Overbury is aware that he has been betrayed and entrapped, and is left by his treacherous patron to languish in a dungeon. He addresses him in the bitterest and most indignant language, and threatens him with a desperate and fatal revenge. He remembers, too, the threat which had been applied to himself; knows himself to be in the power of the man who used it; feels himself to be dying by inches, of maladies which the most rigorous confinement could not have produced; and yet it never enters his mind that his unscrupulous enemy may have determined, by his death, to get rid of him and his dangerous secrets!
The evidence of Overbury's father is affecting. "After my son was committed," he said, "I heard that he was very sick. I went to the court and delivered a petition to the king, the effect whereof was, that, in respect of my son's sickness, some physicians might have access unto him. The king answered, that his own physician should go to him; and then instantly sent him word by Sir W. Button that his physician should presently go. Upon this, I only addressed myself to my Lord of Somerset, and none else, who said my son should be presently delivered, but dissuaded me from presenting any more petitions to the king; which notwithstanding, I (seeing his freedom still delayed) did deliver a petition to the king to that purpose, who said I should have present answer. And my Lord of Somerset told me he should be suddenly relieved; but with this, that neither I nor my wife must press to see him, because that might protract his delivery, nor deliver any more petitions to the king, because that might stir his enemies up against him; and then," added the poor old man, "he wrote a letter to my wife, to dissuade her from any longer stay in London."
This letter was, "Mrs. Overbury,—Your stay here in town can nothing avail your son's delivery; therefore I would advise you to retire into the country, and doubt not before your coming home you shall hear he is a free man."
Thus did this monster amuse the unhappy parents with delusive hopes till all was over; and he then wrote to the aged father the following unparalleled letter:
"Sir,—Your son's love to me got him the malice of many, and they cast those knots on his fortune that have cost him his life; so, in a kind, there is none guilty of his death but I; and you can have no more cause to commiserate the death of a son, than I of a friend. But, though he be dead, you shall find me as ready as ever I was to do all the courtesies that I possibly can to you and your wife, or your children. In the mean time I desire pardon from you and your wife for your lost son, though I esteem my loss the greater. And for his brother that is in France, I desire his return, that he may succeed his brother in my love."
Somerset defended himself stoutly. His desperate situation seems to have sharpened his faculties. He cross-examined the witnesses with much acuteness and presence of mind, made ingenious objections to their testimony, and laboured to explain away the facts which could not be denied. From eight in the morning till seven at night he exerted himself with an energy worthy of a better cause; but in vain. He was found guilty by the unanimous voice of his judges. He then desired a death according to his degree; but this was denied him, and he received the usual sentence of the law.
Thus were these great criminals brought to justice; and they received, it may be supposed, the punishment of their crimes. No: they were pardoned by the king,—nay more, received especial marks of royal favour! They were imprisoned in the Tower till January 1621, when the king, by an order in council, granted them the liberty of retiring to a country-house. "Whereas his Majesty is graciously pleased," thus ran the order, "to enlarge and set at liberty the Earl of Somerset and his lady, now prisoners in the Tower of London, and that nevertheless it is thought fit that both the said earl and his lady be confined to some convenient place; it is therefore, according to his majesty's gracious pleasure and command, ordered that the Earl of Somerset and his lady do repair either to Greys or Cowsham, the Lord Wallingford's houses in the county of Oxon, and remain confined to one or other of the said houses, and within three miles' compass of either of the same, until further order be given by his majesty." In 1624, they both obtained full pardons; the lady, on the ground that "the process and judgment against her were not as of a principal, but as of an accessory before the fact;" and the earl, merely on the ground of the king's regard for his family. Nor was this all: his majesty granted the earl an income of four thousand pounds a-year out of his forfeited estate; and, what was still worse, in order to save this minion from disgrace, committed a gross outrage on the order of knighthood to which he belonged. "The king," says Camden, "ordered that the arms of the Earl of Somerset, notwithstanding his being condemned of felony, should not be removed out of the chapel at Windsor, and that felony should not be reckoned amongst the disgraces for those who were to be excluded from the order of St. George; which was without precedent." Without precedent indeed!
Remembering the king's solemn vow when, kneeling in the midst of the judges whom he had summoned into his presence, he exclaimed, "If you shall spare any guilty of this crime, God's curse light on you and your posterity; and, if I spare any that are guilty, God's curse light on me and my posterity for ever!" how are we to account for so flagrant a violation of it? Even had he not so earnestly called down the curse of Heaven upon his head, he was bound by the strongest obligations of public justice not to screen from condign punishment criminals so atrocious. Nor can we ascribe his failure in so sacred a duty to personal regard for Somerset. His attachment to him was long since extinguished; a newer favourite had engrossed his capricious affection. Fear, not love, seems to have been the cause of his forbearance.
Before Somerset's trial, mysterious circumstances were remarked, both in his conduct and in that of the king. It is stated by several historians that the earl, while in the Tower, loudly asserted that the king durst not bring him to trial; and there is still extant a letter from him to the king, written immediately after his condemnation, in which he desires that his estate may be continued to him entire, in a style rather of expostulation and demand than of humble supplication. There is a studied obscurity in the style of this letter, as if it darkly hinted at things meant to be understood only by him to whom it was addressed; but its tone indicates that it was meant to impress the king with the dread of a secret which the writer had it in his power to reveal.
The king, on the other hand, showed the most extreme anxiety about the earl's behaviour and the event of the trial. He himself selected certain persons to examine Somerset in secret, among whom was Bacon. They had the king's instructions to work upon the earl's obstinate temper by every method of persuasion and terror; now to give him hopes of the king's compassion and mercy, and now to impress him with the certainty of conviction and punishment. Moreover, the king ordered Bacon (then Attorney-General) to put in writing every possible case which might arise at the trial out of Somerset's behaviour. Bacon accordingly drew up a paper of this sort, on which the king with his own hand made some marginal notes. Bacon having said, "All these points of mercy and favour to Somerset are to be understood with this limitation,—if he do not, by his contemptuous and insolent carriage at the bar, make himself incapable and unworthy of them," the king's remark in the margin was, "That danger is well to be foreseen, lest he upon one part commit unpardonable errors, and I on the other part seem to punish him in the spirit of revenge." Why this solicitude to prevent the "danger" of Somerset's adopting a "contemptuous and insolent carriage at the bar?" And what were the "unpardonable errors" it might lead him to commit? No error could be so unpardonable as the crime he had already committed; and we are led, therefore, to the inference that the king wished it to be understood, that though he was ready to pardon the crime of which Somerset should be convicted, provided he conducted himself discreetly on his trial, yet an error on this score should be held as unpardonable.