by John Hall
Disturbing the dead may be an almost universal taboo nowadays, yet few scruples were observed in earlier and, as one supposes, more god-fearing times. Accounts of coffins being opened out of curiosity are legion, and not even the royal dead at Westminster and Windsor have been safe from inquisitive antiquaries: on occasion a souvenir would be taken from the body, a ring or a lock of hair. Nor was this morbid interest limited to men. ‘The curiosity of some ladies’ caused the coffin of Queen Katherine Parr to be opened in the ruined chapel of Sudeley Castle in 1782, though such was their alarm at the sight and smell of the exposed body that they ordered its immediate reburial. Readers of Pepys will remember his vivid account of lifting up the mummy-like corpse of Queen Katherine de Valois, wife of Henry V, during a tour of the abbey: ‘This was my birthday, thirty-six years old, that I did kiss a Queene.’ How the ‘body-snatcher’ dean of Westminster uncovered the coffin of a son of Theodore Paleologus is told in the next chapter, followed by the story of the opening of the coffin of yet another son over 4,000 miles away in Barbados.
Hamilton Rogers in his history ruminates on how the remains of the great have always been rummaged over by irreverent hands – ‘the cunningly embalmed Egyptian potentate in his burial fortress of the great pyramid, – the Roman emperor in his grand mausoleum, – Greek hero in costly sarcophagus, – British chieftain in flint-piled barrow’ – and laments that Theodore has not been spared this outrage. However, he notes with satisfaction that the remarkable preservation of the body confirms ‘a physiognomy and stature eminently representative of his imperial descent’.
We can be reasonably confident that Theodore was surrounded by family members and close friends on his deathbed, as was customary at the time. The two daughters and at least the youngest son would be present. Who closed his eyes and composed his limbs immediately after death cannot be known, or who came to measure the body for its extra-large coffin. Until comparatively recently every village in England had someone ready to perform these tasks.
Considering the excellent state of Theodore’s body when it was exposed long afterwards, despite the damp ground on which Landulph stands, it seems very probable he was embalmed. This treatment could be pricey. From the beginning of the seventeenth century the medical profession in the guise of the barber-surgeons had petitioned against unqualified persons such as butchers and tailors trying to break their monopoly of ‘opening searing and imbalmeinge of the dead corpses’. And no wonder, for it could be a very lucrative business. Embalming King James in 1625 netted one barber-surgeon £50 – say £7,000 in today’s money – though attending to lesser persons would obviously command a smaller fee, especially in the provinces.
From what we know of Nicholas Lower, the old ways would have been observed as far as possible in the funeral rites. Family and friends would have been joined at Clifton Hall by the rector and parish clerk and the cortege would then set off for the church, the clerk leading the procession with a hand-bell, the priest following beside the coffin. Landulph’s leche bell wt his clapper, first recorded in church accounts in 1559, would have been tolled seventy-six times or thereabouts, once for every year of Theodore’s life. In this country area it is unlikely the coffin was shouldered because of the uneven ground, and the bearers would have carried the coffin on short poles at waist height. A line of hooded mourners led by male relatives brought up the rear of the procession; John Theodore, then aged twenty-five, would act as chief mourner if the eldest son was away at a foreign war; if John was absent also it would have been the sixteen-year-old Ferdinand. Mourners would usually carry a sprig of rosemary for remembrance to cast into the grave at end of the ceremony, an expedient custom in the case of burial in church as it helped to disguise unseemly odours.
Given Sir Nicholas’s predilections, it may be that a hatchment, a diamond-shaped board painted with the Paleologus coat-of-arms, was carried before the coffin for later display in the church. Hatchments had come into vogue in the early seventeenth century following the Dutch fashion, though few examples of this early date survive.
An indispensable feature of obsequies for the best sort of parishioner was the funeral sermon, usually costing about ten shillings, preached on an appropriate text such as ‘How are the mighty fallen’, a theme with particular resonance for a Paleologus. Theodore was of the last generation at whose funeral the Order of the Burial of the Dead remained as it had been in Elizabeth’s time, for in less than a decade the Puritans would abolish what they saw as the tainted ceremonial of popish superstition. Theodore’s son and namesake would be one of the very first whose burial was shorn of all ceremony, albeit in the grand setting of Westminster Abbey.
The Paleologus tomb brings many Greek visitors to Landulph, and the 2007 ceremony led by Archbishop Gregorios66 was not the first to be held in this Anglican church by an Orthodox priest. An earlier memorial service for Theodore was celebrated by a revered figure known as Archimandrite Barnabas, who since his death at the age of eighty in 1995 is referred to by the faithful as ‘of blessed memory’.
Orthodox, in any sense except in reference to the Eastern religion, is not a word that would readily spring to mind to describe Archimandrite Barnabas. The very image of a Greek priest with his bushy white beard and traditional black garb, Barnabas was in fact a Welshman born in 1915 as Ian Burton. In his twenties he was ordained in the Church of England but later converted to Catholicism before finding his true calling in Orthodoxy. On his ordination in 1960 he became the first Welsh Orthodox priest since the Great Schism of 1054. He went on to found small monasteries in Wales and Devon and revived pilgrimages to sites associated with Welsh and Cornish saints.67
To discover an imperial Byzantine connection with Landulph gave great joy to the archimandrite and he was the first Orthodox priest to celebrate a memorial service for Theodore Paleologus in the church. It was the first service of any kind to be conducted in his name since his funeral in 1636.
Notes
64 Various sensational accounts of Fludd and his secret order can be found on the internet.
65 That Sir Nicholas was a stickler on matters heraldic is demonstrated on his wife’s brass, where the impaled arms of Lower are carefully differenced by a mullet, or five-pointed star, the sign of a third son. The detail of this monument would have been supervised by the knight himself. By contrast his own brass by the same hand, completed after his death, omits this mark of cadency.
66 His title of Archbishop of Thyateira and Great Britain is explained at Appendix C.
67 The title archimandrite marks a superior abbot and is nowadays bestowed as a mark of great respect.
17
But when the planets
In evil mixture to disorder wander,
What plagues and what portents, what mutiny …
Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida.
Theodore II’s next appearance in the records is in 1631, the year of his mother’s death, when he came forward as a witness in a Chancery suit brought by the infamous turncoat Sir Richard Grenville, known as Skellum Grenville. This was the unworthy grandson and namesake of the great Elizabethan seaman Grenville of the Revenge. The court papers describe his friend as Theodore Palaeologus of Tavistock, gent, aged twenty-one, who gave evidence that he had been present on 1 April the previous year when Sir Richard paid over money to redeem some jewels pawned by his wife Dame Mary.
Like his father before him, Theodore II seems to have been magnetically attracted to the worst of humanity. Skellum Grenville, a veteran of the failed Cadiz and La Rochelle expeditions, had married the widowed heiress Mary Howard two years before the court case, only to discover that her fortune was held in trust and beyond his reach. The violent beatings he handed out, and his repeated but frustrated efforts to get his hands on her money, quickly led to their separation. The action involving Theodore was one of the couple’s many acrimonious milestones on the way to divorce.
Theodore deposed that he has known Grenville since 1623, and as he would have been fourteen
at the time this strongly suggests he had been taken into service at one of the households of the Grenville affinity. His father would almost certainly have known members of these inter-related West Country gentry families while fighting in the Netherlands, among them Arundells, Carews and Lowers, of whom we shall hear more presently. Skellum Grenville’s father had himself served in the Anglo-Dutch forces at the same time as Theodore I.
Soon after the Chancery hearing, Grenville was imprisoned following an action brought by his estranged wife, but he escaped from gaol in 1633 and fled to Germany. It was there he earned his nickname Skellum, said to derive from the German scheim, meaning scoundrel. He returned to England to join the army raised by King Charles against the Scots in 1640, and so met up again with his friend Theodore Paleologus, now aged thirty-one, who is found listed among the lieutenants who marched north under the command of the Earl of Northumberland.
In the footsteps of his father, Theodore II was now a professional soldier. He may have gained his first experience of warfare either as a mercenary in the renewed European wars, or like Skellum Grenville in one of the Duke of Buckingham’s naval expeditions. Their first taste of active service at home was best forgotten, however, as the move against Scotland ended in a humiliating flight before the Scottish army. Theodore is next heard of in an army list of the same year ‘after the Armies Retreat from Newcastle into Yorkshire’. This time his name is given as a lieutenant in the regiment of Sir Jacob Astley, who was to be an energetic royalist general in the coming Civil War. Like Theodore I, Astley was a Low Countries veteran who had served under the banner of Maurice of Nassau. This may possibly explain the son’s attachment to Astley’s force.
Soldiers were now deciding where their loyalty lay in the conflict between king and parliament. This was the parting of the ways between Theodore II and Grenville, as it was between Theodore and his brothers. In 1641 Skellum led royal troops against the king’s foes in Ireland and reaped further notoriety for the savage treatment meted out to his prisoners. Arrested by parliament on his return to England, he changed sides and was rewarded with a commission in the rebel army. He was sent to join the parliamentary forces and immediately deserted to King Charles at Oxford, revealing the enemy’s plans. He was denounced as a traitor by the Roundheads, who erected a gibbet in London on which was nailed a proclamation against Grenville: ‘Traitor, Rogue, Villain, and Skellum, incapable of all acquaintance and conversation with men of honesty and honour.’
In the meantime Theodore had thrown in his lot with the rebels. By June 1642 his name was on parliament’s Reformado List – a roll of officers whose merits entitled them to half pay even when unemployed – which seems a clear indication of previous experience abroad. Soon afterwards ‘Theo Paholigus’ was named a captain-lieutenant in a regiment of foot raised in Oxford by Oliver, Lord St John of Bletso. This regiment was based at Worcester on 23 October 1642 when the first major engagement of the war began at Edgehill, but Lord St John hurried off to take part in the battle with his troop of horse and sustained a fatal wound that same day. Whether Paleologus fought with him is unknown.
Facing the parliament’s forces as the king’s general-in-chief was the son and heir of Peregrine, Lord Willoughby. Robert Bertie, first encountered in these pages as the childhood friend of John Smith, was now a grizzled veteran of nearly sixty. He had been created Earl of Lindsey by Charles I, and when hostilities broke out he raised a regiment of infantry from his roll of Lincolnshire tenants. Here was yet another who had served in the Low Countries under Prince Maurice. Beside him at Edgehill fought his son Montagu, now bearing the courtesy title Lord Willoughby; this was the same Montagu Bertie who was the friend of John Smith. He had married the daughter of Francis Norreys, who accused Theodore I of being a serial murderer. Lindsey was shot in the thigh during the first stage of the battle and fell surrounded by Roundhead cavalry. Montagu surrendered to take care of his father but was unable to staunch the wound, and the earl died the following day after refusing a surgeon sent to him by the parliamentary commander.
Following Lord St John’s death the colonelcy of the regiment passed to Sir Thomas Essex, a little known figure. Theodore was named among his company commanders. The next thing we hear of him is on 9 May 1643 when a warrant was made out for payment to Theodore Paleologus of £50 arrears of pay, and only a year later he was dead and buried.
It has long been believed that Theodore II was killed at the second battle of Newbury in 1644. Among the authorities who state this is Peter Young, praised by the great C.V. Wedgwood as the leading military historian of the Civil War. Then serving under Sir Philip Stapleton and promoted to the rank of lieutenant colonel – meaning his monthly pay rose to £42 – Theodore is referred to by Brigadier Young as ‘of Landulph, Cornwall’, though we have seen it is unlikely he ever lived there. Young’s book on Edgehill names him among the slain or mortally wounded at Second Newbury.
The trouble is the dates do not fit. Second Newbury was fought on 27 October 1644 and according to the Westminster Abbey register Paleologus’s burial had taken place on 3 May. This date cannot seriously be questioned as records show that on the same day the House of Lords agreed with a decision of the Commons to pay arrears to Captain Paleologus, ‘lately deceased in the service of the Parliament’. A draft order was made out to pay £50 to Stapleton, presumably acting as Theodore’s executor. However, no will has been found to confirm this and Stapleton may have stepped in as his superior officer.
The historian Chris Scott, an authority on the Civil War battles, examined at my request the movements and engagements of Stapleton’s regiment in 1644 alongside the known facts surrounding Paleologus’s death, and has concluded that he probably died of camp fever during the preliminary stage of the protracted Siege of Oxford. Camp fever, also known as epidemic or louse-borne typhus, had arrived in Europe during the fifteenth century. It became a common cause of mortality during the Civil War due to the poor sanitation and standards of hygiene attendant on military life. An early account of the epidemic arriving during a siege speaks of fever accompanying the appearance of red spots over the arms and torso, the symptoms progressing to delirium, gangrenous sores and the stench of putrefying flesh. The parliamentary record of Theodore’s death shorn of comment seems to support Scott’s deduction of death due to disease as officers killed in action were generally lauded for their valour and dedication to the cause. If this is the case, it was a miserable end to Theodore II at the age of thirty-five.
The Siege of Oxford was actually three sieges staged over three years, between 1644 and 1646. During the first siege, two parliamentary armies attacked the city late in May. Their general, the third Earl of Essex – son of Elizabeth’s fallen favourite – was an indecisive and introverted commander who set off to war with his coffin carried before him. His assaults on Oxford proved ineffectual and by early June poor leadership and lack of cooperation between the Roundhead forces allowed the king to escape with the bulk of his army.
Sir Philip Stapleton was colonel of Essex’s Lifeguard and a close personal friend. A cavalry leader at Edgehill, he commanded the right wing of horse at the first battle of Newbury in 1643 when he reportedly discharged a pistol at point-blank into Prince Rupert’s face, only for the weapon to misfire. It is always possible that the story of Theodore’s death at Second Newbury arose from a mix-up between the two battles. However, the first action was in September 1643 and it seems unlikely he would succumb to wounds so long afterwards; in any case there is nothing to connect him with Stapleton at this earlier date.
Westminster Abbey had always been the most prized burial place in England because of its royal associations, an exclusivity confirmed by an order of Elizabeth I limiting interment within its walls to ‘those especially who shall have well and gravely served about our person, or otherwise about the business of our kingdom’. Its pre-eminence continued under the parliamentary regime and it is hard to imagine Theodore being buried in this English Valhalla at any other time.
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The Puritan-inspired Directory for the Publique Worship of God, published by parliament in the year of Theodore II’s death, introduced radical changes to funeral practices. To start with, it ruled that no minister need be present at the burial. The body was to be ‘immediately interred without ceremony’ though marks of respect were still to be observed ‘suitable to the rank of the deceased’. It is probable that Paleologus’s funeral took place by torchlight; the first nocturnal burials occurred late in Elizabeth’s reign and became increasingly fashionable with the accession of James. The new king himself lent his prestige to the trend by ordering the night-time reburial of his mother, Mary Queen of Scots.
A nocturnal funeral allowed the rigid laws governing traditional funerals to be flouted, for instance by enabling a widow to act as chief mourner rather than a senior male relation. A further advantage was that the ruinous expense of the gorgeous display expected of daylight obsequies could largely be avoided. A wartime funeral dictated extra constraints on expenditure, and the fact that the family were usually unable to attend was a clinching argument for dispensing with show. Then again, a busy senior officer like Sir Philip Stapleton who felt duty-bound to be present would find it easier to spare time at night, and the cortege would largely avoid the undignified sights and sounds of a populous city street in daytime.
