POPE, Roger (1624-47), of Woolstaston and Evenall, Salop.

Pope’s parents married in 1623 at Shrewsbury, where his paternal ancestors had flourished as drapers who invested in land in Shropshire (Woolstaston and Smethcott) and Montgomeryshire (Trefeglwys and Llandinam) in the sixteenth century. Pope’s paternal grandfather, also Roger (d. 1628), had made judicious purchases of lands and advowsons, including of former monastic property in Shrewsbury. He also bought more land in Trefeglwys, Llandinam and Caersws.8Salop Archives, 2922/11/1/80. His elder son, Thomas, built a residence on the site of the Austin Friars, Shrewsbury before his death in 1624. His younger son, Richard, then became his heir, but at the time of his death in 1636, Richard Pope held only a reversionary interest in the family’s estate, since his step-mother still lived, and enjoyed the property for her lifetime. He lived instead at Evenall, his wife’s home, and died when Roger was 12.9Salop Archives, 2922/11/1/80; Purton, ‘Popes of Wolstaston’, 38; Owen, Blakeway, Hist. Shrewsbury, ii. 459. Before he died, Richard Pope devised a settlement of his property that included Sir Thomas Hanmer* of Flintshire and Robert Corbett* of Stanwardine as trustees, indicating the territorial and social range of his social circle.10Salop Archives, 2922/11/1/78. Roger Pope’s mother died a year after his father, and one of her executors was a neighbour, Thomas Mytton* of Halston.11PROB11/176, f. 73. Mytton was the brother-in-law of the much wealthier Sir Thomas Myddelton* of Chirk, who promptly bought Roger Pope’s wardship for £500 (22 May 1637).12Salop Archives, 2922/11/1/82; Coventry Docquets, 481; CSP Dom. 1640-1, p. 220. Pope came of age only in March 1645, but he then inherited his patrimony of Woolstaston.

Nothing is known of Pope’s early life, but his marriage to Mytton’s daughter before March 1644 enmeshed him further in the Myddelton interest and in a strongly parliamentarian network. In the spring of 1644 he was keen to offer his services to Parliament. As Mytton’s son-in-law he might have considered himself a natural member of his officer corps, but Mytton seemed less than enthusiastic at the prospect. His advice was that Pope should ask the 2nd earl of Denbigh, commander of the west midlands association, for a commission, even though Mytton had reason to doubt the earl’s willingness to intervene in the Shropshire parliamentarians’ struggle against the king’s party.13Mont. Collns. vii. 362; ‘Thomas Mytton’, supra. Within the year, Pope had acquired the rank of lieutenant-colonel, and assisted Mytton in his ride to the outskirts of Shrewsbury (20 Feb. 1645), so as to be present at its capture a few days later. He was thus an ally of Mytton’s in his uneasy relations with the Shropshire county committee.14A More Exact and Particular Relation (1645), 3 (E.282.15); Brereton Lttr. Bks. ii. 280. It seems certain that membership of the Mytton family, rather than any previous military experience, accounted for his commission. In November, Pope was given his own regiment by Parliament, with the rank of colonel.15LJ vii. 686b, 687a. Mytton deployed Pope’s foot soldiers away from Shrewsbury for service at the siege of Chester, provoking further resentment from the Shropshire committee.16Brereton Letter Bks. ii. 179-80, 279, 322, 369, 402. From Oswestry, at the end of the year, Pope joined Mytton and John Jones I* in a frosty letter to Sir William Brereton* advising him to place his horse and dragoons under the command of the north Wales forces, in the interests of sparing the counties of Denbigh and Flint from plunder.17Brereton Letter Bks. ii. 454. Pope engaged in prisoner exchange with the royalist governor of Denbigh in February 1646, but like the much older John Jones I, a servant of the Myddeltons of long standing, Pope was employed chiefly in negotiation. Both men were Mytton’s commissioners in the protracted talks leading to the surrender of the Anglesey royalists in June 1646.18Cal. Salusbury Corresp. 163; Cal. Wynn Pprs. 291, 292-3, 294, 296; Phillips, Civil War in Wales, ii. 307. It was Pope who was on hand in Mytton’s absence to accept the surrender of Holt castle (13 Jan. 1647).19N. Tucker, North Wales and Chester in the Civil War (2nd ed. Ashbourne, 2003), 92.

The writ for the by-election for Merioneth was moved in December 1646, but the election in April 1647 seems to have been timed to coincide with Mytton’s appointment as major-general for north Wales, a commission which complemented that of Rowland Laugharne in the south. Mytton himself would have been a plausible candidate for the seat, as he was for the honour of custos rotulorum for that county.20Mont. Collns. viii. 156-7. Pope was doubtless put forward as Mytton’s surrogate, and seems to have faced no opposition to his candidacy. On the basis of his own interest in Montgomeryshire, he was added to the assessment commission for that county in June. He made no immediate impact on the House at all, and according to John Barwick, an Arminian clergyman clandestinely active in London on behalf of the king, Pope had been ‘turned’ towards royalism. Barwick prized Pope and another of his contacts at Westminster, the much more significant figure of Sir Thomas Myddelton, whose ward Pope had been, as particularly useful informers: ‘both having been admitted into the most secret councils of the rebels, he learnt many things from them, which it was very much for his majesty's interest to know’.21Life of Dr John Barwick ed. G. F. Barwick (1903), 23. What exactly Pope would have been able to impart to Barwick is questionable, since he seems not to have been named to any committees, and could have attended the House for no more than four months. He died in August 1647, between the 3rd, when he was party to a lease in Shropshire, and the 26th, when the writ was moved for another by-election in Merioneth. Pope died of the plague, and was probably living in Covent Garden at the time of his death, since he was buried in St Paul’s, the parish church there.22Life of Dr John Barwick ed. Barwick, 22; PROB11/247, f. 178. He died intestate, and when his widow came to make her own will in August 1653 she alluded to the ‘sudden change and death’ which had overtaken her husband, such that he was unable to put in writing his testamentary intentions. Despite Pope’s alleged susceptibility to royalism and episcopacy in 1647, his widow specified that her own funeral sermon should be preached by Obadiah Sedgwick, the staunchly Presbyterian minister of Covent Garden.23PROB11/247, f. 178; Oxford DNB, ‘Obadiah Sedgwick’. Pope’s elder son Roger sat for Bridgnorth in 1685 and was father of another Member, but the line died out in 1754, when the estate passed to the Whitmore family.