MATHEW, Roger (c.1576-1646), of Dartmouth, Devon.

Roger Mathew’s ancestry has not been established, but it seems likely that he was descended from the family of that name settled at Berry Pomeroy, not far from Dartmouth, where Roger himself held property.22Devon Muster Roll, 1569, 223; Devon Taxes, 60. His background was the yeoman or husbandman class of farmers in the South Hams, but he was apprenticed at Dartmouth to one of the overseas merchants there, perhaps Robert Martin, whose daughter Mathew eventually married. By 1601 Mathew had finished his apprenticeship and was included in the muster book of those who could be called upon for militia duty, a sign of his recent independence.23Devon RO, DD 61642. In 1599 he married for the first time, but by about 1605, however, he was living temporarily in Alicante, on the Mediterranean coast of Spain. He lodged there in the house of a merchant from Valencia, learning the ropes of the Spanish markets in which he was to trade.24HCA13/48/215. By 1610 Mathew had returned to Dartmouth, and his name appears from that time among the rate-payers of the borough.25Devon RO, DD 16198, 61726, 61789. Joining the French Company of London in 1611 placed him among the minority of Devon merchants, who generally strove to distinguish their separate identity and interests from those of the London merchants.26Devon RO, SM 1989, f. 3; Select Charters, ed. Carr, 66.

The core of Mathew’s business was trade with the Spanish ports, among them Malaga and Bilbao, but also with Portuguese seaports such as Lisbon and French ones such as Morlaix and St Malo.27Devon RO, DD 62056B; DD 62038. The staples of this trade were re-exports of commodities such as Spanish iron from Bilbao, with miscellaneous cargoes sent coast-wise to ports such as Topsham, which serviced Exeter.28E190/942/7; E190/950/1. Added to this mix were the Newfoundland fisheries, in which Mathew invested significantly, bringing back ‘train oil’ (whale oil) and fish for re-export to France and Spain. Throughout his career, Mathew shared the anxieties of his fellow merchants over the insecurity from piracy of the seas their ships navigated, and by 1631 he had also come to fear encroachments by Londoners upon their trade.29SP16/61/117; SP16/149/26; SP16/198/59. The contributions he made towards local initiatives against pirates in the early 1620s and the letters of marque he was granted in 1628-9 on two ships are evidence of the defensive strategy the merchants adopted against predators.30Devon RO, DD 62056A, 62056B; CSP Dom. 1628-9, pp. 286, 304, 439.

By the early 1620s Mathew was among the wealthiest citizens of Dartmouth, heading tax and rate lists of the borough.31Devon RO, DD 61943, 62215, 62678. He progressed along Dartmouth’s cursus honorum in a predictable way, serving his first term as mayor in 1623-4. By this time he had already embarked on his parliamentary career. He emerged in the 1626 Parliament as an active spokesman for his constituents on matters relating to trade and piracy, opposing the embargo on trade with France and appealing for relief from the burden of discharged soldiers wandering the South Hams after the abortive Cadiz expedition. His preoccupations in the 1628 Parliament were again relating to commerce and the protection of the commercial fleet.32HP Commons, 1604-29. Mathew was aligned with the opposition in the Commons by the end of this Parliament. In May 1629 he visited the Tower of London purposely to ask where Sir John Eliot† was housed, and after pausing to ‘gape up’ to the window of Benjamin Valentine* was ejected by one of the warders. Other west country visitors on a similar mission to visit those in the Tower after the turbulent end of the 1628 Parliament were the Dorset puritan ministers, John White and Ferdinando Nicholls.33SP16/142/52.

Mathew’s own religious outlook is hard to assess. It would be easy to assume that he shared the puritanism of White and Nicholls. In 1631 he was a prominent contributor to the fund to rebuild the tower of St Saviour’s church in Dartmouth, and he supported the lecturer, Anthony Harford, when he arrived in 1634. The survival in the refurbished St Saviour’s of pre-reformation church furniture and fittings may suggest limits to his enthusiasm for church reform, however, and there is no suggestion that during the 1630s he was alienated from the Church of England: his may be the initials on two tankards presented to the church during his third mayoral term.34Pevsner, Buildings of England: South Devon (1952), 113-4. Mathew was undoubtedly devoted to the political and religious interests of Dartmouth, whatever he conceived them to be. He continued to represent Dartmouth’s concerns to the government throughout the king’s personal rule. In January 1634, having won the support of the Devon justices of the peace, he and Edmund Fowell* sought to persuade the privy council that to confine trade to English ships would be damaging to the interests of the western merchants. After much waiting on the council and on the masters of Trinity House, Mathews and Fowell found themselves having to petition to be allowed home, each anxious to attend his own business in Devon.35PC2/43, p. 424; SP16/258/34; CSP Dom. 1633-4, pp. 532-3.

Mathew was serving his third term as mayor when the elections for the first Parliament of 1640 were held, and was therefore ineligible to stand. While the Short Parliament was in session, he wrote as mayor to John Upton I* on the subject of privy council letters requiring 2,000 soldiers, presumably for the bishops’ wars, because Mathew and the Dartmouth corporation felt the demands to be an unfair burden.36Aston’s Diary, 87. When Mathew was returned as burgess for Dartmouth, to serve with Upton in the Long Parliament, it was because he was one of the borough’s most senior freemen and councillors. He was relatively slow to make a mark at Westminster. Not until 29 January 1641 was he named to a committee, on the bill for reforming the office of clerk of the market.37CJ ii. 75a. He was included in committees on post office reform and on a bill to enable the heirs of Thomas Finch, 2nd earl of Winchilsea, to sell his lands, a bill which included six other Members for Devon seats (10 Feb., 27 Feb.).38CJ ii. 82a, 94a. Mathew himself successfully proposed on 16 April that the matter of a cargo of tobacco detained by the customs commissioners should be referred to the committee on the customs, evidently with a view to restoring the tobacco to its rightful owners.39Procs. LP iii. 580-1.

Mathew took the Protestation on 3 May, and was named to a further 14 committees during the rest of 1641. Most of these were on matters of trade. They included bills on recruiting to the navy (10 May), river transport on the Thames (21 May), to investigate the patent on wine that added a surcharge of 40s per tun (26 May) and the bill on the making of gunpowder (21 July).40CJ ii. 133a, 141b, 152b, 157a, 219b. In an echo of his own leading part in the refurbishment of one of the Dartmouth churches, he was active in promoting the bill for a new church in Plymouth, calling for it to be read a second time (20 May).41Procs. LP iv. 485. Further echoes of Mathew’s earlier career came with his hostility to the London-based Merchant Adventurers. When they offered £150,000 towards paying off the Scots army in the north, Mathew opportunistically argued in a speech on 28 May that their trading privileges should be abolished and trade opened up. He believed that this deregulation would lead to a more generous donation – £200,000, he thought – than that offered by the Merchant Adventurers. He was added on 17 June to a committee charged with summoning the Merchant Adventurers, considering the possibility of recognising Spanish currency in England, and the merits of inviting loans from the merchant community with the offer of a 10 per cent return. His input on the committees to review the privileges of the Merchant Adventurers (14 July) must have been hostile to that Company.42Procs. LP iv. 625; CJ ii. 178a, 210b.

There is no trace of Mathew in the Journal of the Long Parliament between 24 July and 1 November 1641, but nor is there any record of his having received leave to go home. He was more visible during November. He was among a small group of MPs added to a committee to consider the recent poll tax (1 Nov.) and the following day was one of seven Members named to form a committee on piracy emanating from north Africa, a topic dear to Mathew’s heart for over 20 years.43CJ ii. 300a, 302b. On 10 November he took the initiative in moving that the bill on piracy should be progressed the following day, and was presumably content with the act that was passed soon afterwards.44D’Ewes (C), 117; SR v. 134-5. Mathew’s views on Spanish currency became clearer the following week. A proposal had come from a group of merchants that Spanish coinage could be taken to Ireland to make good the shortage of English money. In the committee formed to consider this, Mathew was hostile to the idea. He argued that Spanish currency was worth 8 per cent less than sterling, and would find its way to France rather than back to England. In the event, his colleagues on the committee took a different view and it was ordered that foreign coin should be sent to Ireland.45CJ ii. 308b; D’Ewes (C), 114-5.

After the outbreak of the rebellion in Ireland in October 1641, naval affairs figured strongly among Mathew’s interests. He was included in the committee to confer with naval officers on setting out the fleet for the forthcoming summer (14 Jan. 1642), which evolved into the ‘committee for the navy’ and, in August, into the Committee of Navy and Customs.46Supra, ‘Committee of Navy and Customs’; CJ ii. 378b, 402b. He was well placed to receive reports from his home district on shipping movements, on 8 February reading out to the House information on Irish ships at Dartmouth. An order was sent back under Mathew’s hand for the ships to be detained, and the information was passed on to the committee of both Houses for Irish affairs.47PJ i. 319; CJ ii. 420a. Like so many of his colleagues in the House, by this time Mathew was preoccupied with matters of security. He moved on 11 February that Denzil Holles* should be made lord lieutenant of Bristol, which passed the House.48PJ i. 351. Only weeks earlier, Holles had been one of the Five Members pursued by the king, so his nomination was a direct challenge to the government. There were of course older associations between Mathew and champions of the Commons. In 1629, Holles had taken one arm of the Speaker to hold him in his chair; Benjamin Valentine, whom Mathew had tried to visit in the Tower at that time, had had hold of the other. But to set against this hint of continuity in Mathew with his radical days of the 1620s, the following month came an intervention from him that suggested once more that he was far from being an out-and-out radical reformer. It was he who moved that Robert Trelawny*, a Plymouth merchant, be sent to the Tower during the pleasure of the House, rather than be disabled from sitting. This was support for a lesser punishment. Whether Mathew was moved by local loyalties, having worked with Trelawny on the bill for the new Plymouth church, is not known, but he was on the losing side of the debate, as Trelawny was expelled.49PJ ii 18. Mathew was named to the committee on 25 January to consider how to deal with the people trying to visit those in gaol for plotting against Parliament; he must presumably have been aware of the ironies echoing down from his 1629 days.50CJ ii. 396a.

Beyond matters of domestic security, Mathew was anxious about the situation in Ireland. His anxiety was shared by many in the west country, a region which would feel the brunt of any invasion of England from across the Irish Sea. On 5 March 1642 he was included in the committee on the bill for suppressing the rising, later in another for considering proposals from the merchant community for funding the punitive expedition (14 May) and was added to the committee that considered a petition from the Irish Protestants (10 Aug).51CJ ii. 468b, 571b, 713a. He evidently swallowed his doubts about the wisdom of importing Spanish coinage into Ireland, as he was one of only five Members asked to negotiate with the merchants involved in the proposal (20 May).52CJ ii. 580b. He was a keen supporter of the Irish Adventure. No doubt partly at his instigation, Dartmouth shared his enthusiasm for the clause by which contributions towards the fund for the army to be sent to Ireland would be rewarded with allocations of land there after the revolt had been quelled: in all, 144 people there subscribed, including not only Mathew but also his daughter. On 30 May, Mathew delivered to the London treasurers a quarter of the £2,668 raised.53SP63/297/256, 259, 285. Two months later, the House authorized him to encourage subscriptions and donations of plate to London, but by this time, preparations were under way for conflict in England.54CJ ii. 743a. On 10 June, Mathew promised to bring in a horse and £50 in plate or money for Parliament’s cause.55PJ iii. 472.

It was natural that Mathew should play a significant part in committees considering mercantile affairs. As a western merchant largely excluded from the London monopoly companies, he would have been suspicious of the part played by the Turkey Company in the diminished sales in Turkey of Suffolk cloth (14 Feb. 1642), and would have continued to be wary of the Merchant Adventurers and their offer of a loan (20 May). Discussions with the Merchant Adventurers on the advancement of trade (12 July) would have been considered satisfactory by Mathew only in the event of their willingness to surrender some of their privileges.56CJ ii. 429b, 580b, 666b. The views of the unchartered merchant strangers of Dover (22 Mar.) would have been of more interest to him.57CJ ii. 491b. Some measure of the respect accorded Mathew by his colleagues may be gained from his inclusion in a committee of only six merchants charged with revising the book of rates for the customs (17 Mar.).58CJ ii. 483a, 491b.

After the civil war had ended, Mathew told the Goldsmiths’ Hall Committee that on the outbreak of the war, two of his sons took up arms for Parliament in the garrisons of Plymouth and Poole, and later transferred to the New Model.59SP23/181/37. As the summer of 1642 wore on, Mathew appeared not to waver in his support for the parliamentary cause. He was included on the important Committee for Irish Affairs on 3 September, and with fellow-Devonians Sir Edmund Fowell* and John Waddon* he was named (16 Sept.) to the committee trying to identify the MPs and others who had incited the king to war: in other words a body trying to root out royalists.60CJ ii. 750b, 769a. On 29 September he was required to report to the Commons on an Irish ship seized at Wexford, and on 5 October was added to a committee to raise dragoons.61CJ ii. 787b, 795b. On the 7th, he was given leave to return to Dartmouth, and never came back to Westminster.62CJ ii. 798a.

Dartmouth was at the outset of the civil war a parliamentarian town. There seems no reason to doubt Mathew’s later testimony that he funded two foot soldiers and two cavalrymen for Parliament. A ship of Mathew’s, Wolf, was fitted out for defensive purposes by Dartmouth corporation in the early stages of the war.63Devon RO, DD 62705. In the autumn of 1642, Mathew supported the change to the civic culture of the town that restricted feasting, in an explicit response to the values being promoted by Parliament.64Devon RO, SM 2004. But when on 17 June 1643, the Westminster Parliament sent for Mathew, he failed to respond to the summons.65CJ iii. 133b. Travel to London would have been very difficult by land, as the royalist forces advanced through the south west, but it is hard to see why he could not have sent a message of reassurance by sea. While Dartmouth endured the siege by Edward Seymour* and Sir Edmund Fortescue, holding commissions from Prince Maurice, Mathew, again on his own later testimony, was urging the townspeople to resist.66SP23/181/37. He said that when Maurice called on the town to surrender, Mathew argued for leaving ‘success to divine providence, for which he was much hated and detested by the king’s party'.67SP23/181, p. 46.

After Dartmouth had fallen to Maurice in October 1643, Mathew claimed he led a double life in the town, continuing to serve as a senior member of the corporation alongside the royalist military administration, but helping parliamentarian sympathisers where and when he could. He provided necessities for the parliamentarians in the town gaol, and hid a former mayor, John Bulley, from patrolling royalist soldiers.68SP23/181, p. 47. In the context of his continuing, but compromised, public service in royalist Dartmouth, Mathew’s departure for the Oxford Parliament in January 1644 is not inexplicable. As he said himself, he went because of its potential, as he saw it, for peace, and because the corporation advised him to go.69SP23/181/37. He may also have been overawed by the military governor, Edward Seymour*, who attended Oxford as knight of the shire, and whose estates dominated Berry Pomeroy, Mathew’s likely place of origin. At Oxford, with Seymour, Mathew signed the letter to Robert Devereux, 3rd earl of Essex, suing for peace.70Names of the Lords and Commons Assembled (1644), 7 (E.32.3). Inevitably, this threatened to make Mathew persona non grata at Westminster, but when many of his Oxford colleagues were disabled from sitting in Westminster any longer, Mathew’s case was briefly respited, indicating that doubts lingered in some quarters over his motives and behaviour.71CJ iii. 374a. By 5 February 1644, however, these doubts had been dispelled, and Mathew was disabled from taking his seat again.72CJ iii. 374a, 389b.

After his service at Oxford, Mathew returned to Dartmouth, to resume his civic career there. He signed local by-laws in April 1645, and until January 1646, when Dartmouth fell to Sir Thomas Fairfax*, must have enjoyed a life in the town that was close to normal. Upon the occupation of the New Model, he was captured and sent to the Tower on the order of Parliament. On 29 January, he was made to kneel before the Speaker to hear the ‘foulness and horridness’ of his wartime conduct laid before him.73CJ iv. 421b. He was returned to the Tower, but his case was put in the hands of John Stephens*, as some Members accepted that his sole offence was his attendance at Oxford.74SP23/181/39. Mathew was released on 9 April, after somewhat more than two months’ confinement.75SP23/3/75. Thereafter, Mathew spent his remaining months in London, negotiating with the Goldsmiths’ Hall Committee over his fine as a delinquent, and trying to persuade them of his true allegiance. He was fined £1,000, reduced on appeal to just over £666, but the fine remained unpaid in July 1649. He died in London in the summer, and was buried at St Margaret Westminster on 14 July 1646. Mathew had made his will the previous November, while Dartmouth was still a royalist garrison. It contains much evidence of Mathew’s local loyalties, but no significant hint of his political outlook beyond a concern that his legatees should inherit something in Ireland as repayment for his Adventure investment of 1642. Two of his sons, perhaps those who had served with the New Model, went to the West Indies in the late 1640s, one dying there by 1653.76SP23/226/714. None of Mathew’s descendants is known to have sat in later Parliaments.