Navy cloth binding with gilt title on the spine. Gilt coat of arms on the front board.

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This book has great charm reflecting its noble content

Sir Henry Firebrace (c. 1619 – 1691) was a courtier to Charles I, serving during his conflicts with Parliament throughout the era of the English Civil Wars. He later served Charles II as a Clerk of the Green Cloth and was knighted about 1685.

Firebrace was one of the king’s attendants at Charles 1’s execution on 30 January 1649, and thereafter he returned to serve Denbigh, who by that time had become a member of the post-civil war government, residing in Warwickshire. He was to remain there, settling in Stoke Golding, close by, for the next nine years.

On the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, Firebrace sought a court position under Charles II having previously been commended as “a person very faithful and serviceable … in his greatest extremities” by Charles I.  He was appointed Third Clerk of the Kitchen of the Board of Green Cloth, promoted to Second Clerk in 1661 and Chief Clerk in 1667; in 1685 he rose to Clerk Comptroller and in 1688 to Clerk.  For this service he was knighted some time before 2 April 1685 and retired c. 1688 at the age of 69.

Firebrace married three times; in 1645 he married Elizabeth Dowell, of Stoke Golding, Leicestershire, with whom he had five children, four of whom survived infancy; their second son Basil (b. 1652) later became the first of the Firebrace baronets; his daughter Hester married Basil Feilding, 4th Earl of Denbigh. Elizabeth died in June 1659 and in 1664 Firebrace married Alice Bagnall, daughter of a Gentleman Usher of the Court, and in 1685 Mary Sergeant, daughter of the Keeper of the Royal Wine Cellar. His first marriage was the only one to produce known issue.

Firebrace died on 27 January 1691 and is buried in Stoke Golding; he had become wealthy and the local church, to which he bequeathed some valuable items of communion plate, contains a marble monument to him.

The poet W. H. Auden was a distant descendant of Firebrace.