Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 49.djvu/97

 accordingly allied himself to Mansfeld and the protestant union in October 1626 (Negotiations, p. 571); but a victory over the imperialists was neutralised by a truce and Mansfeld's subsequent death (ib. pp. 579–593). Suspicion was aroused by the conduct of Bethlen, who complained that the promised subsidy of ten thousand dollars a month from England had not been paid (ib. p. 595). Nevertheless Roe succeeded in keeping Gabor more or less on the side of the German protestants, and also managed in their interest to quash the proposal for a treaty between Spain and the Porte (ib. p. 452). At the same time he was a warm friend of the Greek church in Turkey, and on intimate terms with its celebrated patriarch, Cyril Lucaris. Cyril presented through Roe to James I the celebrated ‘Codex Alexandrinus’ of the whole Bible, which the patriarch brought from his former see of Alexandria; it was transferred with the rest of the royal library to the British Museum in 1757 (cf. Negotiations, p. 618). Roe was himself a collector of Greek manuscripts. Twenty-nine Greek and other manuscripts, including an original copy of the synodal epistles of the council of Basle, which he brought home, he presented in 1628 to the Bodleian Library (, Annals of the Bodleian, 2nd ed., pp. 70, 72). A collection made by him of 242 coins was given by his widow, at his desire, to the Bodleian after his death. He also searched for Greek ‘marbles’ in behalf of the Duke of Buckingham and the second Earl of Arundel.

‘Naked I came in, and naked I goe out,’ he wrote on 6 April 1628, on finally leaving his embassy at Constantinople (ib. p. 810). June found him at Smyrna, whence he sailed to Leghorn, and on the way fought an engagement with Maltese galleys, during which he was struck down by a spar which had fortunately checked a ball (ib. pp. 826–7). Travelling across the continent, Roe visited Princess Elizabeth, the electress-palatine and queen of Bohemia, at Rhenen, and, in compliance with her wish, adopted the two daughters of Baron Rupa, an impoverished adherent of the elector (, Princesses of England, vi. 471). Reaching the Hague in December 1628, he presented to the Prince of Orange a memorial in which he urged that Bethlen Gabor should again be subsidised, and that Gustavus Adolphus should march into Silesia, where Bethlen would join him (Camden Society Miscellany, vol. vii.; Letters of Sir T. Roe, ed. S. R. Gardiner, pp. 2–4). He left the Hague at the end of February for England, and in May 1629 he submitted another memorial to the same effect to Charles I, and in the result was despatched in June on a mission to mediate a peace between the kings of Sweden and Poland (Instructions, printed ib. pp. 10–21). He visited the Swedish camp near Marienburg, and then the Polish camp, brought about a meeting of commissioners in September 1629, and succeeded in arranging a truce for six years (ib. p. 39). He was in close personal relations with Gustavus Adolphus, whose generous character strongly impressed him, while the Swedish king admitted that he owed chiefly to Roe the suggestion, which he put into effect in June 1630, of carrying the war into Germany and placing himself at the head of the protestant alliance. He called Roe his ‘strenuum consultorem,’ and sent him a present of 2,000l. on his victory at Leipzig (, Familiar Letters, ed. 1754, p. 228). After arranging the truce between Poland and Sweden, Roe drew up a treaty at Danzig settling the claims of that city with which he had been instructed to deal, and, breaking his homeward journey at Copenhagen, he concluded a treaty with Denmark which in other hands had been languishing for years.

In the summer of 1630 Roe returned to England from this successful mission. The king had a gold medal struck in his honour, bearing the shields of Sweden and Poland and the date 1630, and on the reverse the crown of England supported by two angels, and beneath a monogram of Roe's initials (Cal. State Papers, Dom. 1630–1, p. 466). This medal Dame Eleanor Roe presented to the Bodleian Library in 1668 (, Annals, 2nd edit. p. 134). But beyond this barren honour the ambassador received no rewards. For six years he lived in retirement, suffering from limited means; his wife's purchased pension was in arrears; even payment was long withheld from him on account of the diamonds which he bought for the king at Constantinople, and the pleasures of a country life ill requited him for the lack of state employment. He ‘bought a cell’ for his old age at Stanford, and afterwards moved to Bulwick and then to Cranford (Cal. State Papers, Dom. 1629–31, pp. 344, &c.). At last, in January 1636–7, he was appointed chancellor of the order of the Garter, to which a year later a pension of 1,200l. a year was added (ib. 1637–8, p. 214). Meanwhile he was in constant correspondence with the queen of Bohemia, who addressed him as ‘Honest Tom,’ and who depended on his influence to counteract the indiscretions of her London agent, Sir Francis Nethersole [q. v.] (, Princesses, vi. 556–66).

In 1638 he was once more sent abroad as ambassador extraordinary to attend the