Samuel Grascome


Samuel Grascome was a clergyman of the Church of England, after the nonjuring schism a member of the breakaway church.

Early life

The son of John Grascome of Coventry, he was educated at Coventry grammar school, and was admitted a sizar at Magdalene College, Cambridge, on 1 June 1661, aged 19. He graduated B.A. in 1664, and M.A. in 1674. On 10 December 1680 he was appointed rector of Stourmouth in Kent. He remained there till his deprivation in 1690, when he settled in London, and gathered a congregation at a house in Scroop's Court, in the parish of St. Andrew's, Holborn. He found a patron in Sir Thomas Fanshawe of Jenkins.

Critic of the House of Commons

During the debates on the Recoinage Act, in 1695–6, Grascome was thought to have published An Account of the Proceedings in the House of Commons in relation to the Recoining the Clipt Money and Falling the Price of Guineas; Brunton writing in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography considers that the author may have been in fact Thomas Wagstaffe, with Grascome doing the legwork. Criticising the House of Commons of the time, which had pushed through the Great Recoinage of 1696, the author argued for a public record of the votes of Members of Parliament. Grascombe had done private research on placemen among them, listing over 100, since the 1692–3 session. The pamphlet contravened parliamentary privilege by giving a division list for the Recoinage Act.
In November 1696 the House voted that the pamphlet was "false, scandalous, and seditious, and destructive of the freedom and liberties of parliament", ordered it to be burned by the common hangman, and petitioned the king to offer a reward for the discovery of the author. On 14 December a proclamation appeared for the apprehension of Grascome, but he escaped. The hunt did find Francis Turner, under an alias, who was arrested.
In February 1699 the attorney-general was ordered to prosecute Grascome. The trial was postponed, and on 3 July it was dropped altogether, the printer, who was the only witness against him, having fled the country. It is suggested that Grascome came to an arrangement with the authorities.

Later life

Grascome spent the last years of his life in theological controversy, defending the nonjurors, and denouncing dissent, occasional conformity, and the Roman Catholic church. He was a strong partisan, and Francis Lee thought that he had damaged the nonjurors' reputation with the government.

Works

Grascome, in common with George Hickes, at one point used the printer William Anderton, who produced also Jacobite literature: in 1693 Anderton was found with Grascome's Remarks on the Present Confederacy. An Appeal of Murther, 1693, was Grascome's anonymous comment on the death sentence for Anderton.
Grascome wrote also:
Lee ascribed most of these treatises to Grascome, in his Memoirs of John Kettlewell, § 55, and added:
Posthumous was An Answer to some Queries sent by a Roman Catholic to a Divine of the Church of England. It was printed in Second Collection of Controversial Tracts by Hickes, who said he found it in Grascome's handwriting among his papers after his death.