An Elizabethan Assassin

by John Hall

  Works of this sort were famously ridiculed in Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, published in 1818, in which the ingénue Catherine Morland declares she would like to spend her whole life reading The Mysteries of Udolpho, an extravagantly plotted tale of 1794 by Mrs Radcliffe, queen of the gothic genre. As a guest at Northanger Abbey, Catherine’s overactive imagination allows her to mistake a washing-list for an ancient document bearing precious secrets and to suspect her blameless host of murdering his wife. As we have seen, the histrionic style of Nathan Drake’s ballad Mary of Hadleigh follows the pattern popularised by Walpole and Mrs Radcliffe, as illustrated in these last lines describing William Balls’s discovery of his daughter at the Paleologus tomb in Cornwall:

  Groans, as if life its inmost seat forsook,

  At length escap’d the pilgrim’s tortur’d breast;

  And Mary, rising, turn’d with ghastly look,

  ‘My father!’ shriek’d, and instant sank to rest!

  Near Falmouth lies a village called Constantine, though historians derive the name from a petty king of ancient Cornwall rather than Constantine the Great or the Paleologus line. However, Constantine is the alias adopted by a race of Cornish squires descending from Theodore of Landulph in a novel by the prolific Edwardian writer Sir Arthur Quiller Couch, commonly known as ‘Q’. His novel Sir John Constantine, published in 1906, purports to be a memoir penned in 1756 by Sir John’s son, Prosper Paleologus Constantine, the manuscript having been discovered and edited by ‘Q’. The farrago of a plot concerns the Cornish knight’s colourful adventures abroad which include rescuing a beautiful princess and being held hostage by Corsican brigands. The Constantines are introduced as impoverished gentry living in a wing of their once-great mansion, ‘with its portraits and tapestries, cases of books, and stands of antique arms’. Sir John stands six feet five inches tall and has an aquiline nose, hollow cheeks and shiny white hair, an appearance clearly based on Jago Arundell’s description of Theodore I’s marvellously preserved corpse.

  ‘Q’ was captivated by the Paleologus legend. An earlier novella of his, The Mystery of Joseph Laquedem, dates from 1900 and seems to be the first work of fiction to add paranormal or uncanny elements to the story. Arguably the weirdest tale of all, it borrows heavily from the mythology of the Flying Dutchman and the Wandering Jew. It takes the form of a letter written during the Napoleonic Wars by a scholarly vicar, a figure clearly based on the historical Jago Arundell. A mysterious Jewish stranger appears in a Cornish village and becomes the lover of a beautiful imbecile called Julie Constantine, supposedly the daughter of a local labourer but in fact the descendant of Theodore of Landulph. The clergyman shows the stranger a brass plaque bearing the Paleologus coat of arms and an ancient fresco of the Crucifixion, both newly discovered under whitewash in his church. The Jew identifies a figure on the fresco as Joseph Kartophilius, the legendary servant of Pontius Pilate who mocked Christ on the road to Calvary and was doomed to go on living until the Second Coming. The stranger then reveals himself as none other than Kartophilius and explains that only Julie – now in the latest of many reincarnations over centuries – can save him from everlasting life. Possibly the story’s most risible line begins: ‘When she was a princess of Rome and I a Christian Jew led forth to the lions…’

  A play performed during the First World War, The Emperor’s Ring, added a topical twist to the Paleologus story. The central theme is the familiar one of a delegation of foreign dignities descending on a humble cottage in Landulph to bend the knee before Theodore’s living descendant, identified here as an aged miner called Simon Paleol. The visitors are envoys of a group of Balkan states rather than Greek freedom fighters, though they too wish to persuade the heir to lead them against the old foe the Ottoman Empire, now the ally of the Kaiser. Their hopes are dashed when a War Office telegram arrives announcing the death in the trenches of the miner’s only son. Appropriately for its vintage, there are many grandstanding speeches from Paleol and patriotic assertions of his family’s Englishness. ‘He died, like many a Paleol afore him, fightin’ for his King an’ country,’ says the old man brokenly on reading the telegram, tears trickling down his weather-beaten cheeks. In the final scene Paleol scorns every blandishment of his would-be subjects and bawls: ‘Make me desert King Jarge an’ my country in wartime, would ‘ee? Turn me into a furrin pagan, would ‘ee?’ With that he seizes Theodore’s signet ring, the priceless heirloom kept in a teapot on the dresser, and rushing outside flings it far into the Tamar.

  The author, William Price Drury, was a high-volume playwright and novelist who enjoyed a distinguished wartime career in the Royal Marines, and it must have been during his time in Plymouth as garrison intelligence officer that he first picked up local folk tales about living descendants of Paleologus. He later settled in the area and in 1929 became mayor of Saltash, the closest town to Landulph. The Emperor’s Ring play was later reworked for Drury’s collection of short stories, published in 1919 with the title All the King’s Men. Described in the story is the opening of Theodore’s coffin as recorded by Jago Arundell, though with the added refinement of the body instantly crumbling to dust like Christopher Lee in the film Dracula. I have found no record of where or when the stage play was performed, though the author himself referred to its production during the war years.

  Drury has two modest claims to fame. According to Admiralty records from his time in Devon, he was the first official ever to report sightings of UFOs. He is also said to have been the first writer to use the expression ‘Tell it to the Marines’ – generally assumed to be an Americanism – as the derisive response to an unlikely tale.

  From Walpole and Mrs Radcliffe the gothic imagination moved on to works like Frankenstein, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Dracula, eventually giving birth to the Magic Realism genre. The sight of Ferdinand Paleologus’s tomb in Barbados had a profound effect on the Cuban novelist and essayist Alejo Carpentier, generally recognised as the inventor of Magic Realism, a term encompassing stories in which a character breaks the rules of the real world. Characteristically, events in a magic realism novel go beyond the confines of the rational or natural, drawing on fable or folklore while retaining a down-to-earth or mundane style. Writers in English associated with magic realism include Angela Carter and Salman Rushdie, but the school originated and remains strongest in Latin America. One critic has defined the genre as ‘what happens when a highly detailed, realistic setting is invaded by something too strange to believe.’77

  Carpentier has written of coming across Ferdinand’s gravestone unexpectedly on a visit to St John’s and reflecting that if the last descendant of the Byzantine emperors could end up as a Church of England vestryman buried in the Caribbean, life was a good deal odder than people realised. Carpentier went on to coin the term lo real maravilloso, the marvellous reality, in a novel of 1949. This was several years before the expression first appeared in English. (I like to think that if someone had informed the Cuban intellectual that the quaint seventeenth-century tombstone that so impressed him was actually put up when he was two years old, he might have decided that life could be a sight queerer than even he imagined.)

  In recent years the Paleologus story is repeatedly conflated with legends surrounding the Knights Templar, Holy Grail, Rosicrucian Order, the Day of Judgement and the hidden bloodline of Christ theories, while another of its recurring themes – the exiled scion of a deposed dynasty who struggles to recover his rights – has firmly taken root in modern fantasy epics set in fictional worlds. Escapist entertainment of this sort includes Game of Thrones. Yet the apocalyptic nature of many of the themes we find in Paleologus fiction may have a deeper source in the psyche.

  Robert Goddard’s Days without Number, published in 2003, is a thriller with supernatural overlays. Set in present-day East Cornwall and Italy with excursions to Tintagel Castle and the Rosslyn Chapel – locations with strong magical associations – its chief characters belong to a Cornish family of Paleologus descended from Theodore I w
ho battle against assorted Bond-style villains. Car and speedboat chases, murders and seductions punctuate a search for a lost stained glass window which bears a cryptic inscription concealing the date of the Second Coming. The secret has been confided to James, brother of Jesus, and preserved by the Templars through the ages. In an end-piece to the book, the scene shifts from the present to the time of the Civil War in Cornwall. With the approach of a Roundhead army bent on wholesale destruction, church stalwarts set about dismantling the precious window to bury it under the Paleologus homestead.

  A modern fantasy and science fiction author, M. John Harrison, resurrects various members of the Paleologus family in a 1992 novel called The Course of the Heart. This comes close to being a contemporary version of Quiller Couch’s novella, mingling a plot about a group of present-day Cambridge students who are affected by a magical experiment gone wrong with the chronicles of a mysterious other world glimpsed in an epileptic woman’s visions, the time and location constantly shifting. The offspring of Theodore are a garbled form of the family we know but are confusingly introduced with different names. Thus it is an Andrew who serves the House of Orange in 1600, ‘perhaps as a soldier of fortune, perhaps as a diplomat or spy’, but who changes his name to John when employed by the Earl of Lincoln.

  Another son, called Constantine instead of Ferdinand, returns to England from his pineapple plantation in Barbados and fathers a daughter called Godscall, born in the year of the Great Fire of London. ‘Whatever happened to her,’ writes Harrison, ‘she carried in her bones the cup, the map, the mirror – the real heritage of the Empress and the real Clue to the Heart.’ The little girl we saw dying in infancy in Wapping has another-worldly existence here as a deathless armour-clad empress. The visionary epileptic is finally revealed as Godscall’s descendant or reincarnation, the Heir to the Heart, the Empress who cannot die. Theodore II also appears in the book but seems to have chosen the royalist cause instead of parliament’s, falling at Naseby with the cryptic words ‘Oh, the shiny armour’. This may signify a dying glimpse of the Empress Godscall in all her splendour as she hovers over the battlefield like a Valkyrie. Harrison’s novel also introduces us to a magical speaking version of the head of St Andrew, the Despot Thomas’s gift to the pope.

  Theodore I and his progeny are recurring characters in a series of works by Jane Stevenson, who skilfully weaves historical fiction in a setting between fact and legend. In The Pretender, published in 2002, we meet Lieutenant Theodore Paleologue in Restoration London. This is our Theodore III, son of the Barbados planter – in Stevenson’s tale promoted to Sir Ferdinando – but instead of being a privateer he is a valiant officer of the Royal Navy. A well-made young man with olive complexion, aquiline nose and small pointed beard, he first appears in a scene on the banks of the Thames declaring, ‘If all had their rights, I should be emperor of the world’, while flinging insults at the passing low-life.

  A long section of the book set in Barbados is enlivened by a slave revolt and a hurricane. The Paleologues are portrayed as uncommonly lenient slave-owners, with Lady Paleologue never quite recovering from the discovery that a favourite slave is implicated in a plot to overthrow white rule. The story has Theodore marrying a native Carib woman rather than the historical Martha Bradbury.

  Stevenson’s Paleologus fiction is further embroidered in The Empress of the Last Days published in 2003 and set in the present. In this novel the young Oxford don hero falls in love with a young black Barbadian academic called Melita Paleologue and together they trace her lineage to a clandestine seventeenth-century marriage between the daughter of James I – Elizabeth Stuart, the Winter Queen – and a dark-skinned physician who is really the heir of a deposed African king. This book refers to Theodore III dying a hero at the battle of Corunna rather than on board the privateer Charles II and has his daughter Godscall marrying the black offspring of the Winter Queen. Melita is conclusively proved to be the rightful queen of England with all the requisite Anglican marriage rites authenticated over the centuries. Stevenson uses the motif of a Greek delegation travelling to Barbados to offer the crown of Greece to a descendant of Theodore of Landulph, but the proofs presented by Melita’s forebear are discounted because of his colour.

  Here again the Rosicrucians and prophetic visions of the Day of Judgement are worked into the plot and there is the innovative appearance of the black king who bears the gift of gold to the Christ Child. The learned genealogist in the novel, the Oxford don’s Uncle Harold, traces Melita Paleologue’s bloodline not only to the emperors of Byzantium and Rome but to the union of Jesus and Mary Magdalene.

  A much earlier fictional work linking the Paleologi with the Stuarts is a curious short story by the Scottish novelist John Galt, the friend of Byron. In his autobiography of 1833 Galt describes his fascination with Theodore and his brood: ‘I sketched a tale once on this subject by supposing one of them to have been the executioner, in mask, of Charles I, whom I represented as having inspired him with vindictive feelings by insolently treating the fallen fortunes of his house. The manuscript of the tale is preserved.’ Whether it was ever published, and whether the manuscript still exists, I do not know, yet it strikes me as of more than passing interest that a fiction writer as far back as Galt discerned a decidedly sinister side to our English Paleologi. Their menacing character was intuited long before Canon Adams unearthed the first evidence of Theodore’s career as an assassin.

  A related American work of historical fiction published in 2010 is Ken McClellan’s The Last Byzantine, subtitled Confessions of a Would-be Messiah. I have not read the book but in the publicity material its author, a former US Air Force war planner, points to the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon as the catalyst for the novel. Its hero is the young orphan John Palaeologus, rightful heir to the Byzantine throne, who is captured and enslaved by the Turks and forced to become a janissary. He later falls into the hands of the Spanish Inquisition. According to the publicity blurb, Palaeologus hopes to ‘pass on the baton of civilisation to the heirs of Rome along with a prophesy of what is yet to come’.

  The best novel of Theodore Paleologus never written was Thomas Hardy’s. A regular visitor to East Cornwall from the 1860s, when the then apprentice architect was courting his future wife Emma Gifford, Hardy almost certainly heard local tales of how humble descendants of the imperial heir still lived along the banks of the Tamar, either in Landulph or in the neighbouring village of Cargreen; and we know Hardy visited Landulph Church because he made a careful copy of the inscription on the Paleologus tomb in the notebook, begun in 1883, in which he jotted ideas for his future novels. Whether consciously or not on Hardy’s part, the motif of the vertiginous fall in fortunes of a great family which is the backstory of Tess of the D’Urbervilles mirrors the persistent stories about Paleologus first recorded half a century previously by Jago Arundell, and the rector’s much-quoted speculation that ‘the imperial blood perhaps still flows in the bargemen of Cargreen’.

  It is not hard to see how this dramatic story would lodge in the mind of a writer preoccupied with the malevolent workings of destiny. The memorable opening of Tess, published in 1891, has an antiquarian parson hailing the feckless wagoner John Durbyfield as the true heir of the ancient family of D’Urberville, an incident which turns the poor man’s brain: ‘Under the church of that there parish,’ he cries, ‘lie my ancestors – hundreds of ’em – in coats of mail and jewels, in gr’t lead coffins weighing tons and tons. There’s not a man in the county of South-Wessex that’s got grander and nobler skillentons in his family than I.’ Delusions of grandeur soon have Durbyfield declaring his line ‘kings and queens outright at one time’, but a fateful claim of kinship with a rich local family calling themselves D’Urberville – a bogus lot who made their money from trade – eventually leads his daughter Tess to the gallows while ‘the D’Urberville knights and ladies slept on in their tombs unknowing’.

  The stories of humble living descendants of Paleologus did not di
e in Hardy’s day. Among the Adams papers I found notes recording Cornish families of recent times who harbour an unshakeable conviction they are of Theodore’s blood. One of the rector’s correspondents, writing in 1925 from an address in Plymouth, recalled that in her former parish of Lanreath were two farming families named Cossentine – a corruption of Constantine – who claimed descent in direct line. ‘And indeed they look very princely,’ she added, ‘one of the families especially, four handsome sisters who have a regal poise of the head and beautifully formed hands and feet! Some of them are still living in St Veep parish.’

  The works of Sir Patrick Leigh Fermor hardly qualify as fiction, but Theodore Paleologus and his brood haunt a number of these celebrated travel books. In his first work, The Traveller’s Tree, an account of the Caribbean islands published in 1950, a lengthy section which begins with the author at the graveside of Ferdinand draws heavily on papers lent to Leigh Fermor by Canon Adams, and the imperial descent of the English Paleologi is described in detail. Musing on what strange adventures ended in this obscure churchyard on a tropical island, Leigh Fermor recites a prayer in Greek over the tomb. The history of the Landulph family is repeated in Mani, a book of 1958 covering a journey through the South Peloponnese, a place boasting its own folklore of imperial heirs – though the tradition is far shakier there, according to Leigh Fermor, than that belonging to far-off Cornwall. More wistful ruminations on the Paleologi occur in a work of 1966, Roumeli: Travels in Northern Greece.

  In a remarkable passage in Mani, the author is lulled into a pipe-dream in which, at some distant future time, the process of Westernisation persuades an enlightened Turkish people to abandon the lands of the old Byzantine Empire and go back to where they came from. Thereupon begins a frantic search for the true heir to Constantinople – an echo of the Greek independence fighters’ quest in Cornwall and Barbados – ending with an ecstatic vision of a Paleologus once more ascending the imperial throne to a joyous fanfare of trumpets. Surrounded by all the pomp of the Orthodox Church ‘in vestments of scarlet and purple and gold and lilac and sea-blue and emerald green’, the heralds proclaim the new emperor King of Kings, Most August Caesar and Basilius, Autocrator of Constantinople and New Rome.