Shortly after the services were over Nicholson sent for Mr. Wallace. "How durst you preach such a sermon?" he demanded. "How dare you take such a text? How dare you presume to tell me my duty? I will not be told my duty." From that day the Governor pursued him with the greatest malice. He summoned him before the Council, and threatened him with ruin, calling him villain, hypocrite, Jesuit. He went all the way to Elizabeth City to lay charges against him before his vestry. When Mr. Wallace could endure this persecution no longer and prepared to sail for England, he tried to stop him.[24] If anything else were needed to make Nicholson a ridiculous figure, it was his love affair with Lucy Burwell. Lucy's father, Major Lewis Burwell, was perhaps the wealthiest man in Virginia. Owning many thousands of acres of land, served by scores of slaves and indentured workers, connected by marriage and birth with some of the most influential families in the colony, he was the typical Virginia aristocrat. Carter's Creek, his residence in Gloucester County, remained standing for over two centuries as witness to his lavish style of living. The great halls, the marble mantels, the elaborate staircase, the wainscoting carved to resemble drapery were reminiscent rather of England than of seventeenth-century Virginia. However, Lucy seems to have spent most of her childhood, not at Carter's Creek, but at King's Creek, an historic old estate left to her parents by her mother's uncle, Nathaniel Bacon, Senior. And here it was that Nicholson pressed his suit, riding over to see her whenever there was a lull in the business of the General Court and the Assembly was not in session. Lucy and her family received him with the courtesy due the representative of the Crown. But they knew of the Governor's fits of anger, of his profanity, and the abuse he had heaped on their relatives. Lucy was not attracted to him and, telling him she did not love him, refused to marry him. When he was at last convinced that all hope of winning Lucy was gone, Nicholson acted like a madman. He swore that if she married another he would with his own hands cut the throats of the bridegroom, the minister, and the justice of the peace who issued the license.[25] All pretence of friendship for her relatives was thrown to the winds. Every few days he sent Major Burwell such threats of ruin that the poor man was kept in a constant state of alarm. "For what I know not, unless it is because I will not force my daughter to marry utterly against her will, which is a thing no Christian body can do," he wrote Philip Ludwell, Senior. "If it please God I live until the return of our next fleet, I propose for England, for I shall not be able to live here."[26]