Thomas Stukley
Thomas Stucley was an English mercenary who fought in France, Ireland and at the Battle of Lepanto before being killed at the Battle of Alcácer Quibir in 1578. He was a Catholic recusant and a rebel against the Protestant Elizabeth I.
Family
He was a younger son of Sir Hugh Stucley lord of the manor of Affeton, in the parish of West Worlington in Devon, head of an ancient gentry family, a Knight of the Body to King Henry VIII and Sheriff of Devon in 1545. His mother was Jane Pollard, daughter of Sir Lewis Pollard, lord of the manor of King's Nympton, Devon, Justice of the Common Pleas, and his wife Anne Hext.It has been alleged that he was instead an illegitimate son of King Henry VIII. Details of any wives or children he may have had are imprecise.
Career
Stucley's early mentors were Charles Brandon, 1st Duke of Suffolk, and then the Bishop of Exeter, in whose household he held a post. He was present at Boulogne during the siege of 1544–45, and again in 1550 on the surrender of the city to the English. From 1547 to 1550, he was a standard-bearer at Boulogne, and then entered the service of Edward Seymour, 1st Duke of Somerset. After his master's arrest in 1551 a warrant was issued against him, but he succeeded in escaping to France, where he served in the French army.His military talents brought him to the attention of Henri III de Montmorency, and he was sent to England with a letter of recommendation from Henry II of France to his supposed half-brother Edward VI of England. On his arrival he proceeded on 16 September 1552 to reveal the French plans for the capture of Calais and for a descent upon England, the furtherance of which had, according to his account, been the object of his mission to England. John Dudley, 1st Duke of Northumberland evaded the payment of any reward to Stucley, and sought to gain the friendship of the French king by pretending to disbelieve Stucley's statements.
Stucley, who may well have been the originator of the plans adopted by the French, was imprisoned in the Tower of London for some months. Having run through his brother's inheritance, he was prosecuted for debt on his release in August 1553 and was compelled to become a soldier of fortune once more. This was not his only financial difficulty: once, claiming a legacy, he broke into the late testator's house and searched the coffers, in defiance of a court injunction. In another episode, he was imprisoned in the Tower at the suit of an Irishman he had robbed.
He returned to England in December 1554 in the train of Emmanuel Philibert, Duke of Savoy, after obtaining an amnesty against his creditors' suits, possibly thanks to the Duke of Suffolk. His credit temporarily improved upon his marriage to Anne Curtis, granddaughter and heir of Sir Thomas Curtis, but he was reputed to squander £100 a day and to have sold the blocks of tin with which his father-in-law had paved the yard of his London house. Within a few months, a warrant for his arrest was issued on a charge of uttering false money and he fled abroad again, deserting his wife, to enter the service of the duke of Savoy. He then fought on the victorious side at the Battle of St. Quentin in 1557.
In 1558, Stucley was summoned before the council on a charge of piracy, although he was again acquitted owing to insufficient evidence, and managed to retain the favour of Queen Mary I of England. On the death of his wife's grandfather at the beginning of Elizabeth's reign he came into money, and he accommodated himself to the Protestant succession and became a supporter of Sir Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester. In 1561, he was given a captaincy at Berwick, where he lived sumptuously; during the winter, he made firm friends with the Gaelic nobleman Shane O'Neill of Ulster, upon the latter's visit to court at London. In 1562, he obtained a warrant permitting him to bring French ships into English ports although England and France were only nominally at peace.
At about this time, on being presented to the queen he said he would prefer to be sovereign of a molehill than the subject of the greatest king in Christendom and that he had a presentiment he would be a prince before he died. She is said to have remarked,
"I hope I shall hear from you when you are installed in your principality". He responded that she surely would, and she demanded,
"In what language?" He answered: "In the style of princes, to our dearest sister."
Stucley then devised a plan for a colony in Florida, at the time hotly contested by rival Spanish and French settlers. To this end, he persuaded the queen to supply a ship of 100 tons, to supplement his fleet of five vessels. Having staged a naval pageant for the queen on the Thames, he promptly sailed his fleet to the coast of Munster in Ireland in June 1563 to go privateering against French, Spanish and Portuguese ships. After repeated remonstrances on the part of the offended powers, Elizabeth disavowed Stucley and sent a naval force under the command of Sir Peter Carew to arrest him. One of his ships was taken in Cork haven, and Stucley surrendered, but he was acquitted once again, with O'Neill pleading his case through diplomatic channels.
Ireland
The meeting with O'Neill led to an extended interest in Irish affairs on Stucley's part. He was recommended by the queen to the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, Sir Thomas Radclyffe, Earl of Sussex, on 30 June 1563, and in 1566 was employed as a captain by the Lord Deputy, Sir Henry Sidney, in a vain effort to induce O'Neill to enter into negotiations with the government. The Ulster lord sought to use him as intermediary with Sidney and in the same year requested his presence in fighting the Scots, an arrangement favoured by the lord deputy. Sidney then sought permission of the crown for Stucley to purchase the estates and office of Sir Nicholas Bagenal, marshal of Ireland, for £3,000, but Elizabeth refused to permit the transaction. The lands lay mostly in the east of Ulster, a territory anciently in Hiberno-Norman possession, which was much fought over by the Irish and Scots, and would be used by the English within a decade as a base for their efforts at colonisation of the province.Undeterred by this failure, Stucley was appointed seneschal of Kavanagh's country in south-east Leinster, and had some say in the controversial land claims of his adversary, Peter Carew. He went on to buy lands from Sir Nicholas Heron in the adjacent County Wexford, and was appointed by Sidney to the office of seneschal there, but the queen objected to the appointment and in June 1568 he was dismissed in favour of Sir Nicholas White. Stucley had fallen prey to the disputes between Sidney and White's patron, the Earl of Ormonde, which resulted, in the following year, in Elizabeth rebuking Sidney for his use of Stucley in the negotiations with O'Neill. In June 1569 Stucley was committed to custody in Dublin Castle for 18 weeks, on White's claim that he had used 'coarse language' against the queen and supported 'certain rebels'.
Spain
Again, Stucley was acquitted, and the authorities released him in October 1569. He had been suspected of proposing an invasion of Ireland to King Philip II of Spain, and soon after his release he offered his services to Fénelon, the French ambassador in London. He returned to Ireland in 1570, where he fitted out a ship at Waterford and made a great show of his piety, proceeding through the streets of the city on his knees as he offered himself up to God. He then sailed from Waterford on 17 April, supposedly for London, but his real destination was Vimeiro, northwest of Lisbon. He had 28 men on board, but only the sole Italian knew their course, and the rest fell into despair when they arrived in Portugal after a five-day voyage.Philip II invited him to Madrid, where he was loaded with honours, probably with a view to impressing upon Elizabeth the threat of an invasion of Ireland to detract from English support for the Dutch rebels in the Netherlands. With the approbation of the Duke of Feria, Stucley was known at the Spanish court as the "Duke of Ireland", and was established with an allowance in a villa near Madrid.
Speculation about Stucley's future role became intense. In 1570, it was claimed that he had sought to interfere in the Ridolfi Plot with an attack on Ireland in the following year during the planned invasion of England from Flanders. The Irish invasion was to have been aided by the Plymouth fleet of Sir John Hawkins, who betrayed the supposed plot to the privy council, leading to the arrest of the Thomas Howard, 4th Duke of Norfolk.
On 12 February 1571, the king was informed by the Spanish ambassador that news was had in London from France that the pope had ceded to the Spanish crown the kingdom created for Philip and Queen Mary I of England, which had fallen vacant upon the excommunication of Elizabeth by Pope Pius V, in his 1570 papal bull Regnans in Excelsis, and that it was rumoured that Stucley was to be sent to England with 14 to 15 companies of troops.
Amidst this international feinting and shaping, the Catholic Archbishop of Cashel, Maurice Reagh Fitzgibbon – an ally of the Irish leader in Munster James Fitzmaurice Fitzgerald – made some effort while in Spain to discredit Stucley's ambitions, much to the displeasure of Feria, and was supported by the Duke of Alba, who dismissed the proposed invasion on the ground that once England fell, Ireland would fall of itself.
The archbishop's brief was to request the appointment of John of Austria, nicknamed Don John, as king of Ireland. On removing to Paris, Fitzgibbon informed the English ambassador there, Sir Francis Walsingham, of Stucley's plan. In 1570, Stucley sought to have an English spy, Oliver King, brought before the Spanish Inquisition. King had a history of attendance at Mass and of knocking his breast daily and so was merely stripped and banished, but then had to cross the Pyrenees in the snow while Stucley's men pursued him. Stucley obtained his passport to leave Spain after Elizabeth demanded his dismissal.
Stucley moved to Rome, where he found favour with Pope Pius V, who had excommunicated Elizabeth in 1571. He was given the command of three galleys at the Battle of Lepanto, and showed great valour. It was a crucial victory for the Holy League over the Ottoman Empire of Selim II, and allowed Spain to devote more resources to its campaigns in northern Europe.
Stucley's exploits restored him to favour in Madrid, and by the end of March 1572 he was at Seville, offering to hold the narrow seas against the English with a fleet of twenty ships. In four years he is said to have received over 27,000 ducats from Philip II of Spain, but wearied by the king's delays he sought more serious assistance from the new pope, Gregory XIII, who aspired to make his son Giacomo Boncompagni King of Ireland.