An Elizabethan Assassin

by John Hall

  Half a century after Leigh Fermor wrote these words, his flight of fancy resonated faintly inside Landulph Church when the cream of Britain’s Orthodoxy gathered in sumptuous vestments at the grave of Theodore Paleologus.

  Note

  77 Stretcher, Professor Matthew, ‘Magical Realism and the Search for Identity’, Journal of Japanese Studies, Vol. 25, No. 2, 1999.

  21

  That the rejection of fabulous pedigrees, the exposure of spurious records, and the substitution of fact for fiction in the realm of family history will, in some quarters, prove distasteful is only what one must expect. Poor, ill-clad, shivering truth stands pitiful by the way; for men have ever passed her by in search of that which they desire.

  Horace Round, Peerage and Pedigree.

  We touched earlier on a number of supposed descendants of Theodore Paleologus local to Cornwall and Barbados and on the claims of the great Victorian mountebank Demetrius Rhodocanakis, but claimants to Byzantine imperial blood – and indeed to the imperial honours – remain a global phenomenon to this day. Pretenders still pop up in every corner of Europe, in the United States and elsewhere, and are especially thick on the ground in England.

  Persons already possessed of a crown are no longer anxious to press a claim to a throne which vanished over 500 years ago: the Romanov czars were probably the last royals to brood seriously on their Paleologus blood, speaking of Moscow as the Third Rome and dreaming of an absorption of Byzantine lands into the Russian Empire, failing which they would no doubt have settled for a port with access to the Mediterranean for the Russian fleet – Constantinople, say.

  Along with other inter-related European royalty, Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip can each lay claim to imperial ancestors, albeit by tortuous routes. Her Majesty’s line of descent goes all the way back to Michael the Crafty and is traced through James I. James inherited Paleologus blood twice over, from his mother Mary Queen of Scots by way of the counts of Savoy – whose pedigree embraces the Paleologus marquises of Montferrat – and from his maternal grandmother Mary of Guise. The Duke of Edinburgh’s descent via his Russian forebears is traced back to Zoe, daughter of Thomas the Despot, and her marriage to Ivan III, Grand Prince of Muscovy. Their grandson was Ivan the Terrible. It was on account of this union that Russia adopted the imperial double-headed eagle which has re-emerged in post-Soviet days.

  Landulph, the early focus of our research into the English Paleologi, remains a property of the Duchy of Cornwall. The Queen and Prince Philip visited Landulph in July 1962 and according to the local newspaper the royal party ‘viewed the interior of the church and was greatly interested in the Paleologus memorial’, as well it might be; the royals also met twenty-three tenants of the manor of Landulph.

  The Maltese genealogist Charles Gauci is one of the best-known researchers of imperial pretenders, and he and Professor Peter Mallat, an Austrian authority on Byzantine culture, have compiled genealogical tables of twenty-eight lines of supposed descent from the Paleologus dynasty, though they prudently decline to vouch for the authenticity of any. These pedigrees appeared in a handbook printed in Malta in 1985. The chart labelled ‘the Cornwall Paleologi’ shows the English family’s descent from John, but instead of being the son of Thomas the Despot this hazy figure is shown as the offspring of Manuel, the son of Thomas who returned to Constantinople and became the fanatical Moslem known as El Ghazi. The table describes our Theodore Paleologus I as ‘of Landulph Castle’, an imposing address which regrettably has never existed. The later family tree is derived in the main from the Landulph brass and ends, as does my own research, with the death in infancy of Godscall, daughter of Theodore III.

  However, this Gauci-Mallat pedigree includes an additional name, one Ricardus Paleologus, supposedly a younger brother of the Theodore born in Pesaro in 1504, the great-grandfather of the Theodore buried in Cornwall. This Ricardus allegedly found himself in the Isle of Wight in 1524 and married a local heiress; we are then referred to a separate genealogical table, ‘the Isle of Wight Paleologi’, which traces thirteen generations from Ricardus to arrive at ‘Prince Petros Paleologus, Duke of Morea, Grandmaster of the Order of St George (English branch). Residence, Isle of Wight, UK’. A second glance at this table shows that the father of Prince Patros was born in 1927 with the rather less glamorous name of Peter Francis Miles.

  We are then cross-referenced to yet another chart labelled ‘Jaloweicki-Palaeologus’ which again originates with Thomas the Despot’s son Manuel Paleologus, the one who returned to Constantinople. This pedigree shows Peter Francis Miles as the grandson of Colonel the Baron Joseph Miles – no provenance of the title is offered – of Wakefield, Yorkshire. This Joseph, the descendant of El Ghazi, supposedly married a Countess Mary d’Authume-Palaeologina and their son was plain old Peter Francis Miles, father of Prince Petros. What happened to the barony is not indicated, though it may be too piffling to mention in the company of these heady princely and ducal titles.

  His Imperial Highness Prince Patros was one of the more engaging figures among the multitude of claimants to the imperial honours. Until his death in 1988 he was a familiar sight in the streets of Ventnor, striding along in a fetching uniform of his own design, ‘with long flowing white hair, sandals but no socks, and some sort of order or military award around his neck’, as the local paper reported at the time. The vast array of ancient documents which proved his descent seems to have been seen by nobody but the prince himself. Debrett’s Peerage ridiculed this stellar pedigree but both The Times and The Daily Telegraph printed obituaries headed with his fabulous title. His widow continued to call herself Her Imperial Highness the Despotina Patricia, aka Empress of the Romans, but their son Nicholas now felt free to pour scorn on the fantasies which he said had shamed and embarrassed the family all his life.

  At the heart of Prince Patros’s claim was that his maternal grandfather, a plumber with the curious local name of Colenutt, inherited his Paleologus blood from the mysterious Ricardus of Tudor times, whose full name was said to be Ricardus Kolenneat Paleologus, the middle name being derived from a Byzantine province and corrupted over the years to Colenutt. According to Prince Patros, the extinction of the line of Theodore of Landulph left the Colenutts as the true imperial heirs.

  Yet another branch of this remarkable Jaloweicki-Palaeologus pedigree begins in the early nineteenth century with a Prince Miecstav, nationality unstated, son of Prince Fedor Jaloweicki na Perejastawo who married a Paleologus daughter of the Isle of Wight lot. This junior branch of the junior branch reaches modern times in the person of Sean Patrick O’Kelly de Conejera born in 1957, son of Lt Col Patrick O’Kelly, Baron de Conejera, ‘Head of the Isle of Man branch of the family’.78

  Among other wonderfully named genealogies set out by Gauci and Mallat are the Paleologue-Crivez, the Tocco Paleologo, the Paleologo-Oriundi, the Vassallo-Paleologo, the Schmidt von Launitz Comnene Paleologue, and the Dolgorouky-Palaeologus. Portraits and photographs of the heads of these august families show court dress with knee-breeches, tails and white tie to be much in favour, along with quasi-ecclesiastical robes and flowing capes with elaborate decorations sporting the double-headed eagle. A taste for handlebar moustaches and monocles is also in evidence.

  The de Vigo Aleramico Lascaris Paleologo family tree is a remarkable Italian one, confidently setting out the family’s direct descent from the Emperor Nero in AD 54. The Paleologus forebears come in with Thomas the Despot – the most popular ancestor among the pretenders – with regular infusions of royal blood from the likes of the kings of Serbia, Jerusalem and the Two Sicilies. The pedigree descends in the present time to the personage known as Prince Enrico Constantino de Vigo Aleramico Lascaris Paleologo, Grandmaster of the Constantinian Order of St George and of the Order of the Cross of Constantinople.

  His Imperial and Royal Highness Prince Enrico, who died in 2010 at the ripe age of ninety-one, was never slow in coming forward to proclaim his imperial lineage. The prince felt the hand of destiny o
n his shoulder in 1967 when King Constantine II of Greece was deposed in the wake of the colonels’ coup d’état, whereupon Enrico got on a plane to Athens and put himself at the disposal of the Greek people. Representatives of the new government did indeed hold talks with the prince, who pointed out his credentials as heir to the last Byzantine dynasty, but the colonels failed to take up his offer to step in for the departed king. Disappointed but undaunted, Enrico returned to his tireless work collecting money for the many charities associated with the imperial orders, which appear to have come into being only when he declared himself their grandmaster.

  There was a different story told about the prince, however. In this he was a fantasist and brazen conman. Branded the son of an unmarried Italian woman of humble origin, Enrico (sometimes calling himself Prince Henri) was claimed by detractors to be a bigamous ex-hairdresser with convictions in various European courts for slander, fraud and theft – in 1953 he was charged with stealing, of all things, 9,464 crates of tinned tomatoes – and in 1972 was pursued by the law for non-payment of support to an abandoned wife and children. He always hotly denied the claim he was once a hairdresser in Genoa. His pedigree was dismissed by a number of worthy authorities as a total fabrication but there were repeated reports of the sale of Byzantine honours and of prestigious plots for the cremated ashes of favoured applicants at the prince’s chateau in France. A company in the Cayman Islands was the alleged destination of various funds handled by Enrico. In the 1990s Palm Beach in Miami and Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas were the prince’s preferred stamping grounds for organising glittering charity balls from which he garnered handsome fees. At one Las Vegas event he was said to have pocketed $42,000 for conferring titles and coats of arms on gullible aspirants. At a charity ball in Tokyo in 2003 it was claimed those honoured with a seat at the princely table had stumped up 50,000 yen for the privilege.

  Since the prince’s death the doings of his followers continue to be announced on the webpage of the noble orders, as are plans for future Byzantine balls to further Enrico’s selfless efforts for world peace. The recently appointed vice chancellor of the orders is Madam Dewi Sukarno, widow of the deposed Indonesian dictator and noted collector of designer shoes, who states she is dedicating the rest of her life to the betterment of society.

  The small medieval town of Viterbo north of Rome has a prominent place in other Italian pedigrees. A large quantity of dubious papers turned up suddenly in Viterbo in modern times which had gone unrecorded for centuries but which conveniently supported certain disputed genealogical claims. Many of these colourful claimants attach their family tree to that from Thomas the Despot to the English Paleologi, so you would think our Theodore of Landulph would at the very least be recognised as primus inter pares of the pretenders. But there are other pedigrees which insist on a common lineage with none other than Demetrius Rhodocanakis, and their imperial pretensions rest on a claim that Theodore’s marriage to Mary Balls was bigamous.

  Prince Enrico’s pedigree boasts a grand total of thirty-three named generations from Nero to himself, though there is an unfortunate gap of some 900-odd years between the fiddle-playing emperor and the next identified forebear on the chart. Compared with this, some of the other pedigrees compiled by Gauci and Mallat seem pitifully threadbare, resorting to lots of dotted lines between ancestors separated by hundreds of years. The Syros Palaeologi, for instance, muster only two named individuals between the death of Despot Andronicus of Thessalonika in 1428 and Marcos Palaeologos, temp. 1762. Or take the Mourtzinos-Palaeologos, with just seven names separating a fifteenth-century progenitor from the present day representative, or the Demetraki-Paleolog of Cracow, who name a mere seven ancestors between Michael the Crafty who died in 1282 and Richard Demetraki-Paleolog, born 1949.

  Another English claimant, a postman calling himself Archie White-Palaeologus, failed to make the grade for the Gauci-Mallat pedigree collection, but in the 1970s he declared himself to be descended from the imperial family. He said his great-grandfather had travelled to Greece during the war of independence to claim his rightful throne but the provisional government gave him the cold shoulder. Archie claimed a number of Paleologi were still living quietly in England and they got together from time to time to dress in imperial robes and call each other prince and princess.

  The Greek cemetery at West Norwood in South London contains the gravestones of a number of individuals claiming imperial blood, though their pedigrees do not appear among those listed by Gauci and Mallat. There is, for instance, a Theodore Attardo di Cristoforo de Bouillion, Prince Nicephorus Comnenus Palaeologus, described as ‘hereditary claimant to the Grecian throne 1863’, and a ‘Princess Eugenie Nicephorus Comnenus Palaeologus’ who died in 1934 and whose tombstone proclaims her ‘descendant of the Grecian Emperors of Byzantium’. A medical officer of the name Paleologus sailed with the British army to serve in the Crimean War, though where, if anywhere, he fitted into the general picture of claimants I have not established.

  The name Paleologus is uncommon but not exceptionally rare in present-day Greece. At the time of writing the national telephone directories list 1,135 subscribers under the traditional Greek spelling, usually transcribed as Palaeologos in our alphabet, with a further 1,149 under the alternative and more modern spelling of Paleologos. As the current population of Greece is estimated at ll.3 million, possession of the name is still noteworthy, and one must wonder how many of these telephone subscribers could also speak of an oral tradition of imperial descent.

  The case of Victor Paleologus is very different to the exotic examples outlined above. More people in the United States would associate the name Paleologus with a notorious murder in Hollywood rather than the Byzantine emperors, if indeed there are Americans in any number who have heard of the imperial dynasty. The age-old obsession with exalted bloodlines and titles has largely disappeared nowadays leaving the general public intoxicated by celebrity in all its manifestations: a star of sport, film or television will trump any royal except the most personable and photogenic. It is a sign of the times that the imposture of which Victor Paleologus stood accused at his trial was not of seeking to impress girls with talk of a glorious pedigree, but of posing as a Hollywood producer involved in a James Bond movie.

  In February 2003 the body of a beautiful twenty-one-year-old aspiring actress named Kristi Johnson was found by hikers on a steep undergrowth-covered slope below a wealthy suburb in the Hollywood Hills. Three years later Mr Paleologus, a failed restaurateur, was convicted of strangling Miss Johnson after luring her to a fake photo shoot. The prosecution described him a master conman who repeatedly used the ploy of auditioning young women for a non-existent Bond movie, dangling the prospect of acting roles, $100,000 fees and parties with the likes of Sean Connery, before subjecting them to sexual assault. The district attorney called for the death penalty though the case was considered weak by many observers due to the lack of forensic evidence. The People versus Paleologus took a sensational new turn when Mr Paleologus unexpectedly changed his plea at the eleventh hour from not guilty to guilty of first-degree murder. He quickly tried to withdraw the guilty plea on the basis of being given flawed legal advice by his attorney when he was tired and confused, but the judge refused to alter the plea a second time.79

  So far as the focus of this chapter is concerned, there is no suggestion Victor Paleologus ever tried to gain benefit from his name, but he tells me of a strong family tradition of descent from the imperial dynasty and remembers the double-headed eagle proudly displayed in the family’s New Jersey home. In his life before prison he paid no attention to ancestry but since his incarceration has begun to research his family’s history with the aid of his prison mentor, a former police officer. However, unlike the remarkable individuals whose claims are described above, in this case Paleologus is his real name and not assumed: the immigration papers of his father, who arrived in America from Mytalini in the Aegean, show he was previously registered with both the –os and –us spelling of
the name, the latter most unusual in Greece, and Mr Paleologus tells me the family used this form in earlier generations.

  As the latest phase of his genealogical research programme, Mr Paleologus is studying the recent advances in mitochondrial DNA fingerprinting which famously allowed the identification of the murdered Romanov family following the exhumation of their bodies in Russia in 1991. He has also been excited by the positive DNA identification of the skeleton of Richard III, who was born the year before the fall of Constantinople, following its discovery on the site of Greyfriars Church in Leicester in 2012. Richard’s genes were positively matched to two samples taken from descendants of his sister, Anne of York, in the seventeenth generation.

  Among descendants of the Russian imperial dynasty whose gene samples provided proof that the remains found at Ekaterinburg were those of the last czar and his family was the Duke of Edinburgh, and Mr Paleologus tells me he is writing to Buckingham Palace as part of his efforts to assemble the DNA information of known descendants of the Paleologus dynasty to compare with his own.

  Nowadays it is possible to subscribe to one of many websites worldwide which have sprung up to sell DNA testing kits, from $119 skywards. This promises a new lease of life to claimants to the imperial blood, though it may not be welcome to some existing pretenders. Within a few minutes of beginning an internet search, I discovered one which tempts customers by offering tests to establish a link with various famous figures in history, such as ‘Discover your relation to Czar Nicholas II’.