'A Memory of Honour': a study of the house of Cobham of Kent in the reign of Elizabeth I

McKeen, David Bruce (1964). 'A Memory of Honour': a study of the house of Cobham of Kent in the reign of Elizabeth I. University of Birmingham. Ph.D.

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Abstract

William Brooke and, after him, Henry his son held the Barony of Cobham if Kent, the Lord Wardenship of the Cinque Ports and the Lord Lieutenancy of Kent from 1558 to 1603. The elder lord was also a Privy Councillor and, in 1596-1597, Lord Chamberlain. Because of the importance of the offices which the Lords Cobham held, and because other of the Brookes were prominent in courtly and diplomatic circles, historians have recently begun to recognize that their part in Elizabethan history is greater than that which Froude and his predecessors had allowed them. To treat of such figures before conducting original and intensive researches into the contemporary books and documents which concern them is, however, never very wise and sometimes even worse than leaving them in the obscurity which they have occupied for centuries. Critics of Shakespeare and historians of the stage, although long interested in the connection between Falstaff, Sir John Oldcastle and the Lords Cobham, are hardly more scholarly than the political historians upon whom they rely for their factual information in considering the family.

"A Memory of Honour" is an attempt, first to point out misconceptions about the Brookes, and then to present in biographical form what can be discovered about them. It traces briefly the relationship of the sixteenth-century Lords Cobham to Oldcastle, discusses the political and social significance which the Brookes had attained by the time of the accession of Elizabeth, and sets forth in detail the careers of William and Henry Lords Cobham as courtiers, ministers, politicians, literary patrons and private men during the forty-five years of the queen's reign. The Falstaff-Oldcastle-Cobham question is considered in the light of what has been learned about the Brookes and the stage.

Type of Work:	Thesis (Doctorates > Ph.D.)
Award Type:	Doctorates > Ph.D.
Licence:	All rights reserved All rights reserved
College/Faculty:	Faculties (to 1997) > Faculty of Arts
School or Department:	School of History and Cultures, Department of History
Funders:	None/not applicable
Subjects:	D History General and Old World > DA Great Britain
URI:	http://etheses.bham.ac.uk/id/eprint/12289

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