SUDDENLY, studies of Jacobean England seem to be flavour of the month. Only last year there was Antonia Fraser on the Gunpowder Plot, and now here is another author with feminist leanings on the Overbury case.
The death of the 32-year-old courtier and poet Sir Thomas Overbury while a prisoner in the Tower was the second great cause celebre of the reign of James I. Incarcerated for falling out of favour with the king, Overbury died suddenly in 1613, probably from poison. Two years later Lord Chief Justice Sir Edward Coke (he of the law reports and the Institutes) brought four small fry to trial and had them convicted and executed. Then he moved on to his real target, the Earl of Somerset and his wife.
The twist here was that Robert Carr, later Viscount Rochester, later still Lord Somerset, had also been a royal favourite; moreover, he had also been the inseparable friend of Overbury. Even more bizarrely, his wife of two years standing, Frances Howard, had earlier been divorced from the third Earl of Essex on the grounds of the latter's alleged impotence. The gossip was that Frances had been promiscuous before her marriage, had feigned virginity, and then petitioned for an annulment from Essex on grounds of his non-consummation of the marriage.
An irate Essex claimed that he had been impotent only with her, because she disgusted him. But for Frances to get the annulment and marry her lover Rochester, she had to submit to a physical examination by the Nullity Commission. One of the many episodes of black farce in this book occurs when Frances and Rochester bamboozle the commission by substituting a heavily veiled virgo intacta. Having examined "Lady Essex", the Nullity Commission declared itself satisfied and declared the marriage void.
Coke's argument at the trial was that Frances and her husband had motive, means and opportunity to do away with Overbury. The four unfortunates who were their accomplices had already confessed and gone to the gallows. But if that accounted for means and opportunity, what about motive? Coke's case was that Overbury and Rochester had fallen out when Overbury told him that Frances was fine as a mistress but was too great a whore to play the role of wife.
When Rochester told Frances this, she would not rest until she had murdered the man who insulted her. And, alleged Coke, what more perfect method than by poison? Here he cleverly alluded to the canard already current that Frances was a witch, for had not Essex declared that it was only by witchcraft that his former wife had prevented him from consummating their marriage? After all, one of the reasons women were feared as witches was precisely because they prepared food and could therefore easily kill their menfolk.
Somerset and his wife were tried, found guilty and sentenced to hang. Then, in a ludicrous travesty even of the rough justice then available in English society, the king intervened to commute the sentence to a trivial term of imprisonment.
Naturally people queried how four accessories to a crime could be executed while the principals went free. The king's action seemed particularly perverse, because poisoning was regarded with especial horror in Tudor and early Stuart England; a statute of Henry VIII's reign ordained that the penalty for this crime was to be immersed alive in boiling water.
Anne Somerset tells the story very effectively, and she laces tier narrative with excursuses on Jacobean crime and punishment, attitudes to the supernatural, sexuality and much else. Nonetheless, in her excellent book she does not draw the obvious moral: that in class-bound England the denouement, in which the Somersets walked free while "ordinary folk" died, was not so extraordinary as she seems to think. In this sense Lord Lucan and the murdered nanny stand at the end of a very long and time-honoured sequence. {correction} 97020400025