PALMER, Sir Roger (1577-1657), of the Strand, Charing Cross, Westminster.

The Palmers were regarded in seventeenth-century Sussex as one of the county’s most ancient gentry families; the Richard le Palmere who had represented Lewes in the 1295 Parliament may have been an ancestor of the civil-war MP.26Misc. Gen. et Her. i. 105-6; W.H. Hills, Parl. Hist. of the Borough of Lewes (Lewes, 1908), 4. They had settled at Angmering in Sussex by the early fourteenth century, and by the mid-sixteenth century they were supplying MPs for the county and for constituencies in West Sussex and Surrey.27Misc. Gen. et Her. i. 106; HP Commons 1509-58. Palmer belonged to a cadet branch of the family, but nonetheless one with a respectable tally of parliamentary returns to its name. His grandfather Sir Henry Palmer† had sat for Bramber in the 1554 Parliament, and his father had been MP Arundel in the Parliaments of 1586 and 1601.28HP Commons 1509-58; ‘Thomas Palmer II’, HP Commons 1558-1603. The family’s principal residence was at Wingham, about five miles east of Canterbury, which Palmer’s grandfather had purchased in 1553.29A. Hussey, Chrons. Wingham (Canterbury, 1896), 186.

The Palmers had been intermittently involved in court circles since the reign of Henry VIII.30HP Commons 1509-58. Palmer’s father and younger brother James both held positions in the Jacobean court.31‘Sir Thomas Palmer’, ‘Sir James Palmer’, Oxford DNB. But Palmer himself seemed destined for a career in the law – that is, until he came to the attention of the Gray’s Inn lawyer and aspiring courtier Sir Francis Bacon†. In about 1600, Bacon presented Palmer at court, where his ‘good qualities’ as a horseman, musician and (above all) dancer ‘soon got him friends’.32Misc. Gen. et Her. i. 109; HP Commons 1604-29. Under James I, Palmer was a cupbearer first to Prince Henry and then, after the latter’s death in 1612, to Prince Charles, the future Charles I. From the mid-1610s he was in receipt of one crown pension of £100 a year and another, through his wife, of £200 a year.33SP16/180/16, f. 31v; CSP Dom. 1614, p. 248.

Palmer probably owed his return in 1614 for the Kentish constituency of Queenborough to his younger brother James Palmer, who would replace him as the town’s MP in the elections to the 1621 Parliament. James Palmer was a servant of Queenborough’s principal electoral patron Sir Philip Herbert*, 1st earl of Montgomery and the future 4th earl of Pembroke.34Supra, ‘Queenborough’; HP Commons, 1604-29. In 1623, Roger Palmer was personally selected by James I to travel to Madrid in order to attend Prince Charles in his attempt to win the hand of the Spanish Infanta.35SP14/139/128, f. 178v. He was returned for Queenborough again in the general elections of 1624 and 1625, but made no recorded contribution to either Parliament. Soon after the accession of Charles I, he was appointed master of the household, beating off competition from, among others, Sir Thomas Jermyn*.36Supra, ‘Sir Thomas Jermyn’; Shaw, Knights of Eng. i. 162; HP Commons 1604-29.

Palmer’s court career suffered no obvious ill affects as a result of the generally insignificant figure he cut as MP for Queenborough in the Parliaments of 1626 and 1628-9. Indeed, on the death of his brother-in-law Sir Marmaduke Darrell in 1632, he was promoted to the lucrative court office of cofferer – a role that gave him ample opportunity to strengthen his friendship with the chancellor of the exchequer Francis Cottington†, 1st Baron Cottington. Palmer’s social circle during the 1630s also included Sir John Hippisley*.37E134/20&21Chas2/Hil7; SP23/56, f. 237v; CSP Dom. 1636-7, p. 75; 1639, p. 509; VCH Mdx. ii. 393; HP Commons 1604-29. There is some truth to the claim made by one seventeenth-century commentator that Palmer ‘got a great estate in these employments, and, had it not been for the [civil] war, by which he was a mighty loser, he had been as rich a younger brother as any in his time’.38Misc. Gen. et Her. i. 109; SP23/56, f. 237. He lent the king £3,000 during the second bishops’ war; and one of his nephews claimed after the Restoration that Palmer and his brother James had between them lost £10,000 in such loans.39SO3/12, f. 102; CSP Dom. 1665-6, p. 328.

In the elections to the Short Parliament in the spring of 1640, the earl of Pembroke nominated Palmer for election to Canterbury.40Add. 11045, f. 99v. Palmer should have enjoyed a strong interest in the borough in his own right, for much of his estate was situated within a few miles of the city. Nevertheless, in a sharply fought contest he and William Dell*, Archbishop William Laud’s personal secretary, were defeated by two of Canterbury’s leading citizens, John Nutt and Edward Masters.41Supra, ‘Queenborough’. In the elections to the Long Parliament that autumn, Palmer was returned for the Lancashire borough of Newton. It is not clear who recommended him to the voters of Newton, for he was quite clearly a carpetbagger. An outside possibility is that he was nominated by the earl of Pembroke, whose office as lord chamberlain gave him considerable electoral influence. But any recommendation from the crown or a court grandee on Palmer’s behalf would almost certainly have been mediated through a more local figure. One plausible candidate for this role would have been Lancashire’s lord lieutenant and soon-to-be royalist leader, James Stanley†, Lord Strange (the future 7th earl of Derby), whose family seat at Knowsley lay a little to the west of Newton and whose approbation apparently weighed much with the borough’s voters and, almost certainly, with its principal electoral patron Francis Legh – the uncle of the man returned for Newton alongside Palmer, Peter Legh.42Supra, ‘Newton’.

In keeping with his earlier parliamentary career, Palmer was a relatively insignificant figure in the Commons, receiving only one committee appointment in the Long Parliament and contributing very little to debate. His only known involvement in the Houses’s efforts to reform the perceived abuses of the personal rule of Charles I was as a member of a sub-committee – of the Commons’ standing committee for religion – set up on 23 November 1640 to receive complaints from ministers ‘oppressed’ by the Laudian church authorities.43CJ ii. 54b; Procs. in Kent 1640 ed. Larking, 80, 81. Palmer’s inclusion on this sub-committee is something of a mystery, for unlike the great majority of its members he was a future royalist and was not associated with the godly interest in the House. Perhaps he was persuaded to serve by the sub-committee’s chairman – Palmer’s fellow Kentishman, Sir Edward Dering. That same month (November), he stood bond for £1,000 towards securing a City loan for the supply of the royal and Scottish armies in the north.44CJ ii. 133a; D’Ewes (N), 51. His likely concern to pay off the armies in the north, and thereby increase the king’s room for political manoeuvre in his dealings with the parliamentary leadership, may well account for his only appointment in the Long Parliament – to a committee set up on 15 February 1641 to attend Charles and request the royal assent to a bill for the relief of the northern counties and the English forces quartered there.45CJ ii. 86a.

On 19 July 1641, Palmer either attended or was called before a committee for putting a stop to payments authorised by the king to Secretary Sir Francis Windebanke* and other courtiers who had fled abroad.46Infra, ‘Henry Pelham’; Harl. 479, f. 75. Palmer claimed that since the spring he had been unwilling to pay out any money as cofferer that was likely to end up in Windebanke’s pockets; but the committee nonetheless ordered that no warrants be directed to him for payment of board wages to the disgraced secretary of state.47Harl. 479, f. 75. Palmer’s only recorded interjection on the floor of the House was on 4 February 1642, when he moved that a warrant be issued for holding new elections at Newton to replace Peter Legh, who had died a few days earlier of a wound he had received in a duel.48PJ ii. 269. However, given his possible links with Sir Edward Dering, he may have been the ‘Sir R. P.’ who that same day (4 Feb.) took issue with the godly MP Sir Walter Erle for moving that more copies of Dering’s proscribed publication be found and burnt.49PJ ii. 268, 272.

Palmer may have been present in the House, or at least still at Westminster, when he was granted leave on 4 July 1642 – for reasons not easily explicable – to attend the king at York.50CJ ii. 649a. As might have been predicted, given his long record of loyal service to the Stuarts, he sided with the king at the outbreak of civil war; and on 2 September, the Commons suspended him from sitting until the committee for absent Members – which had summoned him to attend the House, but without success – had examined the cause of his absence.51CJ ii. 750a. On 19 September, the Commons voted to summon him again, having received information that he had furnished the king’s army with 10 horses.52CJ ii. 772a; Add. 18777, f. 3. In December, it was reported that Palmer was with the king’s army.53CJ ii. 888b. However, it was not until 28 September 1643 that the Commons’ patience finally snapped, and it ordered that his estate be sequestered ‘for his long and willful neglecting and deserting the service of the commonwealth, in not attending, as he ought, in the House’.54CJ iii. 256a.

Having attended the Oxford Parliament early in 1644, signing its letter of 27 January to Robert Devereux, 3rd earl of Essex, urging him to compose a peace, Palmer was promptly disabled from sitting by his former colleagues at Westminster.55Rushworth, Hist. Collns. v. 573; CJ iii. 374a. He continued to serve as cofferer until at least April 1644, but he appears to have played an insignificant role in royalist wartime administration.56E101/440/15; Eg. 2978, ff. 133-134v; Docquets of Letters Patent ed. Black, 391-2. In July 1646, he petitioned to compound on the Oxford surrender articles, under which he was fined £3,577.57SP23/190, p. 265; CCC 1394; CJ v. 433b; vi. 387a. He claimed to have suffered losses in personal belongings, household goods and unpaid rents to the tune of £19,000.58SP23/190, p. 255. Thereafter, he seems to have withdrawn from public life, probably living quietly at Wingham and his residences in the Strand and in Suffolk. In 1655-6, the Kent commissioners for securing the peace of the commonwealth assessed him at £22 for decimation tax, while the commissioners in Suffolk, where he owned property reportedly worth £500 a year, assessed him at £48.59‘The Cromwellian decimation tax of 1655’ ed. J.T. Cliffe (Cam. Soc. ser. 5, vii), 442, 447, 472; CCAM 180.

Palmer died childless on 8 October 1657 and was buried in his brother James’s vault in the parish church of Dorney in Buckinghamshire.60Misc. Gen. et Her. i. 109. In his will, he referred to a deed of December 1643 by which he had assigned his property in Buckinghamshire, Cardiganshire, Glamorgan and Monmouthshire in trust to James; and he bequeathed much of the remainder of his estate to James’s son (Palmer’s nephew) Roger Palmer†, the future 1st earl of Castlemaine. He also bequeathed legacies – mostly to his nephews and nieces – totalling £2,755.61PROB11/269, ff. 345-6. Palmer’s nephew Roger represented New Windsor in the 1660 Convention.62HP Commons 1660-90.