Robert Brooke (MP for Dunwich)
In his will dated 18 December 1598 the alderman wrote, "I have already fullie advaunced my eldest sonne Roberte Brooke by my landes and mannors purchased of Maister Arthur Hopton Esquier, lyeng and being in the County of Suffolck.
[12] In the subsequent unpleasantness Hopton was for a while imprisoned by Brooke: the final decree, while reserving those premises to Sir Arthur, was costly to him, and led to a commission of inquiry at the Blythburgh White Hart.
[14] In 1608-1609 Joan's father was Lord Mayor of London, and he died in 1610: her brother John Weld, gent., in 1610 acquired the manor of Arnolds in Edmonton, Middlesex,[15] and invested as a charter Council Assistant in the Newfoundland Company.
[18] She was buried in the Cockfield chapel at Yoxford church, where she has a brass memorial:[19] it records that she was Sir Humfrey Weld's first-born daughter and was aged 38 at her death in May 1618.
[20] Sir Robert remarried in c 1620 to Elizabeth Brooke (born 1601), daughter of Thomas Colepeper (died 1613) of Great Wigsell in Salehurst, East Sussex.
Sir Robert then purchased a residence at Abbots Langley in Hertfordshire, so that she could live within a reasonable distance of her friends in London: they continued there together for some years before moving more permanently into Cockfield Hall.
[25] By a decree of 1623, following a bankruptcy suit begun in 1621, it appears that Brooke, who often had cause to travel to London, acquired a substantial house in St Stephen Walbrook in settlement of a debt owing to him.
By 1628 it was represented that some 80 of the townsfolk, mainly seafarers, were so poor that they were near to starving, and a committee of magistrates imposed a rate in 13 parishes of Blything Hundred upon several private persons to raise relief to help them.
[35] William Dowsing the iconoclast gave his associate Francis Jessup charge of visiting the churches of Bungay, Blythburgh and Yoxford, but he made Sir Robert Brooke responsible for levelling the chancel steps at Bramfield.
"[39] Dame Elizabeth shares a large mural monument in the Cockfield chapel at Yoxford church with her late husband, though 37 years separate the dates of their deaths.
The monument has a white marble surround with a broken segmental pediment with rolled terminals and with festoons or swags over, surmounted by a free-carved and painted shield and crest.
The entablature projects over a pair of free Ionian columns, which rest below on a black marble corbel-table supported beneath by white grooved and rolled foliate consoles.
The main inscription, in a neat cursive script in Latin, remembers Sir Robert, follows with a eulogy for Dame Elizabeth, and mentions her parentage and her children, "e quibus Maria sola superstes lugens curavit hac apponenda marmori".
