CRYMES (GRYMES), George (1605-1657), of Peckham, Surr.

Published in The History of Parliament: the House of Commons 1604-1629, ed. Andrew Thrush and John P. Ferris, 2010
Available from Cambridge University Press

Constituency

Dates

Family and Education

bap. 10 Feb. 1605,1 1st s. of Sir Thomas Crymes* and Margaret, da. of Sir George More* of Loseley, Surr.2 educ. Brasenose, Oxf. 1622; I. Temple 1624.3 m. 25 May 1637, Alice, da. and coh. of Charles Lovell of East Harling, Norf., 6s. (2 d.v.p.) 4da. kntd. 9 Dec. 1628. suc. fa. 1644. cr. bt. by d. bur. 15 Oct. 1657.4

Offices Held

Commr. execution of poor laws 1632;5 servant to Charles I by 1642.6

Commr. sewers, Kent and Surr. 1642 and 1639, London and Mdx. 1645.7

Biography

Crymes was returned for Haslemere to the third Caroline Parliament, presumably thanks to the patronage of his maternal grandfather, Sir George More, who owned the lordship of the manor. On 19 May 1628 he was among those reported by Sir William Bulstrode for not having received the sacrament at the Members’ communion, but his case was reprieved because he had been ill since the beginning of the Parliament. On the following day, however, he was licensed to come into the House, having received communion ‘in the presence of two Members of this House’.8 He left no further mark on the records of the Parliament.

In 1634 Crymes joined with his cousin George Donne and his brother-in-law John Brograve in writing commendatory verses for the playwright John Ford’s Perkin Warbeck, describing the author as ‘my faithful, no less deserving friend’.9 In 1638, after Donne attempted unsuccessfully to acquire £200 from Crymes by cheating at cards, the former begged him ‘to do so much for him, being a distressed kinsman, ... as to make him a bond for the payment of the said sum’, which he swore he would use only to get credit on the Exchange. Crymes agreed and Donne promptly turned the bond over to his older brother, who took advantage of Crymes’s own need of ready money to persuade him to exchange further bonds for relatively small sums.10

In July 1643 the House of Commons ordered that because Crymes was ‘in war against Parliament’ the yearly sum of £300 allowed him by his father should be sequestered. By February 1644, possibly motivated by his father’s declining health, he was seeking to make his peace with Parliament. Petitioning the following month he claimed he had only attended Charles I because of an unspecified, and otherwise undocumented, office in the royal Household, and that he had never been in the king’s army. Nevertheless the committee for compounding found that he had been present at the battle of Edgehill and that he was ‘unsettled in his judgment in the difference between king and Parliament’. Consequently he was fined £500.11 Having inherited his father’s estate in April 1644, Crymes, despite being heavily in debt, was assessed at £2,000 by the committee for the advance of money. Crymes appealed against this assessment, claiming that his Surrey estates were not worth £80 per annum and that his northern revenues, which were ‘but of £178’, had not been paid for three years. He also maintained that the rest of his inheritance was out in jointure.12 Crymes became further embroiled in difficulties in November 1646, when an Inner Temple lawyer alleged that he had carried £100 from his cousin (Sir) Poynings More* to Charles I at Oxford.13

Crymes was granted a baronetcy at some stage before his death. His son used the title without challenge after the Restoration, claiming to have inherited it from his father, but there is no record of the original grant. In 1655 Crymes was listed as a royalist suspect and the title was presumably conferred for his support for Charles II during the Interregnum. He died intestate, and was buried at Camberwell on 15 Oct. 1657. Administration of his estate was granted to his widow the following March. There is no indication that his property was in any of the Interregnum Acts for the sale of royalist estates, but his heir, Sir Thomas, successfully promoted a bill for the restoration of his estate in 1660. It was sold almost immediately afterwards, and no later member of the family sat in Parliament.14

Ref Volumes: 1604-1629

Authors: Alan Davidson / Ben Coates

Notes

  • 1. W.H. Blanch, Ye Par. of Camerwell, 54.
  • 2. Vis. Surr. (Harl. Soc. xliii), 144.
  • 3. Al. Ox.; CITR, ii. 143.
  • 4. CB, iii. 15; Shaw, Knights of Eng. ii. 195; Blanch, 53-5.
  • 5. PC2/42, f. 54.
  • 6. CCC, 835.
  • 7. C181/4, f. 126v; 181/5, ff. 153, 266.
  • 8. CD 1628, iii. 463, 472, 491.
  • 9. J. Ford, Chronicle Historie of Perkin Warbeck (1634), sig. A3v.
  • 10. R.C. Bald, John Donne, 577-83.
  • 11. CJ, iii. 167a; CCC, 835.
  • 12. CCAM, 399.
  • 13. LJ, viii. 578b.
  • 14. CB, iii. 15; A.R. Bax ‘Suspected Persons in Surr. during the Commonwealth’, in Surr. Arch. Colls. xiv. 187; Blanch, 54; HMC 7th Rep. 136.