“LUSTY” STUCLEY
If Devonshire has turned out a number, and a very considerable number, of gallant and honourable gentlemen, she has also given birth to some great scoundrels, and one of these was Thomas Stucley or Stukeley.
His life was worked out with great pains and elaboration by the late Richard Simpson in his School of Shakespeare, London, 1878. Indeed, it occupies one hundred and thirty-nine pages in the first volume of that work. To give the biography at all fully here is not possible, space is not at one’s disposal for all details; it is also unnecessary, since that exhaustive account by Simpson is accessible to every one. The utmost we can do is to give a summary of the chief events of his chequered career. Captain Thomas Stucley was the third son of Sir Hugh Stucley, of Affeton in the parish of West Worlington, near Chumleigh. Hugh Stucley, the father of our Thomas, was Sheriff of Devon in 1544; his wife was Jane, daughter of Sir Lewis Pollard. Sir Hugh died in 1560.
The eldest son, Lewis Stucley, was aged thirty at the death of his father. He became standard-bearer to Queen Elizabeth.
It was rumoured during the life of Thomas that he was an illegitimate son of Henry VIII, like Sir John Perrot. “Stucley’s birth,” says Mr. Simpson, “must have occurred at the time when the King, tired of his wife Catherine, was as yet ranging among favourites who were contented with something less than a crown as the price of their kindness. Elizabeth Tailbois had been succeeded by Mary Boleyn; and as Mary Boleyn was married to William Carey at Court, and in the presence of the King, 31 January, 1521, it is clear that some one else had already succeeded to her place.”
Whether Thomas ever claimed to be of royal blood we do not know. If so, Lady Stucley, like Lady Falconbridge, might have cried out:—
Where is that slave—where is he,
That holds in chase mine honour up and down?
But he was certainly treated at foreign courts as one of birth superior to that of a younger son of a Devonshire knight; and the tradition obtains some support from the familiar way in which he was received by both queens, Mary and Elizabeth, and the peculiar terms of intimacy which he assumed towards royal personages; moreover the Duke of Northumberland treated him with the same jealousy with which he might have treated Henry Fitzroy, Duke of Richmond, had he been still alive. In the play Vernon says:—
Doubtless, if ever man was misbegot,