July 1572 he was associated with the lord mayor in the government of London in the temporary absence of Elizabeth, and was commissioner of oyer and terminer for Essex (20 Oct. 1573) and an ecclesiastical commissioner (23 April 1576). Cooke died 11 June 1576, and was buried in the church of Romford, Essex, where many other members of his family were buried. An elaborate monument, inscribed with Latin and English verse, was erected there to his memory. By his wife he had four sons, Anthony, Richard, Edward (M.A. Cambridge 1564), William (M.A. Cambridge 1564), and five daughters. The eldest daughter, Mildred, became second wife of William Cecil, lord Burghley; Ann was second wife of Sir Nicholas Bacon; Margaret was wife of Sir Ralph Rowlett, and was buried on 3 Aug. 1558 at St. Mary Staining, London; Elizabeth was wife first of Sir Thomas Hoby, and secondly of John, lord Russell, son of Francis, second earl of Bedford; and Katharine was wife of Sir Henry Killigrew. Cooke's executors under his will, dated 22 May 1576, and proved 5 March 1576–7, were his sons-in-law Bacon and Burghley and his two surviving sons Richard and William. The heir, Richard, steward of the liberty of Havering-atte-Bower, born in 1531, died 3 Oct. 1579, and was succeeded by his son Anthony (1559–1604), with the death of whose third son, William, in 1650, the male line of the family became extinct (Notes and Queries, 2nd ser. xii. 480).
A Latin translation, dated 1560, of Gregory Nazianzen's ‘Theophania,’ attributed to Cooke, is in the British Museum (MS. Royal 5 E. xvii). He contributed Latin verses to the collections published on the deaths of Martin Bucer, Catherine and Margaret Neville, and to Carr's translation of ‘Demosthenes.’ The ‘Diallacticon de veritate natura atque substantia corporis et sanguinis Christi in Eucharistia,’ edited by Cooke and first published in 1557, is not by him, but by his friend John Ponet or Poynet, bishop successively of Rochester and Winchester, whose library came into Cooke's possession on the bishop's death in 1556. Peter Martyr's ‘Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans,’ 1558, was dedicated to Cooke. Five letters addressed by Sturm, Cooke's Strasburg friend, to Cooke between 1565 and 1567 are printed with ‘Roger Ascham's Letters’ (ed. 1864, ii. 93, 116, 121, 162, 164). They are chiefly requests for protection in behalf of foreign scholars visiting England.
[Cooper's Athenæ Cantab. i. 351–3, 563; Morant's Essex; Froude's Hist. ch. xxxvi.; Biog. Brit. (Kippis), 94–100; Ballard's Memoirs of Learned Ladies; Strype's Cranmer (1845), ii. 856; Strype's Cheke, 22, 47, 155; Strype's Memorials, II. i. 74, 385, III. i. vi. 24, 232; Strype's Annals I. i. 151, II. ii. 86; Burnet's Reformation; Fuller's Church Hist. ed. Brewer; Camden's Annals; Lloyd's Worthies; Fuller's Worthies. A pedigree of the family has been compiled from original sources by Mr. E. J. Sage of Stoke Newington.]
COOKE, BENJAMIN (1734–1793), Mus. Doc., born in 1734, was the son of Benjamin Cooke, who kept a music-shop in New Street, Covent Garden. His mother's maiden name was Eliza Wayet, and she was a member of a Nottinghamshire family. The elder Cooke died before his son was nine years old, but the boy had been already placed under Dr. Pepusch, with whom he made such progress that at the age of twelve he was appointed deputy to Robinson, the organist of Westminster Abbey. In 1749 he succeeded Howard as librarian of the Academy of Ancient Music, and three years later took Pepusch's place as conductor. In September 1757 he was appointed master of the choristers at Westminster Abbey, and on 27 Jan. 1758 he became a lay vicar of the same church. On 2 Nov. 1760 Cooke was elected a member of the Royal Society of Musicians, and on 1 July 1762 he succeeded Robinson as organist of the abbey. He became a member of the Catch Club on 6 April 1767, and of the Madrigal Society on 9 Aug. 1769, and in 1775 he took the degree of Mus. Doc. at Cambridge, where his name was entered at Trinity College. His exercise for this occasion was an anthem, ‘Behold how good and joyful,’ which had been originally written in 1772 for the installation of the Duke of York as a knight of the Bath. In 1782 Cooke received the honorary degree of Mus. Doc. at Oxford, and in the same year was elected organist of St. Martin's-in-the-Fields, after a severe contest, in which Burney was his chief opponent. Cooke was an assistant director at the Handel Festival in 1784, and received one of the medals which George III caused to be struck to commemorate that event. In 1789 changes in the constitution of the Academy of Ancient Music caused him to resign the conductorship, a step which he felt so strongly that for some time he refused to belong to a small musical club known as the ‘Graduates Meeting,’ as he objected to meet his successor, Dr. Arnold. Cooke for many years had suffered from gout. He spent the summers of 1790–3 at Ramsgate, Brighton, Oxford, and Windsor, but was attacked at the latter place by his old malady, and shortly after his return died at his house in Dorset Court, Westminster, 14 Sept. 1793. He was buried on 21 Sept. in the west cloister of the abbey, where a monument was erected
