ROLLE, Sir Samuel (c.1589-1647), of Insworke, Maker, Cornw. and Heanton Satchville, Petrockstow, Devon.

On his father’s side, Sir Samuel Rolle was descended from a junior branch of the Rolles of Stevenston, but his grandmother was the heiress of the Yeos, who had lived at Heanton Satchville for eleven generations before he took up residence there.27Vis. Devon 1620 (Harl. Soc. vi), 322-3. His second marriage, into the Wise family of Sydenham, elevated his standing socially and probably accounts for his knighthood in 1619. He probably owed his first parliamentary experience, in 1625, to his cousin, Sir Reginald Mohun†. Rolle was named only to one committee and no further interest by him in other Parliaments of the 1620s has been noted.28HP Commons 1604-1629. With his brothers he invested in property in Devon and Somerset during the 1620s and 30s, and during the latter decade he applied himself to managing his interests in Callington in Cornwall, in his capacity as lord of the manor, and was credited with a revival of the town’s fortunes.29Coventry Docquets, 550, 698; D. Gilbert, Parochial Hist. Cornw. ii. 469. These Cornish interests notwithstanding, Rolle was living at his ancestral property of Heanton Satchville by 1634.30Coventry Docquets, 170.

By the late 1630s, Rolle may have been out of sympathy with the direction of government policy. In April 1639, he sent no explanation to the privy council for his failure to send money to support the king’s journey north to confront the Scots.31Rushworth, Hist. Collns. iii. 913. He reaped his reward for his nurturing of Callington when he was returned there for what became known as the Short Parliament. He was named to no committees during the three weeks of this assembly but was vocal on 18 April against Ship Money. He complained to the House that after he had left Heanton for London to serve in this Parliament, his goods had been distrained by the high sheriff, Sir Nicholas Martyn*, for non-payment of that tax. Rolle argued that privilege of Parliament should extend to property as well as to persons, otherwise ‘it would dishearten men from the service of the country’.32Procs. Short Parl. 160. Rolle found many sympathisers among his colleagues, some calling for Martyn to be sent for as a delinquent. Others saw beyond the particular circumstances of this incident, advocating that before the House rose, they should ‘lay a brand’ on Ship Money.33Procs. Short Parl. 162.

It was probably the humiliating experience of having his goods distrained for non-payment of taxation, as well as the prior objection to the tax that was implied in the incident, that made Rolle anxious to secure a seat in what was evidently expected to be a reforming Parliament when it convened in November 1640. He had high hopes of success at Okehampton, Newport or what he had heard would be a newly enfranchised borough, Lydford (which in the event did not after all acquire the right of returning Members to Parliament).34Antony House, Carew-Pole BC/24/2/63. In the event nothing came of any of these prospects, but he certainly stood at Bere Alston in the by-election there on 19 November. He was unsuccessful there, too, and in an account to his brother-in-law, Thomas Wise*, attributed his failure firstly to threats to tenants of ‘my lord’, almost certainly meaning Mountjoy Blount, 1st earl of Newport, proprietor of Bere Ferrers. Newport was at this point allied with the opposition peers, and must have given Rolle some encouragement in his bid to secure the seat. Rolle also complained of bribery on behalf of the victor, Hugh Pollarde. Nothing daunted, however, Rolle brushed aside thoughts of complaining about the by-election, noting instead that Ashburton and Honiton had regained the parliamentary franchise, and still hoped that Lydford and Great Torrington would do so too.35Antony House, Carew-Pole BC/24/2/58, 24/2/59.

In these efforts to find a seat, Rolle sought assistance from a range of MPs he considered sympathetic, including Arthur Upton, a critic of the king, and Edward Seymour, a loyalist.36Antony House, Carew-Pole BC/24/2/63. Although Rolle himself was clearly motivated by a wish to reform the government in church and state, speaking disparagingly of attempts to defend the church hierarchy, in late 1640 he evidently entertained no perception of ‘party’ in Devon.37Antony House, Carew-Pole BC/24/2/63, 24/2/59. His struggle for a seat continued into the spring of the following year. Reports of disputed elections at Okehampton and Newport, and the continuing prospect of new seats at Lydford buoyed his hopes.38Antony House, Carew-Pole BC/24/2/69. In the end, however, it was none of these boroughs but the county seat left vacant by the death of his brother-in-law, Wise, that brought him into the House by the end of April 1641. In more than one instance, Rolle’s correspondence indicates that he was on good terms with Francis Russell, 4th earl of Bedford and his successor to the title, William Russell*, the 5th earl, but this potential patronage source did not in the end propel him into the Commons.39Antony House, Carew-Pole BC/24/2/70; Buller Pprs. 58-9.

Rolle was named to a total of 46 committees in 1641. In the first few weeks of his attendance he was included in important committees on abuses in church courts (27 Apr.) and on the bill for securing true religion, the king’s person and the rights of subjects (6 May), but also on regulating public transport on the Thames (21 May).40CJ ii. 128b, 136b, 152b. With other MPs of the south west he was named to the committee on a bill for a new church in Plymouth (20 May).41CJ ii. 151a. His rhetoric, however, was pugnacious. He took the Protestation on 3 May, and on 24 May offered to lend £500 towards disbanding the armies in the north, and was confident that ‘ere long he and the rest of the country might do this House good service’.42CJ ii. 133b; Procs. LP iv. 554. He reported that the minister and parishioners of Newington, Middlesex, had taken Parliament’s recently-promulgated protestation one morning, to be confounded in the afternoon by Allen Blaney, a lecturer, who brought in his own protestation to maintain the ceremonies of the Church of England (15 June) and who denied that the Commons had the right to make a law.43Procs. LP v. 170, 183, 172, 191. On 30 July Rolle spoke again on the protestation and how it was being opposed by the bishops, and was named that day to the committee charged with bring in impeachments of members of the episcopate.44Procs. LP vi. 150; CJ ii. 230b.

Rolle was involved on 26 and 28 June in conferences with the Lords on the king’s planned journey to Scotland and on propositions brought in by John Pym*. The committee of 28 July on what expedient for running the country should be adopted if the king left England for Scotland was another body dominated by the ‘junto’, towards which Rolle was evidently sympathetic at this juncture. Unlike the Devon lawyer, John Maynard*, Rolle took the army plot very seriously, regarding it as aimed not only against Parliament but also against the person of the king.45Procs. LP vi. 383. His involvement in the committee set up on 17 July to secure the transfer of property of the late 4th earl of Bedford to his widow and children denotes his regional allegiance to the Russell family, an association which included Pym, Oliver St John and other reformers.46CJ ii. 189b, 190b, 215a, 227a. A significant ally of Rolle’s was Sir Walter Erle, a political associate of William Strode I. It was Rolle who moved that Erle might be released from attending the House, owing to illness (10 Aug.).47Procs. LP vi. 335. A number of others were excused similarly by Rolle, and if these favours are a token of friendship then Rolle was close to Sir John Bampfylde, Francis Buller I and Sir Richard Buller and, more surprisingly, Sir Bevill Grenvile and Richard Shuckburgh.48Procs. LP vi. 6, 352; PJ i. 483, 491, 515. Erle and Rolle sat on 14 committees together in 1641. On 17 June they were both named to a committee charged with the revisionist task of reconsidering a clause that had crept into copies of the Petition of Right that compromised the levying of tonnage and poundage, and Rolle joined Pym, Erle, Strode and others on 3 December to warn the Lords of the superiority of the Commons as an elected body

representative ... of the whole kingdom, and their lordships being but as particular persons, and coming to parliament in a particular capacity ... if they shall not be pleased to consent to the passing of those acts, and others necessary to the preservation and safety of the kingdom, that then this House, together with such of the Lords that are more sensible of the safety of the kingdom, may join together and represent the same unto his majesty.49CJ ii. 178b, 330b.

As in London the sense of crisis deepened, Rolle was involved in a number of efforts to address the immediate issues facing Parliament, such as the investigation into whether armed men were to be sent to Westminster (13 Dec.), which prefigured the attempted arrest of the Five Members. The response of the lord mayor of London to the London petition, the Grand Remonstrance, was hostile, and the Commons set up a committee to investigate the treatment meted out to the petitioners by the authorities. With Erle, Strode and Sir Robert Cooke, Rolle in turn questioned the king’s serjeants, Sir Ralph Whitfield and John Glanville* on the conduct of their examinations of citizens and their leading questions about rumours of a rising in the capital (20 Dec.), an interview that was at least faintly hostile to the lawyers.50CJ ii. 340a, 350a; D’Ewes (C), 320.

Rolle’s experience of Ship Money in 1640 made him a natural participant in the enquiry into how much of that tax remained in the hands of sheriffs (27 Dec. 1641).51CJ ii. 357b. He was hostile to the seven Catholic priests condemned in December 1641, with Sir Arthur Hesilrige leading the yeas into a division in support of executing them, a motion lost by 11 votes (20 Dec.).52CJ ii. 339b; D’Ewes (C), 273-4. With John Hampden, Oliver Cromwell, Strode and St John he considered a petition from Gray’s Inn lawyers against papists (18 Feb. 1642).53CJ ii. 440a. The rise of popery was of course linked to the problem of Ireland and specifically the rising there. Rolle was included in committees on the relief of Protestants in Ireland (20 Dec.1641), on the province of Munster (27 Dec.) and after the king’s attempt on the Five Members (4 Jan. 1642) he was included with Erle in the committee of safety at the Guildhall (later adjourned to Grocers’ Hall) which explicitly included the Irish emergency in its brief. Again with Erle he was among the additions to the committee on collecting contributions from Members themselves towards the relief of distressed Protestants of Ireland (15 Jan.), and he was one of those investigating the delays in sending food supplies and an expeditionary force across the Irish Sea (24 Jan. 1642).54CJ ii. 350a, 357b, 369a, 381b, 385a, 391a, 391b. He himself was a subscriber to the Irish Adventure, paying in the considerable sum of £1000.55Rushworth, Hist. Collns. iv. 564.

Through the early months of 1642 the twin themes of Ireland and popery evidently loomed large in Rolle’s thinking. He, Sir Simonds D’Ewes and Sir Henry Vane I searched through seized correspondence on 13 January, only to find it innocuous, and a week he and D’Ewes were among those reviving an August 1641 ordinance on disarming papists.56D’Ewes (C), 53, 121; CJ ii. 387a. He helped promote Sir Faithful Fortescue, of a Devon family, for service in the expeditionary force to Ireland (28 Jan.), reported news (erroneous, as it turned out) that the port of Youghal had fallen to the rebels (5 Feb.) and brought news on 22 February of a ship detained in Clovelly, bound from Dunkirk to Waterford, crewed by Catholics and carrying muskets and gunpowder.57CJ ii. 448a; D’Ewes (C), 208, 283, 444-5. The importance he invested in this minor incident suggests the degree of alarm not only he but others in the west country felt in 1642 about the Irish rising, now uppermost in people’s minds but not even mentioned in the anti-popish petition which Rolle introduced from Devon in January.58D’Ewes (C), 145; The Petition of the Knights, Gentlemen and Yeomanry of ... Devonshire (1642, E.181.27). He was deeply hostile to Sir Edward Dering*, whose published collection of speeches denouncing the Grand Remonstrance brought upon him the wrath of the Commons. Rolle’s proposed punishment of Dering (2 Feb.), by book-burning, imprisonment in the Tower and a life-long ban from ever sitting in Parliament again, was adopted by the House.59D’Ewes (C), 262.

Between late February and mid-June 1642 Rolle was named to 16 committees with the Lords on various aspects of the drift towards armed conflict, including the defiance of the king by Sir John Hotham* at Hull, on the defence of the kingdom and on securing a loan for Parliament by the merchant strangers.60CJ ii. 450b, 452b, 461a, 484a, 486a, 501b, 512b, 525b, 550b, 562a, 563a, 574a, 589a, 617b, 623a, 635b. The merchant strangers resisted, pleading the old custom of exemption, but Rolle was active in scouring around for other sources of money. He approached the City committee for the Irish Adventure to plead for spare cash for Ireland (16 May) and joined with the Lords to promote Parliament’s new Propositions for contributions (10 June).61CJ ii. 499a, 572b, 617b. He was busy in military preparations that were couched in terms of defence. He was named to committees involved in moving the Yorkshire powder magazine from Hull (18 May), on trying to clear troops away from Chester to Ireland (27 May), on trying to stop soldiers from joining the king at York (17 June); and in defence of his own region moved for a supply of gunpowder for Devon and with John Waddon* gave consideration to the affairs of Plymouth (21 July).62CJ ii. 577a, 588b, 630a, 683b; PJ ii. 112. On 10 June Rolle offered to set out 12 cavalry horses for Parliament’s cause, but he was concerned that his county and a number of others was over-burdened by the bill to raise £400,000 by assessments. He failed to persuade the House of the merits of his case, and his bill to ameliorate the assessments fell (8 Apr.).63PJ ii. 141, iii. 466; CJ ii. 517b. His willingness to plead specially for Devon people and causes was on display again on 12 July, when on that occasion he argued the case of the absent Sir Thomas Hele, and was reproved sharply by William Strode I, who condemned Rolle’s arguments as a bad precedent.64PJ iii. 201.

In June 1642, Rolle informed the House of seditious sermons preached at the Temple church by Hugh Cressy, former chaplain to Thomas Wentworth†, 1st earl of Strafford, the latest in a number of cases involving London parish affairs that had attracted Rolle’s attention since June 1641.65PJ iii. 72; CJ ii. 177b, 277a, 396a, 517a; Procs. LP v. 170. On 21 July, he was named to the committee on Plymouth affairs and also moved that care be given to the menace of piracy off the western coasts by ‘Turks’, presumably from north African ports. Later that day Francis Rous moved that Rolle be given leave of absence on grounds of ill health.66PJ iii. 243, 245. He left Westminster for Devon, building the county militia there, of which he was named by Parliament a deputy lieutenant.67Antony House, Carew-Pole PC/G4/9/21. By August 1642, Rolle had his own regiment, and on the 22nd of that month, the royalist Arthur Bassett, from Great Torrington, called fruitlessly upon Rolle to disband. 68Devon and Cornw. N. and Q, xxxv. 256; HMC Portland, i. 54. He was at Heanton in September, passing on military intelligence from the 5th earl of Bedford, and at the end of the month declined a plea from Sir Richard Buller* and other Cornish parliamentarians to send his regiment, pleading that any resolution to leave Devon had to be taken by the deputy lieutenants as a whole. He did, however join with Sir John Northcote* and others to write to the Speaker, outlining the threat to Parliament’s grip on Devon from the Cornish royalists (21 Oct.).69Buller Pprs. 58-9, 73; CJ ii. 818a.

As Northcote, Rolle and his former adversary Sir Nicholas Martyn remained in Devon to organise a parliamentarian military presence there, on 7 December Parliament issued an order clearing them from the king’s declaration that they were traitors.70Harl. 164, ff. 247, 267v; LJ v. 478a; HMC Portland, i. 77. In mid-January 1643 Rolle invited Robert Bennett* to take a command in his regiment, which had been augmented by Dutch officers brought by Sir John Northcote from London.71Devon and Cornw. N and Q, xxxv. 257. He had returned to Westminster briefly by 4 April, to be named to a committee that supervised Edmund Prideaux I in their effort to disengage the Devon parliamentarians from their treaty with the royalists of Cornwall.72CJ iii. 29a. He, Henry Grey*, 1st earl of Stamford, and Northcote wrote the declaration denouncing the treaty and its ‘subtle devises of pretended’ peace (16 Apr.).73Som. RO, DD WO56/6/59. But he was back in the field in May, when his regiment was part of the parliamentarian force that suffered defeat at Stratton (16 May). 74Devon and Cornw. N and Q, xxxv. 257. After this setback, Rolle may have made his way to London, where on 16 August a Rolle whose forename is no longer evident was included in a committee on transition arrangements in the House in the event of an adjournment.75CJ iii. 206b. But if this was Sir Samuel, it was a brief visit to the capital, and he is not recorded as having sat at Westminster again until 1 August 1644.76CJ iii. 575a.

Rolle was in Exeter when it surrendered to Prince Maurice in September 1643, along with Sir John Bampfylde, Sir John Northcote and Sir Nicholas Martyn.77M. Stoyle, From Deliverance to Destruction (Exeter, 1996), 202. Pardons were issued to him and to his son Robert Rolle* at Oxford in February 1644 under the king’s seals, but it is unclear whether either accepted them.78Docquets of Letters Patent ed. Black, 149, 151. Rolle evidently had to satisfy a Commons committee before he was re-admitted in August, which must suggest at least that he was examined about his standing with the royalists.79CJ iii. 575a. On his return, he seems to have moved cautiously, among his friends. He was named to the committee on the ordnance office, of which Erle was lieutenant (5 Aug.), to one on managing that office (26 Aug.) and to another on a petition from the London committee of Adventurers to Ireland, an old interest of Rolle’s.80CJ iii. 580b, 599b, 607a. Between his readmission and the end of 1644 he was named to 18 committees, some picking up former themes that interested him. These included raising money for a brigade not for the west but for the City of London (13 Sept.) and reducing the costs of military fortifications around the capital.81CJ iii. 626a, 659a, 676a. Other aspects of military matters that caught his attention were on conflicts between county committees and local commanders (3 Sept.), on the problems of Thames ship-owners whose vessels had been placed at the disposal of Parliament’s navy (12 Dec.) and on military movements in Hampshire (28 Jan. 1645).82CJ iii. 617a, 722a; iv. 33b.

Rolle took the Covenant on 29 January 1645, and the following month was included in committees on raising funds for the New Model army and for recruiting to that force.83CJ iv. 35b, 52a. When Sir Philip Stapilton took to the Lords a message to ask them to hasten approval of the New Model’s officer list, Rolle, John Waddon and Sir Edmund Fowell were the Devon men who went with him (6 Mar.), and four days later he was part of the delegation to the London common council seeking funds.84CJ iv. 71b, 73b. He was added to the committee for settling the debts of the late John Pym on 4 March, but his own financial problems were addressed on 3 June when he was among those awarded the sum of £4 a week in recognition of the depletion of his estate through wartime damage.85CJ iv. 69a, 161a. Rolle seems to have found acceptable the sequestration and sale of delinquents’ estates. On 18 April he was called to work on an ordinance for paying officials by selling royalists’ estates, and on 28 July initiated a debate on some ‘discoveries’ of estates in the west which when sold would fund an official’s arrears and the general cause of defeating the king’s forces there. He was included in the committee working on a general ordinance for selling the estates of papists and ‘delinquents’ (31 July), and when it passed the Houses he was one of the commissioners for sales named in the legislation (19 Aug.).86CJ iv. 115b, 221b, 225a, 246a. On 6 June he was named as a commissioner for the excise, a notoriously divisive and controversial tax.

On 25 July Rolle was included in a committee with the Westminster Assembly which was required to send letters to county committees asking them to nominate laymen and ministers for the proposed new Presbyterian system of church government. There seems no doubt that in religion Rolle was sympathetic to Presbyterianism.87CJ iv. 218a. Probably in his capacity as a member of the committee for the Western Association, Rolle signed a ‘brief’ addressed to corporate bodies on behalf of Taunton after the siege there had been lifted.88Fairfax Corresp. ed. Bell, i. 219-20. As the New Model pushed into the south west after the fall of Bristol in September, Rolle (with Sir John Bampfylde, John Ashe and Anthony Nicoll) was required to attend Sir Thomas Fairfax* and advise him on affairs in the region.89CJ iv. 292b, 293a. On 29 September 1645 with other MPs from Dorset, Devon and Cornwall Rolle was asked to go to the south west, and his presence in the House was not recorded again until the following June.90CJ iv. 440a. Part of the task that lay before the committee sent down to these counties was to organise by-elections in the many vacant seats, but this proved a difficult assignment. During this period of absence from the House, Rolle returned to his complaints of the burden of war. It was not the heavy charge of the assessments that concerned him on this occasion, but the imposition of quartering soldiers, which revealed him to be less than enthusiastic about what the presence of the New Model would mean for his county. As John Ashe* noted sardonically on 10 November, ‘he that was so eager to have the army come into Devon is now as willing to be discharged of them, at least of the charge and burden of them’.91Bodl. Nalson V, f. 29.

Rolle had returned to Westminster by 3 June 1646, when he was named a commissioner for judging scandalous offences in the fledgling Presbyterian system.92CJ iv. 563a. Despite an evident tailing off in his level of activity in the Commons, he was included in some important committees in the autumn of 1646. He was once more asked to join a committee to the City in search of a loan, probably intended as a payment to the departing Scottish army (5 Sept.), accompanied as so often before by Sir Walter Erle. With the Lords and the Scots commissioners he was one of the Commons committee (24 Sept.) discussing the fate of the king after the Scots handed him over to Parliament.93CJ iv. 663a, 675a. On 10 October he was named to the committee on the terms and conditions of employment of major-generals (commanders of forces independent of the New Model), which would have included Edward Massie*, commander of the western brigade, within its purview.94CJ iv. 689b. He helped draft instructions for county committees in pursuit of delinquents’ estates to confiscate (29 Oct.) and worked on ordinances for the sale of the lands of John Paulet, 5th marquess of Winchester (30 Oct.) and to establish a new committee at Goldsmiths’ Hall for compounding with delinquents (10 Dec.).95CJ iv. 708a, 710b; v. 8b.

Rolle’s final committee nomination, on 22 March 1647, was to work on an ordinance for keeping royalist ministers out of church livings.96CJ v. 119b. He was probably already ill by this point, as he drew up his will on 2 March. In 1645 he had settled £1000 each on his four younger sons, and left a bequest of a further £1000 to his daughter. Rolle’s puritan punctiliousness is visible in his stipulation that no money of his should be lent at interest.97PROB11/204/39. Rolle’s illness distanced him from the political crisis of the summer of 1647. He was the kind of Presbyterian western MP that a vote of 5 July was aimed against, and when the Independents managed to add a rider to an ordinance prohibiting those who had aided the king which extended the ban to those who had sued the king for pardon, John Rushworth* thought this would include Rolle and Bampfylde.98CJ v. 233b; Fairfax Corresp. ed. Bell, i. 367-8; Underdown, Pride’s Purge, 82. It seems unlikely in fact that Rolle was attending Parliament by this point. On 9 October he was excused as sick at a call of the House.99CJ v. 329b. He died in December and was buried at Petrockstow on the 7th of that month. His son Robert Rolle became politically active in the 1650s, but followed the pattern of many of the south-western gentry in indicating a sympathy for the cause of monarchy.