Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 49.djvu/123

  which were threatening a schism among German Lutherans. By an unhappy mischance he was arrested on imperial territory by the Baron von Anholt, at the request of Philip of Spain, and spent four years in captivity. His release was procured by the baron's counsellor-at-law, Stephen Degner, who had been Roger's fellow-student under Melanchthon at Wittenberg. Degner promised Rogers's gaolers 160l. When Rogers put the facts before Lord Burghley, the latter ordered a collection to be made among the clergy to defray the sum. On 5 May 1587 Rogers was appointed a clerk of the privy council; he had already filled the office of assistant clerk. He was M.P. for Newport, Cornwall, 1588–9. He still occasionally transacted official business abroad, visiting Denmark in December 1587, and again in June 1588, when he conveyed expressions of sympathy from Queen Elizabeth to the young king on the death of his father, Frederic II. On his own responsibility he procured an arrangement by which the subjects of Denmark and Norway undertook not to serve the king of Spain against England.

He died on 11 Feb. 1590–1, and was buried in the church of Sunbury beside his father-in-law's grave. In a ‘Visitation of Middlesex’ dated 1634 he was described as ‘of Sunbury.’ According to the same authority he had two children—a son Francis, who married a lady named Cory; and a posthumous daughter, Posthuma, who married a man named Speare. The son is said to have left a son, also named Francis, but his descendants have not been traced.

Rogers was a man of scholarly tastes, and was the intimate friend of the antiquary Camden. The latter calls him ‘vir optimus’ in a letter to Sir Henry Savile ( Epistolæ, No. 13), and he contemplated a discourse ‘concerning the acts of the Britons’ for Camden's ‘Britannia,’ but it was never completed. Camden quotes some Latin poems by him in his account of Salisbury, including an epigram on the windows, pillars, and tower-steps in the cathedral there, which he represented as respectively equalling in number the months, weeks, and days in the year. Rogers was also known to the scholar Gruter, who described him to Camden as ‘protestantissimus,’ and he wrote to Hadrianus Junius asking him for early references to the history of Ireland (Epist. 476, 479, 628). He wrote Latin verses in praise of Bishop Jewel, which are appended to Lawrence Humphrey's ‘Life of the Bishop,’ and Latin verses by him also figure in the preface to Ortelius's ‘Theatrum Orbis Terrarum’ and in Ralph Aggas's description of Oxford University, 1578.

[Chester's John Rogers, 1863, pp. 259–71; Wood's Athenæ Oxon. ed. Bliss, i. 569; Hunter's MS. Chorus Vatum in Addit. MS. 24487, ff. 1–2; Cal. State Papers, Dom.; Chauncey's Hertfordshire, i. 123.]

 ROGERS, DANIEL (1573–1652), divine, eldest son of Richard Rogers (1550?–1618) [q. v.] of Wethersfield, Essex, by his first wife, was born there in 1573. Ezekiel Rogers [q. v.] was his younger brother. He proceeded to Christ's College, Cambridge, graduated B.A. in 1595–6, and M.A. in 1599, and was fellow from 1600 to 1608. Reared in the atmosphere of puritanism, Rogers became at college a noted champion of the cause. It is related that when Archbishop Laud sent down a coryphaeus to challenge the Cambridge puritans, Rogers opposed him with such effect that the delighted undergraduates carried him out of the schools on their shoulders, while a fellow of St. John's bade him go home and hang himself, for he would never die with more honour. On leaving the university Rogers officiated as minister at Haversham, Buckinghamshire, but when Stephen Marshall [q. v.], his father's successor at Wethersfield, removed from that place to Finchingfield, Rogers returned to Wethersfield as lecturer, with Daniel Weld or Weald, another puritan, as vicar. He had several personal discussions with Laud, who paid a high tribute to his scholarship, but, after being much harassed for various acts of nonconformity, he was suspended by the archbishop in 1629. The respect of the conforming clergy in North Essex was shown by their presenting a memorial to the bishop on his behalf, but he apparently left Essex for a time. It is doubtful if he be identical with Daniel Rogers, M.A., who was presented by the parliament to the rectory of Green's Norton, Northamptonshire, on 22 July 1643, in succession to Bishop Skinner, who vacated the rectory on 16 July 1645, and seems to have been intruded into the vicarage of Wotton in the same county in 1647 (, Northamptonshire, ed. Whalley, ii. 293).

The latter part of Rogers's life was passed at Wethersfield. where he had for neighbour as vicar of Shalford his relative, Giles Firmin (1614–1697) [q. v.], a warm royalist. On the fast day proclaimed after the execution of the king, Rogers, who had preached at Wethersfield in the morning, attended Firmin's church in the afternoon, which he had only once done before. After the service he went home with Firmin and 'bemoaned the king's death' (Preface to 's Weighty Questions). When the army's petition for tolerance, called 'the agreement of