Robert Lucas is believed to have been born in Ireland before the death of his father in 1650.
The 3rd Baron Lucas inherited his title in the midst of the crisis caused by the threat of invasion by William of Orange; from 12 Dec. he was a regular attender at the meetings of the provisional government.
Lucas’s correspondence survives mainly in the archives of the central government and therefore reflects the varied nature of his official duties rather than his political views or personal concerns. His duties included the protection and safety of the Tower from Jacobite infiltrators.
It was great chance that made him a lord and governor of the most considerable garrison in the nation, both at the same time; to neither of which he could ever have aspired, if they had not dropped upon him whether he would or not; he made his court very assiduously to the king, and by that means he got his majesty to excuse several slips which happened in his government.Macky Mems. 84.
Whichever it was, it dictated a rapid conversion to the cause of the Prince of Orange.
Lucas took his seat at the opening of the first session of the Convention and was then present for just under 75 per cent of sitting days. He was named to the committees for privileges and petitions. On 31 Jan. 1689 he voted in favour of declaring the Prince and Princess of Orange king and queen and entered his dissent at the failure of the House to agree that the throne was vacant. On 4 Feb. he supported the Commons in the use of the word ‘abdicated’ instead of ‘deserted’, again subscribing to a dissent when the resolution that the throne was vacant was lost and on 6 Feb. again voted, this time with the majority, in favour of the resolution to agree with the Commons that James II had abdicated and that the throne was thereby vacant. On 2 Mar. he was amongst the first groups of peers to take the new oaths. On 6 Mar. he subscribed to the protest at the passage of the bill for the regulation of trials of peers (which subsequently failed in the Commons), arguing that resort to a statute amounted to a derogation rather than either a confirmation or improvement on the rights and privileges of the peerage. On 8 Mar. he was named, along with almost every member present, to the committee for the bill to reverse the attainder of William Russell‡, Lord Russell. On 21 Mar. he was appointed to a similarly full committee for the bill to revive proceedings at law. By the end of the session he had been named to a further 20 committees on a variety of public and private bills, ranging from the abolition of hearth tax and the reversal of the attainders against the remaining Whig martyrs to estate and naturalization bills. His wholehearted belief in the reality of the Popish Plot is suggested by his vote on 31 May in favour of the bill reversing the judgments against Titus Oates and on 30 July against adhering to the Lords’ amendments to the bill.
Lucas’s attendance fell back slightly to just under 66 per cent during the 1689-90 session. On 23 Oct. 1689 he was appointed to the committees for privileges, the Journal and petitions and during the course of the session to a further 12 committees. During the remainder of his parliamentary career Lucas was named to the committees for privileges and the Journal whenever he arrived sufficiently early in the session, but since his signature does not appear on the various lists of those who inspected the Journal until 1704, he was presumably not an active member of that committee before that date. Thomas Osborne, marquess of Carmarthen and later duke of Leeds, classified him as a court supporter in a list compiled between October 1689 and February 1690. On 22 Nov. 1689 the House intervened in a quarrel between Lucas and his kinsman William Byron, 3rd Baron Byron, requiring them to ‘pass by those words; and that there should be no further proceedings in the business but continue friends.’ The quarrel seems to have related to a piece of sharp practice by Lucas and a rift between Byron and his heir, also named William Byron, later 4th Baron Byron. Byron senior accused Lucas of luring him to the Tower in order to encourage him to drink
so high that I knew not were I was, nor what I did and then brought me writings to seal which I never had read, nor the contents I know not of; but by my sister report my estate is all made over to my son and in trust with my Lord Lucas till he is of age … in February next.Add. 75366, Lucas to Halifax, n.d. [?c.1689]; Add. 75366 Byron to [unknown], n.d. [?c.1689].
When Byron took his case to the court of exchequer he included Lucas’s name as one of the confederates but this was later scratched out. The case continued until at least July 1690.
The first session of the new Parliament opened on 20 Mar. 1690. Lucas was present on just over 67 per cent of sitting days. He was named to 16 committees covering a heterogeneous range of public and private interests but otherwise left no mark on the session. Between sessions he attended all but one of the prorogation days. The next (1690-1) session saw him present on 75 per cent of sitting days. He was named to the three sessional committees and to 21 other committees. On 6 Oct. he voted for the discharge of James Cecil, 4th earl of Salisbury, and Henry Mordaunt, 2nd earl of Peterborough, from their imprisonment in the Tower. Like other peers, Lucas was concerned for his privileges. During the recess he caused James Dudley to be arrested and committed to Newgate for publishing ‘false and scandalous news’ about him. Dudley was released in February 1691 at the command of the queen after Lucas had indicated his willingness to forgive him.
Lucas attended all of the prorogation days before the opening of the 1691-2 session. He was present on 75 per cent of sitting days and was named to 33 committees. He held the proxy of Ralph Eure, 7th Baron Eure, from 9 Feb. to 17 Feb. 1692. It is likely that the proxy was for use during the Norfolk divorce case, for when the hearings began on 16 Feb. Lucas was one of several court supporters who protested against the decision to exclude proxies. That he intended to use the proxy in favour of Henry Howard, duke of Norfolk, is suggested by a remark that he was overheard to make during the hearing, praising one of Norfolk’s witnesses as ‘an honest man’.
Lucas was once again present on each of the prorogation days. During the 1692-3 session he was present on just over 49 per cent of sitting days, and he was named to 11 committees. On 30 Nov. 1692 he invoked privilege of Parliament to protect a servant who had been arrested and imprisoned. On 1 Dec. the House ordered the arrest of the bailiff involved; his release on payment of fees was ordered a week later, on 9 December. Lucas was absent from the House for over a month, between 16 Dec. 1692 and 23 Jan. 1693. His proxy was registered on 27 Dec. to Francis Howard, 5th Baron Howard of Effingham, and was almost certainly for use in the proceedings on the Norfolk divorce case as well as, perhaps, for the place bill. Howard of Effingham’s views on his kinsman’s attempt at divorce chimed with those of Lucas, and it seems reasonable to conclude that as a court dependent Lucas was in agreement with Howard on the need to oppose the place bill. On 4 Feb. 1693 he voted that Charles Mohun, 4th Baron Mohun, was not guilty of murder.
Unusually, Lucas attended only one of the prorogation days before arriving for the opening of the 1693-4 session on 7 November. He was probably ill, for he was granted a month’s leave from the Tower on 16 Sept. 1693 and earlier in the summer had been at Bath, where his illness was not sufficiently serious to prevent him from arresting some fiddlers who had been induced to play Jacobite songs.
His relative poverty and lack of English estates meant that he had little influence over parliamentary elections. His one known foray into electioneering came at the by-election for Colchester in 1694, caused by the death of Samuel Reynolds‡. Edward Cary‡, husband of Lucas’s niece, Anne, had previously represented Colchester, and Lucas now considered promoting the election of Isaac Selfe, husband of Anne’s sister, Penelope, and owner of the former Lucas interest at Lexden. However, he decided instead to back the candidature of Sir Thomas Cooke‡ and his support was apparently instrumental in securing Cooke’s election. The London merchant, Thomas Haynes, had approached Lucas on Cooke’s behalf. Lucas agreed to ‘write to the town and go down afterwards and lay out what moneys were necessary’, but he claimed that he did so only as a front man for Haynes and Cooke. During the course of the election, Lucas spent nearly £300 in cash, gave a note for £50 and borrowed a further £400 from the London financier, Sir Stephen Evance‡, to defray the expenses involved in ‘taking up of several houses for entertainment of the electors’. After the election, Cooke made Lucas a present of £500 and Lucas, claiming that Haynes had promised to repay the note to Evance, successfully sued him for £400.
Lucas’ attendance rose to nearly 86 per cent during the 1694-5 session, perhaps because he had a need to ingratiate himself at court. In August 1694, during Lucas’s absence to recover his health in the country, the Jacobite prisoner Colonel John Parker had escaped from the Tower. During a detailed investigation into the affair by the lord chief justice, Sir John Holt‡, several witnesses suggested that Parker had escaped via the chimney and implied that he was assisted to do so in part by Lucas’s decision to remove the attendant warder from his room. Lucas himself insisted that Parker must have bribed his way out.
Along with others present Lucas was appointed on 10 Jan. 1695 to the committee for the procession to attend the queen’s funeral. During the course of the session he was named to a further 18 committees. He held Byron’s proxy from 24 Dec. until it was vacated by Byron’s return to the House on 15 Feb. 1695, but there is no indication of the purposes for which it was to be used. During the recess, he was again present on each of the prorogation days. According to Narcissus Luttrell‡, he was also the recipient of a welcome financial legacy, £400 a year, following the death of Sir Edward Sutton.
Lucas’s attendance during the 1695-6 session dropped to 65 per cent; he was named to 15 committees. On 26 Feb. 1696 he signed the Association. He attended two of the three prorogation days during the recess, and his attendance remained at 65 per cent in the following, 1696-7, session. On 20 Oct. 1696 he was appointed to the committees for privileges and the Journal, and on the same day, together with Thomas Wentworth* , 2nd Baron Raby (later earl of Strafford), he introduced John Thompson, Baron Haversham, to the House. He was named to 27 other committees. He was present on 23 Dec. 1696 to vote in favour of the Fenwick attainder. His relationship with the court may still have been a difficult one, for in February 1697 John Egerton, 3rd earl of Bridgwater, seems to have been re-investigating the Parker escape.
During the recess he attended five of the seven prorogation days; he was then present for just over 69 per cent of the 1697-8 session when he was named to 39 committees. On 14 Feb. 1698, in his capacity as governor of the Tower, he told the House that Mohun’s behaviour was such that he had to be kept under close confinement. The following month, on 16 and 17 Mar., in one of the few cases in which a personal interest can be established, he entered dissents to the decisions of the House to overthrow the verdict in Bertie v. Lord Falkland and others. The losing party was Lucius Henry Carey, 6th viscount of Falkland [S], Lucas’s great nephew. On 17 Mar. he was named to the committee to consider a published libel in the case and on 24 Mar. as one of the managers of a conference on the subject. He registered a proxy in favour of Bridgwater on 2 Apr. 1698 and was then absent from the House until 3 May. On 24 May he was named as a manager for the conference on the bill for the effectual suppression of blasphemy and profaneness and again on 15 June for conference concerning the trial of Goudet.
Lucas attended 79 per cent of the first session of the 1698 Parliament and was named to 27 committees. On 3 May 1699 he was appointed one of the managers of the conference on paper duties. During the recess he attended four of the six prorogation days. Despite references to the onset of illness in the late summer, his attendance over the 1699-1700 session was still high, reaching just over 70 per cent.
He missed three of the six prorogation days during the recess, probably through illness as he was given three months’ leave in August 1700.
Although Lucas attended all the prorogation days before the opening of the second parliament of 1701, it seems likely that his health was precarious. He was given three months’ leave in September 1701 and did not attend the new session until 13 Jan. 1702, some two weeks after it had begun and so was not named to the sessional committees.
At the accession of Queen Anne, Lucas was dismissed as governor of the Tower and as lord lieutenant of the Tower Hamlets, although he retained command of the regiment to which he had been appointed shortly before William’s death.
Lucas again missed the beginning of the 1703-4 session, arriving on 9 Dec. a full month after the opening of the session, but his attendance, nevertheless, recovered somewhat, reaching 58 per cent. He reported from a committee of the whole concerning the land tax bill on 16 Dec. 1703. His name appears on the first forecast compiled by Charles Spencer, 3rd earl of Sunderland, as a possible opponent of the occasional conformity bill. By the time Sunderland compiled his second forecast it was clear that Lucas would oppose the bill and subsequent division lists confirm this. For the first time his name also appears on 6 and 29 Feb., and 23 Mar. 1704 as one of those who had inspected the Journal.
The 1704-5 session was Lucas’s last. He again missed the start of the session, arriving a month late on 21 November. He attended for the rest of the month, but in December his attendance became sporadic. His last appearance was on 17 Jan. 1705; he died two weeks later. An undated list, usually ascribed to 1705 but probably earlier, classified him as a supporter of the Hanoverian succession. Whilst several of his contemporaries remarked on the fact of his death, none expressed regret or lauded his character. Thomas Bruce, 2nd earl of Ailesbury, who claimed to have been instrumental in securing Lucas’s original appointment to command the Tower, found being a state prisoner under Lucas’s management intolerable, but it seems unlikely that he would have regarded another governor any more favourably.