An Elizabethan Assassin

by John Hall

  Predictably, the earl’s confused, rambling reply seeks to blame anyone but himself. He laments the fact that the behaviour of his foolish, rude and base servants has gladdened the hearts of his enemies and protests that he has ever been willing to lose his life to serve her majesty, ‘notwithstanding my old and sickly years’. He pleads ‘what care I took to prepare for her Majesty’s coming’ while admitting he had left before her arrival as he was late for the assizes, ‘to my great loss and hindrance’ – presumably a reference to another of his unsuccessful legal actions. He ends with a dig at never receiving ‘great favours and graces’ from the queen which so many other nobles enjoyed, and signs off pathetically with the line: ‘Always ready to honour and obey you as far as my pressed down estate will suffer, as knows the living Lord.’

  For Robert Cecil, any lingering sense of obligation to Lincoln had disappeared by this time, and he may well have felt some kind of vicarious responsibility as the former owner of the house from which the queen had been so humiliatingly excluded. This was a particularly sensitive time for Elizabeth, just weeks after the trial and execution of her former favourite Essex. He was also exasperated by the earl’s repeated failure to keep up payments on the property. Evidently he wrote another stinging letter in response to the earl’s excuses, for before the month was out Lincoln was writing again to complain of ‘bitter threats’ made against him by Cecil.

  His letter said: ‘Since I have always carried to dutiful heart to her [the queen] and testified it many ways, and that you have had proof of my love to you more than to others; the wrongs now offered by you are greater than my tongue or pen can or dare express.’ He moans of the many thousands he is in debt to the queen, Cecil and others, ‘besides the money which I lay in prison for’. The charges against him, he claims, ‘by general report amounteth to as much as seven noblemen’s subsidies, with disgraceful terms unworthily applied’.

  The paper was endorsed by Cecil’s private secretary: ‘The Earl of Lincoln to my master. A desperate letter.’

  Desperate indeed, but that did not stop Cecil writing back in withering terms. He was prepared to make a kingly present, he declared, to ‘whosoever will bring me the man that had ever power to persuade you to do anything but for your own lucre’.

  It was now, when the earl had forfeited the friendship of the most powerful man in the kingdom, that closer to home the long-standing feud with the Dymokes was approaching its climax. At the same time the bishop of Lincoln was joining in the chorus of complaint against Earl Henry. As lay impropriator of Sempringham and four other neighbouring parishes, the earl received their great tithes and was therefore responsible for repairs to the church chancels, but the bishop’s commissaries reported a depressingly familiar story: all five churches were ruinous or in great decay ‘through the default of the earl of Lincoln’.51

  Notes

  50 Historical Mss Commission, Salisbury, 11, 184–5.

  51 The neglect of Sempringham Church continued under succeeding earls and it remained in a ruinous state until restored by Victorian zeal. Daniel Defoe, visiting the site around 1725, noted ‘the full decay’ of the mansion where the Clintons had once lived ‘in the upmost splendour and magnificence’.

  11

  Rustically solemn or in rustic laughter

  Lifting heavy feet in clumsy shoes,

  Earth feet, loam feet, lifting in country mirth …

  T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets: ‘East Coker’.

  County elites were used to maintaining the queen’s peace throughout the realm by exploiting family ties and by a collective control of magistracy, militia and parliamentary seats. This order was seriously threatened in Lincolnshire for around twenty years because of the strife between Lincoln and the Dymoke affinity, for few of the aristocracy or gentry could avoid being embroiled in the feud at some point or other. Lord Willoughby’s success in staying relatively aloof was no doubt helped by his long absences abroad.

  Sir Edward Dymoke headed a distinguished family with extensive estates throughout Lincolnshire. His mother was a daughter of the first Earl of Lincoln, making Earl Henry his uncle. The Dymokes held the hereditary dignity of king’s champion whose function was to ride in full armour into Westminster Hall during a coronation banquet and challenge all comers to dispute the king’s title. The head of the family had performed this duty since the fourteenth century. Edward’s grandfather had issued the challenge at the crowning of Henry VIII, and he himself would fling down the gauntlet at the coronation of James I.

  As a long-serving knight of the shire, Dymoke was a stalwart of Protestantism in parliament, all the more anxious to stress his anti-Catholic credentials as his father had died in Lincoln Gaol as an alleged recusant. The Earl of Lincoln frequently sought to exploit this background, accusing his enemy of ‘the secret practices of these cunning papists’. Parliamentary records show Sir Edward Dymoke as a conscientious and hard-working member, noted particularly for his attention to resident aliens who engaged in business against the interests of English traders. He was counted among the wealthiest men in the county until the last phase of the desperate clash with Lincoln brought him to the brink of ruin.

  The origin of the feud is uncertain, though considering the earl’s insatiable lust for property it may well have started with a sense of grievance over the Dymokes’ ownership of the manors of North and South Kyme, a short distance from Tattershall Castle. These had come to Sir Edward through his grandfather’s marriage to Anne Talboys, sister and heiress of Gilbert, Lord Talboys of Kyme. Lord Talboys was the first husband of Bessie Blount, the cast-off royal mistress who went on to marry the first Earl of Lincoln. Given the second earl’s unconventional theories on inheritance, it is more than likely he convinced himself these manors were rightfully his. As we shall see, Lincoln’s particular bête noire was Sir Edward’s younger brother Talboys Dymoke, named in honour of the family’s benefactor.

  The notion of Morris dancers as dangerous libertines sounds charmingly preposterous to the modern ear, but to the Puritan faction of Elizabethan and Jacobean times the traditional rustic pleasures of the Morris, maypole-dancing, football, hobby-horses and the like were clear incitements to drunkenness and lust or else harked back to popish superstition. Bitter divisions rose throughout England over incessant moves by the evangelical clergy and their sympathisers to abolish celebrations such as May Day and Midsummer Day. In the 1580s Sir Francis Walsingham and the bishop of Lincoln had eagerly backed the city mayor’s ban on May games, maypoles and Sunday trading, only to see all restored by the mayor’s successor.

  Typical of Lincolnshire Puritans was John Vicars, minister at Stamford St Mary in Jacobean times, who regularly harangued those depraved members of his congregation known to frequent inns and flock to stage plays ‘accompanied with painted Jezabels and whorish Delilahs’. On the opposite side locally were the likes of Robert Sanderson, rector of Boothby Pagnell and a celebrated sermoniser, who could have had this same John Vicars in mind when he wrote: ‘We know not how far a sanctified believer may fall into the snares of sin, nor how far a graceless hypocrite may go in the show of godliness.’ And the rift went right to the top. A Privy Council vote of 1589 to make maypole-dancing unlawful was over-ruled by Elizabeth herself, an example of her instinctive support for tradition. Her Archbishop of Canterbury, the Lincolnshire man John Whitgift, was another stout defender of the old ways.

  One might expect an out-and-out Puritan like Walsingham, generally characterised as a humourless figure of morbid religiosity, to be an enemy of the country delights symbolised by the maypole, yet great courtiers like the Dudleys and Sidneys – notable for conspicuous extravagance and self-indulgence – were leading patrons of the Puritan clergy. They found no difficulty in drawing a line between their own entertainments and the merrymaking of lesser folk. With the social, religious and political changes wrought by the Reformation, the new English establishment was constantly discovering reasons to outlaw boisterous seasonal pastimes, especially those w
hich encouraged a degree of disorder or disrespect of their betters, as exemplified by mock kings and queens, boy bishops, Robin Hood plays and lords of misrule.

  The Elizabethan historian John Stow wrote wistfully of times not long gone when a lord of misrule was to be found ‘in the house of every nobleman of honour or good worship, be he spiritual or temporal’, a tradition encouraged at the royal court. But to the zealot these figures were dangerous agents of Catholic worship and sedition and the Morris was ‘the Devil’s Dance’. In his Dialogue against Light, Lewd and Lascivious Dauncing, published in 1582, the ardent reformer Christopher Fetherston railed against Morris men, football on Sunday and May games, and reported breathlessly on ‘ten maidens which went to set May, and nine of them came home with child’. Anyone seeking salacious details of Elizabethan times should start with the books of the godly.

  Theodore Paleologus, observing the bucolic customs of his adopted country for the first time, would have found little strange about the English maypole dance in which participants interweave coloured ribbons, as its origin was in Mediterranean lands. But the notorious events of the May Day games of 1601, in a group of towns and villages dotted around Tattershall, must have opened his eyes to a midsummer madness of a distinctly English kind, and – if he still harboured the slightest doubt in the matter – to the almost universal hatred felt for his noble patron. As an Italian he knew all about the dynamics of the blood feud, and it is certain that the earl would have called upon Paleologus’s talents during the course of a vendetta which reached its climax soon after his arrival at the castle. As we shall see, this was a critical time for his employer, with the sudden calamity of the queen’s visit to Chelsea overshadowing his trials in rural Lincolnshire.

  This was a particularly bad spell for the Earl of Lincoln. We have seen how he had been committed to gaol for the second time in June 1600. This was after Star Chamber heard a new litany of complaints against him from a Lincolnshire gentleman called Henry Ayscough, a cousin of the Dymoke brothers. Lincoln had refused to obey an order to pay Ayscough damages of £760, plus awards to other litigants, and went into hiding. Apprehended the following month, he refused to pay the fees owing to the arresting officer. While still at large he had picked another almighty quarrel with his son-in-law Sir Arthur Gorges, with each denouncing the other as a damnable liar. The earl claimed Gorges had advised him to commit suicide, an accusation furiously denied.

  More family trouble surfaced in November 1600 when the earl was denounced by his younger brother. Thomas Clinton complained to Cecil about ‘the extreme dealings of his unnatural brother’ who had cheated him out of his inheritance from their father.

  The South Kyme troubles of 1601 centred on what was known as the Summer Lord Game. This was a comic play or pageant featuring a local incarnation of the Lord of Misrule. Performed in that part of Lincolnshire from time immemorial as the climax of summer revels, it was staged between 1 May and the end of summer and was teasingly anarchic or subversive in tone. A similar entertainment is the theme of Thomas Nashe’s play Summer’s Last Will and Testament, first performed in the early 1590s in the household of Archbishop Whitgift, and Shakespeare draws on the same tradition in comedies like Twelfth Night.

  Lord Lincoln was a deep-dyed Puritan, at least in the popular sense of being a hypocrite and killjoy, and no one was less likely to turn a blind eye to merrymakers of the lower orders poking fun at their superior ‘with scoffs, jests, wanton gestures, or ribald talk’, as he saw it. To the earl’s mind, a playful challenge to his power might easily turn into an insurrection in earnest, and this was what made a play performed by ‘the vulgar people’ that summer at South Kyme, a village a few miles from his castle, an intolerable insult. Worse, a satire upon him on the stage was orchestrated by his sworn enemies the Dymokes. In his own bill of complaint to Star Chamber, the earl would accuse the brothers of ‘disgraceful, false, and intolerable slanders, reproaches, scandalous words, libels, and irreligious profanations’.

  The renewed conflict with the Dymokes can be traced back to the August of 1599 when a mounted company of Sir Edward’s retainers stopped outside a ‘tipplinge house’ in Tattershall and called out for drink. Their leader was Sir Edward’s unmarried brother, a minor poet, would-be author and general mischief-maker named Talboys Dymoke – ‘being a man of verie disordered and a most dysolute behaviour and condicion,’ according to later testimony of the earl. But though undeniably a hothead, Talboys was no stripling, being well over forty at the time.

  Flirting with the landlord’s wife Anne, Talboys called out in a loud voice: ‘Commend me, sweetharte, to my Lorde of Lincoln, and tell him that he is an Asse and a fool.’52 Further merriment followed at the earl’s expense, there in the very shadow of the castle. Anne’s husband, William Hollingshead, scurried off to report the offence.

  This Hollingshead had his own axe to grind. Before taking on the alehouse he had been a gaoler at Lincoln – infamous for starving inmates to death during the earl’s watch – and chief constable at Horncastle, a town where the earl and the Dymokes vied for mastery. In 1593 Sir Edward had accused Hollingshead of taking bribes, falsifying tax accounts and maliciously charging an innocent man with theft.

  The Clinton ascendency in these parts dated from the first earl’s marriage to Bessie Blount, when part of the Talboys inheritance fell into his lap. Nothing had happened since to endear the dynasty to the locals, and with the Dymoke faction enjoying greater public sympathy, Earl Henry had by this time bolstered his fighting force of tenants by recruiting outsiders at the rate of a shilling a day – over £50 in today’s money. This is why it must have been a heaven-sent opportunity to the earl, smarting from the Dymokes’ merriment at his expense, to acquire the services of Theodore Paleologus.

  The South Kyme games of 1601 began as customary on 1 May, the first anniversary of Paleologus’s marriage to Mary Balls. The date is noteworthy because of what was to occur in distant Chelsea shortly after this time, causing the earl to flee to Tattershall. Hostilities flared again between supporters of the two parties at Coningsby, the neighbouring village to Tattershall, on a Sunday in late July. The flashpoint came when about a dozen men led by Talboys Dymoke rode into Coningsby ‘to be merry’ at an alehouse with villagers who had joined in games at South Kyme a fortnight before.

  These Dymoke men brought with them a number of theatrical props used in the games including a drum, flag and toy spears and ‘did march on horseback two and two together through the streets’ while their Coningsby friends added to the racket with a drum of their own. According to their later sworn evidence, ‘there were not above two swords amongst them’ or, in the words of one of the accused, they had ‘no warlike weapons but only some daggers’. While denying ‘they had drunk the town of Coningsby dry’, the visiting party accepted they had patronised three or four alehouses.

  Just as the revellers were leaving the last alehouse for home, the retinue of the Earl of Lincoln happened to ride through Coningsby and was obliged to pass this merry company in a narrow lane. The visitors then ‘behaved themselves very rudely, with shoutings, noises … that some accompted them to be madmen,’ according to the testimony of Thomas Pigott, gentleman, a companion of the peer. Pigott was sent to entreat them not to scare the earl’s horse, whereupon Talboys Dymoke gleefully called for the drummers to strike up. As gentleman rider, Paleologus would have been at the earl’s side, alert to any threat to his master.

  A reluctant witness, the innkeeper Edward Miles, said he saw Mr Pigott cast down from his horse, ‘but by what means he knoweth not, neither what hurt he had’.53 Pigott himself declared that when he delivered the earl’s message, Talboys and others of his party ‘answered with great oaths that they had a Lord as good as he, and called the company and drums to them back again, and cried aloud, “Strike up drums! Strike up drums!”’ Drummers and flag bearers then ran at the earl’s man, ‘and the whole company after and amongst them in such violent sort, that his horse did fling and plunge, and
the more he entreated them to be quiet, the more fierce and angry they were … insomuch as his horse cast him to the ground to his great bruising, hurt, and damage, being a heavy, corpulent man’.

  Pigott heard cries of ‘Strike him down! Knock him down!’ as an acquaintance helped him to his feet. In the meantime the earl ‘did make haste away from the company homewards, and the disorderly company followed and pursued him a good pace’. No other member of the earl’s retinue is named in the record, but Paleologus would have been responsible for hustling Lincoln away from the scene of danger. Pigott informed the Star Chamber the incident ‘had like to cost him his life; and he was forced to keep to his bed a good space after, and to take physic for the same’.

  According to another witness, the earl did not ride off to his castle but returned to the scene with a constable, ordering him to arrest Talboys Dymoke and his henchmen. A scuffle with brandished swords ensued in the churchyard, though seemingly without bloodshed. Dymoke forbad his followers to go to the castle and appear before the earl as demanded by the constable. From the confused evidence presented later in Star Chamber it appears that this hapless constable, caught between the warring bigwigs, allowed the affair to fizzle out without conclusion beyond the confiscation of the drum. But as so often with records dating back four centuries or more, incomplete documents leave questions hanging in the air. It is unclear whether the earl was still excluded as a justice of the peace at this date, but if so Talboys was certainly within his rights to ignore a summons issued without lawful foundation.

  Even as these scenes were played out at Coningsby, a new cause of conflict arose between followers of the earl and Sir Edward Dymoke at the market town of Horncastle, nine miles from Tattershall. Famous for its horse fair, it had been a centre of Dymoke influence for 200 years or more. At Horncastle, alleged Lord Lincoln, ‘Sir Edward had unlawfully and riotously, by such as he had thereunto appointed … made entry into the parsonage house there’, claiming various rights the earl declared belonged to him. There is something ironic about these expressions of outrage from a serial invader of other people’s property, but this did not prevent the earl adding the Horncastle incident to his suit against the Dymokes for riot and unlawful assembly. However, lawsuits over Horncastle were to end with a court order confirming Sir Edward as in lawful possession of the manor.