An Elizabethan Assassin

by John Hall

  ‘Of mankind,’ wrote Machiavelli, ‘we may say in general they are fickle, hypocritical, and greedy of gain’ and this was clearly something of a guiding principle in Theodore’s life. For we now find his name associated with Sir James Bagge of Saltram, the notoriously corrupt West Country agent of the royal favourite George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham. The connection with Bagge is revealed in a letter – the only one known in Theodore’s handwriting – sent to the duke from Plymouth on 6 March 1628, and endorsed at Dover on 19 March.

  Implausibly handsome, George Villiers had become a major player in the land since his introduction at court in 1614. A younger son from the minor gentry, he quickly displaced all other young favourites in James’s affections and shamelessly exploited the king’s infatuation. Promotion through the peerage came at an unprecedented speed: viscount in 1616 at the age of twenty-four, earl in 1617, marquis in 1618 and the dizzy height of duke in 1623. After the methodical elimination of great peers under the Tudors, Buckingham found himself the highest ranking personage in the realm outside the royal family.

  Showered with confiscated estates and lucrative posts including monopolies and customs farms, he had become England’s second richest man, endlessly interfering in politics at home and abroad. On James’s death he maintained his ascendancy over Charles I, but his arrogance, incompetence and corruption – above all, his promotion of disastrous wars against Spain and France – made Buckingham the most hated man in the kingdom. Two attempts by the House of Commons to impeach him were foiled by Charles dissolving parliament on each occasion.

  As the duke’s key agent, James Bagge had already survived numerous attempts to bring him down on charges of corruption, fraud and extortion. Foul-mouthed and haughty, yet grotesquely servile to those he courted – to Buckingham especially – here was a prospective patron for Paleologus in the mould of the Earl of Lincoln. Bagge’s most outrageous swindle had come in 1625, when Buckingham persuaded Charles to sanction an ill-fated attack on the Spanish at Cadiz. Charged with victualing the expedition and organising the press gang, the newly knighted Bagge not only embezzled the £55,000 for provisioning the fleet, cheating soldiers out of their pay, substituting rotten food which was said to have killed 4,000 of the king’s subjects, but ran up further debts in Charles’s name and plundered a friendly foreign vessel in Plymouth Sound. King Charles doggedly absolved his favourite’s agent from blame.

  In the aftermath of Cadiz, Buckingham sought to retrieve his reputation by relieving Huguenots besieged at La Rochelle, and Bagge was again directed to provision the expedition. But this action too was a humiliating failure, with half of the ill-equipped English soldiers killed; on the fleet’s return angry householders in Plymouth were forced to house the sick and unruly survivors. These two naval disasters, followed by nationwide indignation over Ship Money, a tax the king attempted to impose without the consent of parliament, were important milestones on the road to civil war.

  This was a testing time for James Bagge. He was in severe financial difficulties, not least because of his recently acquired mansion of Saltram overlooking Plymouth Harbour. In 1628, the year of Paleologus’s letter to Buckingham, he was dubbed ‘that bottomless bag’ by Archbishop Laud who with other former allies turned against him; he was also facing further accusations of extortion and embezzlement in a new parliament. Hemmed in by enemies, Bagge needed what support he could muster, and it was at this moment of crisis that Theodore appeared on the scene to offer his services to the king. Paleologus was now in his late sixties, yet one imagines he could still render practical service as a spy. Buckingham had many adversaries in Plymouth, a town with marked anti-royalist sympathies.

  Theodore was now a householder in Plymouth, for in the monthly assessments for poor relief in Old Town Ward that year Theodore Palliologus is rated at a halfpenny a week.63 Of seventy-three households in the ward, twenty-seven were assessed for higher sums – between one penny and eightpence – so Paleologus was by no means among the better off residents in the city. Though his wife Mary was presumably with him in the Old Town, not all the children were still at home. The locally born Ferdinand would have been only nine at this time and daughters Dorothy and Mary were unmarried; however, nineteen-year-old Theodore II was making his own life elsewhere and John, aged seventeen, was probably still in service.

  The Buckingham letter is the only evidence of Theodore’s history in his own words. It is also a strikingly flamboyant example of calligraphy of the time. Written in courtly French and addressed to Monseigneur, the letter followed up a meeting with Buckingham at Plymouth at which Theodore appears to have extracted a fairly firm promise of employment. He thanks the duke for the honour and courtesy shown to him and pledges he will be faithful and capable, adding: ‘I say, sir, capable, as one who has lived and shed his blood in war since his youth, at the pleasure of the late Prince of Orange, and other diverse English and French lords who have seen and known me and can bear witness.’

  The reference to French nobles is the only clue that Theodore may have fought in France as well as in the Netherlands, and this presents another opportunity for him to have served alongside Lord Willoughby. The English lords mentioned as ready to vouch for his character are very likely to have included Willoughby’s son and heir Robert, the newly created Earl of Lindsey. His name would have come up at Paleologus’s meeting with the duke, for the two had known each other since the time of the Italian’s friendship with Captain John Smith. Robert Bertie was one of Charles I’s most active supporters and indeed would be fatally wounded at the first battle of the Civil War.

  Theodore describes himself as born a gentleman of good house and in possession of accomplishments worthy of the name he bears, ‘but unlucky in the misfortune experienced by my ancestors and myself’. He writes of his desire to serve the king in his diverse endeavours and offers ‘all manner of benefits and contentment’. The letter goes on: ‘If it should please your greatness (Vostre grandeur) to employ me in the service of the King, and instruct Sir James Back’ – Theodore’s rendering of Bagge – ‘that he should be kind enough to give me, on your behalf, something to help me pass the remainder of my life, there would be no more grateful employee.’

  There is something of a shift of emphasis in the course of the letter, from the confident assertion of a promise made by the duke with tangible benefits to be delivered in exchange, to something like a plea for a pension. He signs off praying to God for the duke’s health and prosperity, ‘your very humble and very obedient servant’. (The full text in French appears at Appendix B.)

  Two of Britain’s leading authorities on early handwriting, co-authors of a standard work on the subject, scrutinised the letter at my request to evaluate Theodore’s skill as a penman and, since handwriting can offer clues to personality, perhaps cast some light on the writer himself. Each expert gave an opinion before being informed of Paleologus’s story, other than what could be gleaned from the letter, though both cautioned that with correspondence of this date there is always the possibility that a letter was written by a skilled professional scribe or secretary rather than the man himself.

  According to David Iredale, the language is formal textbook italic French of the early seventeenth century. Such a script would typically be written by a well-educated man during the period 1590–1630. It might be Paleologus’s ‘best’ handwriting, carefully crafted with painstaking attention to the rules and not necessarily indicative of character, other than showing a healthy and sensible willingness to please for the sake of obtaining a patron.

  The writing is large and smoothly composed, probably slowly. ‘Large handwriting is sometimes stated as being a sign of a big ego, a larger-than-life character who thinks a lot of himself,’ says Iredale:

  Our writer’s relaxed smooth handwriting suggests a balanced man, one who will not sacrifice quality for speed … The line of writing is more or less level, perhaps aided by pencilled lines, perhaps from much practice. Level lines denote a stable character. There
is a distinct slant to right, normal in italic writing of this date. This is usually stated by graphologists to be the characteristic of an outgoing confident man, an enthusiast, a person who gets on with other people.

  Our man has joined-up lower-case letters which can be a sign of a logical thinker. I see his letter-forms generally as bold and rounded, clearly written … these characteristics suggest a man with dreams and ambitions, though well aware of the importance of worldly possessions, a forceful man, a man capable of forming lasting friendships.

  Mr Iredale adds that the careful dotting of each i and crossing of each t suggests a tidy, organised person, a good manager, a protective leader. ‘I notice that the lower-case o is generally closed, which is a good sign, because an o open at the top implies a person who does not keep confidences. Fortunately he closes the lower-case a, so the man can be trusted.’

  My second authority, John R. Barrett, describes Theodore as a calligrapher of some note. He adds: ‘Although the script is of its time, it is a pretty modern script for the period – even allowing for the fact that continental writers were ahead of British in the use of this kind of fluent italic. The final page is a rather fine piece of calligraphic design.’

  Of special note was the large size of the paper chosen, as paper was expensive: ‘Perhaps this was a deliberate ploy to catch the duke’s eye, and to give the impression that the writer was a man of some consequence … but the large sheet may tell us something about the larger-than-life personality of Paleologus.’ Mr Barrett draws attention to the care with which the letter is set out with notably neat justification of the left-hand margin: ‘Similarly the evenness of the text-block and the large lower margin on the two principal pages suggest extreme care. It is almost a printer’s lay-out … It is tempting to regard this as indicative of a personality trait.’

  The almost universal hatred of Buckingham at this time verged on the mass hysteria which characterised contemporary witch persecutions. This was shown by the murder of the duke’s adviser, Dr John Lambe, two months after Paleologus despatched his letter. An astrologer and fortune-teller, Lambe was both feared and courted for his supposed magical powers, earning a remarkable £40 to £50 for a consultation at the time he won Buckingham’s patronage. He rapidly became ‘the Duke’s Devil’ in the popular imagination and blamed for a diabolic influence on the king. The previous year Lambe had been found guilty of raping an eleven-year-old girl and sentenced to death. Political connections allowed him out on the streets, however, and on 13 June he was surprised by a mob as he left a theatre and stoned to death. A pamphlet which immediately made the rounds ran:

  Let Charles and George do what they can

  The duke shall die like Doctor Lambe.

  On 29 July Buckingham was in the audience at the Globe Theatre for a performance of Shakespeare’s Henry VIII and reportedly left in a hurry after watching the play’s Duke of Buckingham executed. Less than a month later the duke himself was assassinated, stabbed to death by a disgruntled army officer at a public house in Portsmouth. We have no means of knowing whether James Bagge had gratified Theodore in the meantime with funds sanctioned by the duke, but it seems unlikely any arrangements were made for the regular income he craved.

  With his high hopes of the great Buckingham dashed, the Italian was immediately on the look-out for another patron. The man we once heard termed Teodoro Paleologo the Bravo and Very Magnificent Signor was on his uppers: we might now call him the Halfpenny Emperor. But as Machiavelli said, ‘One change always leaves a dovetail into which another will fit’, and his attention quickly fixed on a rich Cornish squire named Sir Nicholas Lower. Throughout his life Paleologus had always seemed to gravitate towards wicked men, but from what we can deduce of Lower’s character for once he attached himself to a good man, if a vain and gullible one. Not long afterwards he was invited to Sir Nicholas’s comfortable home at Landulph across the Tamar, and he was to stay there till the day he died.

  Note

  63 Another page of the Plymouth records shows the charge against Paleologus at one halfpenny a month but this is thought to be a clerical error.

  16

  But who knows the fate of his bones,

  or how often he is to be buried?

  Sir Thomas Browne, Hydriotaphia, or Urn Burial.

  The parish of Landulph stands on the banks of the Tamar, the river which separates Cornwall from the rest of England. Despite an entirely rural identity, it is remarkably close to teeming Plymouth on the Devonshire side. Today the village is probably smaller that it was in the seventeenth century when its principal dwelling was the manor house of Clifton. According to the county’s first historian, Richard Carew, whose Survey of Cornwall was published in 1602, Clifton was ‘a neat seat house, appertaining to one of the Arundels’. This cadet line of the famous family descended from the branch seated at Trerice near Newquay. Clifton passed into the hands of Sir Nicholas Lower in 1627, and he and his wife Dame Elizabeth immediately set about branding the parish church of St Leonard and St Dilph with the heraldic insignia of their two families, like so many stamps of ownership. Elizabeth was born a Killigrew, another name of renown in Cornwall.

  In the church windows you can still see the Lower arms in painted glass, a chevron between three white roses on a black shield, with the Lower crest of a unicorn’s head; against the west wall are ranged elaborately carved panels with twenty-eight ancestral shields of arms, originally the family box pews installed by Nicholas and Elizabeth in 1631. Indeed, this childless pair left the simple granite church with more visible reminders of their occupancy of the big house than most churches show after many generations in the same family. The couple even have two funerary monuments apiece, but more of this later.

  Interestingly to students of heraldry, the double-headed eagle appears with far greater frequency in the armoury of Cornwall than elsewhere in England, a notable instance being the arms of Killigrew. Also of note is the coincidence that the simple historic arms of the duchy are, in heraldic language, Sable bezantee – a black shield charged with discs called bezants, a name derived from the gold coinage of Byzantium. Still displayed today in the heraldic achievement of the heir to the throne as Duke of Cornwall, these arms have been associated with the county from early times. The Killigrew shield of Sir Nicholas Lower’s wife is seen in profusion inside Landulph Church and combines the double-headed eagle and a border studded with bezants, a double dose of Byzantine allusions.

  A curious coincidence must have struck Theodore when the villagers spoke of earlier incumbents of Landulph. Among recent rectors was a colourful character named William Alabaster, born in Mary Balls’s home town of Hadleigh. He had been installed at Landulph in 1596 thanks to the influence of the Earl of Essex. The Alabasters were the most influential family in Hadleigh and evidently connected with the Balls clan. Thomas Alabaster, uncle of this William, had witnessed the 1568 will of the miller Roger Ball, Mary’s grandfather.

  A cleric, mystic, intriguer, soldier, playwright and poet, William Alabaster had been speedily deprived of the £100-a-year living when he announced his conversion to Catholicism. He was also implicated in Essex’s rebellion. Clapped in Clink Prison in Southwark, he contrived an escape but on recapture was incarcerated in the Tower of London. He was pardoned on King James’s accession. An almost exact contemporary of Theodore Paleologus, Alabaster was castigated as ‘the wickedest creature on two legs’ by the English ambassador to the Netherlands when he turned up there, only to be gaoled for plotting against Prince Maurice.

  Alabaster was the nephew of John Still, Hadleigh’s most distinguished rector, the incumbent from 1571 to 1592. This means Still was in all probability the priest who christened Mary Balls. He later became master of both St John’s and Trinity colleges at Cambridge and bishop of Bath and Wells. Bishop Still made vain attempts to reclaim his nephew for the English Church but did not live to see his recantation of Catholicism in 1614. William Alabaster then preached before King James and was rewarded with a fat
living in Hertfordshire, to the horror of parishioners who accused him of frequenting a bawdy house and uttering ‘frivolous and salacious jests and ribaldries’.

  Alabaster married a wealthy widow called Kathryn Fludd, thereby becoming stepfather of the occultist and alchemist Robert Fludd who anticipated Harvey in correctly describing the circulation of the blood. According to the bloodline-of-Christ conspiracy theory expounded in The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail – the claimed inspiration of Dan Brown’s novel The Da Vinci Code – Robert Fludd was the grand master of the sinister secret order The Priory of the Sion.64

  Royalist and conservative to his core, Sir Nicholas Lower appears to have been a somewhat credulous man. There is a document of 1626 which indicates that ‘by cunning’ he was duped by a neighbour over the terms of a lease of a property. Certainly he was obsessed by heraldry and genealogy and consumed by a love for ancient and grand names. Canon Adams recorded seeing in a private collection a nine-foot-long genealogical roll compiled for Sir Nicholas by the College of Arms in 1620, and a pedigree still to be seen in the church traces the Lowers’ claimed descent from dukes of Normandy and kings of England and Scotland besides showing Arundel ancestors from the important branches of Lanherne and Tolverne. ‘Not entirely trustworthy,’ remarks Adams mildly, and goes on to spot ‘an amusing example of faking in the case of Lady Lower’s ancestors’.