Thomas Lucy

Sir Thomas Lucy (born April 24, 1532 , † July 7, 1600 in Charlecote ) was an English justice of the peace and high sheriff, who is known for his connections to William Shakespeare .

Thomas Lucy inherited after the death of his father William Lucy in 1552 both the village of Charlecote , the seat of the family, and the villages of Sherborne and Hampton Lucy in Warwickshire near Stratford-upon-Avon , the birthplace of Shakespeare . Around 1558 he had the family seat rebuilt as the first of the great Elizabethan country houses. He was knighted in 1565 and welcomed Queen Elizabeth I as host on Charlecote in 1573 . He attached great importance to wealth, employed forty servants and was allegedly worried to the point of malice for the protection of his lands and the game living on them.

He was a passionate Protestant and Puritan ; In both his post as Justice of the Peace at Stratford and as a Member of Parliament , he was deeply involved in intimidating and persecuting Catholics who refused to attend Anglican worship. He aggressively raided their homes, especially after the Somerville attack in 1583 . The following year he had a dispute between one of his servants and Hamnet Sadler, a friend of Shakespeare's, to settle. In 1586 he was named the county's high sheriff .

So there was reason enough not to like Lucy at all and even to fear it as an anti-Catholic prosecutor. He had those who assisted Jesuits in the Stratford area arrested and interrogated. He was responsible for raiding the homes of the Arden family following the arrest of Edward Arden, and it was one of his followers who took control of Stratford after the Northern Rebellion was put down.

Shakespeare himself would have had good reasons to view Lucy as an enemy, a man who had persecuted some of his relatives to the grave and cast his shadow over every Old Catholic family in the area. There is also the popular legend that Shakespeare once poached in Charlecote Park, then had to flee Stratford to London and started his career there. Even if this story should be fictitious, the fact remains that the poet in two of his works - the royal drama Henry VI. , Part 2 and the comedy Die Lustigen Frauen von Windsor - a Justice of the Peace Schaal ( Shallow ) appears, whose unmistakable attributes such as his coat of arms made the resemblance to Thomas Lucy unmistakable, at least for contemporaries. And if Shakespeare then compares pikes in the coat of arms with lice in the jacket in the English pun, then it cannot be ruled out that he took revenge on Lucy from the stage in a parodistic and subtle way.

Lucy died in Charlecote in 1600.

Remarks

1. ↑ An apparently deranged man named John Somerville - son-in-law of Edward Arden, head of a prominent and extensive Catholic family, including Shakespeare - was arrested after waving a gun, calling the Queen a heretic, and demanding her death. However, this incident was a welcome excuse to massively persecute the Catholics.

Web links

• Article by Sir Thomas Lucy on In Search of Shakespeare
• Article The Somerville Plot and the end of Arden on In Search of Shakespeare
• Complete genealogy of the Lucy and Lucey families with many biographical details