An Elizabethan Assassin

by John Hall

  Mary remains a shadowy figure, but the fresh beauty of English womenfolk was commonly remarked on by foreigners, among them the German merchant Samuel Kiechel who visited England in 1585 and wrote in his journal: ‘Item, the women here are charming, and by nature so mighty pretty as I have scarcely ever beheld, for they do not falsify, paint or bedaub themselves as in Italy or other places.’22

  She was about twenty-four at the time she met Paleologus. Curiously, there are two baptisms of a ‘Marey Ball’ recorded in the Hadleigh register for 1575, one on 6 May and another on 19 August. As there are five sons named in the will of her grandfather Roger the miller, the other Mary was probably her cousin. Beyond that, we can only sketch in the life of Theodore’s wife from marriage, baptismal and burial records and the line concerning her parentage on the Landulph tomb. We can assume she was healthy as she would regularly bear children to a surprisingly advanced age, five of whom survived into adulthood. But what she looked like we have no idea, whether fair or dark, plump or slender: all we know is that something about Mary proved fatefully attractive to Theodore Paleologus.

  We do, however, have a romantic vision of Theodore’s bride thanks to a Regency poet called Nathan Drake, whose ballad Mary of Hadleigh achieved considerable popular success in the nineteenth century, appearing in numerous literary and ladies’ magazines in Britain and America following its first publication in 1820. This somewhat overwrought composition was clearly inspired by the Revd Philip Parsons’s belief that the Balls family vehemently opposed Mary’s union with Paleologus, and it imagines the couple’s secret marriage and elopement to Cornwall.

  As pictured by Drake, Mary is a dark-haired beauty with ‘cheeks that shame the rose’ who first sees Paleologus as he is carried into her father’s house by moonlight, a handsome stranger ‘speechless and cold, and pierced with thrilling pain’ who has been left for dead by treacherous servants:

  Ah! What defence could Theodoro boast,

  When o’er his couch as evening breezes die,

  He saw the blushing daughter of his host

  In languid sorrow bend the tearful eye.

  First of the forms that ever poet drew;

  Was Mary graceful as the bounding roe;

  On her ripe lip sate love embath’d in dew

  Or ambush’d close where heaves the living snow.

  Profuse and rich her raven tresses fell;

  While dark and full, and thron’d in humid light,

  How many a tear those eyes of sweetness tell!

  Nor was her mind less lovely than her frame;

  For all that suffer’d she had learnt to grieve;

  A lily shrinking from the noontime flame,

  But pouring perfume on the gale at eve.

  And so on for a total of thirty-one verses. The poem’s climax describes William Balls’s unrelenting search for his lost daughter throughout the land until one dark tempestuous night he steals into the dimly lit Landulph church and discovers a white-robed Mary kneeling by a tomb with an infant clinging to her bosom. In anguish he reads the inscription on the brass:

  For there with pangs no utterance could make known,

  With wonder mingling, and with shuddering awe,

  Theodoro, heir of the Imperial throne,

  Commix’d with Mary’s humble name he saw!

  The ballad ends with Mary turning towards her father with a ghastly look and instantly dropping dead.

  In reality there was no romantic elopement with Theodore. We have seen how they married in Yorkshire and raised a family in Tattershall; my research has shown where Mary died, and it was not at Landulph.

  Notes

  21 I have found no record of Earl Henry risking his own person in the lists but his father, the first earl, was a respected jouster.

  22 Rye, W.B., England as Seen by Foreigners, John Russell Smith, London, 1865.

  6

  Who lives past ninety-nine

  Shall afterward speak of a blessed time.

  John Weever, ‘A Prophesy of This Present Year, 1600’.

  Tattershall was a queer sort of place. A moated castle built long after the heyday of the castle, it would never be called upon to withstand a siege in earnest for the simple reason it was incapable of doing so. A determined attacker would have made short work of its walls of bonded brickwork and enormous tracery windows. Though the seat of a great nobleman, it must have struck Theodore as a primitive class of residence, but then he had known the magnificent ducal palaces of Urbino and Pesaro. Here were no Titians, Uccellos or Bellinis to ravish the senses: perhaps only a handful of portraits of Lincoln’s forebears or their royal patrons, crude daubs by the standards of Renaissance Italy. Even to English eyes Tattershall was undeniably old-fashioned compared with the kind of prodigy houses being built by new men like the Cecils, whose enormous mansion of Burghley lay in the gentle rolling countryside in the south-west of the county. So like its owner, the castle had outlived its time, but it gave an impression of impregnability, a useful illusion for a man with as many enemies as Lord Lincoln.

  Built the previous century by Ralph, Lord Cromwell, the grasping lord treasurer of Henry VI, its great tower was constructed of more than a million bricks, reaching a height vying with the cathedrals. Today the tower gives the impression of being a solitary landmark but in Elizabethan times it was the centre of an extensive complex of ancillary buildings, bridges and defensive walls. In Cromwell’s day the household servants exceeded 100, and surviving household accounts of noble neighbours from Tudor times show this was still about the average number. Among neighbours, the Earl of Rutland had ninety-four servants at Belvoir Castle and the Willoughby family at Grimsthorpe just over 100. However, it is hard to picture so many mouths being willingly fed during the tight-fisted rule of the Clintons.

  The long-abandoned tower was saved from demolition in 1911, so we can still explore the lofty chambers frequented by Paleologus and examine the vast crenelated fireplaces of the state rooms with their curious carved panels of heraldry, badges and mottos. We can even peer into the privies, built into the thickness of the wall on each floor of the corner turrets and designed to discharge into the inner moat below. We can tread the 150 steps up to the parapet walk round the battlements – the same steps Paleologus would have climbed on countless occasions – taking in the wide prospect from that windy spot, the monotonous fen landscape stretching away to the east with Tattershall’s great collegiate parish church in the foreground and the small town beyond. What have vanished from the scene are the many ranges of service buildings of Elizabethan times, the kitchens and gatehouses, the lodgings for the earl’s retinue – in all probability these would have included apartments set aside for Paleologus as his family grew. However, we can still look down on the ruins of the commodious stables, among the finest in the land, and the site of the tilting ground can still be made out, a green space to the right of the churchyard.

  It is easy to picture the furnishings and tapestries of the principal rooms, especially the great hall where Lincoln would have dined, the air pungent with smoke from the wood fires and candles. In the castle, honoured guests and favoured retainers would take their place at his lordship’s table while other senior servants ate at a separate table. But what exactly was Theodore’s status within the household? In the rigidly stratified Elizabethan society, what precedence would be allowed to this foreigner who, whatever his pedigree, possessed neither formal rank nor landed property? At least, no record survives to show otherwise, and these were times when ownership of the smallest parcel of land in England was better documented than most human life.

  No doubt it tickled the earl to have an imperial scion at his beck and call, and to judge from the whining claims of victimhood which recur in his letters, this was a man who needed constant lifts to his self-esteem. Depending on his mood, his lordship might summon Theodore to the top table or wave him away. His uncontainable rages make it likely there were times he offered terrible affronts to his retainer, and the fact Th
eodore survived in this atmosphere tells us something of his self-control. This was a thin-skinned age when any perceived insult might demand satisfaction in blood, as we see in the violent lives of such as Marlowe and Ben Jonson. On the other hand, perhaps our mad earl had enough sense to be a little afraid of his gentleman rider.

  The earl’s table would have seemed a poor thing to one who remembered the liberality of a duke of Urbino, yet foreigners were shocked by the sheer quantities of food and drink consumed by the English. The fork, long in use in Italy, was still a rarity in England, and people of all degrees still used a knife and fingers. But after years of campaigning Theodore knew what hardship was like, and the rude fare on the table or the uncouth manners of his neighbours would be taken in his stride.

  And in the stables Paleologus was master. Italian methods of horse breeding, learnt in his Urbino days, were copied by leading English nobles who competed to acquire the best Italian expertise. The second Earl of Lincoln’s legendary meanness did not extend to his stables, for whatever else might be said against the man, no one questioned his knowledge of horses, the exceptional quality of those he bred or his willingness to open his purse to uphold this reputation. As events will show, James of Scotland himself acknowledged the excellence of the earl’s stables.

  However, Lincolnshire at the end of the sixteenth century was a backwater, and a notorious one. Lincoln itself was at least three days’ horseback journey from London by the Old North Road or Ermine Street, a disintegrating relic from Roman times, now little more than a muddy track. Travellers dreaded not only the county’s lonely roads and repeated flooding but its highway robbers and hostile, ignorant natives. The ill-drained fenlands had the blackest name of all, adding the ague and malaria to the perils facing the outsider. For how could any man stay healthy there, asked the antiquary and traveller Sir William Dugdale, ‘the air being for the most part cloudy, gross and full of rotten Harrs [sea mists], the water putrid and muddy, yea, full of loathsome vermin, the earth spungy and boggy, the Fire noisome by the stink of smoaky Hassocks?’23

  In The Anatomy of Melancholy, Burton wrote in echoing terms of Lincolnshire’s ‘bogs, fens, mists, all manner of putrefaction, contagious and filthy noisome smells’. Even a century later, when drainage had begun to transform the fenland, its enduring ill-fame was summarised by a writer who shuddered to think of ‘the grim rustics of this motley place … a strange half-human and ungainly brood’.

  The county had troubled the crown since Henry VIII’s time. The revolt known as the Pilgrimage of Grace started in Lincolnshire, and was savagely suppressed by royal forces ordered to ‘cause such dreadful execution to be done upon a good number of the inhabitants of every town, village and hamlet that have offended in this rebellion, as well by hanging them on trees as by the quartering of them, and the setting of their heads and quarters in every town’.24

  The county’s impoverishment worsened during the late sixteenth century due to frequent outbreaks of plague. In the years 1586 and 1587, when the plague combined with crop failure and catastrophic floods, the city of Lincoln had been so overrun by refugees from the countryside that all outsiders were forbidden entry, while the fearsome pestilence of 1590 was commemorated by a printed ballad, A Mournfull Dittee on the death of certain Judges and Justices of the Peace and divers other gentlemen, who died immediately after the Assizes holden at Lincoln. In the spring of 1599, the year of Paleologus’s arrival at Tattershall, the plague struck once again.

  Over the previous decade Lincolnshire had suffered its most disastrous harvests in living memory. Men still shivered at the memory of the devastation twenty years before when a freak tide and high winds wiped out entire coastal villages. Further, the prosperity of East Coast ports such as Boston declined dramatically in the late sixteenth century as the new Atlantic trade gave pre-eminence to the likes of Bristol and Plymouth. For the common folk, the rack-renting and illegal enclosures of land by grasping landlords – chief perpetrator, the Earl of Lincoln – added a simmering sense of grievance to a short and brutish life.

  For the government in London, the long bleak coastline beyond the fens was a constant concern. Here were any number of lonely creeks and inlets where a boat could land and bring in a smuggled cargo or anyone who wished his comings and goings to pass unobserved. One guesses from the absence of official records of his travels in and out of England that Theodore Paleologus was not infrequently among them. The county’s coast had already figured in several Catholic schemes against the queen, and continued to challenge her officials with its pick of quiet landing places for a lone would-be assassin, spy or seminary priest, or even a possible first foothold for a Spanish invasion.

  Over time many of Lincolnshire’s nobility and higher gentry chose to move to gentler, more sheltered countryside. Not so the Earl of Lincoln. Despite inheriting a huge number of valuable properties throughout the realm, despite his acquisition of many new ones by fair means or foul, he retained the isolated castle as his main residence outside London. Possibly he believed that a menacing physical presence was required to discourage open rebellion.

  After all, had not his own tenants had the temerity to forward an official complaint when he took away their highway and enclosed their common land, then imposed heavy fines and put them in the stocks as trespassers? Had not Tattershall’s townsfolk united in protest over what they called unjust taxes? Had not the Privy Council struck his name from the roll of justices of the peace ‘in regard of the complaints of diverse poore men that have bin hardly used by him’?25 Had he not been castigated by the Council in 1592, as the senior noble responsible for Lincoln gaol, when many of the prisoners locked up there died of starvation? The stern reprimand from the queen’s chief advisors stated:

  We therefore, pitying the miserie of the poore men and sorrie to understand of so little charitie among those that ought chiefly to have the care thereof, have thought good to recommend unto your Lordships espetiallie the speedie reformacion of this so uncharitable a negligence.26

  Even the vicar of Folkingham, another of the earl’s manors in the county, had petitioned the Privy Council. The Revd John Hoskin ‘maketh complaint of verie manye wrongs done unto him by your Lordship,’27 Lincoln was warned.

  Yet as Theodore quickly realised, in the earl’s mind it was always he who was the victim of some shocking injustice, and a suspicion that the Cecils might be turning against him drove his persecution mania to new heights of frenzy. In letters to Burghley he repeatedly called on ‘the lyvying god’ to avenge his wrongs, portraying himself as being ‘used lyke a vyllanous devle’ and ‘desolate and voyde of comfort or frend to procure me indifferent iustyce’.28

  What Lincoln did not know was that as long ago as 1587, as he was angling for the office of lord lieutenant of Lincolnshire, Burghley had advised the other key figure in Elizabeth’s administration, Sir Francis Walsingham, to block the earl’s petition. This was to be done secretly, as even England’s most powerful men were circumspect in their dealings with the Earl of Lincoln. As another great landowner in the county, the chief minister wrote: ‘Some men of my County of Lyncoln have sent to me to prevent that my Lord of Lyncoln, be not their lieutenant. They all fear his government.’ What prompted Burghley to send the warning was ‘my Lord of Lyncolns coming to work underhand for his appointment’.29

  The men of Lincolnshire had reason to fear. In Elizabethan times a lord lieutenant had far-reaching powers including the right to muster and arm the men of the county, to lead them against enemies of the crown and ‘to repress, subdue, slay, kill and put to execution of death these enemies by all ways and means’; he also had at his beck and call every justice of the peace, sheriff, constable and other local official whosoever. The thought of such powers in the hands of this relentless monster alarmed the county, and Burghley neatly solved the problem by engineering his own appointment for life. To the earl, it added insult to injury that Burghley proceeded to name his deadly enemy Sir Edward Dymoke as a deputy lieutenant.<
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  Tattershall Castle had been one of the prize acquisitions of the first earl. It had descended through heirs of Ralph Cromwell to Henry VIII’s brother-in-law and arch-crony, the Duke of Suffolk, passing then to Suffolk’s two young sons. Falling victim to the sweating sickness, these boys died within an hour of each other in 1551. This was during the minority of Henry’s heir, the sickly boy king Edward VI, at which time Lord Clinton – the first earl’s title before his elevation – was one of the greedy, self-serving council who ruled the land. Sidestepping lawful heirs, the council granted Tattershall to Clinton along with other plum estates. By the end of his life he was a major landowner in at least nine counties, with no fewer than thirty-six landed estates in Lincolnshire alone.

  Yet despite vast wealth Clinton was extremely averse to paying bills. In the same year Tattershall fell into his lap a bill was taken out against him for the then gigantic sum of £2,265, whereupon the council issued a pardon for all his debts. On King Edward’s death he made the near-fatal blunder of declaring for Queen Jane Grey, the Protestant candidate, only to quickly trim his sails to gain favour with the Catholic Mary Tudor. On Philip of Spain’s arrival in England as Mary’s husband, he netted a Spanish pension of 1,000 crowns a year. To demonstrate his neutrality he also accepted 1,000 crowns from Philip’s rival, Henri II of France. Clinton declared himself a Protestant again immediately on the accession of Elizabeth, crowning his long career with elevation to the earldom – an extraordinary achievement given the queen’s notorious reluctance to confer peerages. As under Henry, Edward and Mary, he continued to scoop up lucrative royal appointments and grants of land for the rest of his life.