Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 55.djvu/132

 extent in Philip's eyes. Early in 1572 Stucley visited Paris apparently with the object of negotiating a combined French and Spanish invasion of England. The scheme came to nothing, as did another suggested for Stucley by [q. v.] Throughout 1573 and 1574 Stucley seems to have lived in Spain immersed in plots against England and quarrels with his fellow renegades. In October 1575 he was at Rome, where, according to [q. v.], he was ‘in great credit with the pope’ (English Romayne Life, 1582). In the spring of 1576 he was back at Madrid with Dr. (afterwards Cardinal) Allen, negotiating for the deliverance of Mary Queen of Scots and for the reduction of Ireland; but before May he returned to Rome, whence he made a pilgrimage to Loretto. Early in 1577 he went with Don John by way of Florence to the Netherlands, but his principal business was at Rome, where, having given up Philip as hopeless, he was negotiating with the pope for the means for an invasion of Ireland. He claimed for himself the title of Archduke of Ireland, which he was to hold of the holy see. At length he secured material aid. On 4 March 1577–8 it was reported that he had left Civita Vecchia with a galleon carrying six hundred men, and on 4 May the English consul at San Lucar informed his government that Stucley had arrived there with ships and men supplied by the pope. The news created great alarm, and Frobisher was sent to the west of Ireland to intercept him. The precaution was needless. Stucley's ships were so unseaworthy that he was compelled to put in at Lisbon and beg fresh ones from Sebastian, king of Portugal. Sebastian, however, induced Stucley to join his expedition against Morocco. There he fought in command of his Italian soldiers at the fatal battle of Alcazar on 4 Aug. 1578, being killed, like Sebastian, on the field.

Stucley's first wife died apparently before 1565. Colonel Vivian erroneously gives the maiden name of this wife as Poulet. Possibly this was the name of his second wife, who was living in Ireland in 1565. Stucley's youngest brother, Lewis Stucley, who served as standard-bearer to Queen Elizabeth, and died on 1 Dec. 1581, was grandfather of Sir [q. v.] (, Visitations of Devonshire, p. 721).

Stucley at once became the hero of dramas and ballads. There is no evidence as to when ‘The Famous History of the Life and Death of Captain Thomas Stukeley’ was first acted. It was printed ‘as it hath been acted’ at London, 1605, 4to, and was reprinted in Simpson's ‘School of Shakespeare,’ 1878. The printed version is, however, very incomplete. A ballad, probably based on the play, became popular, and four copies of it are in the Roxburghe collection in the British Museum, none of them with any date. Stucley also figures in Peele's ‘Battle of Alcazar,’ which was probably acted before the spring of 1589, and was printed in 1594 (for other poetical references to Stucley see Introduction to the Battle of Alcazar). Reference is made to his story in Kingsley's ‘Westward Ho!’ (chap. v.).

 STUDLEY, JOHN (1545?–1590?), translator, born about 1545, was one of the original scholars of Westminster school, and the earliest to be elected to Cambridge (Alumni Westmonast. p. 45, where the Christian name is given erroneously as Joseph). He matriculated from Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1561; he graduated B. A. in 1566 and M.A. in 1570, being elected a fellow of the college in the interval. He was a good classical scholar, and at a very early age prepared, in continuation of the labours of Jasper Heywood, translations of four of Seneca's tragedies 'Agamemnon,' 'Medea,' 'Hippolytus,' and 'Hercules Oeteus.' He employed the common ballad metre for the dialogue, and rhyming decasyllabics for the choruses, but freely and tediously paraphrased his text with ludicrously tame and bathetic effects. Occasionally he made deliberate changes. To the 'Agamemnon' he added an unnecessary scene at the close, in which he re-narrated the death of Cassandra, the imprisonment of Electra, and the flight of Orestes. To the 'Medea' he prefixed an original prologue and amplified the choruses. The 'Agamemnon' and the 'Medea' were both licensed for publication to Thomas Colwell in 1566, and the 'Hippolytus' to Henry Denham in 1567. No copy of the original edition of either the 'Medea'