identified until death.
In questions of foreign policy Roebuck always championed spirited action on England's part. On 24 June 1850 he moved a strongly worded vote of confidence in Palmerston's recent foreign policy. In 1854 he defended the Crimean war; but the inefficiency which soon became apparent in carrying it on excited his disgust. His most noteworthy appearance in parliament was on 26 Jan. 1855, when he moved for a committee to inquire into the conduct of the war. Lord John Russell resigned the office of president of the council as soon as notice was given of the motion. Although physical infirmity hindered Roebuck from saying more than a few sentences, his motion was carried on 29 Jan. by 305 against 148 votes, and the administration of Lord Aberdeen resigned next day. Lord Palmerston succeeded to the premiership, and at once appointed a committee of inquiry into the war. Of this body, which was known as the Sebastopol committee, Roebuck was appointed chairman. Its report was adverse to Lord Aberdeen's government, and on 17 July Roebuck moved that the ministers who were responsible for the Crimean disasters should be visited with severe reprehension. The previous question was carried, but 181 members voted with Roebuck. Kinglake, in recording these incidents, criticises with acerbity the indiscriminate invective which Roebuck habitually employed. Roebuck was an unsuccessful candidate for the chairmanship of the metropolitan board of works at the first meeting on 22 Dec. 1855. On 3 Sept. 1856 his Sheffield constituents marked their appreciation of his parliamentary activity by presenting him with his portrait and eleven hundred guineas. At the same period he became chairman of the Administrative Reform Association, but that body failed to answer the expectation formed of it by its friends. He was re-elected at Sheffield after a contest in 1852 and 1857, and without opposition in 1859. He headed the poll there in 1865. But, although his popularity with the Sheffield electors was always great, his studied displays of political independence and the gradual modification of his radical views on domestic questions alienated many of his liberal supporters. A speech at Salisbury in 1862, in which he alleged that working men were spendthrifts and wife-beaters, made him for a time unpopular with the artisan classes. Broadhead and other organisers of trade-unionist outrages at Sheffield in 1867 found in him a stern denouncer. When civil war raged in the United States of America he violently championed the slave-holders of the South, boasting that Lord Palmerston had cynically confessed to him that he was on the same side. In like manner, Roebuck defended Austrian rule in Italy. So uncompromising and so apparently illiberal an attitude led to Roebuck's rejection by Sheffield at the election of 1868, when the liberals returned Mr. Mundella in his stead. His friends gave him 3,000l. by way of testimonial. He regained the seat in 1874. During the administration of Lord Beaconsfield, with whom, when Mr. Disraeli, he had had many lively encounters, he favoured the policy of supporting the Turks against the Russians, and finally broke with his few remaining liberal friends. On 14 Aug. 1878 he was made a privy councillor by the tory government. He died at 19 Ashley Place, Westminster, on 30 Nov. 1879. He married, in 1834, Henrietta, daughter of Thomas Falconer (1772–1839) [q. v.] of Bath. She, with a daughter, survived him.
Roebuck was short in stature, vehement in speech, bold in opinion. He addressed popular audiences with easy assurance and great effect. His indifference to party ties was appreciated by the multitude, who regarded him as a politician of stern integrity. A portrait of him by H. W. Pickersgill, R.A., belongs to the corporation of Sheffield.
[R. E. Leader's Life and Letters (with chapters of autobiography), 1897; Times, 1 Dec. 1879; Blackwood, xlii. 192, versified address of ‘Roebuck to his Constituents;’ Spencer Walpole's Lord John Russell; Hunter's Hallamshire, ed. Gatty, pp. 183–4; Greville Memoirs; Kinglake's Crimea, vii. 281, 313–20; Matthew Arnold's Essays in Criticism, 1875, p. 25.]
ROEBUCK, THOMAS (1781–1819), orientalist, grandson of John Roebuck [q. v.] the inventor, was born in Linlithgowshire in 1781. He went to school at Alloa, and afterwards to the high school at Edinburgh. His uncle Benjamin Roebuck (d. 1809), of the Madras civil service, procured him an appointment with the East India Company, and early in 1801 he left England to enter the 17th regiment of native infantry as a cadet. He became lieutenant-captain 17 Sept. 1812, and captain 15 June 1815.
Roebuck soon acquired a complete command of Hindustani, and, on account of his proficiency, was frequently sent in advance when the regiment was on active service. His health suffering, he obtained leave in 1806–9, returned to England, and spent much time in Edinburgh assisting Dr. John Borthwick Gilchrist [q. v.] to prepare an English and Hindu dictionary, and two volumes of the ‘British-Indian Monitor,’ 1806–8. On the return voyage he compiled ‘An English and Hindustani Naval Dictionary,’ with a
