Background
Henry Brooke was born in 1703 in Ireland, the son of William Brooke, rector of Killinkere. His mother was a daughter of Simon Digby, bishop of Elphin.
Henry Brooke was born in 1703 in Ireland, the son of William Brooke, rector of Killinkere. His mother was a daughter of Simon Digby, bishop of Elphin.
Dr Thomas Sheridan was one of his schoolmasters, and Henry Brooke was entered at Trinity College, Dublin, in 1720; in 1724 he was sent to London to study law.
Brooke began his career as a poet. His now forgotten Universal Beauty was published in 1735. He then turned dramatist by adapting extant plays, such as The Earl of Essex.
He attached himself to the party of the prince of Wales, and took a small house at Twickenham near to Alexander Pope. In 1738 he translated the first and second books of Tasso's Gerusalemme Uberata, and in the next year he produced a tragedy, Gustavas Vasa, the Deliverer of his Country.
This play had been rehearsed for five weeks at Drury Lane, but at the last moment the performance was forbidden.
This affair provoked a satirical pamphlet from- Samuel Johnson, entitled "A Complete Vindication of the Licensers of the Stage from the malicious and scandalous Aspersions of Mr Brooke" (1739).
During the Jacobite rebellion of 1745 Brooke issued his Farmer's Six Letters to the Protestants of Ireland (collected 1746) the form of which was suggested by Swift's Drapier's Letters.
About 1760 he entered into negotiations with leading Roman Catholics, and in 1761 he wrote a pamphlet advocating alleviation of the penal laws against them.
He is said to have been the first editor of the Freeman's Journal, established at Dublin in 1763.
His best-known work is the novel entitled The Fool of Quality; or the History of Henry Earl of Moreland, the first part of which was published in 1765; and the fifth and last in 1770.
His wife's death seriously affected him, and he died at Dublin in a state of mental infirmity on the 10th of October 1783.
Brooke declared his belief in universal salvation, that he sought to have a copy of it given out to all new Methodist churches.
He had twenty-two children. Of these, only Charlotte survived adolescence.