Fleeing or Staying? • 77idence, which came from her mother, Lady Eleanor Davies. Fortunately,
Lucy never followed her mother’s penchant for inflammatory millenarian
prophesies in voice and print, which landed Lady Eleanor briefly in Bedlam,
the London hospital for the insane. (Lady Eleanor had prophesied that the
plague and the Civil War were signs of the imminent end of the world.)^2
Married when she was only ten years old to the sixth earl of Huntingdon,
Ferdinando Hastings, Lucy had coped as a child bride with an imperious
mother-in-law and as a middle-aged woman with the death of her husband
in 1656. Amid the tension and loss, she had raised her four children well
(carefully choosing their tutors and her household servants), married her eld-
est daughter to a country gentleman of fine character, and turned her atten-
tion to her only son, Earl Theophilus, as he approached manhood.
Tragedy struck again in 1664 with the death of her married daughter after
a long illness. Lucy bore the loss well but wondered how her grief-stricken
son-in-law, Sir James Langham, would manage on his own. He had taken
his children down to London while he saw to his business affairs. The dis-
tance bothered her, but on the other hand Sir James and the children were
near Lucy’s brother-in-law, Lord Loughborough, and her sister-in-law,
Lady Clifton. She could also count on Gervase Jacques to check on her Lon-
don relations and tell her how they were faring.^3
Jacques’ latest letter to the countess was not a happy one, despite his ef-
forts to set her mind at ease.^4 The traffic on the Great Northern Road was all
heading toward the capital as April came to a close, and the city and court
were crowded with visitors. Among them was a dear friend of Lucy’s, Anne
Stavely, who had left her oldest child at Donnington manor and gone south
with her younger girls. Nothing untoward had happened to the Stavelys or
the Langhams, but Jacques’ other news was truly dreadful. Lord Loughbo-
rough’s son and heir, Henry Hastings Jr., had gotten into an argument over a
gaming and drinking bill at a tavern in Covent Garden. Noble honor called
for settling the matter with a duel, and Lucy’s nephew had been struck fatally
in the head by his opponent’s sword. The solemn funeral cortege and torch-
light burial in Saint Martin in the Fields parish had drawn a huge throng,
led by the grieving peer and his many relatives and friends at court.
The nuptial story involving Sir Gervas and Lady Clifton’s daughter was
just as dramatic. The groom, Mr. Packe, and his party had arrived on the
wedding day only to learn that the bride was sick in bed. Jane Clifton tried to
dress and come down but was overcome with dizziness. “After some little
tyme,” Jacques related, “the small pox appeared.”
Jacques was keenly aware of Lucy Hastings’s uncommon skill in diagnos-