Background
She was born Lady Lucy Percy, the second daughter of Henry, Earl of Northumberland (the famous "Wizard Earl") and his wife Lady Dorothy Devereux.
She was born Lady Lucy Percy, the second daughter of Henry, Earl of Northumberland (the famous "Wizard Earl") and his wife Lady Dorothy Devereux.
She was involved in many political intrigues during the English Civil War. In 1617, she became the second wife of James Hay, 1st Earl of Carlisle. Her charms were celebrated in verse by contemporary poets, including Thomas Carew, William Cartwright, Robert Herrick and Sir John Suckling, and by Sir Toby Matthew in prose.
In 1626, she was appointed Lady of the Bedchamber to Henrietta Maria, Queen of England.
She soon became a favorite of the Queen, and participated in two of her famous masque plays. Strafford valued her highly, but after his death in 1641, possibly in consequence of a revulsion of feeling at his abandonment by the court, she devoted herself to Pym and the interests of the parliamentary leaders, to whom she communicated the king"s most secret plans and counsels.
According to a royalist newsletter, while in the Tower she was threatened with torture on the rack to gain information. She was released on bail on 25 September 1650, but appears never to have regained her former influence in the royalist counsels, and died soon after the Restoration.
The Encyclopædia Britannica article from which the above was taken attributes her death to apoplexy.
François de Louisiana Rochefoucauld mentioned in his Memoirs an anecdote he was told by Marie de Rohan in which Lucy Hay stole some diamond studs (a present of the king of France to Anne of Austria) the queen had given to George Villiers, 1st Duke of Buckingham from the duke as revenge because he had loved her before he loved the queen of France. The king of France then wanted to see the studs and somehow the queen was able to recover them. Alexandre Dumas later used this entire story and therefore probably also based femme fatale Milady de Winter on Lucy Carlisle in his 1844 novel The Three Musketeers.
She was the subject of Sir John Suckling"s risqué poem Upon My Lady Carlisle"s Walking in Hampton Court Garden.
However, she appears to have served both parties simultaneously, betraying communications on both sides, and doing considerable mischief by inflaming political animosities.