“A Parliament member, a Justice of Peace,
At home a poor scarecrow, in London an Ass,
If lousy is Lucy, as some folk miscall it,
Then Lucy is lousy, whatever befall it.
He thinks himself great,
Yet an ass in his state
We allow by his ears with but asses to mate.”
This has been styled a “worthless effusion,” and attempts have been made to pooh-pooh it; but whatever its worth or otherwise, it distinctly shows that sæva indignatio—that unmeasured fury which is one of the stigmata of the literary temperament. Its extravagance is no point against it, and to show that Sir Thomas Lucy was neither a scarecrow nor an ass is altogether beside the mark.
Shakespeare, rubbing his hurts, put all the hatred he could into his rhythmic abuse, and did not stop to consider how closely it tallied with actualities. Now let us reconstruct the actual man. The real Sir Thomas was a personage of wealth inherited unimpaired, and of undoubted culture and esteem: in the words of his contemporaries a “right worshipful knight.” He reigned long in the home of his ancestors at Charlecote, to which he succeeded in 1552, upon the death of his father. He was then only twenty years of age, and he lived until 1602. He had for tutor none other than John Foxe, the martyrologist, to whom his father, Sir Thomas, had given shelter. “Foxe, forsaken by his friends, and accused of heresy for professing the reformed religion, was left naked of all human assistance; when God’s providence began to show itself, procuring for him a safe refuge in the house of the Worshipful Knight, Sir Thomas Lucy, of Charlecote in Warwickshire, who received him into his family as tutor, and he remained there till his pupils no longer needed instruction.” Foxe was married here, at Charlecote, in 1547.
In common with the rich landowners of his time, Sir Thomas Lucy was a patron of architecture and the arts, and in no way the inferior of his contemporaries, as the beautiful hall of Charlecote, built by him, sufficiently proves. Six years after coming into his inheritance he demolished the old mansion and erected that we now see. The house of Lucy had never before lived in such state as that he enjoyed. In 1565 he received the honour of knighthood, and first sat in Parliament in 1571: in all these and succeeding years filling the usual local magisterial offices of a personage of his station. He is said to have entertained Queen Elizabeth on her progress to Kenilworth, in 1572, and the entrance porch to the front of the house is said to have been added for the occasion; a tradition that may well be true, for it is a more elaborate structure than the surrounding composition. It is two storeys in height, and in stone: the frontage in general being chiefly of brick. It is also obviously an addition, and is not exactly central. The building of it converted the ground plan into the semblance of a capital E, which was the courtly way among architects and their patrons of paying a compliment to Queen Elizabeth. Is it not thus sufficiently clear that in the building of his new mansion Sir Thomas had overlooked this customary compliment and that he hurriedly added it, over against the Queen’s coming? The prominence of the sculptured royal arms over the doorway, with the initials “E.R.,” lend support to this view.
This very magnificent person might well “think himself great,” for he was the most considerable landowner in the district, and everywhere deferred to. Besides providing himself with a stately new residence he paid great attention to preserving game on his various estates, and is found in March 1585, about the time of Shakespeare’s alleged poaching exploit, in charge of a Bill in Parliament for its better preservation in the parks of England, which he would appear to have considered not sufficiently protected by the law of some twenty-three years earlier, prescribing three months’ imprisonment for deer-stealing and a fine of three times the damage done.
Here, then, you have a portraiture of that personage whom Shakespeare so grossly travestied. Nor did that impudent ballad suffice to clear the score, for he returned to him in later years, and in the Second Part of Henry the Fourth we find “Justice Shallow” at his country house in Gloucestershire, entertaining Sir John Falstaff, and bragging of what a gay dog and a wild fellow he was in his young days in London; “every third word a lie.” The “old pike” was, says Falstaff, “like a man made after supper with a cheese-paring,” a figure of fun.
“Old pike” gives the key to Shakespeare’s meaning, and must at the time have been well understood locally to refer to the luces, or pike, in the Lucy arms; but, growing bolder, he much more fully, offensively, and unmistakably caricatures Sir Thomas Lucy under the same name of “Justice Shallow” in the Merry Wives of Windsor. The play indeed most prominently opens with him represented as having come up to Windsor from Gloucestershire for the purpose of laying an information before the Star Chamber against Sir John Falstaff for having killed his deer—
Shallow. Sir Hugh, persuade me not. I will make a Star-chamber matter of it—if he were twenty Sir John Falstaffs, he shall not abuse Robert Shallow, esquire.
Slender. In the county of Gloster, justice of peace, and coram.
Shallow. Ay, Cousin Slender, and cust-alorum.
Slender. Ay and ratalorum, too; and a gentleman born, master parson, who writes himself, armigero, in any bill, warrant, quittance, or obligation, armigero.
Shallow. Ay, that we do, and have done any time these three hundred years.
Slender. All his successors, gone before him, have done’t; and all his ancestors, that come after him, may; they may give the dozen white laces in their coat.
Shallow. It is an old coat.
Evans. The dozen white louses do become an old coat well; it agrees well, passant; it is a familiar beast to man, and signifies love.
Another passage a little later contains an allusion which we try in vain to interpret. What was the story of the keeper’s daughter? There is more in this, we may say, than meets the eye. Who knows how the deer-stalking may have been complicated by some incident of a more tender and romantic nature? Keeper’s daughters are notoriously comely and buxom, and imagination may frame a pretty story out of this quaint disclaimer of Falstaff’s—
Falstaff. How, Master Shallow, you’ll complain of me to the king?
Shallow. Knight, you have beaten my men, killed my deer, and broke open my lodge.
Falstaff. But not kissed your keeper’s daughter?
Shallow. Tut, a pin! this shall be answered.
Falstaff. I will answer it straight.—I have done all this.—That is now answered.
Shallow. The Council shall know this.
Falstaff. ’Twere better for you, if it were known in counsel: you’ll he laughed at.