ROE (ROWE), Sir Thomas (1581-1644), of Rendcomb, Glos. and St. Martin’s Lane, Westminster; later of Woodford, Essex

Roe has to be distinguished from a military namesake, knighted in 1603. HMC Rutland, i. 487. His father was a younger son in a successful City family of Kentish origin which produced three lord mayors in Elizabethan and Jacobean times. He lost his father at the age of six, but by 1593 his mother had married Sir Richard Berkeley* and settled down in Gloucestershire. Roe’s only sister married into the same family, and he himself was living with his mother at Rendcomb, five miles north of Cirencester, when he bought an estate at Southrop. VCH Glos. vii. 131, 220. In 1634 he stated that he had been in royal service for 33 years, suggesting that he held Court office before the accession of James I. However, Anthony à Wood’s assertion that he was esquire of the body to Elizabeth seems to be unfounded. CSP Dom. 1633-4, p. 543; Ath. Ox. iii. 111. He evidently also had some experience of military service, although it is difficult to disentangle this aspect of his career from that of his namesake. Embassy of Sir Thomas Roe to India, 58.

In 1610 Roe led an expedition to Guyana, which he financed in partnership with Sir Walter Ralegh† and the 3rd earl of Southampton. The project may also have enjoyed the patronage of Prince Henry, for in a letter to the 1st earl of Salisbury (Robert Cecil†) written from Trinidad in February 1611, Roe described his ‘desire to serve the prince’, as his ‘last and first request’. English and Irish Settlement on River Amazon ed. J. Lorimer (Hakluyt Soc. ser. 2. clxxi) 152, 155. Two further expeditions followed but he wasted his patrimony (by his own confession), and had to resell Southrop to form part of the endowment of Wadham College. Chamberlain Letters ed. N.E. McClure, i. 292; J.A. Williamson, Eng. Colonies in Guiana, 52, 58; Harl. 1576, f. 225v; VCH Glos. vii. 131. He had become acquainted with Princess Elizabeth soon after the accession of James I and accompanied the Elector Palatine on the latter’s wedding journey in 1613. HMC Buccleuch, i. 142; Negotiations of Sir Thomas Roe ed. S. Richardson, 531-2. While overseas he engaged in a formal religious debate with a priest, which was published. Strachan, 41-4. Archbishop Abbot observed that ‘Sir Thomas Roe is a proper gentleman, and goeth among the number of the wits, so that when they choose him for a dispute against Wright, and can make no greater triumph of it than in this pamphlet they do, it goeth very hard with them’. HMC Downshire, iv. 514. He also dabbled in verse, HMC 4th Rep. 344; B. Corney, ‘Sir Thomas Roe: on the Death of Lord Harrington, 1614’, N and Q (ser. 4), v. 9. and was honoured with a few lines from a family friend, Ben Jonson. M. Strachan, Sir Thomas Roe, 3.

Roe paid a flying visit to England early in 1614, perhaps to arrange for a seat in the Addled Parliament. He wrote to William Trumbull* on 17 Mar. that the decision to call a Parliament had been strongly opposed in Court circles; but now expectations were high,

though they that were adverse to it have spread many reports of some of its Members, perhaps to bring to pass their own reasons against it. Yet it is thought by the wisest and honestest sort that the king and his subjects will be heartily reconciled ... Notwithstanding, all jealousies are not so laid aside but that great care is had on both parts for election. HMC Downshire, iv. 340.

Returned for Tamworth, Roe was named to eight committees and made ten recorded speeches. On 8 Apr. he received his first three nominations, for as well being appointed to the privileges committee he was ordered to help search for precedents for the admission of the attorney-general to the Commons and to consider the bill for the continuance or repeal of expiring statutes. Procs. 1614 (Commons), 33-5. He was also appointed to draft an address against undertakers (13 April), Ibid. 76. and to consider the bill against non-residence and pluralism (12 May).Ibid. 218. His first recorded speech was in the debate on the Stockbridge election dispute (11 May), when he asserted that Henry St. John and Sir Walter Cope had been lawfully returned. Ibid. 208. On 17 May he tried on behalf of his fellow governors of the Virginia Company to mitigate the damage done by the speech of their counsel, Richard Martin*, urging that ‘his ill handling of the business might not hinder the suit’. Ibid. 277. Three days later he moved for the recovery of certain books and papers ‘belonging to this House’, and he was again appointed to the privileges committee ‘if he were none before’. Ibid. 297. On 21 May he answered Sir Henry Wotton’s defence of impositions, pointing out that ‘the dukedom of Florence and Milan [were] mere tyrannies. That the 1[st] that ever imposed in Castile had power from the courts[sic] there, which suitable to our Court of Parliament’. Ibid. 312.

Roe joined whole-heartedly in the outcry against Bishop Neile, who had charged the Commons with sedition, but he was initially concerned with maintaining good relations with the Upper House. On 25 May he argued for prior consultation with the Lords, that ‘then may we have better ground to complain to the king’ Ibid. 351., and when the Upper House declined a conference, he was among those who maintained that the Commons ought not to go to the king regardless, since to do so would ‘draw the Lords to be our enemies’, and thus give Neile a chance to escape. He was confident that there was no reason to distrust the Lords, whether spiritual or temporal, though Neile had ‘fallen’, Ibid. 359. and was one of eight Members appointed to draw up a further message to them. Ibid. 360. When Neile tried to excuse himself through Sir Edward Hoby*, Roe retorted that ‘he had confessed more than we looked for, which were to tax both the Houses with sedition and faction’. He moved to ask the Lords ‘to clear or excuse him for this matter in fact’, and was again appointed to the drafting committee. Ibid. 380, 381, 385. He considered the response inadequate, but still argued against appealing directly to the king. Having finally run out of patience with the Lords he argued that the Commons should ‘disable him [Neile] either to be about the king or to be a bishop or to be among reasonable men’. Instead he should be left ‘to run away and bewail his estate in the woods among wild beasts’. Ibid. 409, 411. Faced with the threat of dissolution if the Commons did not grant supply, Roe vainly supported Sir George More’s motion for a committee ‘to treat of the king’s business’, warning against ‘the ending not only of this but of all Parliaments’. Ibid. 415, 420. On 6 June he indicated that he had access to the ambassadors dispatches when he asserted the joy overseas at ‘the fraction between the king and his people’. He proposed an immediate address promising supply ‘if he [James I] will right us; and upon that condition he would give, and not otherwise’. Ibid. 427.

After the dissolution Roe, who was well-known to the board of the East India Company as ‘of a pregnant understanding, well-spoken, learned, industrious, and of a comely personage’, was sent to India at the suggestion of Sir Thomas Smythe* ‘to prevent any plots that may be wrought by the Jesuits to circumvent our trade’. Embassy of Sir Thomas Roe to India, p. xviii. He was also appointed ambassador to the Great Mogul, the first British diplomatic representative in the sub-continent, though according to the Venetian ambassador the king had originally objected to him ‘because he comported himself in an unseemly manner in the last Parliament’. CSP Ven. 1613-15, p. 268. Before leaving, he secretly married an independent-minded young widow, ‘a woman, not a saint’, Harl. 1576, f. 225. who had chosen her first husband in defiance of her family, Chamberlain Letters, i. 288. and whose portion was invested in a pension of £200 a year out of the Court of Wards. Harl. 2039, f. 179.

Roe returned home in September 1619 amid rumours of great wealth which were soon proved false. T. Birch, Ct. and Times of Jas. I, ii. 190; Chamberlain Letters, ii. 264, 265. The Company showed its satisfaction with his work by granting him £1,500, adding him to the ‘committee’, with an allowance of £200, and offering him further employment as superintendent of all its settlements in the east. Embassy of Sir Thomas Roe to India, p. lvi. Having suffered from constant ill-health in India, he preferred to turn his attention westwards, becoming active again in the Virginia Company. Any resentment at Court over his conduct in the Addled Parliament had now evaporated, as he was one of the four royal nominees for the treasurership. Recs. Virg. Co. i. 348 He assisted his brother-in-law Richard Berkeley* and other Gloucestershire gentlemen over the Berkeley plantation, Ibid. 311, iii. 379. and took out a patent with a group of London merchants to manage the tobacco trade for seven years. Chamberlain Letters, ii. 310; APC, 1619-21, pp. 171, 175; CD 1621, vii. 455-7. He also found time to work for Elizabeth of Bohemia who wrote to ‘honest Thom Roe’ from Prague in June 1620, thanking him ‘for the book you have written concerning the Bohemians. It is exceeding well done. I showed it the king. He likes it well, and commends him to you. He says you do so much for him he knows not how to requite you.’ The book referred to was presumably Bohemia Regnum Electiuum, published anonymously in 1620. SP81/17, f. 62.

Returned for Cirencester in 1620, Roe was appointed to 38 committees and one conference, and made over 85 recorded speeches. On the first day of business (5 Feb. 1621) he was named to the committee for privileges, CJ, i. 507b. and took the chair in the sub-committee to draft the petition for freedom of speech. CD 1621, ii. 26, n. 29, 52. He was the first to reprove the unfortunate Speaker Richardson after the latter interrupted Edward Alford on the same day. Ibid. 18. He spoke against allowing the election of (Sir) Henry Britton, CJ, i. 512b. and desired that the holders of Scottish peerages, like the attorney-general, should be excluded from future Parliaments. CD 1621, ii. 36-7. On 8 Feb. he approved Sir Henry Poole’s motion for a bill to regulate parliamentary elections, and further moved ‘for a place to be appointed for keeping the records of this House’, Ibid. 42. and next day he urged ‘that a course may be taken to try whether all Members of the House be sworn’. CJ, i. 514b. That afternoon he reported the draft petition for freedom of speech but it ‘was misliked because it extended too far’, CD 1621, ii. 52. and he failed to persuade the Lower House to act together with the Lords. Ibid. iv. 39. On 13 Feb. he complained of the growing habit of referring matters to grand committee, ‘breeding confusion and slow dispatch’, Ibid. v. 452. and was named to a seven-strong committee for a weekly inspection of the Journal. CJ, i. 520a. He spoke with expert knowledge against the export of ordnance to Spain, exposed by Sir John Jephson*. Secretary Calvert had concluded his reply by dismissing carriages and shot as ‘not worth the speaking of’, but Roe explained that English carriages were ‘better than that of Spain’, which were ‘not fit for shipping’:

For there is but one kind of timber excellent for that purpose, which is dry elm, which as it must be of great thickness, so likewise it must have a longer time to dry: inasmuch that, as I think, there is hardly so much to be found in the kingdom as will make an hundred more. It’s the humble desire of this House that His Majesty may make stay of them, and though that promise of the king be not granted now, yet under colour thereof there have been a hundred pieces of ordnance transported already. CD 1621, ii. 71.

He was named to the committee appointed to draft a bill (26 Mar.) and to which the bill was committed after its second reading (14 May). CJ, i. 572b, 621b. On supply for the recovery of the Palatinate (15 Feb.), he favoured a grant of two subsidies, and opposed prior consultation with the Lords. ‘There is no subject’s estate sure whilst the king wants’, he argued, nor could they give any greater blow to the papists ‘than by being this day reconciled to the king, for they use it as a testimony of an ill affection in us to His Majesty that we relieve not his wants in these times of necessity’. Nicholas, Procs. 1621, i. 48-9; CD 1621, ii. 88.

As befitted a Member for a clothing town, on 16 Feb. Roe spoke against engrossers and staplers in the debate on the bill for free trade in wool, which had been entrusted to a grand committee:

The staplers and those that buy it of them will sell wool better cheap than the gentlemen of the country and the growers can by reason of their falsifications, by mixing of water, sand and pitch which makes it weigh heavier ... And that it were as good that every man might buy as the stapler; for they do all the wrong betwixt the wool-grower and the clothier. Nicholas, i. 54.

When the bill was reported on 13 Mar. he spoke against ‘the rich clothier’, and was one of those who successfully asked for its recommittal. CD 1621, ii. 216. However, his true objective was not to damage the interests of the rich clothiers at all, but merely those of the Staplers’ Company, whose bill to allow the free export of cloth he condemned on 7 May on the grounds that it would ‘overthrow’ the Merchant Adventurers, with whom he enjoyed a familial connection. Roe’s cousin Sir Henry Roe, who managed Roe’s financial affairs, rose to be governor of the Merchant Adventurers by 1640. CSP Col. E.I. 1617-21, p. 445; SP81/48, ff. 257-8; CSP Dom. 1639-40, p. 378. He was followed by Sir Henry Poole, who informed the House that the clothiers believed that the more cloth exporters there were the better, and the following day a petition was presented by the clothiers of Gloucestershire against the Company. CJ, i. 612a; CD 1621, iii. 188-9; Nicholas, ii. 41.

On the shortage of coin Roe proposed summoning the East India, Spanish and Levant Companies to give evidence (26 February). He also defended his former employers against the charge that they carried £30,000 out of the country each year, and condemned the low rate of exchange, ‘which makes all such as come hither bring with them bills of exchange’. CJ, i. 527a, 528a; Nicholas, i. 98. ‘In justification of the patent for tobacco’, he vigorously rebutted Sandys’ attack on the import of Spanish tobacco (27 Feb.), but to no avail as the House agreed that this was ‘one reason of want of money in this kingdom’. CD 1621, iv. 113. Nevertheless, when a bill was brought in to prohibit the import, Roe managed to amend it in committee to allow the patentees time to clear their stocks and cover their rent to the Crown (11 May). Ibid. iii. 233. He was chairman of the committee for the fishing bill, but a temporary indisposition obliged him to pass over the report to Glanville (1 March). CJ, i. 533a. He was back within two days, speaking on further proposals to regulate elections. Ibid. 537a. On 27 Feb. he was appointed to a committee to search for precedents concerning the monopolist (Sir) Giles Mompesson*. Ibid. 530b. On 6 Mar. William Hakewill reported proposals to confer with the Lords about Mompesson. Hakewill divided the case against him into four parts, each assigned to a different spokesman, but, at Roe’s suggestion, accepted only after a division, a fifth spokesman was added, whose responsibility was to be one of ‘aggravation, amplification or recollection’. Ibid. 541a. Roe subsequently shared in the general resentment at the failure of these managers to point the finger of blame at the referees, commenting that ‘after three weeks we brought forth a mouse instead of a mountain’. CD 1621, v. 284. His relatively modest legislative concerns included three private bills, one for Wadham College (9 Mar.), CJ, i. 546b. and two for Norfolk relatives of his mother (17 Mar. and 1 May). Ibid. 559b, 600b. He showed expertise again over the monopolies bill, complaining on 26 Mar. that the ordnance patent granted to Sackville Crowe* threatened the ruin of the Sussex manufacturer John Browne, who retained only a Crown contract ‘which will not keep him awork one month in a year, whereby the most expert founder and best mine in England will be made useless’. CD 1621, iv. 197-8.

During the Easter recess several committees continued to meet. On 13 Apr. Roe gave the background to the petition of Capt. Roger North, who, after a voyage to the Amazon, had been imprisoned in the Tower and suffered the seizure of his cargo of tobacco at the instance of Gondomar.

The river had been discovered 13 years past by himself. This voyage was long in preparation, never interrupted till they were at Plymouth ... The tobacco in question was made by Sir Thomas Roe’s men, and Captain North was to have a fifth part for the transporting. A suit was offered by him in the Admiralty, but was stayed by the Spanish ambassador claiming the tobacco as growing upon his master’s soil. Ibid. 223-4.

On 18 Apr. he reported on the Dungeness and Wintertonness seamarks, CJ, i. 580a-b. and after their condemnation as grievances he was appointed to draft a new bill. Ibid. 581a. When this was reported on 26 May he spoke against the proposal for compensating the patentees, arguing that they should be ‘left to the king for satisfaction’. CD 1621, iv. 379-80. On 19 Apr. he successfully moved that rejected petitions should be so endorsed and returned to the parties, CJ, i. 582b. and in the afternoon he approved the hearing of counsel on behalf of Sir John Bennet*. ‘They are no sirens to enchant, or of such strength as to convince all our judgments’, CD 1621, iii. 23. he said, and was added to the committee to draft the charges. CJ, i. 586a. When Sir James Perrot moved for a committee to look into the claim that ‘some part of the contribution for the Lady Elizabeth is encroached into private hands’, Roe objected that the money was not necessarily being withheld ‘wilfully’, and that there was at any rate a warrant about to go out from the lord treasurer. CD 1621, iii. 96-7. Later, however, he ‘recanted’ his opposition, reviving Perrot’s motion on 2 June. CJ, i. 637a.

During the Parliament Roe received a letter from the Elector Palatine acknowledging Gloucestershire’s generosity over the benevolence and attributing it to his care and skill. SP81/21, f. 11 One of the eight Members appointed to search Floyd’s study on 1 May, he considered whipping the appropriate punishment for the Catholic lawyer’s insults to the Elector and his wife, but urged the House to confer first with the Privy Council, who had originally imprisoned him. CJ, i. 600b, 601a. When the king implicitly denied that the Commons possessed judicial powers, Roe considered that ‘the liberty of our House is hereby shaken’. Nicholas, ii. 21. The Commons proved more circumspect in the case of Bishop Field, who had been charged with simony: Roe reported a draft message on 16 May for transmission to the Lords in which the Commons announced that it intended to leave judgment to the Upper House. CD 1621, iii. 271. Roe was named to help to prepare for the adjournment conference (29 May), CJ, i. 630a. and on 31 May, speaking twice by permission, he argued against the passage of bills, whereby the session would be terminated. He also urged that something should be done during the recess ‘in matter of money’, and that both Houses should petition the king to stop the export of ordnance. CD 1621, iii. 371, 372. On 1 June he successfully moved that the recess committee should be open. Ibid. 384. He supported Sir Dudley Digges’s motion that Members should encourage ports to take up the farm of their own customs. ‘Let not London eat up all the kingdom; and let not the farmers take it in London nor the mayor in other places’. CD 1621, iii. 395. He was one of the 24 Members ordered to attend the king on 3 June, CJ, i. 637b. and on the following day he was among those appointed to draft the enthusiastic resolution for the liberation of the Palatinate. Ibid. 639a.

Before Parliament met again in November, Roe had been sent to Constantinople as ambassador by the Levant Company. It has been suggested that this was ‘a form of banishment’ for his support for the Palatinate in the Commons. S.L. Adams, ‘Protestant Cause’, (Univ. Oxford D.Phil. thesis, 1973), p. 318. Roe seems to have considered the posting a form of exile, Strachan, 155. but there is no evidence that he attributed it to political disfavour and there is no sign that the Levant Company were pressurized into appointing him. It seems to have been economic necessity which forced him to take up the appointment as he informed the East India Company that the only reason for accepting the post was their failure to pay him a pension of £200 a year which he thought he had been promised on his return from India. CSP Col. E.I. 1617-21, p. 445.

On his way to Constantinople he wrote from Zante to Secretary Calvert, recalling ‘the sharp complaints in Parliament for the decay of money’ and condemning the trade with that Venetian island, which devoured money and brought in nothing but a ‘trash berry’, the currant. Negotiations of Sir Thomas Roe, 10. He nonetheless discharged his duty to the Company, largely dependent on that trade, ‘with almost unique success’. A.C. Wood, Levant Co. 86. But he was much more than ‘an ambassador of merchants’: CSP Ven. 1629-32, p. 187 he mediated a treaty between Turkey and Poland, worked for the suppression of piracy in the Mediterranean, and ransomed hundreds of English slaves. Above all he strove to confirm the attachment of Bethlen Gabor, prince of Transylvania, to the Protestant cause. He also plunged eagerly into the affairs of the Orthodox Church, forming a close friendship with the Patriarch Cyril Lucaris, a Calvinist sympathizer who gave him the Cadex Alexandrinus as a gift for his learned monarch. He sought out antiquities for Buckingham and the earl of Arundel, whose rivalries called forth all his diplomatic skills, and himself acquired a collection of manuscripts which he later presented to the Bodleian. M.J. Brown, Itinerant Ambassador, 131, 138, 144, 158; Negotiations of Sir Thomas Roe, 36; M.F.S. Hervey, Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel, 265, 269; CSP Ven. 1626-8, p. 300; Ath. Ox. iii. 114. The Levant Company was naturally reluctant to have him replaced by Sir Thomas Phelips, 1st bt.*, the spendthrift courtier whom Buckingham and Charles tried to foist on it in 1625, but Sir Peter Wyche proved more acceptable. Wood, 87-8. Roe had useful contacts with Buckingham through his wife’s uncle Sir Oliver St. John* and his own nephew (Sir) Maurice Berkeley*, who had married Viscount Purbeck’s sister-in-law. CSP Dom. 1625-6, p. 475. He wrote to Berkeley in the spring of 1627 to rebuke him for his resistance to the Forced Loan.

I hear you are like to be one of the contumacious. I well know that your thoughts are honestly grounded with respect of right, and the ancient laws of the kingdom, to give by Parliament. But yet take counsel of me, nourish not a spirit of contradiction, but rather curb it. We are by nature prone enough to liberty, and every suggestion of that should be suspected to us ... Take heed in your youth of getting a mark and name of opposition, and to sell your name for popularity ... There is a mean, which is the soul of wisdom, not to dig down the foundation, which are the laws, nor to break down the walls to let in the enemy to do it for want of fit supplies. Negotiations of Sir Thomas Roe, 648.

Roe was then, as his Venetian colleague recorded, ‘brimful of most noble ideals, which he proposes to carry out himself’, and confident of royal support. CSP Ven. 1626-8, p. 221. However, by the time he came back to England early in 1629 Buckingham was dead and Charles was about to dissolve his third Parliament.

Roe believed that the 1628/9 Parliament had acted ‘with more passion than wisdom’, for ‘by striving for a shadow of liberty’, it had ‘lost the substance’, and he correctly foresaw that ‘the Parliament doors’ would be ‘sealed for many years’. L.J. Reeve, ‘Sir Thomas Roe’s Prophecy of 1629’, BIHR, lvi. 120-1. Later in 1629 he went on his successful mission to make peace between Sweden and Poland, thereby freeing Gustavus Adolphus for an onslaught on the Empire, but he was kept unemployed for years after his return. Elizabeth of Bohemia, to whom he had now become ‘honest fat Thom’, lobbied for him to be sent to The Hague; Letters of Elizabeth, Queen of Bohemia comp. L.M. Baker, 80. and Oxenstierna, ‘mistaking my condition in Court’, continued to write to him as though he were a senior government figure. HMC 10th Rep. vi. 131. He championed John Dury’s scheme to unite the Protestant Churches, addressing the king for support through Laud, ‘a fast friend’ whose early career had been fostered by Lady Roe’s family. Works of Abp. Laud ed. J. Bliss, vii. 48, 73; CSP Dom. 1634-5, p. 349. He also approved the first Ship Money writs and became chancellor of the Garter in 1636, S.R. Gardiner, Hist. of Eng. vii. 374. celebrating his return to office by founding an apprenticeship charity at Cirencester.VCH Glos. vii. 227. Elected to the Long Parliament for Oxford University after a contest, he was sent on a final diplomatic mission to the Diet of Ratisbon in 1641 and did not resume his parliamentary seat on his return in the following year. Entrusted by Charles I with maintaining correspondence with his diplomats and negotiating the restoration of the Palatinate, Roe lived mostly on a recently acquired property in Essex. Harl. 1901, ff. 49, 52, 72; VCH Essex, 345; Strachan, 269, 272. He drew up his will on 8 July 1644. Much of his estate he left to his wife, ‘my most faithful, loving and discreet companion in all the troubles and infirmities of my life’, which consisted of debts totalling nearly £9,000, including over £2,000 due to him from the Crown. He left £100 and his books and papers to his nephew (Sir) Maurice Berkeley. PROB 11/199, ff. 405-6. He was buried at Woodford on 8 Nov. 1644. Strachan, 280.