Author: Roberts, Thomas
Biography:
ROBERTS, Thomas (1765-1832: ancestry.com)
Born at Bodmin, Cornwall, on 19 May 1765 the youngest of the three children of Thomas Roberts (1735-1809) and his wife, Elizabeth Best (d 1773), he received his only education at a local school. He joined the Methodists in 1782, the year in which he was present when John Wesley (q.v.) preached at Gwennap pit. The uncle with whom he was living at the time was so greatly offended by his conversion that he ejected him from his home. Following an itinerancy in Ireland that commenced in 1786, Wesley, who addressed him affectionately as “Tommy,” appointed him to the Bristol circuit in 1790. Preaching to congregations throughout England, primarily in the West, in the metropolis, and in Wales, he was one of early Methodism’s most popular speakers. Chronic ill health caused him by 1811 to become supernumerary. By 1816 he was entirely blind, yet he continued to preach occasionally at Bath, where he resided in the 1820s and 1830s, and at Bristol. He was thrice married. On 11 July 1793 at St Andrew church in Clifton, he married a wealthy woman, Eleanor Wogan (1761-1795). In 1795 in a period of four months, he lost his wife in childbirth and his year-old son. In the following year, at Bristol on 7 July, he married Mary Randolph (b 1762), the daughter of a wealthy merchant. One child of theirs survived, a boy. Mary died in 1804 and on 1 Oct. 1805 at St Swithin’s Walcot in Bath, he married Jane Lee (1772-1841), an Irish woman, his second wife’s friend. Together, they had seven children. Through his marriages, he accumulated considerable wealth but lost it when, foolishly, he entrusted his fortune to an incompetent business partner who in 1816 was bankrupt. He died at Bristol on 10 Jan. 1832 and was buried eight days later in Gloucestershire at Westbury-upon-Trim. Besides sermons and addresses, he published memoirs of several of his relatives and in 1808 Hymnology. The MR reviewer thought his 1801 Carmen Seculare. A Sacred Poem “not destitute of genius,” the “pinions of his muse … not hopelessly weak.” Buckley’s Remains includes a memoir and a selection of Roberts’s sermons, poems, and hymns. In about 1815, an unnamed university conferred upon him the A.M. (ancestry.com 11 Feb. 2025; Wesleyan Methodist Magazine 49 [1826], n.p., 60 [1832], 1-15; J. Buckley, Remains [1838]; Bibliotheca Cornubiensis) JC