The first member of the Brodrick family represented in these papers is Sir Alan Brodrick (1623-1680), the son of Sir Thomas Brodrick (d.1642) of Wandsworth and his wife Katherine (d.1678), daughter of Robert Nicholas of Manningford Bruce, Wiltshire. Sir Thomas' grandfather, a Yorkshireman, and embroiderer to James I, first settled in Surrey.
Alan studied at Magdalen Hall, Oxford, and was admitted to Gray's Inn in May 1642. If the papers in 1248/1/- and 1248/9/- are his, rather than his father's, he followed events leading up to the outbreak of the Civil War very closely. A royalist sympathiser, he went abroad to France and Italy in the early 1650s before returning to England and becoming involved with the group of royalist conspirators known as the Sealed Knot. He kept the ciphers for the group and transmitted regular intelligence to his relative Sir Edward Hyde, secretary of state and chancellor (from 1658) to King Charles II, in exile in the Spanish Netherlands.
Accusations of drunkeness, bitter disputes with other royalist plotters such as Viscount Mordaunt and some months in the Tower in 1659 all hampered his activities, but he continued in favour with Hyde (Earl of Clarendon from 1660) and sat in the Convention and Cavalier Parliaments for Orford, Suffolk. In August 1660 he was knighted and appointed surveyor-general of Ireland and in 1661 was appointed a commissioner to settle land claims in Ireland. In 1663 he was again appointed commissioner for the revised settlement but was considered unreliable and chiefly intent on gaining compensation for a grant of the estates of two regicides which he had lost through all the regicides' Irish estates being granted to the Duke of York. In 1665 he was appointed to the new court of claims established under the Act of Explanation which sat until 1669 and also continued active in the English Parliament until Clarendon's fall in 1667. Thereafter he turned increasingly to religion (see 1248/1/332-338) until his death in 1680 at Wandsworth.
His brother, Sir St John Brodrick (1627-1712) was a soldier who served in Ireland with the Parliamentary army and was a close associate of Roger Boyle (1621-1679), Lord Broghill and later 1st Earl of Orrery. Brodrick subsequently settled in Ireland, being rewarded with grants of land in Co Cork in 1653 which were subsequently vested in him by the Act of Settlement. He built the town of Midleton, to the east of Cork City, which was made a borough in 1670 out of the old town of Chore or Corra. He married Alice, daughter of Laurence Clayton of Mallow, Co. Cork
Sir St John's Irish lands were chiefly inherited by his eldest son Thomas Brodrick (1654-1730) who had also inherited the family seat at Wandsworth and the Irish lands of Sir Alan after the latter's death in 1680. Thomas was educated at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, and trained as a lawyer, but horse-racing appears to have been his chief passion and despite his Irish interests he spent most of his time in England, although crossing to Ireland for parliamentary sessions until 1714. Thereafter, despite frequent exhortations from his brother Alan to pay more heed to the running of his Irish possessions, he appears to have been a fairly negligent landlord whose affairs were frequently in a state of great confusion.
In the Irish parliament, Thomas sat as MP for Midleton borough in 1692-3, for the County of Cork in 1695-9 and 1703-1713, and for his own borough of Midleton again in 1715-27 (although he did not attend sessions). A passionate Whig, like his brother Alan, the two brothers were leaders of the opposition in the parliament of 1692, but between 1693 and 1696 were leading supporters and parliamentary managers of the Whig Henry, Lord Capell, who served as lord justice and, from 1695, as lord deputy of Ireland. Thomas was appointed to the Irish Privy Council and later also acted as agent for Lord Albemarle and Lady Orkney in respect of the forfeited lands granted to them by William III, a grant which was revoked by Parliament in 1700.
With the appointment of a Tory administration in Ireland under Queen Anne, Thomas went into opposition in Ireland but in England, through his connexion with leading Whigs, he had gained the office of comptroller of the salt, and then joint comptroller of army accounts. He lost the latter office and his place on the Irish Privy Council in 1711 and in 1713, after 20 years in the Irish parliament, was elected as MP for Stockbridge, Hampshire, serving that borough until 1722, when he was elected MP for Guildford, serving until 1727. Although reappointed to the Irish Council in 1714, henceforth he resided in England and was a thorn in the sides of successive governments, opposing the 1719 Peerage Bill, forcing the South Sea Company to raise its bid to convert the national debt into company stock, and chairing the secret committee which investigated the bursting of the South Sea Bubble in 1721 (see 1248/32/1). He also supported his brother in the latter's opposition to Wood's halfpence in Ireland in 1724-5. However, although wary and suspicious of Walpole's conduct of affairs, he was as a true independent perfectly happy to support the government when he believed it right to do so.
He married Anne, daughter of Alexander Pigott of Innishannon, co. Cork, but died without direct heirs and left his estates to his nephew Alan, 2nd Viscount Midleton.
Thomas' brother Alan Brodrick (1655/6-1728), 1st Viscount Midleton, attended Magdalen College, Oxford, and the Middle Temple, being called to the bar in 1678. He returned to Ireland to pursue a legal career, which was interrupted by the revolution of 1688 which caused him to flee to England. After his return in 1690, he was made second serjeant and also became recorder of Cork. In the Irish Commons he headed the so-called 'Munster Squadron', himself sitting for Cork City in 1692-3, 1695-9 and 1703-10 and for the County of Cork in 1713-14. Dissatisfied with the leniency towards the Jacobites embodied in the Treaty of Limerick he was a harsh critic of the Irish government in the parliament of 1692 but a new Whig lord deputy, Lord Capell, secured his support and promoted him to solicitor-general, and he remained a key supporter of Capell until the latter's death in 1696.
He retained office under the Tory lord lieutenant Lord Rochester, appointed in 1700, although a vocal opponent of the activities of the trustees of the forfeited Jacobite estates which had been granted away by William III and resumed by Act of the English parliament in 1700. However after leading the opposition in the 1703-4 session of a new parliament, in which he was elected speaker, his dismissal was secured by the Tory lord lieutenant, the duke of Ormonde.
He returned to office in 1707 as attorney-general, with the appointment of the Earl of Pembroke as lord lieutenant but backed away from Pembroke's proposal to repeal the sacramental test in Ireland, realising how unpopular such a move would be with a majority of MPs, Whig and Tory alike. Brodrick was one of the chief supports of the Whig viceroy Lord Wharton in 1709-10 and was rewarded by being appointed chief justice of the Queen's Bench in Ireland. However he was dismissed when Ormonde was reappointed viceroy and for the rest of Anne's reign was increasingly at odds with the Tory government in Ireland, particularly after his election as speaker of the Commons in 1713.
With the triumph of the Whigs on the succession of George I in 1714, Brodrick was made lord chancellor of Ireland and in the following year raised to the peerage as Baron Brodrick. However, the Whig party in both Britain and Ireland soon fractured and Brodrick, although further elevated as Viscount Midleton in 1717, found himself increasingly sidelined by the British government which preferred to operate through his erstwhile ally and now hated rival William Conolly, chief commissioner of the revenue and speaker of the Commons. Thus his relations with successive Irish viceroys between 1717 and 1725 - the Duke of Bolton, Duke of Grafton and Lord Carteret - tended to start smoothly but rapidly turn sour.
In 1717 he was elected MP for Midhurst in Sussex, in the gift of the Duke of Somerset, but in 1719 won the enmity of the English chief minister, Lord Sunderland, by refusing to support the Peerage Bill. Sunderland was so enraged by Midleton's defiance that he suffered a nosebleed, to the latter's secret gratification (see letters in 1248/4/-; also 1248/7/263a-c). Midleton was still prepared to support the government over the appellate jurisdiction of the Irish Lords, but his son St John (with or without his father's connivance) led the opposition to the government's proposed repeal of the sacramental test in Ireland.
On the verge of being dismissed as lord chancellor, Midleton was saved in 1720 by the return to government in England of Walpole and Townshend. However he soon came to distrust Walpole and refused to cooperate with attempts by Grafton and Carteret to uphold the patent granted to William Wood to mint a copper coinage for Ireland. In April 1725 he resigned as chancellor, dying in August 1728.
He married three times: firstly to Catherine, daughter of Redmond Barry of Rathcormack, Co. Cork, by whom he had a son St John Brodrick (c.1685-1728); secondly in 1693 to Lucy (d.1703), third daughter of Sir Peter Courthope of Little Island, Co. Cork, by whom he had a son Alan, the future 2nd Viscount, and a daughter Alice (1697-1780) along with other children; and thirdly in 1716, in the teeth of his family's opposition, to Anne (1657/8-1748), daughter of Sir John Trevor, and widow of the Rt Hon Michael Hill of Hillsborough, Co. Down.
His father, Sir St John, settled some of the Cork estates on him on his second marriage to Lucy Courthope in 1693, and after the death of Lucy's brother John, killed at the siege of Namur in 1695, she and her sister Anne, the wife of Lawrence Clayton of Mallow, Co. Cork. inherited the estates of her father Sir Peter Courthope which were formally partitioned in 1718 (for the complicated tale of the lands settled on Alan by his father, of the division of the Courthope estates and of disagreements with the Courthope heirs see G145/Box 102/5, in which the old Viscount attempted to clarify matters for the sake of his son by Lucy, the future 2nd Viscount; see also G145/Box 102/4, a rent account book of Alan Brodrick's estates, begun c.1712, but maintained until his death in 1728). He was a far more conscientious and alert landlord than his brother and made periodic attempts to sort out the confusion into which the latter had allowed the greater part of the Brodrick Irish estates to fall.
He also bought an English seat, purchasing the manor of Peper Harow and Oxenford Grange, Witley, from Philip Frowde (otherwise Froud) in 1713. The house acquired by Brodrick, at Oxenford and much altered when owned by Denzil Lord Holles (d.1680), was later pulled down and a new mansion on a different site, was begun by the 3rd Viscount (d.1765), designed by Sir William Chambers. The 1st Viscount can only rarely have visited his new acquisition, although his brother Thomas and son Alan sent him regular reports on its condition and on the quality of the fruit from its gardens. For much of the time it was looked after by Martha Courthope, the widow of John Courthope, brother of the 1st Viscount's second wife Lucy, who also played a large part in bringing up the 1st Viscount's children by Lucy in London.
Alan Brodrick appears to have been closer to his younger brother St John Brodrick (d.1707) than to his other siblings. St John, a lawyer with chambers in the Middle Temple, appears as a somewhat melancholy, mercurial character, acutely conscious of his lack of prospects and consequent failure to attract a wealthy wife. Between 1687 and 1692, he was in friendly communication with the Tory divines, Henry Aldrich (1647-1710), Dean of Christ Church, Oxford, and Francis Atterbury (1663-1732), the future Bishop of Rochester, a tutor at Christ Church to Charles Boyle (1674-1731), later 4th Earl of Orrery (see 1248/1/-); Atterbury was remembered in St John's will (see 1248/2/278-279). St John was was elected MP for Midleton in 1695 but was soon excused attendance on account of poor health. He also sat for the borough between 1703 and his death 4 years later, being named for 49 committees over that period.
What Alan and Thomas, ardent anti-clerical Whigs, made of their brother's links to such notorious Tory 'high-flyers' is not clear; they certainly appear to have despised their brother Laurence Brodrick (d.1748), a clergyman, and brother-in-law William Whitfield, rector of Ewhurst, the husband of their sister Katherine (see 1248/3/33 for a letter from Whitfield of Jan 1711, attempting to justify his failure to secure his parishioners' votes for the right candidate in the general election of 1710). Another brother, William Brodrick, appointed attorney-general of Jamaica in 1692 and a Justice of the King's Bench in Ireland in 1721, was also seemingly held in low esteem.
Alan Brodrick's son by his first wife, St John Brodrick (c.1685-1728) was educated at Eton and King's College, Cambridge, before being admitted to the Middle Temple. He shared his uncle Thomas' passion for horse racing and his relationship with his somewhat puritanical father was often awkward. St John sat in the Irish Commons for Castlemartyr, 1709 and 1713, for Cork City, 1713-14 and for Cork County, 1715-1728, and was nominated to the Irish Privy Council in 1724. In 1721 he was put up for the Devon seat of Bere Alston by Sir Francis Drake and won the seat on petition. In 1727, Drake himself was initially elected for Bere Alston, but chose to sit for Tavistock. St John, however, died before the new election at Bere Alston.
Although a Whig, he was often at odds with both his father and uncle Thomas over parliamentary tactics and his father regularly claimed to disown his son's actions which were often assumed to be incited by him. He initially supported the proposal to establish an Irish bank, but then swapped sides and joined his father in opposition. He agitated in both England and Ireland against Wood's coinage patent.
He married Anne, daughter of the Rt Hon Michael Hill, and sister of Trevor Hill, 1st Viscount Hillsborough, by whom he had four daughters. Towards the end of his life he resided at Ballyannan, the family's Irish seat in Co.Cork, outside Midleton, which apparently he improved. His slow and agonising death from tuberculosis in February 1728, against a backdrop of disputes with father and uncle alike, is recorded in harsh detail in the surviving letters.
As St John predeceased his father, the title and the 1st Viscount's estates were inherited in August 1728 by Alan Brodrick (1702-1747), 2nd Viscount Midleton, his son by his second wife Lucy Courthope. Although hailed by his father and uncle Thomas as a paragon of virtue and youth of great abilities (perhaps because of his profuse expressions of devotion and subservience to his elders' wishes), the younger Alan comes across as a rather insipid character in his surviving letters, certainly in comparison with his step-brother St John. Educated at Eton, he broadened his worldly experience by going on the Grand Tour in 1724-5, acting for his uncle Thomas in the purchase of 'old master' paintings in Italy. In 1727 he took up a post as commissioner of the customs in Edinburgh.
Little correspondence related to the 2nd Viscount survives for the period after he inherited the title in 1728, other than a short series of letters to his uncle Thomas relating to the proving of the 1st Viscount's will and settlement of the Irish estates, and his attempts to fend off the claims of his step-brother's four daughters and heiresses. He married Lady Mary Capel, youngest daughter of the Earl of Essex, in 1729 and in 1730 inherited the bulk of the Brodrick family estates on Thomas' death on 3 October without children. However, he chose not to live in Ireland and ran his estates there through agents and local family members. He died in June 1747 and was buried at Wandsworth.
His only son, George Brodrick (1730-1765), 3rd Viscount Midleton, was similarly an absentee landlord (see 1248/7/379-414). He married Albinia (d.1808) daughter of the Hon Thomas Townshend in 1752. He demolished the old house at Peper Harow and began the construction of a new mansion designed by Sir William Chambers, but died before it was completed.
