England, where she and her native attendants were handsomely received by the London company and others, the queen and courtiers (who had at first looked askance at Rolfe's union) paying her marked attention. She renewed her acquaintance with her old friend Captain Smith, and attended the Twelfth Night masque of 1617 (Jonson's Christmas), in company with the queen.
During her stay in town Simon de Passe engraved the well-known portrait of her, the features of which are agreeable, modest, and not undignified. She is described in an inscription upon the plate as ‘Matoaka, alias Rebecka, wife of the worshipful Mr. Thos. Rolff. Ætatis suæ 21 A° 1616.’ Another portrait in oils was painted by an Italian artist, and belonged to the Rev. Whitwell Elwin of Booton Rectory, Norfolk, whose family intermarried with the Rolfes; an excellent engraving from it appeared in the ‘Art Journal’ (1885, p. 299).
Pocahontas, although reluctant to return to America, pined under an English sky, and in March 1617, after all arrangements had been made for her departure, she died at Gravesend. In the parish register of St. George's Church, Gravesend, is the crude entry: ‘1616, May 2j, Rebecca Wrothe, wyff of Thomas Wroth, gent., a Virginia lady borne, here was buried in ye chauncell’ (Notes and Queries, 3rd ser. v. 123; cf. Court of James I, under date 29 March 1617). Several of her attendants proved consumptive, and gave trouble to the company after their mistress's death. Rolfe subsequently married Jane, daughter of William Pierce, and died in Virginia in 1623, leaving a widow with children. By the princess Rolfe left a son Thomas (born in 1615), who after his mother's death was brought up by his uncle, Henry Rolfe of London. He returned to Virginia in 1640, and married there Jane, daughter of Francis Poythress, leaving a daughter Jane, who married Robert Bolling, and had many descendants. Ben Jonson introduced Pocahontas into his ‘Staple of News’ (1625), and since his day she has formed the title character of many works of prose fiction, by Sigourney, Seba Smith, Samuel Hopkins, John Davis, and others. The romantic incident of the rescue is depicted in stone as a relief upon the Capitol, Washington.
[Capt. John Smith's works, ed. Arber, 1884; Wingfield's Discourse of Virginia; Newport's Discoveries in Virginia; Observations by George Percy (Purchas); Spelman's Relation of Virginia; Whitaker's Good News from Virginia; and Hamor's True Discourse of the Present Estate of Virginia—all written 1607–15; Stith's History of Virginia; Brown's Genesis of the United States; New England Hist. and Genealog. Regist. January 1884; Nichols's Progresses of James I, iii. 243; Revue de Paris, t. xlii. (1832) 211, 321; Cal. State Papers, Dom. 1611–18.
Since Thomas Fuller expressed doubt of the veracity of Captain Smith in his Worthies, Mr. Charles Deane was the first, in a note to his edition of Wingfield's Discourse (1860), to impugn Smith's story of his rescue by Pocahontas. Mr. Deane repeated his doubts in a note to his edition of Smith's True Relation in 1866, and the same view was supported in the Rev. E. D. Neill's Virginia Company in London (ch. v., printed separately as Pocahontas and her Companions, London, 1869), and in the same writer's English Colonisation in America (chap. iv.). Charles Dudley Warner, in the Study of the Life and Writings of John Smith (1881), treats the Pocahontas episode with sceptical levity. Deane's views were also supported by Henry Adams in the North American Review, January 1867; by Henry Cabot Lodge in his English Colonies in America; by Justin Winsor in History of America, vol. iii.; and, with some reservations, by J. Gorham Palfrey in his Hist. of New England (1866), and by Mr. J. A. Doyle in his English in America: Virginia (1882). Bancroft found a place for the story in his narrative until 1879, when, in the centenary edition of his History of the United States, he abandoned it without expressing judgment. Coit Tyler, in his History of American Literature, laments that the ‘pretty story’ has lost historical credit. Professor S. R. Gardiner, in his History of England (1883, iii. 158), regrets its demolition by historical inquirers. The balance of trained opinion is thus in favour of treating the rescue episode as a poetical fiction. Its substantial correctness is, however, contended for by Wyndham Robertson in Pocahontas and her Descendants, 1887, by Poindexter in his Capt. John Smith and his Critics (1893), by Professor Arber in his elaborate vindication of Smith (Smith's Works, ed. Arber, esp. p. cxvii), and by Mr. William Wirt Henry, the most eloquent champion of the story, in his Address to the Virginia Historical Society (Proceedings, February 1882).]
ROLFE, ROBERT MONSEY, Baron Cranworth (1790–1868), lord chancellor, born at Cranworth in Norfolk on 18 Dec. 1790, was elder son of Edmund Rolfe, curate of Cranworth and rector of Cockley-Clay, by his wife Jemima, fifth daughter of William Alexander, and granddaughter of Messenger Monsey [q. v.], physician to Chelsea Hospital. His father was first cousin of Admiral Lord Nelson, while his mother was a niece of James, first earl of Caledon. He received his early education at the grammar school of Bury St. Edmunds, where he was the junior of Charles James Blomfield [q. v.], afterwards bishop of London. He was then sent to Winchester, where he obtained the silver medal for a Latin speech in 1807. Proceeding to Trinity College, Cambridge, he became
