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.