English, and fit to be ‘corrected by Dr. Busby for false grammar.’ On the revolution he resumed his practice at the bar. Rotherham was a friend of Robert Boyle [q. v.], who made him one of the trustees of his lecture (cf. Evelyn, Diary, May 1696). He died about 1696. He was lord from 1684 of the rectory manor of Waltham Abbey, to which succeeded his son, John Rotherham, recorder of Maldon.
[Lysons's Magna Britannia, i. 113; Morant's Essex, ii. 88; Foster's Alumni Oxon. and Gray's Inn Adm. Reg.; Wood's Fasti Oxon. (Bliss), ii. 120, 170; Clutterbuck's Hertfordshire, iii. 126; Cobbett's State Trials, ix. 822, xi. 498; Sir John Bramston's Autobiogr. (Camden Soc.), pp. 304, 311; Luttrell's Brief Relation of State Affairs, i. 444, 446, 450, 470; Haydn's Book of Dignities, ed. Ockerby; Evelyn's Diary, 13 Feb. 1692, 2 May 1696; Foss's Lives of the Judges.]
ROTHERHAM, THOMAS (1423–1500), archbishop of York, otherwise known as Thomas Scot, was born on 24 Aug. 1423 at Rotherham in Yorkshire, and was son of Sir John Rotherham, by his wife Alice. The origin of the alternative surnames is obscure. The archbishop is given the name of Scot coupled with that of Rotherham in Hatcher's ‘Register of King's College’ (1555–1562), in Bishop Wrenn's manuscript at Pembroke, and almost all early notices of him. The Scotts of Ecclesfield were related to him, and received from him the Barnes Hall estate. The name of Rotherham, which he used without any alternative in all official documents, was, however, borne by his parents, and his brother, John Rotherham, of Someries, Bedfordshire. The genealogical history of ‘Scott of Scot's Hall’ very doubtfully claims the archbishop as the son of Sir John Scotte of Brabourne in Kent, a knight who held distinguished offices under Edward IV, and traced his descent from William, youngest brother of John Baliol [see Scott, Sir William, d. 1350]. These contentions cannot be sustained (Notes and Queries, 5th ser. vols. vii.–ix. passim).
Rotherham spent his earlier years, as he tells us in his will, at Rotherham. He received his first education, along with some others ‘who reached higher stations,’ from a teacher of grammar who settled in the town. Anthony à Wood, on the evidence of a letter addressed to a bishop of Lincoln, probably John Chedworth (Oxford Univ. Archives, F 4, 254), claims him as an Oxford man (Athenæ Oxonienses, ed. Bliss, ii. 683). It is possible that he was during 1443 at Eton. In 1444, at the age of twenty-one, he was elected on the foundation at King's College, Cambridge. King's College placed in his hands and that of Walter Field the appointment to the benefice of Kingston in 1457, when he was still probably one of its fellows. In 1463 he was admitted to the degree of D.D. at Oxford, having previously taken it at Cambridge. From 1461 until 1465 he was rector of Ripple in Worcestershire (Nash, Worcestershire, ii. 299). In 1462 he was collated by Bishop Chedworth, his contemporary at King's, to the prebend of Welton Brinkhall in Lincoln Cathedral. He also held apparently in plurality the provostship of Wingham in Kent, resigning it, according to Leland, in 1463. In 1465 he was made prebendary of Netherhaven in the cathedral of Salisbury, and later in that year rector of St. Vedast's, Foster Lane, London. In 1467 he was archdeacon of Canterbury (William of Wyrcester, Annales, ii. 508), being apparently appointed on the death of Thomas Chichley.
Some time before 1461 the staunch Lancastrian Earl of Oxford [see Vere, John de, thirteenth Earl] had made Rotherham his chaplain; and in the earl's suite he may first have seen at court his future patroness, Elizabeth Wydeville, then wife of Sir John Grey, and lady of the bedchamber to Queen Margaret. Doubtless to her, now queen of England, Rotherham owed his appointment in 1467 as keeper of the privy seal to Edward IV, at an annual pension of 360 marks (Pat. Rolls, 7 Edw. IV). He rapidly gained the king's confidence. In 1468 he was made bishop of Rochester, and apparently (Poulson, Beverlac, p. 653) provost of the college of Beverley, holding the latter post until 1472. In 1468 he was appointed sole ambassador to treat with Louis, king of France (Rymer, Fœdera, xi. 625). In 1471 he was ambassador, along with Hastings and others, to Charles of Burgundy (ib. xi. 737), and immediately afterwards was translated to the bishopric of Lincoln. As the deputy of the bishop of Bath and Well, who was invalided, he gave the address at the opening of parliament in 1472, and appears as one of the signatories to the creation of Edward as Prince of Wales.
Early in 1474 he was made chancellor of England, and he prorogued parliament in that capacity on 28 May of that year. The Croyland continuator contrasts Rotherham's skill in managing the parliament with that of his two predecessors, and the large supplies voted for war with France were said to be due to his diplomacy. After the dissolution of this parliament in 1475 Edward desired that Rotherham should accompany him on his French expedition, and an arrangement was made by which the chancellorship was temporarily entrusted to Alcock,
