After the execution of Mrs. Turner and Weston came the trial of Franklyn, who confessed that poison had not been the cause of Overbury’s death.
Weldon, who in 1755, published a history of the Kings of England describes how Franklyn and Weston “came into Overbury’s chamber and found him in infinite torment with the contention between the state of nature and working of the poison, and it had been very like that nature had got the better in that contention ... but they, fearing it might come to light by the judgment of physicians that foul play had been offered him, consented to stifle him with bed-clothes, which accordingly was performed. And so ended his miserable life, with the assurance of the conspirators that he died of poison, none thinking otherwise but these two murtherers.”
The account given by Weldon of the manner in which the Lord Chief Justice received this confession is well worth quoting: “And now poor Mrs. Turner, Weston and Franklyn began the tragedy. Mrs. Turner’s day of mourning being better than her life, for she died very penitently and showed much modesty in her last act. After that died Weston, and then was Franklyn arraigned, who confessed that Overbury was smothered to death not poisoned to death, though he had poison given him.
“Here was Coke glad to cast about to bring both ends together, Mrs. Turner and Weston being already hanged for killing Overbury by poison, but he being the very quintessence of the law presently informed the jury that if a man be done to death with pistol, poinard, sword, halter, poison, etc., so he be done to death, the indictment holds good, if but indicted for one 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 Lord Coke’s law as Overbury was without any law.”
After the trial and execution of the minor prisoners came the trial of the Countess of Somerset, the instigator of the crime, before the House of Peers.
The Clerk of the Crown asked her, “Frances Countess of Somerset, art thou guilty of the felony and murder, or not guilty?”
And she, making obeisance to the Lord High Steward, answered “Guilty,” in a low timid voice.
The Attorney-General, Sir Francis Bacon, then praised King James in a fulsome manner, and held out hopes of pardon to the prisoner. The Lord Chief Justice Coke also talked in servile terms of the king, whose instructions for the investigation of the murder, he declared, “deserved to be written in a sunbeam.”
The Clerk of the Crown now asked the Countess “if she had any cause to allege why sentence of death should not be passed upon her.”
To this the prisoner replied in a low voice, which only the Attorney-General heard, “I can much aggravate, but cannot extenuate my fault. I desire mercy and that the lords will intercede for me to the king.”