William Lucy (1594–1677) was an English clergyman. He was Bishop of St David's after the English Restoration of 1660.
Life Lucy was a student at Trinity College, Oxford. He belonged to the Arminian party, and became Rector of Burghclere in 1619, Highclere in 1621.Kenneth Fincham, Nicholas Tyacke, Altars Restored: The Changing Face of English Religious Worship, 1547–c.1700 (2007), p. 283.
He became Bishop of St Davids upon the Restoration in 1660 — he was elected to the See on 11 October 1660, confirmed 17 November, and consecrated a bishop on 2 December 1660.
In the mid-1660s, Lucy clashed with William Nicholson, Bishop of Gloucester, over Nicholson's visiting rights as Archdeacon of Brecon. Lucy won the resulting court case.
William Lucy's tomb and wall monument are at Christ College, Brecon. The tomb is by William Stanton.Dictionary of British Sculptors 1660-1851 by Rupert Gunnis p.368 He rebuilt the church there, demolished in the Civil War period.
Opponent of Hobbes In 1657, William Lucy published an attack on the philosophy of Thomas Hobbes, and in particular on Leviathan (1651), using the pseudonym William Pyke, Christophilus, and circulated by Humphrey Robinson.Patricia Springborg, The Cambridge Companion to Hobbes's Leviathan (2007), p. 487. A later and expanded edition, of 1663, was under his real name, as Observations, Censures and Confutations of Notorious Errours in Mr. Hobbes his Leviathan.
John Bowle considers Lucy's views as representative of the common view.John Bowle, Hobbes and His Critics (1951), p. 72. He attacked Hobbes's concept of the state of nature, as inconsistent with the Biblical state.Kim Ian Parker, The Biblical Politics of John Locke (2004), p. 79. The popularity of the ideas he conceded, but he attributed it to neophilia.Quentin Skinner, Visions of Politics: Regarding Method (2002), p. 268. His attack has been called traditionalist and moralistic.Norberto Bobbio, Thomas Hobbes and the Natural Law Tradition (1993 translation), p. 215.
Notes and references
Further reading Aloysius Martinich, Leviathan By Thomas Hobbes (2002), Appendix D, p. 580. Andrew Pyle (editor), Dictionary of Seventeenth Century British Philosophers (2000), pp. 544–545.
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