for demanding presents, which was tried before a committee of the House of Commons, and in spite of his explanation, that it was merely a customary present from the town of Beaumaris, which he and his predecessors were in the habit of receiving, he was found guilty by the committee, but was subsequently cleared by the house on the report by 178 to 130 votes. He died poor in 1712, leaving among other issue by his wife Elizabeth, daughter of Major-general Lambert, a son, Nathaniel or Nathanael (d. 1763) [q. v.], author of a history of Rome. His wife survived him till 26 Jan. 1736.
[Woolrych's Eminent Serjeants; Wynne's Serjeants-at-Law; Gent. Mag. 1736; Luttrell's Brief Relation.]
HOOKE, LUKE JOSEPH, D.D. (1716–1796), catholic divine, son of Nathaniel Hooke (d. 1763) [q. v.], was born at Dublin in 1716. He was educated for the priesthood at the seminary of St. Nicolas du Chardonnet, Paris, graduated D.D. at the Sorbonne about 1736, and in 1742 was appointed to one of the six chairs of theology at the Sorbonne. In 1751 an outcry was raised against him for having allowed Martin de Prades, a bachelor of divinity, to argue a thesis which covertly advocated encyclopædist doctrines. Hooke pleaded in excuse that he had only cursorily examined the thesis, and that as soon as he perceived its unsoundness he had been prominent in denouncing it. In 1752 he was deprived of his professorship, but the decree, at the solicitation of his old colleagues, was rescinded in 1754. The deprivation, however, ultimately took effect. In 1762 another theological chair became vacant, and though Archbishop de Beaumont put forward a rival candidate, Petitjean, Hooke was elected by twenty-eight votes to twenty-seven. The archbishop resorted to every device to get the election annulled, and failing in this he forbade the seminaries to send their students to Hooke's lectures. Hooke, consequently, had only half a dozen auditors, and in 1766 gave up the unequal struggle by resigning his chair. He became librarian to the Mazarin Library. In 1775 he was visited by Dr. Johnson at St. Cloud. ‘We walked round the palace and had some talk,’ says Johnson in his skeleton diary, and next day Hooke returned the call at Johnson's inn (Boswell, Johnson, ed. Birkbeck Hill, ii. 397). Hooke's duties at the library were limited to three days a week and nine months of the year. In April 1791 the Paris Directory dismissed him from the librarianship, on account of his refusal of the oath to the civil constitution of the clergy. Hooke contended that his was one of the posts whose occupants were not amenable to the oath. But the Directory appointed as his successor the sub-librarian, the Abbé Le Blond. Hooke refused to retire; but after standing a sort of siege, withdrew to St. Cloud, where he died 16 April 1796. Besides several pamphlets on his personal grievances, Hooke published ‘Religionis Naturalis et Revelatæ Principia,’ Paris, 1754; reprinted in 1774 by Brewer, an English Benedictine, and by Migne in vols. ii. and iii. of his ‘Theologiæ Cursus Completus;’ and ‘Nature et Essence du Pouvoir de l'Eglise,’ 1791. He also edited in 1778, for the Duc de Fitzjames, the ‘Memoirs of Marshal Berwick.’
[Nouvelles Ecclésiastiques, 1762 p. 118, 1763 p. 21, 1764 p. 61; Almanach Royal, 1743; Barbier's Examen des Dict. Historiques, 1820.]
HOOKE, NATHANIEL (1664–1738), Jacobite, born at Corballis in the county of Meath in 1664, was third son of John Hooke, a merchant of Drogheda, and grandson of Thomas Hooke, a merchant and alderman of Dublin. John Hooke (1655–1712) [q. v.], serjeant-at-law, was his eldest brother. In 1679 he entered Trinity College, Dublin, but he left almost immediately, possibly on account of his religious opinions, which were puritan. He proceeded to Glasgow University in 1680, but soon removed to Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, where he was admitted a sizar on 6 July 1681 (Hist. MSS. Comm. App. to 3rd Rep. p. 328), leaving Cambridge as he had left Glasgow, without taking a degree. He then went abroad, probably joining the Earl of Argyll in Holland. In 1685 he landed with Monmouth at Lyme Regis, acting as the duke's private independent chaplain. When in the beginning of July Monmouth passed into Somerset, Hooke was sent secretly to London with one Danvers to raise an insurrection in the city; he was exempted from the general pardon issued on 10 March 1685–6, but in 1688 he gave himself up and was pardoned. Hooke now became a loyal servant of King James II, and turned Roman catholic. After James's abdication he joined Dundee in Scotland, but in May 1689 was taken at Chester and committed to the Tower of London. He was released on 12 Feb. 1689–90, went to Ireland, served in the Jacobite army at the battle of the Boyne, and then entered the French service in the Irish regiment of Galmoy. In 1702 Hooke entered into communication with the Duke of Marlborough; the next year he held a command in the regiment of Sparre, and served with the French army in Flanders and on the Moselle. In August 1705 he
