Family and Education

1st s. of Richard Rogers of Bryanston by his 1st w. Cecilia, da. of Andrew Luttrell of Dunster Castle, Som.; bro. of John I. educ. Oxf. BA 1567; I. Temple 1568. m. (1) da. and coh. of Adrian Poynings, s.p.; (2) Lady Mary Seymour, da. of Edward, Duke of Somerset, s.p.

Offices Held

J.p. Dorset from c.1577, rem. 1587, rest. by 1592/3; duchy of Lancaster steward of Kingston Lacy, Dorset 1579-25 May 1598.1

Biography

Rogers went to the Inner Temple in the same year that his uncle, Matthew Ewens, was admitted to the Middle Temple. Ewens became counsel to the 3rd Earl of Huntingdon, the parliamentary patron of Christchurch, which accounts for Rogers’s return in 1571. By 1597 the 3rd Earl was dead, but Rogers owned property in the borough and presumably brought about his own return. He succeeded his father-in-law Sir Adrian Poynings as steward at Kingston Lacy, the office being conveyed to him by Lord Mountjoy. The Rogers family controlled parliamentary returns at Wareham, the two seats being taken by Andrew and his brother John in 1584, and his family standing and marriage connexions were sufficient to gain him two elections as knight of the shire. His father was sheriff at the time when the election writ was issued for the 1589 Parliament, 15 Sept. 1588. Rogers was in good odour at this period. The previous month he had been described as ‘a gentleman of good account in these parts’ when he had been given the command of a contingent of soldiers sent from Dorset to join the forces assembled at Tilbury against a probable Spanish invasion at the time of the Armada.

Apart from a reference to his implication in the 1577 piracy inquiry in Dorset, most of the early references to Rogers show him acting as intermediary in the dispute between his father and the Earl of Hertford, father of Lord Beauchamp, who had married Andrew Rogers’s sister Honora against the Earl’s strong opposition. At the end of 1581 Rogers visited the Earl’s seat at Tottenham, Wiltshire, where he denied that he had favoured the marriage. In 1587, Lady Mary, Rogers’s wiff, wrote to Burghley from Camberwell, protesting about the removal of her husband from the Dorset commission of the peace, which she ascribed to ‘his absence from the county ... greatly against his will’, which in turn had been caused by her ‘attendance upon her Grace’. Feeling that her own honour and her husband’s ‘reputation and credit’ were at stake, she asked Burghley to write to the lord chancellor. It is plain from a postscript that she feared her father-in-law would hold her responsible for Andrew’s removal. Relations between them were probably strained: in 1600, after Andrew’s death, Lady Mary and her brother the Earl had a dispute with Sir Richard Rogers about her jointure.2

The date of Rogers’s death s.p. and v.p. is not known: it must have occurred soon after February 1599, when the Dowager Lady Russell wrote to her nephew Sir Robert Cecil asking for a knighthood for him. The acrimonious correspondence between Sir Richard Rogers and the Earl of Hertford over Lady Mary Rogers’s jointure had clearly been going on for some time in February 1601. This argues against the only recorded date of death so far discovered (1 Dec. 1601).3

Ref Volumes: 1558-1603

Author: P. W. Hasler

Notes

• 1. Roberts thesis; Vis. Dorset (Harl. Soc. xx), 79; Somerville, Duchy, i. 630; E133/8/1270.
• 2. R. Lloyd, Dorset Elizabethans, 18; HMC Bath, iv 191-3; Vis. Dorset, loc. cit.; Hutchins, Dorset, i. 250; Lansd. 53, f. 112; HMC Hatfield, ix. 28.
• 3. HMC Hatfield, ix. 28; Sales of Wards (Som. Rec. Soc. lxvii), 197.