When this James I. of England had grown nearly tired of his old favorite and minister, Salisbury, for want of better employment he ordered a tilting match, and the order was obeyed with alacrity. In this match Lord Hay resolved to introduce to the King’s notice a youth who enjoyed his lordship’s especial patronage. Accordingly, when the monarch was seated in his tribune, and the brazen throats of the trumpets had bidden the rough sport to begin, the young squire of Lord Hay, a handsome youth of twenty, straight of limb, fair of favor, strong-shouldered, smooth-faced, and with a modesty that enhanced his beauty, rode up on a fiery steed, to lay his master’s shield and lance at the feet of the monarch. The action of the apprentice warrior was so full of grace, his steed so full of fire, and both so eminently beautiful, that James was lost in admiration. But suddenly, as the youth bent forward to present his master’s device, his spur pricked the flank of his charger, and the latter, with a bound and a plunge, threw his rider out of the saddle, and flung young Carr of Fernyhurst, at the feet of his ex-master, the King. The latter recognised his old page, and made amends for the broken leg got in the fall, by nursing the lad, and making him Viscount Rochester, as soon as he was well. James created him knight of the Garter, and taught him grammar. Rochester gave lessons to the King in foreign history. The ill-favored King walked about the court with his arms round the neck of the well-favored knight. He was for ever either gazing at him or kissing him; trussing his points, settling his curls, or smoothing his hose. When Rochester was out of the King’s sight James was mindful of him, and confiscated the estates of honest men in order to enrich his own new favorite. He took Sherborne from the widow and children of Raleigh, with the cold-blooded remark to the kneeling lady, “I maun have it for Carr!”
Rochester was a knight who ruled the King, but there was another knight who ruled Rochester. This was the well-born, hot-headed, able and vicious Sir Thomas Overbury. Overbury polished and polluted the mind of Rochester; read all documents which passed through the hands of the latter, preparatory to reaching those of the King, and not only penned Rochester’s own despatches, but composed his love-letters for him. How pointedly Sir Thomas could write may be seen in his “Characters;” and as a poet, the knight was of no indifferent reputation in his day.
Rochester, Sir Thomas, and the King, were at the very height of their too-warm friendship, when James gave Frances Howard, the daughter of the Earl of Suffolk, in marriage to young Devereux, Earl of Essex. The bride was just in her teens. The bridegroom was a day older. The Bishop of Bath and Wells blessed them in the presence of the King, and Ben Jonson and Inigo Jones constructed a masque in honor of the occasion. When the curtain fell, bride and bridegroom went their separate ways; the first to her mother; the second to school. Four years elapsed ere they again met; and then Frances, who had been ill-trained by her mother, seduced by Prince Henry, and wooed by Rochester, looked upon Essex with infinite scorn. Essex turned from her with disgust.
Rochester then resolved to marry Frances, and Frances employed the poisoner of Paternoster-row, Mrs. Turner, and a certain Dr. Forman, to prepare philters that should make more ardent the flame of the lover, and excite increased aversion in the breast of the husband. Overbury, with intense energy, opposed the idea of the guilty pair, that a divorce from Essex was likely to be procured. He even spoke of the infamy of the lady, to her lover. Frances, thereupon, offered a thousand pounds to a needy knight, Sir John Ward, to slay Overbury in a duel. Sir John declined the offer. A more successful method was adopted. Sir Thomas Overbury was appointed embassador to Russia, and on his refusing to accept the sentence of banishment, he was clapped into the tower as guilty of contempt toward the king. In that prison, the literary knight was duly despatched by slow poison. The guilt was brought home less to Rochester than to Frances, but the King himself appears to have been very well content at the issue.
James united with Rochester and the lady to procure a divorce between the latter and Essex. The King was bribed by a sum of £25,000. Essex himself did not appear. Every ecclesiastical judge was recompensed who pronounced for the divorce—carried by seven against five, and even the son of one of them was knighted. This was the heir of Dr. Bilson, Bishop of Winchester, and he was ever afterward known by the name of Sir Nullity Bilson.
Sir Nullity danced at the wedding of the famous or infamous pair; and never was wedding more splendid. King, peers, and illustrious commoners graced it with their presence. The diocesan of Bath and Wells pronounced the benediction. The Dean of St. Paul’s wrote for the occasion an epithalamic eclogue. The Dean of Westminster supplied the sermon. The great Bacon composed, in honor of the event, the “Masque of Flowers;” and the City made itself bankrupt by the extravagant splendor of its fêtes. One gentleman horsed the bride’s carriage, a bishop’s lady made the bride’s cake, and one humorous sycophant offered the married pair the equivocal gift of a gold warming-pan.
The King, not to be behindhand in distributing honors, conferred one which cost him nothing. He created Rochester Earl of Somerset.
Two years after this joyous wedding, the gentleman who had made a present to the bride, of four horses to draw her in a gilded chariot to the nuptial altar, had become a knight and secretary of state. Sir Richard (or, as some call him, Sir Robert) Winwood was a worshipper of the now rising favorite, Villiers; and none knew better than this newly-made knight that the King was utterly weary of his old favorite, Somerset.
Winwood waited on the King and informed him that a garrulous young apothecary at Flushing, who had studied the use of drugs under Dr. Franklin of London, was making that melancholy town quite lively, by his stories of the abuses of drugs, and the method in which they had been employed by Lord and Lady Somerset, Mrs. Turner (a pretty woman, who invented yellow starched ruffs) and their accomplices, in bringing about the death of Overbury. The food conveyed to the latter was poisoned by Frances and her lover, outside the tower, and was administered to the imprisoned knight by officials within the walls, who were bribed for the purpose.
There is inextricable confusion in the details of the extraordinary trial which ensued. It is impossible to read them without the conviction that some one higher in rank than the Somersets was interested, if not actually concerned, in the death of Overbury. The smaller personages were hanged, and Mrs. Turner put yellow ruffs out of fashion by wearing them at the gallows.