第23章 THE COUNTESS AND THE COZENER(9)

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.

The lad Reeves, whose confession had started the matter, was either dead or dying abroad, and was so out of Coke's reach.But the man who had helped the lad to administer the poisoned clyster, the under-keeper Weston, was at hand.Weston was arrested, and examined by Coke.

The statement Coke's bullying drew from the man made mention of one Franklin, another apothecary, as having supplied a phial which Sir Gervase Elwes had taken and thrown away.Weston had also received another phial by Franklin's son from Lady Essex.This also Sir Gervase had taken and destroyed.Then there had been tarts and jellies supplied by Mrs Turner.

Coke had Mrs Turner and Franklin arrested, and after that Sir Gervase was taken as an accessory, and on his statement that he had employed Weston on Sir Thomas Monson's recommendation Sir Thomas also was roped in.He maintained that he had been told to recommend Weston by Lady Essex and the Earl of Northampton.

The next person to be examined by Coke was the apothecary Loubel, he who had attended Overbury on the day before his death.Though in his confession the lad Reeves said that he had been given money and sent abroad by Loubel, this was a matter that Coke did not probe.Loubel told Coke that he had given Overbury nothing but the physic prescribed by Sir Theodore Mayerne, the King's physician, and that in his opinion Overbury had died of consumption.With this evidence Coke was very strangely content--or, at least, content as far as Loubel was concerned, for this witness was not summoned again.

Other persons were examined by Coke, notably Overbury's servant Davies and his secretary Payton.Their statements served to throw some suspicion on the Earl of Somerset.

But if all the detail of these examinations were gone into we should never be done.Our concern is with the two women involved, Anne Turner and the Countess of Somerset, as we must now call her.I am going to quote, however, two paragraphs from Rafael Sabatini's romance The Minion that I think may explain why it is so difficult to come to the truth of the Overbury mystery.They indicate how it was smothered by the way in which Coke rough-handled justice throughout the whole series of trials.

On October 19th, at the Guildhall, began the Great Oyer of Poisoning, as Coke described it, with the trial of Richard Weston.

Thus at the very outset the dishonesty of the proceedings is apparent.

Weston was an accessory.Both on his own evidence and that of Sir Gervase Elwes, besides the apothecary's boy in Flushing, Sir Thomas Overbury had died following upon an injection prepared by Loubel.Therefore Loubel was the principal, and only after Loubel's conviction could the field have been extended to include Weston and the others.But Loubel was tried neither then nor subsequently, a circumstance regarded by many as the most mysterious part of what is known as the Overbury mystery, whereas, in fact, it is the clue to it.Nor was the evidence of the coroner put in, so that there was no real preliminary formal proof that Overbury had been poisoned at all.

Here Mr Sabatini is concerned to develop one of the underlying arguments of his story--namely, that it was King James himself who had ultimately engineered the death of Sir Thomas Overbury.It is an argument which I would not attempt to refute.I do not think that Mr Sabatini's acumen has failed him in the least.But the point for me in the paragraphs is the indication they give of how much Coke did to suppress all evidence that did not suit his purpose.