The Duke Inheritance: Christina, Sprint and the Cobham Catastrophe (1572–1611)

Watercolour of an empty late-Elizabethan chamber — raised bench, flagstone floor, bundles of legal documents — with a single wooden chair knocked sideways in a shaft of dusty light.

Christina Duke’s Unlucky Marriages

The Brooke Marriage: Expectations Dashed (1558)

Christina Duke was one of the most significant matrimonial prospects in the West Country, and by 1558, her father Richard had secured a match with George Brooke¹ (born 27 January 1533), second son of George Brooke, 9th Baron Cobham.

As a younger son George Brooke, who seems to have preferred the Cobham surname, had no expectation of lands of his own and was dogged by financial difficulties all his life. During Mary’s reign, he had been involved with his family in Wyatt’s rebellion, for which he was briefly imprisoned in the Tower (a sign of things to come for the Brooke family). He found some favour when Elizabeth took the throne, serving as sewer at her coronation in 1559 (higher ranking than it sounds, even if he did have to taste the food for poison). He later obtained a patent for an ‘engine’ to clear sand and mud from river banks and interested himself in furnaces and water pumps, but none of these ventures relieved his poverty. One imagines that he wasn’t exactly the son-in-law whom Richard Duke had envisaged.

Christina and George had five children: three sons and two daughters. The three sons were Duke Brooke (baptised 21 March 1562 at St Margaret, Westminster), Peter Brooke (baptised 20 October 1565 at Otterton) and Charles Brooke, later of Templecombe. The two daughters are unidentified – the History of Parliament biography records ‘3s. 2da.’ but names neither girl. What became of them remains one of the gaps in the record. Nothing new there, then.

George Brooke died between 1569 and 1572; the History of Parliament notes that ‘nothing further has been found about him’ after late 1569. In a real stroke of bad luck, he died before his father-in-law Richard Duke, meaning he never came into possession of the Duke inheritance. Christina found herself a widow with at least three children and the prospect of substantial estates in her future, so still a very attractive matrimonial prospect.

The Sprint Marriage: ‘Subtle Drift and Device’ (1572)

In the year of Richard Duke’s death, a marriage licence was issued by the Faculty Office uniting ‘Christian Brock’ with Gregory Sprint.²

The marriage was supposedly arranged by Richard Duke’s widow, Joan (who happened to be Gregory Sprint’s mother), and The History of Parliament³ records that she did it by ‘subtle drift and device’. Joan had married four times herself: first to John Sprint, an apothecary of Bristol, by whom she had Gregory; then to an unknown second husband; then to Richard Duke; and finally to Roger Gifford, against whom Gregory would later litigate (you will detect a pattern).

The manoeuvre worked. Sprint, from ‘not being anything worth nor having anything’, became worth £200 per annum in land and held 1,000 marks’ worth of goods. Through Christina, he now controlled a substantial inheritance across Devon, Somerset and Dorset, including Stalbridge Weston. He and Christina established residences at Colaton Raleigh and Templecombe. Not in Weston, of course, but close enough to cause trouble.

Sprint’s Political Career and Connections

Sprint used his new wealth to build a political career. He sat as Member of Parliament for Shaftesbury in 1586 and for Bridport in 1589. The Shaftesbury seat was controlled by the 2nd Earl of Pembroke, who had links with both Salisbury and Bristol, the Sprints’ family home. Gregory was a cousin of John Sprint, treasurer of Salisbury cathedral, and of Lord Burghley’s secretary Michael Hickes, who sat for Shaftesbury in the 1589 parliament. His return for Bridport can be attributed to Sir Walter Raleigh, ‘whose agent and neighbour he became’. Useful connections, all of them. If they hadn’t been wasted.

Everything Goes Wrong

Under coverture (the convenient legal doctrine by which a woman, upon marriage, ceased to exist) Sprint held a life interest in his wife’s fortune. The Brooke children held the reversionary inheritance. Conflict erupted early. Sprint wanted to enjoy the fruits of his marriage as fully as possible; the Brooke children wanted their inheritance preserved. Not a recipe for family harmony.

By 1577, barely five years after the marriage, a long series of lawsuits had begun between Sprint and his wife’s sons by her first marriage. The young men, usually supported by their mother, ‘repeatedly attacked their stepfather, sometimes in court and sometimes in person’. The Sprint marital home does not sound as if it was a happy one.

In 1583, Sprint appears to have granted the Brookes his seat at Templecombe but then refused to give them possession, declaring that ‘he built the same for himself and their mother and had no other convenient house to dwell in’. An investigation was ordered by the Privy Council, but the feud dragged on for another decade.

Sprint was eventually involved in a torrent of lawsuits: against the Brooke stepsons, against members of the Duke family, against his mother’s fourth husband Roger Gifford, and against business partners, neighbours and tenants. His name appears under multiple references in the Star Chamber records.

His problems with his neighbours in Stalbridge Weston came to a head in 1578 with a riot.⁴ Gregory and some tenants of Stalbridge Weston squared off against William Thornhull and some tenants of Thornhill manor, both claiming ownership of and the right to cut fuel on a piece of waste called Vearnehill.

Before you imagine pitchforks and burning torches, understand that a Tudor riot was technically defined as any disturbance caused by three or more people assembled to commit an unlawful act by force. Not quite the peasant uprising the word suggests today, but it was serious enough to generate a Star Chamber case. Witnesses were summoned to make depositions and the whole messy business probably became the talk of the neighbourhood.

In 1591, Sprint was outlawed for debt and his goods seized, somewhat hampering his hobby of litigation as outlaws couldn’t take anyone else to court. (Nor could they hold property or exercise any legal authority.) He protested that he was being punished for Duke Brooke’s debts – and there may have been some truth to this. In 1604, Sprint sold land in Otterton to pay debts for which he had stood surety on Duke Brooke’s behalf. The picture that emerges is one of tangled financial obligations on both sides, rather than a simple narrative of Sprint as predator and the Brookes as victims. Though Sprint plainly had the larger share of responsibility, the Brooke sons were no angels either.

Monetising the Manor

Meanwhile, the manor of Stalbridge Weston was still being monetised.

In 1574, Gregory Sprint and Christina his wife granted a copyhold to John Dybbin for an eye-watering £100 (this was probably Frith Farm).⁵ By 1575, copyholds in Weston are being granted by ‘Gregory Sprint, Christiana his wife and Robert Goldesborough, and Thomas Hewytt’,⁶ suggesting that the manor had been farmed. (‘Farming’ a manor meant leasing the demesne lands and the right to collect rents, tithes and court profits for a fixed annual sum.) However, the relationship with Goldsborough and Hewett did not last long. By 1577/78 Sprint is suing⁷ ‘William Brooke [Lord] Cobham, Christopher Sprent, Robert Goldsboroughe, Thomas Hewet and others.’; and they’re pulled into other legal actions involving him as well. We haven’t examined these Star Chamber cases yet, but they will make interesting reading. (We’re stocking up on popcorn.)

Around 1588, long leases were granted on parts of the estate. According to a later Chancery suit brought by Robert Goldsborough in 1623,⁸ two messuages and tenements were leased to a tenant named Thomas Watts for 99 years ‘for a greate sume of money’. The ‘moiety of some woods’ (Frith Wood) was also leased for 40 years on similar terms. One of these tenements alone was valued at £40 a year. Whether the lessor was Duke Brooke or Sprint acting in Christina’s right is disputed – the Goldesborough account names Duke Brooke, but a later claim suggests Christina herself was then in possession. We need to consult the original Chancery documents to be sure what was going on – or as sure as we can be, reviewing a 400-year-old document talking about things that happened perhaps 50 years earlier. But anyway, these long leases at large upfront sums functioned as quasi-mortgages, converting future income streams and timber profits into immediate capital. Someone desperately needed cash.

By 1592, copyholds in Weston were being granted by William Brooke and John Marvyn, with the consent of Christina Sprint and Duke Brooke.⁹ Gregory was out of the picture, having been outlawed for debt, and Christina’s brother-in-law had seemingly stepped in to manage the estate, with the aid of a local pair of hands. John Marvyn was possibly the husband of Melior Goldesborough (sister of Robert Goldesborough), and/or the John Mervyn who was sucked into some of Sprint’s earlier legal actions. By 1599, William Brooke had been succeeded by his son Henry Brooke,¹⁰ cousin to Duke Brooke, but the approach to extracting money didn’t change. In 1592/3, a reversion was granted on the capital messuage acquired by William Watts for £15 back in 1556/7. The reversion cost £84 13s 4d! And in 1599, the reversion of another property to secure it for a widow’s son cost £100. For a tenant family, finding an entry fine (the price of keeping their land in the family) could mean years of debt, borrowing from neighbours, or selling livestock at the worst possible time.

For the tenants, watching their landlady’s husband feuding with his stepsons, selling off long leases on the woods and ratcheting up entry fines must have been deeply unsettling. Nothing quite says ‘stable management’ like your landlord being involved in Star Chamber proceedings, outlawed for debt and squeezing every penny from the estate to fund his litigation.

And then the harvests failed. The years 1594, 1595, 1596 and 1597 brought crops ranging from poor to catastrophic – four bad seasons in succession.¹¹ Grain prices soared, people starved and social order frayed. It wasn’t as severe as the Great Famine of 1315–22, but it was bad enough. For Weston’s tenants, already pressed by rising fines and landlords locked in perpetual litigation, it may have meant choosing between paying rent and feeding their families. The better-off might weather it by eating through their reserves, but the poor faced genuine starvation.

And if anyone in Weston hoped that matters could only improve, they were about to be disappointed.

The Cobham Catastrophe and the Spymaster

The Brooke Family’s Talent(?) for Treason (1603)

The Brooke brothers (Duke, Peter and Charles) weren’t just minor West Country gentry. Their father George Brooke was the second son of the 9th Baron Cobham, so the Brookes helping out with the management of the manor, first William and then Henry, were the 10th and 11th Baron Cobham. It was an arrangement that was about to end abruptly.

In 1603, just as James I took the throne, Henry Brooke and his brother George – not Christina’s late husband, but his nephew – got caught in not one but two separate plots against the new king. George, as one contemporary put it, was ‘the knot that tied together’ both conspiracies. They would prove two of the most incompetent traitors in English history.

George joined some overly optimistic Catholic priests in the ‘Bye Plot’, which had the ambitious goal of kidnapping the king, because what could go wrong with that? Apart from some of the Catholic community viewing the plot as both foolish and dangerous, and leaking details to the Government.

At the exact same time, George’s brother Henry (with Sir Walter Raleigh) was busy with the ‘Main Plot’, planning to use money from Spain to replace James with a more palatable alternative who was both English and (they assumed) easily manipulated, possibly because she was a woman. Unfortunately for them, when Lady Arbella Stuart was invited to agree to the plan, she very sensibly handed the evidence over to King James.¹² (It was perhaps the last time in her life that she showed any sense). This, combined with evidence extracted from the Bye plotters including George, led to the Main plotters being identified.

George was executed for high treason on 5 December 1603.¹³ Henry was convicted but reprieved, stripped of all titles, attainted (meaning all his lands and goods were forfeit to the Crown) and confined to the Tower for the next fifteen years, which gave him plenty of opportunity to reflect on his questionable decision-making. He passed the time amassing a library of over a thousand volumes and attempting to translate Seneca, though by all accounts his scholarly talents did not match his ambition.¹⁴

The arrests, trials and convictions were very much a family affair. The man who orchestrated them was Robert Cecil, 1st Earl of Salisbury: spymaster, Secretary of State and Lord High Treasurer of England. Quite possibly the most powerful man in the kingdom after James I himself. The same Robert Cecil who had married their sister, Elizabeth Brooke, back in 1589.¹⁵ Elizabeth had the good sense to die in 1597, well before her brothers’ spectacular implosion, thus avoiding the awkwardness of being both Lady Cecil and the sister of traitors. That didn’t stop her widower sending his brothers-in-law to the scaffold and the Tower.

Duke Brooke’s Ruinous Gamble

In principle, that should have been the end of the Cobham estates as far as the Brooke family was concerned. But the 9th Baron Cobham’s will, dated 31 March 1552, had established an entail (a restriction limiting inheritance to a specific line of descent) that partially protected them. The Crown could seize only the life interest during the lives of the attainted conspirators; after they died, the entail would carry the estates onward to the next heir. The immediate heir was the infant son of the executed George Brooke, in no position to argue his case. But Duke Brooke was next in line, and he saw an opportunity.

Before 11 August 1604, Duke wrote to Lord Cecil setting out his claim.¹⁶ His lawyers had assured him it was strong enough to take to trial, but he would rather seek it ‘at his Majesty’s hands by way of purchase’, craving only that he might have it ‘at the easiest rate’. He offered £4,000.

He did not get the easiest rate. On 11 August 1604, an agreement was struck between the Earl of Dorset (Lord High Treasurer), the Earl of Northampton and Lord Cecil on one side, and Duke Brooke on the other. ¹⁷

The total price Duke Brooke agreed to pay was £11,500, payable in three instalments: £5,000 on 4 May 1605; £3,250 on 8 November 1605; and £3,250 on 4 May 1606. An earlier source gives the total as £10,769 with a slightly different first instalment, suggesting the terms may have been renegotiated between agreement and execution.¹⁸ Either way, it was a colossal sum for a member of a disgraced family who had needed his stepfather to settle his debts just a few years before – and it appears he used borrowed money to do it.

Farming Out the Manor (Again)

A surviving court rental from 1611¹⁹ reveals that the manor had once again been farmed between at least 1606 and 1608 to a consortium of three men: Sir Thomas Freke, knight; and John Boden and William Younge, gentlemen.

Sir Thomas Freke (1563–1633) of Iwerne Courtney²⁰ was twice MP for the county, deputy lieutenant of Dorset for 30 years, moneylender to the great and good (he ‘obliged Ralegh and Cecil as occasion offered’), and a man with a flexible attitude to maritime law. He sat repeatedly on piracy commissions for Dorset while later running privateering ventures of his own, with ships registered in his son’s name. The largest, the Leopard of Weymouth, was 240 tons and carried 18 guns, so not exactly a fishing smack. Poacher turned gamekeeper springs to mind.

John Boden²¹ (or Budden) was a man with both local connections and government ones. Originally steward to Lord Stourton, he became feodary of Dorset – essentially, the Crown’s eyes and ears on land tenure, inheritance and property values across the county. He reported to the Master of the Court of Wards, who was (from 1599) one… Robert Cecil. The connection must have been useful to both of them.

William Younge is hard to track down, but he was probably a safe local pair of hands and eyes for the other two.

An extract from a court roll²² in 1609 gives us another interesting name: the seneschal (steward) who actually ran the court. John Dackombe. Nephew to John Boden. Robert Cecil’s solicitor, secretary, land-fixer, and eventually executor. An indispensable man who knew where all the money went, which made him very useful and very well rewarded.

The Elizabethan world was remarkably small. And Robert Cecil had his fingers in all of the pies.

Four Deaths and a Disappearance (1606–1610)

Duke Brooke’s final instalment of £3,250 fell due on 4 May 1606. The legal business of completing the purchase would have brought him to London, probably accompanied by his brothers Peter and Charles, who had a direct interest in the family’s claim to the Cobham inheritance. The Brooke family had a connection to the Blackfriars district through their Cobham cousins, whose substantial London house – now held in trust for Henry Cobham’s wife, Frances Howard, Countess of Kildare – stood in the liberty of St Ann Blackfriars.²³ Whether the brothers lodged there, at an inn near the Inns of Court, or with associates, we do not know.

Twenty-three days later, on 27 May 1606, Duke Brooke was dead.

The Templecombe parish register records: ‘10 June 1606 Duke Brooke, Lord of the Manor, died London 27 May, buried at Cobham in Kent.’²⁴ He was so unprepared for death that he left a nuncupative (oral) will, dictated on the day he died to four witnesses. He left small bequests to a handful of people who were evidently at his bedside (including one Robert ‘the footman’) with the residue going to his wife Margaret, who was named as executrix.²⁵

There are three things to notice about this. There’s the nuncupative will. A man makes an oral will when he cannot write or sign his name, which implies a sudden and incapacitating illness. Then there’s the fourteen-day gap between death (27 May) and burial (10 June) in Cobham, Kent. In an age when the dead were normally buried within two or three days, a fortnight’s delay requires explanation. And finally, the date of probate: 12 July 1606 – forty-six days after Duke died.

On that same July day, Charles Brooke also received administration of the estate of ‘Peter Brooke of Templecombe’, who had died without a will.²⁶ Two adult brothers from the same family, dead within weeks or days of each other, their affairs tidied up on the same day in court. Duke’s wife Margaret had renounced her right to act as executrix, leaving Charles to deal with both estates alone.

The most likely explanation is plague.

The London Bills of Mortality for 1606 record 2,124 plague deaths – a sharp resurgence after relatively quiet years in 1604 and 1605.²⁷ Weekly plague deaths rose from 25 in early July to a peak of 177 in late September, following the characteristic seasonal pattern of autumn intensification. The burial register for St Ann Blackfriars – the parish in which the Cobham house stood – shows no plague deaths in the early months of 1606 but records them with increasing frequency from June onwards, with the characteristic pattern of household clusters: three members of the Tyre family buried within three weeks, four Bradleys in a fortnight.²⁸

Duke died on 27 May, just days before the seasonal spike began.

Under the plague regulations then in force,²⁹ any house where a plague death occurred was shut up for forty days. A red cross was painted on the door and a watchman stationed outside. Nobody could enter or leave. The regulations existed to contain the disease, but for the people trapped inside – healthy or not – it was close to a death sentence by proximity. Research on the 1665 Eyam plague, where detailed household records survive, found that three-quarters of all infections were caused by person-to-person transmission, with the force of infection significantly stronger within households. Being locked in a plague house with your dying brother did not guarantee your own death (at Eyam, 63% of the population survived) but it did raise the odds.³⁰

If Duke died of plague on 27 May, the forty-day quarantine would have expired around 6 July. Charles appeared in court on 12 July, almost exactly when you would expect if he had been locked inside a plague house and had to wait for the door to open before he could prove the will.

The fourteen-day burial delay fits the same pattern. A body suspected of plague could not simply be moved out of London. It had to be inspected by the parish searchers, wrapped in cerecloth and probably sealed in a lead coffin before the authorities would permit transport. Fourteen days from death to burial in Kent is consistent with that process.

Peter Brooke’s missing burial record is harder to explain, but consistent with one grim possibility: burial in an unmarked plague pit, with no individual entry in any parish register.

None of this is proof. There is no searcher’s report naming either brother, no entry in the Bills of Mortality listing them individually, and people died of other sudden illnesses in early modern London. But the accumulation of evidence – the sudden death, the oral will, the fourteen-day burial delay, Peter’s vanishing from the record, the quarantine-length gap before Charles could act, and the documented plague resurgence in the very district where the family had connections – means plague fits.

Duke had staked everything on the Cobham purchase. He had completed his final payment on 4 May. Twenty-three days later he was dead, and his life interest died with him. Everything he had borrowed, mortgaged and scraped together over the previous two years was wiped out in a single day.

And it got worse. Charles had to go back to the Crown and buy a new life interest, because Duke’s had expired on his death. On 3 August 1606, he obtained a renewal³¹ of the Cobham estate grant from the King on unknown terms – but the Crown was not in the habit of giving things away, and certainly not to the family of convicted traitors. Whatever Charles paid, it was money he did not have, piled on top of debts inherited from a brother who had already borrowed to fund the original purchase. The Cobham gamble had not just failed once; it had failed twice, and the second failure compounded the first.

Gregory Sprint left Templecombe by 1608, possibly much earlier, retreating to Devon. The History of Parliament notes that ‘he may still have been alive in 1612, but the dates of his birth and death are as obscure as the rest of his life, with the exception of his lawsuits.’ A fitting reflection on a man whose chief legacy was Star Chamber records.

Christina herself died on 7 October 1608.³² She had survived two difficult marriages, decades of litigation, the execution and attainder of her nephews by marriage and the deaths of two of her three sons. Her passing extinguished the life interest that had sustained Sprint’s claim to the estates, but by then it hardly mattered. Everything now fell to Charles, the youngest and sole surviving son.

Charles began selling what he could. In 1609, he conveyed a bundle of Devon manors to Robert Cecil, Earl of Salisbury, for £5,000.³³ But there was not enough time or enough money left for him to turn the family fortunes around.

Charles Brooke died childless on 5 April 1610.³⁴ Drowning in debts, with creditors circling and properties mortgaged to the hilt, he left Weston,³⁵ among other assets, to the one man with both the money and the power to extract value from a tainted inheritance – yes, Robert Cecil – on condition his debts were paid.

For the tenants of Weston, this latest transfer must have seemed like yet another chapter in an increasingly absurd saga. Their manor had spent 600 years in monastic hands. Since then it had passed through the Crown, a one-day shell company, a Court clerk, his daughter, her feuding family, their feuding stepfather – and now the most powerful politician in England. And through it all, they still owed their £17 5s and 22 hens.

Some things, it seems, are simply eternal – even when your landlord keeps changing and their family occasionally commit treason.

References

1
History of Parliament: House of Commons 1558–1603, ‘BROOKE, alias COBHAM, George (b.1533), of London’. https://www.historyofparliamentonline.org/volume/1558-1603/member/brooke-alias-cobham-george-1533.
2
Boyd’s Marriage Index, entry for Gregory Sprint and Christian Brock, marriage licence 1572.
3
History of Parliament: House of Commons 1558–1603, ‘SPRINT, Gregory, of Templecombe, Som. and Colaton Raleigh, Devon’. https://www.historyofparliamentonline.org/volume/1558-1603/member/sprint-gregory.
4
The National Archives (TNA), STAC 5/S10/9: Court of Star Chamber proceedings, Elizabeth I, Sprinte v Thornhill, cause code SCEL-04453, and other Star Chamber documents under the same cause code.
5
Somerset Heritage Centre, DD/WHh/456: Rental of Stalbridge Weston Manor, with court proceedings, c.1558–1612.
6
Ibid.
7
TNA, STAC 5/S5/28: Court of Star Chamber proceedings, Elizabeth I, Gregory Sprynte v William [Brooke] Lord Cobham, Duke Brooke, Robert Coldsboroughe, Thomas Hewet and others, cause code SCEL-04000, bill, answers, replication and other documents under the same cause code.
8
Albert Goldsbrough, Memorials of the Goldesborough Family (Cheltenham: E.J. Burrow, 1930).
9
Somerset Heritage Centre, DD/WHh/456: Rental of Stalbridge Weston Manor, with court proceedings, c.1558–1612., grant to Richard Wattes, 1592/3.
10
Somerset Heritage Centre, DD/WHh/456: Rental of Stalbridge Weston Manor, with court proceedings, c.1558–1612, grant to Eleanor Lock, 1599.
11
Andrew B. Appleby, Famine in Tudor and Stuart England (Stanford UP, 1978), pp. 109–45.
12
‘Lady Arbella Stuart’, Special Collections (blog), Newcastle University, 30 April 2011, https://blogs.ncl.ac.uk/speccoll/tag/lady-arbella-stuart/.
13
Mark Nicholls, ‘Treason’s Reward: The Punishment of Conspirators in the Bye Plot of 1603’, Historical Journal 38 (1995), pp. 821–42. https://www.jstor.org/stable/2640091. The ‘knot’ quotation is Dudley Carleton’s.
14
Lord Ronald Sutherland Gower, The Tower of London, vol. 2 (London: George Bell & Sons, 1902), pp. 6–7
15
History of Parliament: House of Commons 1558–1603, ‘CECIL, Robert (1563–1612), of the Savoy, London and Theobalds, Herts.’ https://www.historyofparliamentonline.org/volume/1558-1603/member/cecil-robert-1563-1612.
16
Great Britain, Royal Commission on Historical Manuscripts, Calendar of the Manuscripts of the Most Honourable the Marquess of Salisbury Preserved at Hatfield House, Hertfordshire, Part XVI (London: H.M. Stationery Office, 1933), p. 224, ‘Duke Brooke to Lord Cecil’ [before 11 August 1604], MS ref. 108.48.
17
Calendar of Salisbury Manuscripts, Part XVI, pp. 224–225, ‘Lands of Henry, Lord Cobham: Agreement made 11 August 1604’, MS ref. 106.85. Copy signed by the Lords and certified by R. Percivale. The agreement also required the Crown to clear encumbrances from the lands, including writs of elegit obtained by Sir John Heale, serjeant-at-law, whose attorney William Kyng had committed what Sir Edward Coke described as ‘a horrible forgery of a judicial proceeding’ in backdating some 48 writs (see pp. 22–23 of the same volume).
18
J. G. Waller, ‘On the Fate of Henry Brooke, Tenth Lord Cobham’, Archaeologia 46 (1881), p. 249.
19
Somerset Heritage Centre, DD/WHh/456: Rental of Stalbridge Weston Manor, with court proceedings, c.1558–1612.
20
History of Parliament: House of Commons 1558–1603, ‘FREKE, Thomas (1563–1633), of Iwerne Courtnay, Dorset’. https://www.historyofparliamentonline.org/volume/1558-1603/member/freke-thomas-1563-1633; and History of Parliament: House of Commons 1604–1629, ‘FREKE, Sir Thomas (1563–1633), of Iwerne Courtnay (alias Shroton), Dorset’. https://www.historyofparliamentonline.org/volume/1604-1629/member/freke-sir-thomas-1563-1633.
21
History of Parliament: House of Commons 1604–1629, ‘BODEN (BUDDEN), John (c.1547–1614), of Shaftesbury, Dorset and Clement’s Inn, London’. https://www.historyofparliamentonline.org/volume/1604-1629/member/boden-john-1547-1614.
22
Somerset Heritage Centre, DD/WHh/452: Extract of courtroll of Weston alias Stalbridge Weston Manor. 26 Sep 1606.
23
The Brooke family’s Blackfriars house is documented in the Calendar of State Papers Domestic, James I, vol. 8 (May 1604): a grant dated 13 May 1604 leased ‘a messuage in Blackfriars, London, possessions of Henry, late Lord Cobham, attainted of treason’ to the Earls of Nottingham and Suffolk in trust for Frances Howard, Countess of Kildare. The house fell within the parish of St Ann Blackfriars.
24
Templecombe parish registers: ‘Duke Brooke esquire Lorde of this mannor departed this life at London the 27th day of Maye and was buryed at Cobham in Kent on twesday the xth day of June 1606.’ Also: Duke Brooke, nuncupative will, probate granted to his brother Charles on 12 July 1606 (TNA, PROB 11/108/103).
25
TNA, PROB 11/108/103: Nuncupative will of Duke Brooke, 27 May 1606, with probate granted to his brother Charles on 12 July 1606.
26
Peter Brooke of Templecombe: died 1606 without a will. Administration granted to his brother Charles on 12 July 1606. PCC Administrations Index, 1596–1608, p. 20 (British Record Society, vol. 81).
27
Charles Creighton, A History of Epidemics in Britain, vol. 1: From A.D. 664 to the Extinction of Plague (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1891), p. 494. Creighton gives a table from the weekly Bills of Mortality showing 2,124 plague deaths in London in 1606, with the infection becoming ‘again active’ after relatively quiet years in 1604 and 1605. Weekly plague deaths rose from 25 in early July to a peak of 177 in late September. Plague remained at endemic levels in London for five consecutive years (1606–1610).
28
Parish registers of St Ann Blackfriars, 1606. Plague burials marked ‘pl’ in the margin begin in June and accelerate through July and August.
29
‘Lazarretos’, Res Medica 5, no. 1 (1966): Edinburgh Diamond Journals, https://journals.ed.ac.uk/resmedica/article/download/925/1317/2784, p. 20.
30
Xavier Didelot et al., ‘Epidemiological analysis of the Eyam plague outbreak of 1665–1666’, Proceedings of the Royal Society B 283 (2016): 20160618. Out of 689 people at risk across 210 households, 257 died (37%) and 432 survived (63%). Three-quarters of infections were attributable to person-to-person transmission, with a significantly elevated rate within households.
31
Great Britain, Public Record Office, Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Series, of the Reign of James I, 1603–1610, ed. Mary Anne Everett Green (London: Longman, Brown, Green, Longmans & Roberts, 1857), pp. 328–336.
32
Templecombe parish registers: ‘Christian Sprinte ladie of this mannor departed this life vij October 1608.’ No burial recorded.
33
Devon Archives, 1039 M/T 6: Covenant to levy a fine, recording Charles Brooke’s conveyance to Robert, Earl of Salisbury, of the manors of Bishopsteignton, Lindridge, Radway and West Teignmouth, 1609.
34
Templecombe parish registers: ‘Charles Broke esquire Lord of this mannor dyed the 5 April 1610.’ No burial recorded.
35
TNA, PROB 11/115: Will of Charles Brooke, 1610.