Sir William Bromley was an English Tory politician. He was Speaker of the British House of Commons

Speaker of the British House of Commons

The Speaker of the House of Commons is the presiding officer of the House of Commons, the United Kingdom's lower chamber of Parliament. The current Speaker is John Bercow, who was elected on 22 June 2009, following the resignation of Michael Martin...

 from 1710 to 1713 and Secretary of State for the Northern Department

Secretary of State for the Northern Department

The Secretary of State for the Northern Department was a position in the Cabinet of the government of Great Britain up to 1782. Before the Act of Union, 1707, the Secretary of State's responsibilities were in relation to the English government, not the British. Even after the Union, there was...

 from 1713 to 1714.

Bromley was a member of an old Staffordshire

Staffordshire

Staffordshire is a landlocked county in the West Midlands region of England. For Eurostat purposes, the county is a NUTS 3 region and is one of four counties or unitary districts that comprise the "Shropshire and Staffordshire" NUTS 2 region. Part of the National Forest lies within its borders...

 family, which by the time of his birth was settled in Warwickshire

Warwickshire

Warwickshire is a landlocked non-metropolitan county in the West Midlands region of England. The county town is Warwick, although the largest town is Nuneaton. The county is famous for being the birthplace of William Shakespeare...

. He was the son of Sir William Bromley (died 1682) and his wife Ursula (daughter of the 1st Baron Leigh

Baron Leigh

Baron Leigh is a title that has been created twice, once in the Peerage of England and once in the Peerage of the United Kingdom. The first creation came in the Peerage of England 1643 when Sir Thomas Leigh, 2nd Baronet, was created Baron Leigh, of Stoneleigh in the County of Warwick...

 of Stoneleigh). He was born at the family seat at Baginton

Baginton

Baginton is a village and civil parish in the Warwick district of Warwickshire, England, and has a common border with the City of Coventry of the West Midlands county. With a population of 801 , Baginton village is four miles south of Coventry city centre and seven miles north of...

, Warwickshire and was baptised on 31 August 1663.

He attended Christ Church

Christ Church, Oxford

Christ Church or house of Christ, and thus sometimes known as The House), is one of the largest constituent colleges of the University of Oxford in England...

, a college of the University of Oxford

University of Oxford

The University of Oxford is a university located in Oxford, United Kingdom. It is the second-oldest surviving university in the world and the oldest in the English-speaking world. Although its exact date of foundation is unclear, there is evidence of teaching as far back as 1096...

 from 1679 and received a BA

Bachelor of Arts

A Bachelor of Arts , from the Latin artium baccalaureus, is a bachelor's degree awarded for an undergraduate course or program in either the liberal arts, the sciences, or both...

 degree in 1681.

Political career

Bromley missed the Glorious Revolution

Glorious Revolution

The Glorious Revolution, also called the Revolution of 1688, is the overthrow of King James II of England by a union of English Parliamentarians with the Dutch stadtholder William III of Orange-Nassau...

 because he was travelling in France and Italy, following the death of his first wife in 1688 (he eventually married four times). Upon his return to England he embarked on a political career. Throughout his time in public life Bromley was a staunch high church Tory with a reputation for honesty and extreme partisanship. His political rivals sometimes found it useful to allege Jacobite

Jacobitism

Jacobitism was the political movement in Britain dedicated to the restoration of the Stuart kings to the thrones of England, Scotland, later the Kingdom of Great Britain, and the Kingdom of Ireland...

 sympathies and refer to Bromley's travel memoirs Remarks on the Grand Tour

Grand Tour

The Grand Tour was the traditional trip of Europe undertaken by mainly upper-class European young men of means. The custom flourished from about 1660 until the advent of large-scale rail transit in the 1840s, and was associated with a standard itinerary. It served as an educational rite of passage...

 of France and Italy to support the allegation.

In 1690 Bromley was elected to represent the county constituency of Warwickshire

Warwickshire (UK Parliament constituency)

Warwickshire was a parliamentary constituency in the Warwickshire in England. It returned two Members of Parliament , traditionall known as knights of the shire, to the House of Commons of the Parliament of the United Kingdom, elected by the bloc vote system.-Boundaries and franchise:The...

 in the English House of Commons. An able debater, his reputation rose rapidly; particularly amongst the Tory squires who shared similar prejudices. In 1696 Bromley refused to take an oath that William III

William III of England

William III & II was a sovereign Prince of Orange of the House of Orange-Nassau by birth. From 1672 he governed as Stadtholder William III of Orange over Holland, Zeeland, Utrecht, Guelders, and Overijssel of the Dutch Republic. From 1689 he reigned as William III over England and Ireland...

 was the rightful and lawful King. As a result he was incapacitated from serving in Parliament and was not re-elected for Warwickshire in 1698.

Bromley returned to Parliament, representing the strongly High Tory constituency of Oxford University

Oxford University (UK Parliament constituency)

Oxford University was a university constituency electing two members to the British House of Commons, from 1603 to 1950.-Boundaries, Electorate and Electoral System:...

, following a by-election in March 1701, after which Bromley was a leading figure in the Tory ranks. He continued to hold the university seat for the rest of his life.

Bromley was a strong opponent of occasional conformity by religious dissenters, who attended Church of England services often enough to avoid the legal penalties imposed by the Test and Corporation Acts. Bromley promoted several bills to strengthen the law, but they were not adopted.

From 1702 to 1705 Bromley was the Chairman of the Committee of Privileges and Elections of the House of Commons. In 1705 he was a candidate for the Speakership. On this occasion a new edition of Bromley's travel memoirs was produced by his political enemies (with an added table pointing the reader to the alleged pro-Catholic and Jacobite passages in the book). Bromley did not become Speaker in 1705.

Following the 1710 election there was a large Tory majority in the House of Commons. On 25 November 1710 Bromley was elected Speaker, without opposition. He was sworn in as a member of the Privy Council in 1711.

In his position as Speaker in 1713, Bromley responded to questions from a Scottish MP with the infamous reply that
"they had catcht hold of Scotland, they wou'd keep her fast.", thereby given credence to the widely held belief in Scotland that Union was a means for England to assert her dominance over Scotland. Lockhart Papers

In 1713 Bromley left the chair of the House to join the administration as Secretary of State for the Northern Department. He lost that office in 1714, when the new King George I

George I of Great Britain

George I was King of Great Britain and Ireland from 1 August 1714 until his death, and ruler of the Duchy and Electorate of Brunswick-Lüneburg in the Holy Roman Empire from 1698....

 installed a Whig

British Whig Party

The Whigs were a party in the Parliament of England, Parliament of Great Britain, and Parliament of the United Kingdom, who contested power with the rival Tories from the 1680s to the 1850s. The Whigs' origin lay in constitutional monarchism and opposition to absolute rule...

ministry. Bromley never held government office again, but he remained the generally recognised leading Tory in the House of Commons until his health declined in the 1720s. Bromley remained an MP until his death in 1732.