Richard le Scrope (c. 1350 – 8 June 1405) was an English cleric who served as Bishop of Coventry and Lichfield and Archbishop of York and was executed in 1405 for his participation in the Northern Rising against King Henry IV.
He had four brothers and two sisters:[1] His father had had a distinguished career as a soldier and administrator, and according to McNiven, Richard's Scrope's first preferments in the church probably owed a great deal to family influence.
[5] Scrope was rector of Ainderby Steeple near Northallerton in 1368, warden of the free chapel of Tickhill Castle, and in 1375 official to Thomas Arundel, Bishop of Ely.
Scrope announced the abdication to a quasi-parliamentary assembly on the following day, and together with Thomas Arundel, Archbishop of Canterbury, escorted Henry Bolingbroke to the vacant throne.
He, assisted by the Bishops of Durham and Carlisle Cathedrals, officiated at a solemn translation of Saint John of Bridlington, 11 March 1404, de mandato Domini Papae.
[citation needed] The King denied the rebel leaders trial by jury, and a commission headed by the Earl of Arundel and Sir Thomas Beaufort sat in judgment on the Archbishop, Mowbray and Plumpton in Scrope's own hall at his manor of Bishopthorpe, some three miles south of York.
[16] Although Scrope's participation in the Percy rebellion of 1405 is usually attributed to his opposition to the King's proposal to temporarily confiscate the clergy's landed wealth, his motive for taking an active military role in the rising continues to puzzle historians.
In the play, the king's agents are shown persuading the Archbishop and the other rebel leaders to disband their army by promising that their demands will be met and then arresting them for high treason.