5444 x 9288 px | 46,1 x 78,6 cm | 18,1 x 31 inches | 300dpi
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Lucius was born either in 1609 or 1610 as the son of Sir Henry Cary, afterwards 1st Viscount Falkland, and his wife Elizabeth Tanfeild, whose father Laurence Tanfeild was at that time Lord Chief Baron of the Exchequer. Henry Cary a member of an ancient Devon family, was lord deputy of Ireland from 1622 to 1629. Lucius was educated at Trinity College, Dublin. In 1625 he inherited from his grandfather the manors of Great Tew and Burford in Oxfordshire, and, about the age of 21, married Lettice, daughter of Sir Richard Morrison, of Tooley Park in Leicestershire. Following a quarrel with his father, whom he failed to propitiate by offering to hand over to him his estate, he left England to take service in the Dutch army, but soon returned. In 1633, by the death of his father, he became Viscount Falkland. His mother had embraced Roman Catholicism, to which it was now sought to attract Falkland himself, but his studies and reflections led him, under the influence of William Chillingworth, to the interpretation of religious problems rather by reason than by tradition or authority. At Great Tew he enjoyed a short but happy period of study, and he assembled a cultured circle, whom the near neighbourhood of the university and his own brilliant qualities attracted to his house. He was the friend of John Hales and Chillingworth, was celebrated by Ben Jonson, John Suckling, Abraham Cowley and Edmund Waller in verse, and in prose by Edward Hyde, 1st Earl of Clarendon, who calls him the "incomparable" Falkland, and draws a delightful picture of his society and hospitality. Falkland's intellectual pleasures, however, were soon interrupted by war and politics. He felt it his duty to take part on the side of King Charles I as a volunteer under Robert Devereux, 3rd Earl of Essex in the Bishops' Wars of 1639 against the Scots. In 1640 he was returned for Newport in the Isle of Wight to the Short and Long Parliaments, and took an active part on the side of the opposition.
