John Rolle
British baron
Died when: 85 years 169 days (1025 months)Star Sign: Libra
John Rolle, 1st Baron Rolle (1750 – 3 April 1842) was a British peer who served as a Member of Parliament in general support of William Pitt the Younger and was later an active member of the House of Lords.
His violent attacks on Edmund Burke and Charles James Fox in the early 1780s led to his being the target for satirical attack in the Rolliad.
He was colonel of the South Devon Militia and was instrumental in forming the Royal 1st Devon Yeomanry and the North Devon Yeomanry.
He was a slave owner.At Emancipation he presented his estate on the island of Exuma in the Bahamas in perpetuity to his freed slaves, whose descendants still lived in what became known as Rolleville as late as the 1920s.
He was the largest landowner in Devon, with about 55,000 acres centred on his seats of Stevenstone in the north and Bicton in the south-east, and thus was highly influential in that county.
He promoted and financed several large engineering projects, including the Rolle Canal in North Devon, in Pottington, Barnstaple, and two road bridges over the River Torridge near Torrington, at Town Mills and Weare Giffard and the sea-wall at Exmouth.
He was an active donor to charitable works in Devon, being patron of his family's almshouses at Livery Dole, Exeter, Otterton, Great Torrington and St Giles in the Wood and of two schools in Otterton.
Physically he was a large man, and made no pretension to an intellectual approach.Nathaniel William Wraxall wrote of him: "Nature had denied him all pretension to grace or elegance.
Neither was his understanding apparently more cultivated than his manners were refined.He reminded me always of a Devonshire rustic, but he possessed plain common sense, a manly mind, and the faculty of stating his ideas in a few strong words." In later life he caused a disturbance at the coronation of Queen Victoria when he fell on the stairs of the throne.
