BROOKE, FULKE GREVILLE, 1sT BARON (1554 1628), English poet, only son of Sir Fulke Greville, was born at Beauchamp Court, Warwickshire. He was sent in 1564, on the same day as his life-long friend, Philip Sidney, to Shrewsbury school. He matriculated at Jesus college, Cambridge, in 1568. Sir Henry Sidney, president of Wales, gave him in 1576 a post connected with the court of the Marches, but he resigned it in 1577 to go to court with Philip Sidney. Young Greville became a great favourite with Queen Elizabeth, who treated him with less than her usual caprice, but he was more than once disgraced for leaving the country against her wishes. Philip Sidney, Sir Edward Dyer and Greville were members of the "Areopagus," the literary clique which, under the leadership of Gabriel Harvey, supported the introduction of classical metres into English verse. Sidney and Greville arranged to sail with Sir Francis Drake in 1585 in his expedition against the Spanish West Indies, but Elizabeth peremp torily forbade Drake to take them with him, and also refused Greville's request to be allowed to join Leicester's army in the Netherlands. Philip Sidney, who took part in the campaign, was killed on Oct. 17, 1586, and Greville shared with Dyer the legacy of his books, while in his Life of the Renowned Sir Philip Sidney he raised an enduring monument to his friend's memory. About 1591 Greville served for a short time in Normandy under Henry of Navarre. This was his last experience of war. In 1583 he became secretary to the principality of Wales, and he represented Warwickshire in parliament in 1601 and 1620. In 1S98 he was made treasurer of the navy. In 1614 he became chancellor and under-treasurer of the exchequer, and throughout the reign of James I. was a valued supporter of the king's party, although in 1615 he advocated the summoning of a parlia ment. In 1618 he became commissioner of the Treasury, and in 1621 he was raised to the peerage with the title of Baron Brooke, a title which had belonged to the family of his paternal grand mother, Elizabeth Willoughby. He received from James I. the grant of Warwick castle, in the restoration of which he is said to have spent £20,000. He died on Sept. 3o 1628.
His only works published during his lifetime were four poems, one of which is the elegy on Sidney which appeared in The Phoenix Nest (1593), and the Tragedy of Mustapha. A volume of his works appeared in 1633, another of Remains in 167o, and his biography of Sidney in 1652. He wrote two tragedies on the Senecan model, Alaham and Mustapha.
Brooke left no sons, and his barony passed to his cousin, ROBERT GREVILLE (c. 1608-1643), who thus became and Lord Brooke. This nobleman was an active member of the parlia mentary party, and defeated the Royalists in a skirmish at Kine ton in Aug. 1642. He was killed at Lichfield on March 2 Brooke, who is eulogized as a friend of toleration by Milton, wrote on philosophical, theological and current political topics. In 1746 his descendant, Francis Greville, the 8th baron (1719-1773), was created earl of Warwick, a title still in his family.
Dr. A. B. Grosart edited the complete works of Fulke Greville for the Fuller Worthies Library in 187o, and made a small selection, published in the Elizabethan Library (1894). The life of Sidney was reprinted by Sir S. Egerton Brydges in 1816, and with an introduction by N. Smith in the "Tudor and Stuart Library" in 1907; Caelica was reprinted in M. F. Crow's "Elizabethan Sonnet Cycles" in 1898. See also an essay in Mrs. C. C. Stopes's Shakespeare's Warwickshire Contemporaries (1907).