England is a paradise for women, and hell for horses: Italy is a paradise for horses, hell for women.
Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy.
In the grand parish church of the Holy Trinity, to the east of Tattershall Castle, is the font at which Theodore and Mary stood on at least four occasions between 1600 and 1614 for the christenings of their children. In 1614, when her second daughter was baptised at Tattershall, Mary was nearly forty, a late age for child-bearing at the time.
If Theodore walked through the door today, the first thing to strike him would be how the interior is flooded with daylight from thirty-two enormous windows of plain glass. In his time the entire church glowed with stained and painted glass, every panel vivid with saints or angels, biblical scenes, fabulous beasts or royal heraldry, the work of fifteenth-century glaziers whose names have come down to us from workshops in places like Peterborough and Stoke-on-Trent. Somehow the glass passed unscathed through the iconoclastic vandalism of the Reformation, so Theodore saw the windows in their perfect state. It must have been like standing inside a great jewel box, all the more captivating for the contrast with the dreary fen landscape outside.
Even more remarkably, the church glass was to escape the attentions of zealots during the Civil War, probably because the Earl of Lincoln of the time was a leading Puritan. But to the townspeople’s never-ending regret, an eighteenth-century vicar objected that the deep colours made it hard for him to read his sermons and despite furious protests nearly all the glass was removed and sold off.
Today only a few original panels survive in the east window, but by a strange coincidence one of these shows Constantine the Great receiving the True Cross and Holy Nails from his mother St Helena. It is a subject rarely depicted in English churches, and one must wonder how many times Theodore gazed up at this image of his most exalted forebear and pointed out details to his wife and offspring, the imperial triple-crown, the ermine-lined purple robe, the Holy Nails that Constantine fixed to his helmet to make him invincible in battle. Did it strike him as odd that the fourth-century Roman emperor and all the figures crowding the scene are dressed in the high fashion of the English fifteenth century?60
In the rows of pews reserved for the castle people the family would have sat through lengthy homilies. Before the King James Bible of 1611 swept all others away, the church might have possessed any of a number of versions, perhaps the Great Bible commissioned by Henry VIII or the revised Bishops’ Bible of 1568. In the Paleologus household the most likely version was the Geneva Bible, a volume which was lighter and easier to handle. Given his personal history, Theodore very likely owned a Greek Testament, probably one of the Stephanus editions published half a century before.
In an Elizabethan household the father’s word was law. Children were expected to be dutiful and obedient and at the start of each day would kneel for a paternal blessing. The Paleologus sons would have been brought up to admire their father’s accomplishments, marvelling at his horsemanship and listening to tales of wars and tournaments and Italian courts; there were stories spun too of his early life, whatever version of it he chose to tell them. Like John Smith, they would listen entranced to the romance of Byzantium’s emperors and conquering generals; unlike John Smith, they were told they were of the imperial blood.
Yet from childhood they must have wondered where they belonged, for the only family they could have known was their mother’s, the millers, clothiers and brewers of Hadleigh. What standing did they derive from a father who, whatever his ancestry, was without fortune, land or title, and subject to the whim of an erratic patron? How far did an English identity assert itself? Was it the bond with modest English forebears which would one day see them take up arms in the Civil War, or the martial instincts of the paternal line? The homilies endured at Tattershall Church must have played a part in moulding their characters, though with different endings: for at some point young Theodore embarked on a path which would place him in the psalm-singing Roundhead army, a rebel against his king and an enemy to brothers upholding the royal cause. Yet it was Theodore who would end up buried in the temple of English worthies, Westminster Abbey.
What did these children make of their father’s fabulous past and present circumstances? That past was another country, indeed a succession of countries, impossibly remote from their daily experience. Were they stirred by dreams of lost Constantinople or more concerned with the tangible benefits of the Hadleigh connection? Perhaps the brothers were divided even in these early days; perhaps Dorothy was already beginning to fret about her matrimonial prospects as the daughter of a landless man.
A Tattershall character that the growing brood would have known well was the town’s most famous commoner resident, the dwarf known as Tom Thumb. Just eighteen inches high, Tom was reputedly eighty years old when Paleologus and Mary set up home together; on his death in 1620, supposedly aged 101, he was buried near the font in which their children were baptised. One imagines Tom being regularly summoned to the castle when his lordship demanded entertainment. As Theodore was exceptionally tall, he and the dwarf provided the kind of spectacle that would amuse the earl’s guests hugely, with Tom’s head bobbing around the horse master’s knee.
It is likely the family had quarters in one of the buildings reserved for the higher class of retainer, rather than in the castle itself, though during the time of Paleologus’s shadowy employment as the countess’s gaoler he may have required a place within the tower. Mary was close enough to the common people and no doubt capable of performing menial tasks, though Theodore’s position protected her from the indignity of physical labour. Surviving Elizabethan accounts at Grimsthorpe Castle give an indication of wages paid to staff in noble households, with senior officials receiving up to £5 a quarter. The steward, gentleman usher, comptroller and master of the horse are all recorded as having their own servants. It is probable that staff at Tattershall enjoyed similar conditions of employment, despite the notorious stinginess of the second earl. Both he and his father prided themselves on their stables, so Theodore would have had at least the equivalent of the four grooms who assisted the Willoughbys’ master of horse.
As Paleologus was known as a scholar we can see him owning a book chest and book rest, and take a guess at a handful of volumes he might have cherished: Italian authors almost certainly including Dante, Castiglione and Machiavelli, perhaps Petrarch, Boccaccio and Aristo; among classical authors might be Aristotle, Pliny, Homer and Horace. He would surely have owned a number of works on the art of warfare, perhaps including that of the earlier Theodore Paleologus; contemporary books on the martial arts – almost all by Italians – would have included the first book printed in English on duelling, Vincentio Saviolo’s 1595 treatise on the use of the rapier and dagger which taught how to ‘kill any man, bee it with a thrust punta, a stocada, with an imbrocadda or a changing blow’, or a weapon concealed under the cloak. As he prided himself on his penmanship, as will be seen when we consider the surviving letter in his hand, we can add to his possessions a box in which he kept his writing materials, the quills of goose-feather, a penknife and inkwell. There would have been sealing-wax also, for a prized possession was a seal of the Paleologus arms with the double-headed eagle, probably in the form of a signet ring. It seems certain this was made for Theodore rather than an heirloom as it bore the initials TP.
How did Mary cope with his absences? According to Robert Burton, a close contemporary of Paleologus, every Italian was a jealous husband, horrified by the freedoms enjoyed by wives in countries like England and France: ‘Upon small acquaintance,’ writes Burton, ‘it is usual to court other men’s wives, to come to their houses, and accompany them arm-in-arm in the streets … The Italian could never endure this, or a Spaniard, the very conceit of it would make him mad: and for that cause they lock up their women.’
Having shown frailty in the early days of their courtship, one imagines Mary avoiding further cause for gossip, and if Theodore conformed to Burton’s stereotype of the Italian husband all who knew the man would steer well clear of the wife. But so far as we can judge for the next eight years or so Theodore was at her side, or absent for relatively short periods. Perhaps it was the first time he was able to give proper attention to his wife and children as well as the earl’s business. Yet there is the question of what was happening to the countess. That poor woman survived until 1611, and we have no way of knowing whether Theodore resumed his earlier rule over her on his return from abroad.
It is very likely the boys had their first lessons at home, and Paleologus would have made sure they practised the use of weapons from the earliest age; the church would then have supervised their schooling, drumming Protestant doctrine into their heads from the age of five or six. Few teachers of the time followed the example of Roger Ascham, the queen’s own tutor, who declared that ‘young people are sooner allured by love than driven by beating, to attain good learning’, and lessons were usually underlined by the application of the birch. The seal of Louth Grammar School, attended by John Smith, actually depicts a master vigorously applying the rod to a pupil’s backside.
60 Much of the Tattershall glass ended up at Burghley House and St Martin’s Church in Stamford, where Elizabeth’s chief minister is buried.