Author: Brooke, Henry
Biography:
BROOKE, Henry (c. 1703-83: ODNB)
He was born at Rantavan, Mullagh, Co. Cavan, to Lettice (Digby) and the Rev. William Brooke. No birth or baptismal records have been found but he was in his seventeenth year in 1720 when he matriculated at Trinity College Dublin. In 1724 he went to London to study law at the Temple, returning to Ireland when an aunt died and he was made guardian to his young cousin, Catherine Meares. He married Catherine while she was still underage and a pupil in a Dublin boarding school. They were to have twenty-three children although just two lived to adulthood; the surviving daughter, Charlotte, edited her father’s collected works after his death and was herself a gifted translator of Irish poetry. The family initially alternated living in Dublin and London where he sought to develop both his legal and his literary careers. He first became known as a playwright although his play, Gustavus Vasa (1739), and an opera, Jack the Giant-Queller (1748) were suppressed in performance on account of their supposed radical politics. Seeking to avoid controversy, they returned to Ireland, to Co. Kildare, where he took a post as a barrack-master. In 1745, on the death of Brooke’s father, they moved to the family home in Cavan. Provoked by fears from the Jacobite rebellion in Scotland, he wrote a series of anti-Catholic pamphlets, Farmer’s Letters and The Spirit of Party. His The Tryal of the Roman Catholics (1761), written for the Catholic Committee, expresses a more sympathetic view. Brooke’s best-known work is a five-volume sentimental novel, The Fool of Quality (1766-70) but even when he wrote the final volume he was beginning to suffer from dementia. Catherine Brooke died in 1773 and, although he published Juliet Grenville: or, the History of the Human Heart, a novel, in 1774, he spent much of the final decade of his life in poor mental and physical health. He died at Dublin and was buried in the cemetery at Mullagh, his father’s old parish. (ODNB 25 Jan. 2021; DIB 25 Jan. 2021; ancestry.co.uk 25 Jan. 2021) SR