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]