Sir William Brooke, 10th Baron Cobham, KG (1 November 1527 – 6 March 1597), lord of the Manor of Cobham, Kent, was Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports, and a member of parliament for Hythe. Although he was viewed by some as a religious radical during the Somerset Protectorate, he entertained Queen Elizabeth I of England at Cobham Hall in 1559, signalling his acceptance of the moderate regime.
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Biography
William Brooke was the son of George Brooke, 9th Baron Cobham (d. 29 September 1558), and Anne Braye (d. 1 November 1558).
Before 1544, Brooke attended The King's School, Canterbury and Queens' College, Cambridge. He spent much of his younger life in Europe. In the early 1540s, he visited Padua. By 1545, William Brooke married Dorothy Neville, daughter of George Neville, 5th Baron Bergavenny, but the marriage was unhappy, and they later separated after 1553. At the end of the decade, he served in northern France, where his father was in charge of Calais, and in 1549, he accompanied William Paget's embassy to Brussels.
Like his father, Brooke sympathized with the anti-Marian nobles; he sided with the rebels during Wyatt's rebellion, and the intervention of his brother-in-law, Henry Nevill, 6th Baron Bergavenny, was needed to keep him from prison. In 1555, he served as MP for Rochester.
In the late 1550s, Brooke's opportunities expanded in a number of areas. His father died in 1558, when he was just over thirty, and he succeeded him as Baron Cobham. Soon after, his wife Dorothy died, and in 1560 at Whitehall, he was free to marry Frances Newton, the daughter of Sir John Newton of Barr's Court, Gloucestershire. Brook became Warden of the Cinque Ports, a position in which he wielded great power over a large number of seats in Parliament. Most important, the accession of Queen Elizabeth I, and his close friendship with William Cecil, 1st Baron Burghley, made him a powerful noble. When Queen Mary I of England had died, it was Queen Elizabeth who had deputed him to inform Queen Mary's husband, Philip II of Spain, of her death. This embassy was only the first in a long series of missions and intrigues. Along with William Cecil, he numbered among his friends some nobles, such as the Duke of Norfolk and the Earl of Arundel, whose loyalty to Queen Elizabeth was far from certain. Brooke suffered some months' house imprisonment as a result of a very tangential role in the Ridolfi plot. In 1578, he joined Francis Walsingham's failed mission to the Low Countries; on this mission, he presumably served as Cecil's agent. In the late 1580s, he helped John Whitgift search for the author of the Martin Marprelate tracts.