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.