An Elizabethan Assassin

by John Hall

  The young man’s deepest fear is laid bare in the following passage of the letter:

  He keeps her now docked up like a prisoner, without suffering her either to write or hear from any of her friends, having appointed to guard her an Italian, a man that hath done divers murders in Italy and in the Low Countries, from which he fled to England, from whom, I protest, she has just cause hourly to fear the cutting of her throat.

  This was a fortnight after Theodore’s wedding to Mary Balls. If there was a honeymoon, it was well and truly over.

  Another who warned Cecil about the earl’s new man was Thomas, Lord Grey de Wilton. Related to both the Clinton and Norreys families, Grey had had ample opportunity to gain insight into Paleologus’s character while both were serving with the Dutch forces. Grey was welcome in Prince Maurice’s circle; indeed, in the same month the suspicions over the countess’s safety came to a head, he returned to the Low Countries and in July that year was to be wounded fighting under Maurice’s command at the Battle of Nieuport, a decisive victory over the Spanish.

  Clearly Cecil was moved to action. A fortnight after Francis Norreys’s plea came a letter from Lady Bridget, widow of one of Lord Norreys’s soldier sons, offering ‘many thanks for your favours showed lately to my Lady Lincoln, by whose good means I did well hope that she should have been released of her long bondage’. But Lady Bridget goes on to say the earl is still refusing to allow the countess to see her son, ‘wherefore my earnest suit to you is that you would once again entreat this unkind lord that he would, in regard of her health and the necessity she hath to take physic, give her leave to come and lie at Chelsey for a time, for where she is no physician may come to her’.

  But the threat of her murder at Paleologus’s hands had been lifted. The countess may have remained a virtual prisoner at Tattershall, but even a man as deranged as Lincoln realised that her elimination was out of the question once the alarm had been raised with the all-powerful Robert Cecil.

  Time and again in this story the threads lead to Cecil. Nearly all our chief players write to him, or are the subject of others’ letters, or both. Many are related to him in one way or another; all depend on his good will. His correspondents seek favours, lay accusations, make excuses; they request a loan, licence or preferment; they beg his intercession with the queen; more often than not they relate a juicy item of tittle-tattle, for nothing is beneath Mr Secretary’s attention. He is the supreme fixer of the age and his good offices are sought as an intermediary, apologist, financier or matchmaker. Rarely does a correspondent fail to offer some gift, a horse or falcon, venison or game birds.

  Every petition reinforces the popular image of this deformed little man as a black spider in the middle of a twitching web. Those dark hooded eyes take in all but give little away. His influence reaches into every matter of state, domestic and foreign, and creeps into every corner of English society. All the business of the realm passes over his desk. And from around this period there are Scotland’s affairs too, for Cecil, intent on being kingmaker when his mistress dies, is in secret correspondence with James Stuart. At the same time he controls the spy network founded by Burghley, which after refinement at his hands is the most formidable in Europe: there are Cecil agents as far away as Moscow and Constantinople. No one is ever entirely trusted by Robertus Diabolus, as the Spanish call him: even as his father lay dying, Cecil slipped a spy into his household.

  The puzzling forbearance which marks many of Cecil’s dealings with Lincoln up to this time, and the blind eye turned to innumerable misdeeds of the peer, may have a simple explanation, and Lady Bridget’s reference to Chelsea is the clue. Cecil and Lincoln had been engaged in long-drawn-out negotiations over the sale of Cecil’s house in Chelsea left to him by Lord Burghley. Embarrassed by the financial strain of his other properties, especially the ruinously expensive Theobalds in Hertfordshire, Cecil needed to dispose of the Chelsea estate at the highest price possible, while Lincoln, himself hugely in debt, was predictably resolved to drive a hard bargain.

  The handsome riverside Chelsea mansion had once belonged to Sir Thomas More, Henry VIII’s lord chancellor, and following More’s execution in 1535 went to a succession of royal favourites, ending up in Burghley’s hands in 1594. Robert Cecil, having finally sold the house to Lincoln in 1599 for £6,000 with £500 down, was now experiencing great difficulty in extracting further payments from the earl.

  Lincoln had proved a dogged haggler, making a last-minute threat to withdraw from the sale unless Cecil threw in various furnishings including a table, carpet, curtains and the tapestries in the great chamber. He even quibbled about a particular cushion. Under the terms of the sale, the property was acquired jointly with his son-in-law, Sir Arthur Gorges, as the major part of the dowry of Lincoln’s only daughter Elizabeth, with the earl reserving a life interest. The ink was hardly dry on the agreement before the old crook reneged on the bargain, first trying to claim the property rightfully belonged to his younger son Edward and then declaring it had to be sold to pay off his own debts.

  The son-in-law’s frustration and indignation bubbles over in a letter to Sir Robert in September 1600 in which he brands the earl a compulsive liar:

  None can testify my careful zeal towards this ungrateful miser than you, whom I have so often solicited with excusing his vices. The love I bore his daughter made me do so, and his cankered disposition requites me accordingly … He has already brought my poor wife to her grave, as I fear, with his late most odious and unnatural despites that he has used towards her, the most obedient child in the world … I disclaim from all his favours, since he had wrought the destruction of my wife.47

  Arthur Gorges was a much admired poet, and the poet expresses himself here with poetic licence. Lady Gorges may well have been in great distress over her father’s behaviour but she was not in fact dead or dying. Indeed Elizabeth Gorges would outlive father and husband, dying in 1643 after bearing Sir Arthur twelve children.

  The Chelsea house is interesting in providing a glimpse into other interiors Theodore Paleologus would have known well. The famous Holbein drawing of Sir Thomas More and his extended family was made here, and though the property was remodelled by later owners the painted versions of the portrait give us an impression of its size and sober distinction. Holbein himself called it dignified without being ostentatious. Contemporary accounts describe a rose-brick frontage of some 164 feet; a fine entrance porch opened to a screens passage and beyond it to a great hall more than seventy feet in length, rising to a beamed and timbered roof. The best-known version of the More portrait shows an interior canopied porch and diamond-latticed window. A covered gallery with oriel windows looked down into the hall, and among other admired rooms were Sir Thomas’s library and private chapel.

  In this setting, the creation of one of English history’s great names, the Earl of Lincoln continued to plot his squalid exploits, and his occupancy of the house turns into yet another unedifying chapter in the story. Falling out with one of his new neighbours, he had a stinking load of night-soil dumped on a wharf close by to cause the maximum annoyance. With this as with other schemes, one wonders whether his gentleman rider was called on to play an active role or was allowed to be a nose-holding bystander. But as we shall see in the next chapter, Lincoln’s most notorious deed at Chelsea was yet to come, and it would have confronted Paleologus with the inescapable truth that the earl’s patronage wrecked any chance of ingratiating himself in courtly circles.

  But at least the countess was no longer at risk once Robert Cecil was alert to the danger. Cecil had finally rounded on the earl in earnest because of the strengthening fears over Lady Lincoln’s plight, and this almost certainly saved the poor woman’s life.

  One benefit was that this now left Paleologus free to concentrate on his official role with close control over the countess passing to lesser retainers. Lady Lincoln was to survive a further unhappy eleven years, though never escaping her husband’s merciless grip. There are no apparent g
rounds for attributing her death to unnatural causes but as soon as she was buried the earl would bring a suit against his stepson Francis, who had since succeeded to his grandfather’s title of Baron Norreys of Rycote. Lincoln alleged his dead wife had misappropriated his property for the benefit of her first husband’s son. This, however, like so many of his lawsuits, was to end in cripplingly expensive failure.

  Chancery archives concerning the earl’s lawsuit against Norreys record the testimony of witness after witness describing the treatment meted out to Lady Lincoln. A typical deposition is that of William Hatt, yeoman, aged fifty, who stated that ‘he being at a house or castle of the earl of Lincoln in Lincolnshire with the late countess did perceive that the bailiffs, officers and servants of the earl had more command in and over the house and goods of the earl than the countess had, and did take her up short as that she had been a mean and single woman’.48

  William Smith, yeoman, aged thirty-two, similarly deposed that Lady Lincoln ‘was oftentimes in want and necessity’ and that the earl refused her ‘such allowance and livelihood, or such command, or authority over his house and estate as did beseem the estate, degree and calling of an earl’s wife’. Smith saw the castle bailiffs, servants and officers treat the countess ‘as saucily and boldly as if she had been their fellow, or rather some simple servant’.

  A gentleman in Lady Bedford’s service, Edmund Stanton, swore that the late countess never used the earl’s wealth to help her first husband’s children or anyone else. On the contrary, Lord Lincoln had taken from the countess ‘her rents and the fines of jointure left to her by William Norreys, esquire, her former husband’, depriving her for the rest of her life.

  None of the earl’s retainers is named in these depositions, but it is difficult not to implicate Theodore Paleologus in the campaign of humiliation waged against the countess. Only Francis Norreys deliberately points his finger at the gentleman rider: though he does not accuse Theodore by name, there is no record of any other Italian in the earl’s employ at this or any other any time, let alone one of a murderous reputation. But it is only fair to Paleologus to note that the second Lord Norreys led a troubled life and it is conceivable that his mental state steered him towards an exaggerated view of the dangers facing his mother during her incarceration.

  Described by contemporaries as ‘of a melancholy humour’, Francis Norreys was married in 1599 to Lady Bridget de Vere, daughter of the seventeenth earl of Oxford – the poet-peer who has been claimed as the true author of the works of Shakespeare – and a granddaughter of Lord Burghley. Coincidentally, Lord Willoughy de Eresby was himself unhappily married to Lady Mary de Vere, sister of the earl of Oxford. The couple separated four years later with Norreys disclaiming paternity of her only child, a daughter called Elizabeth. It is also of note that he was a sworn enemy of the earl’s allies, the Willoughbys. He quarrelled repeatedly with Peregrine Bertie, younger son of Lord Willoughby, wounding him badly in a duel in 1610, and the two had to be parted when about to fight again in 1613. In 1615 an affray in a churchyard resulted in a verdict of manslaughter against Norreys for slaying a Willoughby servant.

  However, killing an inferior was not regarded as gravely as an incident in 1621 when Norreys was sent to the Fleet for jostling a fellow peer in the presence of the Prince of Wales, the future Charles I. This occurred shortly after Norreys had been raised to the earldom of Berkshire, one of the prodigal scattering of titles by King James, who during his reign more than doubled the number of English earls. This, however, paled beside his reckless creation of knights, beginning with forty-six gentlemen being dubbed before breakfast during James’s halt at Belvoir Castle in 1603, when he travelled down from Scotland to claim the crown. Francis Norreys enjoyed his new dignity as earl for just a year and a day before committing suicide by the eccentric method of shooting himself with a crossbow.

  There is a curious postscript to this story. Norreys failed in his efforts to have his daughter declared a bastard, largely because well-placed figures like Robert Cecil, the wife’s uncle, were determined to avert a major scandal. So Elizabeth Norreys went on to inherit the barony of Norreys and passed the title down to her only daughter. This Lady Norreys married Montagu Bertie, fifteenth Lord Willoughby de Eresby, thus carrying Francis Norreys’s barony to his sworn enemy’s descendants, along with the bitterly contested manor of Weston-on-the-Green.49

  Notes

  46 Historical Mss Commission, Salisbury, x, 146.

  47 Ibid., 332.

  48 Chancery Records, 24, 379/63.

  49 To the present day the family of Bertie, Earls of Abingdon, retain the style Lord Norreys of Rycote as the courtesy title of the heir.

  10

  For greatest scandal waits on greatest state.

  Shakespeare, The Comedy of Errors.

  We now come to an affair which, in the eyes of Elizabethan society, would have dwarfed every other outrage committed by the Earl of Lincoln.

  To entertain the queen at home was one of the greatest honours a subject might aspire to, though a hugely expensive one. Arriving with a large retinue of hungry and thirsty courtiers, Elizabeth would expect lavish gifts served up with elegant play-acting and a round of pretty, flattering speeches. Rich men had ruined themselves hosting the queen on her many progresses. On a visit to Lord and Lady Norreys in 1592, for instance, she had been treated to an elaborate play in the course of which actors presented her with weapons of gold set with diamonds and rubies, for allegorical use against her enemies in Ireland, France and Spain, and a jewel-studded key to the gates of Ostend. In approved manner, these extravagant gifts were offered apologetically as ‘trifles’.

  No one should seriously have expected the miserly Lincoln to live up to such standards, but what happened in April 1601 shocked Elizabethans to the core. Faced with a home visit from the queen, Earl Henry did a bunk, leaving the dumbfounded monarch to knock in vain outside his new Chelsea mansion as he galloped off north to Tattershall Castle. It is most likely his gentleman of horse rode beside him; since Cecil’s intervention over the countess, it was impossible to ask Paleologus to exercise his deadly talents.

  We can picture the scene at Chelsea from the graphic account contained in a letter of admonishment sent to Lord Lincoln on 30 April in the joint names of Robert Cecil and the Earl of Nottingham, horrified witnesses of the fiasco. Though ostensibly from both, the letter was undoubtedly dictated by Mr Secretary:

  Such has been the mischance and great folly of your servants at Chelsey, as when her Majesty did lately ride abroad and was accompanied by the Scottish Ambassador, she was desirous to have gone into your house and gardens, from where she was kept out in so rude a fashion as we protest unto you your enemies wanted no colour to say it was by your direction.50

  Despite ‘a great knocking at both gates’, the earl’s servants not only failed to open up but were glimpsed by the royal party furtively peering out from windows of the house. ‘These things did not a little trouble the Queen,’ Cecil continues, ‘though she would make no speech of it then, but we have found it since so suspiciously to move in her as she did almost seem to take it to be done of purpose.’ Cecil and Nottingham tried to persuade the queen there had been some unfortunate mistake or misunderstanding on the earl’s part, ‘out of our care that she did not in any public place speak disgracefully of you’. They fibbed that Lincoln had actually been eagerly looking forward to entertaining the royal party and would be mortified at accidentally missing her.

  Seeing Elizabeth disinclined to believe this story, Cecil upped the ante:

  Rather than fail, we durst undertake that you (in token of how much you despised the matter of charge) would be contented to make us your stewards for a dinner and anything that belongs to it. Of this your offer, her Majesty hath spoken since with very great contentment and honour of you (whereof although you will say, you are not like to taste benefit) yet we are sure that your good judgment serves you, that it cannot be good for you (who have so many enemies) that th
e world should conceive that her Majesty had an ill conceit of you.

  The queen was indeed incandescent at the loss of face witnessed by King James’s ambassador, and insisted the promised dinner should be enjoyed before his departure for Scotland, or as Mr Secretary put it, ‘that he (for these were her words) that saw her kept out, may see her also let in … and so on Saturday next her Majesty will dine there’.

  The earl may have been impervious to Cecil’s sarcasm – ‘how much you despised the matter of charge’ – but the next passage of the letter must have caused such a groan of anguish as rarely ever heard at Tattershall: ‘We will moderate expenses as if it were for ourselves, and we will also find out some present, such as we presume you will not think too much.’ As Lincoln knew well, Cecil and Nottingham never stinted on their banquets and gifts for the sovereign. In other words, by trying to evade a fairly hefty bill for entertaining the queen, the hapless earl had landed himself with a colossal one.

  That Lincoln’s letter in response is dated 2 May, only two days later, indicates the paramount importance Cecil attached to the scandal. The horseback journey usually took a full three days, so his messenger must have ridden hell for leather all the way from Whitehall to Tattershall and back.