by John Hall
It is at least true that Willoughby had a ship built at Berwick, a 140-tonner armed with sixteen cannon, insisting to Sir Robert Cecil that the coast needed protection from Dunkirk pirates; indeed, the peer was on board the vessel when he died, worn out by his long years in Elizabeth’s service. He was perhaps fortunate not to live to face James’s wrath on his elevation to the English throne, or see the royal favours heaped on Edmund Ashfield.
There is another Willoughby link which invites a tantalising question: did Paleologus know Emilia Bassano, the woman most frequently identified as Shakespeare’s Dark Lady? The orphan of an Italian court musician, probably of Jewish blood, Emilia was accepted at the age of seven into the household of Lord Willoughby’s sister Susan, Dowager Countess of Kent, a generous patroness who ensured the child was given a humanist education and taught Latin. Emilia has been called England’s first feminist poet; her collected works entitled Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum – Hail God, King of the Jews – was dedicated to Susan Bertie as ‘the Mistris of my youth, the noble guide of my ungovern’d dayes’. Susan was also her entrée to court where her sultry good looks left many nobles smitten and her playing of the virginals was greatly admired by Queen Elizabeth, herself an accomplished performer.
At eighteen Emilia became the mistress of the queen’s cousin Lord Hunsdon, forty-five years her senior and the patron of Shakespeare’s company of actors. She was married off to an elderly cousin when she fell pregnant. Emilia is generally recognised as the most convincing contender to be the Dark Lady of the sonnets. Paleologus would have had opportunities to meet her through his friendship with the Berties and might very well have encountered her in London during his early days in the Earl of Lincoln’s employ. From around 1597 Emilia regularly consulted the notorious astrologer and court intriguer Dr Simon Forman, seeking magical help to become ‘a lady of title’. A compulsive womaniser, Forman kept a coded diary, deciphered only recently, which chronicles his efforts to seduce the teasing beauty, who constantly led him on only to refuse him at the last moment. Their on-off liaison continued until at least 1600 when the astrologer was still failing to have his way with her. During these years Emilia was living at Longditch, Westminster, which Stow describes in his Survey of London as leading directly into Canon Row. Here was the ‘fair house built by Henry Clinton, earl of Lincoln’.42
This begs the question: did Theodore know Shakespeare? The earl was regularly in London entangled in his legal and business affairs and attempting, however unsuccessfully, to curry favour at court. His gentleman rider would have escorted him on many occasions at places frequented by Shakespeare and the likes of Webster and Jonson; Paleologus may well have frequented the theatre. London at this time had a population of 200,000, hardly more than half the size of present-day Barnsley. Inside their select milieu within this city, it is difficult to believe the assassin and the dramatist did not come across one another. And it seems more likely Theodore caught the eye of Shakespeare than the other way round: the exotic, gigantic Paleologus, henchman of the infamous Earl of Lincoln, source of endless rumour and speculation.
Notes
39 Parry, C.H., A Memoir of Pereguine Bertie, Eleventh Lord Willoughby De Eresby, Murray, 1838.
40 Willoughby family legend may exaggerate the privations of the duchess and Mr Bertie in exile. The couple left England in 1555 with a considerable number of servants and retainers including a fool and, by a curious coincidence, ‘a Greek rider of horses’.
41 John Dowland’s My Lord Willoughby’s Welcome Home, with a setting by William Byrd, remains one of the most frequently played compositions of the Elizabethan age. Among modern recordings for lute or keyboard instrument is a version by the pop singer Sting.
42 Stow, John, Survey of London, reprint of 2009, The History Press.
8
Above all else, be armed.
Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince.
Paleologus’s curious dalliance with the young John Smith must have come as a welcome respite from the domestic dramas – his own and his patron’s – that engulfed Tattershall in 1600. The future Virginia pioneer was born in 1580, the son of a tenant farmer called George Smith, in the Lincolnshire village of Willoughby-by-Alford. The Willoughbys took their name from the manor house there. In his will of 1596 George Smith left ‘the best of my two yeare old colts’ to Peregrine, Lord Willoughby, ‘under whome I have many years lived as his poore tenant’. The dying man exhorted his son and heir ‘to honoure and love my foresaid good Lord Willoughbie during his lyfe’.
There was another Willoughby connection. A Nicholas Smith, George’s cousin, was the owner of a small estate near Louth who considerably enhanced his status by marrying his daughter to Francis Guevara, a member of the family with close associations with Lord Willoughby. We have seen that the peer’s deputy warden at Berwick was the intrigue-loving Sir John Guevara, while his private secretary was one Antonio Guevara. The pair descended from a Spanish mercenary who had converted to Anglicanism and settled locally. Nicholas Smith’s brother was headmaster of the grammar school at Louth attended by John Smith, and his education there – an unusual privilege for a yeoman’s son – was surely down to this link. Smith had the good fortune to be brought up with the peer’s two sons and indeed at one time accompanied them on a visit to France.
In The True Travels, one of the earliest autobiographical works in the English language, Smith claims to have served during his late teens with the English forces in the Low Countries, returning home to Lincolnshire in 1600. Writing of himself in the third person, Smith admits he soon tired of the company of the locals and took himself off to live as a recluse in ‘a little woody pasture a good way from any towne, environed with many hundred acres of other woods: Here by a faire brook he built a Pavilion of boughs’. There was much wonder at his hermit-like ways, and he goes on to describe how he was then befriended by ‘Seignior Thaedora Polalaga, Rider to Henry Earle of Lincolne, an excellent Horse-man and a noble Italian gentleman’. Friends of Smith, surely the Willoughbys, had persuaded Theodore to ‘insinuate into his woodish acquaintances, whose Languages and good discourse, and exercise of riding, drew him to stay with him at Tattershall’. There is a possibility that the pair first met in the Netherlands, but if so Smith fails to mention the fact.
The True Travels tells us that among the books studied in Smith’s rustic retreat were ‘Machiavill’s Art of War and Marcus Aurelius’. No English edition of The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius had appeared at this time and Smith almost certainly means a work called The Dial of Princes, which includes a selection of the Roman emperor’s thoughts. Originally published in Spanish in 1529 by the Hapsburg courtier Don Antonio Guevera, this had recently been translated into English by the author’s kinsman and namesake, Lord Willoughby’s secretary. So it is more than likely that Smith’s copy came from the well-stocked library at Grimsthorpe Castle.
Biographers of Smith have always been beguiled by the connection with the imperial scion. In John Smith, Gentleman Adventurer, C.H. Forbes-Lindsay vividly imagines the odd couple in their ‘woodish acquaintances’, with Paleologus partaking heartily of Smith’s offering of a venison pasty, ‘the contents of which he strongly suspected to have been poached from the Earl’s preserves’. The hermit is enticed to Tattershall Castle by ‘the reputation of the extensive stable of fine horses, the assortment of various arms and the tilt-yard’. Having heard the earl was eccentric and hard to please, Smith is surprised to find him ‘a very pleasant gentleman who bade him make himself as much at home in the castle as though he owned it’.
This hardly sounds like the Lord Lincoln we know, and I have found no contemporary evidence of this genial and hospitable side of the man apart from his friendship with the Willoughbys and a possible fondness for William Balls and his daughter. However, all authorities on John Smith agree it was during this stay at Tattershall that Paleologus honed Smith into a formidable warrior – ‘entering zealously into the instruction of the young man, declaring that he ha
d never before had so apt a pupil’, as one writer puts it. But Smith himself records that ‘long these pleasures could not content him’, and Forbes-Lindsay describes him bidding adieu to ‘his patron the Earl, and his friend the master of horse’, anxious to test his new skills on the battlefield.43
One of the most respected American biographers, Philip L. Barbour, says that it was during the Tattershall interlude when his new mentor ‘filled John Smith’s fancies with further adventurous notions’, inspiring him to fight those legendary monsters, the Ottomans:
A hundred and fifty years of history were swept away by the voice of one of the Emperor’s own family. And the maturing farmer-boy from Lincolnshire both lamented and repented, as he put it, having seen so many Christians slaughter one another in Europe [meaning the Netherlands] while the heathen Turks roamed at will in the East.44
In another American biography, Paleologus is credited with ‘igniting the spirit of the Crusaders’45 in Smith. The colonist himself, in his later work the General Historie of Virginia, writes of his youthful brooding on ‘the miserable ruine of Constantinople’ and of his desire to ‘trie his fortune against the Turkes’.
Smith’s quest took him to Rome where he joined the regiment of a Protestant noble in the service of Emperor Rudolf II. Since the fall of Constantinople the Turks had come close to mastery in the Mediterranean and conquered ever greater tracts of Eastern Europe and the Balkans. In response successive Hapsburg emperors had sought to stitch together a coalition of Christian powers to repel new incursions and reclaim former imperial lands. Smith’s regiment was destined for Transylvania, which with much of Hungary had been under the Ottoman flag for generations. Transylvania was then the focus of the Turks’ relentless drive towards Vienna.
The horrors of war pictured by Breughel and Bosch were no fantasy in war-torn Western Europe, from the Low Countries where English troops fought alongside Dutch rebels against the Spanish occupiers, to repeated scenes of slaughter in Ireland.
But Hungary was worse. English travellers of the time recorded the regular sight by the roadside of rows of impaled corpses, a favourite atrocity in the region since the days of Vlad the Impaler. Christian victories over the Turks were celebrated by soldiers playing bowls with severed Turkish heads, while Turkish victors would make merry by skinning their captives alive.
But the Hungarians standing against them were hopelessly divided into factions – Catholic against Protestant, Lutheran against Calvinist – any of which might temporarily side with the Muslims to spite a rival Christian interest. The country’s woes were compounded by a constant jockeying for supremacy among warlords notorious for their violence, treachery and wanton cruelty. With the land still in the grip of feudalism, the nobility had the power of life and death over common folk who were also at the mercy of Turkish invaders, undisciplined imperial troops and rapacious private armies. Into this almighty chaos rode young John Smith, farmer’s son from Lincolnshire.
There were wars aplenty closer to home for the glory-seeking Englishman. Smith could have taken his pick of Holland, France or Ireland, or signed up for daring adventures by land and sea with the likes of Walter Raleigh and Essex. The compelling reason behind his choice was Theodore Paleologus’s tales of the unending struggle between Christendom and Islam. Smith was not alone in venturing so far, however, as a number of members of Raleigh’s West Country circle also fought there.
Smith first saw action when his regiment helped break a Turkish siege of the city of Lower Limbach. According to his autobiography, the young Englishman distinguished himself from the outset. He happened to have met the city’s governor earlier in his travels and the pair had discussed Machiavelli’s reflections on warfare as studied by Smith and Paleologus in their rustic retreat. Realising that a method of signalling with torches described by Machiavelli would be recognised by the besieged governor, Smith followed up with a night attack which, reinforced by an armed sally out of the city, forced a Turkish withdrawal. The success of the stratagem led to the elevation to the rank of captain by which John Smith has since been known to history.
By 1603 Smith’s regiment was attached to the army of the richest and most powerful warlord of Transylvania. Prince Sigismund Bathory, temporarily acknowledged as the Christian leader in the war, headed a family as dysfunctional, cruel and devious as the Paleologi or Borgias. Described by a contemporary writer as unpredictable as April weather, Sigismund was forced to abdicate four times but three times fought his way back to power. Rumoured to be homosexual or impotent, his inability to consummate his marriage to a Hapsburg princess was officially attributed by the Vatican to witchcraft. Other Bathory princes were notorious for mass murder, deviant lust, torture and cannibalism.
The women of the family were a spectacularly depraved lot. Sigismund’s niece was the infamous Countess Elisabeth Bathory who enjoys new celebrity in our time as queen of the cinema’s lesbian vampire genre. At the time of John Smith’s arrival in the country the countess had recently embarked on the murderous career in which she allegedly bathed in the blood of 600 virgins in an effort to preserve her beauty. If we trace Smith’s perambulations between 1601 and 1603, it seems certain that on at least two occasions he would have cantered below the brooding towers of Cachtice, Countess Elisabeth’s fortress in the White Carpathians. It was here she would be incarcerated for life in 1611 when convicted of murder, sorcery and high treason. Nor was Elisabeth the only Bathory female to bring new scandal on the princely name. Her aunt Klara entered the history books as a witch, husband-killer and insatiable bisexual adventuress; her niece Anna narrowly escaped the stake when tried for necromancy, infanticide and incest.
The most sensational exploit described in The True Travels came in the spring of 1603 when Smith’s regiment joined imperial troops laying siege to an Ottoman stronghold. On three occasions in a single day Smith accepted challenges to mortal combat by a Turkish champion from the city. Duels of this kind were known as monomachies, as mentioned by Robert Burton on the opening page of this book. In each clash the young Englishman emerged the unlikely victor, beheading his fallen adversary to the joyful acclaim of the watching Christian army.
Smith’s biographers agree that the superlative martial skills displayed that day were taught by Theodore Paleologus. In the first contest Smith killed the Turk with a well-aimed lance; in the second he unhorsed his opponent with a pistol shot and finished him off with the sword; in the third Smith was having the worst of the encounter when he managed to slip the tip of his falchion into a chink in the Turk’s armour. The three fights are vividly illustrated by engravings in the 1630 edition of The True Travels, with each pair of steel-clad combatants identified by cross and crescent.
Delighted by the Englishman’s heroics, Prince Sigismund showered him with rewards. To the son of the ‘poore tenant’ of Willoughby-by-Alford the most prized of these was the grant of a coat of arms, the sign of a gentleman. The principal charges on the Smith shield are three severed Turks’ heads, and while his companions-in-arms recognised these as marking his great feat, Smith himself must have revelled in the knowledge that a Saracen’s head was the ancient crest of Willoughby de Eresby. Letters patent later issued by Sigismund were submitted to the College of Arms in London and accepted as authentic by Sir William Segar, Garter King of Arms.
Smith’s fortunes turned with his next battle. Wounded and taken prisoner, he was sold as a slave to an Ottoman pasha, taken in chains to Constantinople and there presented to the pasha’s Greek mistress. It was not the entry into the golden city he had pictured in pipe-dreams with Theodore Paleologus. Smith being Smith, however, he soon managed to stage a daring escape from the domain of the Turk. The Greek mistress fell in love with the English stranger and helped him make his way home to England via Russia.
How large a pinch of salt should be taken with this colourful narrative has long enlivened scholarly debate. Within twenty years of the colonist’s death, Thomas Fuller’s brief life of Smith in his History of the Wo
rthies of England suggested that the ‘perils, preservations, dangers, deliverancies’ described in his books ‘seem to most men above belief, to some beyond truth’. Generations of historians tended to view the captain as a braggart and liar, yet recent research has uncovered evidence which tends to support even the more outlandish tales in The True Travels, helping to reinstate the colonist as an American hero. Barbour, perhaps his most distinguished biographer, points out that despite every effort of the detractors nothing John Smith wrote has ever been proved a lie. Shall we be able to say as much of Theodore Paleologus?
Notes
43 A discussion of contemporary jousting and the changing face of warfare is at Appendix A.
44 Barbour, Philip L., The Three Worlds of Captain John Smith.
45 Captain John Smith by Dorothy and Thomas Hoobler, John Wiley and Sons, New Jersey, 2006.
9
A wretched soul, bruised with adversity.
Shakespeare, The Rape of Lucrece.
No character in this story is more pitiable that Lincoln’s long-suffering second countess, the former Mistress Norreys. High rank had brought her nothing but misery, and any pretence of affection or common courtesy from her husband had ceased with the collapse of his specious claims to the Weston-on-the-Green estate. Now, in 1600, confined to Tattershall Castle with Paleologus as her keeper, she stood in fear of her life.
Sir Robert Cecil was now the power behind the throne, and desperate friends and relations of the lady bombarded him with letters begging him to intervene. Writing on 14 May, Francis Norreys, the countess’s twenty-one-year-old son by her previous marriage, reminds Mr Secretary of an earlier promise to protect Lady Lincoln, either by petitioning the queen or confronting the earl himself. The countess ‘exceedingly fears to exasperate the rancour of his malice towards her,’ says Norreys, ‘because she has resolved, how vilely so ever he uses her, to live with him for ever, in respect of the tenderness she bears to the children she has by him whom he threatens to abandon if she makes any means to depart his house’.46
