The Noble and Gentle Men of England / or, notes touching the arms and descents of the ancient knightly and gentle houses of England, arranged in their respective counties.

by Evelyn Philip Shirley

Sir Thomas Brooke, Knight, Lord Cobham in right of his wife, Joan, daughter and heir of Sir Reginald Braybrooke, Knight, was sixth in descent from William de la Brooke, owner of the manor of Brooke, in the county of Somerset, who died in the fifteenth of Henry III. (1231). Sir Thomas Brooke died in the seventeenth of Henry VI. From his eldest son descended the Barons Cobham; from Reginald the second son sprung the present family. He was seated at Aspel, in Suffolk, and here his descendants continued for nine generations. Ufford came from the heiress of Thomson in 1761.

See Davy's Suffolk Collections, Add. MSS. 19,120, vol. xliv.; and Gent. Mag. for March 1841, p. 306, for an account of the restoration of the Brooke monuments at Cobham.

Arms.—Gules, on a chervon argent a lion rampant sable.

Present Representative, Francis Capper Brooke, Esq.

Hervey of Ickworth, Marquess of Bristol 1826; Earl 1714; Baron 1703.

Descended from Thomas Hervey, who died before 1470, having married Jane, daughter and sole heir of Henry Drury, of Ickworth. There is some uncertainty as to who this Thomas Hervey was; the peerages indeed assume that he was younger brother of Sir George Hervey, of Thurleigh, in Bedfordshire; Mr. Gages however has proved that this could not have been the case, but the Rev. Lord Arthur Hervey in his interesting Memoir on Ickworth and the Hervey family, has adduced several reasons by which it would seem that Thomas Hervey was a younger son of John Hervey, senior, of Thurleigh, and the coheiress of Niernuyt, and uncle of Sir George, the last of the legitimate elder line of that knightly family.

Younger Branch. Bathurst Hervey, of Clarendon, Wiltshire, Baronet 1818, descended from the eighth son of the first Earl of Bristol.

See Gage's Thingoe, p. 286; Brydges's Collins, iv. p. 139; Davy's Suffolk Collections, Add. MSS. 19,135, vol. lix. p. 160; the Rev. Lord Arthur Hervey's papers on Ickworth and the Family of Hervey, 4to. Lowestoft, 1858; and Proceedings of the Suffolk Archaeological Society, vol. ii. No. 7.

Arms.—Gules, on a bend argent three trefoils slipped vert, and so borne by John Hervey, Esq., as appears by "The Proceedings in the Grey and Hastings Controversy" in the Court of Chivalry in the year 1407. See the Proceedings, privately printed by Lord Hastings in 1841, p. 27. The arms of Hervey appear to have been founded on the coat of Foliot, Gules, a bend argent.