The Strange Story of Lady Theophila Lucy, another Berkeley lady

Portrait of a lady, said to be Lady Theophila Lucy nèe Berkeley, later Nelson. 

    Lady Theophila Berkeley, born in 1650, was the second daughter of George, 1st Earl of Berkeley. Her father managed to save the family fortunes, reduced to a critical state during the Civil War, by marrying Elizabeth Massingberd, daughter of the Treasurer of the East India Company. Theophila's younger sister was the notorious Lady Arabella Berkeley, who ran away with Lord Grey. While the two sisters were very different in most respects, both became notorious.

    Theophila was passionate and strong-willed, one of her passions being for brilliant men. She might be said to resemble her great-great-niece Elizabeth Craven in one respect, in that she was an author, albeit of a very different kind. 

    In 1668, when she was eighteen, Theophila married the nineteen-year-old Sir Kingsmill Lucy (1649-1678). He had inherited the estate of Faccombe, in Hampshire on the borders of Berkshire, from his father Sir Richard Lucy, the previous year, and the pair were wed in St James's Church, Clerkenwell, London. In 1673, when he graduated from Oxford, he became MP for Andover. He was a member and stockholder of the East India Company and took a keen interest in science, becoming a Fellow of the Royal Society, before his untimely death at the age of only twenty-nine.

 

    After Sir Kingsmill's death in 1678, Theophila, now a widow with three children (survivors of six to whom she had given birth), travelled to the Continent where she was converted to Roman Catholicism by the sermons of the celebrated Bishop Bossuet and the influence of Cardinal Philip Howard at Rome.

St Peter's Basilica, Rome,
by Piranesi c.1760.

     Another very different passion soon succeeded this religious enthusiasm. In 1680, she met the young Robert Nelson (b.1656) six years her junior, a wealthy Cambridge graduate travelling from Paris to Rome with his older friend Edmund Halley, the astronomer who later became celebrated for predicting the path and return of the comet named after him. Nelson was already a Fellow of the Royal Society, at the age of 24. The young widow was soon smitten by Nelson and broke all rules of decorum by declaring it to him.

    We are told "Lady Theophila...was so captivated with the remarkable handsomeness of his person, the elegance of his manners, and the agreeableness of his conversation, that she was unable to refrain from confessing the strong affection she felt towards him." He returned her ardent feelings. She was on her way to Aix-en-Provence, to visit the Spa on account of her health, and when Halley returned to England, Nelson made a detour from his planned itinerary to accompany her there. On their return to England, they married.

Aix-en-Provence, c. 1692.

    Soon after the wedding, Lady Theophila told her husband that she had become a Catholic, which came to him as a bombshell. In Restoration England, even members of the royal family did not dare to be openly Catholic, and having a Catholic wife could have been a serious setback to Nelson's career. Fortunately he inherited a substantial fortune from his father, a London merchant.

     Nelson's dismay was increased when his wife not only converted her daughter, Theophila Lucy, to Catholicism but went so far as to publish a pamphlet in 1686 on the topic of religion. This was widely disapproved of as being unbecoming to her sex, and one historian writes, "She also became that most odious of all characters, a female polemic, and is said to have been the author of A Discourse Concerning a Judge of Controversy in Matters of Religion, shewing the necessity of such a Judge."  

   Her husband's biographer, Secretan, said that it "is written with a vivacity and clearness which yield no mean impression of the intellectual capacity of the lady whom Nelson espoused".

   Nelson appealed for help to his friends, John  Tillotson, Dean of Canterbury, who wrote a long letter to her on the subject; and George Hickes, the Dean of Worcester, who published some letters on the subject between himself and a Catholic priest. Nelson himself wrote a pamphlet entitled: "Transubstantiation contrary to Scripture; or the Protestant's answer to the Seeker's Request," which had no more effect on his wife's convictions than those of his laborious friends. 

    We don't know how many people Lady Theophila converted to Catholicism but it is said that in one case her pamphlet had the opposite effect: it reconverted another female author, Mrs. Catherine Cockburn, the playwright, novelist and philosopher, who was another Catholic convert, back from Roman Catholic to Protestant. None of this shook the convictions of Lady Theophila. She remained Catholic until her death in January 1706, and Nelson remained devoted to her.

     

In London society, Lady Theophila was liked and admired. Some wit composed these lines about her:-

     In Lucy's beauty Virtue did appear.

     So shone her eyes, such was her voice and air,

     Awfully kind, and lovingly severe.

Portrait of a lady, catalogued as Lady Theophila Lucy but possibly her daughter Theophila. In collection of the Duke of Devonshire at Compton Place.

In 1688, when the Catholic King James II was forced to abdicate in favour of William and Mary, the Nelsons decided to spend some time on the Continent. They told their friends it was on account of Lady Theophila's ill-health, which made it desirable to visit various spas, but it surely had something to do with Nelson's loyalty to the Stuart king, and reluctance to join in the Glorious Revolution. He became that paradoxical creature, a Protestant Jacobite, and Non-Juror, which must have perplexed his wife almost as much as her Catholicism perplexed him. 

    For several years, they travelled in France, Italy and Germany, and Nelson was always well-received on account of his learning, manners and Jacobite views. In 1690 they were at Florence and in 1691 at The Hague, where Lady Theophila's brother, Lord Dursley, was British Envoy. 

     In 1695 they returned to England, where they lived either at his house at Cretingham in Suffolk or in London where he devoted himself to philanthropic causes, including the building of churches to replace those lost in the Great Fire. On the death of Lady Theophila in 1706, she was buried in the churchyard of St Dunstan's Church Cranford, Middlesex, on the estate of her Berkeley ancestors, close to the tombs of her father and mother. When Robert Nelson died nine years later, he chose to be buried beside his wife. Perhaps this odd couple are disputing there still.

     

The St. James's Magazine - Volume 6; Volume 27 

1871 p.183

The Monthly Magazine, and Universal Register 1873, p.273

ODNB, "Robert Nelson".

DNB, "Robert Nelson".

Lives of English Laymen, Lord Falkland, Izaak Walton, Robert ...

William Henry Teale · 1842.‎

The Life of Dr. John Colet, Dean of St. Paul's: In the Reigns ...  Samuel Knight · 1823.

Charles Frederick Secretan. Memoirs of the Life and Times of the Pious Robert Nelson. 1860. P. 301

The Saturday Review of Politics, Literature, Science and Art, 1860.

Catalogue of the Portraits at Compton Place, Sussex, In the Possession of His Grace the Duke of Devonshire, K.G., 1903.

Dining Room.

North Side.

1. Lady Theophila Lucy, second daughter of George Berkeley, 1st Earl of Berkeley, by Elizabeth, daughter and co-heir of John Massingberd, and wife of Sir Kingsinill Lucy, 2nd Baronet, of Broxbourne, co. Herts, and of Facombe and Netley, co. Hants, to whom she was married at the age of 18 (he being 19), at St. James’s, Clerkenwell, 14th May, 1668. He died in Sept., 1678, and Lady Theophila, his widow, who was born in 1650, married, secondly, 23rd Nov., 1682, Robert Nelson (who was born 22nd June, 1656). 

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