Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 34.djvu/257

 the eldest son, was a colonel in the royalist army, was created doctor of medicine at Oxford, 8 Nov. 1643 (, Fasti, ii. 68), and died without issue in 1648. The fourth son, Thomas (1624–1684), apparently a friend of James Howell (Letters, ed. Jacobs, i. 419), matriculated from Queen's College, Oxford, in 1641, aged 17, was elected M.P. for Yarmouth, Isle of Wight, in December 1678 and January 1679, and for Warwick in 1679 and 1681. Portraits of himself and his wife by Kneller are at Charlecote. The headship of the family, with the Charlecote estates, ultimately passed to the sons of Fulk, the sixth son of Sir Thomas, and subsequently to the Rev. John Hammond, grandson of Fulk's second daughter, Alice. Hammond assumed the name of Lucy in 1789, and his descendants still own Charlecote.

 LUCY, WILLIAM (1594–1677), bishop of St. David's, born at Hurstbourne, Hampshire, in 1594, was the fourth son of Sir Thomas Lucy of Charlecote by his second wife, Constance, daughter and heiress of Richard Kingsmill of Highclere, Hampshire [see under ]. Entering Trinity College, Oxford, in 1610, he graduated B.A. on 18 Nov. 1613, and in the following year studied at Lincoln's Inn. But ‘upon second thoughts, and perhaps a desire of a sedate and academical life’ (, Athenæ Oxon. (Bliss), iii. 1127), he entered Caius College, Cambridge, as a fellow-commoner on 12 June 1615, and proceeding M.A. in the following year, lived at Cambridge until 1619, when he became rector of Burghclere, Hampshire. In 1621 he obtained also the living of Highclere, and about the same time was appointed chaplain to the Duke of Buckingham, on the recommendation of James I, who told the duke ‘that he should have an eye upon him as occasions served’ (ib.) In a sermon preached by Lucy at Cambridge on Commencement Sunday, 23 June 1622, he expressed strong Arminian views, and excited so much hostility (, Annals of Cambridge, iii. 145) that he narrowly escaped rejection when he supplicated the B.D. degree in 1623 (, Univ. of Cambr.)

Lucy lived quietly at Burghclere until the outbreak of the civil war, when he was ‘both active and passive to his ability in the great cause’ (Tanner MSS. cxlvi. 133). He lost his library, which he had been at great pains to collect (Observations … of divers errors … in Hobbes's Leviathan, 1657, Epistle to the Reader), and at last (1656?) his livings were sequestered (Clarendon State Papers, 1656, No. 664;, Sufferings of the Clergy, p. 298). At the Restoration he became bishop of St. David's, his consecration taking place at Westminster on 18 Nov. 1660. He was present at the Savoy conference, but took no part in the debates (, Nonconformist's Memorial, 2nd edit. i. 29).

Lucy entered on his incumbency in difficult circumstances. The cathedral at St. David's, the collegiate church at Brecon, and the bishop's houses at Brecon and Abergwilly were practically in ruins. The diocese, one of the largest in the kingdom, was without efficient organisation, and during the civil war and the protectorate, active as the dissenting preachers had been in the more populous districts, the smaller parishes had suffered from lack of ministrations of any kind. The revenues of the see were meagre, and Lucy did little to remedy this state of things. From a return made in 1670 (Tanner MSS. cxlvi. 126, 127), it appears that during the first ten years of his episcopate the expenses of the diocese amounted to 2,700l., including 1,500l. spent in the restoration of the collegiate church and the bishop's and prebend's houses at Brecon, and 200l. in augmentation of poor vicarages. Lucy complained that the bishopric had ‘never maintained his expenses with a frugal hospitality,’ and that he was ‘the poorest bishop in England or Wales’ (ib. cxlvi. 133).

Lucy insisted with impolitic vehemence on the rights of his office. William Nicholson, bishop of Gloucester, who held the archdeaconry of Brecon in commendam, claimed the right, nomine suo proprio, of holding visitations and correcting faults in the clergy. There can be no doubt that he exceeded his powers, although the limits of the archdeacon's jurisdiction were not clearly defined. Lucy contended that he could only sit either by himself or his surrogate with the chancellor, to collect his procurations, but ‘his visitation, as it was unseasonable in time, so it was erroneous in the business he undertook to meddle with—invading all jurisdiction episcopal, which was never, as I can learn, attempted by any’ (Lucy to Archbishop Sheldon, 19 Oct. 1663, ib. xlvii. 51). Archbishop Sheldon vainly counselled peace. ‘My jura episcopalia are things entrusted to me,’ wrote Lucy, ‘and I ought to render a fair account to my successor how I have preserved them