Sir William Lucy^[1]

1510 - 1551  (41 years)

• Name	Sir William Lucy
  Birth	1510	Charlecote, Warwickshire, England
  Gender	Male
  Death	1551	Charlecote, Warwickshire, England
  Person ID	I26756	Master
  Last Modified	30 Dec 2016

  
  

  Father	Sir Thomas Lucy,   b. 1488, Charlecote, Warwickshire, England d. 3 Sep 1525, Fleet Street, London, Middlesex, England (Age 37 years)
  Mother	Elizabeth Empson,   b. 1490, Towchester, Northamptonshire, England d. 1523, , , , England (Age 33 years)
  Marriage	8 Oct 1507	Easton, Northamptonshire, England
  Family ID	F6817	Group Sheet  |  Family Chart

  
  

  Family	Anne Fermor,   b. 1515, Easton, Northamptonshire, England d. 1553, Charlecote, Warwickshire, England (Age 38 years)
  Marriage	1531	Neston, Northamptonshire, England
  Children	1. Barbara Lucy,   b. 1531, Charlecote, Warwickshire, England d. 1605, Stanway, Gloucestershire, England (Age 74 years)  [Father: natural]   2. William Lucy,   b. 24 Apr 1532, Charlecote, Warwickshire, England d. 7 Jul 1600, Charlecote, Warwickshire, England (Age 68 years)  [Father: natural]   3. Jane Lucy,   b. 1545, Charlecote, Warwickshire, England d. 1600, Compton Verney, Warwickshire, England (Age 55 years)  [Father: natural] + 4. Timothy Lucy, Esq,   b. 16 Nov 1547, Charlecote, Warwickshire, England d. 21 Jan 1616, Ludlow, Shropshire, England (Age 68 years)  [Father: natural]
  Family ID	F6816	Group Sheet  |  Family Chart
  Last Modified	27 Dec 2016

  
  

• Event Map

  Birth - 1510 - Charlecote, Warwickshire, England Marriage - 1531 - Neston, Northamptonshire, England Death - 1551 - Charlecote, Warwickshire, England  = Link to Google Earth

  
  

• Notes

  Lucy, Shakespeare, and Anti-CatholicismSir Thomas Lucy, the English Warwickshire squire who is traditionally associated with the youth of William Shakespeare, was born on the 24th of April 1532, the son of William Lucy, and was descended, according to Dugdale, from Thurstane de Cherlecote, whose son Walter received the village of Charlecote from Henry de Montfort about 1190. Walter is said to have married into the Anglo-Norman family of Lucy, and his son adopted the mother's surname. Three of Sir Thomas Lucy's ancestors had been sheriffs of Warwickshire and Leicestershire, and on his father's death in 1552 he inherited Sherborne and Hampton Lucy in addition to Charlecote, which was rebuilt for him by John of Padua, known as John Thorpe, about 1558. By his marriage with Joyce Acton he inherited Sutton Park in Worcestershire, and became in 1586 high sheriff of the county. He was knighted in 1565. He is said to have been under the tutorship of John Foxe, who is supposed to have imbued his pupil with the Puritan principles which he displayed as knight of the shire for Warwick in the parliament of 1571 and as sherif of the county, but as Mrs. Carmichael Stopes points out Foxe only left Oxford in 1545, and in 1547 went up to London, so that the connection must have been short. He often appeared at Stratford-on-Avon as justice of the peace and as commissioner of musters for the county. As justice of the peace he showed great zeal against the Catholics, and took his share in the arrest of Edward Arden in 1583. In 1585 he introduced into parliament a bill for the better preservation of game and grain, and his reputation as a preserver of game gives some color to the Shakespearian tradition connected with his name. Nicholas Rowe, writing in 1710, told a story that Lucy prosecuted Shakespeare for deer-stealing from Charlecote Park in 1585, and that Shakespeare aggravated the offense by writing a ballad on his prosecutor. The trouble arising from this incident is said to have driven Shakespeare from Stratford to London. The tale was corroborated by Archdeacon Davies of Sapperton, Gloucestershire, who died in 1708. The story is not necessarily falsified by the fact that there was no deer park at Charlecote at the time, since there was a warren, and the term warren legally covers a preserve for other animals than hares or rabbits, roe-deer among others. Shakespeare is generally supposed to have caricatured the local magnate of Stratford in his portrait of Justice Shallow, who made his first appearance in the second part of Henry IV, and a second in the Merry Wives of Windsor. Robert Shallow is a justice of the peace in the county of Gloucester and his ancestors have the dozen white luces in their coats, the arms of the Lucys being three luces, while in Dugdale's Warwickshire (ed. 1656) there is drawn a coat-of-arms in which these are repeated in each of the four quarters, making twelve in all. There are many considerations which make it unlikely that Shallow represents Lucy, the chief being the noteworthy difference in their circumstances. Lucy was knighted in 1565 by The Earl of Leicester, and played host to Elizabeth at his home in 1572. A Justice of the Peace and Member of Parliament for Warwickshire at one time, Lucy was clearly a man to whom material wealth meant much. He employed forty servants and was allegedly viciously protective of his lands and the game found thereon. Clearly a Queen's man, he was also active in the intimidation of Catholics, aggressively raiding their homes after the Somerville Plot for signs of sedition. In 1584 he arbitrated in a dispute between one of his servants and Hamnet Sadler, a friend of William Shakespeare's. Lucy would have been widely disliked and even feared as an anti-Catholic enforcer. During Campion's mission he arrested and interrogated the Jesuit's supporters in the Stratford area. He was also responsible for raiding all the Arden family homes after the arrest of Edward Arden, and it was a retainer of his who had taken over the control of Stratford after the successful facing down of the northern rebellion. William, then, might have had good reason to feel enmity towards Lucy, a man who had persecuted some of his kinsmen to the grave and cast a shadow over the lives of every old Catholic family in the area. If the poaching myth is true, then Lucy may well have been the reason William left Stratford. Lucy's death in 1600 came at a time of great family scandal, when his granddaughter eloped with a servant. Shakespeare is thought to have used Lucy as the inspiration for the character of Justice Shallow in "The Merry Wives of Windsor." William Lucy 1511-1551 William married Anne, daughter of Richard Fermor of Easton Neston, Northamptonshire, a merchant of the Staple of Calais. The second of their five daughters, Jane, marrried George Verney of Compton and is buried at Compton Verney. The third, Maria, married Christopher Hales of Meriden, friend of the reformers Bullinger and Sturmius, an exile at Zurich during the Marian persecutions with his elder brother, John Hales of Coventry. William Lucy, an ardent friend to the New Learning, connected by marriage with Bishop Latimer, engaged John Foxe the martyrologist to be his son's tutor.

  
  

• Sources

  [S761] Yates Publishing, Ancestry Family Trees, (Online publication - Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com. Original data: Family Tree files submitted by Ancestry members.), Ancestry Family Tree. http://trees.ancestry.com/pt/AMTCitationRedir.aspx?tid=101799235&pid=100