An Elizabethan Assassin

by John Hall

  Between them, Jago Arundell and Adams served this small parish for over seventy years, and neither passed many days without pondering on what strange circumstances brought Theodore Paleologus to live out his last years in their quiet corner of Cornwall. The curious brass at Landulph had been noted in published histories since at least the mid-1700s, but only with the advent of these two rectors does any record of serious research come down to us. Each in his time delved among old records, collected folk memories, swapped speculations with learned men, gave lectures and noted their discoveries in academic journals. Each laboured to rescue the historical Theodore Paleologus from oblivion, so each in a sense became part of his story.

  At the time I began this book, virtually everything known about Paleologus can be credited to these two men, though it is only with Canon John Adams in the 1930s that we find the first critical scrutiny of the legend. I was obliged to turn detective myself to trace Adams’s lost papers on Paleologus, which after being bequeathed to the Institution of Cornish Studies somehow ended up unrecorded in a dusty storeroom of an outlying campus of Exeter University. The trial of the brothers and nephew at Pesaro, to take one example, came to light thanks to persistent enquiries by Canon Adams more than three and a half centuries after that murderous assault was carried out.

  The target of the attack was another Greek by origin, one Leone Ramusciatti, who held the rank of colonel. So much was known to Adams, but a lengthy document of 1578 in legal Latin, only recently unearthed from the Pesaro archives, paints a picture of the Paleologi as a desperate gang who barricade themselves inside a church to avoid arrest, to the consternation of the duchy authorities: a tantalising section of the manuscript appears to refer to a successful murder being committed by the gang in addition to the attempt on Ramusciatti’s life. Written closely over eight sides of decayed parchment in a crabbed legal hand, the document sets out a judgement that the civil powers will be within their rights to snatch the malefactors from the church without formally seeking ecclesiastical permission.

  Other manuscripts show that the trial of the Paleologus brothers ended with Leonidas’s execution, though Scipione’s fate is unknown. Theodore is referred to as a minor, though clearly he was old enough to be party to the crime. At this date the age of majority varied from state to state throughout Italy and how the law stood in Urbino is unclear, but it would have been between sixteen and eighteen; the older age would place the year of Theodore’s birth as 1560.

  Escaping the death penalty because of his youth, Theodore was banished from the duchy. He was fortunate, for even at his tender age he might have been despatched to the galleys. We do not know if the reigning duke, Francisco Maria II, made any kind of intervention in view of the long service of the Paleologus family; nor indeed is it certain whether any of the assailants or the victim was a ducal retainer at this time. A melancholic figure of far less substance than his forebears, this duke had succeeded to the Urbino title only four years before. He had been raised at the court of Spain and may not have felt the same sense of obligation to old retainers as earlier generations; certainly he never achieved their eminence in Italy’s affairs. In any case, the Rovere reign in Urbino was hastening to a close. Failing to sire a male heir, permanently harassed by lack of money, Francesco Maria II was soon to bequeath his duchy to the papacy.

  So Theodore had started out in life as he would go on, for the next certain news we have of him comes nearly twenty years later when he slips into England in his professional capacity as contract killer. England is to become the nearest thing to home he will ever know. There he will meet and inspire the future colonist John Smith, and will become the henchman of perhaps the most hated aristocrat in the country. And it is in England he will marry and raise a family.

  Notes

  5 The head was enshrined in St Peter’s in Rome, where it remained until 1964, when Pope Paul VI sent it back to Patras as a gesture of goodwill to the Orthodox Church.

  6 Most present-day historians say Sphrantzes’s major chronicle was an expanded and much elaborated work, possibly outright forgery, by the sixteenth-century priest Makarios Mellisserios, ‘the Pseudo-Sphrantzes’.

  7 Emperor Justinian I had set a precedent nine centuries earlier. According to the contemporary historian Procopius, Empress Theodora was the daughter of a bear-trainer and a circus acrobat, and prior to her marriage enjoyed a long career as an actress-courtesan of unparalleled depravity.

  8 The duke’s murder has been seen as the inspiration of the play-within-a-play in Hamlet.

  3

  The same vice committed at sixteen, is not the same, though it agree in all other circumstances, at forty, but swells and doubles from the circumstance of our ages, wherein besides the constant and inexcusable habit of transgressing, the maturity of our Judgement cuts off pretence unto excuse or pardon: every sin, the oftener it is committed, the more it acquireth in the quality

  of evill.

  Sir Thomas Browne, Religio Medici.

  Nineteen years have passed and the year is 1597. As in a new shifted scene, Theodore Paleologus arrives in England. If his later claim is true, the period of exile from his homeland has seen him employed as a soldier in the Low Countries, shedding his blood in the Protestant cause alongside the great general of the day, Prince Maurice of Nassau. Yet our theme of murderous intrigue continues. He has come to London to find and kill a man.

  Theodore’s target is a compatriot, a noble citizen of the Tuscan republic of Lucca. Allesandro Antelminelli is aged twenty-five and, in his desperate efforts to evade his stalker, will soon be passing himself off under an alias and claiming to be a Florentine. One year earlier, Allesandro’s father and three brothers had been seized, tortured and put to death on a charge of treason against the state. As we have seen in the affair of Theodore’s uncles, sudden arrest and execution was no uncommon fate in the Italy of the time.

  Fortuitously absent from Lucca at the critical moment, Allesandro was now summoned home to stand trial for complicity in the crime. Aware of the certain outcome of complying he fled for his life, ending up in London. Here he assumed the identity of Ambergio Salvetti, the name by which he would be known for the rest of his life. It was in the guise of Salvetti that he attached himself to the poet-diplomat Sir Henry Wotton, best remembered today for his quip that an ambassador is an honest man sent abroad to lie for his country. At this early stage of his career Wotton was acting as a secretary-cum-secret-agent for Queen Elizabeth’s reckless favourite the Earl of Essex, and on the point of leaving England to travel the Continent. Salvetti was placing himself in dangerous fellowship, however. As we shall see, Wotton would prove perfectly amenable to betraying his Italian companion so long as the price was right.

  Now nearing his fortieth year, Paleologus is well established as an assassin. At some point during the intervening years his youthful indiscretion has been forgiven and the banishment from the duchy revoked. By one means or another he has made his peace with the ruling clique, and we know this because of an important letter addressed to Signor Teodoro Paleologo at Pesaro in 1597.

  When we hear of a contract killer today, we do not expect the term to mean that the individual engaged to carry out a murder is actually in possession of a written contract. But this was sixteenth-century Italy and what is as good as a written contract does exist. Assassination was so far interwoven in the fabric of political life that the authorities would record arrangements for murder as a routine matter of official business, and the letter sent to Pesaro was signed by the senior magistrate of Lucca, Francesco Andreotti. The noble status of Paleologus explains the grandiloquent form of address:

  Very Magnificent Signor

  I have heard with much pleasure that you keep me in your remembrance as I do you, and to show my confidence in you I take the opportunity of employing you in my affairs. By the bearer of this you will be informed what it is that I require, and I beg and request that you will place entire confidence in him. I on my part shall not be ungrateful
for besides the usual reward of your work I think of securing you a pension.

  Written in the Tuscan dialect, this document was discovered in 1881 by Heath Wilson, an English resident in Florence, during a search of the city archives. Wilson’s translation into English was among the papers collected by Henry Duncan Skrine, a wealthy Somerset squire with antiquarian tastes, and these were later published by the Historical Manuscripts Commission. The Skrine manuscript refers to the man addressed in this remarkable letter as ‘Teodoro Paleologo the Bravo’, the latter word being defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as an Italian term meaning ‘a daring villain, a hired soldier or assassin; a reckless desperado’. The bravi were indispensable retainers of an Italian potentate of the time, protecting their lord from enemies and obeying any order to intimidate, kill or maim.

  Various theories have been put forward as to why our reckless desperado came to England in the first place, and why he chose to settle here. An explanation based on my own researches follows in due course. The earliest scholarly account of Paleologus and his travels was the work of the Landulph rector of Regency times, the Revd Francis Jago – he had not yet added the Arundell to his name, for reasons to be clarified later – in a paper read to the Society of Antiquaries in 1815, the year of Waterloo. (Jago had a knack of synchronising his personal milestones with momentous battles.) His paper was published two years later in the respected journal Archaeologia.

  Ignorant of the trial at Pesaro, Jago advocates several possible grounds for Theodore leaving Italy, the first and least convincing being Pope Sixtus V’s decree of 1585 which prohibited foreigners from living in Rome. If the Paleologi still depended on papal goodwill, Jago conjectures, ‘perhaps Sixtus might enforce this decree to rid himself of a family whose high descent he possibly regarded with a jealous eye, recollecting the meanness of his own origin’ – this pope being whispered to be the son of a swineherd.

  Another possibility is that Theodore volunteered for the long war against the Turks which was waged by Emperor Rudolf II from 1593. This centred on Hungary and Transylvania, and serving in the imperial army were Englishmen who might happily befriend the Italian of exalted ancestry: Jago mentions in particular Sir Thomas Arundell of Cornwall, for it was a Thomas Arundell who then owned the manor called Clifton in the parish of Landulph, the very house where Theodore would end his days. Here is a theory which has the advantage of neatness at the expense of credibility. In any case, Jago strongly prefers the notion that it was another Cornishman who influenced Theodore into coming here. This was Sir Henry Killigrew, Queen Elizabeth’s ambassador to the Venetians and Genoese, whose daughter was married to the owner of this same manor house at the time of Theodore’s arrival in Cornwall. This is not at all a bad idea, though one might add an overlooked West Country candidate in Sir Arthur Gorges, poet, scholar and soldier, who spent his youth on the Devon side of the Tamar, a stone’s throw from Landulph. Gorges will figure in a later chapter of Theodore’s story.

  One contemporary of Jago’s, the Scottish writer John Galt, suggested that it was actually Theodore’s father Camilio who made the break with Italy, being forced to flee with his son after making himself obnoxious to the pope because of his adherence to Greek Orthodoxy. This notion, at variance with all we know of the religious scruples of the Paleologi, was to be put out of court by later discoveries.

  Others took up Jago’s idea that Theodore was either a pitiable victim of persecution by the pope, or else was enticed to England by a comrade-in-arms in the continental wars. The historians of Cornwall, Daniel and Samuel Lysons, assured their readers that ‘the descendant of Prince Thomas who lies buried in Landulph sought asylum in consequence of the hostility shewn towards the Greeks by Pope Paul V and his successor Gregory XV’9, while the theory preferred by Thomas Maule, in the Cornish section of The English Counties Delineated published in 1838, took up the idea that Paleologus ‘came to England with Sir Thomas Arundell, after the battles in Hungary, and was induced to prefer Landulph for his residence, as from its vicinity to the sea, and the warmth of climate, it more nearly resembled Pesaro than any other place in the kingdom’.

  Not until the 1930s would Jago’s successor at Landulph realise that it was the killing ways of Theodore which first brought him to England. Canon Adams had the simple idea of asking an Italian-speaking lady parishioner to write to the librarian of Pesaro, and the librarian’s response to his queries filled in several missing pieces of the Paleologus puzzle and pointed in the direction of the Skrine Archive. This enabled Adams to patch together that murky episode in Theodore’s life, the Salvetti affair.

  The Lucca authorities had first commissioned another assassin to track down their fugitive. This was a man by the name of Marcantonio Franceotti, who having taken an oath to kill Salvetti was paid 200 lire on account. Franceotti appears to have kept close on the trail for some considerable time, but with a cunning born of desperation Salvetti contrived to stay always one step ahead. And once Franceotti had used up his advance expenses, he seems to have despaired of running the quarry to ground. Reporting back to Lucca that the job required a more seasoned practitioner in the art of murder, his recommendation fell on Theodore Paleologus. The tone of the magistrate’s letter to Paleologus indicates that Lucca was well aware of his reputation, and the dangled prospect of a pension strongly suggests the city had made use of his talents on at least one previous occasion. Franceotti was evidently ‘the bearer of this’: who better to brief Paleologus on the target?10

  To anticipate our story, Paleologus’s attempts to liquidate Salvetti would also eventually end in failure, though the fugitive would then face a new threat to life or liberty from his supposed friend and protector, Sir Henry Wotton. As it turned out, the hunted man was to beat all the odds by outliving every other actor in his drama, Theodore Paleologus included, despite the Lucca authorities persisting in their efforts to eliminate him until at least 1627. This was thirty years after the contract with Paleologus, whose inability to honour the bargain must have been a keen disappointment – not least because of the longed-for pension over and above the ‘usual rewards’ of his work. Chronic lack of funds was a common occupational hazard for spies and assassins of the time, and everything we shall learn of Paleologus says he was no exception.

  So an unmistakeable pattern emerges. Our first documentary proof of Theodore’s existence discloses his role in an attempted murder; this second document is a commission to commit murder; a third we shall consider shortly is a letter which tells of ‘divers murders’ committed by Paleologus, and of fears he is about to murder an English countess. Theodore in his prime must have been a pretty scary character. Yet tellingly, evidence of his crimes is always hearsay or circumstantial. Paleologus is never to be caught red-handed.

  So what of Henry Wotton’s later role in the protracted Salvetti affair? Fear of being implicated in the botched Essex revolt kept him out of England for the rest of Elizabeth’s reign – his fellow-secretary Henry Cuffe was hanged, drawn and quartered at Tyburn – but in 1602 a golden opportunity arose to ingratiate himself with the queen’s likely successor, James of Scotland. Wotton happened to be living in Florence when the reigning Medici grand duke of Tuscany, Ferdinand, got wind of a plot to murder King James. The resident Englishman was entrusted with a letter of warning and a casket of Italian antidotes against various poisons. A perfect command of the Tuscan language enabled Wotton to make his way to Edinburgh in the guise of an Italian. Gratefully welcomed by the Scottish king, who kept his true identity a secret from the court, he was rewarded with a knighthood on James’s accession the following year.

  By 1607 Sir Henry was English ambassador at Venice when he became personally involved in Lucca’s efforts to do away with Salvetti. James had by this time fallen out with Grand Duke Ferdinand, who was sheltering an English refugee called George Elliot, a declared traitor. Exchanging letters in cipher, Wotton and the Lucca magistrates wove a plot to have Elliot abducted and traded for Salvetti, then living fearfull
y in London. Once again the wily Italian evaded capture, however, and thereby deprived Wotton of a promised bounty of 2,000 ducats. He was to die peacefully in bed aged eighty-five.11

  But to return to Paleologus. At the time he was shadowing Salvetti, was he already a widower with a child, as recorded by several Victorian historians and accepted well into the twentieth century? According to a version of his story long given credence, Theodore was married on 6 July 1593, on the island of Chios. His bride was a noble lady of eighteen called Eudoxia Comnena, the daughter of Alexius Comnenus and his wife Helen Cantacuzene. Both surnames are of imperial dynasties of Byzantium. By this account, Eudoxia died in childbirth on 6 July 1596 – three years to the day after her wedding – leaving a daughter Theodora, and in 1614 this Theodora was married in Naples to ‘Prince Demetrius Rhodocanakis’.

  The trouble is the story is a complete fiction. It was concocted as late as the 1860s by a rich London-based Greek merchant, also named Demetrius Rhodocanakis, who claimed descent from the supposed princely bridegroom. Obsessed with proving his Paleologus blood, Rhodocanakis bribed an Italian genealogist to compile a false pedigree which was then backed up by assorted ancient-looking documents, the handiwork of a skilful Greek forger, and various references to non-existent antiquarian books. The pedigree was convincing enough to take in the likes of the Papal Court and the British Foreign Office, a success which emboldened the merchant to start signing himself ‘His Highness’. By his reckoning, Theodora’s marriage to his namesake conferred the imperial rights to him, ‘there existing no legitimate male descendant of the emperors’.12