The Other Tudors (18 page)

Prideaux had married Thomas’s sister, Mary, and it was their son whose wardship he was awarded. Thomas got to take funds from the Prideaux estate and the wardship stayed within the family and went to a member who was enjoying remarkable favour at Court.

No sooner had Thomas become the Prideaux boy’s guardian than he began looting the child’s estate. The Privy Council issued a Note that since, ‘order was heretofore given him to forbeare to enter the houses, open the chests, or meddell with the goods of serjeant Prideaux deceased, he hath contrary to that order sithens so don, he is eftsoones required to abstaine from the meddling therewith, until the lawe shall have determined the right herin …’
¹¹
The Council ordered Edward Drew and John Bodley to ‘keep safe from spoyle’ the goods and chattels of the Prideaux estate until the courts had decided what should be done and what Thomas might be entitled to.

In 1559 Alderman Curtis died and Thomas’s wife, Anne, came into her full inheritance. Thomas should now have been comfortably off. According to Dr Oliver in his
Views of Devonshire
, ‘by rich matches he [Thomas] got so good an estate as might have qualified a moderate mind to have lived bountifully and in great esteem, equal to the chief of his house.’ Thomas, however, was not a ‘moderate mind’. In Lord Burghley’s State Papers there was an anonymous account of Thomas’s life that Burghley had edited. One part read that Thomas was, ‘… commonly pretending himself to be a man of value and livelihood, when in truth he never had in his own right one foot of land, but by borrowing in every place and paying nowhere …’
¹²

By 1559 Thomas had managed to change his allegiance again and was now in the service of Sir Thomas Parry, Elizabeth I’s Treasurer and Master of Wards, and Sir Henry Neville, Sheriff of Berkshire. The wardship of his nephew may have proved insufficiently lucrative and now Thomas applied again. In May 1560 he wrote to Parry, asking if he might purchase the wardship and marriage of ‘Mr Brent’s daughter’. If Anne Curtis was already dead and her money almost spent, Thomas would be looking for a second wealthy wife. Neville also wrote to Parry, praising Thomas but there is no record that Thomas gained the wardship of Mr Brent’s daughter or that he married her. Perhaps on this occasion he failed to direct things his own way.

By 1561 Thomas, based on his growing reputation as an excellent soldier and commander, was captain of the forces at Berwick, and living very comfortably. However, his lavish lifestyle used up the last of his wife’s money and he left Berwick a poor man again. It was here that he met and became friendly with Shane O’Neill, an Irish nobleman, who wrote to Elizabeth I of his time in Berwick:

It was not just Shane O’Neill who appreciated Thomas’s talents. When the King of Sweden was seeking the Elizabeth I’s hand in marriage in 1562, he chose Mr Keyle, an Englishman, to act as his intermediary. Of course, Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, (who hoped to marry the Queen himself ) was against the scheme, and Mr Keyle was forced to report to the King: ‘Lord Robert … wrought marvellously to have had me in prison … he made his old friends Stucley and Allen his means to trouble me, thinking thereby to have had me in prison. ’
¹⁴

By 1563 Thomas was a licensed privateer. He decided to found a colony in the newly discovered lands of Florida, although he was not so much intending to set up a colony as found a kingdom. Thomas is supposed to have said, ‘I would rather be king of a molehill than subject to a mountain.’ The record of a meeting between Thomas and Elizabeth I recounted: ‘… that Queen Elizabeth … demanded him pleasantly whether he would remember her when he settled his kingdom. “Yes,” saieth he, “and write unto you also.” “And what style wilt thou use?” “To my loving sister, as one prince write to another”.’
¹⁵

Thomas set about putting together a small fleet, five ships and a pinnace (a small vessel used in support of larger ships), to pursue his grand plan at colonisation. He even persuaded Elizabeth to provide him with one ship. Oliver Leeson wrote to Thomas Challoner, English Ambassador to Spain: ‘They say the Queen has delivered certain of her ships to Mr Stucley, and he is bound to Florida with four or five ships.’
¹⁶

The ships he assembled, however, turned out to be for privateering, not colonising. Thomas never got to Florida; in fact he got no further than Ireland. He used his warrant to become a privateer, although he attacked Spanish ships as well as the French vessels he was authorized to take. At the end of the year John Cureton in Bilbao wrote to Challoner in Madrid that English ships were seizing French ships carrying Spanish goods, including two French ships taken out of port in Galicia by Stukeley, carrying Spanish goods worth 30,000 ducats. Two charges were recorded of piracy, one being:

Thomas’s attacks on friendly shipping were becoming embarrassing, especially at a time when Elizabeth I was trying to keep on reasonably friendly terms with other European rulers. Challoner wrote from Madrid to William Cecil: ‘Stucley’s piracies are much railed at here on all parts. I hang down my head with shame enough. Alas, though it cost the Queen roundly, let him for honours sake be fetched in.’
¹⁸
Elizabeth I responded to Challoner’s request and the Council sent two ships after the pirates said to be operating in Irish waters. This small force was under the command of Sir Peter Carew, who happened to be Thomas’s ‘cousin’ (Thomas’s aunt, Thomasine, married Sir George Carew; Peter was his younger brother). Carew managed to seize one of Stukeley’s ships in the Irish port of Cork Haven, but the man himself evaded capture and had left the port before their arrival.

On 22 June 1565, the Privy Council wrote to Lord Justice Arnold setting out rewards and punishments, and the current situation regarding illegal privateers including, ‘grievous complaints by the King of Spain against T Stucley the pirate.’
¹⁹
In April 1565 Thomas sent a letter to Cecil from Dublin, agreeing to place himself in custody, ‘I insure your honour I have little left at this present but mine honesty, which I shall most humbly desire you to think well of, not doubting but when I shall by your good means be heard I shall be better judged of than I am at this present …’
²⁰

Cecil wished it to be known that the Queen took piracy very seriously but miraculously, far from being imprisoned or hanged, Thomas was released. Lord Justice Arnold who examined the case of piracy against him recorded that he ‘did not understand that he had committed any piracy upon the coast of Ireland or elsewhere’ and being ‘recommended to mercy as having done no harm’ Thomas should be discharged.
²¹
The Admiralty Court, however, was prepared to proceed against him until he was finally released on bail. There was trouble brewing in Ireland and Thomas had made a most valuable connection there. In June and again in July 1565 Shane O’Neill wrote to the Queen:

The Queen and Cecil decided to use Thomas’s talents in Ireland. Cecil, the canniest of statesmen, supported Thomas in his new endeavours; so did his old commander, Pembroke, and his friend, the Earl of Leicester. Thus, Cecil wrote to Sir Henry Sydney, Lord Deputy in Ireland, praising Thomas’s courage and his ability to serve.

Thomas started work as a liaison officer between Shane O’Neill and Sir Henry Sydney, but O’Neill was soon making himself unpopular with the Governors of Ireland with his Irish sympathies, his local strength and popularity. Sydney wrote to Cecil complaining that O’Neill would not meet with him. O’Neill was not wholly to blame for the circumstances. After many instances of treachery on the part of the English, he was loath to meet with Sydney in case he was arrested or even murdered. O’Neill would not trust any safe conduct and when he offered to meet Sydney in the open somewhere so that there could be no danger of an ambush, Sydney refused.

Once more Thomas appeared with letters and a ‘first-hand’ account of a conversation he claimed to have had with O’Neill who said:

The conversation was the kind of inflammatory rhetoric that the Lord Deputy wanted to hear since it supported his interpretation of events. Thomas was commended by Sydney who joined the ranks of his well-wishers.

Even now, things did not go all Stukeley’s way. In March 1566, Sydney wrote to Cecil asking if Sir Nicholas Bagenall might sell the office of Marshall of Ireland along with his estates to Thomas Stukeley for £3,000. The offer, however, was not approved. Cecil and the Queen might be prepared to make use of Thomas’s skills, but that was a far cry from letting him take an influential place amongst the landed gentry in Ireland. Cecil wrote back to Sydney on 27 March, saying that the transaction was not well spoken of at Court. On 31 March, Elizabeth I wrote to Sydney saying that the purchase of the estates and offices should not go ahead, ‘considering the general discredit wherein he [Thomas] remaineth, not only in our own realm, but also in other countries …’.

In May 1566 Thomas was still in Ireland, hoping to salvage something out of the ruins of his efforts. He may have been at the defence of Dundalk, fighting for Sydney against his old friend and ally, Shane O’Neill. He may have been marrying; it looks as if he married a rich Irish widow named Elizabeth Peppard. In 1562 and again in 1566 a lease was given to Walter Peppard, a Gentleman Usher of the King’s Chamber, for the lands of St Mary’s Abbey in Dublin. Walter had a wife, Elizabeth, and a son, Anthony, and another lease was issued in 1583 to ‘Elizabeth Stukeley, widow’ and her son, ‘Anthony Peppard’, indicating that Thomas married Elizabeth after the death of Walter Peppard. It was Elizabeth’s money that funded all Thomas’s extravagant attempts to purchase titles, lands and posts.
²⁴

In June 1567 Thomas made a last attempt to establish his fortunes, buying land and the post of Seneschal of Wexford from Nicholas Heron. Once again, the purchase was forbidden by the Council in London. It had actually been completed and Thomas was settled in the forts at Laghlin and Carlogh, but the Queen was adamant; within a year they had been handed back to Heron. The Barony of Odrone, which Thomas had purchased as part of the package, went to Sir Peter Carew.

Elizabeth had become annoyed with O’Neill and wrote to Sydney to say that O’Neill should be brought down and a Council in Munster set up; she also stated that Thomas should return to England ‘to answer the charges against him’ in the Admiralty Court.
²⁵
Thomas had been at his old habits again; part of the charge against him related to his purchasing hides and skins from Edward Cook, a known pirate who operated out of Southampton. By October 1568, Thomas was officially removed from all the posts he had bought during his alliance with O’Neill, by order of the Crown.

Thomas was not one to go down without a battle – of words at least. On 10 March 1569 Nicholas White, Heron’s successor, wrote to Cecil, complaining that Thomas had been criticising him and poisoning the Lord Deputy against him. White got his revenge when he sent Cecil a deposition from Richard Stafford, ‘as to expressions of Stucley undutiful to her Majesty, in the presence of himself and William Hore.’
²⁶
Amongst other offences, Thomas was reported to have said of the Queen, ‘I care not a fart for her nor yet for her office.’ In June 1569 Thomas was arrested, sent to Dublin Castle and charged with speaking against the Queen and raising troops to oppose her. It looked as if Thomas was in serious trouble – but yet again, after 17 weeks in prison, he was released on parole.