by John Hall
In memoriam
John Herbert Adams
Author’s note
Except when quoting directly from a source, I have used the spelling Paleologus rather than one of its many variants as this is how it appears on my subject’s memorial. However, I call him Theodore rather than Theodoro because the longer he lived in England, the more frequently this spelling appeared in official records. Similarly, I call his youngest son Ferdinand instead of Ferdinando.
I have kept to the original spelling and punctuation of quoted documents where this gives a flavour of the period without the risk of tiring or puzzling the reader with chunks of archaic language, otherwise I have opted for a modernised form of words.
For the crucial period covered in these pages England lagged behind Europe by observing the Julian calendar rather than the Gregorian, so the English year ran from 25 March instead of 1 January. A document of the affected months would be dated, for example, February 1689/90. Except when quoting directly from such a document, I have adjusted dates to the modern style, in this case February 1690.
Acknowledgements
I am most grateful to the Society of Authors and the Authors’ Foundation for the generous award of the Elizabeth Longford grant which made possible research in Italy and Barbados. A grant from the Cornwall-based ‘Q’ Committee, trustees of the Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch Memorial Fund, helped to fund further researches in England. I must also thank Piers Brendon for his encouragement when few seemed to see the point of a biography of an obscure figure like Paleologus.
Among many distinguished academics who were generous with their time and advice I should mention especially Judith Herrin, Professor of Late Antique and Byzantine Studies at Kings College, London; Robin Law, Professor of African History, University of Stirling; and Professor Jane Stevenson, who combines her educational role at the University of Aberdeen with a successful career as a historical novelist and who kindly tracked down the source of the statement that Ferdinand Paleologus was the inspiration of Magic Realism. Christopher Rowe was an insightful reader of an early draft of sections of this book, and he and Nigel Coulton assisted with the translation of difficult passages of early legal Latin. Two of the country’s leading authorities on early handwriting, Dr David Iredale and John Barrett, most generously analysed the handwriting of Theodore Paleologus, and Chris Scott was similarly unstinting in examining the likely circumstances of the death of Theodore II. These and others with specialised knowledge, sometimes of extremely obscure subjects, were unfailingly helpful.
I thank His Eminence Archbishop Gregorios, Father Gregory-Palamas Carpenter, and the Revd Philip Lamb for their patient assistance with many queries. I thank a luminary of the Church Monuments Society, Dr Julian Litten, for his unrivalled knowledge of seventeenth-century burial customs – it has rightly been said he is the best man in England to take you down into a vault – and I am grateful for his informative comments. Andrew Barrett, historian of Landulph, was a fount of knowledge on the church and parish. The Alabaster Society proved a mine of information on the town of Hadleigh and the Balls family, and I offer special thanks to Laraine Hake and Dr Tony Springall for their generous assistance in searching town records for evidence of the Balls family. John Carras of the Anglo-Hellenic League was most helpful in researching records in Greece.
In Barbados, the collections of the Shilstone Memorial Library proved crucial to my research and I was fortunate to have the assistance of Joan Brathwaite, archivist, and Miguel Pena, the museum’s researcher. At St John’s Church, Angelina Lovell-Johnson was a helpful guide. To Paul Foster, historian of Barbados, serendipitously encountered at the graveside of Ferdinand Paleologus, I am greatly indebted for sharing his encyclopaedic knowledge of the island past and present.
In Italy, the archives of the Oliveriani Library in Pesaro were of central importance and I thank Dr Marcello Di Bella, library director, and his staff, especially Maria Grazia Alberini, for their assistance in identifying documents relating to the Paleologi. Monica Russo was my admirable translator of Italian.
In the United States, I sincerely thank Mr Victor Paleologus for his rewarding and illuminating correspondence composed under the most trying personal circumstances. I always opened his meticulously handwritten letters with keen anticipation. Thanks are also due to Chief Stubbs and Lieutenant Salerno of the Santa Monica Police Department and to Jean Guccione of the Los Angeles District Attorney’s Office.
My thanks also to Dr Christine Faunch, head of Heritage Collections at Exeter University; Angela Broome, librarian archivist at the Courtney Library, Royal Institution of Cornwall; Claire Larkin of the Alumni Office, Oxford University; Steve Edwards of the Foundation for Medieval Genealogy; Sue Kauffman of the Liverpool Record Office; Christine Reynolds, assistant keeper of muniments at Westminster Abbey Library; Enid Davies, assistant archivist at St George’s Chapel, Windsor Castle; Alan Barclay of the Plymouth and West Devon Record Office; Jon Culverhouse, curator of the Burghley House collections; Ray Biggs of the Grimsthorpe and Drummond Castle Trust; Rachel Lacy, editor of Orders of the Daye, the journal of the Society of the Sealed Knot; Mrs Dymoke of Scrivelsby; the Revd Gordon Plumb; Mr Colin Squires of Saltash Heritage.
I am indebted to Dr Garry Tregidga, senior lecturer at Exeter University and assistant director of the Institute of Cornish Studies, and Sarah Jayne of Academic Services, University of Exeter: to Sarah I owe a special word of thanks for unearthing the long-mislaid collection of Canon Adams’s manuscripts and letters from a mass of uncatalogued material at the University’s Tremough campus. That inspired search saved months of labour.
Kind assistance was provided on many occasions by staff at the British Library (in particular the manuscript reference team), National Archives at Kew, Lincolnshire Archives, Lincolnshire County Libraries, Courtney Library in Truro and the Public Library and Morrab Library in Penzance.
At The History Press, my thanks to Mark Beynon and Naomi Reynolds.
To my wife Lilian, thanks and much love.
Finally I formally acknowledge my debt to the late Canon John Herbert Adams. The results of his investigations provided the early framework for this book and will remain the starting point for any future biographer of the English Paleologi. That indispensable body of knowledge was itself based on pioneering research by his distant predecessor as incumbent at Landulph, the Revd Francis Jago Arundell, who began his enquiries into the mysterious Paleologus before even the penny post was at his disposal. It is humbling to reflect how few are my own discoveries despite such present-day advantages as the infinite archives of the internet and cheap jet travel.
I must, of course, add that responsibility for any errors, mistaken conclusions, misreading of ancient documents and wild surmises is entirely my own.
Contents
Title
Dedication
Author’s Note
Acknowledgements
Prologue
An Elizabethan Assassin
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Epilogue
Appendix A
Appendix B
Appendix C
Bibliography
Picture Credits
Plates
Copyright
/> I hear new news every day, and these ordinary rumours of war, plagues, fires, inundations, thefts, murders, massacres, meteors, comets, spectrums, prodigies, apparitions, of towns taken, cities besieged, in France, Germany, Turkey, Persia, Poland, etc., daily musters and preparations and suchlike, which these tempestuous times afford, battles fought, so many men slain, monomachies, shipwrecks, piracies, and sea-fights, peace, leagues, stratagems, and fresh alarms … Now come tidings of weddings, maskings, mummeries, entertainments, jubilees, embassies, tilts and tournaments, trophies, triumphs, revels, sports, plays: then again, as in a new shifted scene, treasons, cheating tricks, robberies, enormous villainies in all kinds, funerals, burials, deaths of Princes, new discoveries, expeditions; now comical, then tragical matters.
Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, 1621.
Claimed Descent of the English Paleologi
Prologue
Mighty, indeed, were these Paleologi: mighty in power, dignity, and renown; yet within less than two centuries from the heroic death of the Emperor Constantine, their direct descendant, Theodoro Paleologus, was resident, unnoticed and altogether undistinguished, in a remote parish on the Tamar.
Sir Bernard Burke, Vicissitudes of Families.
Remember that what you are told is really threefold: shaped by the teller, reshaped by the listener, concealed from both by the dead man of the tale.
Vladimir Nabokov, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight.
It has become commonplace to describe any new study of a historical character as a detective story. This investigation of Theodore Paleologus is the first biography of an exotic yet elusive figure who surfaced in mysterious circumstances in Elizabethan England. It is certainly a detective story of sorts, and one that brims with murders, treasons, revels, battles, sieges, tournaments, forgeries, piracies, cheating tricks, burials and much more that we find listed among the Anatomist of Melancholy’s ‘enormous villainies in all kinds’. But proof positive of the crimes of Theodore Paleologus is now beyond mortal grasp and we might as easily call his life a legend, morality tale or horror story.
Let us start with the legend.
At the fall of Constantinople on Tuesday, 29 May 1453, an event which burst like a thunderclap over the Christian world, the last emperor of Byzantium died valiantly sword in hand, defending his capital against the Muslim invader. Constantine XI, of the ancient family of Paleologus, left no direct heir, and his only brother to reach safety in the west was Thomas, known by his resounding Byzantine title of Thomas the Despot. Recognised by the pope as emperor-in-exile, Thomas died in Rome twelve years later, and of his sons – there were two, three or four of them, depending on which authority you believe – only the youngest, John, left heirs male. The single family of the bloodline to survive into the next century made their home in the Adriatic port of Pesaro, but during the 1570s they were embroiled in a disastrous vendetta. The sole survivor was the subject of this history, the then teenaged Theodore Paleologus, last of the legitimate imperial blood.
Banished from Pesaro, Theodore wandered round Europe and after a spell as a soldier of fortune ended up in England. Here he married a gentlewoman who bore him sons, three surviving into adulthood. A revered, white-bearded figure in old age, Theodore Paleologus died in 1636 at a manor house in Cornwall leaving his illustrious pedigree recorded on a small memorial brass in the parish church. The bloodline of Paleologus must have seemed secure, so far as those tempestuous times allowed. But all three sons fought in the English Civil War, one dying in the king’s cause and one in Cromwell’s. The surviving brother fled to the new colony of Barbados, married there and left a son, another Theodore, who returned to England and became a sailor. This Theodore, the third generation to marry an Englishwoman, died in 1693. His only child was a posthumous daughter who died in infancy, the last representative of the imperial line.
There is a poignant postscript to this tale. Over a century later, during the Greek War of Independence, the provisional government in Athens sought vainly in Cornwall and Barbados for a descendant of Theodore who would accept the crown of Greece and chase the infidel from Constantinople.
Thus far the legend, yet it is also essentially a factual account of the English dynasty of Paleologus which was accepted by respected historians until recent times. As late as 1940 Sir Stanley Casson wrote of Theodore as ‘the last recorded heir to the throne of Byzantium’, and similar assertions are scattered through scholarly works dating back two centuries and more.1 Disobligingly, historians of the present day tend to dismiss Theodore’s claim out of hand, though so far as I am aware without benefit of original research. Chief of the iconoclasts is Sir Steven Runciman, in whose famous book on the fall of Constantinople a single reference to the English family occurs in a footnote: ‘The pathetic double eagles carved (sic) on the tomb of Theodore Palaeologus in the church of Landulph in Cornwall have, regrettably, no business to be there.’ The clinching evidence for the modernists is that no son of Thomas the Despot called John is mentioned by the contemporary chronicler George Sphrantzes, a survivor of the Ottoman conquest. Alone among recent writers, the philhellene and arch-romantic Sir Patrick Leigh Fermor sounds a sympathetic note. Although admitting a ‘shadowy’ quality about the youngest son of Thomas, he says that if the authenticity of John is accepted, there are no grounds for doubting our Theodore’s ancestry: ‘Among his compatriots and contemporaries, at any rate, his Imperial descent was never questioned.’ It is an argument that leaves the sceptics unmoved.
The Landulph monument has excited much curiosity over the years. The bold statement that ‘Here lyeth the bodye of Theodoro Paleologus of Pesaro in Italye descended from ye Imperyall lyne of ye last Christian Emperors of Greece’ comes as an unexpected, not to say stirring, sight in a lonely Anglican church. And while no life of Theodore has been published before, his legend has inspired a remarkable number of works of fiction from the early nineteenth century to the present day. The Edwardian author Sir Arthur Quiller Couch penned a novel based on a local tradition that Theodore sired a race of dashing Cornish squires; he also wrote a weird novella with a plot revolving around Theodore’s progeny, occult secrets and rebirth over many centuries. Thomas Hardy visited Landulph Church in the 1880s and carefully copied the tomb inscription into the notebook in which he jotted ideas for novels, stumbling on the germ of the plot for Tess of the D’Urbervilles. Several romantic novels and a murder thriller have appeared in recent times in which Theodore features either as a protagonist or the ancestor of the principal character. I have also traced a lengthy Regency ballad and a First World War play about him. A complex mythology continues to evolve and the Paleologus story has even been identified as the source of the Magic Realism genre in modern literature.
These are some of the many afterlives of Theodore Paleologus, a chain of ever more fantastic reincarnations. Like Dr Who, the same man can be endlessly rearranged in time and space. To a novelist or poet, he can be a once and future king, a swashbuckling adventurer, a demon lover, a son of prophesy awaiting the appointed hour, or a kind of Wandering Jew or Flying Dutchman figure; in one recent book he is revealed as the ancestor of the rightful, black-skinned queen of England. His spirit strays deep into Da Vinci Code territory, wafting in and out of the Priory of Sion and the Rosslyn Chapel, whispering of global conspiracies, hermetic numbers, the bloodline of Christ and the End of Days. He is a kind of all-purpose deus ex machina.
My initial aim in writing this book was to separate fact from fiction. Was the man buried in that quiet spot in Cornwall a genuine heir to the Byzantine emperors or an imposter? As my researches progressed, I grasped that much which seemed fanciful in the legend is firmly rooted in fact. Searches in Italian archives, following the discovery of a long-lost box of Paleologus papers in an English university storeroom, were added excitements to my quest. So far as his imperial lineage goes, a fair body of documentary evidence can now be presented which should help decide the issue in the reader’s mind. Yet the more I unearthed of my
subject’s story, the more beguiling his personality appeared and the wider the focus of my investigation. For if the man was an imposter, fraud would be among the lesser offences on the charge sheet against him.
Briefly stated, the Theodore Paleologus I shall portray here is a multiple murderer, mercenary, apostate, seducer and spy – a real-life figure with all the sinister glamour of the fictional characters inspired by his legend. Yet the defence may easily present him in a sympathetic light, stressing his roles as paterfamilias, asylum-seeker, freedom-fighter, expert linguist, acclaimed horseman and classical scholar.
His years in England bridge the late glories of the Elizabethan age and the chronically unsettled times before the Civil War, and among the dramatis personae flitting in and out of his story are some of the most dazzling characters of the times, from Sir Philip Sidney to the Duke of Buckingham, from the poet-diplomat Sir Henry Wotton to Prince Maurice of Nassau. We meet two ill-starred Earls of Essex and assorted Bacons and Cecils; we see Theodore reading Machiavelli with the colonist Captain John Smith; we picture him in the company of the historical Tom Thumb and the leading candidate as Shakespeare’s Dark Lady.
But all his life he felt a magnetic pull towards very bad men, for time and again we find him intimately involved with some of the most notorious, vicious and corrupt figures of the age. And as he disappears from sight on frequent occasions, almost certainly under an alias, it seems perfectly possible that Theodore is also known to history with a completely different identity, with deeds known only to the Recording Angel. As it is, this story must be an epic assembled from scraps.
What we can trace of his wanderings show him as a restless soul. Following the banishment from Pesaro, we have fleeting glimpses of him pursuing a double career throughout Europe as soldier of fortune and contract killer. There is a claimed appearance on the Aegean island of Chios, where he may or may not have married another woman before taking his English wife. Once he emerges in England, he ranges north, east, south and west – popping up in Yorkshire, Lincolnshire, London, Devon and finally Cornwall – though with frequent absences supposedly spent fighting for the Protestant cause in the Low Countries. In between are blank periods when we simply do not know his whereabouts. Now you see him, now you don’t, and all that lingers is a faint whiff of sulphur. Yet even his Cornish burial, in the honoured place next to the altar, is not our final sighting, for there is the macabre touch of the opening of his coffin a century and a half after his death, revealing the body in a perfect state of preservation.
