Rolle was one of the most distinguished lawyers of his generation. His contemporary (Sir) Matthew Hale† thought him ‘a man of very great natural abilities, of a ready and clear understanding, strong memory, sound, deliberate and steady judgment, ... of great freedom from passions and perturbations, of great temperance and moderation’. During the 1620s he was also a highly regarded figure in the Commons, although he never aspired to parliamentary leadership. Rolle entered the Inner Temple in 1609, and embraced his legal training with enthusiasm. His fellow students included John Selden* and a future lord keeper (Edward Littleton II*), attorney-general (Edward Herbert*) and recorder of London (Thomas Gardiner†); Rolle is said to have regularly met them for informal discussions about legal questions. Called to the bar in 1617, he resolved early on to concentrate on the Common Law, and in due course attached himself almost exclusively to King’s Bench. During his first few years there he made extensive reports of cases which, although intended only for his private use, were to be published posthumously as his Abridgment ... del Common Ley.
In 1621 Rolle was elected to Parliament at Callington, where his father controlled a seat.
Returned for Callington once again in 1624, Rolle remained attentive to legal issues. On 17 Apr. he was appointed to a bill committee concerned with the creditors of people who died while being prosecuted, and during the debate on the York House bill on 28 May, he expressed concern that not all interested parties had been consulted. Two days earlier he reported the recent Lords’ amendments to the bill for restricting the right to remove lawsuits from inferior to central courts. He was also named to the legislative committee concerning the continuance of expiring statutes (25 March). Rolle delivered the committee report on Sir Edward Engeham’s estate bill (1 May), and was nominated or added to committees which scrutinized three other estate measures, along with the bill to restore Carew Ralegh in blood.
In the 1625 parliamentary elections Rolle’s kinsman, Thomas Wise, took the family seat at Callington, and he himself found a place at Truro, where his brother-in-law, Hugh Boscawen, was recorder.
This Parliament saw Rolle’s first nominations to bill committees concerned with the Church. These aimed to prevent abuses on the Sabbath and to allow ministers to take leases of farmland (22 June and 11 July). Of course, both issues had legal overtones, and the law remained a significant theme in Rolle’s parliamentary career. On 24 June he introduced a bill dealing with administrations, but the measure proceeded no further and its details are lost. He was also named to legislative committees concerned with writs of partition of land, bribery in procuring judicial posts, and the sale of estates belonging to the 4th earl of Dorset (Sir Edward Sackville*) (27 and 29 June, and 8 July).
Rolle attended the Oxford sitting, and there revealed a scepticism about Charles I which went well beyond his previous comments on taxation. On 10 Aug. he sided with those Members who questioned the king’s claim that parliamentary supply was urgently needed for the forthcoming military adventure. Rolle insisted that the Crown could obtain adequate credit for this, and he ridiculed the notion that foreign victories could be expected from a navy which was unable to stop Turkish pirates from raiding the English coast. Echoing Sir Robert Phelips, he argued: ‘If the necessity for money [is] now so great, this [is] our time to press for redress [of] our grievances’. By this Rolle seems to have meant concerns already voiced in the House about religion, royal extravagance and the position of the duke of Buckingham, but as a West Country man he clearly took the threat from the Turks seriously. When he returned to the attack the next day, he noted the old convention that Tunnage and Poundage was intended to be spent on guarding the seas, and reminded the House that in Edward III’s reign English merchants had offered to protect themselves in return for receiving these revenues.
In the 1626 Parliament Rolle again represented Truro, while his merchant brother John took the family seat at Callington. Surviving records of the Commons’ proceedings fail to distinguish between the two men, but while John was entering the House for the first time, Rolle was now one of its more familiar figures, and there can be little doubt that he was the more active party. Certainly all nominations to committees concerned with legal business must be assigned to him. There were six of these, covering corruption in the choice of officeholders (14 Feb.), a Chancery decree (2 Mar.), grants of administration (7 Mar.), erroneous judgments in the equity courts (27 Mar.), an old deed drawn up for Thomas Cecil†, 1st earl of Exeter (24 May), and citations out of ecclesiastical courts (17 March). Rolle contributed to a debate on this last measure on 18 Apr., explaining that part of the proposed legislation was founded on the 1604 Canons. On the previous day he recommended Elizabethan ecclesiastical statutes as the proper guide for assessing Richard Montagu’s controversial tract Appello Caesarem, while refraining from more direct criticism of the work. On 24 May he was appointed to help draft a bill to curb Crown interventions during proceedings in the prerogative courts, though nothing further was heard of this.
Given his previous record in the Commons, it can safely be assumed that it was Rolle who was added to the committee of privileges on 11 Feb., and it follows from this that other mentions of privilege and elections probably also refer to him. On 16 Feb., reviewing the case of Emmanuel Giffard, whose claim of privilege rested on the assertion that his election indenture bore an inaccurate date, Rolle recommended acceptance of this plea providing that the facts were confirmed, noting that any other decision would encourage further false returns. However, on 24 Mar. he delivered the negative verdict of the committee which investigated the election while in prison of Sir Thomas Monck. With his old friends Selden and Littleton he was named to a select committee on 25 Feb. to consider the bishop of Oxford’s breach of privilege in prosecuting Sir Henry Marten, and he was nominated or added to committees which examined the similar cases of Sir Henry Hastings and John More II (22 May). Rolle was also appointed on 2 Mar. to a bill committee addressing the due election of knights of the shire. Controversially, he argued on 14 Feb. in the committee of privileges that the custom which prevented serving sheriffs from sitting in Parliament, recently exploited by Charles I to keep Sir Edward Coke* out of the Commons, lacked statutory force, and might perhaps in this case be ignored.
This was a bold stance to take in the circumstances, but the critical attitude towards the government which Rolle had revealed in 1625 was undiminished. On 8 Mar. he analysed the wording of the 1624 Subsidy Act, which he had helped to draft, to confirm that the Commons might demand a more satisfactory account from the Council of War of how the money raised had been spent. It was presumably also Rolle himself who referred back to another 1624 Act on 7 June to argue that the Council of War ought to settle debts owed to English subjects before paying out money due to the king’s banker, Philip Burlamachi.
The most difficult field in which to tell the two brothers apart is that of economic matters. John could offer the Commons the benefit of his experience as a London merchant, but there is evidence to suggest that it was Rolle who actually dealt with most business. For example, on 27 Apr. the Mr. Rolle who called for the summons of customs officials who were collecting Tunnage and Poundage without parliamentary authority included procedural advice to the House in his speech. Similarly, the politically sensitive proposals for a new Book of Rates are unlikely to have been entrusted to a novice Member.
Rolle retained his Truro seat in 1628, and was again joined at Westminster by his brother. Just as in the previous Parliament, the records generally fail to distinguish clearly between them, except for three occasions when they were named to the same committee. On 13 June they were appointed to consider rival petitions from the London Goldsmiths and Exchangers concerned with regulation of the exchange market, and another double nomination followed the next day, involving Henry Billingsley’s petition about the transportation of foreign post. One week earlier, both men had been named to the committee for drafting the preamble of the subsidy bill.
Although Rolle was not named to the committee of privileges in this Parliament, he apparently retained his interest in privilege cases. On 1 Apr. he was appointed to two bill committees concerned with oaths taken by Members upon admission to the Commons. He was also nominated on 14 Apr. to help investigate the reported slandering of John Selden by the 2nd earl of Suffolk (Theophilus Howard*), though he failed to participate.
Rolle was appointed to a further conference with the Lords about liberties on 23 Apr., and to the committee for the bill declaring Parliament’s privileges five days later. On 29 Apr., during the debate on the bill for subjects’ liberties, he stressed the importance of a cause being specified in warrants of imprisonment, to maximize the means of redress available to the prisoner concerned. He was alarmed by the king’s warning on 2 May that he would not tolerate any encroachment upon the royal prerogative, and argued the next day that Charles must be reassured on this point immediately, otherwise continued work on the bill would simply anger him further. At the same time, he did not want the Commons to concede too much ground: ‘let us not bind up ourselves in a way as though we would ask nothing else of him’. On 5 May the king reiterated his refusal to accept an explanatory bill of liberties, effectively wrecking this strategy, and Rolle joined calls for debate on Charles’s speech to be delayed for a day, to allow time for its implications to be absorbed.
Although Rolle cannot be seen as a leader of the Commons in either 1626 or 1628, he had certainly lent his firm support to the cause of reform. It is therefore astonishing that when controversy erupted around his brother John in the 1629 session, combining as it did elements of privilege, unparliamentary taxation and the liberty of subjects’ goods, he took no known part in the resultant debates. The motive for his reticence is unclear. If he felt unease at the tactics adopted by the House he might reasonably have said so. One possible consideration is the fact that one of the king’s principal spokesmen, Sir Humphrey May, was his uncle by marriage, though this had not noticeably restrained Rolle during the previous session.
During the 1620s Rolle had gradually taken on more prominent tasks at the Inner Temple, such as auditing the steward’s accounts, and by the end of this decade he was also attracting attention in King’s Bench. According to Hale, Rolle ‘argued frequently and pertinently; his arguments were fitted to prove and evince, not for ostentation; ... his words few, but significant and weighty; his skill, judgment and advice in points of law and pleading ... sound and excellent.’
As the Civil War approached, Rolle’s radical streak resurfaced. In 1639 he apparently declined to lend money towards the king’s expedition against the Scots. At the outbreak of hostilities in England he was one of the 13 serjeants-at-law who sided with Parliament, which duly sought his further promotion. The propositions presented to Charles I in February 1643 included a request for Rolle to become a justice of King’s Bench, and he was finally sworn in two years later.
he was a patient, attentive, and observing hearer, and was content to bear with some impertinences rather than lose anything that might discover the truth or justice of any cause. ... He ever carried on as well his search and examination as his directions and decisions with admirable steadiness, evenness, and clearness: great experience rendered business easy and familiar unto him, so that he gave convenient dispatch, yet without precipitancy or surprise.
In October 1648, the Commons voted for Rolle to become chief justice himself, and although the House of Lords initially balked at the idea he received his commission the following month.
The timing of Rolle’s appointment was significant. Although he had been a consistent supporter of the parliamentary cause, his instincts lay with the conservative elements who held sway in the Commons during the autumn of 1648, not with the more radical Rump which survived Pride’s Purge that December. Rolle refused to preside over the king’s trial, and nursed serious reservations about the abolition of the House of Lords.
Rolle lost his place in the central executive when the Rump was dissolved in 1653, though he was appointed a treasury commissioner in the following year. He remained lord chief justice until 1655, and during his final years in this post presided over his most controversial cases. In November 1653 a gang led by the Portuguese ambassador’s brother, Dom Pantaleon Sa, murdered a lawyer at the New Exchange on the Strand, Westminster. Rolle ordered Sa’s committal and, contrary to precedent, ruled during the trial in July 1654 that he was not entitled to diplomatic immunity, because he was not actually the ambassador and the offence was of a criminal nature. Sa was duly convicted and executed.
On 12 Mar. 1655 Rolle was at Salisbury for the assizes when the city was seized by royalists in the opening phase of Penruddock’s rising. Dragged from his bed, he was threatened with summary execution until Penruddock himself intervened to save his life. Although Clarendon states that Rolle was released forthwith, it appears that he was in fact detained for two days until government forces reached Salisbury, and he emerged from his ordeal badly shaken. He was named to the commission of oyer and terminer for trying the rebels, but refused to participate in the hearings on the grounds that his status as a victim of the royalists rendered him unfit to deliver impartial judgments. He was probably also instrumental in having the general indictment reduced from treason to the levying of war against the government, contrary to the wishes of attorney-general Edmund Prideaux†. He further irritated his masters by insisting on the recovery of horses taken from him at Salisbury.
Rolle died on 30 July 1656, and was buried at Shapwick in early September. His finances were presumably still healthy, since he had bought the manor of East Tytherley in Hampshire two years earlier.