Henry Lacy redeemed the mis-spent youth which provoked his father’s testamentary threat to disinherit him by rendering long service to the borough of Stamford and by his work for local corporate and private landowners, including William Cecil. As deputy steward for Stamford to Sir John Hussey, by then Lord Hussey, and a former alderman who had entertained the King in his house in 1532, Lacy was a natural choice for Membership of the Parliament of 1536 in succession to John Hardgrave, who despite the royal request for the re-election of the previous Members did not sit again: his fellow Maurice Johnson may already have been his son-in-law. Hussey’s execution in 1537 for his failure to suppress the Lincolnshire rebellion was followed by one of Lacy’s periodic intermissions as deputy steward, and he was not re-elected in 1539, but when holding the office again under John Harington I and John Russell, Baron Russell, he sat in the next two Parliaments. He was not to sit again, but with Cecil’s help he procured his son Robert’s election to the second Edwardian Parliament. He was appointed to the Lincolnshire bench under Mary and his eventual removal in the following reign need not, in view of his age, imply any rejection of the Elizabethan settlement although he was probably the justice whose lack of sympathy with a Protestant sister, ‘one mistress Anne Lacy, widow in Nottinghamshire’, was noted by Foxe; he had several namesakes, including a Calais alderman active in the 1520s and 1530s, but none of them seems to have been a Marian justice. By his will of 1 May 1564 (proved on 30 Jan. 1565) Lacy left lands in Stamford and elsewhere in Lincolnshire to his son Thomas on condition that he provided for the education at Cambridge of Bennet, son of Robert Lacy, and made lesser provision for another son and for his two daughters.
biography text
Volume
Parlimentarian
Parliamentarian
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