This one, by Lorraine C. Attreed, is entitled An Indenture between Richard Duke of Gloucester and the Scrope Family of Masham and Upsall, one of the two noble branches of the Scropes, the other being those of Bolton. The indenture, a copy of which serves as an appendix, dates from mid-January 1476 shortly after the death of the fifth Baron, when his widow Elizabeth (Greystoke) sent her eldest son Thomas, sixteen, to work for the future King, who later married the third brother Ralph to his niece Cicely.
Elizabeth also paid the Duke two hundred marks a year to protect Thomas’ inheritance through his role as Warden of the West Marches – yet another of his titles that Mancini missed, after Lord High Constable and (subsequently) Lord Protector and Defender of the Realm. Thomas was the great-nephew of Henry, the third Baron, executed after the Southampton Plot in 1415 and great-great-nephew of Richard, the Archbishop of York who was beheaded in 1405 after the Northern Rising. The title eventually passed into abeyance in 1517 as Thomas and his three brothers left no male heir between them.
Within three years of the indenture beginning, Thomas himself, the sixth Baron was married to Elizabeth Neville, daughter of the late Marquis of Montagu, becoming a cousin of both the Duke and Duchess. He served in the Scotland campaign of 1480-2 as a confirmed Yorkist, reversing his family’s sixty years of adherence to the Lancastrian regime. Unlike his Bolton cousins, he didn’t gain property in the South-West after the Buckingham rebellion but he did sit in judgement over two 1484 rebels. He fought at Bosworth and was reluctant to serve Henry “Tudor”, decining to serve in the latter’s first Parliament. He may have been involved with Lovell and the Stafford brothers of Grantham in their first rebellion and definitely was with Lincoln and Lovell at Stoke Field, as was his cousin John, Baron Scrope of Bolton. Both nobles were captured and only fully pardonned in 1489. He died on St. George’s Day in 1493, his personal heir being his daughter Alice and the Barony passing to his brother Henry.
murreyandblue 