by John Hall
Every great household in England appointed officers variously known as master of the horse, gentleman of horse or gentleman rider, with non-commissioned assistants called yeomen of the horse who supervised the grooms. Our Theodore would have been some distance removed from any chores like mucking out in the Tattershall stables. And there would have been a lot of muck. Not long before this date the Willoughby stables at nearby Grimsthorpe Castle were recorded as housing 135 horses, and the Earl of Lincoln is unlikely to have been outdone by a lower-ranking neighbour. What a great nobleman of the time demanded from the head of his stable might owe something to the horse’s service in war and everyday matters of travel, but had far more to do with cutting a fine figure and winning the plaudits of his peers and monarch, above all in the lists.
Yet a whiff of danger hung about the post, and from the beginning there is a sense of complicity in the relationship between Lincoln and Paleologus. There is something strongly atavistic about the pair of them. On the contemporary stage the horse master or gentleman rider was frequently a key figure, and commonly portrayed as an individual high on ambition and low on scruples. Bosola, the principal villain in the archetypical tragedy of the period, The Duchess of Malfi, fatally worms his way into his mistress’s confidence after he is named her gentleman of horse. And real life presented parallel examples. Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, selected as his own master of horse a pushy young blood called Christopher Blount. In 1589, eight months after Leicester’s death, Blount married the widowed countess, thereby acquiring immense wealth and influence. However, in Blount’s case the fall came as suddenly as the rise and he went to the block for his part in the Essex revolt.
The sinister intimacy which could grow between a great man and his master of horse is exemplified by Richard III and Sir James Tyrrell, who by tradition procured the murder of the Princes in the Tower as foreshadowed in Shakespeare’s lines:
KING RICHARD:
Dar’st thou resolve to kill an enemy of mine?
TYRRELL:
Please you, but I had rather kill two enemies.
KING RICHARD:
Why there thou hast it …
Tyrrell, I mean those bastards in the Tower.
TYRRELL:
Let me have open means to come to them,
And soon I’ll rid you from fear of them.
Or consider this exchange, slightly abbreviated, between Duke Ferdinand and the arch-villain in The Duchess of Malfi, and the Earl of Lincoln’s new gentleman of the horse looks chillingly cast as a real-life Bosola:
FERDINAND:
There’s gold.
BOSOLA:
So:
What follows? Never rained such showers as these
Without thunderbolts i’the tail of them:
Whose throat must I cut?
FERDINAND:
Sir, I’ll take nothing from you that I have given:
There is a place that I procured for you
This morning: the provisorship o’ the horse.
BOSOLA:
What’s my place?
The provisorship o’ the horse? Say, then, my corruption
Grew out of horse-dung: I am your creature.
After so many perilous years as a mercenary, spy and assassin – probably even now evading vengeful pursuers of his own – it is not unlikely the ageing Theodore craved a spell of safer and ostensibly respectable employment. He was now around forty, ‘at which year begins the first part of the old man’s age’, as lugubriously noted by the Tudor diarist Thomas Peynel.20 Possibly he entered the earl’s household hoping that a stint as retainer to a high-ranking noble would attract the attention of a greater one, perhaps even of the queen herself: there was Roberto Zinzano as a precedent. On his part the earl must have been expecting to call upon the lethal talents of Paleologus from the start; as we shall see in reports, an alarming plan was now festering in his mind.
Whatever the case, the new gentleman rider quickly proved indispensable to his patron. The most striking fact about Lincoln is that he fell out with virtually everyone he knew – family, neighbours, servants, the great ones at court, even the sovereign herself. The exception was Theodore Paleologus, for the domicile of the Italian and his family at Tattershall over the next sixteen years or so – for the rest of the earl’s life – indicates that he rubbed along with his employer very well, or else had some hold over him. As the volatile peer and the self-reliant exile had so little in common, one must ask what kind of hold this might be. Was Paleologus tolerated at the castle because he knew where the bodies were buried, if only because he buried them himself?
The common people of Tattershall had long had reason to hate and fear their lord, and we can only guess their thoughts at the sudden appearance of this exotic creature. But we know he cut an irresistibly glamorous figure in the eyes of one young woman. For Mary Balls, the newcomer was the answer to a maiden’s prayer.
Notes
14 Letters and Papers, Reign of Henry VIII, Vol. xi, 463.
15 British Library, BM, 27/41.
16 Historical Manuscripts Commission, Salisbury, 312.
17 Historical Manuscripts Commission, Salisbury, 332.
18 State Papers, Domestic, 1581–90, 176/12.
19 The Complete Works of Roger Ascham, published by White, Cochrane, London, 1815.
20 Peynel, De Guajaci Medicina, 1540.
5
The stranger within my gates
He may be evil or good
But I cannot tell what powers control,
What reasons sway his mood;
Nor when the Gods of his far-off land
Shall repossess his blood.
Rudyard Kipling, ‘The Stranger Within my Gate’.
In the annals of Mary’s birthplace, the wool town of Hadleigh in Suffolk, the family name appears under various spellings of Ball and Balls. On the Paleologus tomb at Landulph her father is called William Balls and described as ‘gent’, but this is a significant departure from the truth. My researches show the family came from far humbler stock, for Mary’s father was almost certainly the younger son William who is mentioned in the 1568 will of Roger Ball, miller, of Hadleigh Bridge.
However modest their origins, the family were on the up-and-up by the 1570s when parish records present ‘William Balles’ as one of the well-to-do coterie of citizens who ran the town. The Balls diversified into the cloth-making business that had brought great prosperity to Hadleigh and William acquired further prestige as sub-collector for the market. This unpaid post marked its holder as an affluent and trusted individual with the running of the town’s almshouses among his duties. Subsidy lists, which give a snapshot of relative wealth, regularly place one or more of the Balls menfolk among the better-off townspeople from this time well into the seventeenth century, though the Thomas Balls who ran Hadleigh Bridge Mill in King James’s time was twice fined for illegal brewing.
There is no hint in the surviving town records that Mary’s father or any of the family aspired to be recognised as gentry and the highest they would have classed themselves is as yeomen. But in far-off Cornwall by the 1630s, out of sight of those who knew the Ballses as millers, brewers and clothiers, no one was likely to challenge the assertion of gentle rank.
So does the fiction of Mary’s gentility cast doubt over the larger claims made in her husband’s name? That Theodore should gild his wife’s rank does not compromise his pedigree: the more certain he was of his exalted origins, the touchier he might have been over a misalliance with a miller’s granddaughter: we have already considered a number of disgraceful attachments of earlier Paleologi which later generations preferred to forget. Yet perhaps it is inevitable that the sceptic will discern here a further shadow over Theodore’s imperial pretensions.
How a Hadleigh girl with no known family or friends outside Suffolk came to be in Tattershall in 1599 has puzzled former researchers into Paleologus’s life. Canon Adams could find no Tattershall link with the Balls family, though he speculat
ed that a Nicholas Ball buried in 1618 at Cottingham – the Yorkshire village where Theodore and Mary were married – might possibly be a relation. Yet as this form of the name is and was a common one, his suggestion was never more than tentative.
However, my own random searches of Tattershall records brought to light a document which appears to connect Mary’s father to the village, and even to the Earl of Lincoln’s household. This is an inventory of the goods and chattels of a John Atkin of Tattershall, musician, deceased, appraised on 9 March 1585. Atkin’s worldly possessions, valued at a grand total of £8 0s 2d, include the dead man’s instrument – item, his harpe – with a valuation of 3s 4d. One of the witnesses to the document signs himself William Balles. This is and was an uncommon form of the name. Now, the only likely employer of a harpist in such an out-of-the-way spot as Tattershall is the resident noble, and the fact that the name Balles seems to be otherwise unrecorded in the village strongly suggests that this is indeed William of Hadleigh, and that he is attached, at least temporarily, to the Lincoln household. That he should be asked to witness a legal document argues that the miller’s son was now accorded relatively high status.
It was in 1585 that the second earl succeeded to the title and, on inheriting the bulk of his father’s estate, embarked on a headlong rush to acquire more properties the length and breadth of the land. One possibility is that the entrepreneurial Balles came to his notice around this time, acted as an agent and in that role was invited to stay at the castle. Another thought is that Lincoln, as a ruthless encloser, was chiefly interested in Balles’s expertise in the cloth trade. Whatever business the pair were involved in, it must have sufficiently gratifies the earl to explain the presence of Balles’s daughter Mary at Tattershall some fifteen years later, though in exactly what capacity remains unclear.
He must have been an exciting new force in Mary’s life, this exceptionally tall and imposing foreigner of whom disturbing and dangerous things were whispered. Perhaps she witnessed the gentleman rider’s first appearance on the tilting ground next to Holy Trinity churchyard, infamously despoiled to widen the castle moat. On a choice mount from one of the finest stables in the land, armed cap-a-pied, Paleologus must have looked like the ideal image of royalty on a coin or seal, pictured by convention as a mounted hero in armour, though with little resemblance to any real king of Theodore’s day. In Henry IV, Part I, Shakespeare caught his contemporaries’ admiration of the consummate equestrian with his picture of Prince Hal vaulting into the saddle, witching the world with noble horsemanship. For Mary, the cavalier in the Clinton colours of blue and white was surely all the more alluring for the rumours swirling about him.21
Canon Adams, whose notes on Paleologus so often bear the stamp of a man of cloth of his day, wrote that he ‘regretted to record’ that Mary was pregnant before marriage, just as he ‘regretted to state’ his discovery of Theodore’s profession as assassin. Judging from the date of her child’s delivery, it is most likely Mary conceived sometime late in September 1599. So she may well have conceived during or soon after Harvest Festival, one of the hallowed English customs that Puritans of the day were striving to outlaw. Though other revels of pagan origin were succumbing to killjoy pressure, the traditions of harvest-time were still enjoyed throughout the country, a last excuse before Christmas for bucolic fun and games. But harvesting in 1599 had been disrupted by panic over the supposed new Armada, with a nationwide call-to-arms stripping farms of their labour. Peers like Lincoln were ordered to send all available forces south to face the non-existent invaders, and not until early September was the crisis declared a false alarm and the bands allowed to depart.
With the added anxieties caused by the delay, end-of-harvest celebrations when they came must have been all the more hectic. The last load of corn would be trundled out of the last field to the sound of pipe and drum, the signal for the giving of presents and feasting, drinking and singing. By convention it was a time when the barriers between masters and servants were relaxed, and kissing beneath the harvest moon tended to follow. For some like Mary there were riskier pleasures, and cheeks must have reddened as the familiar lesson from Deuteronomy was read out in church:
Thou shalt observe the feast of tabernacles seven days, after that thou has gathered in thy corn and thy wine; and thou shalt rejoice in thy feast, thou, and thy son, and thy daughter, and thy manservant, and thy maidservant, and the Levite, the stranger, and the fatherless, and the widow, that are within thy gates.
Theodore Paleologus had been the stranger within the gates many times since his exile, but the encounter with Mary Balls changed the course of his life for good. Perhaps we should be charitable about his purposes at this juncture. Now well past the midway point in the allotted threescore years and ten of Scripture, he may have longed to leave the Dark Wood of Error remembered from his readings of Dante. He had escaped the galleys or worse for attempted murder in his teens. For twenty years or more he had dodged sabre and shot on the battlefield and every epidemic attendant on camp life. And how many times in his parallel career as assassin and spy had he risked a stiletto in a dark alley, and rope or axe on the scaffold? As I surmise from a letter we will consider shortly, Theodore’s life was now at hazard in the Netherlands: after so many years in war-ravaged regions the prospect of a settled family life in a distant backwater must have had its charms. An Italian descended from Greeks who thought they were Romans would try his hand at being an Englishman.
But why was the wedding such a desperately late affair, no more than six weeks before Mary bore his son? When did Mary reveal she was pregnant, and what was Theodore’s immediate reaction? Had she exaggerated her family’s status? Did he misconstrue her dowry prospects? What was the reaction of his patron, the ever-unpredictable Earl of Lincoln?
A distinct possibility is that Theodore had been in London with his master, who spent a great deal of time in London because of his endless lawsuits. Perhaps Theodore was hoping to be put forward for the Ascension Day tilt at Whitehall Palace, one of the major events in the Elizabethan calendar. Age was no barrier to taking part – Sir Henry Lee, Elizabeth’s master of the armoury, competed in Ascension Day tilts until nearly seventy years old – and to see a skilled exponent like Theodore Paleologus tilt in the Clinton colours would have given the earl great satisfaction, even when weighed against the considerable cost involved, for as ever Lincoln’s parsimony would have struggled with the yearning to cut a dash like his fellow earls.
If this is the case the earl and Theodore were to be disappointed. The great celebration held each year on 19 November was first delayed due to bad weather then deferred until the spring of 1600 because of the illness of the Earl of Cumberland, the chief challenger. But if her lover was delayed, what was Mary’s state of mind during his absence?
Terrible penalties threatened a pregnant spinster. The minister of a parish church could prosecute those of loose morals through the ecclesiastical courts and anyone found guilty faced humiliating public confession to ‘the vile and heinous sin of fornication’ or even excommunication. Yet in practice such sanctions were confined to the lower orders, for even church leaders turned a blind eye to transgressions committed by the better sort. A Jacobean bishop of Lincoln, John Williams, attempted a cover-up when his registrar – a man already charged with extortion – fathered a bastard. Bishop Williams bribed the registrar’s accusers to withdraw their evidence but, most unusually, was later hauled before the Star Chamber, found guilty of subordination of perjury, and not only imprisoned in the Tower but fined a staggering £10,000. As a rule such scandals never saw the light of day but Williams had made powerful enemies because of his puritan sympathies.
Many aspects of Mary’s plight are unclear and likely to remain so. Was her status within the earl’s household sufficient to shield her from degrading public exposure? Did the earl favour William Balls enough to protect his daughter? Did a friend or relation remove her from wondering eyes, offering sanctuary somewhere outside Tattershall? Mo
st intriguing of all, was Paleologus a willing bridegroom or the subject of irresistible pressure from family or patron? Besides being a sadist and hypocrite, the earl was a puritan in all negative senses of the word, and it is not difficult to picture him affecting moral indignation over Mary’s seduction under his roof and insisting that Theodore make her an honest woman.
It is no wonder the couple preferred to marry far away from prying eyes, but why the church of St Mary in Cottingham? Today the journey from Tattershall to this East Yorkshire village is nearly seventy miles if the Humber is crossed but far longer if one skirts the river, as one might well choose to do if dependent on Elizabethan transport and accompanied by a heavily pregnant woman. All we know for certain is that the St Mary register for 1600 records the marriage of Thedorus Palelogu and Maria Balle, primo die May.
There is a Cottingham connection with Tattershall and the Clintons which offers a possible explanation why the vicar might refrain from asking awkward questions of the giant foreigner and his bride. Many years before, the lordship of Cottingham with nearly 2,500 acres had been granted to Henry Fitzroy, Duke of Richmond, the only bastard acknowledged by Henry VIII. The mother of this duke was Bessie Blount, subsequently married off to the first Earl of Lincoln. When Richmond died young, Cottingham went to the Duke of Suffolk along with the Tattershall lands.
