English judge, politician and legal writer
Sir Robert Broke SL (c. 1515 – 5 or 6 September 1558) was an English judge, politician and legal writer. Although a landowner in rural Shropshire, he made his fortune through more than 20 years' service to the City of London. MP for the City in five parliaments, he served as Speaker of the House of Commons in 1554. He is celebrated as the author of one of the Books of authority. A prominent religious conservative, he founded a notable recusant dynasty. His surname is also rendered Brooke, and occasionally Brook, which are, for modern readers, better indicators of pronunciation.
Early life and education.
Robert Broke was born by 1515: his known Oxford University admission date suggests the first decade of the century. He was the eldest son of
*Thomas Broke of Claverley in Shropshire.
*Margaret Grosvenor, daughter of Humphrey Grosvenor of Farmcote, a hamlet to the south-east of Claverley.
Most of early 16th century Shropshire was poor and underdeveloped sheep country, ruled by the Council of Wales and the Marches. Claverley was a large parish, dominated by the Gatacre family, whose seat was at its southern edge.
Broke was admitted to study for a BA at Oxford University in 1521. As a very minor member of the landed gentry, Broke needed to seek sources of income outside his own locality if he were to prosper, and he did so through London and the law. He studied at Strand Inn, and from there was admitted to Middle Temple at some point between 1525 and 1528. He studied pleading with John Jenour, a famous Prothonotary who influenced a whole generation of judges and jurists.
Judicial career.
Broke enjoyed considerable power as an official of the City of London before attaining high office in the last four years of his life. He was also the author of several important works on the law.
Offices held.
Broke's judicial career began in 1536 when he was appointed Common Serjeant of London on the recommendation of Henry VIII and the queen, Jane Seymour; how he gained such royal favour is unknown. As Serjeant, Brooke attended court with the Lord Mayor of London, as well as the Court of Aldermen and the Court of Common Council, the city's main deliberative body. One of his tasks was to review, rewrite and put forward parliamentary bills proposed by the city. In 1540, Broke identified and returned a volume of the Letter-Books of the City of London that had been lost for some time. In January 1544, he was directed to intervene in the passage of two bills: one from the secondaries of the compter, aiming to repeal the Act against untrue verdicts; another already put to the house that intended to prevent merchants buying steel and other goods, which Broke was told to forestall. In 1545, it was a bill to bring urban sanctuaries under the control of borough and city authorities.
Among the legal officers, the Common Serjeant was second only to the Recorder of London. When this post became vacant in 1545, a letter from the king to the Aldermen once again proved decisive in securing it for Broke, and he took office on 12 November. On 17 November he was elected to parliament in place of his predecessor as Recorder, Sir Roger Cholmley. On 19 November he was granted Freedom of the City of London, a status tied to his membership of the Worshipful Company of Mercers, the first in order of precedence of London's Livery Companies.
Holding these public offices did not prevent Broke pursuing private practice, and his signature is found on bills in chancery in the 1530s and 1540s. During this time he was also deputy chief steward for the Duchy of Lancaster, and was created a Serjeant-at-law in 1552.
On 8 October 1554 he was appointed Chief Justice of the Common Pleas, probably a reward from Queen Mary for his performance as Speaker of the House of Commons. He was knighted on 27 January 1555 by King Philip. On 26 February, he presided over the trial of Charles Stourton, 8th Baron Stourton, accused of murdering two men, William Hartgill and his son John. Stourton refused to plead and Broke threatened him with the punishment of being pressed to death. He then entered a plea of guilty and was executed on 16 March.
Broke fell into conflict with the court's Puisne Justices when he appointed Thomas Gatacre, his wife's brother, as Chief Prothonotary in 1557. The justices rejected him, and Broke's second choice, William Wheteley, was then allowed to take office despite judicial preference for another candidate.
Works.
In 1542 Broke became a bencher at the Middle Temple. As Autumn Reader that year, his subject was the 1540 Statute of Limitations; the reading circulated in manuscript and was subsequently printed in 1547. As Lent Reader in 1551, his subject was Pleas of the Crown, using chapter 17 of Magna Carta as the source: this also circulated in manuscript before being published in 1641, almost one hundred years after his death.
Broke's most important work was "La Graunde Abridgement", a classified compendium of law as it then prevailed. Modelled on a work of the same name by Anthony Fitzherbert, with which it is sometimes confused, it closely reflected Broke's own interests and experience. A section is given over to the subject of London, great stress is placed on the role of parliament and it contains numerous cases in which Broke appeared. The book was not published until 1568, a decade after Broke's death, and was in Law French, but it was an immediate success and came to be regarded as one of the Books of authority which courts can use as evidence of the law prevailing at the time. From it Richard Bellewe extracted important cases decided during the reigns of Henry VIII, Edward VI and Mary I and issued them as a separate compilation, soon rendered into English, and often cited as Brook's New Cases. This proved even more popular than the book from which it was extracted.
Political career.
Broke served as a Member of Parliament for the City of London from 1545 until 1554, serving as Speaker of the House of Commons of England in 1554.
Parliament of 1545.
Broke was elected to the Parliament of 1545, the last of Henry VIII's reign, as a replacement for Sir Roger Cholmley. The parliament had been called as long ago as December 1544 and Cholmley was elected to Parliament on 19 January 1545. However, the opening of parliament was delayed until 23 November and Cholmley was appointed an Exchequer Baron in the meantime, and so forced to relinquish both his post as Recorder and his parliamentary seat.
London had four MPs. Two, called "knights", were elected by the Aldermen, and one of these was always the Recorder. The other two, called "burgesses" were elected by the Court of Common Council from a list of twelve proposed by the Aldermen. The Recorder always resigned his seat when he left office: hence Broke's election was automatic. London was second only to the Crown as sponsor of legislation and solid legal acumen was in need at all times among its delegation to the House of Commons.
Broke's colleagues in the 1545 parliament were Sir Richard Gresham, a former Lord Mayor, John Sturgeon, a staunch Protestant, and Paul Withypoll, a wealthy merchant with interests in the Netherlands, Spain and Crete. Much of their work involved defending the City against the claims of its clergy. They were unsuccessful in getting their bill on sanctuaries through the House, but they were able to force a compromise over a bill intended to tighten up tithe collection from the citizens. Such manoeuvring was typical of the concerns of London members in the Tudor period.
Parliament of 1547.
The first Parliament of Edward VI lasted for most of the reign, and Broke was automatically returned to it. His aldermanic colleague was the goldsmith Sir Martin Bowes, who had just served his term as Lord Mayor, having made so large a fortune at the Royal Mint that he was able easily to afford the £10,000 to settle accounts when he and the other masters were found to have systematically debased the coinage. Bowes remained a London MP throughout Broke's term, apart from a short break in 1553. The first session of the parliament definitively abolished chantries. A major concern of the London members in the second and subsequent sessions of the parliament was to ensure that the City did not lose control of the wealth of the chantries within its boundaries to the king. Broke, who had been appointed commissioner for chantries in London, Westminster and Middlesex in 1546, during an earlier and abortive move toward abolition, must have had first-hand knowledge of the subject. The London members also wrestled with an Act to release fee farms for three years to ensure that London got the best terms from it. Broke was told to work closely with one of the burgesses, who had specialist knowledge of the subject. The other burgess, Thomas Curteys, was elected an alderman in 1551 – a move which he resisted to the point of imprisonment and which forced him to resign his seat in parliament. In 1552 Broke was sent to lobby for further assurances from the Crown about lands recently purchased by the city.
Broke was not limited to purely metropolitan concerns: as a skilled lawyer and draftsman, his talents were useful to the Crown and its ministers, and he was called upon by others if they thought his skills could benefit their cause. In 1549, he was given responsibility for a bill "for preaching divers opinions." The third session of the parliament passed an Act to reform canon law and Broke was appointed to the commission set up for this purpose on 12 February 1552. In March 1552 he was one of those deputed to the redraft the Treason Act 1551 to make it illegal to say that the king "is an heretic, schismatic, infidel or usurper of the crown." He was one of those enlisted in 1549 by the supporters of Henry Clifford, 2nd Earl of Cumberland, whose family had long held the shrievalty of Westmorland by hereditary right: the supporters of his neighbour Thomas Wharton, 1st Baron Wharton, were proposing to end the arrangement. He was also called in by John de Vere, 16th Earl of Oxford in 1552 to advise on legislation he was promoting to free himself of commitments made to Edward Seymour, 1st Duke of Somerset, the disgraced and executed former Lord Protector.
Parliament of March 1553.
Broke and Bowes were sent to the last parliament of Edward VI's reign, along with two burgesses: Curteys's replacement, John Blundell, and John Marshe – both Protestants and particularly long-serving MPs. The parliament met as the succession question loomed large and lasted for only the month of March 1553. However, the London delegation were initially more concerned with their campaign to get the use of fuel in London better regulated – in which they succeeded through the passage of an Act.
However, Broke was soon given the question of the Maidstone election to investigate, and this was perhaps a result of the succession crisis. The town had been granted a charter of incorporation in 1549. An election was called as soon as the parliament was summoned, but there was no reference to parliamentary representation in the charter. Broke was joined in his work by Richard Morgan, a fellow judge and MP for Gloucester, as well as a fellow Catholic. They were enjoined by parliament to "peruse the charter of Maidstone ... whether they may have burgesses in this House; and in the meantime the burgesses there to be absent out of this House till it be fully ordered." It was possible that supporters of John Dudley, 1st Duke of Northumberland had used Maidstone's ambiguous status as a way of increasing parliamentary support for Lady Jane Grey's succession, as the town was in the Protestant heartland of Kent. In fact, the lord of the manor was Thomas Wyatt, the High Sheriff of Kent who made the return was Sir John Guildford, a cousin of Dudley's wife, and one of the burgesses elected was a relative of both Dudley and Jane Grey. It is unclear what Broke and Morgan reported, or even if they delivered their report, but Maidstone was disfranchised and did not regain the right to