Having looked at some of the commonly held opinions and assumptions made about the demographics of the early Roxburghe Club and how these views have influenced appraisals of their literary activities, it is now time to examine the actual membership and how it measures up against those claims. It is probably not spoiling any potential surprise to say that, far from being the homogenous group assumed by many commentators, the men who made up the early Roxburghe Club represented a wide spectrum, with a bewilderingly complex range of belief and opinion. It may be true to say, for instance, that all the members were comparatively wealthy. They obviously had to be to collect rare books during the high tide of auction prices, but the differences in wealth between the richest among them such as the Duke of Devonshire and the least wealthy such as Dibdin or Haslewood was vast. One might state too that they were largely establishment figures, but they ranged from the ultraconservative, almost rabidly antiradical, political activist such as George Watson Taylor or Alexander Boswell to the somewhat surprisingly radical Archdeacon Wrangham. In terms of religion many were clerics, some were High Church, some evangelical, one Catholic, but in character with the time, none were publicly atheist.

Of the first 31members, 10 were at some point in their life an MP. The majority of the aristocratic members were MPs in the Commons until the subsequent succession to their title pushed them into the Lords, and a number of the landed gentry held a seat at some time. Of the 21 men not formally involved in Parliamentary politics, most were either clergymen or practised law, although of course not being officially parliamentarian does not imply an absence of political opinion, activity or influence. A number of the members held positions that could be interpreted as politically active outside of Parliament, such as Francis Freeling, who, while secretary of the post office, was accused by William Cobbett of acting to suppress the circulation of Cobbett's series of radical political pamphlets the Porcupine. Freeling denied the accusations but was also speculated to have been instrumental in founding or overseeing a government financed newspaper, the Sun, published with the intention of counteracting public subversion.