[1] Active in colonial enterprises in North America, he became a strong republican in the Rump Parliament but stopped short of regicide.
at Magdalen Hall, Oxford in 1606), dedicated his juvenile work 'The Cuckow'[7] to 'his worshipful good friend Master Thomas Wroth, an affecter and favourer of the Muses' in 1607, addressing him as 'dear friend' and 'Patron',[8] and promising better thereafter:When as my wit with riper fruit shall growMy muse may speak to thee in sweeter rymeAnd for thy worth some graver poem show.
The chief of these were the manors of Newton and Petherton Park, of which his great-grandfather Robert had been appointed Forester by Henry VII,[12] and which his grandfather Sir Thomas had purchased from Edward VI in 1550.
[13] Petherton Park became the seat of his branch of the family, and for the rest of his life Wroth was associated with Somerset politics, while conducting his London affairs from Coleman Street.
[15] In 1598 Margaret and her brother Nathaniel were with their mother at their father's deathbed at Leigh, Essex, attended by William Noyes, then 'minister of this place'.
[19] Wroth composed and published The Husband: a poem expressed in a Compleat Man at the time of his marriage:[20] Richard Niccols included an epigram (no.
29) to Dame Margaret, in fourteen lines of rhymed couplets, in his small 1614 collection Vertue's Encomium:[21] 'Margarite', the gem, the pearl and the daisy, is extolled with play on the words 'rich' and 'worth'.
Over the next five years Wroth prepared his rhymed English translation of Book 2 of Virgil's Aeneid (with parallel Latin text), as The Destruction of Troy.
Wroth's Destruction of Troy, in which he resolved into prophecy the words of Creusa's apparition, may be read as a Virginian text for the colonial culture carrying its religion to a new western land, its prophetic mission under the direction of providence.
His brother-in-law, Margaret's brother, was the colonial pioneer Sir Nathaniel Rich, and like Robert Sidney a most active figure in the Virginia Company.
In September 1635 the government seized a letter which he had written to Dr. John Stoughton in which he lamented the condition of the church and hinted at resistance unto blood.
She made a will providing for the education of her niece Frances Grimsditch, her sister Jane's daughter, who was in waiting in the Wroth household.
[33] She also established a charity of sermons and gifts to the poor of St. Stephen Coleman Street,[34] where she desired to be buried near to her daughter[35] and the parents of Sir Thomas.
Wroth wrote a prose Declaracion of the life sicknes and death of his dearest and most beloved wife dedicated to Sir Nathaniel Rich,[37] and in the four-days' progress to London for her funeral at Coleman Street[38] he composed a poetic Encomium for her in thirty-one stanzas,[39] which he afterwards published.
[44] Nathaniel Rich died in 1636 making bequests for the families of his sisters Jane Grimsditch (of Haslemere, Surrey)[45] and Anne Browne to emigrate to the Bermudas.
(son of Robert Rich of Felsted, but his education supervised by his uncle Nathaniel) became an active figure in the New Model Army.
[51] On 3 January 1648, seconding Henry Marten's resolution,[52] he moved that Charles I should be confined under guard in a secure castle, that Articles of Impeachment should be drawn up against him, and that they should lay him aside and settle the kingdom without him:"I care not what form of government you set up, so it be not by Kings and devils.