Sir Thomas Roe

Sir Thomas Roe (born c. 1581, near Wanstead, Essex, Eng.—died November 1644, Bath, Somerset) was a diplomat and author who advanced England’s mercantile interest in Asia and was prominent in negotiations during the Thirty Years’ War. He was knighted in 1604.

Roe began his diplomatic career in India as ambassador to the court of the Mogul emperor Jāhāngīr. In his four years of duty (1614–18) there he furthered the fortunes of the English East India Company.

As ambassador to Constantinople (1621–28), Roe obtained increased privileges for the English merchants trading in the Ottoman Empire. He negotiated a treaty with Algiers, then subject to Ottoman rule, resulting in the release of several hundred Englishmen captured by the Barbary pirates (1624). He also mediated a peace treaty between the Ottoman Empire and Poland.

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Returning to England in 1629, Roe helped negotiate the Truce of Altmark between Gustavus II Adolphus of Sweden and Sigismund III of Poland, for which he received a gift of £2,000 from the Swedish king. The truce left the Swedes free to intervene on the Protestant side in the Thirty Years’ War. After spending six years in retirement, Roe was appointed chancellor of the Order of the Garter (1637) and given an annual pension of £1,200 (1638).

He served as the English representative at three conferences—Hamburg (1638), Ratisbon (1641), and Vienna (1642)—where attempts were made to end the Thirty Years’ War. Meanwhile, in 1640 he was made a privy councillor and was elected a member of the Long Parliament for the University of Oxford. In July 1643 he was permitted, because of ill health, to retire to Bath.

Roe left numerous diplomatic memoirs, including the Embassy of Sir T. Roe to the Court of the Great Mogul (1899).