ROGERS, Nathan (1639-aft. 1708), of Gray’s Inn, Mdx.; Llanfaches, Mon. and Ford, Wargrave, Berks.

Nathan Rogers enjoyed his first and only parliamentary experience when he was 19 years of age. The son of a puritan freeholder, possibly a tailor, he was brought up in an environment in which political turmoil was the norm. In old age, he recalled being turned out of the family home in Llanfaches, Monmouthshire, as a small child by men of Henry Somerset, 5th earl of Worcester. His father and others had resisted the earl’s enclosure of Wentwood Chase; the bailiff and ‘other merciless Raglanders’ had put out Nathan, his mother and small sister, not allowing her ‘to carry a bed or any of her goods out of the house’.9Memoirs of Mon. 70. He recorded how his mother returned to her parents’ home near Cardiff, but attributed her death soon afterwards to the trauma of her expulsion from Llanfaches. Around 15, Nathan left south Wales for Merchant Taylors’ school. His father’s choice of academy in 1654 was on the face of it, surprising. The headmaster, William Dugard, had a history of printing in the interests of Charles I, and had been dismissed (temporarily)from his post in 1650 for trying to print Defensio Regia by Salmasius. Although Dugard had by the mid-1650s accommodated himself to the republic, and enjoyed the friendship of John Milton, his school still seems an improbable selection for the sectary Wroth Rogers to have made.10‘William Dugard’, Oxford DNB. The connection between the London school and its outpost, Wolverhampton grammar school, may have played a part, as Wroth Rogers’ mother’s family were Staffordshire people.

Rogers matriculated from St John’s, Oxford in July 1655, but left almost immediately to enter Gray’s Inn. His father had been settled in Hereford as military governor since 1648, and Nathan owed his place in Richard Cromwell’s* Parliament, while under age, entirely to his father’s standing with the corporation of Hereford. His being groomed for a place in Parliament explains why the corporation of Hereford admitted him as a freeman. He was quite probably still living in London when he was elected. Making no impression on the assembly, he was brought back to Hereford by the military alarms in the summer of 1659. He was assigned the rank of cornet, the most junior officer in the army, in his father’s foot company in Hereford garrison, and doubtless helped in the counter-insurgency campaign against the rising of Sir George Boothe* for the king.11CCSP iv. 304. After the Restoration of Charles II, Rogers’ brief and uneventful period in public life ended, as his father lost all office and disappeared to Worcester in obscurity.

Rogers seems to have lived at Llanfaches while his father was still alive. He tells us that he often served as foreman of the jury at the Speech Court of Wentwood Forest, the assembly of the commoners. The Rogers holding must once have been a significant one; located at Allt-tir-fach, it included one of the three corn mills in the chase, but Wroth Rogers sold a significant part of it.12Memoirs of Mon. 25, 79. Nathan retained a hostility towards the cavaliers after 1660, insisting that it was the Presbyterians and Independents that had brought about the Restoration, not the Laudians, who had only brought ruin on the Stuarts.13Memoirs of Mon. 78. His own religious sympathies are evident from the licensing of his houses as congregationalist meeting places in 1669.14Early Recs. of Nonconformity ed. G.L. Turner (3 vols., 1911), ii. 1225. Given the history of conflict between his family and Raglan, his own experiences in the 1650s and his return to Llanfaches, it is not surprising that in the late 1670s he should emerge as the leader of the opposition to the Somerset family, now transplanted across the Severn in Badminton, Gloucestershire. Henry Somerset, 3rd marquess of Worcester and from 1682 1st duke of Beaufort, grandson of the persecutor in Nathan Rogers’s childhood, was then stamping on the freeholders what Rogers called the ‘badge of Beaufordian slavery’, and Rogers became their solicitor.15Memoirs of Mon. 11, 81. Ostensibly a continuation of the 1630s campaign against enclosure, the late 1670s struggle was animated by Beaufort’s alleged hostility to Protestant dissenters. Rogers was arrested at least twice, on one occasion, he tells us, at four in the morning, and was taken to prison on the authority of a writ obtained by Worcester in the House of Lords. Rogers appeared before the Lords on 10 December 1678, and submitted to the charge that he had breached Worcester's privilege. He seems to have owed his release to Sir Anthony Ashley Cooper*, 1st earl of Shaftesbury.16Memoirs of Mon. 84-86, 88; LJ xiii. 244b, 409b, 411a, 412b; HMC 9th Rep. ii. 116; HMC 12th Rep. ix. 71, 76.

A legal action at common law followed, in which the freeholders agreed to indemnify Rogers as their attorney. They lost, and he was forced to abscond in order to avoid being saddled with the entire costs of the case. During these upheavals, he served not only as a commissioner for assessments in Monmouthshire, but as steward of the king’s lordships of Caldicot and Newton.17Memoirs of Mon. 90. This record of public service did not prove a bulwark against arrest on suspicion of disaffection to the government of James II in 1685, but Rogers survived to hail the ‘stupendous achievement of the illustrious Prince of Orange’ in 1688.18Memoirs of Mon. 17. His book detailing his life of opposition to the house of Raglan and Badminton was published in 1708, after which he is lost sight of. His marriage to Susanna Ford of Wargarve in Berkshire produced at least three children, the eldest of whom died around 1739 in Westminster.19Vis. Berks. 1664-6, 84; Vis. Berks. 1665-6, 274; PROB11/695/246. There is no record of his descendants sitting in Parliament.