which were not published until_ 1614, _the year after their writer's
death, at the age of thirty-two; but they may have been written earlier
than the "Characters of Virtues and Vices"--ethical characters--written
by Joseph Hall, which were first published in_ 1609.
_Sir Thomas Overbury died poisoned in the Tower on the_ 15_th of
September_ 1613. _On the_ 5_th of January_ 1606, _by desire of James the
First, the young Earl of Essex, aged fourteen, had been married to the
Lady Frances Howard, aged thirteen, the younger daughter of the Earl of
Suffolk. Ben Jonson's "Masque of Hymen" was produced at Court in
celebration of that union. The young Robert Devereux, third Earl of
Essex, had good qualities too solid for the taste of a frivolous girl;
and when, after travel abroad, the husband of eighteen claimed the wife
of seventeen, he found her happy in flirtation with the King's
favourite, Sir Robert Carr. Though compelled to live with her husband,
she repelled all his advances, and after three years of this repugnance
tried for a divorce. The King's Scotch favourite, Carr, had been made,
in March 1611, an English peer, as Viscount Rochester, when the age of
the young Countess of Essex was nineteen. He was the man highest in King
James's favour. If the divorce sought by the Countess early in 1613 were
obtained for her, it was understood that Carr would marry her, and that
support of the divorce would be a way to future benefit through his good
offices. Thus she obtained the support of her father and uncle, the
Earls of Suffolk and Northampton. The King's influence went with the
wishes of the favourite. The trial, in 1613, ending in a decree of
nullity of marriage, was a four months' scandal in the land. Among the
familiar friends of Robert Carr, Lord Rochester, was Sir Thomas
Overbury, born in Warwickshire in 1581, and knighted by King James in
1608. He strongly opposed the policy of a divorce obtained on false
pretences followed by his patron's marriage to the divorced wife. The
grounds of his opposition may have been part private, part political.
His opposition was determined, and if he offered himself as witness
before the Commission, he probably knew enough about the lady's secret
practisings to give such evidence as would frustrate her designs. It was
thought desirable, therefore, to get Overbury out of the way. The King
offered him a post abroad. He was unwilling to accept it, and at last
was driven to an explicit refusal. The King was angry, and caused his
Council to commit Sir Thomas Overbury to the Tower for contempt of His
Majesty's commands. He was to be seen by no one, and to have no servant
with him. Sir William Wood, the Lieutenant of the Tower, was superseded,
and Sir Gervase Helwys was put in his place with secret understandings,
of which the design may only have been to prevent Sir Thomas Overbury
from saying anything that could come to the ears of the world until the
divorce was granted. But Lady Essex wished Sir Thomas Overbury to be
more effectually silenced. She had tried and failed to get him
assassinated. Now she resolved to get him poisoned. She obtained the
employment of a creature of her own, named Weston, as his immediate
keeper. Weston falsely professed to Lady Essex that he had administered
the poison she had given him, and that the result had been not death but
loss of health. There is much uncertainty about the evidence of detail
and of the privity of others in the designs of Lady Essex, who seems at
last to have completed her work by the agency of an apothecary's
assistant. He gave the fatal dose in an injection, by which Overbury was
killed ten days before the Commission gave judgment in favour of the
divorce. At Christmas the favourite married the divorced wife, having
been created Earl of Somerset, that as his wife she might be Countess
still. In the following year, 1614, Sir Thomas Overbury's "Characters"
were published, together with his Character in verse of A Wife, who was
described as "A Wife, now a Widow." This had been published a little
earlier in the same year separately, without any added "Characters."
When the Characters appeared they were described as "Many Witty
Characters and conceited Newes written by himselfe and other learned
Gentlemen his Friends." The twenty-one Characters in that edition were,
therefore, not all from one hand. Their popularity is indicated by the
fact that in the next year, 1615, they reached a sixth edition. Three
more editions were published in 1616. This was because interest in the
book had been heightened by the Great Oyer of Poisoning, the trial in
May 1616 of the Earl and Countess of Somerset for Overbury's murder, of
which both were found guilty, though the Countess took all guilt upon
herself. Then followed a tenth edition in 1618, an eleventh in 1622, a
twelfth in 1627, a thirteenth in 1628, a fourteenth in 1630, a fifteenth
in 1632, a sixteenth in 1638; and then a pause, the seventeenth being in
1664, two years before the fire of London. By this time the original set
of twenty-one Characters had been considerably increased, "with
additions of New Characters and many other Witty Conceits never before
Printed;" so that Overbury's Characters, which had from the first
included a few pieces written by his friends, became a name for the most
popular miscellany of pieces of Character Writing current in the
Seventeenth Century, and shows how wit was exercised in this way by
half-a-dozen or more of the mob of gentlemen who wrote with ease. These
are the pieces thus at last made current as_