Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 49.djvu/214

 of the English, having fired away all their ammunition, quitted the line; many of the French also quitted the line—beaten out of it, according to the English version; but no adequate result was to be expected from such tactics. So far as the fighting was concerned, the battle was drawn; but Toulouse, recognising that, in face of a fleet which he could not defeat, it was impossible to make any attempt on Gibraltar, drew back to Toulon. On the 16th the fleets lost sight of each other, and on the 19th the English anchored at Gibraltar, where they expended some of their remaining ammunition in salvoes and salutes in honour of their victory. After refitting the disabled ships and providing for the defence of Gibraltar, leaving there all the marines, to the number of two thousand, with guns, stores, and provisions, Rooke, with the main body of the fleet [see ], sailed for England on the 25th, and arrived at St. Helen's on 24 Sept.

The country was just then enthusiastic over the news of Blenheim, for which the whigs took special credit to their party. The tories put forward Malaga as a victory gained at sea, and of as much importance as Blenheim. Rooke was exalted as the peer of Marlborough. But the friends of Marlborough were in power, and considered it within their right to shelve a man whom his partisans presumed to compare with the great duke. The result was that Rooke was superseded from the command, and was not employed again. He died on 24 Jan. 1708–9. He was three times married: first, to a daughter of Sir Thomas Howe of Cold Berwick in Wiltshire; secondly, to Mary, daughter of Colonel Francis Luttrell of Dunster Castle, Somerset; and, thirdly, to Catherine, daughter of Sir Thomas Knatchbull of Mersham Hatch, Kent. By the second wife alone he had issue one son, George, to whom Queen Anne and Prince George stood sponsors; the son died without issue in 1739.

There is a monument to Rooke's memory in Canterbury Cathedral; his portrait, by Michael Dahl, in the painted hall at Greenwich, has been engraved.

[Campbell's Lives of the British Admirals, iii. 385; Charnock's Biogr. Nav. i. 402; List books and other documents in the Public Record Office; Marshall's Genealogist, iv. 197–8; Burchett's Transactions at Sea; Lediard's Naval Hist.; Rooke's Journal, 1700–2 (Navy Records Soc.); Memoirs relating to the Lord Torrington (Camden Soc.); Parnell's War of the Succession in Spain, where Rooke's conduct is severely criticised on—in some cases—an incorrect statement of the facts; Boyer's Hist. of Queen Anne; Troude's Batailles navales de la France; Engl. Hist. Rev. Jan. 1892, pp. 111–14.] 

ROOKE, GILES (1743–1808), judge, third son of Giles Rooke, merchant of London, a director of the East India Company, by Frances, daughter of Leonard Cropp of Southampton, was born on 3 June 1743. He was educated at Harrow and Oxford, where he matriculated from St. John's College on 26 Nov. 1759, graduated B.A. in 1763, and proceeded M.A. in 1766, being elected in the same year to a fellowship at Merton College, which he held until 1785. He was also called to the bar at Lincoln's Inn in 1766, and went the western circuit to such profit that in 1781 he was called to the degree of serjeant-at-law, and in April 1793 was made king's serjeant. At the ensuing Exeter assizes he prosecuted to conviction one William Winterbotham, a dissenting minister at Plymouth, for preaching sermons of a revolutionary tendency; and on 13 Nov. of the same year was appointed to the puisne judgeship of the common pleas vacant by the death of John Wilson [q. v.] At the same time he was knighted. He presided at the trial at the York Lent assizes in 1795 of Henry Redhead Yorke [q. v.] for conspiracy against the government. He died on 7 March 1808. By his wife Harriet Sophia (d. 1839), daughter of Colonel William Burrard of Walhampton, Hampshire, he left a large family. Rooke was not a great judge, but he appears to have been a pious and an amiable man, with a taste for theology and polite literature. He was author of ‘Thoughts on the Propriety of fixing Easter Term,’ 1792 (anon.)

[Foster's Alumni Oxon.; Howell's State Trials, xxii. 826, xxv. 1049; Gent. Mag. 1794 i. 474, 1808 i. 277; Foss's Lives of the Judges.] 

ROOKE, JOHN (1780–1856), writer on political economy and geology, eldest son of John Rooke, yeoman and surveyor, of Aikton-head, Cumberland, by his wife Peggy, was born there on 29 Aug. 1780. A farmer until he was thirty years of age, he was entirely self-taught, except for the knowledge he acquired as a boy at the village school and Aikton school. He devoted himself to the study of political economy, and became a zealous advocate of free trade. The project of a railway across Morecambe Bay aroused his interest in geological study and in the practical applications of geology. In an unpublished correspondence with his friend Andrew Crosse [q. v.] he sought to explain ‘the geognostic operations of the universe by the opposite physical and electrical qualities of matter’—a theory which he entitled ‘the theory of explosive forces.’ In 1844 he read a paper before the British