An ancient family, the Lacons took their name from a hamlet near Wem in northern Shropshire, but by 1600 marriage and purchase had shifted the balance of their estates, so that two-thirds of their 11,000 acres lay in south-eastern Shropshire, with most of the remainder straddling the northern end of the Shropshire/Staffordshire border. Sir Francis was later reckoned to have inherited property worth £3,000 a year, and he also developed lucrative coal-mining interests at Broseley and Earnwood, Shropshire.
Having been tutored by an Oxford don, Lacon went up to university at the age of 14, thus avoiding any requirement to take the Oath of Supremacy. His first wife was a daughter of the 1st Viscount Montagu, a dazzling match in financial, social and religious terms, as the bride’s father was England’s premier Catholic loyalist.
The government naturally took a keen interest in the Lacons over the next few years. In July 1601, perhaps as a gesture of loyalty, one of the Lacon servants carried a message from (Sir) Walter Chetwynd* to the Privy Council about the detention of a group of suspected Catholic booksellers.
Fortunately for him, at the time of Gunpowder Plot Lacon was in the north of England raising troops for the English regiment serving with the Spanish forces in the Low Countries, accompanied by the secular priest Henry Shaw, who had no connection with the plotters.
While Lacon’s life to 1605 involved many compromises between secular and religious allegiance, the appalling revelations of the Gunpowder Plot afforded him an opportunity to demonstrate his loyalty in an unequivocal manner. In January 1606 he sent Capt. William Newce to the Spanish Netherlands, ostensibly to liaise with Arundell about recruits, but actually to allow Newce to renew contacts made in Spain with Col. Giacomo de Francheschi, who planned to use Newce to betray Dutch fortresses into Spanish hands and to implement a plot to kill James at Royston.
The imposition of the new Oath of Allegiance upon those intending to serve in foreign armies meant that Lacon’s Catholic recruits never reached the Low Countries. However, having demonstrated his loyalty at a crucial moment, Lacon found the government inclined to take a more benign attitude towards his often unorthodox activities thereafter. Thus Salisbury never managed to find the funds Udall required to search for priests at the Lacons’ house at Kinlet, Shropshire. Even when Udall later claimed that the family was harbouring the author of Prurit-anus, a scatological attack on the king’s publications justifying the Oath of Allegiance, the government showed little interest in his accusations. Their indifference may also have owed something to the fact that the man Udall named as author, Lacon’s old acquaintance Thomas Wright, was one of the few Jesuits then prepared to condone the taking of the Oath, a stance which provides another illustration of Lacon’s loyalist inclinations.
Lacon’s loyalty earned him not only a respite from official persecution, but also the opportunity to pursue a public career, a notable achievement for a known Catholic. Within months of his father’s death in 1608 he had been added to the commission of the peace and the Council in the Marches, while in 1611 he was picked as sheriff of Shropshire. In February 1610 he stood for election to Parliament at Bridgnorth, in a chaotic by-election in which the writ was temporarily lost, and an argument between the borough bailiffs over the franchise resulted in the submission of rival returns on behalf of Lacon and Sir George Heyward of Cound, Shropshire; the privileges’ committee validated Lacon’s return on 10 March. Having taken such trouble to secure his seat, Lacon left little trace in its records, being named to a single committee for the estate bill of Thomas Mildmay (31 March). If this was Lacon’s stepson - there were several namesakes - it would suggest that the inspiration for his election came from his third wife.
The new Lady Lacon lived at Aldgate, London, and it may have been at her instigation that Lacon secured a minor post at Court in 1613, joining another Shropshire Catholic, William Gatacre, in the post of cockmaster. Lacon had an additional reason for remaining in the metropolis, to further a romance rumoured to be developing between one of his daughters and Antonio Foscarini, the Venetian ambassador, although the latter’s departure in 1615 clearly dashed any hopes on this front.
Lacon’s son Rowland was returned to the Addled Parliament for Much Wenlock, but neither man stood for election thereafter. This was largely because of growing financial problems, but may also have owed something to the Commons’ increasingly hostile attitude towards Catholics after the outbreak of the Thirty Years’ War in 1618. Lacon was named in the Commons’ petition against recusant officeholders in 1624, and was one of the few individuals so listed to be removed from office. However, what the Commons took away with one hand, they gave back with the other: the same session passed a private bill which confirmed Lacon’s title to an estate he had bought from the recusant Edwards family of Chirk, Denbighshire in 1613.
By the time his third wife died in 1616, Lacon was in some financial difficulty. Recusancy fines were almost certainly the least of his problems, and there may have been an element of truth in his son’s subsequent claim that he had spent £50,000 during his second and third marriages ‘through keeping great hospitality, living in London and having many suits in law, and removing his household and family to several places’.
Lacon filed his final Chancery suit in May 1642, and his son’s composition petition of April 1647 suggests that Sir Francis was by then dead. His widow secured administration of his estate, perhaps at Hereford, while his inventory, which survives in a Chancery suit of 1648, enumerated goods worth £156, nearly half of which was paid over to the parliamentarian county committee in back taxes.