An Elizabethan Assassin

by John Hall

  The Elizabethan and Jacobean period was indeed the golden age of fraud in pedigree-making, with many of the characters in this book, most notably the Berties and Cecils, paying the heralds to draw up fabulous family trees to disguise their standing as new men. Sir Nicholas Lower was relatively unambitious in tracing his ancestry to royalty; around this time the Heskeths of Lancashire ordered themselves an illuminated pedigree scroll detailing their descent from Adam and Eve.

  Canon Adams’s researches established the curious fact that Lady Lower was not only a first cousin of Sir Nicholas but a niece of his great-grandmother. Her family was far more important than his, her father being the Sir Henry Killigrew who served as Queen Elizabeth’s ambassador to Venice and Genoa, and whose name occurred in an earlier chapter as one of the Cornishmen wrongly credited with enticing Paleologus to England. Lady Lower’s mother was one of the four celebrated daughters of the humanist sage Sir Anthony Coke, and the girls’ marriages connected the relatively obscure Lowers with some of the great names of the time. Lady Lower’s sister Mildred married Lord Burghley and was the mother of Sir Robert Cecil; sister Anne married Sir Nicholas Bacon, becoming the mother of Sir Francis and the spy Anthony; a third sister Elizabeth married John Lord Russell, heir to the Earl of Bedford.

  The Coke girls were reputedly the best educated females in England, and if Lady Lower inherited anything of her mother’s love of scholarship she must have welcomed the company of Theodore Paleologus for his erudition and knowledge of Greek, as Sir Nicholas cherished him for his exalted lineage. And indeed, on an epitaph in the church composed by her husband, Lady Lower is praised as the equal of any of her ancestors ‘for true virtue, piety and learning’.

  Sir Nicholas would probably have been disappointed to know that the name Lower is remembered four centuries later only because of his brother William, and that its fame has nothing to do with the glories of lineage. The elder brother of Sir Nicholas, William Lower was a pioneer astronomer and close friend of Thomas Harriot. The owner of one the first telescopes in Britain, William described what was later known as Halley’s Comet long before Edmund Halley was born, sending Harriot a meticulous account of his observations in 1607. This was the same year it was seen by Johannes Kepler, astronomer to Emperor Rudolf II at Prague. It was not until 1705 that Halley recognised the periodicity of the comet that is known by his name. William Lower was also among the earliest observers of solar spots and the craters of the moon. Another famous scientist in the family was Richard Lower of Bodmin who carried out the first experimental blood transfusions on a human subject in 1666.

  Both Jago Arundell and Adams imagined Paleologus in contented old age, a respected, white-bearded scholar enjoying the generous hospitality of a barren, well-to-do couple. That Paleologus’s two daughters were soon invited to settle in with him burnishes this image of a comfortable retirement. Jago Arundell recorded that the old manor house of Clifton was still partly standing in his day, and showed clear signs of having been divided to accommodate two families.

  How did Paleologus see out his days? After our long investigation, our subject remains almost as elusive as ever and our knowledge of the inner man almost non-existent. To Sir Nicholas and Dame Elizabeth the live-in guest was not the multiple-murderer and apostate we have tracked over many years, but a scholar, paterfamilias and no doubt an earnestly practising Anglican: above all, this was a man who had brought the enchantment of royalty into their little corner of Cornwall.

  Perhaps as his life drew to a close Theodore took to brooding on his sins, like Calyphas in Marlowe’s Tamburlaine:

  I know, sir, what it is to kill a man;

  It works remorse of conscience in me.

  On the other hand, he may have had no conscience at all. Yet it is tempting to go along with the rosy image of Theodore in these final years at Landulph, a reformed character spinning airy glories of Constantinople for old Sir Nicholas, as he had done thirty years earlier for young John Smith. He had lived an extraordinary life, though one imagines the greater part of it was concealed from his hosts. Worldly success may have eluded him; he might be, in Sir Bernard Burke’s words, ‘unnoticed and altogether undistinguished’ to the outside world. But he had evaded countless perils since his youthful banishment and there were three healthy sons to carry on the bloodline. In this picture of his last years we may easily see him as resigned to the whims of fate and grateful for the modest comforts he has. And who could guess when another turn of Fortune’s wheel might allow his descendants to claim their birthright? That is, if we assume that Theodore himself actually believed in the imperial pedigree.

  Carew’s Survey of Cornwall laments the lack of resident noblemen in the county but finds solace in the abundant gentry – ‘and I make question whether any shire in England, of but equal quality, can muster a like number of fair coat-armours,’ the historian adds, quoting the old proverb that all Cornish gentlemen are cousins and praising the sociability of the class: ‘They converse familiarly together, and often visit one another. A gentleman and his wife will ride to make merry with his next neighbour, and after a day or twain these two couples go to a third, in which progress they increase like snowballs.’ Sir Nicholas served as sheriff of Cornwall in 1633, a post which further extended the circle of friends and relations he would visit or entertain at Clifton, eagerly showing off his imperial guest.

  We have seen that a Master William Lower served at Ostend but it is also worth noting that Richard Carew’s son John was one of a number of Cornish adventurers who had fought there from 1601, distinguishing himself by extraordinary fortitude when a cannonball took off his right hand. If, as we surmise, Theodore was present during the siege, John Carew may well have met up with him again in Cornwall, and indeed was possibly instrumental in introducing his old comrade-in-arms to the Lowers.

  Yet Landulph was far from being the idyllic spot which charms the visitor today. In the words of Carew, who was the squire of Antony House not many miles from Landulph, few counties were as plagued by the poor as Cornwall where ‘those vermin swarm in every corner’, though the historian is insistent that the majority are not native Cornish but Irish migrants, arriving daily by the shipload. ‘To the high offence of God and good order,’ rumbles Carew, ‘they maintain idleness, drunkenness, theft, lechery, blasphemy, atheism, and, in a word, all impiety’. The proximity of a magnet like Plymouth ensured that Landulph was not free of the attentions of these marauding beggars and thieves.

  The plague remained an ever-present threat. Plymouth had seen one of its worst outbreaks in 1626 when 2,000 died. Theodore was still living in town with Mary at this time, and an invitation to a village like Landulph must have been welcome. No other major epidemic struck the area during the next few years, though the plague raged in London almost continuously throughout 1636, Theodore’s last year of life, with well over 10,000 recorded victims.

  Landulph felt unsafe during these years for another reason, for Muslim raiders from North Africa had made themselves a dreadful menace to Devon and Cornwall. Admiralty records of Jacobean times list many hundreds of English ships captured by Barbary pirates with no fewer than twenty-seven vessels being taken off Plymouth alone in 1625, the first year of Charles’s reign. Crews and passengers were sold into slavery at Algiers, Tripoli or Tunis. Not content with preying on shipping, pirates would land at coastal villages in the hours of darkness and round up terrified men, women and children to sell in the slave markets.

  To Theodore it must have seemed as if the heathen who chased his ancestors from Constantinople would dog him to the ends of the earth. His life had been punctuated by the remorseless advances of the Ottomans through the outposts of Greek civilisation: Chios had been conquered in 1566; Malta had come within a hair’s breadth of falling in the Great Siege of 1565; Cyprus, evangelised in ad 45 by Paul and Barnabas, fell in 1571. That same year Crete, last bastion of Hellenism, was temporarily saved by the great Christian sea victory of Lepanto, but though the Ottoman fleet was annihilated t
he Christian allies failed to follow up with an attack on undefended Constantinople.

  Even easier than England for the pirates were targets in lands close to their lairs, especially Italy and Spain; in all, an estimated 85,000 European Christians were sold into white slavery during the hundred years beginning 1580. However, English captives had slim hopes of being ransomed, lacking the go-between services long offered by Catholic clergy. Yet there are numerous records of West Country authorities helping efforts to ransom prisoners, supporting their dependants, or giving alms to escapees. In 1607, for instance, the Cornish town of Liskeard gave a local man three shillings ‘towards the ransoming of his brother being taken by the Turks’ and the following year two shillings and sixpence to two sailors ‘which had there tongues cutt out of there heades’ when their ship was seized. Generous donations to the cause, supported by prayers, were offered by many churches.

  Things were so bad by 1625 that the West Country’s maritime trade virtually came to a halt. Fishermen and merchants refused to put to sea, prompting the Duke of Buckingham to dispatch a naval squadron to deal with the threat. Shamefully, the squadron took refuge in Falmouth harbour after a brief tussle with the raiders, ‘the sayd Pyrats being farre better saylers then our English shipps’. In a matter of days during August the Turks took at least twenty-five ships belonging to the town of Looe, captured Lundy Island and its entire population, snatched many inhabitants of Padstow, and seized sixty men, women and children seeking sanctuary in a church in Mount’s Bay. Buckingham’s abject failure to protect the English seas, not only by the lack of fighting ships but by the decay of coastal fortifications, fuelled the bitter resentment burning against the duke and, increasingly, the king himself.

  The level of piracy eased off for a while between 1627 and 1630, but the coast then faced danger from French men-of-war thanks to Buckingham’s foreign policy. Thereafter Turkish attacks resumed with a vengeance, however, the raids peaking in 1636, the year of Theodore’s death. Again, towns and churches throughout Cornwall responded generously to redeem captives, with Plymouth organising monthly collections. In the accounts of the mayor of Liskeard that year were more donations to unfortunates ‘spoiled’ by the Turks including another poor man minus his tongue.

  Pirates were not the only threat, as young able-bodied men – the breadwinners in most families – risked being taken by the press gang. Cornwall was the navy’s first target on the eve of the Cadiz expedition, and on Sir James Bagge’s orders 350 Cornishmen were levied in April and May 1625 and marched into Plymouth. The quest for men continued throughout the summer; in September, shortly before the fleet sailed, the Privy Council ordered a further 500 be impressed to replace those who had died, deserted or fallen sick while billeted in Plymouth. At one time, 10,000 snatched men were crammed into the port. The Cadiz impressments were furiously resented in Devon and Cornwall and there was stout opposition two years later when Buckingham demanded yet more men for his La Rochelle adventure. Bagge was then ordered to impress all sailors on board merchant ships in the West Country.

  The rector of Landulph at the time of Theodore’s death was the oddly named Bezaleel Burt – in the Book of Exodus, Bezaleel is the workman called by God to build the Ark of the Covenant – and it was presumably he who conducted the service. Burt had been incumbent at Landulph since 1624 when he succeeded William Hele, the replacement for the disgraced William Alabaster.

  Burial inside a church had always been expensive and was officially discouraged by this time, not only due to pressure of space but because of a growing concern for hygiene. As one bishop declared, bodies were no longer to be interred below the church floor ‘for that by their general burying there great infection doth ensue’. However, exception was to be made for ‘those of the best sort of the parish’.

  The date of death is given on Theodore’s brass as 21 January 1636, though by present reckoning this would be 1637. However, the Bishop of Exeter’s Transcripts record the date of burial as 20 October 1636. The discrepancy was first noted by Jago Arundell, but the Landulph register does not resolve the problem as entries between the years 1628 to 1648 are missing. Errors in bishops’ transcripts are not unknown, but Canon Adams believed the monument was erected some years after Theodore’s death when memories had grown hazy: Dame Elizabeth died in 1638, and Sir Nicholas may well have ordered her brass and Theodore’s at the same time. However, it is just as likely that these two monuments were commissioned along with one for himself as Sir Nicholas felt death approaching. As a widower with no children, he almost certainly ordered his own memorial, a supposition strengthened by the three brass plates being indistinguishable in terms of heraldic draughtsmanship, decorative elements and style of lettering. Each sets out the pedigree of the deceased to a degree unusual even in that ancestry-conscious age, and we have seen that the elderly knight’s passion was genealogy. Sir Nicholas died in 1655, and as this was nearly twenty years after Theodore’s burial it would not be surprising if the recollection of his date of death was faulty.65

  The Lower brasses are fixed side by side on the wall above the Clifton family pew and mounted so high that the inscriptions are difficult to read. Strangely, a large tomb chest also bearing the names of Sir Nicholas and Dame Elizabeth stands in the chancel below Theodore’s brass. A large and magnificent monument of black marble, this is also carved with the impaled arms of Lower and Killigrew. Why the couple should be commemorated twice is a mystery.

  A casual visitor might easily overlook the brass which has inspired the Paleologus legend. Measuring only twenty-one inches high by nineteen inches across, it is fixed to the vestry wall to the right of the altar and is thought to be the work of a London engraver, a good but not outstanding craftsman. The monument was first illustrated in Edwin Dunkin’s Monumental Brasses of Cornwall in 1882. Though of great interest, the coat-of-arms above the inscription throws up a number of problems. On the shield is the crowned and double-headed eagle of Byzantium but with its talons resting on two squat towers, supposedly representing the gates of Rome and Constantinople. What is not shown on Dunkin’s engraving, though clearly visible on the brass itself, is that the shield is in heraldic terms per fess, which means it is divided by a horizontal line to signify that the background is of two colours. There is no clue as to what these colours might be, or indeed the colour of the eagle: the imperial eagle was sometimes black and sometimes gold.

  Another puzzle is the small crescent at the base of the shield. In English heraldry this is the mark of difference for a second son; the difficulty is that such a mark often becomes hereditary, so its original purpose is lost. There is the added complication that in Italian heraldry the crescent has no such significance. My guess is that the crescent was not used by Theodore himself but added by order of his pedantic if misguided friend Sir Nicholas when he commissioned the monument. Either he had been told that Theodore was a second son, though we have no evidence of this, or he was deriving the arms from the ancestor Thomas the Despot, described on the brass as second brother to the last emperor.

  I can find no Italian record of the arms borne by Theodore’s ancestors in Pesaro. However, by chance I have seen a plainly related coat-of-arms in one of the remarkable painted churches of Cyprus which date from the Byzantine era. This is the tiny church of St George at Xylophagou, not far from Larnaca, where a recent cleaning of smoke-blackened grime from the fifteenth-century murals has revealed a similar shield. The blazon here is per pale gules and argent – that is, divided vertically red and silver – with a crowned double-headed eagle sable, or black. Instead of resting on towers, each of the eagle’s talons grasps a roundel: one is the gold disc or bezant, the other a roundel of red called a torteau, said to be a representation of the Sacred Host. The choice of red and white may be explained by the fact that the Paleologus emperors quartered the cross of St George with the family arms on their banner, so we might surmise these were the colours of Theodore’s shield.

  The leading authorities on Cyprus’s pai
nted churches, Andreas and Judith Stylianou, believe the Xylophagou arms are of the noble donor or benefactor of St George’s, one of the Paleologus family connected with Queen Helena Paleologina, a niece of Constantine XI who married a Latin ruler of Cyprus. The last of this Cypriot line, a Demetri Paleologo, was killed during the Turkish conquest of the island in 1571.

  We can catch something of the veneration of ancient families that animates people like Nicholas Lower in the awe-struck tone of the Victorian historian Hamilton Rogers, who ends his book The Strife of the Roses and Days of the Tudors with a chapter on the Paleologus monument. After a wordy description of how a casual visitor might stroll around Landulph Church, Rogers goes on:

  Now stay thy foot, and hearken! For we are standing not on princely, nay, nor royal, but even over Imperial dust. Give thy thoughts wing, from these leaden skies and mist-hung coasts, – nor stay them until they reach the sunny shores of the Bosphorus and the Golden Horn, the classic precincts and immortal traditions of that superlatively beautiful city, and to the illustrious dynasty that erstwhile ruled her … then learn that a direct descendant of this distinguished race, an exile from his native clime, and almost an outcast on the face of the earth, found his last refuge in this life, under a friendly roof nearby, and lies at rest, – not in marble sarcophagus under a vaulted dome near the home of his royal ancestors, – but, equally well, beneath the simple pavement of this rustic sanctuary.

  The burial of Theodore was not his last appearance. In his lecture to the Society of Antiquaries, Jago Arundell described how about twenty years previously – that is, about 1795 – the vault below the Paleologus brass was opened: ‘The coffin of Paleologus was seen, a single oak coffin; and curiosity prompting to lift the lid, the body of Paleologus was discovered, and in so perfect a state, as to ascertain him to have been in stature much above the common height, his countenance oval in form, much lengthened, and strongly marked by an aquiline nose, and a very white beard reaching low on the breast.’