by John Hall
Much has been made of the location of Theodore’s burial place in the chapel of St Andrew, off the north transept of the abbey and near the foot of the tomb of a Lady St John who died in 1615. This was Catherine, widow of John, second Baron St John of Bletso, uncle of the fifth Lord St John who was slain at Edgehill. Her alabaster effigy lies propped on its side in the so-called toothache pose, with the right hand pressed against the cheek. That Theodore’s place in the abbey was secured by the influence of the St Johns, as stated by Canon Adams and indeed repeated by the Westminster authorities, is I think open to question. Confusion may have arisen between the two Lords St John, with Theodore’s proximity to the lady buried nearly thirty years before being entirely coincidental. But whatever the reason he was buried at Westminster, we can be confident it was not to honour his imperial descent.
The simple gravestone we see in the abbey bears only the name Theodorus Palaeologus and the date 1644, but not all is as it seems. For the presence of the stone we need look back no further than 1864 when the distinguished churchman Arthur Stanley was appointed dean of Westminster.
Known to Queen Victoria as ‘the little dean’ because of his diminutive stature, Stanley was morbidly obsessed with coffins, corpses and the like. Earlier in his career he had avidly examined a supposed head of Oliver Cromwell and the bones of James III of Scotland, and the Westminster Abbey job was the answer to his dreams. Stanley’s decision to install heating in the Henry VII chapel meant the excavation of the floor, which to his delight exposed the coffin of Charles II. The dean then insisted on continuing to delve amid the abbey’s foundations, his many finds including the lead coffin of James I and a vault occupied by Henry Tudor and his queen, Elizabeth of York. He also exposed the coffin of Elizabeth I but refrained from prising open the anthropoid lead shell in which the body was encased. Appalled by Stanley’s rummaging among her ancestors, Victoria now took to calling the little dean ‘that body-snatcher’. It was Stanley who discovered Theodore’s coffin in St Andrew’s chapel and ordered the inscribed stone to mark its location. Given the dean’s incurable inquisitiveness, one must wonder whether he yielded to the same temptation as the finders of the first Theodore’s coffin.
At Westminster as at Edgehill, once again we see different strands of the Paleologus story coming together, reminding us that the world of the time was a very small one. Whether or not there was a St John connection with Theodore II’s burial place, it is certainly coincidental that he was interred only a few steps from the enormous Jacobean monument of the Earl of Lincoln’s bête noire, the first Lord Norreys of Rycote, whose recumbent effigy lies flanked by the kneeling figures of his six soldier sons in full armour. Among these is William, first husband of the unhappy countess of Lincoln and father of the Francis Norreys who denounced Theodore I as a murderer. Among other characters in this book who are buried a stone’s-throw from Theodore II are the third Earl of Essex, his last commander-in-chief, the Earl of Oxford, claimed as the real author of Shakespeare, and Sir Francis Vere, English commander at the Siege of Ostend.
Theodore II’s body was spared the fate of prominent parliamentarians buried in the abbey who bore the wrath of royalists at the Restoration, when their remains were dug up and subjected to symbolic execution and quartering as traitors, with their heads impaled on spikes at Tyburn. Charles II signed an order that the bodies of all other persons ‘unwarrantably buried’ in the abbey since 1641 should be exhumed and cast into a pit in the nearby churchyard of St Margaret’s. According to Dean Stanley’s Historical Memorials of Westminster Abbey, an exhaustive directory of burials within its precincts, only seven bodies interred during the Commonwealth were spared this ‘mean vengeance’. But whether Theodore was left in peace because he was a simple soldier or because his grave was then unmarked is uncertain.
As Theodore II was throwing in his lot with the Roundheads, his youngest brother Ferdinand backed the other side. The next surviving record of him after his baptism is at the age of nineteen, in January 1639, when his name occurs on the list of soldiers at St Michael’s Fort in Plymouth Sound. Better known today as Drake’s Island, this rocky six-acre outcrop was first fortified against the French in 1549, with barracks for 300 men being added at the end of the century. Ferdinand was not an officer like his brother Theodore but a common soldier paid £12 a year. The start of the Civil War found few Englishmen with experience of fighting, which made the seasoned veterans of European conflicts eagerly sought by both sides. But most troops – probably including most of the thirty then stationed at St Michael’s Island – were unwilling, undisciplined and ill-equipped.
At the outbreak of hostilities Cornwall sided with the king and Devon with parliament. Plymouth itself was governed by the royalist Sir Jacob Astley, Theodore II’s old commander, but King Charles blundered in summoning him to join the main army. The moment he was gone the city declared for the rebels. As the king’s forces took control of the rest of Devon in the early stages of the war, Plymouth remained the only port loyal to parliament through nearly four years of siege. The final onslaught came in January 1645 when Skellum Grenville was in command of the royal forces investing the city. Now infamous for atrocities and profiteering in his home county, Grenville launched a reckless full-scale attack by 6,000 troops but failed to break the city’s defences. When one of the royalist officers protested at the senseless loss of life, Skellum drew his sword and killed him on the spot.
Once the rebels seized control of Plymouth, St Michael’s Island became a gaol for royalist prisoners and declared traitors. What happened to Ferdinand after 1639 is unclear, and his name is not found in the army lists compiled by both sides in 1642, though in any case these are of officers only. Canon Adams concluded he had left the army and England before war broke out; alternatively, he may have been among the many royalist sympathisers who chose shipment to Barbados rather than imprisonment at home, but this option seems not to have been available until the closing stages of the conflict.
As we shall see, Ferdinand was in Barbados by 1644, which effectively disposes of the legend that he escaped to the West Indies after fighting on the royalist side at Naseby, the battle which destroyed Charles’s hopes of winning the war. Similar stories are woven around the second of the sons born at Tattershall, John Theodore. In the Adams papers from 1946 I found a copy of a letter written from Landulph Rectory to one of the rector’s regular correspondents, and in this he mentions his frustrated efforts to pin down the source of the claim that John and Ferdinand served together at Naseby in the regiment of a Major William Lower, where by one account John was slain. However, another story has him falling at the battle of Lansdown Hill in Somerset in 1643, a pyrrhic victory for the royalists in which Major Lower himself was killed. Adams reproaches himself for his carelessness in losing his original reference – ‘I am very cross with myself’ – which might have clarified a continuing link between the young Paleologi and the Lowers during the Civil War.
John Paleologus remains the most enigmatic of the three brothers. It is certain that he was not killed at Lansdown Hill because on 26 June 1644 he was in Barbados with Ferdinand, as the pair witnessed a deed together on that day. It seems highly improbable that he returned to fight at Naseby the following June when the king’s army was all but wiped out. Yet apart from witnessing the deed with his brother there is no further trace of him in the West Indies or anywhere else. Clearly we can dismiss out of hand the contention of Charles Sandoe Gilbert, author of The Historical Survey of the County of Cornwall published in 1817, that ‘it is probable that John and Ferdinando returned to their native country’, and not only because their native country was England. But we will return later to what may have befallen John in the New World.
Before following Ferdinand to Barbados, where the Paleologus saga takes more of its remarkable twists, we must complete the story of his surviving sisters, Mary and Dorothy, who both appear to have remained in the manor house at Landulph after their father’s death.
Of M
ary or Maria very little has come to light and she is now the only one of the five children surviving into adulthood whose year of birth is unknown. Canon Adams assumed she was the youngest of the Paleologus girls, though her name comes before that of Dorothy on the Landulph brass and the order in such cases usually goes with age, as it does with their three brothers. When Sir Nicholas Lower made his will in January 1654 he left Mary ten pounds ‘to be paied unto her within one quarter of a yeare after my decease’. The will refers to her as Mrs Maria Paleologus, leading some earlier historians to suppose this was Theodore’s wife, the former Mary Balls. But the prefix is a contraction of mistress which at this time was equally applied to a spinster; that this was indeed the daughter Mary is clear from the burial record.
As will be seen, she was also bequeathed twenty shillings when her brother Ferdinand died in Barbados. The fact that she received these two legacies is practically all we know of Mary Paleologus, except that she was buried at Landulph on 15 May 1674. As an unmarried woman she would have had her coffin carried to church by young women dressed in white with a garland of flowers on the lid. This custom lingered on for centuries and mouldering examples of these ‘maidens’ garlands’ can still be seen in a handful of English country churches.
The other daughter, Dorothy Paleologus, married William Arundel, son of the Alexander Arundel from whom Sir Nicholas purchased Clifton. The striking thing about this marriage, on 23 December 1656, is that Dorothy was then fifty years old. There is a minor mystery about where the couple wedded as the ceremony is recorded in the registers of both Landulph and St Mellion, the latter presumably being where William Arundel worshipped, though to add to the confusion the register entry there describes him as de St Dominick. St Mellion and St Dominic are neighbouring villages not far from Landulph. The clerk of St Mellion grandly describes the bride as Dorothea Paleologus de stirpe Imperatorum – of the imperial stock – while the Landulph register entry is balder: William arundel and darythy pallealogus were mayed the twenty 3 december. The marriage dates from the Commonwealth years, and the Revd Bezaleel Burt had been replaced in 1643 by one Edward Amerideth, the nominee of parliament. Amerideth was in turn ejected after the Restoration.
Jago Arundell claimed the couple settled soon afterwards in St Dominic parish but as he offered no evidence this may be no more than a guess based on the St Mellion entry. What undermines Jago Arundell’s statement is that he also claimed the St Dominic registers were accidentally destroyed, whereas Canon Adams quickly established they were extant. Registers for the next twenty years threw no further light on the couple’s later history, however, and Adams found no other Cornish record of any issue of the union. Given Dorothy’s age, the chances that she bore children are virtually nil, and Adams seems to suspect Jago Arundell speculated on the couple having issue to prop up his oft-quoted suggestion that ‘the imperial blood perhaps still flows in the bargemen of Cargreen’,68 the neighbouring village to Landulph. In Carew’s Survey of Cornwall, Cargreen is called ‘a fisher town’, though dismissed with laborious wit as being so poor ‘it can hardly muster a mean plight of dwellings or dwellers; so may their care be green, because their wealth is withered’. Dorothy was buried at Landulph in 1681 and her husband three years later.
This is the last time we need mention the researches of Francis Jago Arundell in this book, and is an appropriate place to complete our brief biography of the first historian of Theodore Paleologus.
Born in 1780 the only son of a surgeon of Launceston, Francis Jago was seized by a love for Cornish history in his youth, and the rectorship of Landulph saw his passion channelled into the study of Paleologus. He was elected a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries in 1811 though finally removed from the fellowship for being twenty-eight years behind with his subscription. Canon Adams was sniffy about his Georgian predecessor’s assumption of the name Arundell. He changed his name in 1815 on the basis that a Jago ancestor had married a co-heiress of the Arundells of Trevarnoe, a branch of this great family of Cornwall; that they were the former owners of Clifton and had actually married into the Paleologus line was clearly an irresistible attraction to Jago. Adams does not disguise his view that his predecessor’s claim to Arundell blood was unconvincing. But whether it was bogus or not, by assuming the renowned name the rector sprinkled himself with a little imperial stardust.
Adams also formed a low opinion of Jago Arundell’s business acumen. In his files he recorded how his predecessor had ‘built a great embankment at Landulph and thereby practically ruined himself’, doing so with the hare-brained idea of developing the village as a popular spa. At that time the river Tamar at high tide flowed up to the churchyard wall and across the road and footpath from the rectory, so that Jago Arundell sometimes had to go to church in a boat. The inspiration for the spa project came when he was told of an ancient holy well within a quarter of a mile of the church which had been described in an eighteenth-century source as ‘an excellent medicinall spring’. Water from this well was brought into church for baptisms.
Next the rector began to build a spa hotel, the unfinished edifice of which was later made into a farmhouse. It was generally presumed he had obtained a lease of the land from the Duchy of Cornwall, to which it belonged then as now. In a marginal note Adams says he was told by an old villager that Jago Arundell did not obtain a lease but ‘squatted’ on what he believed to be ownerless wasteland. The note adds: ‘The Duchy allowed him to ruin himself and then stepped in and claimed everything under their foreshore rights.’
Jago Arundell lost so much money in the failed scheme that he was forced to leave the country. In 1822 he obtained a position as chaplain to a British factory at Smyrna, and a portrait of the rector now hanging in the church seems to have been painted there. Smyrna was the perfect bolthole for a cleric of his interests. He wrote a well-received book on a pilgrimage he undertook to the Seven Churches named in the Book of Revelation and published other scholarly works on the ruins of Antioch. He also amassed a huge number of early manuscripts and other antiquities, his prized collection of ancient coins finally ending up in the British Museum.
Francis Jago Arundell was eventually able to return to Landulph, dying there in December 1846. He was buried under the church floor close to Theodore Paleologus and is commemorated by an enamel plaque of his assumed arms of Arundell, which was set up on the wall below the Paleologus brass. Despite his pioneering studies, the antiquarian rector never came close to discovering the true nature of Theodore’s early adventures, and one can only wonder what he would have made of them.
There is a terrible irony in Jago Arundell’s choice of Smyrna for his self-imposed exile. Exactly 100 years after his arrival, the city was destined to be the place where the Great Idea – the old Greek dream of driving the Turks from the Byzantine lands – would finally end in ruins.
With the Ottomans defeated in the Great War, Smyrna was awarded to Greece by the victorious Allies and the restoration of a Christian empire with its capital at Constantinople – then occupied by British troops – seemed finally within grasp. But the resurgent Turkish army’s entry into Smyrna in 1922 led to an orgy of ethnic cleansing that shocked the world. Estimates of the Greek and Armenian Christians murdered or expelled are still furiously contested by Turkey, but up to 100,000 were claimed to have been burnt alive when the Greek quarter was deliberately set ablaze. A year later the war between Greece and Turkey ended with each country casting out their minority populations of over a million Orthodox Greeks and half a million Muslims. It was the end of a romantic vision that had inspired Greek patriots since the death of Constantine XI.
Note
68 Arundell, Jago, Archaeologia article.
18
The coffin … was found to contain the perfect skeleton, which impressed all present with the idea he must have been a man of extraordinary stature, and this, as a local octogenarian observed, was known traditionally to have been the Greek prince from Cornwall.
Henry Bradfield, ‘The Last
of the Paleologi’.
Exactly when and in what circumstances Ferdinand left for Barbados is a matter for conjecture. His presence in the island is first recorded in 1644, the year his brother Theodore was buried at Westminster, but how long he had then been there we do not know. He may have been a royalist seeking refuge, or just conceivably one of the king’s soldiers transported by Cromwell as an option to imprisonment at home. But it is far more likely he was simply seeking to make his fortune with the aid of kinsfolk, the Ballses of Suffolk, who figured among the very earliest settlers in the new colony.
Ferdinand was now in his early twenties and a giant of a man like his father. He would have embarked at Plymouth or a neighbouring port, with the Lizard as his last sight of England. Stretching before him was a journey of 4,000 miles in wretchedly cramped conditions on a diet of broth, porridge, boiled biscuit and the like. Even a civilian ship would be heavily armed as an Anglo-Spanish peace treaty signed in 1630 was ignored by Spain in her ‘backyard’ of the New World, and freebooters of all nations were an ever-present danger. If the trade winds were kind the vessel could make good time and the passengers might be confined on board only five weeks or so. But low-lying Barbados was notoriously difficult for a lookout to spot, and if the island was passed the crew had great trouble beating back against the wind. One settler who arrived in Barbados in 1638 wrote a harrowing account of his crossing, with 350 passengers jammed together below decks during the cold weather and so many being sick it was almost impossible to escape infection. Eighty who died on the voyage were thrown overboard.