The Account Books

The early 1640s volumes, two kept by John Halford, and two by Joseph Hawksworth, overlap chronologically and, to some extent, in coverage. Halford's cover midsummer 1640–midsummer 1641 and midsummer 1641–midsummer 1642, although some of the spending covers matters outside these dates, notably the charges of a trip to Virginia and New England in 1634–1635 (p. 108). Halford's formal title, if he had one, is not clear; he is described by John Adamson as the keeper of Brooke's privy purse, and he did account for personal spending on behalf of both Lord and Lady Brooke, as he travelled with Brooke between Warwickshire and London in the early 1640s. But he is perhaps best considered as a peripatetic steward of the household, paying the caterer's bills for both Warwick Castle and Brooke House in Holborn, and probably acting at times as a secretary (along with other clerics and senior officials). Halford received over £3,000, mostly in rental income, in both years, from the receivers of the rents of the midlands’ estates Joseph Hawksworth and Henry Hunt, and the Receiver-General John Bridges, senior. He spent almost all of it, organizing his spending under seventeen overlapping headings for 1640–1641, and sixteen slightly different ones for the following year.

Two volumes kept by Joseph Hawksworth, variously described as Brooke's Secretary and (more accurately) as his steward (as in Mercurius Aulicus, 25 November 1643) run in theory from midsummer 1640 to midsummer 1643 but they too record arrears of rents, and other receipts as well as payments outside these dates. Hawksworth was the receiver for some of Brooke's Warwickshire estates, notably in Warwick itself, as well as collecting smaller sums from property in Oxfordshire and Lincolnshire, and he had overall responsibility for the castle mills, with weekly accounts of the profits, presumably based on accounts kept by a subordinate (perhaps Thomas Fish, keeper also of Wedgnock Park). The total profits of the mills in the first volume were ‘cast up by the auditor’. Hawksworth's payments ‘promiscuously set down’ are mostly the necessary outgoings from the estates themselves, but they include household expenses and some wages, and here they overlap with Halford's accounts. They too may have been tidied up by the auditor. The second volume ends with charges for the settling of the militia in Warwickshire in June and July 1642, an indication of Hawksworth's early transformation from civilian to military service. The auditor, William Bridges, listed Hawksworth's receipts (net of estate expenses) in 1640–1641 as £2,338 with £286 15s in payments (p. 207), while in 1641–1643 the totals are much larger, at about £4,500 for both receipts and payments, presumably including the sum of £2,052 ‘due to my Lord’ for 1640–1641 (p. 320).

The later volumes kept on behalf of Brooke's widow reflect, to some extent at least, a more settled household in Holborn, and more systematic accounting practices (see Figures 4 and 5). Warwick Castle was a parliamentarian garrison for all these years and so expenses focus on the family's London seat, Brooke House in St Andrew's Holborn parish, with occasional visits to their other mansion, also named Brooke House, at Hackney, and on regular travels, particularly to visit Lady Brooke's sister, the countess of Carlisle at Waltham in Essex. The accounting year is dated from Brooke's death at the first siege of Lichfield on 2 March 1643; all are in thin folio paper books, whose titles vary. The first is labelled, ‘The book of the whole year's charges and disbursements at Brooke House, ending 2 March 1644’; while the third, more succinctly, is ‘The book of disbursements and receipts at Brooke House’. They begin with expenses, first with a capacious miscellaneous category of ‘diet, grocery, wood, coal, candles, reparations, taxes, payments, gifts, gardens, stables, travelling charges, and all other household necessaries’, otherwise described as ‘ad hoc expenses’. The term ‘ad hoc’ does a great deal of service in these volumes. 1643–1644 includes weekly sums paid to the caterer Mr Smyth who ‘left unpaid the bills’, when he departed in March 1644. Robert Smyth, however, was back in the same role at the start of the next volume (March 1644–March 1645) and continues through the later volumes, with a Mrs Smyth sometimes standing in for him. Robert Smyth (or a man of the same name) also acted as bailiff for the manor of Clutton, in Somerset, and Mrs Smyth seems to have acted while he was absent in the country. After the miscellaneous expenses, other disbursements are included under separate headings for [money] ‘wages’ sometimes described as ‘ad hoc’ wages; ‘apparel’, again sometimes ‘ad hoc’, and usually including purchases of pictures and books as well as clothes; and sums ‘lent to be paid’. Overshadowing these everyday expenses are the costs of dealing with the consequences of Robert Greville's premature death at Lichfield on 2 March 1643: the complex processes by which the wardship of Brooke's heir Francis was secured for Lady Brooke; the provision of a financial settlement for the posthumous son Fulke, born in July; and repayment of the significant debts Brooke had left, mostly connected to parliamentarian mobilization in the early 1640s. Hence in 1643–1644 and 1644–1645, there is a heading for ‘my Lord's Office and Wardship’, and from the latter year onwards there is a section for sums ‘lent and paid by my Lady's command’ from her own and her son's revenues towards tradesmen's bills due in Robert Greville's lifetime. Spending on lawsuits is a distinct category in 1645–1646 and in 1648–1649.

Receipts, mainly from landed income, follow disbursements in all Lady Brooke's accounts, charged to the Receiver-General John Bridges, senior, and William Bridges his son and successor from 1648, and to the receiver for the main midlands’ estates, Henry Hunt and then Matthew Bridges. John Bridges received some sums directly from tenants, some from the bailiffs of particular manors, but also miscellaneous ‘extraordinary’ profits, from paying guests recompensing him for ‘diet’ of themselves and their horses, and from sales of trees and horses. In 1643–1644 these ‘receipts being promiscuously set down as they were received’ were then ‘reduced into … heads’ (p. 338). In 1643–1644, Mr (George) Ingram accounted for profits from the Greville property in Hackney but subsequently these were paid directly to John Bridges, while receipts from some of the ‘outlying’ estates such as Wellingborough in Northamptonshire and Penkridge in Staffordshire were sometimes sent up by Hunt, sometimes sent directly to Holborn. Receipts from Hunt and Matthew Bridges were sent net of charges such as taxation, tithes or wages paid in the country. Lady Brooke's jointure rents (£459 in 1643–1644, £247 in 1644–1645, £493 in 1645–1646, and £762 in 1646–1647) were noted particularly and all surpluses were to be used towards the payment of the late Lord's debts and legacies. Despite significant arrears during the war years, there always was a substantial surplus. In 1643–1644, £716 was left of receipts of almost £2,600, to be put towards Brooke's debts; in 1644–1645 receipts were a little lower at £2,432 and disbursements a little higher at £2,000, leaving just £432. In 1645–1646, in contrast total receipts were £3,336, and spending was £1,938, leaving a generous £1,398 towards Brooke's debts and annuities. For 1646–1647, total receipts were £3,700 and expenses £2,745 leaving £955 for the late Lord's liabilities. The gap for 1647–1648 is most likely a result of contingent archival survival but it may also reflect the illness of Henry Hunt, the key midlands receiver who made his will in November 1647 and died the following summer, and emerging plans for the retirement of John Bridges, senior, the head of the large family whose members dominated the household and estate administration of the Grevilles throughout the seventeenth century. The 1648–1649 accounts mark Hunt's passing with William Bridge's note that his widow delivered up her accounts in May 1648, handing £500 surplus to Captain Mathew Bridges who used £400 to redeem a mortgage and pay an outstanding bill, and returned her the rest (p. 492). They also mark – with five blank pages – the succession of Major William Bridges (the title testimony to brief military service) to his father as general receiver in December 1648. As we shall see below, these accounts also demonstrate attempts to clear up an auditing backlog caused by civil war. Despite all these preoccupations, total receipts in 1648–1649 for John, Matthew and William Bridges came to £4,578 and disbursements were £1,830, leaving a lavish £2,748 for the executors of Brooke's will to settle debts and legacies (p. 502).Footnote ¹

As William was now the receiver, it was Matthew Bridges who audited this latest volume, in a process that might seem unduly self-contained if not open to abuse, but seems to have aroused no suspicions. They were regularly, if not always promptly approved by Lady Brooke who signed in each one that she had ‘perused this book of accounts, and have also caused the same to be perused’, and allowed all the disbursements listed. The first was perused within a week of its end-date on 10 March 1644, and the second exactly a year later. But the accounts for March 1645–March 1646 were not approved until 28 March 1648, a week after she perused and approved the accounts for 1646–1647 (21 March 1648). The account ending in March 1649 was not approved until 18 March 1650.

These nine volumes are amongst some two hundred surviving records of accounts covering 1639 to the end of the seventeenth century in the rich collection of the Grevilles of Warwick Castle. The material remains difficult to use, badly organized or rather repeatedly reorganized, and now in the process of comprehensive and lengthy re-cataloguing. In 1978 Warwick County Record Office purchased the archive then stored in three rooms in the castle's Guy's Tower. The records were first listed by ‘Buck and Baker’, the agents for the castle estate in 1845, but their ‘BB bundles’ were mostly broken up by the Reverend James Harvey Bloom, ‘a quick but inadequate worker’ who produced a handwritten catalogue of the ‘more interesting’ material in three volumes, ‘Catalogue of the Cartae Antiquae at Warwick Castle’ (1901) and arranged the records into 357 boxes.Footnote ² In the 1970s Mr Pepys, Lord Brooke's librarian organized material not catalogued by Bloom and continued to place it in boxes. In 1978 there remained ‘a large and disorganized group of archives’ mostly in sacks that has been more recently listed. Pepys's Boxes 411–414 were described as ‘early stewards’ accounts’, but as the Record Office explains, ‘the content of these bundles was chaotic, and has been put into date order’. A more coherent list of accounts was produced, beginning with stray rent accounts from 1614–1615, and including the material now published. These now have ‘TN’ references referring to (long-standing) ‘temporary numbers’. They include a ‘Main Series’ but also overlapping draft rent accounts, and for the 1650s onwards accounts of individual receivers and individual members of the family.

No early modern account is a comprehensive and unproblematic financial record, while elite estate management in the mid seventeenth century was not yet characterized by clear hierarchies and clearly defined responsibilities amongst senior officials. These ‘main’ accounts depend on and refer to more specific financial records sometimes subsequently lost. The version of Henry Hunt's receipts in the volume for 1643–1644 was validated by ‘the particulars thereof appeareth by the rent books and other papers under his hand’ (p. 340), while it is explained for 1644–1645 that his receipts are ‘as appeareth by two sides of paper under his own handwriting’ (p. 367), a valiant attempt here to control a rather haphazard process. At a lower level of household and estate administration, John Halford noted reimbursements to Ann Walker as in the ‘imprest book’, and sums paid to Richard Gibson ‘upon his bills dated … as appears by the particulars’. Some wages for 1639 had been recorded in a ‘wast book’ (pp. 160, 182). The gardener George Medley kept accounts of the ‘fruit of the garden which he sold for £5’ between 9 August 1645 and 10 January 1646, discharging himself ‘by his own wages, the weeding woman and other layings out per bill’ (p. 399). These archival cross-referencings underline the value of accounts in embodying intimate, complex, and hierarchical social ties, as will be discussed further below.

All Lady Brooke's accounts are fair copies produced by a scribe with additional marginal comments and queries probably by William Bridges as auditor until 1648–1649. William presumably did the adding up. Very occasionally there are indications of slips in the copying, promptly corrected, as when a misplaced entry is crossed out and then added in the proper place (pp. 429, 432). The accounts of John Halford and Joseph Hawksworth are also fair copies, in this case made years after the transactions recorded, and they deserve more specific attention. Both men had in normal times wide-ranging responsibilities within the estates, but by 1642–1643 these were combined with military service in parliament's armies. Halford served as Captain of two companies of foot in Warwick, one based in the castle and one in the town, while Hawksworth combined weekly oversight of the castle mills in 1642 and 1643, with mobile and demanding duties as a cavalry commander. The perfecting and auditing of their accounts had to wait until John and William Bridges dealt with the backlog in 1648, and their own originals are lost.Footnote ³ In spring 1648, William Bridges spent seventeen weeks in Warwickshire with his father and his brother Francis auditing the ‘accounts of Major Halford, Major Hawksworth and Mr Fish and of all the tenants of all the manors in those parts’. Matthew Bridges paid a Mr Mead £5 for ‘writing out Major Hawksworth's, Major Halford's and 6 of Mr Fish's books of account’ and then 8s more for two more of Fish's books. The summaries at the end of Halford's second account were compiled by William Bridges, and he validated all the volumes as true copies which were checked with his youngest brothers Brooke and Francis (pp. 120, 186).

The accounts published are fuller for spending than for income, although the midlands receivers Hawksworth, Hunt, and Matthew Bridges often include the names of tenants as well as summary receipts. A full discussion of leasing policies and rental income would require examination of the draft rent accounts kept by local receivers that survive in greater numbers from the 1650s to the end of the century as well as the deeds and leases. Where comparisons can be made, it is reassuring that the totals given in the household accounts match those in the draft, working documents. Rent accounts for Michaelmas 1642 to Lady Day 1644, covering many of the estates Hawksworth was responsible for, are one example. The drafts are more comprehensive in listing all rents due in theory, rather than merely receipts, so they vividly suggest the disruption of civil war.Footnote ⁴

There are glimpses only here of the financial costs of Robert Greville's colonial ventures, notably the Providence Island Company, and researchers need to look elsewhere for material, although Halford accounted for a rare profit with £865 in receipts from the indigo prize (pp. 39, 122).Footnote ⁵ Brooke's involvement with the Irish Adventurers is indicated only in the payments to Lord Forbes who commanded the ‘Sea Adventure to Ireland’ in August 1642. Brooke himself does not seem to have invested directly in Irish land, although John Bridges and other Alcester men pledged small sums.Footnote ⁶ Lost accounts probably include personal spending by Lady Brooke herself, presumably out of a regular allowance from her husband and then (as indicated in later accounts) from her widow's jointure. John Halford reimbursed Lady Brooke for sums she had paid doctors during her ‘lying in’ of her fourth son, ‘Mr Algernon’ in March 1642 (p. 168), and £7 1s 10d was given to Mistress Ingram to buy childbed linen at the birth of Fulke in July 1643 (p. 332), but there are fewer entries relating to her confinements, and fewer for her ‘apparel’ and other personal purchases than might be expected. Personal accounts for Lady Brooke do survive for the later seventeenth century, once her sons were of age.Footnote ⁷

The Halford and Hawksworth accounts have been used by political historians to explore the networks and political activities of a distinctively radical parliamentarian peer with wide-ranging intellectual interests and a talent for popular mobilization in London and Warwickshire in the summer of 1642.Footnote ⁸ They are important evidence for the resilience of Brooke's widow, as she oversaw the education of her children and the survival of the family's vast estates, and the musical provision for the children, in particular, has been recognized.Footnote ⁹ More remains to be discovered on all these issues, while the particular impact of civil war on the household will be explored further below. Recent work, and some not so recent, has demonstrated that the accounts of elite households are also crucial sources for important themes in social, economic, and cultural history. Great households were centres of patronage, power, and networking. They were places of employment and sociability, and of complex relationships, both hierarchical and intimate, familial and professional, emotional and intellectual. Their getting and spending reveal the complexities of landed society, and the importance of consumption and display. Accounts often reveal the agency of women who were as likely as men to keep or authorize accounts, as Lady Brooke's experience demonstrates.Footnote ¹⁰

Accounts are not simply evidence for how money was obtained and spent, but themselves embody cultural and social processes. They depend on and help to construct relationships of power and authority; they include narratives of events and hint at individual and collective life stories.Footnote ¹¹ As the hands of scribes, receivers, and auditors created the accounts, so they record hundreds of encounters between people with different responsibilities for, or agency over money. Two successive entries in Halford's accounts from June 1641 acknowledge the overall authority of Lord Brooke, and the role of lesser servants as intermediaries, while illuminating Brooke's social and political networks. £8 12s was paid to the Yorkshire politician Henry Darley ‘which your Lordship commanded me to repay him’, and Halford sent Thomas Langdon (probably a footman) with 4s ‘To your Lordship at Lord Poulett's bowling alley’ (p. 117). Political crises in the autumn of 1641 and the spring of 1642 did not prevent the children having ‘cakes’ or sweetmeats to keep them happy on long coach journeys (pp. 126, 142).

On the other hand, routine accounting matters are contextualized through a narrative of the outbreak of war, as when Halford notes paying extra sums to the London caterer, William Coleman ‘by order from my Lord at my going to Warwick presently before the Castle was besieged, 23 July 1642’. Some stories will remain mysterious, such as why Halford had to pay 6d to ‘a boy for walking Mr Sadeskey's horse home’ (p. 141).Footnote ¹² Something of the personalities of the accountants emerges in their entries with the chaotic or preoccupied Hawksworth and his ‘promiscuous’ setting out of receipts, a contrast with the more systematic Halford and even more with William Bridges's attempts to bring order to the family accounts. No one individual dominates these volumes, but running through them is a virtual genealogy of the Bridges family. Father and sons moved between Alcester and London, and between military commands and service in the estate administration. ‘Aunt’ Ingram, sister of John Bridges senior and wife of George Ingram also served the Grevilles, and Henry Hunt was a ‘cousin’ and near neighbour on the Warwickshire–Worcestershire border. In the last account here we see the changing of the generations as Matthew Bridges succeeded Hunt as midland receiver, and hence it is he who accounts for the costs of his ‘father's, brother William's, and brother Frank's’ diet for themselves and their horses in Warwickshire when they went to sort out the accounts of Halford, Hawksworth, and the local tenants. Dealing with the backlog was followed shortly by the retirement of John Bridges senior but it also served to induct the youngest brothers, Brooke then eighteen, and Francis only sixteen into the Greville estate administration, which was also the Bridges family business.

The Lord and the Lady

Robert Greville, 2nd Lord Brooke, was adopted in childhood by Fulke Greville, the austere courtier poet, who oversaw his education and ensured that he was the named heir when Fulke was made Baron Brooke of Beauchamps Court in January 1621. Robert's inheritance of a vast estate following the murder of Fulke Greville, 1st Lord Brooke, in 1628 was resented by kin who believed they had better claims, particularly by the first lord's nephews, sons of his sister Margaret who married Sir Richard Verney. The first years of Brooke's inheritance were marked by lawsuits with the Verneys and Sir Fulke Greville, a cousin of the first lord. Early in the Long Parliament Brooke asked the House of Lords to review a decree of the Court of Requests ordering him to pay £5,000 to Sir Fulke, and Lady Brooke remained concerned with him in 1648.Footnote ¹³ She was also well advised to obtain a copy of Mr George Verney's will (p. 346). This included a codicil claiming half his mother's interest in the property, ‘the inheritance in fee simple’ of Fulke, Lord Brooke, and asked his eldest brother, Sir Greville Verney, to continue his legal struggle to recover the property or some compensation for it.Footnote ¹⁴

It may be that the circumstances of his inheritance as well as his own radical Puritanism limited Brooke's friendships with the senior Warwickshire gentry. His networks in the county as revealed by these early accounts and the diary of the Warwick schoolmaster, Thomas Dugard, suggest that his closest ties were with Puritan families such as the Burgoynes, Purefoys and Temples of Frankton, and with godly ministers, including several clerics harassed by the Laudian regime, and given shelter at Warwick Castle. Through his marriage to Lady Katherine Russell, daughter of the fourth earl of Bedford, and his close friendship with William, Viscount Saye and Sele, Brooke was prominent in national godly networks, long critical of the policies of Charles I and deeply invested in colonial enterprise. He was the largest single investor in the Providence Island Company, a small Caribbean island that proved a disappointment as a base for a godly colony and anti-Spanish privateering. Brooke and Saye seriously contemplated emigration in 1635 and the accounts show that John Halford had made the long journey to New England on Brooke's behalf in 1634–1635 (p. 108). With Saye and others Brooke founded a settlement at ‘SayeBrooke’ in Connecticut, and owned the land on which New Haven was founded. Relationships with colonial merchants such as Maurice Thompson helped to mobilize city interests against the king in the 1640s, and were a crucial force within the Irish Adventurers, who lent money to suppress the 1641 Irish rising, on the promise of recompense from Irish land. Brooke was initially intended as the commander of an army against the Irish and his support for the sea expedition under Lord Forbes is indicated here.Footnote ¹⁵

Between 1639 and his death in March 1643, Brooke worked energetically in both London and Warwickshire to rally opposition to Charles I. The accounts include payments to Gualter Frost, suggesting treasonous contacts with the Scots Covenanters and organizing for war against the king (pp. 101, 103, 104). Brooke and Saye were imprisoned at York in April 1639 for refusing to fight the Scots or to swear loyalty to Charles in the First Bishops’ War, and after the failure of the Short Parliament in May 1640 Brooke was again arrested and his Holborn study was searched for evidence of treason. He was one of the ‘Twelve’ peers who petitioned for the calling of Parliament after Charles's defeat in the Second Bishops’ War, and from the meeting of the Long Parliament he was amongst the most militant members of the House of Lords, a key ally of the earl of Warwick and somewhat at odds with his more moderate father-in-law whose death in May 1641 dismayed all who hoped for settlement. Clarendon described Brooke and Saye as ‘two popular men … most undevoted to the Church, and in truth to the whole government’, while Richard Baxter believed Brooke and Sir Henry Vane the younger were the only two ‘gross’ sectaries amongst the parliamentarian opposition before the outbreak of war.Footnote ¹⁶ The accounts provide some evidence for Brooke's London contacts (although not all will have generated any financial record), as well as his electioneering and his subsequent military mobilization in Warwickshire.Footnote ¹⁷

Somehow in these hectic months Brooke managed to publish two substantial tracts. The Nature of Truth, written in the summer of 1640 and published in November, was a neo-platonic discussion of how truth could take many forms, but was ultimately to be found in union with God. The influence of his chaplain, Peter Sterry, and his secretary, John Sadler, is evident in Brooke's mysticism and millenarianism, and his hostility towards forced conformity to the ‘cringings, crouchings’ of will-worship, established by worldly authorities. A Discourse Opening the Nature of that Episcopacie which is exercised in England (1642), written during the summer recess of Parliament in 1641 combined an aristocratic disdain for the low birth of bishops, dependent on the crown for wealth and power, and thus supporters of arbitrary power, with a radically relaxed attitude to Baptists and separatists. Brooke hoped to see the downfall of ‘Tyrannical prelates’ in England as in Scotland, and he condemned a ‘unity of darkness and ignorance’ such as found in Spain. Brooke had been educated at Leiden University and he praised the religious freedom of the United Provinces. The commitment to religious liberty made Brooke a hero of Milton, who praised Brooke enthusiastically in Areopagitica as a ‘right noble and pious Lord’: ‘I cannot call to mind where I have read or heard words more mild and peaceful’ than his treatment of ‘sects and schisms’; only Christ's last testament of love and peace to his disciples surpassed it. Brooke's open-minded approach to patronage is demonstrated in his lively, intellectual household that encompassed moderate Puritans such as Thomas Dugard and the more decisively Presbyterian Simeon Ashe as well as more radical figures like Peter Sterry and, apparently, the lay preacher John Spencer, usually described as Brooke's coachman. He sheltered an exiled Bohemian nobleman in George Sadeskey, and paid generous sums to John Dillingham as both tailor and news writer. Hence the rather back-handed compliment from Thomas Spencer, another moderate and minister of nearby Budbrooke who wrote Brooke's ‘Life’: ‘A deare Foster-Father he was to manie Ministers and Schoole-Masters, allowing them yeerlie pensions or salaries. Not only those that went his way, but also such as did conforme to the Church-government were his Beneficiaries’.Footnote ¹⁸

Brooke had mixed success in the Warwickshire county elections for the Long Parliament and the election of his close associate William Purefoy and his half-brother Godfrey Bosvile at Warwick was not straightforward either, but his capacity for popular mobilization is demonstrated in energetic measures to raise the county militia and volunteers for the Parliament as revealed in Hawksworth's accounts. In the spring and summer of 1642 Brooke moved frequently between Warwickshire and London, and was clearly conscious of the need for military and political coordination between these two arenas. A True Relation of the Lord Brooke's Settling of the Militia in Warwickshire, in the form of a letter from ‘J.S.’ [John Sadler] to a ‘speciall Friend in the city’ was printed by a radical press, while a petition from the officers, trained bands, and volunteers in the county to Brooke, calling for the punishment of ‘malignants’ and for the county magazine to be taken from Coventry to safety at Warwick Castle was presented by him to the Lords who ordered its official printing.Footnote ¹⁹ At the same time, Halford's accounts show payments for books and diurnals ‘to send into the country by my Lord's order’, as well as a book of news for Lady Brooke. The accounts reveal early purchases of arms and armour in May 1641, during the crisis prompted by the Army Plot and the execution of the earl of Strafford. Halford seems to have witnessed Strafford's execution on Brooke's behalf (pp. 66, 107).

Brooke's early success in Warwickshire was countered by royalists under the earl of Northampton in August 1642; in Brooke's absence (as evident at several times in the accounts) Warwick Castle was besieged with parliamentarian artillery seized by the Cavaliers and for two weeks in August the castle mills ceased to operate (p. 270). While Brooke's deputy Sir Edward Peyto hung a bible and a winding sheet from the ramparts to demonstrate dedication to God's cause, Brooke, John Hampden, and Lord Saye's son, Nathaniel Fiennes brought up forces from London to drive Northampton from the county.Footnote ²⁰ From early 1642 Brooke had been raising and exercising forces in London, initially intended for Ireland, and he subsequently commanded a foot regiment in parliament's main army under the earl of Essex. His subordinate officers included the future Leveller, John Lilburne and the future radical soldier, John Okey. The regiment fought at Edgehill in October, although Brooke was not there, and suffered serious losses in November at Brentford, where Lilburne himself was captured. The debacle at Brentford was said to have driven one parliamentarian commander, Denzil Holles, towards a ‘peace party’ position but Brooke remained resolute. His early regiment was disbanded but on 31 December 1642 he was appointed commander of a ‘West Midlands Association’ of Staffordshire and Warwickshire, raising men and money through city connections as well as through his Warwickshire dependents and allies. John Sadler was Commissary General of the Association, and its treasurer was a radical merchant, Rowland Wilson the younger, a partner of Maurice Thompson, a long-standing contact through the Providence Island Company and the Irish Adventurers.

In February 1643 Brooke mustered his forces, including volunteers, at Warwick Castle. In a speech marking the ‘election of his captains and commanders’ and again published in the London press, he declared they were fighting the Lord's battles as ‘in the time of King David’ and refused the help of mercenaries, insisting, ‘we must rather employ men who will fight merely for the cause sake’(see Figure 2).Footnote ²¹ His forces disarmed Stratford-upon-Avon to prevent its becoming a royalist stronghold and marched to besiege Lichfield where the cathedral close was garrisoned for the king. Here – providentially in royalist propaganda and disastrously in parliamentarian laments – Brooke was killed by an optimistic shot from the central spire on 2 March, the festival of St Chad, the cathedral's founder.

Figure 2. Frontispiece of A Worthy Speech Made by The Right Honourable the Lord Brooke (London, 1643). © Shakespeare Birthplace Trust.

In March 1643 at twenty-five years old, Katherine, Lady Brooke, was a widow with four sons, the eldest no more than six years old, and pregnant with a fifth, Fulke, born in July. The daughter of Francis, 4th earl of Bedford, Katherine Russell was married in about 1631 aged only thirteen to Robert Greville, some ten years her senior. The consummation of the marriage was presumably delayed, as their first son, Francis, was not born until 1637. Lady Brooke remained a widow for the rest of her life. She was certainly a conscientious and resilient defender of her sons’ interests and of the Greville estates, no doubt with the support in particular of the Bridges family. Brooke's will is not to be found in the National Archives and the embittered widow of his younger brother alleged that his executors (both John Bridges and Henry Hunt) had pretended he had died intestate in order to avoid paying legacies. The copy of the will printed here, and the material in the Greville manuscripts listing funeral charges and debt repayments were produced or collected to defend legal challenges.Footnote ²² In the absence of direct sources it is harder to assess how far she endorsed her husband's particular political and religious stances. She continued his patronage of Peter Sterry, and retained John Sadler for some months as tutor of her elder sons, before he went on to more demanding service of the parliament. Both men were active in militant ‘Independent’ parliamentarian circles. In the 1650s she employed Alexander Tulidah, a veteran army radical and Leveller sympathiser, as a receiver on her Lincolnshire estates, although his marriage to Dorothy Bridges, daughter of John senior must also have helped. Certainly, Brooke's protégés associated her with her husband's piety and politics: in 1643 Simeon Ashe, Samuel Clarke and William Overton (Clarke's brother-in-law) oversaw the publication of The Prophecy of Daniel Explained by Ephraim Huitt (once preacher at Wroxall, in Warwickshire) who (in their terms) ‘by the Tyranny of the Prelaticall party, was diverse years since driven into New-England’:

Lady Brooke effectively deployed Brooke's status as parliamentarian martyr in defending the interests of her sons, but she could produce more sceptical arguments if necessary. Her pleas to Parliament countered the king's grant of the wardship of her eldest son to his royalist uncle George, Lord Digby (see Figure 7), and produced £5,000 for the maintenance of the posthumous son for whom his father had made no provision.Footnote ²⁴ Most exceptionally this sum, charged to the confiscated lands of the Irish Catholic earl of Antrim was paid promptly and in full by February 1651. As the accounts explain, Parliament had earlier settled on her Digby's ‘fashionable’ house on Queen Street for Fulke's maintenance. Lady Brooke successfully persuaded surviving members of the Providence Island Company to reduce her late husband's liability for its debts, while the later accounts suggest scrupulous and sustained commitment to satisfying other creditors.Footnote ²⁵ Nonetheless she could distance herself from her husband's legacy if it might limit the claims of his creditors, presenting his colonial enterprises as a weakness in a Chancery Case of 1651: her husband, ‘being young and altogether unexperienced in affaires of that nature hee soe far ingaged himselfe in those fruitlesse adventures that his estate became thereby much prejudiced to the manifest hindrance and priudice [prejudice] of his children’.Footnote ²⁶ She was presumably the moving force behind the election of her brother William, 5th earl of Bedford, as Recorder of Warwick, in succession to her husband (himself a controversial choice). Bedford was chosen on 5 August 1644, a matter of days after the lifting of his sequestration for a brief flirtation with royalism. The Deputy Recorder Edward Rainsford, no friend to the Grevilles, argued that they prioritized ‘their particular interests or private respects’ rather than the general good of the corporation.Footnote ²⁷

Lady Brooke remained close to her Russell siblings and it may be that her conscientious, if not prompt supervision of the accounts owed something to the example of her father and brother. Her sons were given a broad education, introduced to French, Latin, and Greek at appropriate ages and taking dancing and music lessons alongside their routine tuition. The elder sons paid a visit to the library of the godly London ministry at Sion College, while a more perplexing trip was her visit with her eldest (aged eleven or twelve years) to the trials of the duke of Hamilton and the earl of Holland in the spring of 1649 (pp. 456, 459). Holland had been imprisoned in Warwick Castle, and as the earl of Warwick's brother was presumably known to them.Footnote ²⁸

Residences, Estates, and Income

Robert Greville inherited property in twelve counties from the first Lord Brooke. The fortunes of this branch of the Grevilles had been transformed in the 1520s through the marriage of an earlier Fulke Greville (a younger son of the senior Milcote line) to Elizabeth Willoughby, an heiress of Lord Willoughby de Broke. The Willoughbys had earlier inherited the lands of the Beauchamp family on the failure of that male line. Greville estates initially centred around the town of Alcester and the manor of Beauchamps Court, and were significantly extended in the early seventeenth century. Sir Fulke Greville was granted Warwick Castle by James I and during his lifetime the castle, much decayed, and used mainly as a prison, became, according to the historian William Dugdale ‘a place not only of great strength but extraordinary delight … the most princely seat that is within these midland parts’ (see Figures 3 and 6); from the 1620s it replaced Beauchamps Court as the Grevilles’ main provincial residence.Footnote ²⁹ Fulke, Lord Brooke, made extensive purchases in Warwickshire and London, including substantial mansions in the parishes of Hackney and St Andrew's Holborn, as well as lucrative property in Northamptonshire, Somerset, and Wiltshire. In a survey of Robert Greville's estates by the Court of Wards in 1643 or 1644, profitable lands in Lincolnshire were described as ‘lately purchased’, and they might have been bought by the second lord himself.Footnote ³⁰ By the outbreak of civil war it has been estimated that Brooke had an annual income of some £4,500 with significant variations depending on the balance between rents and fines for the renewal of long leases. There is no evidence of direct farming or of direct exploitation of coal resources in Clutton, although castle mills were meticulously managed under Joseph Hawksworth's supervision. Further research on estate management would be fruitful, but it seems that leases in Warwick and Alcester were often made on easy terms to family servants, while in more detached manors such as Knowle, fines were being raised before the civil war. These accounts reveal little on relationships with tenants, although, when Ellin King, widow, the tenant of the mills in Penkridge, Staffordshire came to London to pay a heriot of £3 and £30 of her arrears of £40, ‘my Lady gave her 10s to carry her home’ (p. 388). The summary receipts included in these household accounts do not reach pre-war levels and reveal the impact of heavy wartime taxation and rent arrears. Nonetheless, despite the complications of the premature death of the second lord, and the depredations of civil war, annual rental income rose to as much as £7,000 in the later 1650s.Footnote ³¹

Only in the early 1640s did the family spend much time at Warwick Castle which from the summer of 1642 was transformed into a parliamentarian garrison, as we shall see below. The accounts demonstrate the Grevilles had many tenants and servants in the town, and patronized local vintners, apothecaries, and other tradesmen, but they were not universally popular. Brooke was chosen as Recorder in August 1641, when the deputy recorder, Edward Rainsford gave an eloquent speech praising him as one of the ‘puissant champions … risen up in this present Parliament for defence of our religion and rights’ but more privately Rainsford resented the influence of the Grevilles. In a long ‘Remonstrance’ entered in the corporation minute book he argued that powerful gentry (with the exception of the Lucys of Charlecote) had mostly sought to dominate and exploit the townspeople, while avoiding their proper share of tithes and other levies. He regretted that Brooke had replaced the more popular (and distant) earl of Warwick and, as we have seen, he was more affronted by the imposition of Bedford as Brooke's successor. He unsuccessfully opposed the election of Brooke's half-brother, Godfrey Bosvile, as MP in succession to the recently dead Sir Thomas Lucy in 1641.Footnote ³²

Evidence of how the Greville households related to their London neighbours in Holborn and Hackney is limited. Brooke House, Holborn, previously known as ‘Bathe’ house was bought and improved by the first lord; in the inventory printed in our Appendix 2 it is a sumptuously furnished mansion with chambers for senior servants like Halford, Bridges, and Cross, and for each of the three eldest sons. In the Hearth Tax for 1666 it was assessed at thirty-two hearths with George Ingram next door in a house of six hearths.Footnote ³³ There is no sign of any member of the household in the parish records, and no apparent contact with the rector, the Episcopalian John Hackett, although regular sums were paid to a Mr Harcourt, the lecturer.Footnote ³⁴ According to the Hearth Tax, Brooke House (also known as the King's Place) at Hackney, also purchased by Fulke Greville in the early seventeenth century, may have been potentially a grander residence, assessed at thirty-seven hearths. There is little evidence in the accounts of Robert Greville's links with Hackney despite the presence there of the militant parliamentarian preacher Calybute Downing. Katherine, Lady Brooke, visited regularly in the later 1640s and was responsible for improving the gardens, later praised by John Evelyn and Samuel Pepys. For Evelyn, the gardens were ‘one of the neatest and most celebrated’ in England, while Pepys admired the exotic plants and the ‘pretty aviary’. Neither admired the house itself, condemned by Evelyn as a ‘despicable building’.Footnote ³⁵

Household Size and Structure

The scholarship on seventeenth-century aristocratic households and their servants is scattered, and more limited than the rich work on domestic service and servants in husbandry. The brief sections in Stone's Crisis of the Aristocracy remain valuable while older, illuminating studies by Gladys Scott Thomson deal with Lady Brooke's birth family in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Her brother was a meticulous and energetic controller of his household finances and Katherine may well have benefitted from the example of her father and the advice of her brother when faced as a young widow with the complexities of household and estate management.Footnote ³⁶ A precise picture of the size and structure of the household of Lord and Lady Brooke cannot be derived from these accounts, as is commonly the case in this period. While tutors and dancing masters are given titles (but not always names), the men and women responsible for collecting and spending money, and for the everyday care of the household and its members are rarely given formal job titles and more ‘menial’ servants are often not given full names. There was much flexibility and ‘multi-tasking’, as Rosemary O'Day found with the Temples of Stowe, and at Warwick the schoolmaster Thomas Dugard was both occasional clerk and chaplain, while the overlaps between Halford and Hawksworth have already been noted. Vagueness was also a result of the intimacy of even a great household. Accountants and auditors knew who the people were and what they did and had no need for written precision. In 1645–1646 at Holborn, wages were paid to ‘Henry the cook’, ‘Mr Fulke's nurse’, to Patience and her sister, and to ‘the maid in the kitchen’. We can work out that Patience and her sister are the Patience and Elizabeth Taylor of earlier accounts, but there is another Patience ‘a new maid’ in a subsequent volume (p. 416).Footnote ³⁷

John Bridges the elder was clearly the most senior servant until his retirement in 1649, and his successors in the more formal world of the late seventeenth century were usually described as Receiver-Generals; but Bridges and his eldest son, Colonel John, also provided legal services, not least as executors of Brooke's will. Some aristocrats kept a ‘house lawyer’. William Bridges was auditor of most of these accounts, while we can discern overlapping responsibilities between regional receivers and occasional glimpses of bailiffs responsible for particular manors. Mr Fish, in charge of Wedgnock Park in Warwick, was an important figure. Amongst senior servants within the household, later more clearly defined as caterers or stewards of the household were William Coleman, John Fisher, and Robert Smyth in London. Thomas Hinde was probably house steward in Warwick. Mr Sadeskey, the Bohemian exile was responsible for the hounds, and perhaps also master of the horse, an important figure in many elite households. The roles of other senior servants such as Richard Cross and John Overton, both with chambers in Holborn, and recognized in Brooke's will remain obscure.Footnote ³⁸

The household comprised living-in servants, those who were regularly employed but lived out and a larger group who were paid by the day as casual labourers but in fact were often employed for many years. All these categories might shift over time. Senior servants except for chaplains and tutors rarely lived in permanently, although they might have private chambers available to them. Halford paid forty-one people board and annual money wages in his 1640–1641 accounts, and he paid poll tax for twenty-eight people in Castle Street, in Warwick, in 1641. This must represent those adults who normally lived in the castle, although only fourteen people were left there when Lady Brooke left to join her husband in London in November 1640. In July 1641 Halford paid poll money of £100 for Brooke himself, and 2s 6d for Lady Brooke, Mr Cross, Mr Freeman, Mr Coleman, and ‘Langdon’ the footman who were presumably living in Holborn. In 1645–1646 approximately twenty-five servants were paid board wages in Holborn (pp. 380–382).

As with other elite households, many servants were also tenants of the Grevilles, who recruited servants from their town of Alcester, and, to a lesser extent, from Warwick. Typically, also, was the prominence of married couples and others connected by kin. Amongst the senior servants were George and Katherine Ingram, Ann and John Fisher, and Robert Smyth and his wife. More intermittently, Hannah Dugard, wife of the Warwick schoolmaster, was paid for work done for Lady Brooke at the castle. Lower in status were Thomas and Mary Terrill, working as cook and maid respectively. The most extraordinary example, of course, are the Bridges family already discussed. Born in the Greville town of Alcester, both John Bridges senior and his third son William ended their lives as gentlemen of Hackney.

The salaries paid to senior servants are comparable to those found elsewhere.Footnote ³⁹ Halford, for example, was paid £20 per annum plus his board, whereas Sterry's stipend was £30. Mr Stanley, the tutor who succeeded Sadler began with £20 per annum, but was paid £30 by 1646–1647. The household after 1643, headed by a widow and including five young children, also had more female servants than was the norm, including personal attendants such as Mrs Archbole, Anne Fisher, and Mary Terrill, paid a modest £4–£5 a year in money, but a Nurse Roberts in the first accounts received a generous £20 per annum (pp. 91–92, 159, 349). No wages were directly paid to Mrs Katherine Ingram, despite her appearing to be a very close attendant on Lady Brooke (p. 332). More ‘menial’ servants received board, clothing, and gifts besides their money wages, so the sums of £3 per year paid to Bridget Parker the ‘washmaid’, or the 30s paid ‘Black Dick’ to help the coachman for a year have to be seen in that context (pp. 92, 103). The ‘children’ seem to have been paid board only, at least at first. If ‘Bess the Dwarf’ is the same person as ‘Little Bess’, the washmaid, then at first other people were paid an allowance for her care, and clothes were bought for her until at Lady Day 1645 she received £1 for half a year's wages, increased to 30s by midsummer 1646 (pp. 109, 416). ‘Jack the Indian boy’, present only in the earliest accounts, and presumably a young child brought from the Caribbean or New England was supported with board and clothing, with extra costs for his care when he had the measles (pp. 50, 71, 110).Footnote ⁴⁰ There is other evidence of health care for servants. John Martin a servant of long-standing, who helped Halford pack for London in November 1640, was reimbursed in December 1641 for the 5s he had paid the ‘bonesetter’ after his leg was hurt with ‘the fall of a great box’ (p. 165). Martin was paid for much labouring work, acting also as a watchman when Warwick Castle came under threat in August 1642 (p. 301). Less fortunate was William Ward, the postilion, whose skull was broken by a horse in October 1641. Although Halford recorded payments of £3 to two separate surgeons, his next entries were the expenses of the coroner's inquest, making the coffin, and digging Ward's grave, and 10d spent to fetch his mother. Ward was buried on 26 October 1641 and his mother was paid the £2 wages ‘near’ due to him at his death (p. 135).

It has not proved feasible to provide biographical information for most of the servants (and tenants) named in these accounts. Many servants indeed are not given their full names, as we have seen. There is nothing in the records themselves to compare with the notes on 105 servants the countess of Bath included in her accounts, along with brief biographies for twenty-eight of them.Footnote ⁴¹ Some could be traced in local records, and others appear in the lists of taxpayers, and musters of soldiers amongst the administrative records of the civil war. The necessary work would be lengthy and the results inconclusive. Details of individual senior servants are included in Appendix 4, along with a biography of the gardener and soldier George Medley as an example of what might be possible.

As Lawrence Stone has written aristocratic service ‘attracted a considerable number of ambitious and talented men’, who often did well out of it.Footnote ⁴² As already suggested, Lord Brooke's household included impressive, committed intellectuals in Peter Sterry and John Sadler, as well as a very broad range of godly ministers. Some of his more routine arrangements and connections in particular suggest ideological as well as practical criteria; the Bohemian exile Sadeskey was master of hounds, the zealous parliamentarian John Dillingham was paid for both clothes and intelligence, while another activist, Alderman John Towse was amongst the grocers patronized in London.Footnote ⁴³ Provincial officials such as the younger John Bridges, Halford, and Hawksworth served Parliament loyally, although in different ways, up to the Restoration. Brooke's death at an early stage of the war means that we cannot judge how far the different choices of, for example, Dugard and Sterry, would have been influenced by, or affected their shared patron. Brooke's political appeal was not founded on ancient lineage, and his reputation depended on ideological commitment as much as on his wealth. Consequently, the approbation of men like Sterry and Sadler, Dugard and John Bryan was useful to him, while his patronage facilitated their careers. There are glimpses of other relationships in these accounts: Oliver St John (‘Mr Solicitor’) owed much to his patron, Brooke's father-in-law, while in turn a young John Thurloe was running errands for St John in the early 1640s. We should not assume that Thurloe and St John were simply following the ‘line’ of their patrons; it is as likely that they worked together because they shared attitudes and principles.Footnote ⁴⁴

The Impact of Civil War

The accounts provide direct evidence of the coming and impact of civil war in Brooke's early purchase of arms in 1641, and artillery in early 1642, initially for Ireland but ultimately deployed in England, and then in the charges for mobilizing the county militia. Warwick Castle was fortified, survived a siege in August 1642 and remained a garrison, to some extent at least, until the eve of the Restoration. There is ample evidence in the accounts of the impact on tenants and of the consequent rent arrears, while the weight of taxation can be followed through the receivers’ disbursements. At Cester Over, for example, Hunt paid £33 tax at £1 a week for twenty weeks and then was charged for twelve months at £1 3s 4d, although ‘none paid yet’ (p. 397). There were also expenses associated with negotiations with local authorities over taxation, with frequent trips to Coventry where the county committee sat, as with the 12s 8d ‘For expenses at Coventry two days about Cester Over tax Mr Fish, myself and others for an order’ (p. 399).Footnote ⁴⁵ Furthermore, as discussed above, the disruptions and distractions of war are embodied in the very forms in which the accounts of Halford and Hawksworth have survived.

Most dramatically, civil war meant spatial and social dislocation for Warwick Castle where an aristocratic home became a military garrison, and many of Brooke's servants moved into the service of the state as soldiers and administrators. Godliness, to some extent, was no doubt expected of senior servants and inculcated in kitchen boys but within the complex coalition of the parliamentarian cause, it was not necessarily the case that all would follow the same path. The premature death of Brooke and the absence of Lady Brooke in London meant the ultimate authority in the household was distant at best, while in practice in Warwickshire status based on household service was complicated by varieties of ideological commitment and power derived from official positions within the parliamentarian state.

The spatial aspects of the castle's transformation into a garrison and prison are registered in Hunt's note that he had managed to extract £38 ‘Of the prisoners for damage done unto the furniture and bedding where they lodged’ in the castle, although the ‘damage’ was above £60 (p. 396). They are more vividly demonstrated in the inventory of Brooke's personal estate in Warwick taken in January 1644. In contrast to the luxurious comfort evident in Holborn, at Warwick most things of value were locked away in the Wardrobe for safekeeping. This room took up a third of the listing which covered almost seventy rooms; it was packed with luxurious tapestries and precious textiles, Turkey and Persian carpets. Most important rooms were virtually empty: the great hall held just two tables and a desk for books, the ‘new’ dining room, a single table undressed with plate or linen. Very few chambers included beds, but old beds were scattered around the tower rooms presumably for use by weary soldiers (see Appendix 3, pp. 536, 538–547). In 1646–1647 Hunt reimbursed John Halford for his payments to John Martin: £7 12 6d for thirty-five weeks ‘for his pains in the wardrobe’ besides 40s already paid’; Martin was a generally useful man who was also paid for ‘airing of goods, cleansing of rooms etc’ in the castle between December 1646 and 25 March 1648 (p. 492).

Lady Brooke returned to Warwick Castle in 1652.Footnote ⁴⁶ Owing to her determination to ensure the long-term survival of the estate, a survey of the castle's ‘ruins and defects’ was carried out on 15 March 1652 by John Seagood, gentleman, in the presence of John Martin and Richard Dunckley masons (both paid regularly by the day in these accounts), Anthony Lane, glazier, and the gardener, George Medley. Stairs, doors, walls, windows, and ‘spouts of lead’ had all suffered in creating the fortifications and much was ‘wholly decayed’, ‘utterly spoyled’ or ‘demolisht’. The estimate for repairs came to £861 10s 4d, of which the greatest sum and the most eloquent laments concerned Medley's gardens, where it was claimed repairs would cost £200. The gardens, established by the first Lord Brooke, had been ‘wholly defaced’ by the breast works constructed at the bottom of the mound, while the mound itself ‘which was handsome and beautiful in former times… is utterly spoiled’ by the great ordnance planted there, ‘besides many fruit trees and other plants cut down’.Footnote ⁴⁷ Lady Brooke was offered generous compensation of £1,000 by the Council of State, to be paid for from the sale of delinquents’ estates, although it is not clear if it was ever paid.Footnote ⁴⁸

The garrison was first established in the castle in summer 1642; it survived the siege and sheltered wounded soldiers and prisoners after the battle of Edgehill. It was reduced over the winter of 1642–1643, before being reinforced under the authority of Brooke's midlands association and later by the Warwickshire county committee. Over the next three years it usually numbered between 250 and 300 men in three companies of foot, commanded by Brooke's half-brother Godfrey Bosvile, MP, until he was replaced by William Colemore following the Self-Denying Ordinance. The captains of foot based in the castle were all senior servants: John Halford, and John and Matthew Bridges. John Halford also captained one of the four further companies of the ‘town foot’, while John Bridges also commanded a troop of horse based in the castle. From December 1642 and perhaps earlier John Bridges was also Governor of Warwick Castle, and from 1645, promoted to Colonel, he was also Governor of Warwick town.Footnote ⁴⁹ The earliest accounts for the garrison (from May 1643–January 1645) were kept by Thomas Hinde, a senior household official in the Greville household before the war. In 1651 Hinde was described as paymaster to the castle, while in testimony to a Restoration investigation his role was defined as clerk to the three companies of castle foot. In some ways the garrison looks like the pre-war household in military garb: the cook was Bartholomew Heath who was a Greville tenant in Warwick and paid for various work in the household accounts, along with his brother Constantine or Constance. The fueller was Thomas Round, from a prominent Alcester family, and perhaps the son of another Thomas Round, one of the Grevilles’ Warwickshire bailiffs. Charles Johnson, who succeeded Hinde as paymaster from January 1645, was a prosperous Alcester merchant and a Greville tenant.Footnote ⁵⁰ In the early months of the war there was confusion between the state's money, and Lord Brooke's: in one account there is a copy of a breathless order from Major John Bridges to John Bryan, asking that Bryan use £100 of ‘my Lord's money left in your hands by Mr Hunt … Because at this present there is great want of money to pay the soldiers’.Footnote ⁵¹

The changes in the work done by Hinde and Heath were relatively limited but even here they were accountable to parliamentarian authorities rather than to Lady Brooke. There were more dramatic transformations for George Medley who exchanged gardening for service as a drummer in the castle's foot company (perhaps combining both as the war came to an end); and for the minister of Barford, John Bryan, who combined service as the garrison chaplain with onerous responsibilities as receiver of money and plate ‘lent’ to Parliament on the propositions in 1642–1643. Bryan was not a skilled accountant, and at least five different versions of his accounts survive in the National Archives: a 1647 attempt concluded that he had spent £40 more than he had received, but Bryan did not want to claim the difference because ‘he could not have disbursed it had he not received it though forgotten to be set down’.Footnote ⁵²

The most dramatic transformations were in the roles of John Bridges and Joseph Hawksworth, successive governors of the castle where they had been servants, albeit senior servants.Footnote ⁵³ Relationships amongst such men within the intimate hierarchy of a great household might be tense in normal times, and the success of Bridges in particular seems to have attracted resentment. In three long investigations between 1645 and 1663, John Bridges was accused by parliamentary committees and Restoration commissions of embezzling goods plundered from Charles I's baggage train shortly before the battle of Edgehill. The accusations originated with men hostile to the parliamentary wartime administration in Warwickshire but it is noticeable that distinctly unhelpful evidence was given by close associates, such as Hawksworth, Bryan, Hinde, and Johnson. While Bridges claimed he had done nothing except with Brooke's sanction, Hawksworth remembered warning Brooke that Bridges was undervaluing the goods taken, and ‘that it was fitt that they were sold and the best made of them for the publique service’, while Bridges had suggested they were worth little.Footnote ⁵⁴ John Bryan recounted sinister, private meetings by Bridges and his wife in the ‘pillage cellar’, where the king's goods were kept, criticized Bridges's presumptions as governor, keeping ‘a table which did beseeme a governor of a greater place’, and, most seriously, claimed that Bridges had tried to stop him giving evidence to the committee of accounts.Footnote ⁵⁵ It may be that these former colleagues were genuinely alarmed at Bridges's activities. He certainly seems to have done well out of military service, although he was never convicted of corruption. They may have been covering their own backs in the context of the early months of war when money was short and careful accounting and administrative procedures had not developed. Political motives may also have played a part, for Hawksworth seems to have been a more militant parliamentarian than Bridges. Resentment at the Bridges family's domination of the Brooke household administration is surely an element; all these household servants were now individually responsible to the public service or the state, rather than collectively subject in their places to the authority of Lord and Lady Brooke.

The household accounts contain no evidence of conflict between Lady Brooke's household in London and the military regime in Warwick, although her purchase in 1648–1649 from John Rushworth of a copy of Hawksworth's commission ‘for the government of Warwick Castle’ suggests she kept a watching brief. The castle remained a prison with a smaller garrison until the Restoration. The earl of Holland was held there until February 1649 when he was taken to London for his trial and execution and it was also used for prisoners taken at the battle of Worcester in September 1651. From the mid 1650s the family had some use of it but it was only finally surrendered by Hawksworth to the fourth Lord Brooke in April 1660.

Consumption and the Household

None of these accounts itemize expenses very systematically or precisely, but with close reading they offer many valuable insights. Some signposts and suggestions are given here but fuller analysis will bring many rewards. The civil wars put a stop to the normal pattern of the Brooke household, peripatetic between London and Warwick, but the earlier accounts suggest how it was managed. Halford organized the packing up of goods at Warwick, assisted by the ubiquitous John Martin, when the family moved to London for the opening of the Long Parliament in November 1640. Halford also travelled with Lord Brooke when they returned to Warwick for the parliamentary recess in summer 1641. Hawksworth, in contrast, made only one trip to London in the early 1640s. Some of the contrasts between Warwick and London are demonstrated in the two Halford accounts. There is no heading for ‘husbandry’ in the second, mostly London-based account, and much more is spent on sociability, demonstrated in the exchange of gifts, and visits to parks and bowling greens, involving small, casual ‘tips’ to servants and provision of ready money to the Lord and Lady to pass on as gifts, wagers, or small purchases. The laconic diary of the schoolmaster Thomas Dugard describes formal dinners and meetings of Puritan leaders at Warwick Castle in the 1630s, while early accounts suggest a wider range of both casual and more intense encounters in London.Footnote ⁵⁶

Lady Brooke did not visit Warwick between 1643 and 1649 and the expenses listed by midlands receivers are mainly on wages and other payments for essential servants; taxes, levies and other charges allowable out of the estates. Extensive building work was done at Warwick, especially to make the castle defensible. As we have seen gardens were a particular focus for Lady Brooke, and significant sums were spent on wages for gardeners and weeding women, and on seeds, fruit trees, and garden implements in both Warwick and London. The life of Lady Brooke and her young children after 1643 appears less hectic than in the early 1640s, but, as the accounts reveal, it was still sociable and peripatetic. There were frequent, often extended visits to her sister Margaret, the countess of Carlisle: six weeks were spent at Waltham Abbey in summer 1645 for example (p. 373). The accounts for 1646–1647, reveal the first extended residence by some of the household at Hackney. The young Lord's dancing master had to make twenty trips there in June and July 1646 before Lady Brooke, her two elder sons, and several servants departed for seven weeks in Bath and further trips to Waltham. Lady Brooke's sister-in-law, Lady Dorothy Haselrig seems to have been left in charge of the younger children and the oversight of the London houses.

In London, transport was expensive. Halford's early accounts include horse hire, sharing and borrowing coaches, and trips to Westminster and elsewhere by water. At the beginning of these accounts the family had no adequate coach so that in April 1641 a sedan was hired for 3s to carry ‘my Lord’ to the Parliament house (p. 86). Gratuities were given to the coachmen of fellow peers of all political persuasions from the courtier Lord Finch to the godly Lord Robartes, and cost as much as hiring a coach. From May 1641, substantial payments were made to painters, upholsterers, a silkman, a gilder, and a harness-maker, as well as a coach-maker. The total cost of the finished product approached £120 (six times Halford's money wage) but shortly after money was again spent on coach-hire while this new one was mended (pp. 112–113, 149, 151). By 1649 however, the family had more than one coach: in 1649 work was again done on the ‘great coach’, while an old coach was exchanged for a new one (pp. 458–459).Footnote ⁵⁷

In London weekly sums were paid to the caterer for the routine feeding of the household; there are no detailed kitchen accounts like those compiled by the countess of Bath. There is rich evidence nonetheless for luxury food, with gifts of venison, and large sums spent on sugar, cake, and ‘comfits’: the comfit-maker's bill was a sizeable £22 11s 10d (p. 419). The accounts include regular spending on clothes of all sorts, and for servants as well as all members of the aristocratic family. In 1644, 2s 6d (itself not an insignificant sum) was spent on mending the coachman's black coat; but on the other hand the young lord's scarlet cloak cost more than the annual money wages for a maidservant, with 33s spent on lace, and £3 18s for the scarlet cloth (p. 357). Footmen were provided with liveries, bought from the tailor and journalist, John Dillingham (p. 175). The family consumed innumerable pairs of gloves, but these seem rarely to have been the expensive, elaborate gloves important for mourning, and fashionable display. In the summer of 1641 four pairs for the second lord cost 13s while a dozen pairs for the children was only 7s. The costs of different types of glove are demonstrated in July 1643 when three pairs of gloves for the elder children cost 15s, whereas three dozen pairs were purchased a few weeks later for £1 (p. 332).Footnote ⁵⁸ In contrast there is little evidence of spending on jewellery, apart from occasional reference to rings, watches, and clocks, although Halford paid 2d for a paper box for ‘my Lady's jewells’ in 1640 (p. 67).

A range of entries can be summed up as care of the body.Footnote ⁵⁹ Apothecaries are amongst the most mentioned of any professional service in the accounts, although their bills are rarely itemized. There are also ad hoc purchases of medicine – herbs, roses, and archangel flowers – with occasional evidence of their use within the household, as when unspecified ingredients are bought for Katherine Westcott to make ‘treacle water’ with. Personal grooming was important. There are at least nineteen references to barbers who are regularly paid for cutting hair and shaving the boys’ heads. In one year alone 36s was paid ‘for trimming my Lord and Mr Robert’ and for shaving them sixteen times (p. 414). Six periwigs were bought for the same boys in December 1646 at a cost of £3 4s (p. 414). They were both under ten years old. Regular sums were spent on soap, and on wages to girls and women who did the washing. In the early 1640s Jane Bibs was paid 2d a week for twenty weeks for washing ‘Jack Indian's linen’ (p. 305).

Regular sums were spent on legal services, mostly concerned with the estates. Financial transactions were signalled in the new heading, ‘money imprest’, for ad hoc small-scale credit arrangements. The second lord's debts can be traced to some extent through the long process of their repayment in the accounts of his widow. Charitable giving included relieving the poor at the gates of Warwick Castle fortnightly when the family was in residence. It does not seem to have been practised in London, although there are many examples of casual giving, as ‘to a poor woman by my lady’ (pp. 100, 164), sometimes at a fast day or a sacrament. After the war the Warwickshire receiver (and Alcester resident) Matthew Bridges paid the traditional ‘Christide’ sum for ‘frieze’ for gowns for the town's poor widows (pp. 497, 499). Official levies and taxes included poor rates, tithes, and national levies from pre-war purveyance towards the royal household, through the early levies of the Long Parliament and the much heavier civil war taxation, with much concern with arrears from 1645.

The accounts provide outstanding evidence for the upbringing and education of elite children. In the 1640s they were educated at home; later accounts cover their time at university. Book purchases suggest they followed a conventional academic curriculum, supplemented by French tutors, dancing classes, and serious music instruction.Footnote ⁶⁰ The music teacher, Mr Coleman was well known, while amongst the tutors was the radical intellectual John Sadler, once their father's secretary. A writing master Mr Tranter was paid 20s ‘in hand’ to teach my Lord and Mr Robert with 20s more promised, ‘upon their writing well’, although it appears that he only received 30s in all (p. 379).

The boys had toys, chessmen, pistols, and bows and arrows (pp. 55, 56, 59, 67). Besides their grammars and classical texts, they were well supplied with Bibles. ‘Mr Francis’ was given a Psalm book and a Testament when he was about four years old (p. 136), a Latin Testament followed in 1645 (p. 357) with French and Greek Testaments noted in the accounts for when he was ten (pp. 411, 413). The three eldest sons had Bibles bought for them in the winter of 1646 with a Testament for Algernon, then aged four (p. 414). Servant boys, but not girls, also received religious texts, presumably alongside some instruction in reading: in the summer of 1641, Jack Indian received a Testament and Harry the kitchen boy, a Bible and a catechism (pp. 173, 175).

Finally, the accounts chart the relationships between an aristocratic household and the London merchants, tradespeople, and professionals who provided goods and services. Some are named: John Thomy and John Wines amongst the butchers, Mr Bentham the fishmonger, Alderman Towse the grocer, Mr Potter the saddler, and the much-valued Mr Parr the sugar man. Others are simply ‘the mealman’ or ‘the poulterer’. They take their place amongst a host of chandlers, vintners, apothecaries, grocers, saddlers, and upholsters within a city economy in which elite consumption played a vital part.