Sir Carr Scrope, 1st Baronet (20 September 1649 – 1680), versifier and man of fashion in the
Restoration
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* Conservation and restoration of cultural heritage
** Audio restoration
** Film restoration
** Image restoration
** Textile restoration
* Restoration ecology
...
court of
Charles II of England
Charles II (29 May 1630 – 6 February 1685) was King of Scotland from 1649 until 1651, and King of England, Scotland and Ireland from the 1660 Restoration of the monarchy until his death in 1685.
Charles II was the eldest surviving child of ...
.
Biography
Scrop was the son of
Sir Adrian Scrope and Mary Carr, daughter of Sir Robert Carr, of Sleaford. He matriculated from
Wadham College, Oxford, on 26 August 1664, being entered as a fellow-commoner on 3 September. He was created
MA on 4 February 1667. On 16 January 1667 he was created a Baronet, of Cockerington in the County of Lincoln.
Scrope came to London, and was soon numbered among the companions of
Charles II and the wits "who wrote with ease". About November 1676 he was in love with Miss Fraser, lady-in-waiting to the
Duchess of York
Duchess of York is the principal Courtesy titles in the United Kingdom, courtesy title held by the wife of the duke of York. Three of the eleven dukes of York either did not marry or had already assumed the throne prior to marriage, whilst two of ...
; but her extravagance in dress—one of her costumes is said to have cost no less than £300—so frightened him that he changed his matrimonial intentions. In January of the next year
Catharine Sedley (afterwards
Countess of Dorchester) quarrelled with him in the queen's drawing-room over some lampoon that she believed him to have written. Scrope fancied himself ridiculed as "the purblind knight" in
Earl of Rochester's ''Allusion to the Tenth Satire of the First Book of Horace'', and attacked his rival in a very free and satirical poem ''in defence of satire'', an imitation of Horace. Rochester retorted with a vigorous lampoon, which is printed in his works, and Scrope made in reply a very severe epigram. Many references to Scrope (he was a man of small stature, and often ridiculed for his meanness of size) appeared in the satires of the period. He was a member of the "
Green Ribbon Club", the great
Whig club, which met at the King's Head tavern over against the Inner Temple Gate.
In 1679 Scrope was living at the north end of the east side of Duke Street, St. James's, Westminster. and in August of the next year he was at Tunbridge Wells for his health, and with "a physician of his own". He is said to have died in November 1680, and to have been buried at St. Martin's-in-the-Fields; the baronetcy thereupon became extinct.
Family
Carr Scrope was eldest son of Sir
Adrian Scrope of Cockerington, Lincolnshire, a
Cavalier
The term Cavalier () was first used by Roundheads as a term of abuse for the wealthier royalist supporters of King Charles I and his son Charles II of England during the English Civil War, the Interregnum, and the Restoration (1642 – ). It ...
and
knight of the Bath (d. 1667). His mother, Mary, daughter of Sir Robert Carr of Sleaford in the same county, died in 1685, and was noted in her day "for making sharp speeches and doing startling things".
Bibliography
A translation by Scrope of the epistle of Sappho to Phaon was inserted in ''Ovid's Epistles translated by Various Hands'', numerous editions of which were issued between 1681 and 1725, and it was reprinted in Nichols's ''Collection of Poems''.
Other renderings of Ovid by Scrope are in the ''Miscellany Poems'' of 1684.
Scrope He wrote the prologue to Sir
George Etherege
Sir George Etherege (c. 1636, Maidenhead, Berkshire – c. 10 May 1692, Paris) was an English dramatist. He wrote the plays '' The Comical Revenge or, Love in a Tub'' in 1664, ''She Would If She Could'' in 1668, and '' The Man of Mode or, ...
's ''Man of Mode'', a song which was inserted in that play, and the prologue to Lee's ''Rival Queens''.
Scrope's song of ''Myrtillo's Sad Despair'', in Lee's ''Mithridates'', is included in Ritson's ''English Songs'', and the song in the ''Man of Mode'' is inserted in the same volume.
A satirical piece, called ''A very heroical Epistle from my Lord All-pride to Dol-Common'' (1679), preserved in the ''Roxburghe Collection of Ballads'' at the
British Museum
The British Museum is a public museum dedicated to human history, art and culture located in the Bloomsbury area of London. Its permanent collection of eight million works is among the largest and most comprehensive in existence. It docum ...
(iii. 819), and printed by Mr. Ebsworth in the fourth volume (pp. 575–576) of his collection, is supposed to have been written by Scrope.
Notes
References
;Attribution
* The entry cites:
**
Anthony Wood's Fasti, ii. 294;
**Foster's Alumni Oxon.;
**Robert Barlow Gardiner's Wadham College Registers, i. 253;
**
Peter Cunningham's Nell Gwyn, ed. Wheatley, pp. xli–xlii;
**''Notes and Queries'', 7th ser. i. 429, 519;
**Foster's Yorkshire Pedigrees;
**Burke's Extinct Baronetcies;
**Moore's Carre Family, 1863;
**cf. a familiar epistle to 'Mr. Julian, Secretary to the Muses,' in Egerton MS. 2623, f. 81, which refers chiefly to Scrope, is printed in the Works of George Villiers, duke of Buckingham (1775, ii. 142–5), and has sometimes been attributed to Dryden.
{{DEFAULTSORT:Scrope, Carr
1649 births
1680 deaths
Alumni of Wadham College, Oxford
Baronets in the Baronetage of England
17th-century English poets
17th-century English male writers
English male poets
Carr