An Elizabethan Assassin

by John Hall

  Earls were now top of the heap. Conscious of their shaky legitimacy, the Tudors had systematically eliminated all possible claimants to the throne among the higher aristocracy with their problematical Plantagenet blood. The last remaining duke, Norfolk, was executed for allegedly plotting with Mary Queen of Scots in the same year that Edward Clinton was raised to his earldom. Lincoln was one of the Tudors’ replacements for the old nobility.

  Whatever his failings, the first earl was an achiever, a successful general and admiral who satisfied each royal master. Clearly he also had a nagging conscience over the character of his heir, then known by the courtesy title of Lord Clinton. In his will dated 11 July 1584, the earl left his soon-to-be widow a group of manors and lands for life, including the second most important Lincolnshire seat, a mansion he had raised on the site of Sempringham Priory, and carefully added penal clauses aimed at protecting her possessions from the heir to his title.

  Anticipating a ferocious backlash over the terms of the will, the earl decreed a crippling fine of £2,000 ‘if my said son or any other for him or in his name or by his abetment, assent, or procurement shall directly or indirectly interrupt at any time during the life of my said wife or trouble, molest or disturb my said loving wife’. Furthermore, any hostile action by his son would mean a substantial portion of these lands passing permanently to his widow’s children by a previous marriage. The appointed overseers of the will were no lesser figures than the Earl of Leicester and Burghley himself.

  It was in a frantic effort to undermine the old countess’s rights that the heir bombarded Lord Burghley with repeated denunciations of those cunning and wicked women, his wife and stepmother, who he claimed were not only trying to swindle him but slandering him as ‘a vyllanous devle’ to the queen. These wild charges reached a new pitch as his father lay on his deathbed with the sweating sickness.With his legal efforts to overturn the will quickly dismissed, the new earl’s reputation at court sank even lower. His Irish stepmother was Elizabeth Fitzgerald, a long-standing friend and confidante of the queen, who had been immortalised in her youth as ‘the Fair Geraldine’ of the poet Earl of Surrey, and she was destined to live comfortably on the inheritance from her husband until her death in 1590. It was she, not the heir, who paid for the first earl’s magnificent tomb in St George’s Chapel at Windsor.30

  Only in his insatiable lust for land and property and aversion to paying bills did the second earl outshine his sire. After coming into the title he enclosed or converted to pasture at least 4,000 acres on his Lincolnshire estates alone, destroying many villages and livelihoods in the process. Nor did he hesitate to depopulate Tattershall itself, pulling down twenty farmhouses and turning over arable smallholdings to pasture. In those days people tended to stay where God had put them and the earl’s dispossessed tenants had little choice but to become labourers or wanderers on the road.

  However, Lincoln did seize one opportunity he must have believed would ingratiate him with his sovereign. When Mary Queen of Scots was tried for treason at Fotheringay Castle in 1587, he was one of the commissioner peers who sat in judgement and recommended the sentence of death. Wiser souls contrived some excuse to be absent. Elizabeth may have been keenly aware of the threat posed by Mary alive, but she also trembled at the precedent of killing an anointed queen. Once the deed was done, Elizabeth was frantic to distance herself from blame and turned savagely on everyone involved in the execution, from Lord Burghley to the hapless messenger who carried the warrant to Fotheringay.

  But Earl Henry’s brazenness knew no bounds. Months after the execution, when the conscience-stricken Elizabeth finally ordered Mary’s burial at Peterborough Cathedral with regal honours, Lincoln turned up as one of the chief mourners. He was not alone in fulfilling this strange double role, however, as his neighbour the Earl of Rutland also figured both as Mary’s judge and mourner. There was a sequel to this curious episode less than two years later, in September 1589, when Lincoln was chosen to represent Elizabeth at the forthcoming wedding of King James of Scotland, Mary’s son. How news of his selection was received at Holyrood is not recorded, but Lincoln himself was unabashed and indeed in coming years would make repeated efforts to curry favour with this likely successor to the English throne.

  Queen Elizabeth’s personal stand-in at the funeral of Mary Stuart, adorned in the borrowed regalia, was none other than Lincoln’s mother-in-law, the widowed countess of Bedford. This was yet another of the earl’s relations who was soon to feel the blast of his fury, this time for encouraging ‘treachery and perjury’ against him. Inevitably, the pair fell out over his seizure of a property belonging to someone else, but again it was the lady who bested the earl. Another trusted friend of the queen, Lady Bedford refused to be browbeaten and the peer ended up, to his great astonishment and anguish, in a prison cell.

  Not long after Mary Stuart’s funeral, the earl began to cast covetous eyes on the valuable manor of Weston-on-the-Green, near Bicester in Oxfordshire. Originally part of the inheritance of the statesman Lord Williams of Thame, who died in 1559, it had been willed to his widow for life and was then to pass to Lord Williams’s son-in-law, Lord Norreys of Rycote, a respected veteran soldier and close friend of the queen.31 Lady Williams remarried twice before her death thirty years later, at which time Lord Norreys generously agreed that her last husband, an elderly and infirm gentleman named James Crofts, might remain at Weston for life.

  It was at this point the Earl of Lincoln laid claim to the manor on the basis that he had married as his second wife the widow of Norreys’s eldest son, who had expired of a fever while serving in the Irish wars. What made the earl’s claim so preposterous was that the owner Lord Norreys was still alive, as were his five younger sons. Failing to win Weston by law, Lincoln’s natural recourse was naked violence, and the outrages which followed were reported in fascinating detail to Star Chamber, the all-powerful body composed of key privy councillors.

  Star Chamber had not yet turned into the infamous instrument of royal tyranny it would become under the Stuarts. On the contrary, under Elizabeth it was seen to offer some level of protection to commoners oppressed by those whose rank placed them beyond the reach of ordinary courts. A complaint laid before the Chamber in June 1588 stated that Henry, Earl of Lincoln, contrary to her majesty’s laws and in contempt of the same, descended on Weston Manor with nearly forty ‘lewd and evell dysposed persons … armed and appointed in warlike sort with swords daggers pikestaffs billes longstaves rapiers and divers other weapons’. This miniature army broke down the doors of the manor barn and administered fierce beatings to the manor workers ‘to their great feare terror and amazement’32 before carting off goods belonging to Mr Crofts.

  Whether by luck or design, Lincoln chose his time well. Elizabeth’s ministers were facing more pressing concerns than his private war, for this was the date of one of the greatest challenges to England in her history. The first sighting of the long-expected Spanish Armada had just been reported off the Scillies, and the ill-used Lord Norreys had bigger things on his mind than the looting of Weston. After busying himself with coastal defences against the awaited invasion, the old warrior hurried to escort the queen to Tilbury, scene of her famous speech of defiance to the powers of Europe.

  A second and more serious assault on Weston came in September the following year, on the eve of Lincoln’s departure to Scotland for King James’s nuptials. A new complaint to Star Chamber centred on testimony from Crofts’s servants describing how, at dusk, a party of about forty of the earl’s armed retainers invaded the manor again with ‘pistolles ready, charged bowes and arrowes, swordes and daggers, longe pyked staves, and Billes, and such like forcible and outragious weapons’. At their head was Lord Lincoln himself, brandishing a rapier and dagger. Finding the great gate ‘fast locked, boulted and barred’ against him, he flew into a towering rage and falsely claimed to have a warrant from Queen Elizabeth which entitled him to hang all at Weston as traitors and rebels. At length, when the a
ttackers procured ladders to scale the walls and break into the courtyard, the manor servants retreated into the house and bolted the door. The earl, ‘horriblie swearing’, called for ‘strawe or hedgewood to sett fire to the house’ but was eventually persuaded the property would be useless to him if reduced to ashes.

  Only when the raiders began to batter down the front door did the defenders give up the fight, though not before Lincoln had struck down the bailiff of the manor with his sword. In possession at last, the triumphant peer called for supper in the great hall before retiring to the best bedchamber. Crofts himself had been absent during the invasion, but returned during the night with followers of his own. There was now a prospect of serious bloodshed. Roused from his sleep, the earl appeared at the window and ‘being in great heate, choler and furye, said with alli voice, swearing grete and terrible othes, “Where be the Villaynes, Traytors, Rebells and Rascalls? Set open the dores! I will beate them awaye, or leave my Carcasse amongst them!”’ Faced with the threat that he and his servants would all be hanged, Mr Crofts decided discretion was the better part of valour and left the maddened nobleman in charge.

  It was not for long. Soon afterwards, either remembering his royal errand or belatedly grasping that retaliation was inevitable, Lincoln galloped off towards Scotland leaving Weston in the hands of a number of his retainers. These henchmen were charged with holding the house by force, but had the sense to realise the game was up once Crofts reappeared with a posse of armed followers and justices of the peace.

  In the event Lincoln never completed his journey to the Scottish court. At some point after leaving Weston he learned that James’s bride Anne of Denmark was stormbound in Norway and the impatient bridegroom had decided to sail across and marry her there.

  The lawsuits which ensued over Weston, involving claim and counter-claim of riotous assembly, perjury and slander, were to rumble on for no fewer than seven years. In the meantime new complaints against the earl piled up thick and fast at court, among them the pathetic suit of an old family retainer who had been stripped of a modest pension willed to him by the first earl. The Privy Council tried to shame Lincoln into behaving decently towards the poor man’s family out of consideration of his long and faithful service, begging the earl to reflect ‘how much it would touch your lordship in honour and otherwise, if through your lordship’s hard dealing they should perish’. But to beg charity of Lincoln was like asking water to flow uphill.

  At last, in June 1592, Star Chamber decided enough was enough. When the earl ignored a further stern rebuke for his misdeeds, he was suddenly arrested, forced to pay a huge fine and committed to Fleet prison. The matter which seems finally to have tipped the scales was a new torrent of venom directed against Lady Bedford. Once recovered from his amazement at being incarcerated, the earl bombarded Lord Burghley with letters protesting his innocence and blaming everybody else for his misfortune.

  ‘I assure your lordship of my honour,’ he wrote, ‘and I take the living God to witness, that I know myself clean in conscience … and would think myself happy, yea, and thrice happy, to die sooner with honour, rather than suffer this scar or blot of disgrace, laid upon me by malice and false witness.’ He signed off ‘from my unsavoury and disquiet lodging in the Fleet, this 15th of June 1592’.33

  The pleas to the lord high treasurer evidently bore fruit as within a fortnight Lincoln was back at his London house in Canon Row, Westminster, taking up quill and paper to thank Burghley for delivering him out of ‘that filthy and unwholesome lodging’ but also to fulminate about the size of the fine imposed on him – £1,000 – and to thunder against the ‘so base people’ whose lies had brought him low, ‘not having the fear of God before their eyes’. In his crazed imagination the chief conspirators in the affair were his mother-in-law, Crofts and Lord Norreys, who had all procured perjured witnesses against him.

  As the year wore on the earl’s behaviour became ever more bizarre and Burghley was repeatedly pestered to overturn unfavourable judicial rulings. In one letter Lincoln bemoans his ‘lamentable state, overpressed with enemies, with griefs and sickness; without comfort, council or friends’.34 Surely it should be crystal clear that anyone who stood against him was a liar and traitor and almost certainly a papist or atheist? In November, in the futile hope that Burghley would take his part once again, he wrote self-pityingly of being forced ‘to toil out my sickly carcase at this time of year to be a humble suitor’.

  But the Privy Council now seemed to have Lincoln’s measure. He was again summoned before them the following May and ‘dealt soundly withal by the Lords upon complaints made against him of wrongs offered’. Yet in 1595 his great adversary Sir Edward Dymoke wrote to Burghley’s son, Sir Robert Cecil, to complain that he had been obliged to break up his household and disperse all his servants from Scrivelsby Court – the Dymoke seat near Horncastle since the fourteenth century – ‘being forced by his Lordship’s unkind molestation’.35 Lincoln appeared to be facing another spell in the Fleet, the usual destination of prisoners committed at the royal pleasure or by order of Star Chamber.

  Given the earl’s track record, it seems astonishing that early in 1596 Queen Elizabeth again nominated him as her ambassador, this time to an influential German state. Possibly she was bowing to pleas to get him out of England on any pretext. And Lincoln was probably thankful to leave the country at this time as the Privy Council had just given notice of an action brought against him by the minister of Folkingham. Also to be answered was a suit by the earl’s page, Roger Fullshaw, who had inherited his father’s manor a few months before only to see Lincoln appropriate the deeds, pretending the property was forfeit because of a debt owed by the dead man. Fullshaw utterly refuted the claim and prayed for the Privy Council’s protection in view of ‘the most horrible outrages committed against him’36 by his master, including false imprisonment.

  Worse still, the earl was now facing a charge of slander brought against him by Sir John Norreys, son of the Lord Norreys of Rycote from whom he had attempted to wrest Weston Manor. Sir John, a much admired soldier, was now lord general of the queen’s army in Ireland, having already distinguished himself in command of Anglo-Dutch forces in the Netherlands. The vitriol of the slander, coming soon after the earl’s release from prison, showed how his hatred of Lord Norreys now extended to the entire Norreys clan, rousing him to wild accusations of murder, cowardice and corruption against various members of this distinguished family. Witnesses recorded hearing his fervent wish to see the extinction of Lord Norreys’s title by ‘the dissolucion of him and all the rest of his sonnes’.

  Lincoln’s rage was doubtless heightened by the fact that Sir John, one of his numerous creditors, had recently forced him to hand over a fine horse from the Tattershall stables in settlement of a debt of twenty marks. Yet the earl’s curse was to be very nearly fulfilled, for he would live to gloat over the death of Lord Norreys and no fewer than five of his six soldier sons while on active service. But we are getting ahead of our story.

  The embassy to Germany was another sorry chapter in Lincoln’s career. As personal representative of Elizabeth, he set off in great state on 5 July for the court of Philip the Magnanimous, Landgrave of Hesse, to attend the christening of his son and heir, Prince Otto. Attended by one of his younger sons, Edward, and with a large personal retinue and six musketeers to guard the cart which bore the royal gift of plate to the Landgrave Philip, the earl sailed from Yarmouth to Flushing, travelling on into Germany in a stately procession of carriages.

  As records of Theodore Paleologus from this period are scant, it is tempting to look for him in every shadow, and a first encounter with Lincoln during this embassy of 1596 is a possibility. The strategic importance of Flushing made it a honeypot for spies. However, there is no mention of the Italian in reports on the earl’s movements which sped back to England from the agent Anthony Bacon, brother of the great Sir Francis. At this time both Bacons were key figures in the intelligence network of the Earl of Essex, E
lizabeth’s favourite. But by October Lincoln was home again with a European reputation to match that in his own country. ‘The erle of Lincoln was return’d from the landgrave of Hesse,’ wrote Anthony Bacon, ‘no less charg’d with most princely honours and liberalities than he had left behind dishonours, clamours and curses for his base miserliness and insupportable fancies or rather furies.’37

  Once again an ignominious performance by Lincoln coincided with one of the defining moments of the Elizabethan age, Essex’s Cadiz expedition. Having captured and burned the town and forced the Spaniards to scuttle their anchored fleet, Essex had set sail for home on 4 July. It was as Bacon was anxiously awaiting news of his master’s daring enterprise that he filed his report on the Earl of Lincoln’s antics.

  As was usual practice, an official tract recording the ambassadorial mission was published later in the year – The Landgrave of Hessen his princelie receiuing of her Maiesties Embassador. Imprinted at London by Robert Robinson, 1596 – but it is remarkable among such documents because no mention is made of the name or title of the ambassador, though the accompanying son, ‘Master Edward Clynton’, is mentioned more than once. It is a sign of the unprecedented level of disgust and embarrassment caused by the nobleman’s ill-natured deeds.

  Complaints against the earl resumed in rapid-fire succession after his return from Germany. On 30 June 1597, the Privy Council wrote demanding satisfaction in ‘honour and good conscience’ on behalf of two poor suitors at Tattershall and followed up with an unusually heated letter on 17 August urging action on yet more outstanding petitions against him, in one case a ‘very grevious complaint against your Lordship’ which was causing ‘pittyfull moane’ among his victims. It went on: ‘Wee cann doe no lesse then require your Lordship, beinge as you are a noble man, to regard your honour and calling and to forbeare to give these occacions of complaint against you, whereof even of late wee have received divers.’ And so it went on. From Oxfordshire one Robert Blower protested that ‘certaine disordered persons’38 belonging to Lincoln had dispossessed him of his house and land.