ROGERS, Wroth (d. c.1684), of Allt-tir-fach, Llanfaches, Mon. and Hereford.

Most commentators have followed the ‘mad Lord Coningsby’ (Thomas Coningsby†, 1st Baron Coningsby [I]) in supposing Wroth Rogers to have been a tailor.26Thomas, Earl Coningsby, Collns. concerning the Manor of Marden (2 vols., 1727), ii. 262; T. Richards, Puritan Movement in Wales (1920), 93; G.F. Nuttall, The Welsh Saints (Cardiff, 1957), 90. Proof of his calling, as opposed to the hostile and possibly deranged Coningsby’s mere assertion, seems now beyond retrieval. Rogers sent his son to be educated at Merchant Taylors’ school, but he himself was never a member of that Company. The choice of academy is quite likely to rest upon Wroth Rogers’ maternal family links with the Wolverhampton district, where the Merchant Taylors maintained an offshoot school.27Reg. of Scholars admitted into Merchant Taylors School ed. C.J. Robinson (2 vols. 1883), i. 219; Vis. Staffs. 1614, 1663-4 ed. Grazebrook, 305. What is more certain is that Wroth Rogers’ grandfather, Roger Vaughan of Tretower, Breconshire, was the minister of Llanfaches, seven or eight miles north east of Newport, from 1589, and built the patrimonial house at Allt-tir-fach, where Wroth was born.28N. Rogers, Mems. of Mon. (1708, ed. I. Waters, Chepstow, 1978), 25; Bradney, Hist. of Mon. iv. 187. It is presumed that Wroth Rogers acquired his distinctive given name from William Wroth, the puritan minister of Llanfaches. The clergyman Wroth is thought to have arrived in the parish either in 1611 or 1617, so it is possible that John and Jane Rogers bestowed on their minister the honour of naming their eldest son after him. Alternatively, the name could have been a simple acknowledgment of a family connection with the Wroths, a family which had moved from Herefordshire to become plentiful in the Abergavenny district.29Nuttall, Welsh Saints, 90; T. Richards, ‘Eglwys Llanfaches’, Trans. Hon. Soc. Cymmrodorion 1941 (1941), 158; Mon. Wills ed. J. Jones (S. Wales Rec. Soc. xii), 142-3, 145-6; Oxford DNB, ‘William Wroth’; Collns. towards Hist. and Antiq. of the County of Hereford. Upper Division, Pt. II ed. J.H. Matthews (Hereford, 1913), 13. Whether or not Rogers had been named after William Wroth, he was certainly a supporter of his as the minister developed ideas inimical to those of Charles I and Archbishop William Laud. William Wroth was cited in the court of high commission, and Wroth Rogers was an active sympathiser. Rogers was a tenant of the Catholic Henry Somerset, 5th earl of Worcester, and as well as being cited in the church courts with Wroth was subjected to proceedings in star chamber. According to Nathan Rogers, Somerset won a court judgment against his father, and Wroth Rogers was forced to leave Allt-tir-fach in the face of the advancing bailiffs of the ‘merciless Raglanders’.30Rogers, Mems. of Mon. 70; The Testimony of William Erbery (1658), 313.

William Wroth had been forced out of his living by April 1638, and set about establishing at Llanfaches the first gathered congregation in Wales; as one pious commentator put it, the parish was as ‘Antioch, the mother church in that gentile country’.31The Life and Death of Mr Henry Jessey (1671), 9; Testimony of William Erbery, 162-3; W. Cradock, Saints’ Fulnesse of Joy (1646), 12; W. Ebery, Apocrypha (1653), 8-9 (E.684.26); G.H. Jenkins, Protestant Dissenters in Wales 1639-1689 (Cardiff, 1992), 73. Rogers was a member of this church ‘according to the New England pattern’, joined by ‘many Saints from Somerset, Gloucestershire, Herefordshire, Radnor, Glamorganshire’ who came ‘with delight’ to Llanfaches.32Erbury, Apocrypha, 8. He did not sign the petition of 1641 promoted by seven puritan ministers in south east Wales, which called for a godly preaching ministry, so may have already left Monmouthshire before Wroth’s death, which had occurred by April of that year.33Add. 70109, misc. 69. The Llanfaches church was dispersed by the impact of civil war, and Wroth Rogers somehow found his way into the army of the Eastern Association by April 1644, but probably enlisted into Edward Montagu’s regiment as much as a year earlier, when it was raised in Cambridge and the Isle of Ely. It is on the face of it surprising that a Welshman should have moved so far east, but the presence in the same regiment of Francis Blethin, one of another family from the Llanfaches area, suggests that a group of Monmouthshire men may have enlisted together. The most obvious link between Llanfaches and the Fens was through Oliver Cromwell*, who had promoted the 1641 Monmouthshire petition on religion in the Commons.34SP28/29; Firth and Davies, Regimental Hist. ii. 398; Rogers, Mems. of Mon. 70; S.K. Roberts, ‘Propagating the Gospel in Wales: the making of the 1650 Act’, Trans. Hon. Soc. Cymmrodorion n.s. ix. 64; supra, ‘Oliver Cromwell’. In Montagu’s regiment, Rogers probably took part in the campaign that culminated in the battle of Marston Moor (2 July 1644), and when the New Model army was formed, Rogers was given a captaincy in the tenth regiment of foot, still under Montagu and alongside Francis Blethin.35Temple, ‘Original Officer List’, 61

Montagu’s new-modelled regiment saw action at Naseby in June 1645 and at the sieges of Bridgwater and Bristol. The regiment was re-assigned to John Lambert*, and moved further into south-west England in 1646.36Anglia Rediviva, 329; Firth and Davies, Regimental Hist. ii. 398. Rogers was given command of Barnstaple as governor, and introduced measures there against the spread of plague. In August 1646, a company under him was detailed to take arms from Barnstaple to Bristol.37Gentles, New Model Army, 133; HMC Portland, i. 390. Rogers, by this time promoted to major, was wholly in sympathy with the army’s grievances, as expressed in regimental statements. Even though Rogers took payments for disbanding the Barnstaple garrison, he abhorred the attempts to disband some regiments and ship others to Ireland, and deplored the arrears of pay and lack of provision for indemnity.38SP28/128, pt. 17. With John Hewson*, Thomas Pride*, John Okey* and others, he presented The Petition and Vindication of the Officers of the Army to Parliament (27 Apr. 1647). Lambert’s regiment also raised as a grievance the perceived reluctance of the clergy to denounce the onslaughts in print and from the pulpit by Presbyterian ministers against the army, naming Thomas Edwards and Christopher Love.39Worcester Coll. Oxf. Clarke MS XLI, ff. 123-5; Woolrych, Soldiers and Statesmen, 83; D. Farr, John Lambert (Woodbridge, 2003), 50; Gentles, New Model Army, 159. At the time, the radical minister William Erbery was chaplain of this regiment. Erbery and Rogers’ minister at Llanfaches, William Wroth, both played a major role in framing the petition of the Welsh ministers in 1641, so it seems likely that Rogers played at least as great a part as Lambert in attracting the incendiary preacher to serve the regiment.40Add. 70109, misc. 69; Farr, Lambert, 50. Rogers was on the army’s council of officers in May 1647, but does not seem to have taken a particularly prominent role.41Clarke Pprs. i. 109. By May 1648, probably as part of the redeployment of regiments and companies during the second civil war, Rogers was at Hereford as military governor, a post he was to retain until the Restoration of the monarchy. The second civil war in Wales was characterised by the more radical partisans of Parliament in Herefordshire as a Presbyterian plot, reported to Edward Harley* as an attack on his family, whose head, Sir Robert Harley*, had been one of the Eleven Members of 1647.42Add. 70006, f. 23. Rogers’ arrival marked the eclipse of the Harleys for a decade. Rogers was still closely enough associated with his regiment to join its other officers in petitioning against the Newport Treaty in November 1648, thus identifying himself completely with the Independents and the militants in the army against the king.43The Moderate Intelligencer no. 197 (21-28 Dec. 1648), [p.10] (E.536.18); Firth and Davies, Regimental Hist. ii. 400-1. He must have approved of the trial and execution of Charles in January 1649.

As a long-standing governor of Hereford, Rogers became an important and influential figure in the county, building up the castle as his headquarters.44CCC 140. But he was never promoted beyond the rank of lieutenant-colonel, and seems not to have become as powerful as some garrison commanders, such as Colonel Philip Jones*.45G.E. Aylmer, ‘Who was ruling in Herefordshire from 1645 to 1661?’, Trans. Woolhope Naturalists’ Field Club, xl. 378, 382. His son wrote how Rogers kept aloof from the sequestration business managed by John Flackett* and others. Nathan Rogers identified a quality of moderation in his father’s conduct

And for his probity, justice and his civility to the royal party, when he was governor of Hereford, he obtained the affection of all; for what he got by the public he liberally and charitably spent, as well as a good part of his own paternal estate, which he sold.46Rogers, Mems. of Mon. 79.

Members of the county committee would not necessarily have agreed. The Harleys and the treasurer, Thomas Blayney, had been rounded up. Rogers tackled Blayney, one of the Harleys’ confidants, in order to ensure that the garrison was victualled properly, provoking complaints to the Committee for Compounding that he had been menacing in his approach. But within a year, the local committee was commending Rogers to the Goldsmiths’ Hall commissioners for his integrity and public-spiritedness.47Mercurius Elencticus no. 58 (26 Dec. 1648-2 Jan. 1649), 554 (E.536.31); CCC 141, 183. Some of the hostility he initially faced in Herefordshire may have derived from the speed with which he augmented his regiment, by some 500 volunteers; according to his son, he achieved this target within a month.48Underdown, Pride’s Purge, 179; Rogers, Mems. of Mon. 79.

In May 1650, Rogers was facing difficulties in persuading the Presbyterian-leaning ministers of Herefordshire to take the Engagement to be loyal to the commonwealth government. He had been named to the commission of the peace for the county in March, in the company of Thomas Harrison I*, who was at this point the most powerful figure in the region. Rogers shared Harrison’s millenarian outlook, and was named with John Herring*, John James* and Stephen Winthrop* to be a Herefordshire bloc among the commissioners for propagating the gospel in Wales. This group effectively replaced the Harleys as the dominant faction in the county’s politics, albeit temporarily, and elevated ‘submission to Jesus Christ and the present government’ as their criteria for loyalty and local political promotion.49Bodl. Nalson VIII, f. 114. As well as of the erratic Miles Hill who denounced the Presbyterians in general and the Harleys in particular, Rogers became a patron of Richard Delamain, a highly individualistic preacher in Hereford: Rogers provided him with an entrée to local office by taking Delamain on as a gunnery officer at the garrison.50Impostor Magnus (1654), 15, 17 and passim. Rogers’ connections with Harrison’s party bestowed on Rogers an authority beyond Herefordshire; he was evidently regarded as reliable by the Rump Parliament, was busy rounding up suspects in Worcester during the summer 1651 emergency, and was appointed a commissioner for the high court of justice in south Wales, set up in the wake of the brief revolt there.51CSP Dom. 1650, pp. 150, 175; 1651, p. 267; CJ vii. 338a.

By the spring of 1653, Rogers and the other Herefordshire radicals had become impatient at the lethargy of the Rump, and rejoiced at its dissolution by Oliver Cromwell. He, John Herring*, Benjamin Mason* and Richard Delamain wrote on behalf of the godly sectaries of the county to Cromwell, congratulating him on the expulsion and exulting that the ‘great and long-desired reformation is near the birth’. They were convinced of Cromwell’s calling: ‘Oh! my lord, what are you, that you should be the instrument to translate the nation from oppression to liberty, from the hands of corrupt persons to the saints?’52Milton State Pprs. 92.

Under Harrison’s tutelage, it is unsurprising that Rogers and Herring should have been summoned to represent the county in the Nominated Assembly. They were lodged together in Whitehall, and shared the same political and religious perspective. Neither of them was particularly active in the House. They were both on the committee for prisons and prisoners, in which they might have been expected to share a concern for the liberties of inmates. In September, Rogers was a teller for the losing side in a vote to continue the excise, which took place on a bill for continuation brought by the council. Purely local interests suggested him as a member of the committee on wastes of timber in the Forest of Dean, in which he was named with other religious radicals from the region with a military background, such as Herring and John Croft of Gloucestershire.53CSP Dom. 1652-3, p. 412; CJ vii. 287b, 315a, 337b. When the Assembly began to disintegrate under the weight of the incompatible expectations of radicals and conservatives, Rogers, John James and John Herring were on the side of those who rejected the plans to consolidate the ordained ministry, and thus were in the camp of the former group.54Catalogue of the Names of the Members (1654, 669.f.19.3).

Despite his radicalism, Rogers did not turn his back on public life during the Cromwellian protectorate. He retained his power base at Hereford during the transition, but played no discernible role in the elections for the first protectorate Parliament. In countering royalist unrest in 1655, however, he was much to the fore, becoming a commissioner under Major-general James Berry* in the two counties of Herefordshire and Monmouthshire. He interviewed John Birch* about his intentions during this period, receiving from him a threat that he would again use his sword. When this was reported to the lord protector’s council, Rogers was ordered to ensure that Birch’s house was made untenable as a garrison for any rebels.55TSP iv. 237; CSP Dom. 1655, pp. 90, 136. In August 1655, Rogers was trying to recover money from the council towards the costs he had incurred in raising four companies of horse and foot to meet the possible insurgency by royalists. The government’s response was to identify a sum authorised during the 1651 royalist incursion to be raised in the county, and allocate it to Rogers’ needs. The order, with variants of it, was repeated over the next two years, but Rogers seems never to have grown impatient at his treatment.56CSP Dom. 1655, pp. 148, 272, 279; 1655-6, pp. 349, 1656-7, pp. 65, 86, 120, 169, 268; 1657-8, p. 186. His natural instinct towards ‘healing and settling’ is suggested by his treatment of the royalist Sir John Scudamore†, Viscount Scudamore [I], whom he exonerated as ‘very peaceable and quiet … without offering the least disturbance to the public peace of the commonwealth, though we believe he hath been much tempted thereunto by evil minded men’.57FSL, V.b.3, f.30. Indeed, Berry queried Rogers’ judgement over the latter’s views on suitable sheriffs; the major-general objected to a nominee of Rogers who was about to marry into a royalist family.58TSP iv. 742.

Rogers intervened on behalf of the military interest during the county election for the Parliament of 1656. As sheriff, he presided over the election, but denied the poll to those seeking to elect the group of county gentry candidates, awarding the indenture to James Berry and Benjamin Mason, these two soldiers balancing the gentry figures Edward Harley and Bennet Hoskins.59Add. 70007, f. 80. He himself was returned for Hereford, where he had by this time a sufficient interest of his own, as a magistrate and property-owner, let alone as a military governor. There is evidence that by this time, Rogers was turning away from his radical religious past. In 1656 he married the grand-daughter of Humphrey Salwey*. His new wife inclined to the Presbyterian minister Richard Baxter, and had indeed moved to Kidderminster to benefit from his ministry. There was evidently some distance between Rogers and his wife on religious topics, as her correspondence with Baxter makes clear.60Kidderminster par. reg.; DWL, Baxter Letters, iv. 120, 227. Rogers had been interested enough in the emerging Quaker movement to attend one or more of their meetings at the house of John Herring, but the Friends did not regard him as a reliable convert. His obliging letter to Baxter – who had officiated at the marriage of Rogers and Dorothy Salwey – supplying him with details of an apparition that had troubled the household of Philip Jones’s* sister-in-law in the Gower peninsula of south Wales, suggests that he did not share either the Quakers’ contempt for the professional ministry or Baxter’s paranoia about the antinomian menace.61Memory of the Righteous Revived (1689), 49; R. Baxter, Certainty of the Worlds of Spirits (1691), 22-3.

It was thus a more mellow and accommodating Rogers who took his seat in the second protectorate Parliament in September 1656. He was a little more active in this assembly, but if he ever made a speech on the floor of the House, it went unrecorded by Thomas Burton*. He was named to the important and large committees on Scottish and Irish affairs (22 Sept.), and was named to a few other committees, but none of them was on a politically sensitive topic: on abuses in legal writs, on reforming legislation on grain supplies, and improving the excise revenue by imposing a direct tax on inns. The committee on the reform of probate law probably had the widest significance (28 Oct. 1656), but the committee for naturalising citizens to which he was named on two weeks later proved to be his last in this or any other Parliament.62CJ vii. 426b, 427a, 428a, 435b, 445b, 446a, 452a. After the closure of this Parliament, Rogers returned to his military duties in Hereford. He was active as a commissioner under the 1654 legislation for regulating the ministry. In May 1658, he signed a testimonial for the minister William Michell of Aymestrey, in the company of a number of Presbyterian clergy, further evidence of his ‘Cromwellian’ willingness to work with a range of religious opinion.63Add. 70126, unbound: testimonial of 13 May 1658.

During the summer of 1659, and the crisis provoked by Sir George Boothe’s* rising, Rogers was given a commission in John Okey’s* regiment, but he stayed at Hereford garrison, with his son Nathan as his ensign.64CJ vii. 698a, 721a, 724a, 747a; CSP Dom. 1658-9, pp. 384, 393; 1659-60, pp. 30, 80,105, 578. The garrison was supported by the excise of three counties, and Rogers did his duty to stave off the threat, but the drift of events in 1659-60 made his long-term survival in office increasingly unlikely. During 1659, John Lambert’s old officers, including Mark Grime, had become identified by the Quakers as sympathetic, but the destruction of Lambert’s interest in January 1660 meant that Rogers’ military connections were now weak. In Herefordshire, the Harley family, whose interest he had helped subdue in 1648, had kept its power dry through the 1650s, and as elections for the Convention of 1660 loomed, they had Rogers in their sights. There were a number of grievances they might have harboured against him, but in the circumstances of April 1660, Robert* and Edward Harley were particularly incensed by Rogers’ continued influence with the ministers of Hereford, who had petitioned for the governor who had presided there for nearly 12 years. A Harley-inspired association of Presbyterian ministers along the lines of Baxter’s Worcestershire Association had met in October 1658, soon after the death of Oliver Cromwell, to consider uniformity of church ordinances and the promotion of clerical ordination.65Add. 70007, f. 137. Despite his apparent friendliness with Baxter, and his work as a commissioner for scandalous ministers from 1654, in the eyes of the Harleys Rogers had favoured unordained men ‘and mechanics in particular’ for the ministry. One of Rogers’ appointees, Jonathan Smith at Ross-on-Wye, was alleged to have celebrated the anniversary of the battle of Worcester each year with cakes and ale for the parish. Robert Harley denounced Smith as deserving ‘better to be punished than to be ordained’.66Add. 70007, f. 77v; Calamy Revised, 447. Some of Rogers’ favoured ministers apparently refused to read the Covenant.

On losing all his civil and military commissions in 1660, as well as his property acquired through state confiscations, Rogers could not return to Llanfaches as he had sold or greatly reduced his estate there. Instead, he moved to the suburbs of Worcester and almost certainly lived there peaceably. A rumour in 1665 that he was abroad fomenting trouble with other old roundheads seems implausible.67CCSP v. 495. In 1672, he was probably the ‘Ralph’ Rogers recorded by tax collectors as living in Foregate Street, and when he made his will in 1683, his neighbours from that street signed as witnesses. He maintained his friendship with the Salweys, his wife’s sister, Elizabeth Winnington of Stanford being first named among his executors. She was married to Sir Francis Winnington†, solicitor to Prince Rupert and attorney-general to James, duke of York, but an exclusionist in 1678. Rogers died in 1683 or 1684, but his place of burial is not known.68PROB11/379/66. His daughter, Frances, married Peter Persehouse (d. 1731), serjeant-at-arms to the House of Lords.69Vis. Staffs. 1614, 1663-4, 237-8.