‘he was greatly trusted in all matters of the revenue, and seldom or never spoke but to facts, and when he was clear in his point.’ On his motion on 23 April 1729 an increment of 115,000l. was voted for the civil list; he defended the salt duty bill against Pulteney's criticisms on its second reading, 2 March 1731–2; he supported the motion for the exclusion of Ireland from the colonial sugar trade, 21 Feb. 1732–3, and the subsequent proposal (23 Feb.) to draw on the sinking fund to the extent of 500,000l. for the service of the current year. His fidelity to Walpole during the heated contests on the excise bill of the same year (14 and 16 March), and the motion for the repeal of the Septennial Act, 13 March 1733–4, lost him the Bristol seat at the subsequent general election, when he was returned (30 April) for Lyme Regis, Dorset, which he continued to represent until his death. On Walpole's fall he was summoned by the committee of secrecy to give evidence as to the minister's disposal of the secret-service money, but declined to be sworn (14 June 1742), saying that he was fourscore years of age, and did not care whether he spent the few months he had to live in the Tower or not, but that the last thing he would do was to betray the king, and next to the king the Earl of Orford. On 8 Dec. 1744 he opposed the bill for doubling the taxes on places and pensions. He died on 21 April 1752. There is a portrait of Scrope in the treasury, presented in 1776 by the Right Hon. George Onslow.
Scrope was author of ‘Exercitatio Politica de Cive Protestante in Republica Pontificia’ (a tractate against the papal power), Utrecht, 1686, 4to; and joint author with Baron Clerk of ‘Historical View of the Forms and Powers of the Court of Exchequer in Scotland,’ Edinburgh, 1820, 4to [see Clerk, Sir John].
[Collins's Peerage, iii. 302; Visitation of Oxfordshire (Harl. Soc.); Burnet's Own Time, 1823, v. 348 n.; Luttrell's Relation of State Affairs, vi. 300, 304, 633; Walpole's Letters, ed. Cunningham, i. 176, 178, 198; Coxe's Memoirs of Sir Robert Walpole, ii. 519; Seyer's Bristol, ii. 577, 580; Parl. Hist. viii. 702, 1015, 1196, 1214, 1328, ix. 482, xi. 441, xii. 825, xiii. 1031; Hist. MSS. Comm. 8th Rep. pt. i. App. pp. 79, 85; Swift's Works, ed. Scott, xvi. 64, 66; Gent. Mag. 1752, p. 192; Foss's Lives of the Judges; notes kindly supplied by G. L. Ryder, esq.]
SCROPE, RICHARD le, first Baron Scrope of Bolton (1327?–1403), chancellor of England, was the third son of Sir Henry le Scrope (d. 1336) [q. v.], chief justice of the king's bench, and his wife Margaret. At the age of seventeen (November 1344) he succeeded his eldest brother, William, in their father's estates. He had already served with this brother in Brittany, but won his first laurels at Neville's Cross, where he was knighted on the field, after which he lost no time in joining the king before Calais. There was hardly a campaign in France or Scotland for forty years to follow in which Scrope was not engaged. He early attached himself to the service of John of Gaunt, duke of Lancaster, in whose train he fought at Najara (1367), and in nearly all his subsequent expeditions down to 1385. This association went far to determine the part he played in the critical domestic politics of the closing years of Edward III's reign. On 8 Jan. 1371 Scrope—who had once (1365) sat for his county in the commons—was summoned to the upper house, and on 27 March succeeded Bishop Brantingham as treasurer on Sir Robert Thorp taking the great seal from William of Wykeham. This substitution of lay for clerical ministers was not particularly successful. It was Scrope no doubt who, on a tax upon parishes being proposed, estimated their number at forty thousand, while in reality there were only 8,600. He laid down his office in September 1375 to take up the (joint) wardenship of the west marches against Scotland.
On Richard II's accession Scrope became steward of the household, an office to which the minority gave unusual importance. He figured prominently in the first two parliaments of the reign, in the second of which, held at Gloucester, the great seal was transferred (29 Oct. 1378) to him. He remained chancellor for little more than a year, giving way to Archbishop Sudbury on 27 Jan. 1380, and returning to the business of the Scottish border. But on 4 Dec. 1381 he again became chancellor and a member of the commission headed by Lancaster to inquire into the state of the royal household. But as the nominee of parliament and Lancaster (who between 1380 and 1384 retained his services for life in peace and war), Scrope was soon at variance with the young king. He refused to seal Richard's lavish grants, and, when royal messengers demanded the great seal from him, would only surrender it into the king's own hands (11 July 1382). He told Richard that he would never again take office under him (Walsingham, ii. 68).
Retiring into the north, Scrope resumed his activity as warden on the border, and was in both the Scottish expeditions of 1384 and 1385. It was on the latter occasion that he challenged the right of Sir Robert Grosvenor to bear the same arms as himself—viz. azure,
