LUCAS, Henry (1587-1663)

According to the distinguished mathematician Isaac Barrow, who was the first holder of the Cambridge professorship which still carries Lucas’s name, Henry Lucas was

a man much to be honoured for the dignity of his descent, as being related to very noble families by the nearest kindred of blood; but the greatness of his mind rather detracted from the nobleness of his stock, and darkened the splendour of his parentage with the excellence of his virtues.15Barrow, Lectiones, p. iii; Usefulness of Mathematical Learning, p. vii.

Just what aristocratic connections these might have been is unclear. There had been Lucases living in Suffolk since at least the late twelfth century and his father’s armorial bearings confirm that he claimed descent from one of the branches of the family originating there.16J. Stratton, ‘Henry Lucas’, N. and Q. 10th ser. iv. 166; Oates, Cambridge Univ. Lib. 354-5. Otherwise his ancestry is obscure.

Henry’s father, Edward, first appears in 1570s when he began to acquire land in and around Thriplow in Cambridgeshire.17PROB11/58/288; C146/8455; C146/8807; C146/8689; H.C. Hughes, ‘Notes on Thriplow Place’, Procs. Camb. Antiquarian Soc. xxxii. 12-13; VCH Cambs. viii. 243. However, his main residence was in London. Between 1585 and 1595, he was living in the parish of St Giles’s, Cripplegate, where his second son was born in 1587.18‘Strangers resident in London’, 208. Lucas senior seems to have been a benefactor to Cambridge University, although there is no evidence that he had ever formally enrolled there as a student. He was probably the person who contributed towards the new gateway at Magdalene College in 1585, paid for the wainscoting in that college’s hall the following year and presented one of the chapel windows (now in the hall) to Corpus Christi in 1587.19RCHM City of Cambridge, i. 53, plate 119 (d), ii. 138, 142-3; R. Blomefield, Collectanea Cantabrigiensia (Norwich, 1750), 150; MIs Cambs. 174; J. Corder, A Dict. of Suff. Arms (Suff. Rec. Soc. viii), cols. 85, 298.

The properties at Thriplow should have formed a respectable inheritance for Henry, his only surviving child, but, as the latter recalled six decades later, ‘what my father left me was snatched from me by unhappy suits in law during my childhood’.20PROB11/311/547; Barrow, Lectiones, p. iii; Usefulness of Mathematical Learning, p. viii-ix. As joint executor of the 1587 will of his nephen John Flowerdewe, Edward Lucas had assumed responsibility for the Flowerdewe estates (most of which were at Hethersett in Norfolk) during the minorities of Flowerdewe’s four young children.21PROB11/72/52. Complaints that Lucas had failed to fulfil the deceased’s wishes began as soon as the children came of age.22C2/ELIZ/F1/54. When Lucas died intestate, the Flowerdewes persuaded the 1601 Parliament to pass a private Act permitting them to bring actions in the courts to force a sale of the Lucas estates to recover their legacies.23PA, HL/PO/PB/1/1601/43ElizIn29. In 1606 and 1608, the lands left by Edward Lucas were duly seized.24C2/JASI/L6/12; VCH Cambs. viii. 243. Other creditors under the terms of the will also sought redress at law from Lucas’s widow, Mary.25C2/ELIZ/M13/32. In a similar but separate case, Mary Lucas was also sued by her nephew and nieces for failing to fulfil her duties as executrix to her brother, Poyninge Heron.26PROB11/87/15; Oates, Cambridge Univ. Lib. 356. As late as 1622 Henry Lucas was trying to persuade chancery to get the Flowerdewes to account for the scale of their seizures.27C2/JASI/L6/12.

It was perhaps because of this litigation that Lucas’s time at Cambridge as a student was extremely brief. Apart from his own and Barrow’s claims that he had attended St John’s, the only evidence of his sojourn is a payment in the college accounts from 1602 for the use of tennis courts by William Austen, (Sir) Gervase Clifton* and ‘Mr. Lucas’.28PROB11/311/547; Barrow, Lectiones, p. iv; Usefulness of Mathematical Learning, p. ix; Al. Cant.; Oates, Cambridge Univ. Lib. 357. His studies at the Middle Temple may have been similarly interrupted, especially as his admission there took place only a month after chancery agreed to the confiscation of his estates.29M. Temple Admiss. 85.

About 1617 Lucas became secretary to Edward Russell, 3rd earl of Bedford, and his wife, Lucy Harington.30‘Henry Lucas’, Oxford DNB. Lucas was probably among those whom the countess appointed to collect the customs on sea coal at Newcastle-upon-Tyne, due to her by a royal grant of July 1619.31CSP Dom. 1619-23, p. 61. In 1622 the countess’s trustees took legal action against the Newcastle corporation to force them to co-operate.32R. Welford, Hist. of Newcastle and Gateshead (1884-7), iii. 243-5. By 1629 Lucas had advanced to the important post of secretary to one of the secretaries of state, Viscount Dorchester (Dudley Carleton†).33CSP Dom. 1628-9, p. 549 Of necessity, Lucas dealt with much of his employer’s vast paperwork, and had the prospect of a more lucrative position in royal service.34CSP Dom. 1629-31, pp. 28, 29, 36, 38, 40, 49, 198, 206, 313, 344, 365, 476; 1631-3, pp. 135, 153, 229.

Dorchester’s death in February 1632 was potentially a disaster, but later the same year Lucas entered the service of the 1st earl of Holland (Henry Rich†).35HMC Cowper, i. 479. As Holland’s representative he became involved in July 1634 with John White I*, trustee for the 4th earl of Dorset (Sir Edward Sackville†), and Job Harby in the syndicate which was granted the customs on exported sea-coals for 31 years.36Coventry Docquets, 226; C66/2645, mm. 1-11. Through Lucas, Holland gained over £1,250 in this scheme’s first year of operation.37HMC Var. Coll. viii. 194-5. When in 1636 Holland, as chancellor of Cambridge University, pressed with the king its claims for exemption from the visitation planned by Archbishop William Laud, Lucas sent progress reports to the vice-chancellor, Henry Smyth, and the clerk of the council, Edward Nicholas†.38CUL, Add. 23, ff. 29-29v; CSP Dom. 1636-7, pp. 97, 338. Increasingly reliant on Lucas to manage his disordered personal finances, about 1641 the earl conveyed his various debts to a group of trustees headed by his secretary. In return, Holland granted these trustees the profits of the greenwax office of king’s bench and common pleas, which may have amounted to £2,000 a year.39CCAM 628-31; CSP Dom. 1660-1, p. 186; Aylmer, King’s Servants, 213.

Lucas owed his elections to Parliament in 1640 entirely to the support of Holland. On 11 March the senate of Cambridge University followed the earl’s preference for Lucas in the junior place, spurning Sir John Lambe, who had the crucial disadvantage of being Laud’s vicar-general.40Camb. Univ. Trans. ii. 558; M.B. Rex, Univ. Representation in Eng. 1604-1690 (1954), 121. Lucas then left no trace in the records of the Short Parliament. There was even greater competition for the university seats at Cambridge that autumn, but challenges from the celebrated antiquary, Sir Henry Spelman†, and the master of the Fleet, Henry Hopkins, failed to prevent the re-elections of Lucas and Thomas Eden*. Lucas easily topped the poll.41Bodl. Tanner 65, f. 164; Orig. Lttrs. of Eminent Literary Men ed. H. Ellis (Cam. Soc. xxiii), 163-4; Cooper, Annals Camb. iii. 304; Camb. Univ. Trans. ii. 558; Rex, Univ. Representation, 146-8.

During the first six months of the Long Parliament, Lucas’s role was as obscure as in its predecessor. But this began to change with his master’s appointment as captain-general of the army north of the Trent in April 1641. One of Holland’s first acts was to bring in Lucas to replace Robert Scawen* (steward to his predecessor, Algernon Percy†, 4th earl of Northumberland) as the secretary handling his paperwork.42CSP Dom. 1640-1, p. 557. In recognition of this the Commons then added Lucas to the committee on the state of the army (18 May).43CJ ii. 149a. By the time he accompanied Holland to York in June 1641, the treasurer-at-war, Sir William Uvedale*, was already complaining of Lucas’s shortcomings.44CJ ii. 189b, 244b-245a; Procs. LP v. 374; Harl. 479, f. 3. As Uvedale told his deputy, Matthew Bradley, Lucas was ‘raw and altogether unready’ and ‘so totally ignorant of all businesses of this nature that you must afford him your assistance’.45CSP Dom. 1641-3, pp. 23, 29. On the major issue facing Holland how to persuade the Scots to withdraw from England Lucas was optimistic. He told Sir Thomas Fairfax* in August 1641 that the deal for payment of the Scots’ arrears was ‘an act of so much confidence in their fidelity, as I hope will oblige them to observe it and to leave us in so much peace and leisure, as the House may thereafter wholly attend the restoration and settlement of our affairs at home’.46Add. 15858, f. 63v. With the onset of winter, Lucas returned to Westminster.

For the time being the matters Lucas raised there all concerned the universities. His intervention in the debate on 23 October on the bill to ban clergymen from holding secular office was an unsuccessful attempt to amend it so that it would not exclude heads of house at Oxford and Cambridge from the commissions of the peace. The following week he presented the Commons with certificates from two Cambridge colleges to show that they were no longer applying any of the Laudian liturgical innovations in their chapels.47D’Ewes (C), 30, 32, 49. Six months later, when John Crew* reported from the committee which was preparing a general declaration on matters of religion (7 Apr. 1642), Lucas raised the case of a Cambridge student who was believed to have tried to convert some of the students at Peterhouse to Catholicism.48PJ ii. 137.

Charles I’s departure from London in January 1642 in the wake of his failed arrest of the Five Members forced Holland to choose between the king and Parliament. Having opted for Parliament, the earl was sacked as groom of the stool. How far Lucas was influenced by Holland’s rather lukewarm stance thereafter is impossible to judge with any precision. Plausibly, like Holland, he sided with the peace party. In 1665 Isaac Barrow (who had supported the royalists during the 1640s) told an audience of Cambridge dons that

in those wicked and unhappy times, when a covetous barbarity gaped after the profits of the university, imposing burthens upon all, and everywhere exacting the most unreasonable taxes; [Lucas] stoutly defended your cause and maintained your immunities; he strenuously exerted all his power, and effected much, what through advice, what through persuasion, that the gown might not be made tributary to the cloth; that the fury of Mars might not pray upon the property of Minerva; that the wealth dedicated to the nurture of the liberal arts might not be perverted to maintain the worst of tyrants, and to promote the enterprises of wicked men.49Barrow, Lectiones, pp. viii-ix; Usefulness of Mathematical Learning, pp. xii-xiii.

But the post-Restoration context and the intention to flatter Lucas’s memory undermines the credibility of this account.

Although he continued to sit at Westminster, Lucas was indeed hardly involved in the prosecution of the war against the king, not least because Holland had largely withdrawn from active command in the field. His sole outing as a teller – in the vote on 17 August 1642 concerning Uvedale’s accounts was probably as much about protecting his own past record as about future accountability. The division is ambiguously recorded, but it seems most likely that Lucas and Robert Reynolds* marshalled the majority who wanted Uvedale to be summoned to present his accounts as treasurer-at-war.50CJ ii. 724b. The choice of Lucas a week later to go to ask the 3rd earl of Suffolk what he planned to do with the Suffolk militia was simply because the earl was Holland’s son-in-law.51CJ ii. 736a. Lucas showed some willingness to assist the war effort, for he had promised in June 1642 to lend £50 and a horse, promising a further loan the following December, and he was named to the contributions committee (28 Oct. 1642), but his inclusion in the committee set up in July 1643 to investigate the powers of the parliamentary committees which handled money suggests that he shared the growing concerns about abuses in the ad hoc system of finances Parliament had created.52PJ iii. 471; Add. 18777, f. 110; CJ ii. 825b, iii. 186a. As he had not himself invested in the Irish Adventure, his appointment to a couple of the Irish committees, including the Committee for Irish Affairs (3 Sept. 1642), probably instead reflected Holland’s interests in such matters.53CJ ii. 750b, 808a.

Perhaps the most telling indication of Lucas’s stance was his reaction to Holland’s return from Oxford in October 1643. The previous August, following the Commons’ rejection of the Lords’ resolution in favour of peace, Holland and the 5th earl of Bedford (William Russell*) had fled to the royalist headquarters at Oxford. But disappointed by his hostile reception there, Holland returned two months later. His welcome in London was even more frosty. Lucas was the only MP to wait on him on his return.54Harl. 165, f. 228v. His personal loyalty to the earl overrode all other considerations.

Religious policy for Lucas was bound up with the interests of Cambridge University. In general, he seems to have been willing to support policies seeking to establish Presbyterianism. He took the oath imposed in the aftermath of Edmund Waller’s* plot on 6 June 1643, the earliest possible opportunity and three days before Holland.55CJ iii. 118a; LJ vi. 87a. On 12 December he drew the attention of the Commons to the letter which the 2nd earl of Manchester (Edward Montagu†) had recently sent to the Lords proposing a purge of the university dons. He also presented the petition from Trinity College on the decision by the Cambridgeshire sequestrators to confiscate the rents of those colleges which had tried to send plate to the king. He was then second-named to the committee on the bill to remove scandalous ministers throughout the Eastern Association*.56Harl. 166, f. 240; CJ iii. 338b. Like Manchester, Lucas’s concern at this stage was probably to clarify the legality of such a policy.

For over a year Lucas then appears to have been largely inactive in the Commons. The next record of him speaking in the House dates from April 1645 when he introduced the bill exempting Cambridge colleges from paying taxes.57Harl. 166, f. 200. But from the time the idea of a purge of Cambridge University was revived in June 1645, Lucas was named to most of the committees which paved the way for the resulting legislation.58CJ iv. 174a, 312a, 350b. To some extent, this may have been just because he was the university’s MP and it is also possible, as Barrow implied, that Lucas’s main concern was to keep any parliamentary intervention in university affairs to a minimum. He may therefore have shared the fears expressed by the Cambridge colleges in their petition to Parliament, to which he and John Selden* were asked to prepare a suitably reassuring reply denying any intention to infringe the university’s ancient privileges (4 Aug. 1645).59CJ iv. 229b. However, his appointment as a commissioner for scandalous offences in June 1646 had a wider application and, along with his support for the earlier bill, does suggest that he was favourable towards the Presbyterian view that there were some religious principles which should be rigorously enforced.60CJ iv. 562b; A. and O. The same is true of his appointment in March 1647 to the committee on the bill intended to prevent malignant clergymen being named to livings or fellowships.61CJ iv. 119b.

Lucas played little part in the events of 1647. He remained at Westminster in the days following the flight of the two Speakers and the Independents on 30 July, being named three days later to the committee which investigated the apprentices’ riot of 26 June.62CJ v. 265a. A further committee appointment on 8 September, the same day the seven Presbyterian peers were impeached, reveals that he was still in the Commons after the return of the Independents, but he had absented himself from the House at some point before 9 October.63CJ v. 295b, 329b. Thereafter his attendances may have been infrequent. He was added to the committee for raising money for Ireland on 1 November and was included in the committee on the jurisdiction of the high court of Admiralty the following March. He was again absent from the Commons in late April 1648.64CJ v. 347a, 505b, 543b.

Lucas seems to have avoided making the mistake of openly joining Holland’s rebellion in July 1648. Indeed, far from viewing him as suspect, Parliament soon after appointed Lucas to the commission for scandalous offences (29 Aug.) and as one of the commissioners empowered to collect assessment arrears in Cambridgeshire to encourage the disbandment of the army (23 Sept.).65A. and O.; CJ vi. 30a. In late September 1648 he was added to the committee appointed to consider the fate of books and manuscripts which had been seized under sequestration orders. This was so that he could help organise the transfer of the library of Lambeth Palace which Parliament had earlier presented to Cambridge University.66CJ vi. 39a. Lucas was named as one of the Cambridgeshire militia commissioners as late as 2 December but was then among those purged from the Commons by the army four days later.67A. and O.; A List of the Imprisoned and Secluded Members (1648, 669.f.13.62); A Vindication (1649), 29 (irregular pagination) (E.539.5).

That Lucas had stood aloof from Holland’s misguided uprising turned out to be advantageous to the earl’s family. This may well have been deliberate, for, in the aftermath of Holland’s capture, it allowed Lucas to disentangle the earl’s financial affairs. The Committee for Advance of Money stepped in to claim the £1,500 it had previously demanded from the earl and quickly alighted on the money supposedly held by Lucas for repayment of a debt of £1,000 to the late Sir John Pennington. This was one of the debts covered by the deal involving the greenwax profits, and was soon complicated by dispute over Holland’s exact entitlement. By January 1649 the committee had established that Lucas claimed £1,764 in greenwax arrears while, in turn, owing £500 to Pennington’s executors. The earl’s execution on 9 March 1649 did nothing to simplify the problem and Lucas now became one of the eight overseers who assisted Holland’s wife implement the terms of his will. The other overseers included Denzil Holles* and Sir William Lewis*.68PROB11/211/516. After further investigations, the Committee for Advance of Money concluded that, as the other debts and payments which Lucas was expected to pay would consume most of the profits, the sequestration order on the greenwax profits should be lifted. However, it was not until 1652 that the committee finally settled the rival claims to these profits and at that date Lucas still owed £250 to Pennington’s executors.69CCAM 628-31; CCC 2078. Lucas probably continued to act on behalf of Holland’s widow and his surviving children. The eldest daughter, Frances, who married William, Lord Paget, would receive £100 in Lucas’s will as a mark of his respect for her.70PROB11/311/547.

During the final years of his life Lucas built up a large library ‘for the entertainment of my leisure’.71PROB11/311/547. The collection, which seems to have been accumulated in earnest only from about 1651, included numerous works in Latin, French and Italian, and by his death numbered over 4,000 volumes.72CUL, Mm.4.27; Oates, Cambridge Univ. Lib. 361-7. His copy of Thomas Hobbes’s De Corpore (1655) was a present to him from the author.73T. Hobbes, Elementorum Philosophiae sectio prima de Corpore (1655), flyleaf inscription (CUL, P*.16.9(F)). Whether Lucas resumed his seat in the Commons after the readmission of the secluded MPs on 21 February 1660 is not known. At the Restoration, together with Harby and Lord Buckhurst (Charles Sackville†), he reclaimed the remaining five years on the sea-coals grant, although Paget now held the share Lucas was managing.74CTB i. 12; CSP Dom. 1660-1, pp. 186, 433; 1661-2, pp. 189, 620; 1663-4, p. 341; 1664-5, p. 154 During this period Lucas had lodgings in London in Chancery Lane and it was there that he died in 1663, possibly on 15 July. He was buried nearby in the chancel of the Temple Church on 21 July.75Smyth’s Obit. 58; Reg. of Burials at the Temple Church, 16; ‘Henry Lucas’, Oxford DNB.

Lucas’s will, drafted just over a month before he died, assured him his posthumous fame. He disposed of substantial sums of money and, although he could afford to be generous with the legacies he left to his surviving relatives, his stated purpose in giving most of it away was ‘to restore it to God from whose bounty I received the whole’.76PROB11/311/547. Most famously, his bequests included money to purchase lands worth £100 a year to endow the first chair in ‘the mathematical sciences’ at Cambridge.77PROB11/311/547; Endowments of the University of Cambridge ed. J.W. Clark (Cambridge, 1904), 165-71; CSP Dom. 1663-4, pp. 401, 461; Barrow, Lectiones, pp. ix-x; Usefulness of Mathematical Learning, p. xiii. The gift of his book collection was also one of the major additions to the holdings of the university library in this period.78CUL, Mm.4.27; University Archives, Grace Bk. H, p. 335; Oates, Cambridge Univ. Lib. 361-7. (In making it, Lucas was no doubt aware that the collection he had helped remove from Lambeth Palace in 1648 had only recently been reclaimed from the university by Archbishop William Juxon.)79Barrow, Lectiones, p. x; Usefulness of Mathematical Learning, pp. xiii-xiv. To ensure that Cambridge University honoured these wishes, Lucas appointed Thomas Buck, the long-serving esquire bedell and university printer, as one of his two executors.80H.P. Stokes, Esquire Bedells of the University of Cambridge (Cambridge Antiquarian Soc. xlv), 96-9. Yet these Cambridge donations were at the time only of secondary importance. Lucas instructed that the residue of his estate, amounting to £7,000, be spent on an almshouse for poor men living in and around Windsor Forest. In 1668 his executors established the hospital at Wokingham in Berkshire which still bears his name and which, in accordance with his wishes, is still managed by the Drapers’ Company.81PROB11/311/547; W. Archer-Thomson, Drapers’ Co. ii. 115-27; A.H. Johnson, Hist. of the Worshipful Co. of the Drapers (Oxford, 1914-22), iii. 331; Lysons, Magna Britannia (1808-22), i. pt. ii. 443; VCH Berks. iii. 226, 235-6. The first master was Thomas Hodges, one of the fellows intruded at St John’s College, Cambridge, by the earl of Manchester in 1644.82R.F. S[cott], ‘Notes from the college records’, The Eagle, xxxiii. 480-1. However, it is as the founder of the Lucasian professorship that Lucas is now mainly remembered, if only because his desire to encourage the study of mathematics at his old university soon came to fruition in the most spectacular fashion imaginable. Six years after Lucas’s death, Isaac Barrow stepped aside to make way for an especially talented young fellow of Trinity, Isaac Newton†. The university’s pre-eminence in mathematics was soon beyond question and the Lucasian chair has remained the ultimate glittering prize for a Cambridge mathematician. In due course, Newton himself became MP for the university, as did two of his nineteenth-century successors, Sir George Gabriel Stokes and Sir Joseph Larmor.83Hist. Reg. of the University of Cambridge, ed. J.R. Tanner (Cambridge, 1917), 83.