A Sulfurous Spirit. Lucy Hay, Countess of Carlisle (1599 - 1660)
A woman who had committed many crimes with the spirit of a man ...... Her desires were so ardent that she oftener made advances to the other sex than waited for solicitation. She had frequently, before this period, forfeited her word, forsworn debts, been privy to murder, and hurried into the utmost excesses by her extravagance and poverty. But her abilities were by no means despicable; she could compose verses, jest, and join in conversation either modest, tender, or licentious. In a word, she was distinguished by much refinement of wit, and much grace of expression.
Sallust’s description of Sempronia sister of the Gracchi was well known in the Seventeenth Century. Ben Jonson had published the play ‘Catilline, His Conspiracy,’ that portrayed the scheming Sempronia at the heart the Roman Republic. During the English Civil War it was a moniker attached to one of the great plotters of the age - Lucy Hay the Countess of Carlisle.
Born in 1599 to Henry Percy the 9th Earl of Northumberland, Lucy saw her father imprisoned for association with the Gunpowder Plotters. The Earl spent seventeen years in the Tower in relative comfort, but insisted on his daughter living with him. At the age of seventeen, Lucy - already renowned as a beauty - became involved with Sir James Hay. Despite her father’s disapproval, and attempts to stop the marriage, Lucy married Hay in 1617.
Hay was a favourite of both James I and his son Charles, and used as an ambassador to various European courts leaving his young wife at home. By 1622, Hay was made Earl, but the marriage was not successful in producing children, nor it seems particularly happy. Lucy was made Lady of the Bedchamber to the new queen Henrietta Maria in 1626 and was soon firmly ensconced as the Queen’s favourite. The prim and proper Henrietta Maria was fascinated and scandalised by Lucy’s wit and behaviour. Lucy became the Duke of Buckingham’s mistress, and it is here that her name first becomes attached to fiction.
Buckingham’s affair with the Queen of France led to the theft of the Queen’s diamond necklace. The culprit was alleged to be Lucy Hay. The French writer François de La Rochefoucauld who knew all three of the protagonists, Buckingham, Lucy, and Anne of Austria, recorded the story in his notes. Later, Alexander Dumas would use La Rochefoucauld’s revelations for the plot of his novel The Three Musketeers, and Lucy Hay as the basis of Milady D’Winter - one of the great femme fatales of literature.
Lucy had by now also become the muse for Caroline poets. Sir John Suckling’s risqué, sexually charged poem Upon My Lady Carlisle’s Walking portrays her at the height of her beauty and fame.
In spite of masks and hoods descry The parts denied unto the eye. I was undoing all she wore, And had she walked but one turn more, Eve in her first state had not been More naked or more plainly seen.
When James Hay died in 1638 he left Lucy as an extremely wealthy influential widow. She quickly became embroiled in a torrid affair with the King’s most important advisor - the Earl of Strafford. Strafford became an object of hate for the Puritan faction in Parliament and Lucy schemed tirelessly on his behalf. The King’s betrayal of Strafford and the Earl’s impeachment and execution in 1641, saw her turn against the royal couple with a vengeance.
Her next step has left historians perplexed for centuries: she became John Pym’s mistress. Pym the architect of Strafford’s execution now took Strafford’s place in her bed. As the crisis of the January 1642 reached a head, Lucy was passing intelligence from the Queen’s household to Pym and the other leaders of the Puritans. When Charles set out to arrest the five members, they were already forewarned, most probably by the Countess. Charles failure to arrest the five members and subsequent flight from London set the nation on course for Civil War.
Pym’s death in the autumn of 1643 and the rise of the Independents saw Lucy’s influence with the Parliamentary faction wane. She drifted back towards the peace party, involving herself in numerous plots and schemes - none of which were successful.
During the second civil war, she sided with the Presbyterian faction, pawning her jewels and maintaining correspondence on the King’s behalf. She was finally arrested in March 1649 and threatened with the rack. After her release from the Tower, Lucy - by now in her fifties and in declining health and influence - retired to her house in London. She died there not long after the Restoration.
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