CARY, LUCIUS, Lord Viscount Falkland, was born in Oxfordshire about the year 1610, and was a young nobleman of great abilities and accomplishments. About the time of his father's death in 1633, he was made gentleman of the privy chamber to King Charles I. and afterwards secretary of state. Before the assembling of the long parliament, he had devoted himself to literature, and every pleasure which a fine genius, a generous disposition, and an opulent fortune, could enable him to gratify. When called into public life, he stood foremost in all attacks on the high prerogatives of the crown; but when civil convulsions came to an extremity, and it was necessary to choose a side, he tempered his zeal, and defended the limited powers that remained to monarchy. Still anxious, however, for his country, he seems to have dreaded equally the success of the royal party and that of the parliament, and among his intimate friends often sadly reiterated the word "peace." This excellent nobleman freely exposed his person for the king in all hazardous enterprises, and was killed in the thirty-fourth
year of his age, at the battle of Newberry. He wrote several things, both poetical and political; and in some of the king's declarations, supposed to be penned by Lord Falkland, we find the first regular definition of the English constitution that occurs in any composition published by authority. His predecessor, the first Viscount Cary, was ennobled for being the individual who carried to King James the earliest tidings of Queen Elizabeth's death.