An Elizabethan Assassin

by John Hall

  A flattering false insculption on a tomb,

  And in men’s hearts reproach? The bowelled corpse

  May be seared in, but (with free tongue I speak)

  The faults of great men through their sear-cloths break.

  Thomas Middleton, The Revenger’s Tragedy.

  The old earl had been ailing for some time at his now favoured retreat of Sempringham. He had reached the great age of seventy-three. Perhaps in these last days his mind finally dwelt on a lifetime of misdeeds and fearfully recalled sermons by the fire-and-brimstone preachers favoured by the Puritan persuasion. There was, for instance, Henry Greenwood’s thunderings from the pulpit at St Paul’s Cross only a year before, when his subject was the lake called Tophet which awaited sinners in hell.

  ‘Hell is a most lamentable and woeful place of torment,’ cried Greenwood, ‘where there shall be screeching and screaming, weeping, wailing, and gnashing of teeth for evermore: and this is Tophet. Where torment shall be upon torment, each torment easeless, endless, remediless; where the worm shall be immortal, cold intolerable, stench unendurable, fire unquenchable, darkness palpable, scourges of devils terrible, and screeching and screaming continual: and this is hell.’ There was worse. ‘Nay moreover,’ said the preacher, ‘great men, noble men, and mighty princes, are not only liable to Tophet, but the greatest part of them shall to the devil.’61

  Or was Earl Henry comforted by a belief in preordination? During his lifetime most English clergy taught the curious Calvinist view that the world was divided into the elect and reprobate whom God had arbitrarily predestined, the one to heaven and the other to hell. He had committed more than his fair share of the enormous villainies listed in Robert Burton’s great obloquy on his age, his life made up of now tragical, then comical matters. Yet to one of Lincoln’s cast of mind it must have been unthinkable that God would disoblige a belted earl.

  We have no idea whether the gentleman rider was at his master’s bedside when, as recorded in the parish register, ‘Henry layt Earle of Lincolne departed out of this lyf at his manor howse of Semperingham, the xxjx day of September, anno domine 1616.’ He died the same year as Shakespeare. After bringing so much suffering down on so many heads throughout his long reign, perhaps his passing was mourned by no one but Theodore Paleologus, a confidante of the old tyrant in later years and his accomplice in delinquencies known and nameless. With his master gone, Theodore’s prospects were in freefall.

  Lincoln was buried at Tattershall three days later. Despite long and careful preparations for a tomb befitting his exalted station in life – one meant to incorporate the grand marble statuary appropriated from the goods of the executed rebel Mayrick – there is no sign or record that it was ever erected. Given Earl Henry’s atrocious relations with his heir Thomas, it is no surprise that the new earl declined to be confronted by a monument to his father’s glory every time he set foot in church. With more foresight, he might have followed the example of many a Jacobean grandee who erected his tomb when alive, doubting the reliability of his heirs. Lincoln left a will which almost certainly included instructions for his tomb, but the will is no longer extant and it was in any case nullified by the Prerogative Court of Canterbury, a decision which may well indicate an attempt to spite his kin from beyond the grave. This was the same court which had thrown out his legal application to overturn the will of his own father.

  I remarked earlier on my frustration at having no portrait of Theodore Paleologus to offer the reader. Far more remarkable is the absence of a likeness of the second Earl of Lincoln, one of the great nobles of the realm. All we have is a kneeling ‘weeper’ flanking the tomb of the first earl, the centrepiece of the Lincoln Chapel at St George’s, Windsor, and some doubt may be cast even on this identification. For behind this tomb is a curious story.

  The alabaster effigies of the earl and his third wife and widow lie on a tomb chest with figures of mourners ranged around its sides. An eighteenth-century engraving of the tomb shows the figure of Henry as the first of three sons on the earl’s side of the tomb chest. By convention, sons are on the same side as the male, placed in order of seniority, while daughters kneel beside the female. The tomb is in excellent condition, yet for a reason unknown two of the mourning sons disappeared at some point after this engraving was made for Joseph Pote’s History and Antiquities of Windsor Castle, published in 1749. The three sons are almost indistinguishable, so a tentative identification of the survivor as Henry rests on the presumption that the all-important heir was spared when the others were removed. If this is indeed Henry, the portrayal of him as a mourner has a certain irony, given his undisguised eagerness to take his father’s place. But then we have seen how he mourned Mary Queen of Scots.62

  The lack of a portrait of Earl Henry is intriguing. Portraits of anyone but a king, queen or archbishop were uncommon at the beginning of the Tudor age, but by Henry VIII’s time the peerage and higher gentry routinely commissioned portraits – several survive of the first Earl of Lincoln, for instance, including a magnificent drawing by Holbein – and by the end of Elizabeth’s reign many a squire, alderman or merchant was leaving his likeness to posterity, whether as a portrait or effigy. Around 5,000 sculptural tombs were erected in English churches between the dissolution of the monasteries and the Civil War, and most of these remain alongside large numbers of monumental brasses. The absolute peak in production came in the last years of Elizabeth and the reign of James. By 1631, when John Weever published the first book on funeral monuments, the author complained that upstart tradesmen were building tombs as grand as those of the highest nobles.

  It is difficult to believe that a man of such high rank as Lincoln failed to have his portrait painted. To take an obvious example among his neighbours, Lord Willoughby was painted at various ages, both in armour and civilian costume, often in a fashionably melancholy pose; in one equestrian portrait an African page trots behind his lordship’s horse in what may be the earliest English painting to include a black servant. We can also see Willoughby’s life-sized effigy in Spilsby Church, the family’s ancestral burial place. Considering countless such examples I conclude that a portrait of Earl Henry certainly did exist, and can only suppose that such was the loathing he inspired even among close relations that no one cared to preserve it after his death.

  There is no record of Paleologus at Tattershall after 1616. We can take it that the third earl lost no time evicting the master of horse and his brood. The eldest boy, Theodore II as we should now call him, was only seven at the time, and we shall have no sight of him for the next fifteen years. Evidence of how Mary later moved to the West Country with Theodore will be presented in a later chapter. Meanwhile the loss of his patron the earl led Theodore himself into one of those enigmatic disappearances into the twilight zone which inspire many of the later fantasies about him.

  What became of them all in the years immediately afterwards is unknown, but it was common practice for adolescents to be placed in service for a few years, typically in a household of a higher class. So the yeoman class served the gentry and the gentry served the nobility. Where exactly the young Paleologi fitted into this is a moot point; their father could justly boast of his social connections, however, and the long association of Theodore with the Berties of Grimsthorpe suggests one possible destination when the sons reached a suitable age. One or more of them may have gained a place as a page here or in some other noble household, making himself useful while learning how the best people behaved. Certainly the Paleologus boys in adult life would have no difficulty mixing with the higher classes. But in 1616 the family was effectively out on its ear, and the children may well have found temporary asylum with their humble Balls relations. Perhaps they ended up as guests of the illegal brewer who was troubling the respectable folk of Hadleigh around this time.

  Or did Theodore have a relative then living in London? There are scattered documentary references to an Andrew Paleologus who was resident in the East End in the reign of Charles I, t
hough possibly much earlier. When he arrived and exactly what relation he was – if any – is unclear. In the Calendar of Domestic State Papers for January 1634 is an intriguing note that a ‘Grecian minister’ had come to England the previous September bringing letters from the Patriarch of Constantinople to ‘Andreas Paleologus, a Grecian’ and another document shows him still resident in 1641. Andrew lived at St Katherine Dock near the Tower of London, and in a later chapter we will find the only grandson of Theodore at addresses in neighbouring Wapping and Stepney. The Elizabethan historian John Stow called Wapping ‘a continual street, or a filthy strait passage, with alleys of small tenements or cottages, built, inhabited by sailors’ victuallers’. But any family link between Theodore and Andrew remains conjectural without new evidence.

  Though now in his mid-fifties, Theodore himself may have returned to the Continent in search of a war. Following the suppression of the Irish revolt in 1603 and the peace treaty with Spain the following year, King James strenuously avoided further armed confrontation, resisting efforts to embroil his subjects in wars in Europe. Theodore’s old stamping ground of the Netherlands offered a mercenary few prospects until the expiry of the Truce with Spain in 1621. The best opportunity may have come in 1618 when the Thirty Years War was sparked by the offer of the Bohemian crown to the Elector Palatine Frederick, husband of James’s daughter Elizabeth. Oddly enough, in the twenty-first century this romantic figure known as the Winter Queen would become a character in one of the more phantasmagorical works of fiction based on the Paleologus legend, in which she and Theodore are the ancestors of the true queen of England.

  However, the Thirty Years War may have come too late as we next have news of Theodore in 1619 when he is again in England. The plain truth is we do not know where he was for three years. Once again he has slipped away into the shadows.

  Thomas Clinton, third Earl of Lincoln, did not rule the roost at Tattershall for long, dying at the castle in January 1618. His son, the sturdily Puritan fourth earl, Theophilus, was a more formidable character, and in his time Tattershall provided America with some of its earliest settlers. His wife fitted out a ship named The Lady Arbella after their daughter, which sailed to the New World from Southampton in 1629. Among the passengers was Thomas Dudley, formerly the earl’s steward at the castle, Dudley’s daughter Anne and her husband Simon Broadstreet, another of the peer’s retainers. Broadstreet was to become the governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and overseer of Harvard College. Arbella herself married a Puritan worthy, a Rutland squire called Isaac Johnson, who migrated to America with John Winthrop, while her younger sister Lady Susan married John Humphrey, another prominent New England figure.

  An early critic of Charles I, Earl Theophilus was imprisoned in the Tower in 1626 for organising opposition to the king’s forced loan. In 1647, a year that saw him made speaker of the House of Lords, he was impeached for levying war against the king. He inherited something of the political acumen of his great-grandfather the first earl, however, and cannily lent money to the exiled Charles II. At the Restoration he was granted the privilege his grandfather had schemed for in vain, serving as carver at the coronation banquet.

  There is a different story to tell of Earl Henry’s son by his second countess. Another of the family who preferred the name Fiennes to Clinton, this son was also called Henry, and certainly took after his sire rather than his mild, self-sacrificing mother. Although hated by the earl and cheated out of his mother’s legacy, he seemed to be making up for a bad start in life when King James took a fancy to him, making him a knight and a gentleman of the Privy Council. Things went downhill from there, and he proved himself a true chip off the old block.

  Sir Henry seduced a woman of good family by a promise of marriage, claiming his existing wife Eleanor was on the point of death. Lady Fiennes declined to die, however, and the mistress was then kept for two years in a secret apartment of Henry’s London house, after which time he attempted to poison his wife. In June 1620 Lady Fiennes appeared to be dying in earnest, whereupon the mistress rushed out invitations to her wedding. When Lady Fiennes rallied once again, the mistress ran off with another man. Mad with jealousy, Sir Henry and two retainers chased after the pair armed with ‘swords, daggers, stilettos, pistols, petronels and guns’, the kind of armoury familiar to us from his father’s exploits.

  A witness who was due to give evidence against Sir Henry was murdered on the eve of the trial, apparently by ruffians hired by the knight. Even so, he appeared before Star Chamber on 19 February 1622, and was found guilty of the attempted murder of his wife, of robbery and ‘other grave charges’. He was fined £2,000 and gaoled, only to be let out at the instigation of a king with a life-long partiality for dangerous young men.

  The later story of the Clintons is an illustration of the vicissitudes which have faced noble families with striking regularity. In the eighteenth century the ninth earl of Lincoln was made duke of Newcastle, but this title became extinct in 1989 on the death of the tenth duke, a bachelor lepidopterist. However, the Lincoln earldom survived with the discovery in Australia of a direct descendant of none other than wife-poisoning Sir Henry Clinton alias Fiennes, son of our Earl Henry by his long-suffering second wife. The heir was a seventy-five-year-old retired miner and butcher, Ted Clinton, who inherited as eighteenth earl. Though disappointed to find no castles or rolling acres came with the title, the new Lord Lincoln travelled to London with his countess, a former waitress named Linda, to claim his seat in the House of Lords. ‘I thought of going into politics in Australia,’ he told a reporter, ‘but decided I was too honest.’

  Notes

  61 Chandos, John (ed.), In God’s Name: Examples of Preaching in England, 1534–1662, Hutchinson, 1971.

  62 A further mystery about the tomb is the number of sons and daughters. The first earl had four sons, not three, and four daughters, three by Bessie Blount and one by his second wife, yet there are seven female mourners on the monument. All seem to be by the same hand and of the same material, so the thought they might have been relocated from another tomb – as sometimes happened when church interiors were rearranged – can probably be dismissed. So along with the question of where the missing sons went to, and why the fourth was not represented, is another: where did the extra daughters come from? One might fleetingly suspect that the countess, whose marriage to Lincoln was childless, had enterprisingly sneaked offspring of her own onto the monument, but by her first husband Sir Anthony Browne she had only two sons, both of whom died in infancy. So we may never know who all these mourners are supposed to be or what kind of musical chairs they have been playing.

  15

  POOH-BAH:

  I accept refreshments at any hands, however lowly. I also retail state secrets at

  a very low figure.

  W.S. Gilbert, The Mikado.

  Among miscellaneous papers in the Adams archive I found a brief note that a friend of a friend had mentioned spotting an entry for the baptism of a Ferdinando Paleologus in the parish register of St Andrew’s, Plymouth. Canon Adams appears not to have followed up this lead with his usual zeal, for in his Royal Institution of Cornwall lecture he stated that no baptismal record had been discovered for Ferdinand or his sister Mary, repeating this in its later publication in the Institution’s journal. ‘The records may turn up some day but I doubt it,’ he noted. ‘I fear the entries are likely to have been among the many registers which have succumbed to neglect or the ravages of time.’ The friend’s information was good, however, and the proof was right on Adams’s doorstep. With the help of staff at the Plymouth and West Devon Record Office I had no difficulty finding the record of the youngest boy’s christening on 15 June 1619:

  Ffardinando son of Theodore Paleologus an Ittalian.

  How the entry was missed by Adams may be explained by the mistake of an early archivist who transcribed the surname as Paledayne, an error now corrected. The gratuitous information about Theodore’s nationality is unusual in register entries of
this kind and suggests he was a relative newcomer to the town; it also appears to confirm that despite a twenty-year residency in England and an Anglican marriage he never sought naturalisation. He was still the outsider, the other. At this time Theodore was nearly sixty and Mary Paleologus in her mid-forties, a notably late age for bearing children.

  The search was now on for further Paleologus records at St Andrew’s and an entry was quickly found for the burial of Theodore’s wife Mary, née Balls, on 24 November 1631. She would have been fifty-six at the time of death. These missing pieces of the jigsaw are important in narrowing down the couple’s ‘lost years’ after leaving Tattershall from twelve to three. So Theodore settled in the West Country long before 1628, the date previously fixed on by researchers as the first to show him living there. That his kin moved with him to Devon at the earlier time is shown by a legal paper which describes the eldest boy, Theodore II, as resident in the county at least as early as 1623. But this is a document to be considered later.

  Proof that Paleologus lived in Plymouth at the earlier date means he was very likely a witness to perhaps the most famous event in the town’s history. The Mayflower, crammed with 102 members of the Plymouth Company, set out on its perilous journey to the New World on Wednesday, 6 September 1620. It had been delayed in the port for over a month due to appalling weather, and it is easy to picture Theodore chatting to the party as they kicked their heels on the quayside.

  A steady trickle of non-conformists left England during James I’s reign, prominent among them the Lincolnshire pioneers. Many were inspired by the colonising exploits of Captain John Smith, but none would capture the popular imagination so much as the Pilgrim Fathers, though only a third of the ship’s passengers were actually Puritans. Blown far from the intended destination of Virginia, the Mayflower finally sighted land on 9 November. A child delivered on board to a woman called Susanna White, as the ship rode at anchor in Cape Cod Bay, is recognised as the first European to be born in New England; he was christened Peregrine. Though half the band died in the first winter, Plymouth in Massachusetts became the earliest permanent settlement in New England. However, John Smith himself castigated the Pilgrims as full of ‘pride, singularity, and contempt of authority’, though his view may have been coloured by their refusal of his offer to guide their expedition.