Sir Roger Wilbraham

Sir Roger Wilbraham (4 November 1553 – 31 July 1616) was a prominent English lawyer who served as Solicitor-General for Ireland under Elizabeth I and held positions at court under James I, including Master of Requests and surveyor of the Court of Wards and Liveries. He bought an estate at Dorfold in the parish of Acton, near his birthplace of Nantwich in Cheshire, and he was active in charitable works locally, including founding two sets of almshouses for impoverished men. He also founded almshouses in Monken Hadley, Middlesex.

Roger Wilbraham was born in Nantwich, Cheshire in 1553, the second of four sons of Richard Wilbraham (1525–1611/12) and his first wife, Elizabeth (d. 1589/90), daughter of Thomas Maisterson. The Wilbraham family was a junior branch of the Wilbrahams of Woodhey, who were prominent in Cheshire affairs from the 13th century onwards. His father served as Master of the Jewel House to Mary I and also collected revenues for the queen in the Nantwich Hundred. In 1580, he built Townsend House on Welsh Row in Nantwich, in which James I later stayed while visiting the town in 1617. His mother's family, the Maistersons, was one of the most important ones in Nantwich.

Wilbraham became a lawyer, and was admitted to Gray's Inn in London in 1576. On 13 February 1585, he was appointed Solicitor-General for Ireland, a position he held for 14 years. During his years in Ireland, the Irish judiciary were notorious for corruption, and for bitter feuds among themselves; shortly before his arrival in Ireland Nicholas Nugent, the Chief Justice of the Irish Common Pleas, had been hanged for treason on very thin evidence, after a trial presided over by hostile colleagues. Wilbraham's attitude to judicial misconduct was cynical and pragmatic: even where a judge's conduct was disgraceful, he argued that if they gave good service to the Crown then, unless they were convicted of treason or other capital crimes, they should not be treated too severely.

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