He was the son of an Amsterdam patrician, Zacharias Rothe, a sugar merchant and administrator at the Dutch East India Company.
His father sent him on foreign trips in preparation for merchant life, where he was introduced to the pietistic ideas of Ludwig Friedrich Gifftheil among others.
The diarist Samuel Pepys wrote an account of the wedding,[2] which took place in Goring House, and was described as a magnificent occasion.
Pepys somewhat cynically remarked that Nan was lucky to marry a wealthy man, ("a great fortune she has lit upon"), since her father was almost destitute.
Presumably Roder, or his brother-in-law, the German-born chemist Frederick Clod, who had married Nan's sister Mary, paid for the lavish wedding.