Elizabeth Brooke (writer)

Elizabeth Brooke (January 1601 – 22 July 1683), also known as Lady Brooke or Dame Elizabeth Brooke, was an English religious writer, part of whose writing of Christian precepts survives,^[1] and was matriarch of a landed manorial family in East Suffolk, East Anglia, during the English Civil War and Restoration periods.

An extended account of her religious thought and practice, written by her minister at Yoxford, Suffolk at the time of her funeral, was printed together with some of her own precepts. Her stance and practice was, like that of her brother Lord Colepeper, politically loyal to the Crown, and her allegiance was therefore to the established Church, but she and her husband, Sir Robert Brooke, lived and worked in close connection with the more Puritan or Presbyterian spirit among the gentry and magistracy of the neighbourhood, and supported a moderate and inclusive policy towards ministers inclined to Nonconformism within the church at large.