Royalist garrison as well as a parliamentarian garrison and it was slighted after the Civil War: that is, enough of it was pulled down, so that it could never again be defended as a, as a military centre.  But Warwick Castle, it’s owned by a loyal parliamentarian family, and indeed the leading parliamentarian martyr.  It’s a parliamentarian garrison, so it survives the Civil War. It’s damaged, but they’re rich enough and they’re supported enough to repair and even recreate the garden.

[38.42]

Stewart Beale:  So, following the death of Lord Brooke in 1643, he left behind a widow, Katherine, who I know is a big focus of another of your forthcoming books, Andy.  So I wonder if you might say a little about who Lady Brooke was, and how it was she came to marry Robert Greville.

Andy Hopper:  So, Katherine was the daughter of Francis Russell, fourth Earl of Bedford and his wife, Catherine.  Bedford was a very prominent Puritan, at the forefront of the parliamentary opposition to Charles I in 1640 with the calling of the Long Parliament.  The marriage was likely arranged by Katherine’s parents around 1631, probably because they approved of Robert Greville’s Puritan credentials and they were attracted by his recent inheritance of the extensive estates of the first Lord Brooke.  So, that is quite common for aristocratic families at this time, to have those kind of dynastic arrangements being foremost in the motives for arranging marriages.

[39.49]

Stewart Beale:  Can we say much about what their married life was like?

Andy Hopper:  Well, we know little of their relationship.  There’s the odd tantalising hint in the accounts.  We must remember that Robert was 11 years older than Katherine and they were aged around 24 and 13 at their marriage, and so, in view of Katherine’s young age, we would hope that the marriage wasn’t consummated immediately and it wasn’t until she was around 18 that she gave birth to their first child.  And then Katherine went on to bear Robert five sons inside six years.  Francis, the eldest, was born in 1637; Robert in 1638; Edward in 1641 after a brief pause there; Algernon in 1642, and then finally Fulke, who was born after his father’s death in 1643.  So poor Katherine, she as only 18 when the eldest was born, and 24 when the youngest was born.

[40.54]

Stewart Beale:  And what challenges did Lady Brooke face because of the premature death of her husband?

Ann Hughes:  Well, she was faced as a young widow with the complexities of household and estate management.  Her father had died.  Her brother had defected briefly to the Royalists and so he was not a terribly useful support within the parliamentarian cause.  But she managed very successfully to defend and protect her children, protect their financial status.  She kept them safe in London.  She had them educated and entertained.

Lady Brooke does remarkably well.  Her family, her Russell family, have left very extensive household accounts, it may be that she had learned the value of systematic accounting and support – she was supported by parliamentarian allies.  She was also clearly supported by members of the Bridges family, and in the sort of late, later accounts after her sons come of age, she often keeps her own personal accounts, which I think Matthew Bridges and William Bridges organise.  So she is stabilising the household.

Her husband was left very, very significant debts.  He’d lost the largest amount of money of all the investors in the Providence Island Company, which fails in the early ‘40s, because their colony is captured by the Spanish.  She sorts out those arrears.  A lot of the accounts are involved in paying off debts that Robert Greville had secured in raising forces in the early 1640s and those debts seem to be very systematically paid out.  So she is conscientious, systematic, caring for her family and the estates.

[42.54]

Stewart Beale:  And Andy, as succinctly as possible, could you explain a little about wardship and the impact of this on Katherine’s experiences of the Civil Wars?

Andy Hopper:  Yes, this was a big challenge she faced after her husband’s death.  So, if a landowner had held an estate from the King in lieu of knight’s service, if that landowner died before their heir had reached the age of 21, the estate and the heir had to be assigned a guardian who would look after or, more frequently, exploit them and the estate for their own gain.  And this whole process was administered by the Court of Wards.  Its purpose was to raise money for the Crown, as the monarch would receive the payment from the successful applicant for the wardship.  And during the Civil War, the Court of Wards was split – there was a rival Court of Wards set up at Oxford for the Royalists, while the parliamentarian one remained at Westminster.

And the King granted the wardship of young Francis, the eldest of Katherine’s sons, to his favourite, Lord Digby, who happened to have married Katherine’s sister, Anne.  And this granted Digby custody of Francis and Katherine received a letter demanding she hand over Francis or face a colossal fine of £5,000.  So she had to prevent this at all costs, to prevent Francis being handed over to the Royalists and to preserve his inheritance, too.  So the accounts help reveal the stages by which Katherine did this.  She petitioned Parliament to claim the wardship for herself – this was a lengthy, expensive, difficult process, with lots of palms needed to be greased.  There were £78 in fees paid out to about 19 different people in order for her to secure the guardianship of Francis to herself.  And I think her experience and those of other high-profile parliamentarian war widows helped make the case for the abolition of the Courts of Wards by the Long Parliament in 1646.

[45.01]

Stewart Beale:  And how was it that Katherine became the most richly remunerated parliamentarian war widow of the conflict?

Andy Hopper:  Well, in a dramatic gesture in January 1648, the House of Lords voted Katherine £5000 for the education of her fifth son, Fulke, and it’s intriguing that this was exactly the same sum that the King had threatened to fine her for not handing over her eldest son, Francis, to Lord Digby in 1644.

[45.32]

Stewart Beale:  And do we know that this enormous sum ordered by Parliament was actually paid?

Andy Hopper:  Well, this is the joy of the household accounts.  Yes, they reveal that they were.  The sum was paid by rents confiscated from lands in Ireland, held by the Royalist Marquis of Antrim and his wife, the Duchess of Buckingham, the widow of the King’s favourite who was murdered in 1628.  The accounts show that sum was paid in full, almost within three years of the House of Lords order, by February 1651.  Katherine was able to use this money to loan to other members of her family at a rate of interest, to her younger brother, Edward, and her brother-in-law, Sir Arthur Haselrig.

[46.15]

Stewart Beale:  And what happened to Katherine and her five sons?

Andy Hopper:  Well, the story of her sons is quite a sad one because many of them died young.  Francis died in 1658, soon after he came of age as third Baron Brooke; Edward died in 1655, aged only 14; Algernon in 1662, aged only 20.  Her second son, Robert, lived longer and became fourth Baron Brooke on the death of his elder brother Francis, and he lived until 1677 – so he outlived his mother by a year.

By the 1660s, Katherine was suffering from numerous illnesses and was never far from her physician, the Congregationalist minister, James Cooke.  She died in 1676 and it was the fifth son, the one whom she was pregnant with when her husband was shot, Fulke Greville – he outlived them all and succeeded as fifth Baron Brook, not dying until 1710.

[47.17]

Stewart Beale:  And we asked the same question about Lord Brooke, but how should we remember Katherine?

Andy Hopper:  Well, I would like to see her remembered fondly as the foremost war widow of the parliamentarian cause.  Through her efforts and those close to her, she was able to protect the inheritance of her sons, the family estates as well, throughout the Interregnum.

Warwick Castle, rightly, has one of her portraits, depicting her in the mourning attire she purchased, which we see a bit about in the accounts.  And I’d love to see the management of the castle doing a bit more to commemorate her role in safeguarding the Castle during the late 1640s and into the 1650s.  Ann pokes fun of me from time to time, saying that I have this very romantic viewpoint about Katherine!

[48.07]

Stewart Beale:  Thank you very much, Andy and Ann, for our discussion today.  It’s been really interesting to hear your thoughts.

Andy Hopper:  Thank you very much.

Ann Hughes:  Thank you very much.

[48.16]

Warwick Castle survives in good condition today and is open to the public. The armour worn by Lord Brooke when he was shot at Lichfield is often on display in the great hall of the castle, and there is also a portrait of a tearful Lady Brooke, clothed in her mourning attire.

The Household Accounts of Robert and Katherine Greville from 1640 to 1649 form Volume 68 of the Camden Series of the Royal Historical Society, published by Cambridge University Press.

To request a copy of the book, please email: administration@royalhistsoc.org

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