by John Hall
Horncastle had already been the scene of two unseemly episodes in this epic feud. The first was when the earl called a petty sessions meeting which culminated in the arrest of Sir Edward and seven of his men for disturbing the peace. Lincoln then sat on the bench with his younger son, who remained loyal despite many indignities heaped upon him, the pair of them ‘outfacing and appalling the jury’. The earl ‘gave Sir Edward the lie thrice and told him he was in a mad fit, with other most foul and opprobrious words not befitting that place’. When the jury retired to consider their verdict, the two parties clashed at an inn with Lincoln pulling one adversary by the beard and his son wounding another with his rapier while attempting to kill Sir Edward.
In a later scene, two Lincoln supporters summoned a private sessions under a pretext, then indicted Dymoke servants for riotous assault. The earl packed the jury with his own men, selecting as foreman an individual who was locked in a lawsuit against Sir Edward. The knight foiled the plot by arriving with two friendly justices who insisted on joining the bench and the sessions ended in a bloody riot with the rival Justices of the Peace at each other’s throats.
The troubles came to a head five weeks later, on the last Sunday in August, when a dramatised ‘death of the Lord of Kyme’ – a thinly disguised Earl of Lincoln – was performed on a makeshift stage at South Kyme, ‘hard by the maypole standing upon the green’. Sir Edward had moved to the manor house there six years previously after the earl’s private army forced him out of Scrivelsby Court, the Dymoke ancestral pile near Horncastle. Neighbours were invited to feast on venison at the home of a servant of Sir Edward, one John Cradock the elder, yeoman, whose son John the younger was that year’s summer lord. On offer was a surprise entertainment to mark the end of the revels. According to the earl’s suit, Talboys Dymoke was the author and principal actor of this play, aided and abetted by South Kyme villagers who had been involved in the earlier fracas at Coningsby. According to one witness, about 100 men, women and children assembled on the green immediately after evening prayers at the parish church, though another witness spoke of 300–400. Stools and cushions were set for the guests of honour, Sir Edward Dymoke and his lady, though witnesses later denied they were present.
What happened next showed how the amateur playwright Talboys had appropriated the Summer Lord Game to strike at Lincoln. He began by ‘counterfeiting the person’ of the peer and mimicking ‘his speeches and gesture’, then ‘termed and named the earl of Lincoln, his good uncle, in scornful manner’ until he was dragged offstage by a villager acting the part of the Devil. In a later scene, which was largely in verse, the same man reappeared in the role of the Fool and read out his last will and testament, bequeathing his wooden dagger to the earl and ‘his coxcomb and bauble’ to any who refused to follow Sir Edward Dymoke to Horncastle to confront his foe. In the interval there was ‘a dirge sung by Talboys Dymoke and others’ in which they referred by name to ‘most of the known lewd and licentious women in the cities of London and Lincoln and town of Boston, concluding in their songs after every one of the names, ora pro nobis’.54
As this book devotes much space to the sins of Earl Henry, it is fair to draw attention to what might be a rare virtue. This was an age when the great openly acknowledged mistresses and bastards, but during my researches I have found no hint of sexual laxity on Lord Lincoln’s part, unless – and this is by no means clear – the roll-call of loose women in Talboys’s script is a personal dig at his uncle. The one exception is the mention of a bastard daughter born prior to his first marriage, though only one source refers to her in passing and gives no further detail. This matter apart, the earl’s interest in women appears to be exclusively focused on their ownership of property, real or supposed, and familiarity with local ladies of easy virtue fits more easily with what we deduce of Talboys Dymoke. A later libellous document allegedly published by Dymoke refers to the earl’s heir Lord Clinton as a ‘cuckold and brat, bastard, son of a whore’55 along with other choice insults, but it is notable that no aspersions of this kind are cast at the earl himself.
If Talboys counted on popular hatred preventing the play from coming to the earl’s attention, he was badly mistaken, and this was to have dire consequences for the Dymoke clan. Retainers of Lincoln got wind of the promised performance and a few infiltrated the crowd on the village green. When the play was over, the party hurried back to Tattershall to report to their master. According to some witnesses, Sir Edward only heard about the satire on the earl some time afterwards and then ‘did with grief bitterly reprove and check Talboys for the doing thereof’.
In the complaint to Star Chamber dated 23 November 1601, Lincoln predictably concentrates on the outrage to his dignity by the lower orders. The queen and her ancestors, he says, ‘have ever had a gracious regard of the honour and estate of the nobility and peers of this your highness’s realm, and men of more inferior condition to them have carried such respective and due observance to the nobles of this kingdom, as they have not once presumed to scandalise or deprave there persons and place by public frowns and reproaches’. How was it then that ‘one Talboys Dymoke, a common contriver and publisher of infamous pamphlets and libels … by the direction, consent or allowance of Sir Edward Dymoke of Kyme, knight’, had committed these intolerable offences?
Yet when the case came before Star Chamber, what sealed the Dymokes’ fate was not so much the lese-majesty suffered by a noble as the disrespect shown to the great shibboleth of the age, the Protestant religion. For after the make-believe earl had been carried off by the Devil, a mock funeral service was conducted by John Cradock senior in the role of a tipsy clergyman. As told by one of the informers, ‘In frown of religion, and the profession thereof, being attired in a minister’s gown and having a corner cap on his head, and a book in his hand opened’, the Dymokes’ bailiff mounted a pulpit next to the maypole and delivered ‘a profane and irreligious prayer’. A pot of ale hung beside him in place of an hourglass, ‘whereof he did drink at the concluding of any point or part of his speech’.
The sermon began with a burlesque prayer for the departed earl:
Now blessed be his body and his bones;
I hope his legs are hotter than gravestones,
And to that hope let’s all conclude it then,
Both men and women pray, and say, ‘Amen’.
All that survives of the manuscript is a few remembered scraps like this given in evidence, mostly by hostile witnesses. There is nothing here to suggest that a successful future beckoned for Talboys in the professional theatre. Much of the sermon was in cod Latin which must have mystified the rustic audience, and the most striking lines quoted in court was another spoof prayer – ‘The mercy of Mustard-seed and the blessing of Bull-beef and the peace of Pot-luck be with you all. Amen’ – and a passing reference to ‘the story of Mab’.
Students of Shakespeare may sit up at the mention of Mustard-seed and Mab. A Midsummer Night’s Dream, in which Titania orders her fairy Mustard-seed to attend on Bottom, was written about 1595 and first printed in quarto in 1600, a year before these events at South Kyme; the first recorded mention of Queen Mab, ‘the fairies’ midwife’, occurs in Romeo and Juliet, also written around 1595 and printed two years later. This suggests that Talboys Dymoke enjoyed early performances of these great plays during visits to London, whether at The Theatre,where the troupe then called the Lord Chamberlain’s Men took to the public stage for the first time, or at The Globe itself, which had opened as recently as 1599. Or did the aspiring playwright carry home to South Kyme some of Shakespeare’s earliest published works? Either possibility might account for an admirer of the most successful dramatist of the day borrowing these names for his own composition.
Shakespeare himself was not above taking revenge of the kind aimed at the earl. Though cruder and more malevolent, Talboys Dymoke’s piece compares with the lampoon of Sir Thomas Lucy, the Warwickshire landowner who by tradition prosecuted the young bard for poaching, as the absurd Justic
e Shallow in Henry IV Part Two and The Merry Wives of Windsor. The mischief did not end at South Kyme. Talboys penned a scurrilous rhyme mocking the earl and his son Lord Clinton which he subsequently nailed up in the towns of Sleaford and Louth, and scandalised the congregation at Billingborough, another village close to Tattershall, where he interrupted the preacher in the pulpit by calling out: ‘Why dost thou not pray for the good earl of Lincoln? He hath as much need to be prayed for as any other.’
The earl was to enjoy a last triumph. The Star Chamber suit against the Dymokes was to drag on till 1610, when Lincoln obtained a rare legal verdict in his favour, though the wording of the judgement indicates that the severe sentences handed down owed more to the ‘frown of religion’ than to the libel against the earl. Talboys Dymoke, principal cause of all the trouble, was by this time beyond the judges’ reach – in what circumstances he died we do not know, but he was buried at Horncastle only a year after the notorious South Kyme games – and retribution fell on his brother Sir Edward and the lesser fry. Their defence that everything had been done ‘in the merriment at the time of the May game’ was dismissed out of hand.
The bailiff John Cradock and two other chief actors in the play were hauled off to London and committed to Fleet prison, paraded through Westminster Hall ‘with papers’ – that is, having signs around their necks naming their crimes – before being pilloried and whipped. They were then dispatched to the assizes in Lincoln where they were again set in the pillory, whipped and required to acknowledge their offences and to beg forgiveness of ‘God and the earl’. They were also fined £300 apiece, a ruinous sum for common men, and bound to good behaviour before release. As a gentleman Sir Edward escaped the degradation of physical punishment but was committed to the Fleet during the pleasure of the monarch, by this time King James. His fine of £1,000 began a permanent decline in the Dymoke fortunes, a course confirmed during the Civil War by hardships suffered for loyalty to the royal cause.
The judgement signalled a growing intolerance of festive licence as the Tudor era ended. Star Chamber’s role under the Stuarts was as an instrument of tyranny. The increasingly assertive demands for religious conformity sounded the knell for a tradition which had remained virtually unchanged for centuries but would be entirely erased during the Commonwealth. The South Kyme game might be seen as a last hurrah for Merry England.
The early years of the new century witnessed repeated reverses for the earl. As a high-ranking peer, however, he was still called upon to perform official duties, and in February 1601 he was summoned to Westminster Hall for the indictment of the Earl of Essex. A witness of the trial, the French ambassador de Boissie, reported home to his master Henri IV with a biting description of the jury comprised of Lincoln and his fellow senior peers: while Essex and the counsel were pleading, he wrote, ‘my lords guzzled as if they had not eaten for a fortnight, smoking also plenty of tobacco’56 before speedily pronouncing the unanimous verdict of guilty of high treason.
Lincoln was also a juryman at the perfunctory trials of co-conspirators in the revolt, and once again displayed his true colours. During the trial of Essex’s chief lieutenant in Wales, Sir Gelli Meyrick – whose knighthood failed to exempt him from being hanged, drawn and quartered – Lincoln discovered that during the Cadiz raid the Welshman had looted a magnificent set of marble columns, intending them for use on his own tomb. Lincoln wrote to the Privy Council submitting that such pillars were too fine to mark a traitor’s grave, and sought to appropriate them for the grand monument he planned for himself in the church at Tattershall. Cecil was still being pestered on the matter on 18 April. ‘I pray you will not forget your promise to help me to the stones for my tomb,’57 wrote the earl. It was a shameless performance, though nothing less than what one would expect of the man.
But the trial of Essex would come back to bite him.
Notes
52 Star Chamber Records, 5, L1/29.
53 Ibid., 5, L13/33.
54 Ibid., 5, L1/29.
55 Ibid., L34/37.
56 Windwood, R., Memorials and Affairs in the Reigns of Queen Elizabeth and King James I, London, 1725.
57 Historical Mss Commission, Salisbury, x, 38.
12
OLIVIA:
What is thy parentage?
VIOLA:
Above my fortunes, yet my state is well. I am a gentleman.
Shakespeare, Twelfth Night.
We have seen that the first child of Theodore and Mary Paleologus was born in June 1600, only to die in September that year. There is now a gap of six years before the Tattershall baptismal records of the next three children, displaying the common vagaries of spelling of the time: Dorathie, daughter of Theodore Palaloga, on 18 August 1606; then Theodore Palalogo, son of Theodore Palalogo gent, on 30 April 1609; then John Theodore, son of Paleologo Theodore gent, on 11 July 1611. In August 1614 there is a partially legible entry for Elizabeth, daughter of Theo … which is very likely to be another Paleologus child, but as no other record can be found of an Elizabeth Paleologus – crucially, she is not named on the Landulph monument – it seems certain she died in infancy. Of the births of Mary and Ferdinand we find no record in the Tattershall register, though we might reasonably infer that Ferdinand was the youngest son from the sequence of their names on the brass, and indeed we shall later find evidence of his later birth in Devon.
Here is something of a mystery. Mary Balls first became pregnant soon after Theodore’s arrival at the castle, giving birth in June 1600; between 1606 and 1614 she had children at regular intervals, there being at least four and possibly six live births. Why, then, no children for this fertile woman between 1601 and 1606? Once again Paleologus has melted into the shadows. Canon Adams deduced that like many other mercenaries he was shut up in Ostend during the notorious bloody siege – one of the longest in history – which due to its heroic defence and appalling slaughter excited the admiration and horror of all Europe between July 1601 and September 1604.
This theory fits in with Theodore’s handwritten claim of service in the Anglo-Dutch cause, which we will examine later, and the lack of any evidence of involvement in his patron’s doings in England over this period. After our multiple sightings of him in Lincolnshire and Yorkshire in 1600 – with his marriage, the birth and death of his first son, his ‘woodish acquaintances’ with John Smith and his role as the countess of Lincoln’s gaoler – the local record suddenly falls silent. With Paleologus under the spotlight of suspicion for planning Lady Lincoln’s murder, the earl must have been persuaded of the wisdom of his temporary absence, though Mary continued to maintain the family home at the castle.
Commanding the defence of Ostend was Elizabeth’s famous general Sir Francis Vere, who led an English force of 3,000 regulars and mercenaries in support of a Dutch army totalling perhaps 5,000. These were vastly outnumbered by the surrounding Spanish troops. The siege was called ‘a long carnival of death’ but for officers on both sides it was valued as a university of war, witnessing the appearance of novel weaponry and siege techniques. A Cornishman called William Lower was a captain in Vere’s army and encouraged other Cornish gentlemen to join his ‘war school’ there. Lower is a name we will meet at a later stage of Theodore’s life.
Though the Spanish grip on the landward sides of Ostend could not be broken, the secure harbour allowed Allied ships to land reinforcements and provisions. This meant it was possible for the wounded or those of rank and influence to take home leave, though if our supposition that Theodore was there is correct we have no idea if he was among those officers granted this privilege. Nor do we know if he was there for the beginning of the siege on 5 July 1601 – which would mean he left Lincolnshire before the infamous Kyme play – or was among the reinforcements who arrived at a later date.
The Spanish finally broke into the fortress’s outer defences and forced Ostend to surrender on 20 September 1604. But the cost of victory was shattering with 35,000 men killed or wounded. The astonishing bravery of the de
fenders prompted the Spanish to allow the surviving soldiers full military honours and they marched out of the gates with drums beating and flags flying. The Spanish general treated the enemy officers to a magnificent banquet.58 The scale of the defeat at Ostend persuaded King James to begin peace negotiations with Spain that same year, and the Dutch later signed the Twelve Year Truce.
After hugely damaging losses during Elizabeth’s final years, the Earl of Lincoln now enters a relatively quiescent period. Perhaps the enormity of the break with Cecil has finally sunk in; perhaps the mountainous debts have left him too embarrassed to plot new offensives; perhaps in his sixties he is simply too exhausted. And if our theory about Paleologus at Ostend is correct, the peer has, for the time being, lost his most formidable henchman.
Hated more heartily than ever by the townsfolk of Tattershall, the earl had taken to spending more time at his second seat at Sempringham, though we have already seen how he was at loggerheads with the local parson, John Hoskin of Folkingham, and had brought the wrath of the bishop of Lincoln down on his head for allowing his parish churches thereabouts to fall into ruin. Sempringham Hall, erected on the site of a priory granted to the first earl at the Dissolution, was in fact far grander than Tattershall Castle, comparable with Renaissance prodigy houses of the likes of Burghley and Longleat. Earl Henry’s increasingly chaotic financial state meant there was nothing to spare for its maintenance, however, and one pictures the peer’s residence there as falling far short of the standards expected of a senior peer. Indeed, continuing neglect of the property by future earls would mean that virtually every trace of the mansion had gone within 100 years.