It is hardly likely when that comely but penniless young Scot Robert Carr, of Ferniehurst, fell from his horse and broke his leg that any of the spectators of the accident foresaw how far-reaching it would be in its consequences. It was an accident, none the less, which in its ultimate results was to put several of the necks craned to see it in peril of the hangman's noose.
That divinely appointed monarch King James the Sixth of Scotland and First of England had an eye for manly beauty. Though he could contrive the direst of cruelties to be committed out of his sight, the actual spectacle of physical suffering in the human made him squeamish. Add the two facts of the King's nature together and it may be understood how Robert Carr, in falling from his horse that September day in the tilt-yard of Whitehall, fell straight into his Majesty's favour. King James himself gave orders for the disposition of the sufferer, found lodgings for him, sent his own surgeon, and was constant in his visits to the convalescent. Thereafter the rise of Robert Carr was meteoric. Knighted, he became Viscount Rochester, a member of the Privy Council, then Earl of Somerset, Knight of the Garter, all in a very few years. It was in 1607 that he fell from his horse, under the King's nose. In 1613 he was at the height of his power in England.
Return we for a moment, however, to that day in the Whitehall tilt-yard. It is related that one woman whose life and fate were to be bound with Carr's was in the ladies' gallery. It is very probable that a second woman, whose association with the first did much to seal Carr's doom, was also a spectator. If Frances Howard, as we read, showed distress over the painful mishap to the handsome Scots youth it is almost certain that Anne Turner, with the quick eye she had for male comeliness and her less need for Court-bred restraint, would exhibit a sympathetic volubility.
Frances Howard was the daughter of that famous Elizabethan seaman Thomas Howard, Earl of Suffolk. On that day in September she would be just over fifteen years of age. It is said that she was singularly lovely. At that early age she was already a wife, victim of a political marriage which, in the exercise of the ponderous cunning he called kingcraft, King James had been at some pains to arrange. At the age of thirteen Frances had been married to Robert Devereux, third Earl of Essex, then but a year older than herself. The young couple had been parted at the altar, the groom being sent travelling to complete his growth and education, and Frances being returned to her mother and the semi-seclusion of the Suffolk mansion at Audley End.
Of the two women, so closely linked in fate, the second is perhaps the more interesting study. Anne Turner was something older than the Countess of Essex. In the various records of the strange piece of history which is here to be dealt with there are many allusions to a long association between the two. Almost a foster-sister relationship seems to be implied, but actual detail is irritatingly absent. Nor is it clear whether Mrs Turner at the time of the tilt-yard incident had embarked on the business activities which were to make her a much sought-after person in King James's Court. It is not to be ascertained whether she was not already a widow at that time. We can only judge from circumstantial evidence brought forward later.
In 1610, at all events, Mrs Turner was well known about the Court, and was quite certainly a widow. Her husband had been a well-known medical man, one George Turner, a graduate of St John's College, Cambridge. He had been a protege of Queen Elizabeth. Dying, this elderly husband of Mistress Turner had left her but little in the way of worldly goods, but that little the fair young widow had all the wit to turn to good account. There was a house in Paternoster Row and a series of notebooks. Like many another physician of his time, George Turner had been a dabbler in more arts than that of medicine, an investigator in sciences other than pathology. His notebooks would appear to have contained more than remedial prescriptions for agues, fevers, and rheums. There was, for example, a recipe for a yellow starch which, says Rafael Sabatini, in his fine romance The Minion,[7] "she dispensed as her own invention. This had become so widely fashionable for ruffs and pickadills that of itself it had rendered her famous." One may believe, also, that most of the recipes for those "perfumes, cosmetics, unguents and mysterious powders, liniments and lotions asserted to preserve beauty where it existed, and even to summon it where it was lacking," were derived from the same sources.
There is a temptation to write of Mistress Turner as forerunner of that notorious Mme Rachel of whom, in his volume Bad Companions,[8] Mr Roughead has said the final and pawky word. Mme Rachel, in the middle of the nineteenth century, founded her fortunes as a beauty specialist (?) on a prescription for a hair-restorer given her by a kindly doctor. She also 'invented' many a lotion and unguent for the preservation and creation of beauty. But at about this point analogy stops. Both Rachel and her forerunner, Anne Turner, were scamps, and both got into serious trouble—Anne into deeper and deadlier hot water than Rachel—but between the two women there is only superficial comparison. Rachel was a botcher and a bungler, a very cobbler, beside Anne Turner.
Anne, there is every cause for assurance, was in herself the best advertisement for her wares. Rachel was a fat old hag. Anne, prettily fair, little-boned, and deliciously fleshed, was neat and elegant. The impression one gets of her from all the records, even the most prejudiced against her, is that she was a very cuddlesome morsel indeed. She was, in addition, demonstrably clever. Such a man of talent as Inigo Jones supported the decoration of many of the masques he set on the stage with costumes of Anne's design and confection. Rachel could neither read nor write.
It is highly probable that Anne Turner made coin out of the notes which her late husband, so inquisitive of mind, had left on matters much more occult than the manufacture of yellow starch and skin lotions. "It was also rumoured," says Mr Sabatini, "that she amassed gold in another and less licit manner: that she dabbled in fortune-telling and the arts of divination." We shall see, as the story develops, that the rumour had some foundation. The inquiring mind of the late Dr Turner had led him into strange company, and his legacy to Anne included connexions more sombre than those in the extravagantly luxurious Court of King James.
In 1610 the elegant little widow was flourishing enough to be able to maintain a lover in good style. This was Sir Arthur Mainwaring, member of a Cheshire family of good repute but of no great wealth. By him she had three children. Mainwaring was attached in some fashion to the suite of the Prince of Wales, Prince Henry. And while the Prince's court at St James's Palace was something more modest, as it was more refined, than that of the King at Whitehall, position in it was not to be retained at ease without considerable expenditure. It may be gauged, therefore, at what expense Anne's attachment to Mainwaring would keep her, and to what exercise of her talent and ambition her pride in it would drive her. And her pride was absolute. It would, says a contemporary diarist, "make her fly at any pitch rather than fall into the jaws of want."[9]
II
In his romance The Minion, Rafael Sabatini makes the first meeting of Anne Turner and the Countess of Essex occur in 1610 or 1611. With this date Judge A. E. Parry, in his book The Overbury Mystery,[10] seems to agree in part. There is, however, warrant enough for believing that the two women had met long before that time. Anne Turner herself, pleading at her trial for mercy from Sir Edward Coke, the Lord Chief Justice, put forward the plea that she had been "ever brought up with the Countess of Essex, and had been a long time her servant."[11] She also made the like extenuative plea on the scaffold.[12] Judge Parry seems to follow some of the contemporary writers in assuming that Anne was a spy in the pay of the Lord Privy Seal, the Earl of Northampton. If this was so there is further ground for believing that Anne and Lady Essex had earlier contacts, for Northampton was Lady Essex's great-uncle. The longer association would go far in explaining the terrible conspiracy into which, from soon after that time, the two women so readily fell together—a criminal conspiracy, in which the reader may see something of the "false nurse" in Anne Turner and something of Jean Livingstone in Frances Howard, Lady Essex.
It was about this time, 1610-1611, that Lady Essex began to find herself interested in the handsome Robert Carr, then Viscount Rochester. Having reached the mature age of eighteen, the lovely Frances had been brought by her mother, the Countess of Suffolk, to Court. Highest in the King's favour, and so, with his remarkably good looks, his charm, and the elegant taste in attire and personal appointment which his new wealth allowed him lavishly to indulge, Rochester was by far the most brilliant figure there. Frances fell in love with the King's minion.
Rochester, it would appear, did not immediately respond to the lady's advances. They were probably too shy, too tentative, to attract Rochester's attention. It is probable, also, that there were plenty of beautiful women about the Court, more mature, more practised in the arts of coquetry than Frances, and very likely not at all 'blate'—as Carr and his master would put it—in showing themselves ready for conquest by the King's handsome favourite.
Whether the acquaintance of Lady Essex with Mrs Turner was of long standing or not, it was to the versatile Anne that her ladyship turned as confidante. The hint regarding Anne's skill in divination will be remembered. Having regard to the period, and to the alchemistic nature of the goods that composed so much of Anne's stock-in-trade at the sign of the Golden Distaff, in Paternoster Row, it may be conjectured that the love-lorn Frances had thoughts of a philtre.
With an expensive lover and children to maintain, to say nothing of her own luxurious habits, Anne Turner would see in the Countess's appeal a chance to turn more than one penny into the family exchequer. She was too much the opportunist to let any consideration of old acquaintance interfere with working such a potential gold-mine as now seemed to lie open to her pretty but prehensile fingers. Lady Essex was rich. She was also ardent in her desire. The game was too big for Anne to play single-handed. A real expert in cozening, a master of guile, was wanted to exploit the opportunity to its limit.
It is a curious phenomenon, and one that constantly recurs in the history of cozenage, how people who live by spoof fall victims so readily to spoofery. Anne Turner had brains. There is no doubt of it. Apart from that genuine and honest talent in costume-design which made her work acceptable to such an outstanding genius as Inigo Jones, she lived by guile. But I have now to invite you to see her at the feet of one of the silliest charlatans who ever lived. There is, of course, the possibility that Anne sat at the feet of this silly charlatan for what she might learn for the extension of her own technique. Or, again, it may have been that the wizard of Lambeth, whom she consulted in the Lady Essex affair, could provide a more impressive setting for spoof than she had handy, or that they were simply rogues together. My trouble is to understand why, by the time that the Lady Essex came to her with her problem, Anne had not exhausted all the gambits in flummery that were at the command of the preposterous Dr Forman.
The connexion with Dr Forman was part of the legacy left Anne by Dr Turner. Her husband had been the friend and patron of Forman, so that by the time Anne had taken Mainwaring for her lover, and had borne him three children, she must have had ample opportunity for seeing through the old charlatan.
Antony Weldon, the contemporary writer already quoted, is something too scurrilous and too apparently biased to be altogether a trustworthy authority. He seems to have been the type of gossip (still to be met in London clubs) who can always tell with circumstance how the duchess came to have a black baby, and the exact composition of the party at which Midas played at 'strip poker.' But he was, like many of his kind, an amusing enough companion for the idle moment, and his description of Dr Forman is probably fairly close to the truth.
"This Forman," he says,
was a silly fellow who dwelt in Lambeth, a very silly fellow, yet had wit enough to cheat the ladies and other women, by pretending skill in telling their fortunes, as whether they should bury their husbands, and what second husbands they should have, and whether they should enjoy their loves, or whether maids should get husbands, or enjoy their servants to themselves without corrivals: but before he would tell them anything they must write their names in his alphabetical book with their own handwriting. By this trick he kept them in awe, if they should complain of his abusing them, as in truth he did nothing else. Besides, it was believed, some meetings were at his house, wherein the art of the bawd was more beneficial to him than that of a conjurer, and that he was a better artist in the one than in the other: and that you may know his skill, he was himself a cuckold, having a very pretty wench to his wife, which would say, she did it to try his skill, but it fared with him as with astrologers that cannot foresee their own destiny.
And here comes an addendum, the point of which finds confirmation elsewhere. It has reference to the trial of Anne Turner, to which we shall come later.
"I well remember there was much mirth made in the Court upon the showing of the book, for, it was reported, the first leaf my lord Cook [Coke, the Lord Chief Justice] lighted on he found his own wife's name."
Whatever Anne's reason for doing so, it was to this scortatory old scab that she turned for help in cozening the fair young Countess. The devil knows to what obscene ritual the girl was introduced. There is evidence that the thaumaturgy practised by Forman did not want for lewdness—as magic of the sort does not to this day—and in this regard Master Weldon cannot be far astray when he makes our pretty Anne out to be the veriest baggage.
Magic or no magic, philtre or no philtre, it was not long before Lady Essex had her wish. The Viscount Rochester fell as desperately in love with her as she was with him.
There was, you may be sure, no small amount of scandalous chatter in the Court over the quickly obvious attachment the one to the other of this handsome couple. So much of this scandalous chatter has found record by the pens of contemporary and later gossip-writers that it is hard indeed to extract the truth. It is certain, however, that had the love between Robert Carr and Frances Howard been as chaste as ice, as pure as snow, jealousy would still have done its worst in besmirching. It was not, if the Rabelaisian trend in so much of Jacobean writing be any indication, a particularly moral age. Few ages in history are. It was not, with a reputed pervert as the fount of honour, a particularly moral Court. Since the emergence of the lovely young Countess from tutelage at Audley End there had been no lack of suitors for her favour. And when Frances so openly exhibited her preference for the King's minion there would be some among those disappointed suitors who would whisper, greenly, that Rochester had been granted that prisage which was the right of the absent Essex, a right which they themselves had been quite ready to usurp. It is hardly likely that there would be complete abnegation of salty gossip among the ladies of the Court, their Apollo being snatched by a mere chit of a girl.
What relative happiness there may have been for the pair in their loving—it could not, in the hindrance there was to their free mating, have been an absolute happiness—was shattered after some time by the return to England of the young husband. The Earl of Essex, now almost come to man's estate, arrived to take up the position which his rank entitled him to expect in the Court, and to assume the responsibilities and rights which, he fancied, belonged to him as a married man. In respect of the latter part of his intention he immediately found himself balked. His wife, perhaps all the deeper in love with Rochester for this threat to their happiness, declared that she had no mind to be held by the marriage forced on her in infancy, and begged her husband to agree to its annulment.
It had been better for young Essex to have agreed at once. He would have spared himself, ultimately, a great deal of humiliation through ridicule. But he tried to enforce his rights as a husband, a proceeding than which there is none more absurd should the wife prove obdurate. And prove obdurate his wife did. She was to be moved neither by threat nor by pleading. It was, you will notice, a comedy situation; husband not perhaps amorous so much as the thwarted possessor of the unpossessable—wife frigid and a maid, as far, at least, as the husband was concerned, and her weeping eyes turned yearningly elsewhere. A comedy situation, yes, and at this distance almost farcical—but for certain elements in it approaching tragedy.
Badgered, not only by her husband but by her own relatives, scared no doubt, certainly unhappy, unable for politic reasons to appeal freely to her beloved Robin, to whom might Frances turn but the helpful Turner? And to whom, having turned to pretty Anne, was she likely to be led but again to the wizard of Lambeth?
Dr Forman had a heart for beauty in distress, but dissipating the ardency of an exigent husband was a difficult matter compared with attracting that of a negligent lover. It was also much more costly. A powder there was, indeed, which, administered secretly by small regular doses in the husband's food or drink, would soon cool his ardour, but the process of manufacture and the ingredients were enormously expensive. Frances got her powder.
The first dose was administered to Lord Essex just before his departure from a visit to his wife at Audley End. On his arrival back in London he was taken violently ill, so ill that in the weeks he lay in bed his life was despaired of. Only the intervention of the King's own physician, one Sir Theodore Mayerne, would appear to have saved him.
Her husband slowly convalescing, Lady Essex was summoned by her family back to London. In London, while Lord Essex mended in health, she was much in the company of her "sweet Turner." In addition to the house in Paternoster Row the little widow had a pretty riverside cottage at Hammersmith, and both were at the disposal of Lady Essex and her lover for stolen meetings. Those meetings were put a stop to by the recovery of Lord Essex, and with his recovery his lordship exhibited a new mood of determination. Backed by her ladyship's family, he ordered her to accompany him to their country place of Chartley. Her ladyship had to obey.
The stages of the journey were marked by the nightly illness of his lordship. By the time they arrived at Chartley itself he was in a condition little if at all less dangerous than that from which he had been rescued by the King's physician. His illness lasted for weeks, and during this time her ladyship wrote many a letter to Anne Turner and to Dr Forman. She was afraid his lordship would live. She was afraid his lordship would die. She was afraid she would lose the love of Rochester. She begged Anne Turner and Forman to work their best magic for her aid. She was afraid that if his lordship recovered the spells might prove useless, that his attempts to assert his rights as a husband would begin again, and that there, in the heart of the country and so far from any refuge, they might take a form she would be unable to resist.
His lordship did recover. His attempts to assert his rights as a husband did begin again. The struggle between them, Frances constant in her obduracy, lasted several months. Her obstinacy wore down his. At long last he let her go.
III
If the fate that overtook Frances Howard and Rochester, and with them Anne Turner and many another, is to be properly understood, a brief word on the political situation in England at this time will be needed—or, rather, a word on the political personages, with their antagonisms.
Next in closeness to the King's ear after Rochester, and perhaps more trusted as a counsellor by that "wise fool," there had been Robert Cecil, Lord Salisbury, for a long time First Secretary of State. But about the time when Lady Essex finally parted with her husband Cecil died, depriving England of her keenest brain and the staunchest heart in her causes. If there had been no Rochester the likeliest man in the kingdom to succeed to the power and offices of Cecil would have been the Earl of Northampton, uncle of Lord Suffolk, who was the father of Lady Essex. Northampton, as stated, held the office of Lord Privy Seal.
The Howard family had done the State great service in the past. Its present representatives, Northampton and Suffolk, were anxious to do the State great service, as they conceived it, in the future. They were, however, Catholics in all but open acknowledgment, and as such were opposed by the Protestants, who had at their head Prince Henry. This was an opposition that they might have stomached. It was one that they might even have got over, for the Prince and his father, the King, were not the best of friends. The obstacle to their ambitions, and one they found hard to stomach, was the upstart Rochester. And even Rochester would hardly have stood in their way had his power in the Council depended on his own ability. The brain that directed Robert Carr belonged to another man. This was Sir Thomas Overbury.
On the death of Cecil the real contenders for the vacant office of First Secretary of State—the highest office in the land—were not the wily Northampton and the relatively unintelligent Rochester, but the subtle Northampton and the quite as subtle, and perhaps more spacious-minded, Thomas Overbury. There was, it will be apprehended, a possible weakness on the Overbury side. The gemel-chain, like that of many links, is merely as strong as its weakest member. Overbury had no approach to the King save through the King's favourite. Rochester could have no real weight with the King, at least in affairs of State, except what he borrowed from Overbury. Divided, the two were powerless. No, more than that, there had to be no flaw in their linking.
The wily Northampton, one may be certain, was fully aware of this possible weakness in the combination opposed to his advancement. He would be fully aware, that is, that it was there potentially; but when he began, as his activities would indicate, to work for the creation of that flaw in the relationship between Rochester and Overbury it is unlikely that he knew the flaw had already begun to develop. Unknown to him, circumstance already had begun to operate in his favour.
Overbury was Rochester's tutor in more than appertained to affairs of State. It is more than likely that in Carr's wooing of Lady Essex he had held the role of Cyrano de Bergerac, writing those gracefully turned letters and composing those accomplished verses which did so much to augment and give constancy to her ladyship's love for Rochester. It is certain, at any rate, that Overbury was privy to all the correspondence passing between the pair, and that even such events as the supplying by Forman and Mrs Turner of that magic powder, and the Countess's use of it upon her husband, were well within his knowledge.
While the affair between his alter ego and the Lady Essex might be looked upon as mere dalliance, a passionate episode likely to wither with a speed equal to that of its growth, Overbury, it is probable, found cynical amusement in helping it on. But when, as time went on, the lady and her husband separated permanently, and from mere talk of a petition for annulment of the Essex marriage that petition was presented in actual form to the King, Overbury saw danger. Northampton was backing the petition. If it succeeded Lady Essex would be free to marry Rochester. And the marriage, since Northampton was not the man to give except in the expectation of plenty, would plant the unwary Rochester on the hearth of his own and Overbury's enemies. With Rochester in the Howard camp there would be short shrift for Thomas Overbury. There would be, though Rochester in his infatuation seemed blind to the fact, as short a shrift as the Howards could contrive for the King's minion.
In that march of inevitability which marks all real tragedy the road that is followed forks ever and again with an 'if.' And we who, across the distance of time, watch with a sort of Jovian pity the tragic puppets in their folly miss this fork and that fork on their road of destiny select, each according to our particular temperaments, a particular 'if' over which to shake our heads. For me, in this story of Rochester, Overbury, Frances Howard, and the rest, the point of tragedy, the most poignant of the issues, is the betrayal by Robert Carr of Overbury's friendship. Though this story is essentially, or should be, that of the two women who were linked in fate with Rochester and his coadjutor, I am constrained to linger for a moment on that point.
Overbury's counsel had made Carr great. With nothing but his good looks and his personal charm, his only real attributes, Carr had been no more than King James's creature. James, with all the pedantry, the laboured cunning, the sleezy weaknesses of character that make him so detestable, was yet too shrewd to have put power in the hands of the mere minion that Carr would have been without the brain of Overbury to guide him. Of himself Carr was the 'toom tabard' of earlier parlance in his native country, the 'stuffed shirt' of a later and more remote generation. But beyond the coalition for mutual help that existed between Overbury and Carr, an arrangement which might have thrived on a basis merely material, there was a deep and splendid friendship. 'Stuffed shirt' or not, Robert Carr was greatly loved by Overbury. Whatever Overbury may have thought of Carr's mental attainments, he had the greatest faith in his loyalty as a friend. And here lies the terrible pity in that 'if' of my choice. The love between the two men was great enough to have saved them both. It broke on the weakness of Carr.
Overbury was aware that, honestly presented, the petition by Lady Essex for the annulment of her marriage had little chance of success. But for the obstinacy of Essex it might have been granted readily enough. He had, however, as we have seen, forced her to live with him as his wife, in appearance at least, for several months in the country. There now would be difficulty in putting forward the petition on the ground of non-consummation of the marriage.
It was, nevertheless, on this ground that the petition was brought forward. But the non-consummation was not attributed, as it might have been, to the continued separation that had begun at the altar; the reason given was the impotence of the husband. Just what persuasion Northampton and the Howards used on Essex to make him accept this humiliating implication it is hard to imagine, but by the time the coarse wits of the period had done with him Essex was amply punished in ridicule for his primary obstinacy.
Sir Thomas Overbury, well informed though he usually was, must have been a good deal in the dark regarding the negotiations which had brought the nullity suit to this forward state. He had warned Rochester so frankly of the danger into which the scheme was likely to lead him that they had quarrelled and parted. If Rochester had been frank with his friend, if, on the ground of their friendship, he had appealed to him to set aside his prejudice, it might well have been that the tragedy which ensued would have been averted. Enough evidence remains to this day of Overbury's kindness for Robert Carr, there is enough proof of the man's abounding resource and wit, to give warrant for belief that he would have had the will, as he certainly had the ability, to help his friend. Overbury was one of the brightest intelligences of his age. Had Rochester confessed the extent of his commitment with Northampton there is little doubt that Overbury could and would have found a way whereby Rochester could have attained his object (of marriage with Frances Howard), and this without jeopardizing their mutual power to the Howard menace.
In denying the man who had made him great the complete confidence which their friendship demanded Rochester took the tragically wrong path on his road of destiny. But the truth is that when he quarrelled with Overbury he had already betrayed the friendship. He had already embarked on the perilous experiment of straddling between two opposed camps. It was an experiment that he, least of all men, had the adroitness to bring off. He was never in such need of Overbury's brain as when he aligned himself in secret with Overbury's enemies.
It is entirely probable that in linking up with Northampton Rochester had no mind to injure his friend. The bait was the woman he loved. Without Northampton's aid the nullity suit could not be put forward, and without the annulment there could be no marriage for him with Frances Howard. But he had no sooner joined with Northampton than the very processes against which Overbury had warned him were begun. Rochester was trapped, and with him Overbury.
For the success of the suit, in Northampton's view, Overbury knew too much. It was a view to which Rochester was readily persuaded; or it was one which he was easily frightened into accepting. From that to joining in a plot for being rid of Overbury was but a step. Grateful, perhaps, for the undoubted services that Overbury had rendered him, Rochester would be eager enough to find his quondam friend employment. If that employment happened to take Overbury out of the country so much the better. At one time the King, jealous as a woman of the friendship existing between his favourite and Overbury, had tried to shift the latter out of the way by an offer of the embassy in Paris. It was an offer Rochester thought, that he might cause to be repeated. The idea was broached to Overbury. That shrewd individual, of course, saw through the suggestion to the intention behind it, but he was at a loss for an outlet for his talents, having left Rochester's employ, and he believed without immodesty that he could do useful work as ambassador in Paris.
Overbury was offered an embassy—but in Muscovy. He had no mind to bury himself in Russia, and he refused the offer on the ground of ill-health. By doing this he walked into the trap prepared for him. Northampton had foreseen the refusal when he promoted the offer on its rearranged terms. The King, already incensed against Overbury for some hints at knowledge of facts liable to upset the Essex nullity suit, pretended indignation at the refusal. Overbury unwarily repeated it before the Privy Council. That was what Northampton wanted. The refusal was high contempt of the King's majesty. Sir Thomas Overbury was committed to the Tower. He might have talked in Paris, or have written from Muscovy. He might safely do either in the Tower—where gags and bonds were so readily at hand.
Did Rochester know of the springe set to catch Overbury? The answer to the question, whether yes or no, hardly matters. Since he was gull enough to discard the man whose brain had lifted him from a condition in which he was hardly better than the King's lap-dog, he was gull enough to be fooled by Northampton. Since he valued the friendship of that honest man so little as to consort in secret with his enemies, he was knave enough to have been party to the betrayal. Knave or fool—what does it matter? He was so much of both that, in dread of what Sir Thomas might say or do to thwart the nullity suit, he let his friend rot in the Tower for months on end, let him sicken and nearly die several times, without a move to free him. He did this to the man who had trusted him implicitly, a man that—to adapt Overbury's own words from his last poignant letter to Rochester—he had "more cause to love... yea, perish for.. . rather than see perish."
It is not given to every man to have that greater love which will make him lay down his life for a friend, but it is the sheer poltroon and craven who will watch a friend linger and expire in agony without lifting a finger to save him. Knave or fool—what does it matter when either is submerged in the coward?
IV
Overbury lay in the Tower five months. The commission appointed to examine into the Essex nullity suit went into session three weeks after he was imprisoned. There happened to be one man in the commission who cared more to be honest than to humour the King. This was the Archbishop Abbot. The King himself had prepared the petition. It was a task that delighted his pedantry, and his petition was designed for immediate acceptance. But such was Abbot's opposition that in two or three months the commission ended with divided findings.
Meantime Overbury in the Tower had been writing letters. He had been talking to visitors. As time went on, and Rochester did nothing to bring about his enlargement, his writings and sayings became more threatening Rochester's attitude was that patience was needed. In time he would bring the King to a more clement view of Sir Thomas's offending, and he had no doubt that in the end he would be able to secure the prisoner both freedom and honourable employment.
Overbury had been consigned to the Tower in April. In June he complained of illness. Rochester wrote to him in sympathetic terms, sending him a powder that he himself had found beneficial, and made his own physician visit the prisoner.
But the threats which Overbury, indignant at his betrayal by Rochester, made by speech and writing were becoming common property in the city and at Court One of Overbury's visitors who had made public mention of Overbury's knowledge of facts likely to blow upon the Essex suit was arrested on the orders of Northampton. In the absence of the King and Rochester from London the old Earl was acting as Chief Secretary of State—thus proving Overbury to have been a true prophet. Northampton issued orders to the Tower that Overbury was to be closely confined, that his man Davies was to be dismissed, and that he was to be denied all visitors. The then Lieutenant of the Tower, one Sir William Wade, was deprived of his position on the thinnest of pretexts, and, on the recommendation of Sir Thomas Monson, Master of the Armoury, an elderly gentleman from Lincolnshire, Sir Gervase Elwes, was put in his place.
From that moment Sir Thomas Overbury was permitted no communication with the outer world, save by letter to Lord Rochester and for food that was brought him, as we shall presently see, at the instance of Mrs Turner.
In place of his own servant Davies Sir Thomas was allowed the services of an under-keeper named Weston, appointed at the same time as Sir Gervase Elwes. This man, it is perhaps important to note, had at one time been servant to Mrs Turner.
The alteration in the personnel of the Tower was almost immediately followed by severe illness on the part of the prisoner. The close confinement to which he was subjected, with the lack of exercise, could hardly have been the cause of such a violent sickness. It looked more as if it had been brought about by something he had eaten or drunk. By this time the conviction he had tried to resist, that Rochester was meanly sacrificing him, became definite. Overbury is hardly to be blamed if he came to a resolution to be revenged on his one-time friend by bringing him to utter ruin. King James had been so busy in the Essex nullity suit, had gone to such lengths to carry it through, that if it could be wrecked by the production of the true facts he would be bound to sacrifice Rochester to save his own face. Sir Thomas had an accurate knowledge of the King's character. He knew the scramble James was capable of making in a difficulty that involved his kingly dignity, and what little reck he had of the faces he trod on in climbing from a pit of his own digging. By a trick Overbury contrived to smuggle a letter through to the honest Archbishop Abbot, in which he declared his possession of facts that would non-suit the nullity action, and begged to be summoned before the commission.
Overbury was getting better of the sickness which had attacked him when suddenly it came upon him again. This time he made no bones about saying that he had been poisoned.
Even at the last Overbury had taken care to give Rochester a chance to prove his fidelity. He contrived that the delivery of the letter to the Archbishop of Canterbury should be delayed until just before the nullity commission, now augmented by members certain to vote according to the King's desire, was due to sit again. The Archbishop carried Overbury's letter to James, and insisted that Overbury should be heard. The King, outward stickler that he was for the letter of the law, had to agree.
On the Thursday of the week during which the commission was sitting Overbury was due to be called. He was ill, but not so ill as he had been. On the Tuesday he was visited by the King's physician. On the Wednesday he was dead.
Now, before we come to examine those evidences regarding Overbury's death that were to be brought forward in the series of trials of later date, that series which was to be known as "the Great Oyer of Poisoning," it may be well to consider what effect upon the Essex nullity suit Overbury's appearance before the commission might have had. It may be well to consider what reason Rochester had for keeping his friend in close confinement in the Tower, what reason there was for permitting Northampton to impose such cruelly rigorous conditions of imprisonment.
The nullity suit succeeded. A jury of matrons was impanelled, and made an examination of the lady appellant. Its evidence was that she was virgo intacta. Seven out of the twelve members of the packed commission voted in favour of the sentence of nullity.
The kernel of the situation lies in the verdict of the jury of matrons. Her ladyship was declared to be a maid. If in the finding gossips and scandal-mongers found reason for laughter, and decent enough people cause for wonderment, they are hardly to be blamed. If Frances Howard was a virgin, what reason was there for fearing anything Overbury might have said? What knowledge had he against the suit that put Rochester and the Howards in such fear of him that they had to confine him in the Tower under such miserable conditions? In what was he so dangerous that he had to be deprived of his faithful Davies, that he had to be put in the care of a Tower Lieutenant specially appointed? The evidence given before the commission can still be read in almost verbatim report. It is completely in favour of the plea of Lady Essex. Sir Thomas Overbury's, had he given evidence, would have been the sole voice against the suit. If he had said that in his belief the association of her ladyship with Rochester had been adulterous there was the physical fact adduced by the jury of matrons to confute him. And being confuted in that, what might he have said that would not be attributed to rancour on his part? That her ladyship, with the help of Mrs Turner and the wizard of Lambeth, had practised magic upon her husband, giving him powders that went near to killing him? That she had lived in seclusion for several months with her husband at Chartley, and that the non-consummation of the marriage was due, not to the impotence of the husband, but to refusal to him of marital rights on the part of the wife because of her guilty love for Rochester? His lordship of Essex was still alive, and there was abundant evidence before the court that there had been attempt to consummate the marriage. Whatever Sir Thomas might have said would have smashed as evidence on that one fact. Her ladyship was a virgin.
What did Sir Thomas Overbury know that made every one whose interest it was to further the nullity suit so scared of him—Rochester, her ladyship, Northampton, the Howards, the King himself?
Sir Thomas Overbury was much too cool-minded, too intelligent, to indulge in threats unless he was certain of the grounds, and solid upon them, upon which he made those threats. He had too great a knowledge of affairs not to know that the commission would be a packed one, too great an acquaintance with the strategy of James to believe that his lonely evidence, unless of bombshell nature, would have a chance of carrying weight in a court of his Majesty's picking. And, then, he was of too big a mind to put forward evidence which would have no effect but that of affording gossip for the scandal-mongers, and the giving of which would make him appear to be actuated by petty spite. He had too great a sense of his own dignity to give himself anything but an heroic role. Samson he might play, pulling the pillars of the temple together to involve his enemies, with himself, in magnificent and dramatic ruin. But Iachimo—no.
In the welter of evidence conflicting with apparent fact which was given before the commission and in the trials of the Great Oyer, in the mass of writing both contemporary and of later days round the Overbury mystery, it is hard indeed to land upon the truth. Feasible solution is to be come upon only by accepting a not too pretty story which is retailed by Antony Weldon. He says that the girl whom the jury of matrons declared to be virgo intacta was so heavily veiled as to be unidentifiable through the whole proceedings, and that she was not Lady Essex at all, but the youthful daughter of Sir Thomas Monson.
Mrs Turner, we do know, was very much a favourite with the ladies of Sir Thomas Monson's family. Gossip Weldon has a funny, if lewd, story to tell of high jinks indulged in by the Monson women and Mrs Turner in which Symon, Monson's servant, played an odd part. This Symon was also employed by Mrs Turner to carry food to Overbury in the Tower. If the substitution story has any truth in it it might well have been a Monson girl who played the part of the Countess. But, of course, a Monson girl may have been chosen by the inventors to give verisimilitude to the substitution story, simply because the family was friendly with Turner, and the tale of the lewd high jinks with Symon added to make it seem more likely that old Lady Monson would lend herself to such a plot.
If there was such a plot it is not at all unlikely that Overbury knew of it. If there was need of such a scheme to bolster the nullity petition it would have had to be evolved while the petition was being planned—that is, a month or two before the commission went first into session. At that time Overbury was still Rochester's secretary, still Rochester's confidant; and if such a scheme had been evolved for getting over an obstacle so fatal to the petition's success it was not in Rochester's nature to have concealed it from Overbury, the two men still being fast friends. Indeed, it may have been Overbury who pointed out the need there would be for the Countess to undergo physical examination, and it may have been on the certainty that her ladyship could not do so that Overbury rested so securely—as he most apparently did, beyond the point of safety—in the idea that the suit was bound to fail. It is legitimate enough to suppose, along this hypothesis, that this substitution plot was the very matter on which the two men quarrelled.
That Overbury had knowledge of some such essential secret as this is manifest in the enmity towards the man which Lady Essex exhibited, even when he lay, out of the way of doing harm, in the Tower. It is hard to believe that an innocent girl of twenty, conscious of her virgin chastity, in mere fear of scandal which she knew would be baseless, could pursue the life of a man with the venom that, as we shall presently see, Frances Howard used towards Overbury through Mrs Turner.
V
As a preliminary to his marriage with Frances Howard, Rochester was created Earl of Somerset, and had the barony of Brancepeth bestowed on him by the King. Overbury was three months in his grave when the marriage was celebrated in the midst of the most extravagant show and entertainment.
The new Earl's power in the kingdom was never so high as at this time. It was, indeed, at its zenith. Decline was soon to set in. It will not serve here to follow the whole process of decay in the King's favour that Somerset was now to experience. There was poetic justice in his downfall. With hands all about him itching to bring him to the ground, he had not the brain for the giddy heights. If behind him there had been the man whose guidance had made him sure-footed in the climb he might have survived, flourishing. But the man he had consigned to death had been more than half of him, had been, indeed, his substance. Alone, with the power Overbury's talents had brought him, Somerset was bound to fail. The irony of it is that his downfall was contrived by a creature of his own raising.
Somerset had appointed Sir Ralph Winwood to the office of First Secretary of State. In that office word came to Winwood from Brussels that new light had been thrown on the mysterious death of Sir Thomas Overbury. Winwood investigated in secret. An English lad, one Reeves, an apothecary's assistant, thinking himself dying, had confessed at Flushing that Overbury had been poisoned by an injection of corrosive sublimate. Reeves himself had given the injection on the orders of his master, Loubel, the apothecary who had attended Overbury on the day before his death. Winwood sought out Loubel, and from him went to Sir Gervase Elwes. The story he was able to make from what he had from the two men he took to the King. From this beginning rose up the Great Oyer of Poisoning. The matter was put into the hands of the Lord Chief Justice, Sir Edward Coke.
The lad Reeves, whose confession had started the matter, was either dead or dying abroad, and was so out of Coke's reach. But the man who had helped the lad to administer the poisoned clyster, the under-keeper Weston, was at hand. Weston was arrested, and examined by Coke. The statement Coke's bullying drew from the man made mention of one Franklin, another apothecary, as having supplied a phial which Sir Gervase Elwes had taken and thrown away. Weston had also received another phial by Franklin's son from Lady Essex. This also Sir Gervase had taken and destroyed. Then there had been tarts and jellies supplied by Mrs Turner.
Coke had Mrs Turner and Franklin arrested, and after that Sir Gervase was taken as an accessory, and on his statement that he had employed Weston on Sir Thomas Monson's recommendation Sir Thomas also was roped in. He maintained that he had been told to recommend Weston by Lady Essex and the Earl of Northampton.
The next person to be examined by Coke was the apothecary Loubel, he who had attended Overbury on the day before his death. Though in his confession the lad Reeves said that he had been given money and sent abroad by Loubel, this was a matter that Coke did not probe. Loubel told Coke that he had given Overbury nothing but the physic prescribed by Sir Theodore Mayerne, the King's physician, and that in his opinion Overbury had died of consumption. With this evidence Coke was very strangely content—or, at least, content as far as Loubel was concerned, for this witness was not summoned again.
Other persons were examined by Coke, notably Overbury's servant Davies and his secretary Payton. Their statements served to throw some suspicion on the Earl of Somerset.
But if all the detail of these examinations were gone into we should never be done. Our concern is with the two women involved, Anne Turner and the Countess of Somerset, as we must now call her. I am going to quote, however, two paragraphs from Rafael Sabatini's romance The Minion that I think may explain why it is so difficult to come to the truth of the Overbury mystery. They indicate how it was smothered by the way in which Coke rough-handled justice throughout the whole series of trials.
On October 19th, at the Guildhall, began the Great Oyer of Poisoning, as Coke described it, with the trial of Richard Weston.
Thus at the very outset the dishonesty of the proceedings is apparent. Weston was an accessory. Both on his own evidence and that of Sir Gervase Elwes, besides the apothecary's boy in Flushing, Sir Thomas Overbury had died following upon an injection prepared by Loubel. Therefore Loubel was the principal, and only after Loubel's conviction could the field have been extended to include Weston and the others. But Loubel was tried neither then nor subsequently, a circumstance regarded by many as the most mysterious part of what is known as the Overbury mystery, whereas, in fact, it is the clue to it. Nor was the evidence of the coroner put in, so that there was no real preliminary formal proof that Overbury had been poisoned at all.
Here Mr Sabatini is concerned to develop one of the underlying arguments of his story—namely, that it was King James himself who had ultimately engineered the death of Sir Thomas Overbury. It is an argument which I would not attempt to refute. I do not think that Mr Sabatini's acumen has failed him in the least. But the point for me in the paragraphs is the indication they give of how much Coke did to suppress all evidence that did not suit his purpose.
Weston's trial is curious in that at first he refused to plead. It is the first instance I have met with in history of a prisoner standing 'mute of malice.' Coke read him a lecture on the subject, pointing out that by his obstinacy he was making himself liable to peine forte et dure, which meant that order could be given for his exposure in an open place near the prison, extended naked, and to have weights laid upon him in increasing amount, he being kept alive with the "coarsest bread obtainable and water from the nearest sink or puddle to the place of execution, that day he had water having no bread, and that day he had bread having no water." One may imagine with what grim satisfaction Coke ladled this out. It had its effect on Weston.
He confessed that Mrs Turner had promised to give him a reward if he would poison Sir Thomas Overbury. In May she had sent him a phial of "rosalgar," and he had received from her tarts poisoned with mercury sublimate. He was charged with having, at Mrs Turner's instance, joined with an apothecary's boy in administering an injection of corrosive sublimate to Sir Thomas Overbury, from which the latter died. Coke's conduct of the case obscures just how much Weston admitted, but, since it convinced the jury of Weston's guilt, the conviction served finely for accusation against Mrs Turner.
Two days after conviction Weston was executed at Tyburn.
The trial of Anne Turner began in the first week of November. It would be easy to make a pathetic figure of the comely little widow as she stood trembling under Coke's bullying, but she was, in actual fact, hardly deserving of pity. It is far from enlivening to read of Coke's handling of the trial, and it is certain that Mrs Turner was condemned on an indictment and process which to-day would not have a ghost of a chance of surviving appeal, but it is perfectly plain that Anne was party to one of the most vicious poisoning plots ever engineered.
We have, however, to consider this point in extenuation for her. It is almost certain that in moving to bring about the death of Overbury she had sanction, if only tacit, from the Earl of Northampton. By the time that the Great Oyer began Northampton was dead. Two years had elapsed from the death of Overbury. It would be quite clear to Anne that, in the view of the powerful Howard faction, the elimination of Overbury was politically desirable. It should be remembered, too, that she lived in a period when assassination, secret or by subverted process of justice, was a commonplace political weapon. Public executions by methods cruel and even obscene taught the people to hold human life at small value, and hardened them to cruelties that made poisoning seem a mercy. It is not at all unlikely that, though her main object may have been to help forward the plans of her friend the Countess, Anne considered herself a plotter in high affairs of State.
The indictment against her was that she had comforted, aided, and abetted Weston—that is to say, she was made an accessory. If, however, as was accused, she procured Weston and Reeves to administer the poisonous injection she was certainly a principal, and as such should have been tried first or at the same time as Weston. But Weston was already hanged, and so could not be questioned. His various statements were used against her unchallenged, or, at least, when challenging them was useless.
The indictment made no mention of her practices against the Earl of Essex, but from the account given in the State Trials it would seem that evidence on this score was used to build the case against her. Her relations with Dr Forman, now safely dead, were made much of. She and the Countess of Essex had visited the charlatan and had addressed him as "Father." Their reason for visiting, it was said, was that "by force of magick he should procure the then Viscount of Rochester to love the Countess and Sir Arthur Mainwaring to love Mrs Turner, by whom she had three children." Letters from the Countess to Turner were read. They revealed the use on Lord Essex of those powders her ladyship had been given by Forman. The letters had been found by Forman's wife in a packet among Forman's possessions after his death. These, with others and with several curious objects exhibited in court, had been demanded by Mrs Turner after Forman's demise. Mrs Turner had kept them, and they were found in her house.
As indicating the type of magic practised by Forman these objects are of interest. Among other figures, probably nothing more than dolls of French make, there was a leaden model of a man and woman in the act of copulation, with the brass mould from which it had been cast. There was a black scarf ornamented with white crosses, papers with cabalistic signs, and sundry other exhibits which appear to have created superstitious fear in the crowd about the court. It is amusing to note that while those exhibits were being examined one of the scaffolds erected for seating gave way or cracked ominously, giving the crowd a thorough scare. It was thought that the devil himself, raised by the power of those uncanny objects, had got into the Guildhall. Consternation reigned for quite a quarter of an hour.
There was also exhibited Forman's famous book of signatures, in which Coke is supposed to have encountered his own wife's name on the first page.
Franklin, apothecary, druggist, necromancer, wizard, and born liar, had confessed to supplying the poisons intended for use upon Overbury. He declared that Mrs Turner had come to him from the Countess and asked him to get the strongest poisons procurable. He "accordingly bought seven: viz., aqua fortis, white arsenic, mercury, powder of diamonds, lapis costitus, great spiders, cantharides." Franklin's evidence is a palpable tissue of lies, full of statements that contradict each other, but it is likely enough, judging from facts elicited elsewhere, that his list of poisons is accurate. Enough poison passed from hand to hand to have slain an army.
Mention is made by Weldon of the evidence given by Symon, servant to Sir Thomas Monson, who had been employed by Mrs Turner to carry a jelly and a tart to the Tower. Symon appears to have been a witty fellow. He was, "for his pleasant answer," dismissed by Coke.
My lord told him: "Symon, you have had a hand in this poisoning business——"
"No, my good lord, I had but a finger in it, which almost cost me my life, and, at the best, cost me all my hair and nails." For the truth was that Symon was somewhat liquorish, and finding the syrup swim from the top of the tart as he carried it, he did with his finger skim it off: and it was believed, had he known what it had been, he would not have been his taster at so dear a rate.
Coke, with his bullying methods and his way of acting both as judge and chief prosecutor, lacks little as prototype for the later Judge Jeffreys. Even before the jury retired he was at pains to inform Mrs Turner that she had the seven deadly sins: viz., "a whore, a bawd, a sorcerer, a witch, a papist, a felon, and a murderer, the daughter of the devil Forman."[13] And having given such a Christian example throughout the trial, he besought her "to repent, and to become the servant of Jesus Christ, and to pray Him to cast out the seven devils." It was upon this that Anne begged the Lord Chief Justice to be merciful to her, putting forward the plea of having been brought up with the Countess of Essex, and of having been "a long time her servant." She declared that she had not known of poison in the things that were sent to Sir Thomas Overbury.
The jury's retirement was not long-drawn. They found her guilty.
Says Weldon:
The Wednesday following she was brought from the sheriff's in a coach to Newgate and there was put into a cart, and casting money often among the people as she was carried to Tyburn, where she was executed, and whither many men and women of fashion followed her in coaches to see her die.
Her speeches before execution were pious, like most speeches of the sort, and "moved the spectators to great pity and grief for her." She again related "her breeding with the Countess of Somerset," and pleaded further of "having had no other means to maintain her and her children but what came from the Countess." This last, of course, was less than the truth. Anne was not so indigent that she needed to take to poisoning as a means of supporting her family. She also said "that when her hand was once in this business she knew the revealing of it would be her overthrow."
In more than one account written later of her execution she is said to have worn a ruff and cuffs dressed with the yellow starch which she had made so fashionable, and it is maintained that this association made the starch thereafter unpopular. It is forgotten that with Anne the recipe for the yellow starch probably was lost. Moreover, the elaborate ruff was then being put out of fashion by the introduction of the much more comfortable lace collar. In any case, "There is no truth," writes Judge Parry, in the old story[14] that Coke ordered her to be executed in the yellow ruff she had made the fashion and so proudly worn in Court. What did happen, according to Sir Simonds d'Ewes, was that the hangman, a coarse ruffian with a distorted sense of humour, dressed himself in bands and cuffs of yellow colour, but no one heeded his ribaldry; only in after days none of either sex used the yellow starch, and the fashion grew generally to be detested.
Pretty much, I should think, as the tall 'choker' became detested within the time of many of us. After Mrs Turner Sir Gervase Elwes was brought to trial as an accessory. The only evidence against him was that of the liar Franklin, who asserted that Sir Gervase had been in league with the Countess. It was plain, however, both from Weston's statements and from Sir Gervase's own, that the Lieutenant of the Tower had done his very best to defeat the Turner-Essex-Northampton plot for the poisoning of Overbury, throwing away the "rosalgar" and later draughts, as well as substituting food from his own kitchen for that sent in by Turner. "Although it must have been clear that if any of what was alleged against him had been true Overbury's poisoning would never have taken five months to accomplish, he was sentenced and hanged."[15]
This, of course, was a glaring piece of injustice, but Coke no doubt had his instructions. Weston, Mrs Turner, Elwes, and, later, Franklin had to be got out of the way, so that they could not be confronted with the chief figure against whom the Great Oyer was directed, and whom it was designed to pull down, Robert Carr, Earl of Somerset—and with him his wife. Just as much of the statements and confessions of the prisoners in the four preliminary trials was used by Coke as suited his purpose. It is pointed out by Amos, in his Great Oyer of Poisoning, that a large number of the documents appertaining to the Somerset trial show corrections and apparent glosses in Coke's own handwriting, and that even the confessions on the scaffold of some of the convicted are holographs by Coke. As a sample of the suppression of which Coke was guilty I may put forward the fact that Somerset's note to his own physician, Craig, asking him to visit Overbury, was not produced. Yet great play was made by Coke of this visit against Somerset. Wrote Somerset to Craig, "I pray you let him have your best help, and as much of your company as he shall require."
It was never proved that it was Anne Turner and Lady Essex who corrupted the lad Reeves, who with Weston administered the poisoned clyster that murdered Overbury. Nothing was done at all to absolve the apothecary Loubel, Reeves's master, of having prepared the poisonous injection, nor Sir Theodore Mayerne, the King's physician, of having been party to its preparation. Yet it was demonstrably the injection that killed Overbury if he was killed by poison at all. It is certain that the poisons sent to the Tower by Turner and the Countess did not save in early instances, get to Overbury at all—Elwes saw to that—or Overbury must have died months before he did die.
According to Weldon, who may be supposed to have witnessed the trials, Franklin confessed "that Overbury was smothered to death, not poisoned to death, though he had poison given him." And Weldon goes on to make this curious comment:
Here was Coke glad, how to cast about to bring both ends together, Mrs Turner and Weston being already hanged for killing Overbury with poison; but he, being the very quintessence of the law, presently informs the jury that if a man be done to death with pistols, poniards, swords, halter, poison, etc., so he be done to death, the indictment is good if he be but indicted for any of those ways. But the good lawyers of those times were not of that opinion, but did believe that Mrs Turner was directly murthered by my lord Coke's law as Overbury was without any law.
Though you will look in vain through the reports given in the State Trials for any speech of Coke to the jury in exactly these terms, it might be just as well to remember that the transcriptions from which the Trials are printed were prepared UNDER Coke's SUPERVISION, and that they, like the confessions of the convicted, are very often in his own handwriting.
At all events, even on the bowdlerized evidence that exists, it is plain that Anne Turner should have been charged only with attempted murder. Of that she was manifestly guilty and, according to the justice of the time, thoroughly deserved to be hanged. The indictment against her was faulty, and the case against her as full of holes as a colander. Her trial was 'cooked' in more senses than one.
It was some seven months after the execution of Anne Turner that the Countess of Essex was brought to trial. This was in May. In December, while virtually a prisoner under the charge of Sir William Smith at Lord Aubigny's house in Blackfriars, she had given birth to a daughter. In March she had been conveyed to the Tower, her baby being handed over to the care of her mother, the Countess of Suffolk. Since the autumn of the previous year she had not been permitted any communication with her husband, nor he with her. He was already lodged in the Tower when she arrived there.
On a day towards the end of May she was conveyed by water from the Tower to Westminster Hall. The hall was packed to suffocation, seats being paid for at prices which would turn a modern promoter of a world's heavyweight-boxing-championship fight green with envy. Her judges were twenty-two peers of the realm, with the Lord High Steward, the Lord Chief Justice, and seven judges at law. It was a pageant of colour, in the midst of which the woman on trial, in her careful toilette, consisting of a black stammel gown, a cypress chaperon or black crepe hood in the French fashion, relieved by touches of white in the cuffs and ruff of cobweb lawn, struck a funereal note. Preceded by the headsman carrying his axe with its edge turned away from her, she was conducted to the bar by the Lieutenant of the Tower. The indictment was read to her, and at its end came the question: "Frances Howard, Countess of Somerset, how sayest thou? Art thou guilty of this felony and murder or not guilty?"
There was a hushed pause for a moment; then came the low-voiced answer: "Guilty."
Sir Francis Bacon, the Attorney-General—himself to appear in the same place not long after to answer charges of bribery and corruption—now addressed the judges. His eloquent address was a commendation of the Countess's confession, and it hinted at royal clemency.
In answer to the formal demand of the Clerk of Arraigns if she had anything to say why judgment of death should not be given against her the Countess made a barely audible plea for mercy, begging their lordships to intercede for her with the King. Then the Lord High Steward, expressing belief that the King would be moved to mercy, delivered judgment. She was to be taken thence to the Tower of London, thence to the place of execution, where she was to be hanged by the neck until she was dead—and might the Lord have mercy on her soul.
The attendant women hastened to the side of the swaying woman. And now the halbardiers formed escort about her, the headsman in front, with the edge of his axe turned towards her in token of her conviction, and she was led away.
VI
It is perfectly clear that the Countess of Somerset was led to confess on the promise of the King's mercy. It is equally clear that she did not know what she was confessing to. Whatever might have been her conspiracy with Anne Turner it is a practical certainty that it did not result in the death of Thomas Overbury. There is no record of her being allowed any legal advice in the seven months that had elapsed since she had first been made a virtual prisoner. She had been permitted no communication with her husband. For all she knew, Overbury might indeed have died from the poison which she had caused to be sent to the Tower in such quantity and variety. And she went to trial at Westminster guilty in conscience, her one idea being to take the blame for having brought about the murder of Overbury, thinking by that to absolve her husband of any share in the plot. She could not have known that her plea of guilty would weaken Somerset's defence. The woman who could go to such lengths in order to win her husband was unlikely to have done anything that might put him in jeopardy. One can well imagine with what fierceness she would have fought her case had she thought that by doing so she could have helped the man she loved.
But Frances Howard, no less than her accomplice Anne Turner, was the victim of a gross subversion of justice. That she was guilty of a cruel and determined attempt to poison Overbury is beyond question, and, being guilty of that, she was thoroughly deserving of the fate that overcame Anne Turner, but that at the last she was allowed to escape. Her confession, however, shackled Somerset at his trial. It put her at the King's mercy. Without endangering her life Somerset dared not come to the crux of his defence, which would have been to demand why Loubel had been allowed to go free, and why the King's physician, Mayerne, had not been examined. To prevent Somerset from asking those questions, which must have given the public a sufficient hint of King James's share in the murder of Overbury, two men stood behind the Earl all through his trial with cloaks over their arms, ready to muffle him. But, whatever may be said of Somerset, the prospect of the cloaks would not have stopped him from attempting those questions. He had sent word to King James that he was "neither Gowrie nor Balmerino," those two earlier victims of James's treachery. The thing that muffled him was the threat to withdraw the promised mercy to his Countess. And so he kept silent, to be condemned to death as his wife had been, and to join her in the Tower.
Five weary years were the couple to eat their hearts out there, their death sentences remitted, before their ultimate banishment far from the Court to a life of impoverished obscurity in the country. Better for them, one would think, if they had died on Tower Green. It is hard to imagine that the dozen years or so which they were to spend together could contain anything of happiness for them—she the confessed would-be poisoner, and he haunted by the memory of that betrayal of friendship which had begun the process of their double ruin. Frances Howard died in 1632, her husband twenty-three years later. The longer lease of life could have been no blessing to the fallen favourite.
There is a portrait of Frances Howard in the National Portrait Gallery by an unknown artist. It is an odd little face which appears above the elaborate filigree of the stiff lace ruff and under the carefully dressed bush of dark brown hair. With her gay jacket of red gold-embroidered, and her gold-ornamented grey gown, cut low to show the valley between her young breasts, she looks like a child dressed up. If there is no great indication of the beauty which so many poets shed ink over there is less promise of the dire determination which was to pursue a man's life with cruel poisons over several months. It is, however, a narrow little face, and there is a tight-liddedness about the eyes which in an older woman might indicate the bigot. Bigot she proved herself to be, if it be bigotry in a woman to love a man with an intensity that will not stop at murder in order to win him. That is the one thing that may be said for Frances Howard. She did love Robert Carr. She loved him to his ruin.
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