Named a "worthie and puissant man of the city" by Richard Grafton (who wrongly termed him a draper), he became a citizen and grocer of London, and in 1372-3 purchased[1] from the Malmains family the estates of Mereworth, Maplescomb, and West Peckham, in Kent.
On the fall of John of Gaunt and his partisans at the close of Edward III's reign (1377), Adam Stable, the then Lord Mayor, was deposed and replaced by Brembre, who belonged to the opposite party.
[6] In the parliament of Gloucester (1378) Thomas of Woodstock, the king's uncle, demanded Brembre's impeachment as Lord Mayor for an outrage by a citizen on one of his followers, but the matter was compromised.
[11] His foremost opponent, John Northampton,[12] held the mayoralty for two years (1381–3) in succession to Walworth, but at the election of 1383 Brembre, who had been returned to parliament for the city at the beginning of this year,[13] and who was one of the sixteen aldermen then belonging to the great Grocers' Company,[14] "ove forte main … et gñt multitude des gentz … feust fait maire"[15] William Stubbs calls attention to this forcible election as possessing "the importance of a constitutional episode,"[16] but wrongly assigns it to 1386.
While Lord Mayor (1384), Brembre had effected the ruin of his rival, John de Northampton (who had appealed in vain to John of Gaunt), by his favourite device of a charge of treason;[19] and though Thomas of Woodstock, Duke of Gloucester, and the opposition accused him of plotting[20] in favour of Suffolk (the chancellor), who was impeached in the parliament of 1386, and of compassing their death, he not only escaped for the time, but at the close of the year (1386) was, with Simon de Burley and others of the party of resistance, summoned by Richard into his council.
[21] He was therefore among the five councillors charged with treason by the Lords Appellant on 14 November 1387, and, on the citizens refusing to rise for him, fled, but was captured (in Wales, says Jean Froissart) and imprisoned at Gloucester,[22] until on 28 January 1388 he was moved to the Tower.
[24] Brembre, who was styled "faulx Chivaler de Londres", and who was hated by York and Gloucester,[25] was specially charged with taking twenty-two prisoners out of Newgate and beheading them without trial at the "Foul Oke" in Kent.