Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 51.djvu/143

  at Buironfosse (1339). Galfrid le Baker (p. 65) relates the well-known anecdote of Scrope's punishing Cardinal Bernard de Montfavence's boasts of the inviolability of France by taking him up a high tower and showing him her frontiers all in flames. He now appears with the formal title of king's secretary, and spent the winter of 1339–40 in negotiating a marriage between the heir of Flanders and Edward's daughter Isabella. Returning to England with the King in February, he was granted two hundred marks a year to support his new dignity of banneret. Going back to Flanders in June, he took part in the siege of Tournay, and about Christmas died at Ghent (, p. 120;, p. 73). His body was carried to Coverham Abbey, to which he had given the church of Sadberge (Fœdera, iv. 417). Jervaulx and other monasteries had also experienced his liberality. Besides his Yorkshire and Northumberland estates, he left manors in five other counties. Scrope was the more distinguished of the two notable brothers whose unusual fortune it was to found two great baronial families within the limits of a single Yorkshire dale.

Scrope married Ivetta, in all probability daughter of Sir William de Roos of Ingmanthorpe, near Wetherby. A second marriage with Lora, daughter of Gerard de Furnival of Hertfordshire and Yorkshire, and widow of Sir John Ufflete or Usflete, has been inferred (Scrope and Grosvenor Roll, ii. 104) from a gift of her son, Gerard Ufflete, to Scrope and his mother jointly in 1331; but Ivetta is named as Scrope's wife in 1332 (Whalley Coucher Book).

By the latter he had five sons and three daughters. The sons were:, first baron Scrope of Masham [q. v.]; Thomas, who predeceased his father; William (1325?–1367), who fought at Cressy, Poitiers, and Najara, and died in Spain; Stephen, who was at Cressy and the siege of Berwick (1356); Geoffrey (d. 1383), LL.B. (probably of Oxford), prebendary of Lincoln, London, and York (Test. Ebor. iii. 35, but cf. Scrope and Grosvenor Roll, ii. 110). The daughters were Beatrice and Constance, who married respectively Sir Andrew and Sir Geoffrey Lutterell of Lincolnshire; and Ivetta, the wife of John de Hothom.



SCROPE, GEORGE JULIUS POULETT (1797–1876), geologist and political economist, was born on 10 March 1797, being the second son of John Poulett Thomson, head of the firm of Thomson, Bonar, & Co., Russia merchants, of Waverley Abbey, Surrey, and of Charlotte, daughter of Dr. Jacob of Salisbury. , lord Sydenham [q. v.], was his brother. George was educated at Harrow school, and after keeping one or two terms at Pembroke College, Oxford, migrated in 1816 to St. John's College, Cambridge, graduating B.A. in 1821. But while still an undergraduate he had become a keen student of geology, influenced by Professor [q. v.] and Professor [q. v.], then at the outset of his career. With his parents he had spent the winter of 1817–18 at Naples, where Vesuvius—then active—on the one side and the Phlegræan fields on the other, naturally directed his thoughts to the phenomena of volcanoes. In 1819 he returned to Italy and extended his studies to the volcanic districts of the Campagna, visiting the following spring the Lipari Islands and Etna, besides making the tour of Sicily. In the spring of 1821 he married Emma Phipps Scrope, heiress of (1772–1852) [q. v.] of Castle Combe, Wiltshire, and assumed her name. His geological work was in no way interrupted. In the same year, in June, he went to Auvergne, and spent six months in examining its extinct volcanos with those of the Velay and Vivarrais. This done, he again visited Italy, where he arrived just in time to witness the great eruption of Vesuvius in October 1822, when the upper part of the cone—about six hundred feet in height—was completely blown away. He also examined the Ponza islands and studied all the different volcanic districts of Italy from the Bay of Naples to the Euganean hills, returning to England in the autumn of 1823, by way of the districts of like nature in the Eifel, the vicinity of the Rhine and the north of Germany (, Considerations on Volcanos, p. vii; Geological Magazine, 1870, p. 96).

In 1824 he joined the Geological Society, and his reputation became so speedily established that in 1825 he was elected one of the secretaries, his colleague being [q. v.] At that time Werner's notions—that basalts and suchlike rocks were chemical precipitates from water—had led astray the majority of geologists. The triumph of the ‘Neptunists,’ as the disciples of Werner were called, over the ‘Plutonists,’ whose leaders were (1726–1797) [q. v.] and [q. v.], seemed assured. But