Author: Rodda, Richard
Biography:
RODDA, Richard (1743-1815: ancestry.com)
He was born 17 May 1743 and baptized two days later at Sancreed, Cornwall, one of the ten children of Honour Pearse and her husband, Nicholas Rodda. Drowning (the subject of his published poem) and near-drowning were terrible recurrences in his life. In 1759, deep in the tin mine in which he laboured, he was “by a miracle … saved from being drowned in three fathoms of water.” His first wife, Elizabeth Stephens (b 1745), whom he had married on 10 July 1767 at St Mary, Pwllcrochan, Pembrokeshire, drowned in 1794 with two of their children while travelling from Pembroke to Bristol by sea. On four other occasions he narrowly escaped death, deliverances, he believed, that gave evidence of divine mercy. His early occupation as a miner was halted when he was pressed into the Royal Navy. A Quaker gentleman, whom he did not known, intervened to have him released. His eldest brother, Martin Rodda, was a Wesleyan itinerant preacher; he emigrated to America in 1774. The poet—he converted to Methodism in 1758—followed his brother’s example by joining the ministry. His first appointment, to Glamorgan in 1770, was arranged by John Wesley, who became his constant correspondent. Wesley wrote from Bristol in 1789, “You are a man I can trust: whatever you do, you will do it with your might.” Following Wesley’s death, the poet became a leading figure, Wesley having named him among the “Legal Hundred” commissioned to administer the denomination following the founder’s death. Suffering from asthma, he was superannuated to Burslem in 1797 and then to London in 1802. The poet died at his residence, 24 and 25 Brunswick Place, St Leonard Shoreditch, age 72, on 30 Oct. 1815. On 6 Nov., he was buried in Wesley’s vault at the City Road Chapel. On 25 Nov 1795 at St James, Bristol, he had married a second time, to a High-Church woman, Elizabeth Dryall (1754-1835); she, it was gossiped, was worth £1500. There was at least one child by the marriage. (“An Account of Mr. Richard Rodda 1784: in a Letter to the Rev. John Wesley,” Arminian Magazine 7 [1784], 298-303, 353-48, 410-16, 464-68; J. Pawson, Letters [1994-95], 1: 168, 2: 22; Bibliotheca Cornubiensis, 2: 583-84; Encyclopedia of World Methodism 2: 2042; A Dictionary of Methodism in Britian and Ireland online 5 Apr. 2024) JC