ROBERTS, Gabriel (b.c.1665), of Ampthill, Beds.

Gabriel Roberts, of a Beaumaris family, was the grandson of Lewis Roberts of the East India Company, merchant and writer, and nephew of Sir Gabriel Roberts, deputy governor of the Levant Company, who died in 1715, aged 85. Having entered the East India Company’s service as a writer, he arrived at Fort St. George in June 1683.1H. D. Love, Vestiges of Old Madras, i. 483; Lipscomb, Bucks. iii. 132; Recs. of Ft. St. George, Diary and Consultation Bk. 1688, p. 109. Returning to England in he was again sent out in 1701, taking his seat as second of council to Governor Thomas Pitt on 11 June 1702. When Pitt left India in October 1709, Roberts resigned his post at Fort St. David but did not himself leave for England till 1711.2Diary and Consultation Bk. 1689, p. 17; 1702, p. 48; Recs. of Ft. St. George, Despatches from England, 1701-6, p. 47; Despatches to England, 1702-11, pp. 8, 113, 117, 143. He appears to have acquired a property at Ampthill belonging to the Bruces, by whom he was returned as a Tory at Marlborough in 1713. He lost his seat there at the general election of 1715, but recovered it on petition in May 1717. He now supported the Administration, voting for the repeal of the Occasional Conformity and Schism Acts and the peerage bill, on which he was classed as ‘doubtful,’ to be spoken to by Sunderland. Re-elected in 1722 for Marlborough, he transferred in 1727 to Chippenham, voting with the Opposition on the arrears of the civil list in 1729 but thereafter with the Government. He did not stand again and the date of his death is not known. His son was not John Roberts, Henry Pelham’s secretary, as suggested in the DNB, but Philip, the father of Wenman Coke, ancestor of the earls of Leicester.