by John Hall
Rhodocanakis sought to beef up his connection with the Paleologi by laying claim to a more plausible ancestor, this time a real historical character. This was Dr Constantine Rhodocanakis, an eminent physician – otherwise, a brazen quack – who became a personal friend of Charles II during his exile in Holland. Accompanying Charles to England at the Restoration, he published a number of medical books, among them a collection of remedies of his own invention based on antimony, which were dutifully swallowed by the king and his brother the Duke of York. The doctor was pleased to publish a testimonial from the Civil War hero Prince Rupert: ‘I have found the Spirit of Salt prepared by Dr Constantine Rhodokanaces very good for the stomach, and it maketh sauces to have a very excellent taste.’13 The remedy also warded off the plague, acted as an antidote to assorted poisons and cured dropsy, scurvy, ague, cancer, wind and stone, spleen, jaundice, falling sickness and worms. According to the fake pedigree, the inventor of this marvellous medicine was the grandson of Theodore Paleologus.
The impostor finally overreached himself by penning a biography of his invented ancestral namesake. Published in Athens in 1872, its frontispiece was captioned as a portrait of the physician by Sir Peter Lely, but this was later exposed as a doctored photograph of the merchant himself in fancy costume.
Prior to the discovery of Rhodocanakis’s forgeries, the Chios marriage was duly given its place in Theodore’s story by a number of historians such as WH Hamilton Rogers, who included it in his chronicle of the West Country in medieval and Tudor times. For decades scholars accepted the 1593 wedding without investigation. In his early days as rector, Canon Adams himself was taken in, dutifully relating the story in a guidebook to Landulph Church published in the 1930s.
Rhodocanakis had been unmasked by a German researcher in 1908, though it appears to have taken many years for the news to reach England and historians continued to report the Chios marriage as fact. The scam has since figured in several books on remarkable fakes and fakers. But a by-product of this affair was to taint the name Theodore Paleologus with the whiff of fraud. There is irony here since the false pedigree ignored the well-documented English family of Paleologus sired by Theodore, which Rhodocanakis claimed was the result of a bigamous marriage: indeed, to acknowledge a legitimate Cornish line would fatally undermine the Greek merchant’s pretence to the imperial honours. However, the Rhodocanakis red herring succeeded in muddying the waters, and no doubt contaminated Theodore in the minds of later scholars. Yet this is one crime of imposture of which our man must be immediately acquitted.
Even Theodore’s real marriage in England is the subject of confusion. Early accounts wrongly state that this took place at Hadleigh in Suffolk, the birthplace of his bride Mary Balls, on 27 May 1617. The blame here rests with yet another clerical antiquary, the Revd Philip Parsons – the first I know of to make a study of Theodore Paleologus – who mistakenly believed he had stumbled on evidence of a cover-up of the ceremony. In a book on church relics published in 1794, Parsons speculated that an erased entry in the Hadleigh register for 1617 arose from ‘resentment, or the desire of concealment’ of the match by Mary’s family, then in ignorance of Theodore’s starry lineage. The line was taken up by Jago Arundell and reproduced in the Archaeologia article. Among others to repeat this misinformation was the distinguished biblical scholar George Tregelles, one of the authors of the Victoria County History volume on Cornwall.
When Adams had the Hadleigh registers checked, no obliterated entry could be found for the year 1617. He noted that a single mutilated line discovered in the search was for 1591, when Mary could have been no more than fifteen years old, but neither day nor month matched the date given in Parsons’s book. Adams charitably attributed the error to ‘muddle’ caused by an inability to read old writing or an over-active imagination. But yet another layer of cloud was added to the Paleologus story.
As we shall see, the marriage to Mary Balls actually took place at Cottingham in East Yorkshire on May Day, 1600, and the bride was no Byzantine lady of imperial extraction but a young Englishwoman of humble, if not lowly, background, who was heavily pregnant on the day of the wedding. The later months of 1599 and the millennial year were a pivotal time for Theodore Paleologus, and by good fortune this period is the best documented of his life. But before examining his courtship of Mary, and what fraught circumstances surrounded their nuptials, we need to ask why this hardened mercenary and assassin suddenly decided his fortune lay in an altogether new occupation, in an isolated corner of another country, and in the household of a deranged nobleman.
Notes
9 Magna Britannia: Cornwall, Cadell and Davies, London, 1814.
10 Intriguingly, in 1568 Queen Elizabeth’s great spymaster, Sir Francis Walsingham, regularly employed a Protestant ex-soldier from Lucca, one ‘Tommaso Franchiotto’ alias ‘Captain Francois’, as a double agent. Franchiotto, while simultaneously in the pay of the French crown, alerted his English patron to an alarming plot hatched in France – then at war with England – to poison the queen. The name, city of origin and occupation may all be coincidental but the failed assassin Franceotti could well have been a relation of Walsingham’s spy.
11 Lucca’s later efforts to eliminate Salvetti included a 1620 plot which failed, as reported by the would-be assassin, because ‘every citizen is a policeman’ in London.
12 Kurz, Otto, Fakes, Yale University Press, 1948.
13 Rhodocanakis, Konstantinos, A Discourse in the praise of Antimonie and Alexicacus Spirit of Salt of the World, both published in London, 1664.
4
Oppression, fraud, cozening, usury, knavery, bawdry, murder, and tyranny, are the beginning of many ancient families: one hath been a bloodsucker, a parricide, the death of many a silly soul in some unjust quarrels, seditions, made many an orphan and poor widow, and for that he is made a lord or an earl … Another hath been a bawd, a pander to some great men, a parasite, a slave, prostituted himself, his wife, daughter, to some lascivious prince, and for that he is exalted. Now may it please your good worship, your lordship, who was the first founder of your family?
Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy.
Theodore’s new employer was Henry Clinton alias Fiennes, second Earl of Lincoln, whose principal seat in Lincolnshire would be home to the Italian for many years to come. The great tower of Tattershall Castle, brooding over the flat windswept landscape of the fens, remains an outstanding landmark in this part of England, denounced by Henry VIII as ‘one of the most brutal and beastly of the whole realm’.14 Dominating a town that had suffered a drastic depopulation shortly before Theodore’s arrival – Tattershall was now scarcely more than a village – the draughty medieval castle must have seemed a far cry from sunlit memories of Urbino or golden dreams of Constantinople.
In Lord Lincoln, a man at this time approaching sixty years of age, one seeks in vain for any trace of a redeeming feature. He confronts us as a figure of almost heroic iniquity. Here was a throwback to the over-mighty barons of feudal times whom the Tudors are commonly credited with having tamed. No one informed Earl Henry of this, however, and his vendettas had first attracted the censure of Elizabeth’s Privy Council some twenty years before Paleologus appeared on the scene. An unknown number of men were killed and maimed on both sides in the peer’s private wars against his neighbours. In a typical case among the countless ‘horrible outrages’ reported to the Privy Council, sixty of Lincoln’s retainers from the castle descended ‘most riotously’ on the house of a close relation of his, Sir Edward Dymoke, armed with guns, crossbows, longbows and cudgels. Another relation subjected to violent attacks was Robert Savile, who complained that Lincoln forced his way into his parlour where ‘after great threatening wordes’ he struck down Savile’s son with a cudgel. The property was then invaded by threescore of Lincoln’s men armed with ‘gunnes crosbowes long bowes and such like’.15
A torrent of pantomime villainies followed. Besides frequent pitched battles, we find that riots, arson, ab
duction, sabotage, extortion, perjury and the suborning of juries are regular features of the story. At Tattershall the earl annexed part of the churchyard to extend the castle moat, ‘so that divers people were digged up, some green and lately buried, and thrown into the moat to fill up’.16
Despised by his fellow peers, feared and loathed by the local gentry, a notorious swindler of his tenants and servants, above all a monstrous tyrant to his own wife and children, the earl combined a soaring arrogance towards the common run of humankind with a grovelling sycophancy towards the handful who wielded power at court. Above all he sucked up to the Cecil family headed by Lord Burghley, the queen’s chief minister. Despite every opportunity conferred by rank and wealth, Lincoln utterly failed to make a mark in public life beyond exciting universal contempt for his ungovernable temper, spite, avarice, miserliness, profound lack of tact and judgement and grotesque self-pity. Alarming signs of madness had been noted from his youth and succession to the title fifteen years before tore away the last checks on a cruel and sadistic nature. This he habitually indulged by violent assaults on all who crossed him, and by slandering them as traitors, thieves, cowards and papists.
As his long-suffering son-in-law, Sir Arthur Gorges, declared to Sir Robert Cecil: ‘His wickedness, misery, craft, repugnance to all humanity, and perfidious mind is not amongst the heathens to be matched. God bless me from him.’17
The earl’s forebears had not always been great men. The founder of the family fortunes was one of the ‘men of ignoble stock lifted up from the dust’ as a contemporary chronicler branded the unpopular tax-gatherers of Henry I, but by the sixteenth century the Clintons could hardly be called parvenus. Though the earldom had been created as recently as 1572, Paleologus’s patron was also the tenth Baron Clinton. So the Clintons had been country lords for as long as Theodore’s ancestors had been emperors.
Edward Clinton, the first earl, was the ne plus ultra of Tudor toadies, performing the remarkable feat of finding favour with every monarch from Henry VIII to Elizabeth. Then known as Lord Clinton, he secured his place in Henry’s good books by marrying Bessie Blount, the king’s discarded mistress. The second earl was not the son of Bessie, however, but of the second of his father’s three wives. As a favourite of the king Edward Clinton profited hugely from the dissolution of the monasteries with the grant of two monastic properties in Lincolnshire and a third in Kent, along with numerous manors and other land holdings; he benefited also from the confiscated estates of less canny nobles who fell foul of the unpredictable Henry.
In earlier years the first earl had secured his heir important posts such as vice-admiral of Lincolnshire. In 1559 he briefly represented the Cornish pocket borough of Launceston and in 1571 secured a Lincolnshire seat. But in parliament as elsewhere he miserably failed to distinguish himself. The single record of his attendance in the House of Commons is predictably self-centred, to press a claim of privilege of rank following the arrest of one of his henchmen. The grander court appointments dried up as his mental instability became clear, though he managed to cling to his post as one of the county’s commissioners of sewers. Even in this innocuous-sounding role he aroused deep resentment, sparking complaints to the Privy Council for gross overcharging for repairs to the drainage system and other deceptions.
In 1585, shortly before succeeding to his father’s title, he had turned on his stepmother, the third wife of the first earl, accusing her of poisoning the queen’s mind against him. In a hysterical letter to Burghley, he claimed his own wife was in league with the countess ‘to blow innumerable slaunders into her hyghnes eares’.18 This wife, Catherine Hastings, was not long for this world. The date and cause of Catherine’s death remain obscure but only one year later the new peer was already terrorising his unfortunate wife number two. But he was a belted earl, and in Elizabethan England an earl got away with almost anything.
In all, the Privy Council would be inundated with complaints by or against Lord Lincoln for well over thirty years, and law suits without number bore his name as either plaintiff or defendant. In many of these actions he called himself Henry Fiennes instead of Clinton, in pursuit of a claim to a title belonging to that name, even though a Clinton forebear had renounced all rights to the Fiennes peerage as long ago as 1448.
It was this unhinged and highly dangerous individual who welcomed Theodore Paleologus to Tattershall Castle sometime in 1599, when his crimes against kin, neighbours, servants and tenants were about to scale new heights. For the earl, recruiting a henchman of the Italian’s sinister reputation clearly had attractions over and above his skills as a horseman. Then again, Italy was the land of the vendetta, as one might say the spiritual home of Henry, Earl of Lincoln. And to judge from what evidence remains to us, the pair of them got on like a house on fire.
The England of 1599 was a country in the grip of paranoia. The year saw a new Armada scare, a disastrous war in Ireland to add to the draining conflict in the Low Countries and a terrible quarrel, soon to prove fatal, between the aged queen and her former favourite Essex. A rash of murder plots against Elizabeth ignited rumours she was already dead, heightening fears of war over the succession. The faction-torn court feared foreign invasion and insurrection from Catholics at home. To the poor and weak it was above all a time of pestilence, failing crops and exorbitant prices. That summer a false report of a Spanish landing in the Isle of Wight led the panicky government to raise an army of 25,000. It was not a good time to be a newly settled alien.
Then, as ever, immigration stirred strong popular resentment, but hostile acts against outsiders were savagely suppressed by the Elizabethan establishment. A few years before Paleologus’s first visit to England, the Privy Council had assumed unprecedented powers to put to torture anyone suspected of libelling ‘strangers’. Among those to suffer was the dramatist Thomas Kyd, the suspected author of an anti-foreigner poem, who under torture implicated his fellow playwright Christopher Marlowe. Not all leading courtiers backed the government line that England benefited economically from migrants and was duty-bound to give asylum to political or religious refugees. Throughout the 1590s a few important figures such as Sir Walter Raleigh and Sir Nicholas Bacon protested at the granting of privileges to foreigners that were denied to the native English, such as freedom of worship, but official policy was dictated by the pro-alien Cecil party.
Distinguished scholars were not exempt from the deep popular prejudice against foreigners, and Italians in particular. This was not only because Italy was the nest of popery. Roger Ascham, the queen’s venerable tutor, warned travellers against visiting the country lest they be corrupted by ‘plenty of new mischiefs never known in England before; for manners, variety of vanities, and … filthy living’.19 Typically among contemporary authors, William Harrison in his Description of Britain praised the English yeomanry as ‘merry without malice, and plain without inward Italian or French craft and subtlety’, while Thomas Gainsford, in The Glory of England, dismissed all Tuscans as ‘buggerers and blasphemers’.
The Italian had long been seen as a figure of dangerous sensuality. The musician-cum-private secretary David Rizzio, ambitious favourite of Mary Queen of Scots and rumoured father of her son James, had been stabbed to death in the palace of Holyroodhouse in 1566 at the instigation of Mary’s jealous husband, Lord Darnley. In 1571, in one of innumerable conspiracies blamed on Italians, a Florentine called Roberto Ridolfi had allegedly plotted the assassination of Elizabeth and her replacement by the Scottish queen. Every theatre-goer knew the Italian assassin as a stock character in Elizabethan drama, with special renown as a poisoner. The real-life murderer of Dowager Queen Jeanne of Navarre went under a variety of names, the only certain fact about him being that he was Italian and had been shadowed by Walsingham’s spies on his arrival in England. He appears as the character Pothecarie in Massacre at Paris, Christopher Marlowe’s take on the St Bartholomew’s Day bloodbath of 1572, in which he despatches the dowager ‘with a venomed smell of a pair of perfumed gloves�
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On the other hand, Italians enjoyed international prestige as horsemen, and the admiration accorded to horsemanship in Elizabethan England would be hard to overstate. Sir Philip Sidney pokes gentle fun at the Italians’ high reputation on the opening page of his Defence of Poesy, reminiscing about a stay at the Holy Roman Emperor’s court where he and a friend placed themselves under a riding master called John Pietro Pugliano:
And he, according to the fertileness of the Italian wit, did not only afford us the demonstration of his practice, but sought to enrich our minds with the contemplations which he thought most precious … He said soldiers were the noblest estate of mankind, and horsemen the noblest of soldiers. He said they were the masters of war and ornaments of peace, speedy goers and strong abiders, triumphers both in camps and courts. Nay, to so unbelieved a point he proceeded, as that no earthly thing bred such wonder to a prince as to be a good horseman … if I had not been a piece of a logician before I came to him, I think he would have persuaded me to have wished myself a horse.
Elizabeth’s great favourites, the Earls of Leicester and Essex, were both appointed her master of the horse, a more or less ceremonial office so far as the horseflesh was concerned but hugely rewarding in financial terms. Yet the royal stables offered coveted posts promising power and wealth for lesser souls. One Robert Alexander, who in 1588 was gentleman rider to the Earl of Northumberland, later became equerry of the stable to the queen and was honoured with a knighthood. In fact he had been born in Italy as Roberto Zinzano and began his career as a riding master in Naples before anticipating Theodore Paleologus by trying his luck in England. Sir Robert not only earned a salary plus bed and board, but took a cut from the sale of horses trained in the royal stables at £100 apiece.
