52 



Claim to t\t Carlkm d TOltes, 



In the House of Lords. 

 By O. Poulett Scrope, Esq., M.P. 

 [^^HE readers of this Magazine may recollect that in a notice 

 ijjjljf jj of the successive Earls of Wiltshire in a former volume, 1 

 mention was made of the first creation of that dignity, anno 1397, 

 in the person of Sir William Le Scrope, K.G. eldest son of Richard, 

 first Lord Scrope of Bolton, the Chancellor of Richard II. Two 

 years later, on the dethronement of that unhappy monarch, the 

 Earl of Wilts, who almost alone among the courtiers of Richard 

 remained faithful to his benefactor, was executed at Bristol, together 

 with Sir John Bushy, and Sir Henry Grene, it is said without 

 trial and contrary to the terms granted on their capitulation, by 

 the invader Henry of Bolingbroke, Earl of Hereford, afterwards 

 Henry IY. 



Sir William Scrope left no issue. Nevertheless (the original 

 grant by letters patent having been made in an exceptional form, 

 to him and his heirs male for ever (sibi et heredibus suis masculis in 

 perpetuum) 2 the dignity would descend to his next surviving brother 

 and his male heirs in succession, (in accordance with the law as 

 declared in the case of the Earldom of Devon) unless his execution, 

 or rather its affirmation by Parliament in the same year, acted as 

 an attainder, and consequently as an extinction of the title. 



It would seem as if this supposition had at that time and ever 

 since been taken for fact, inasmuch as neither his next brother, Sir 

 Roger, second Lord Scrope of Bolton (after the decease of his 

 father), nor any through nine generations of his descendants, who 

 continued in direct male line to inherit the Barony of Bolton, 

 down to the year 1630, appear to have at any time claimed the 

 superior title of Earl of Wilts. Moreover the dignity of Earl of 



1 Yol. iv. p. 10. 

 5 See the Charter printed in the fifth Peerage Report, p. 117. 



