In this post, co-editors Stewart Beale, Andrew Hopper and Ann Hughes introduce their new volume in the Royal Historical Society’s Camden Series: The Household Accounts of Robert and Katherine Greville, Lord and Lady Brooke, at Holborn and Warwick, 1640–1649 (Camden Society (December 2024).
Robert Greville, 2nd Lord Brooke, was a prominent figure among the aristocratic opposition to Charles I, a religious radical and intellectual who emerged as a successful popular leader in the early months of the English Civil War. This volume publishes the richly detailed household accounts kept for Brooke and then for his widow, Katherine, on an annual basis between 1640 and 1649.
Until now, these texts have scarcely been studied by historians. They make an illuminating source for Brooke’s capacious intellectual, religious, and political networks, and for his mobilisation of popular support for Parliament in 1642. They also uncover the administration of his estates and households in London, Warwickshire, and the Midlands before and after his untimely death.
These accounts are crucial sources for political, economic, and military historians, and equally important for social and cultural historians interested in the history of the family, childhood, and widowhood, as well as those concerned with consumption and material culture.
The full text of the Household Accounts of Robert and Katherine Greville, Lord and Lady Brooke is now available via Cambridge University Press, with free access to the editors’ Introduction to the volume.
Robert Greville, 2nd Lord Brooke, emerged as one of Parliament’s popular war leaders during the opening year of the Civil War.
With his seat at Warwick Castle, Parliament appointed Brooke as general of their regional forces in Warwickshire and Staffordshire. Having mustered his forces at Warwick, Brooke moved to besiege the royalists inside Lichfield Cathedral Close in Staffordshire on 2 March 1643. Brooke was standing in the doorway of this house, now named ‘Brooke House’, on Dam Street when he was shot through the eye from extreme range by a firearm concealed in the cathedral tower 177 yards away. He was killed instantly and buried around a month later in the vault of his predecessor and cousin, Fulke Greville, 1st Lord Brooke, in the chapter house of St Mary’s Church, Warwick.
Lichfield Cathedral, photograph by Andy Hopper
Brooke House on Dam Street, Lichfield, photograph by Andy Hopper
The killing of Brooke was a hammer blow to the parliamentarian cause. The royalist historian, Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon later reflected how Brooke’s death ‘was exceedingly lamented by that party, which had scarce a more absolute confidence in any man than in him.’
The suddenness of Brooke’s death left his family and household unprepared and in shock. Brooke’s widow, Katherine, was aged only twenty-four, pregnant with their fifth son, Fulke, and had four other infant sons to care for, all aged under six years. The Long Parliament exalted Brooke as a Godly martyr for their cause and were determined that their treatment of his bereaved widow, herself the daughter of the late Francis Russell, 4th Earl of Bedford, should be seen to be generous and exemplary.
In 1648, the House of Lords voted Katherine £5,000 for the education of her fifth son Fulke … This made Katherine the most richly compensated war widow of the English Civil War.
Katherine understood how to play the part of the patient and stoic Godly widow, an image communicated in this portrait, one of a series of her in mourning attire by Theodore Russell. Katherine’s numerous petitions to the House of Lords conveyed a similar message. They were carefully crafted to represent Katherine in the most favourable and deserving light, prizing her patient forbearance and suffering in God’s (and Parliament’s) cause, above the pursuit of her personal interests. This was so important because widowhood brought a loss of status and endangered noble patrimonies, especially during a time of civil war.
Portrait of Katherine Greville, Lady Brooke, by Theodore Russell, in private collection
In 1644 Parliament granted Katherine the wardship of her eldest son, Francis, and in 1648, the House of Lords voted her £5,000 for the education of her fifth son Fulke, to be paid for out of the Irish lands of the Duchess of Buckingham and her husband, the Earl of Antrim. This made Katherine the most richly compensated war widow of the English Civil War. The Brooke Household Accounts show that this enormous sum was paid in full within just three years, and that some of it was loaned out at interest to Katherine’s brother-in-law, Sir Arthur Hesilrige, who had married Lord Brooke’s sister Dorothy Greville.
The Brooke Household Accounts reveal much about how a Godly noble household mobilised for war, both in Warwickshire and in London.
While many seventeenth-century historians are very familiar with Lord Brooke, only a handful have consulted the Brooke Household Accounts, now published as the latest volume in the Royal Historical Society’s Camden Series of primary sources. The accounts are now part of the Warwick Castle Collection held in the Warwickshire County Record Office at Warwick. They were first used by Ann Hughes to assess the income and economic status of Lord Brooke for her doctoral thesis during the 1970s and then in her monograph, Politics, Society and Civil War in Warwickshire, 1620–1660 (Cambridge University Press, 1987).
Warwick Castle, photograph by Andy Hopper
The Brooke Household Accounts reveal much about how a Godly noble household mobilised for war, both in Warwickshire and in London. They set out aspects of the functioning of Lady Brooke’s households at Warwick Castle and her two London mansions. Confusingly, these were both called ‘Brooke House’.
The accounts include valuable evidence of Lady Brooke’s activities and social circles, including dealings with her kinfolk, peers, friends, chaplains and servants. They furnish rich information on the purchase of books, toys, firearms and clothes to divert the orphaned boys.
Situated in Holborn and Hackney, these were the places where Katherine spent most of her early widowhood during the 1640s. The accounts include valuable evidence of Lady Brooke’s activities and social circles, including dealings with her kinfolk, peers, friends, chaplains and servants. They furnish rich information on the purchase of books, toys, firearms and clothes to divert the orphaned boys, thereby providing a valuable source for elite consumption and material culture. Her boys received lessons in arithmetic, French, dancing and archery, and were often sent with their maids to Hackney. Once a little older, they frequented the library at Sion College, equipped with books for sermon notes.
The accounts also provide plentiful evidence for the rental incomes of the Brooke estates, shedding light on agricultural history and the operation of the castle mills at Warwick. They reveal something of the lives and salaries of the household servants, including the important Bridges family, drawn from the middling sort in the Grevilles’ town of Alcester. These comprised a father and five sons who made their fortunes through service to the family and the parliamentary cause.
The accounts also touch on medical history, with the money paid for ‘healing the kitchen boy’s eye that was hurt by the fox’, and the expenditure spent in vain on surgeons for William Ward, the postilion, whose skull was broken by a horse in October 1641.
Among the lower status servants were ‘Little Bess’ the washing maid and Jack ‘the Indian boy’, likely a servant from New England or the Caribbean. The accounts also touch on medical history, with the money paid for ‘healing the kitchen boy’s eye that was hurt by the fox’, and the expenditure spent in vain on surgeons for William Ward, the postilion, whose skull was broken by a horse in October 1641.
Throughout the 1640s, and into the 1650s, Katherine enjoyed close contacts with leaders of the parliamentarian cause, as well as with other members of her Russell family. She was required to maintain her brother, William Russell, 5th Earl of Bedford, when he was confined temporarily in Brooke House after he returned from his short-lived defection to the royalists in January 1644.
Her most regular contacts were with her sister, Margaret, the Countess of Carlisle, whose husband was a lukewarm royalist. It is possible that Katherine attended the execution of her late husband’s old enemy, William Laud, Archbishop of Canterbury, on Tower Hill, in January 1645. Parliament awarded her the Queen Street, London residence of Charles I’s favourite Lord Digby, which Katherine rented out to Thomas, Lord Fairfax, the parliamentarian commander-in-chief, during his time in the capital in 1648-49.
The Household Accounts show that in March 1649, Katherine took her eldest son, Francis, to witness the trials of the royalist lords, James, 1st Duke of Hamilton, Henry Rich, 1st Earl of Holland, and Arthur, Lord Capel. She later purchased for Francis their scaffold speeches. Later that year she visited the republican politician, Alexander Popham, in his house at Littlecote in Wiltshire.
At a time when so many castles were being slighted to make them indefensible, the republican Council of State recommended a grant of £1,000 for the renovation of Warwick Castle. Parliament wanted to be seen to honour Lady Brooke, even after the regicide and the abolition of the House of Lords. Ultimately, Katherine was able to preserve her sizeable jointure and seems never to have considered remarriage.
These accounts are also of value to historians of military welfare. They reveal that Lady Brooke made charitable payments to the poor that included other widows and refugees fleeing from Ireland, such as ten shillings for ‘the poor Irish woman that was at Bath’. Two shillings were given to ‘divers poor maimed people by my Lady’s command that were carried in a cart.’ Katherine made substantial payments to James Cooke, the pioneering surgeon at Warwick Castle, who was also pastor of a congregational meeting in the town. After 1643, the accounts concluded each year on 2 March, showing how the household’s lives were still shaped and ordered by civil-war bereavement and the anniversary of Lord Brooke’s untimely death.
About the authors
Stewart Beale is a commissioning editor at Palgrave Macmillan. He completed his doctorate in History at the University of Leicester in 2018. He has published several journal articles in Historical Research, The Local Historian, Midland History and The Seventeenth Century, which examine the experiences of war widows, orphans, and maimed soldiers during and after the British Civil Wars.
Andrew Hopper is Professor of Local and Social History in the Department for Continuing Education at the University of Oxford. He is known for his two monographs ‘Black Tom’: Sir Thomas Fairfax and the English Revolution (Manchester, 2007), and Turncoats an Renegadoes: Changing Sides during the English Civil Wars (Oxford, 2012). He is the principal investigator of the Civil War Petitions Project www.civilwarpetitions.ac.uk and co-editor of the ‘World Turned Upside Down’ www.worldturnedupsidedown.co.uk podcast. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, a Fellow of the Society for Army Historical Research, and chair of the editorial board of Midland History.
Ann Hughes is Professor (Emerita) of Early Modern History at Keele University. Her research focuses on the religious, cultural, and political implications of the revolutionary crisis in mid seventeenth-century Britain, with recent interests in print culture and modes of communication, preaching, gender, and the complex engagements of men and women with the parliamentarian wartime state.
Anne’s publications include Gender and the English Revolution (London, 2011); Gangraena and the Struggle for the English Revolution (Oxford, 2004); The Causes of the English Civil War (Basingstoke, 2nd edition, 1998), and was co-editor of The Complete Works of Gerrard Winstanley (Oxford, 2009). Lord Brooke features prominently in her first book, Politics, Society and Civil War in Warwickshire, 1620–1660 (Cambridge, 1987).
About this latest volume in the Camden Series
The Household Accounts of Robert and Katherine Greville, Lord and Lady Brooke, at Holborn and Warwick, 1640-1649, edited by Stewart Beale, Andrew Hopper and Ann Hughes, is now available online and in print from Cambridge University Press. Free access is also available to the editors’ Introduction to the volume.
Full online access to the volume is available to members of the Royal Historical Society as a benefit of membership. Fellows and members of the Society may also order a print copy of the volume at the discounted prize of £16 per volume. To order a copy of the volume, please email administration@royalhistsoc.org, marking your email ‘Camden’.
The Society publishes new volumes in the Camden Series each year. Volumes in 2025 (from June) include Michael Taylor, ed., The Memoirs and Correspondence of Admiral George Grey, 1809-1833; Helen Newsome, ed., Holograph Correspondence of Margaret Tudor Queen of Scots, 1489-1541; and Mark Philp, Aysuda Aykan and Curtis Leung eds. A Collector Collected: The Journals of William Upcott, 1803-1823.
About the Camden Series
The Royal Historical Society’s Camden Series is one of the most prestigious and important collections of primary source material relating to British History, including the British empire and Britons’ influence overseas.
The Society (and its predecessor, the Camden Society) has since 1838 published scholarly editions of sources — making important, previously unpublished, texts available to researchers. Each volume is edited by a specialist historian who provides an expert introduction and commentary.
Today the Society publishes two new Camden volumes each year in association with Cambridge University Press. The complete Camden Series now comprises over 380 volumes of primary source material, ranging from the early medieval to late-twentieth century Britain.
HEADER IMAGE: John Smythson, Bathe House, Holborn, London, the main front, 1619. Home of Sir Fulke Greville. Drawing. Royal Institute of British Architects Collections. SC236/III/6 (1). Digital image courtesy of RIBA Collections, RIBA12951.