ELIZABETH I’S MERCENARY SCOUNDREL
“IT IS POSSIBLE STUKELEY FOUGHT AT THE BATTLE OF PINKIE CLEUGH ON 10 SEPTEMBER 1547”
The 15th and 16th centuries are full of the remarkable and flamboyant lives of soldiers of fortune. None are more fascinating than Englishman Sir Thomas Stukeley (c. 1525 – 4 August 1578). He fought all over Europe in the service of four English monarchs, two popes and various other heads of state. He was a man whose appetite for mischief knew no bounds; Stukeley involved himself in several of the most prominent political and religious intrigues of the day and offered his service to any and all who would take it.
Stukeley was born at Affeton in Devon, the third son of Sir Hugh Stukeley, at some point in the early 1520s. When he was a young man, rumours began to spread that Thomas was a bastard son of King Henry VIII. He was born in the period when Henry was looking for mistresses and had visited Affeton. It was also a period when Henry seemed desperate to father sons (the illegitimate son he recognised, Henry Fitzroy, was born in 1519).
One reason to favour this rumour is that in subsequent decades Stukeley escaped several intrigues unscathed when others involved to a lesser degree were put to death. The apparent closeness in appearance to Henry that Thomas Stukeley bore is hard to verify; all known paintings of him have disappeared and we only have one, rumoured, portrait of him to go by. Thatportrait, Man in Red, from the Holbein school (now at Hampton Court) is the source of the depiction of him here. We also have at least two plays about Stukeley, written 10-15 years after his death, which suggests he was a subject worth retelling into the 1590s.
Thomas Stukeley’s first foray into service was in the house of Charles Brandon,
