Boleyn, being a Norfolk neighbour, who is mentioned repeatedly in the above accounts as a visitor at Hunstanton. In 1536 Sir T. le Strange was appointed to attend on the king's person during the Pilgrimage of Grace, and to bring fifty men with him; in July of that year he was placed on the commission to inquire into the revenues of the wealthy abbey of Walsingham, near his own Norfolk estate. It is to his credit that, though a personal friend of the king, and employed on business connected with the dissolution of the monasteries, Sir Thomas does not appear to have used his influence at court to secure for himself any church lands whatever. His picture, by Holbein, hangs at Hunstanton Hall, and a pencil sketch of him is among the Holbein drawings at Windsor; both these were exhibited at the Tudor Exhibition in 1890. He married Anne, daughter of Nicholas, lord Vaux; died 16 Jan. 1545, and was buried at Hunstanton.
The son, Sir Nicholas le Strange (1515-1580), became steward for life of the manors of Mary, duchess of Richmond (25 Jan. 1547); was knighted by Protector Somerset while serving with him in Scotland in 1547 (Metcalfe, Knights, p. 96); was elected M.P. for Norfolk (November 1547), for King's Lynn (1555), for Castle Rising (1571); and was sheriff of Norfolk and Suffolk in 1548. On 15 Sept. 1549 he wrote to William Cecil, the king's attorney, denying any sympathy with Kett's rebellion (State Papers, Dom. Edw. VI, viii. No. 60). In 1559 he was a member of the household of Thomas Howard, duke of Norfolk, went with the duke to Scotland, and in February 1560 carried messages from him to the privy council. On 4 Oct. 1571 Le Strange denied, when examined by the council, all knowledge of the duke's treasonable negotiations with Mary Queen of Scots (Hatfield MSS. i. 533). He married, first, Ellen, daughter of Sir William Fitzwilliam of Milton, Northamptonshire; and secondly, Katharine, daughter of Sir John Hide of Aidborough. By his first wife he had three sons and two daughters (Inq. post mort. in Public Record Office; Chanc. Inq. 24 Eliz. pt.i.p.20).
[Le Strange Household Accounts, Archæologia, xxv. 411-569; Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, of Henry VIII; State Papers of Henry VIII, xi, 73.]
LE SUEUR, HUBERT (1595?–1650?), sculptor, appears to have been born in Paris about 1595. According to tradition he was a pupil of Giovanni Bologna at Florence, but nothing seems certain except that Le Sueur assisted Pietro Tacca, Bologna's pupil, in 1610, in the completion of Bologna's statue of Henri IV on the Pont Neuf at Paris, which was destroyed in the revolution. After receiving employment from the king on various works in Paris, Le Sueur came over to England about 1628. He lived for a time in Drury Lane, and afterwards in Bartholomew Close, near the church of St. Bartholomew the Great in Smithfield.
In 1630 Le Sueur was employed by Sir Richard Weston (afterwards Earl of Portland), then lord treasurer, to make and cast a brazen statue of Charles I on horseback, to be set up in the gardens of Weston's new house at Roehampton. Le Sueur was to take advice from the king's ‘riders of great horses’ as to the shape of the horse and the king's action on the horse, and he was to receive 600l. for the work, which was to be completed in eighteen months. This is the first important commission that Le Sueur is known to have received. There is no evidence to show that the group was completed; but an identical group was cast in London in 1633, apparently at the expense of Weston, although, according to tradition and the inscription on the engraving of the statue by Hollar, it was at the expense of the Earl of Arundel. A small model by Le Sueur was in Charles I's own collection. There appears to have been an intention to set the statue up in Covent Garden, but it seems to have remained unplaced until the execution of the king, when it was sold as old metal by the Parliament to one John Revett, a brazier in Holborn, and was ordered to be destroyed. Revett, however, concealed it safely, and produced it in 1660; it was immediately claimed by Weston's son Jerome, earl of Portland, but Revett declined to give it up, and presented it to the king. It was not till 1674 that it was set up at Charing Cross upon a pedestal, designed by Grinling Gibbons [q. v.], and executed in marble by Joshua Marshall. On the left forefoot of the horse is the signature ‘huber le sveur (fe)cit 1633.’
From another agreement preserved among the State Papers, dated 20 March 1633, it appears that Archbishop Laud gave Le Sueur a commission to execute for 400l. two bronze statues of the king and queen; these were completed in 1634, and presented by Laud to St. John's College, Oxford, where they still remain in the second quadrangle: they have sometimes been attributed to F.Fanelli [q. v.] Another agreement, dated 18 July 1634, records a commission to Le Sueur from Lord Cottington to set up a great tomb in Westminster Abbey. Le Sueur's tomb and bust of Lady Cottington still remain, but the recumbent figure of Lord Cottington was executed at a later date by F.Fanelli. Le Sueur
