by John Hall
Ignorant of any further record of Ferdinand’s son, Bradfield and other historians of the day believed Theodore III had died in youth and as a consequence the whole St John’s property had devolved upon the widowed mother Rebecka. Canon Adams himself believed this for many years, writing in his guide to Landulph Church that Theodore died in 1680 and was buried in Barbados. Adams’s indefatigable friend Mr Shilstone discovered otherwise, unearthing a previously overlooked entry of Theodore’s marriage in the register of St Michael’s Church near Bridgetown on 14 October 1684. His bride was Martha Bradbury, daughter of Christopher Bradbury of St Michael’s.
Within a year Martha’s father was dead. By his will signed on 14 August 1685 and recorded a month later Theodore and Martha were left £20 to be laid on in plate on the birth of their first child. On a visit to St Michael’s Church I noted the tombstone of a Captain Christopher Bradbury in the porch, this time a genuine seventeenth-century monument. By tying these facts together Adams and Shilstone established that a Theodorus Palaeologey who was known to have been buried at Corunna in Spain – previously thought to be an unrelated individual of the same name – was in fact Theodore III, only son of the planter Ferdinand. This Theodore made a will on 1 August 1693, appointing as executor his wife Martha Paleologua.
Theodore III was a sailor serving on a ship called the Charles II in the reign of William and Mary. This much became clear. He is described in the Probate Act Book as ‘recently of Barbados, afterwards of Stepney’ and his stated rank of gentleman means he was almost certainly an officer. But his last known address was neighbouring Wapping, which we have heard the London historian John Stow call a ‘filthy strait passage’ inhabited by sailors’ victuallers. It was also the site of Execution Dock where pirates were hanged from a gibbet close to low-water mark and left dangling until submerged three times by the tide.
Theodore’s unfamiliar name gave trouble to the clerk who copied out the will as in addition to various spellings of Paleologus he renders his given name as Theodoxes in several places. Theodore authorises Martha to demand and receive ‘from the Right Honorable the Treasurer or Paymaster of their Majties Navy’ all such wages, pay, bounty money, prize money and all other sums of money which are due to him and to convey or let ‘all or any of my Messauges Lands and Tenements’. This suggests that Theodore was a man of some substance. The will, evidently made at sea, was witnessed by the ship’s commander, Charles Gibson, and three others, presumably officers. It was not proved until 15 March of the following year at London.
By some historians – and also, as will be seen in a later chapter, by writers of fiction – Theodore III has been presented as an officer of the Royal Navy. Canon Adams went part way to the truth by establishing that his name was absent from contemporary Admiralty records; nor was there an officer named Charles Gibson, nor indeed a Royal Navy vessel called the Charles II. Adams spent a fruitless four days in further searches of the Public Record Office before concluding that Theodore must have served on a hired ship, but never arrived at the reality. In fact Theodore proved himself a true chip off the old block: he was a buccaneer and very likely a slaver as well.
With his Barbados background and share in the family plantation, it is most probable he learned his trade as a seaman on a slave ship and left the sugar business in the hands of his mother and stepfather. We do not know his date of birth, but there is nearly a decade to account for between his marriage and his embarkation on the Charles II. The move to Stepney fits well with this premise as the Thames was a vital stage in the triangular trading system which carried cash crops from the New World to Europe, from there carried manufactured goods to West Africa, and from Africa transported slaves to the New World. In the case of Barbados this generally meant carrying sugar and molasses to London, whence the profits from the sale – often in the form of weapons and ammunition – went to African chiefs in exchange for slaves. Cheap Barbados rum was also used for barter. The slaves were then transported back to the starting place and the cycle was repeated. For a plantation business it made sense to be involved at each phase to maximise earnings.75 It was also a sensible precaution to guard against fraud and misappropriation by agents at any stage during a round journey of maybe eighteen months.
These were hellish voyages. To add to the unavoidable hazards of sea-faring at the time – gales and tornadoes, freezing cold and intolerable heat, rotten food and lack of water, rampant infectious diseases, pirates – the transportation of slaves added a new dimension of horror because of the grotesque overcrowding of the captives in the hold and the constant threat of revolt. A slaver needed an iron constitution to habituate himself to the cruelty of his trade and commonplace scenes such as dead slaves being used as bait for sharks, so the shark meat could feed the slaves still living. Theodore III had to be as much a stranger to our modern-day sensibilities as was his grandfather.
Following the suggestion of a leading historian of the Royal African Company, the enterprise set up by King Charles II which long monopolised the slave trade, it was possible to trace a slave ship called the Charles II. The only record I found of the vessel in the database of trans-Atlantic slave trade voyages was a tantalisingly brief report of its last known passage in 1704. Much of the information often given of such ships – tonnage, year of construction, number of guns, and so on – is absent, but it is confirmed as a property of the Royal African Company flying the British flag. The Charles II began its voyage from Barbados on 1 April 1704 and embarked 273 slaves at Cape Coast Castle in what is now Ghana. Cape Coast Castle, which changed hands several times in the wars between the English and Dutch, was one of the notorious prisons built to house enslaved natives, up to a thousand at a time. Sometime after its departure for Barbados on 28 July the Charles II is reported as captured though the captor is unspecified. A total of 236 slaves are recorded as disembarked, indicating a fairly average death rate on board during an Atlantic crossing. Whether the slaves were captured along with the ship or for some reason disembarked earlier is not clear. Pirates preyed on slave ships both in African waters and in the Caribbean and all but heavily armed vessels were at risk of seizure.
More often encountered in the trans-Atlantic archives from the 1660s is a slave ship named simply as the Charles, the property of the Company of Royal Adventurers which was the forerunner of the Royal African Company. This vessel regularly transported slaves from Africa to Barbados. For a voyage of 1665 we have more details of the vessel including its displacement of 130 tons and the captain’s name, Nicholas Pepperell, with a recorded landing at Barbados of 165 slaves out of the 238 embarked in West Africa. A ship of this size would typically mount six or eight guns. An added comment is ‘voyage completed as intended’. With its sister ship called the James, the Charles had less luck on another occasion when they were prevented from buying slaves on the Gold Coast by Dutch men-of-war.
Could the Charles and Charles II have been the same ship? This was the focus of my thoughts when a documentary reference to a Captain Charles Gibson caught my eye and I realised I might have wandered off in the wrong direction. The Charles II of our Theodore’s time turned out to be not a slaver but a fast, up-to-date and formidably armed warship, and one which was to play a sensational role in what is called the golden age of piracy. On board the Charles II as its recently promoted first mate was a Royal Navy veteran and former slaver called Henry Every, reputedly a Plymouth man. He was soon to find worldwide notoriety as the most successful buccaneer in history.
At this time England was allied to the old enemy Spain as a counter to the rising superpower France. Ambitious English investors commissioned a small expeditionary fleet of ships led by the forty-six gun Charles II – a warship named not after the dead English monarch but Carlos II, the king of Spain. The once mighty empire was now in sharp decline with its future prospects hampered by an unstable and prematurely senile monarch and a court riven by internal dissent. Destined to be the empire’s last Hapsburg monarch, Carlos II had already presided over the loss of much of
the Spanish Netherlands and of Portugal and the Portuguese colonies, and the vilest auto-da-fe of the Spanish Inquisition. But he still ruled over a domain of nearly five million square miles.
The English expedition was to have a letter of marque from Madrid – in effect, a licence to commit piracy against certain nationals. This would authorise the force to sail to the Spanish West Indies where it was to plunder French possessions, provide arms to Spanish residents and raise treasure from wrecked galleons. Headed by the prominent London merchant Sir James Houblon, the speculators promised excellent pay in advance, and indeed all monies due to the crews were paid up to 1 August 1693 – by a curious coincidence, the date Theodore Paleologus made his will. The exact date of Theodore’s death is unclear though we know it was either on the voyage out from England or when the fleet had reached ‘le Groyne’, the contemporary term for Corunna. He did not live to face the dilemma of either opposing or joining a memorable lawless escapade, the kind of challenge few of the Paleologi could have resisted and which his grandfather and namesake would surely have relished.
At anchor at Corunna, the idle crews of the English ships fretted as problems piled up one after another. Months went by but the promised Spanish document failed to arrive. As their money ran out, the crew of the Charles II petitioned Captain Gibson for another advance. The request was refused and rumours quickly spread among the increasingly desperate sailors that they had been tricked into slavery by the Spanish. Chief of the rumourmongers was the first mate Henry Every. Around 9 p.m. on 7 May 1694 a gang of about twenty-five conspirators, joined by men from another of the English ships called the James – again, an interesting coincidence – seized the Charles II. Captain Gibson was sick and confined to bed in his cabin, though by other accounts he was helplessly drunk: either way, the mutiny was bloodless. As darkness fell the captain of the James grasped that something was amiss and called across to the Charles II that men were deserting, whereupon Henry Every – unanimously elected the mutineers’ leader – made a run for the open sea under fire from the James. Once at a safe distance from land, Captain Gibson and all who refused to join the mutiny were put in a boat to row ashore.
Under Every’s command the Charles II, now renamed the Fancy, was the terror of the Indian Ocean for the next two years. Its most famous exploit was the plunder of a convoy of twenty-five ships of the Grand Mughal of India on pilgrimage to Mecca. Now the flagship of a small pirate squadron, the Fancy captured a treasure-laden galleon and its escort ship after hours of hand-to-hand fighting on deck. The loot was estimated by insurance assessors to be worth the astounding figure of £600,000 – the value then, not today’s equivalent – in gold and gems. It has been claimed to be the richest haul in the history of piracy. But the lasting ill-fame of the action rests on the horrific rape of the women on board. Among those violated was a close relation, possibly granddaughter, of the Grand Mughal himself, though later legend held she was a young princess who willingly joined Every and became his wife. Other women stabbed themselves or jumped overboard to thwart their attackers. The outrage posed such a serious threat to English trade with India that the English government put an unprecedented £500 bounty on Every’s head, a sum doubled by the East India Company.
Many of the pirate crew were later captured. Six were convicted of conspiring to steal the Charles II with piratical intent and on 25 November 1696 five of them were hanged at Execution Dock at Wapping, the last home of our Paleologus dynasty. John Sparkes, one of the condemned, was the only crew member to admit taking part in the rapes on board the Indian treasure-ship, repenting the ‘horrid barbarities he had committed, though only on the bodies of the heathen’.76 But Every himself was never run to earth. One story says he lived out a life of ease under an assumed name, another version says he was swindled out of his share of the loot and died in poverty close to his birthplace, by tradition Plymouth or one of its neighbouring villages.
The fate of the former Charles II is unknown, though it was last positively heard of in the Bahamas where the pirates tried urgently to dispose of the most incriminating piece of evidence of their criminal career before making their separate escapes. Though one account claims Every gave it to the governor of Nassau as a bribe, others say the vessel was lost after being deliberately driven onto rocks. Or could it have been the slave ship of that name, by some means sold on to the Royal African Company with the original name restored, only to fall victim to an act of piracy itself a few years later?
The sensational exploits of Henry Every inspired the publication of many semi-factual and fictional versions of his story over the following decades, among them Daniel Defoe’s The King of Pyrates. A highly popular play called The Successful Pyrate was performed at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane. Captain Every has featured in the majority of factual books on piracy ever printed. And as in the case of Theodore Paleologus, in modern times the captain has become a fantasy figure with ever more fanciful fictional forms of him appearing in novels, TV dramas and films. A sanitised Every was played by Guy Stockwell in the 1967 film The King’s Pirate and he has appeared in three episodes of Dr Who, in 1966 and twice in 2011. On the last occasion Captain Every was resurrected as a ‘space pirate’ who assisted the Doctor in his epic battles.
As a last word on Theodore III, it should be noted that 1683 was the turning point in the Ottomans’ centuries-long drive to conquer Europe. Their long march west, watched with foreboding by all our generations of Paleologi, ended in the failure of the Siege of Vienna. Young Theodore had the satisfaction of knowing that their empire suffered the rapid loss of much of the European territories they had overrun. Yet from the little that can be pieced together about him, one senses that the third Theodore saw himself as a colonial Englishman, a pragmatist, a pioneer of the new British Empire. He owed more to his Balls family than to any forebear who might have dreamed of returning to Constantinople.
At Canon Adams’s instigation, a researcher named Cregoe Nicholson searched the registers of St Dunstan, Stepney, in 1946 and found a record of a christening: 1693/4 January 24 Godscall daughter of Theodore Paleologus of upp. Wapping Gent: and of Martha uxor. 12 days old. Given the date of Theodore’s will in August the previous year it is almost certain the child was posthumous, though Theodore may well have known of his wife’s pregnancy before his death.
The unusual name Godscall has been the subject of much speculation over the years. Canon Adams believed it was a surname, probably derived from Martha’s Bradbury forebears, though no evidence to support this has been found. Many others have seen in it the seventeenth-century Puritans’ fondness for eccentric godly names such as Fear the Lord, From Above and Sorry for Sin, along with more durable choices like Faith and Charity. Yet there is no record of Puritan leanings among the Bradburys or on Ferdinand’s side of the Paleologus family. Or is the explanation the most obvious of all, that the baby was so sickly from birth that the mother feared her imminent death even at the christening and stoically accepted that God was calling her? The chances are the child was dead within hours or days, yet she was to be resurrected in the romantic imagination three centuries later.
I found nothing to contradict the traditional view that Godscall was the last representative of the English Paleologi, dying in infancy like so many children of the time. Despite the remarkable given name and surname which would surely leap out at anyone delving into London’s old records, nothing further has been unearthed of Godscall Paleologus. So the journey which began many centuries earlier in Constantinople, taking us to Renaissance Italy, to Shakespeare’s England and the newly settled tropical colony of Barbados, must come to a bathetic end in Wapping.
From this moment the English Paleologi will live on only in works of ever more elaborate fantasy. On the wilder shores of fiction they will inhabit alternative worlds: Theodore I will elope with Mary Balls and become the ancestor of the rightful, black-skinned queen of England; Theodore II will swop sides in the Civil War and die for king rather than Cromwell; the privateer-
cum-slaver Theodore III will be a dashing hero of the Royal Navy; one of the Paleologus brothers, unnamed, will be the masked executioner of Charles I. Even the dead baby Godscall will rise phoenix-like from the grave, a deathless empress in another dimension.
Notes
75 The captain of the Charles II may have played a similar role himself. The surname Gibson appears frequently in the Barbados archives: a Quaker family of that name were major plantation owners, though unpopular with contemporaries because of their efforts to Christianise their slaves. Whether Captain Gibson was of this clan I could not establish. The apparent contradiction of Quakers dealing in slaves seems not to have troubled the Society of Friends at the time. A Quaker slave ship was infamous for conditions on board even by contemporary standards, and on one voyage landed only twenty-two slaves alive in Barbados out of 250 embarked in Africa. The ensuing scandal was about the wasted profit rather than the extreme inhumanity entailed.
76 Grey, Charles, Pirates of the Eastern Seas (1618–1723), Sampson, Low, Marston, 1933.
20
I am fond of history, and am very well
content to take the false with the true.
Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey.
As precious little has been known of the true story of Theodore Paleologus and his posterity, novelists, playwrights and poets have allowed themselves carte blanche with the legend and thereby begot much weird and wonderful fiction. This rich vein of invention can be linked to the appearance of the original gothic novel, The Castle of Otranto, in 1765.Horace Walpole’s lurid romance set a fashion for supernatural tales of wicked nobles, exiled princes and droopy maidens, customarily opening on a dark stormy night and played out against a background of crumbling castles and yawning crypts illuminated by flashes of lighting. It seems fitting that the fearless, handsome young peasant who figures in this first book of the genre should be named Theodore and that in the final pages he is revealed as the rightful prince who will replace the tyrant of Otranto.
