by John Hall
The earl’s mounting paranoia is palpable in his reply dated ten days later from Tattershall Castle and addressed to Sir Robert Cecil, in which he continues to blame the malice and false slanders put about by ‘ancient adversaries’ headed by Sir Edward Dymoke. In his crazed brain it was once again poor Earl Henry contra mundum.
Next in the firing line was Lincoln’s own son and heir, the newly married Thomas, Lord Clinton. The earl not only appropriated the rich dowry of Thomas’s heiress bride but refused to make any provision for the young couple, even when his young daughter-in-law was laid low by a dangerous illness. This time Queen Elizabeth herself was stirred to intervene.
In a letter dated August 1597, the Privy Council informed the earl:
The Queen, having heard of the recovery of your daughter-in-law the Lady Clynton, commands us that seeing God Almighty is so gracious as by this restitution to give you hope of comfort in your son and heir, so should it be a provocation of His displeasure if by a second cause any impediment should arise which might work a new alteration. Consider then what it is for young folks to want, and how far in honour you are bound to do what her father expected, though out of trust he dealt more loosely than he needed. Consider what a portion he parted with and besides all these matters the Queen’s earnest request.
The earl was ordered immediately to provide a suitable home for the couple and restore the value of the lands gifted by the bride’s father, the eminent courtier Sir Henry Knyvett. The letter ended:
The Queen means not to dispute upon point of law or bonds; for she knows in such a case as this where it concerns a gentlewoman descended from a father of noble blood, and where she interposeth herself as well for regard of the young Lord as for his wife, that you will regard the obligations of honour and compassion. And we do assure you that it would be very acceptable to the Queen to find that you yielded so nobly and kindly to so princely and gracious a motion.
The earl had proved impervious to all previous appeals to the finer instincts, and words like honour and compassion doubtless continued to fall on deaf ears. Elizabeth read his character right enough with her phrase about points of law. But the royal strictures must have given Lincoln pause, coming on top of unmistakable signs of loss of patience by the indispensable Cecils. Even a man as unbalanced as Lincoln knew better than openly defy a Tudor monarch: however gracelessly, he was forced to open his purse to the young Clintons.
By now the earl was heavily in debt. Despite the great inheritance from his father, now augmented by the recovery of the Sempringham estate on the death of the dowager countess, he had been brought low by years of high living – chiefly down to expensive tastes in horseflesh and jewels – and extravagant building schemes in London, Sempringham and elsewhere. Incapable of curbing his mad spending, he had recently bought a grand house in Chelsea from Sir Robert Cecil. This new expense combined with years of ill-judged business affairs, bad investments and a passion for litigation, resulting in enormous lawyers’ fees and disastrous fines. Then, late in 1599, as his new gentleman rider was settling in at Tattershall Castle, the long-smouldering feud with the Dymokes reignited, and in a later chapter we shall see how this brought new scandal upon the earl and financial catastrophe upon his enemies.
This was a time in Paleologus’s life when critical events occurred in bewildering succession. The discovery of Mary Balls’s pregnancy led to the overdue wedding on 1 May 1600. Their son, baptised Theodore at Tattershall on 12 June, died on 1 September. Just two days after the baptism, Sir Robert Cecil opened a hair-raising letter claiming that the Earl of Lincoln had given a notorious Italian murderer control over the countess, a prisoner at Tattershall Castle. The following day the Privy Council issued a warrant for the earl’s arrest.
The irony is that the charge against Lincoln was not of plotting his wife’s murder, but of non-payment of debts.
Notes
23 Dugdale, The History of Drayning and Embanking, London, 1662.
24 Letters and Papers of Henry VIII, Vol. xii, part 1, February 1536.
25 Acts of Privy Council, xxv, 517, 519.
26 Acts of Privy Council, xxiii, 339.
27 Acts of Privy Council, xxv, 407, 411.
28 State Papers Domestic 1581–90, 177/41.
29 Ibid., 201/40.
30 The Fair Geraldine was herself the subject of colourful gossip. Soon after her marriage to Lincoln the Archbishop of Canterbury, Matthew Parker, accused her of ‘frailty’ and ‘forgetfulness of duty’. Parker went so far as to say the countess should be chastised in Bridewell, a notorious gaol of loose women.
31 Lord Norreys was the son of the Henry Norreys who was executed for high treason by Henry VIII as one of the alleged lovers of Queen Anne Boleyn. Elizabeth’s staunch support of the Norreys family was tantamount to an assertion of her mother’s innocence.
32 Star Chamber Records, 5, C19/36.
33 British Museum Harleian Papers, 6995/77.
34 Ibid., 6995/109.
35 State Papers Domestic 1595–7, 18, 143.
36 Chancery Records, 2 Ff.l, No. 4.
37 Thomas Bird, Memoirs of Queen Elizabeth, London, 1754.
38 Acts of Privy Council, xxvii, 1597–8, 506.
7
The fifteenth day of July,
with glist’ning speare and shield
A famous fight in Flanders
was foughten in the field
The most courageous officers
were the English captains three
But the bravest in the Battel
was brave Lord Willoughby.
Bishop Percy, Reliques of Ancient English Poetry.
Before we examine Theodore Paleologus’s time at Tattershall in closer detail, and his role as the countess’s gaoler, we must return to the question which vexes everyone who ponders on his chequered career: what or who induced him to settle in England? As for what, we have the evidence that the Low Countries were getting too hot for him following further murderous adventures there. As for who, I believe there is a strong case for naming one of Elizabeth’s outstanding generals in preference to all other candidates previously put forward.
Peregrine Bertie, thirteenth Baron Willoughby de Eresby, was a leading figure in England’s war in the Netherlands, where he became the key ally of Theodore’s commander, Prince Maurice of Nassau. In Lincolnshire he was a neighbouring landowner of the Earl of Lincoln, and one of the very few county grandees who always managed to avoid a quarrel with the irascible peer. Indeed, the pair served together on commissions to root out Catholic sympathisers. Lord Willoughby was also the patron of the future Virginia colonist John Smith, whose friendship with Paleologus we shall see described in his autobiographical True Travels – a friendship which inspired some of Smith’s most extraordinary exploits. Smith was brought up on the extensive Willoughby estates centred on Grimsthorpe Castle, not far from Tattershall.
A hero celebrated in song and verse, Lord Willoughby had soldiered in the Netherlands from the early days of the war, serving under the Earl of Leicester before replacing him as head of the English army. Willoughby not only cooperated closely with Prince Maurice but became a personal friend. This suggests he may have become acquainted with Paleologus as early as the 1580s. Here are credible grounds to explain the Italian’s employment at Tattershall, presuming an urgent need for him to quit the Netherlands and a personal recommendation from Willoughby. Maurice and Willoughby may very well have used him as a go-between. With his savoir vivre, skill in languages and expert horsemanship, the resourceful Italian would have made an ideal carrier of sensitive diplomatic correspondence and secret messages between the two commanders.
This is also a time Paleologus’s abilities as a spy, honed when employed by clients such as the republic of Lucca, would have proved most useful to his masters. Almost any travelling gentleman of the period was duty-bound to dabble in surveillance – reporting back to his home country was frequently the price paid for authorisation to travel – but few offered the talents
of the Italian. It is not difficult to picture Paleologus in this murky world of ciphers, secret writing and forgery, his value as an intelligencer enhanced by the practical skills of a hardened mercenary.
In 1586 Willoughby was one of the heroes of Zutphen, the battle in which Sir Philip Sidney received a deadly Spanish musket-ball in the leg. Several of the characters in this story were on the battlefield under the gaze of Leicester with Prince Maurice not far away, so Paleologus may well have been present. The immediate English commander during the action was the Sir John Norreys whose family were soon to be embroiled with the Earl of Lincoln over the Weston Manor invasion. According to one contemporary source it was when Willoughby found himself in difficulties that Sidney rode fatally to the rescue.
Queen Elizabeth was to send an English contingent under Willoughby to support the Huguenot leader Henri of Navarre in his unsuccessful siege of Paris in 1590. In a later chapter we shall see evidence in Paleologus’s own hand that he fought in France, and though this does not specifically link him to Willoughby there are a number of accounts of him serving in Elizabeth’s army as well as Prince Maurice’s.
The Willoughby de Eresby title is one of the English peerages which may descend in the female line in the absence of a male heir. Peregrine’s mother Katherine Willoughby, one of the great heiresses of Henry VIII’s time, had been the intended child bride of the son and heir of the king’s brother-in-law, Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk, the then owner of Tattershall Castle. In the event, the claim of this sickly youth – the last person to bear the title Earl of Lincoln before the Clintons – was set aside when the newly widowed duke decided to marry her himself. Suffolk was about fifty years old and Katherine thirteen.
Widowed in 1545, the duchess took as a second husband her gentleman usher at Grimsthorpe, an otherwise obscure figure called Richard Bertie. According to an early memoirist of the family, ‘it is said he was Master of the Horse to Charles Brandon; but as it was usual for the great men of those times to retain great officers, in a sort of imitation of their prince, I doubt whether he was in so high a station’.39 Katherine herself admitted Bertie was ‘meanly born’ and genealogists have since identified him as the son of a stonemason. Whatever his origins, he and his wife became fervent reformers and they fled abroad soon after the accession of Mary Tudor. By family tradition the penniless exile Katherine gave birth to her son Peregrine in a church porch in Germany and he was given the unusual name to commemorate his parents’ dangerous wanderings.40
The Clintons’ acquisition of Tattershall, where his mother had reigned as duchess, must have touched a nerve with Lord Willoughby, even more so as an earlier Lady Willoughby de Eresby was a co-heiress of Ralph Cromwell and wrongly dispossessed of her share in his fortune. One may be confident that had matters been the other way round, the Earl of Lincoln would have launched an unrelenting campaign to reclaim a property he thought rightfully his.
As we shall see, Theodore’s sinister reputation preceded him to England. Lord Willoughby may well have been aware of it through his dealings with Prince Maurice, and certainly knew of the Italian’s martial talents; that he should put in a quiet word with Lincoln – a man then frantic to recruit suitable followers for his private war – seems to me a more probable scenario than any previously mooted. Indeed, Paleologus may well have been spying in the English interest around this time, with or without the Dutch leader’s knowledge, and it is under one or other of the aliases in the surviving payment records of the competing English intelligence networks operating in the Low Countries that we may brush against Theodore Paleologus without knowing it.
Prince Maurice exerted himself to stay on best terms with his Protestant allies and tipped off the English about at least one foreign plot against Elizabeth’s life. Having lost his father, William the Silent, at the hands of a spy-assassin, Maurice was protected by a well-oiled intelligence service of his own. As we have seen, Theodore in Maurice’s service had all the credentials to make a formidable agent, along with special gifts which would commend him as a messenger between the generals. Besides being a superb horseman and expert linguist, he was intelligent, educated, resourceful and one may surmise entirely unhindered by scruples. He had the courage for desperate work and the skill to extricate himself from dangerous situations. How else had he lived so long? And just as his familiarity with court life at Urbino gave him the airs and graces to move in the highest circles, he also possessed the common touch, as we can observe in his dealings with farmer’s lad John Smith and miller’s granddaughter Mary Balls. The long association with the Earl of Lincoln, a singularly quarrelsome man, tells us something not only of Theodore’s character but of his social skills.
In England the secret services established by Sir Francis Walsingham and the Cecils, along with the lesser known network inherited by Essex from his stepfather the Earl of Leicester, achieved a degree of sophistication unequalled elsewhere, though many of their guiding ideas had their origin in the Italian city states. It is striking how frequently the correspondence of spymasters of the time refers to the employment of Italian agents, many of them unnamed or under obvious aliases. One of Leicester’s best spies was an Italian whose aliases included Rocco Bonetti and Mr Rocke, and among Walsingham’s finest was Horatio Palavicino, a rich Italian merchant with a spy-ring of his own. But the great coup of Walsingham’s career was to place a spy operating under the memorable alias of Henry Fagot inside the French embassy in London, a move which led to the exposure of the Throckmorton plot to depose Elizabeth in the wake of a foreign invasion. Fagot’s true identity has been revealed in modern times as the Italian thinker and renegade priest Giordano Bruno, who was to be burnt at the stake in Rome in 1600.
However, Walsingham’s key papers vanished immediately after his death, probably into the hands of the Cecils; Essex burnt many of his in a few fateful hours of 8 February 1601, when he grasped his rebellion had failed. With them may have gone any documentary proof that Paleologus spied for England.
Lord Willoughby returned to England from his lengthy service abroad in 1598.41 We can not only place Paleologus in Lincoln’s household the following year, but thanks to the Smith connection we have clear evidence of friendly relations with the Willoughby family circle in 1600.
Willoughby himself had received his last royal appointment in 1599. This was the governorship of the border town of Berwick-on-Tweed and the wardenship of the East Marches. Though a popular idol, the peer seems to have been under something of a cloud at this time. The new office may appear insignificant compared with his previous high commands in the Netherlands and France, but he had to lobby hard to secure it. Earlier, in response to a letter from Queen Elizabeth hinting that he should stay around the court, Willoughby had retorted stiffly that ‘he was uncapable of serving her Majesty as a courtier; but as a soldier, every drop of blood in his veins was at her service against all her enemies’. To friends he was plainer, declaring he was ‘none of the reptilia that could crawl and cringe upon the ground’. So off he went to Berwick-on-Tweed, where he soon attracted the ire of the King of Scots and sparked an international incident.
In early summer 1599 an English Catholic intriguer named Edmund Ashfield obtained a border pass from Willoughby under false pretences. Once in Scotland he met up with King James on two occasions, advising him on how to press his claim to Elizabeth’s crown. Discovering he had been duped, the incensed governor ordered the seizure of Ashfield on Scottish soil. This sensational kidnap was carried out by Willoughby’s deputy and cousin, Sir John Guevara, and three unnamed assistants armed with rapiers and daggers. With the collusion of the English ambassador they contrived a meeting with Ashfield on the sands at Leith where they plied him with drugged wine – ‘which so bedulled his senses as he wist not what he did’ – and rushed him back to Berwick in the ambassador’s coach. It would be gratifying to identify Theodore as one of the ‘craftie gentilmen’ involved, perhaps on loan from Tattershall as a returned favour to Willoughby, but there is no
evidence of his participation in an escapade for which Paleologo the Bravo was ideally suited.
Furious that Ashfield could be snatched ‘violentlie out of the hart of our country’, James subjected the ambassador to house arrest and demanded the Englishman’s return, which Willoughby peremptorily refused. The controversy was still bubbling away in June 1601 – and Ashfield still a prisoner – when Lord Willoughby suddenly ‘took a great cold’ which proved fatal. He had suffered ill health for many years.
Willoughby and Guevara were also suspected of complicity in the mystery-shrouded Gowrie Conspiracy which rocked Scotland in August 1600. On the surface this was a wild plot against King James, but many believed it to be a plot by James against the Earl of Gowrie, a long-time enemy to whom the king owed a huge sum of money. The handsome young Gowrie was also the rumoured lover of James’s queen, Anne of Denmark. According to the king’s adherents, James was lured to the earl’s house in Perth and exposed to a chaotic attempted murder or kidnapping to avenge the execution of Gowrie’s father on trumped-up charges, while others claimed James had fabricated the attack to justify the bloody elimination of Gowrie which promptly followed.
Relations between England and Scotland were at a new low in the wake of the Ashfield incident, and one widely held contemporary theory had it that Gowrie had come to an understanding with Guevara that the abducted king would be taken off by sea on a ship owned by Lord Willoughby. The peer and Gowrie were known to be personal friends. The ever-suspicious James himself muttered darkly about a mysterious English ship which had been hovering off the coast at this time, refusing all communication. Much was made by the royal faction of Gowrie’s education at Padua, where he was said to have brooded on revenge for the wrongs done to his family while studying ‘the subtleties of Italian crime’.
