page_title: Roger Wilbraham
section_title: Solicitor-General for Ireland
hierarchical_section_title: Roger Wilbraham / Solicitor-General for Ireland
caption_attribution_description: Almshouses in churchyard of St Mary's Church, Acton, Cheshire
context_page_description: Sir Roger Wilbraham 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.
context_section_description: Wilbraham  was educated at Shrewsbury School and Cambridge University. He became a barrister,  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, although he frankly admitted that he saw it as the pathway to a more senior  position at the English Court. 
  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,  if he  gave good service to the Crown then,  unless he was  convicted of treason or another capital crime,  he should not be treated   severely, Wilbraham  argued.
  Wilbraham himself undoubtedly gave good service to the Crown: in 1597 the Privy Council of Ireland, in a letter to Sir Robert Cecil lamenting the inefficiency of the Irish law officers  (especially the recently deceased King's Serjeant  Arthur Corye), exempted Wilbraham  from their criticisms, as  "he hath taken more care and pains than all the rest". He did  much to increase the Crown revenues, and  although he made a substantial profit in the process, this was not then   regarded as corruption.  In 1597 a complaint was made that he was keeping all the fees for making grants on the Exchequer of Ireland  for himself, rather than sharing them with the other law officers and the Remembrancer.    The Dublin government appears to have ignored the complaint, no doubt because of its opinion, expressed forcefully to Cecil the same year,  that Wilbraham was the only one of the law officers who did his job efficiently.   In 1590-3, when the Attorney-General for Ireland, Sir Charles Calthorpe, was suspended from duty, Wilbraham seems to have coped efficiently with a double workload.
caption: Almshouses in Acton founded by Sir Roger Wilbraham
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