She Stands Accused

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Mention is made by Weldon of the evidence given by Symon, servant
to Sir Thomas Monson, who had been employed by Mrs Turner to
carry a jelly and a tart to the Tower. Symon appears to have
been a witty fellow. He was, ``for his pleasant answer,''
dismissed by Coke.

My lord told him: ``Symon, you have had a hand in this poisoning
business----''

``No, my good lord, I had but a finger in it, which almost cost
me my life, and, at the best, cost me all my hair and nails.''
For the truth was that Symon was somewhat liquorish, and finding
the syrup swim from the top of the tart as he carried it, he did
with his finger skim it off: and it was believed, had he known
what it had been, he would not have been his taster at so dear a
rate.

Coke, with his bullying methods and his way of acting both as
judge and chief prosecutor, lacks little as prototype for the
later Judge Jeffreys. Even before the jury retired he was at
pains to inform Mrs Turner that she had the seven deadly sins:
viz., a whore, a bawd, a sorcerer, a witch, a papist, a felon,
and a murderer, the daughter of the devil Forman.''[13] And
having given such a Christian example throughout the trial, he
besought her ``to repent, and to become the servant of Jesus
Christ, and to pray Him to cast out the seven devils.'' It was
upon this that Anne begged the Lord Chief Justice to be merciful
to her, putting forward the plea of having been brought up with
the Countess of Essex, and of having been ``a long time her
servant.'' She declared that she had not known of poison in the
things that were sent to Sir Thomas Overbury.

[13] State Trials.

The jury's retirement was not long-drawn. They found her guilty.

Says Weldon:

The Wednesday following she was brought from the sheriff's in a
coach to Newgate and there was put into a cart, and casting money
often among the people as she was carried to Tyburn, where she
was executed, and whither many men and women of fashion followed
her in coaches to see her die.

Her speeches before execution were pious, like most speeches of
the sort, and ``moved the spectators to great pity and grief for
her.'' She again related ``her breeding with the Countess of
Somerset,'' and pleaded further of ``having had no other means to
maintain her and her children but what came from the Countess.''
This last, of course, was less than the truth. Anne was not so
indigent that she needed to take to poisoning as a means of
supporting her family. She also said ``that when her hand was
once in this business she knew the revealing of it would be her
overthrow.''

In more than one account written later of her execution she is
said to have worn a ruff and cuffs dressed with the yellow starch
which she had made so fashionable, and it is maintained that this
association made the starch thereafter unpopular. It is
forgotten that with Anne the recipe for the yellow starch
probably was lost. Moreover, the elaborate ruff was then being
put out of fashion by the introduction of the much more
comfortable lace collar. In any case, ``There is no truth,''
writes Judge Parry,

in the old story[14] that Coke ordered her to be executed in the
yellow ruff she had made the fashion and so proudly worn in
Court. What did happen, according to Sir Simonds d'Ewes, was
that the hangman, a coarse ruffian with a distorted sense of
humour, dressed himself in bands and cuffs of yellow colour, but
no one heeded his ribaldry; only in after days none of either sex
used the yellow starch, and the fashion grew generally to be
detested.

[14] Probably started by Michael Sparke (``Scintilla'') in Truth
Brought to Light (1651).

Pretty much, I should think, as the tall `choker' became detested
within the time of many of us. After Mrs Turner Sir Gervase
Elwes was brought to trial as an accessory. The only evidence
against him was that of the liar Franklin, who asserted that Sir
Gervase had been in league with the Countess. It was plain,
however, both from Weston's statements and from Sir Gervase's
own, that the Lieutenant of the Tower had done his very best to
defeat the Turner-Essex-Northampton plot for the poisoning of
Overbury, throwing away the ``rosalgar'' and later draughts, as
well as substituting food from his own kitchen for that sent in
by Turner. ``Although it must have been clear that if any of
what was alleged against him had been true Overbury's poisoning
would never have taken five months to accomplish, he was
sentenced and hanged.''[15]

[15] Sabatini, The Minion.

This, of course, was a glaring piece of injustice, but Coke no
doubt had his instructions. Weston, Mrs Turner, Elwes, and,
later, Franklin had to be got out of the way, so that they could
not be confronted with the chief figure against whom the Great
Oyer was directed, and whom it was designed to pull down, Robert
Carr, Earl of Somerset --and with him his wife. Just as much of
the statements and confessions of the prisoners in the four
preliminary trials was used by Coke as suited his purpose. It is
pointed out by Amos, in his Great Oyer of Poisoning, that a large
number of the documents appertaining to the Somerset trial show
corrections and apparent glosses in Coke's own handwriting, and
that even the confessions on the scaffold of some of the
convicted are holographs by Coke. As a sample of the suppression
of which Coke was guilty I may put forward the fact that
Somerset's note to his own physician, Craig, asking him to visit
Overbury, was not produced. Yet great play was made by Coke of
this visit against Somerset. Wrote Somerset to Craig, ``I pray
you let him have your best help, and as much of your company as
he shall require.''

It was never proved that it was Anne Turner and Lady Essex who
corrupted the lad Reeves, who with Weston administered the
poisoned clyster that murdered Overbury. Nothing was done at all
to absolve the apothecary Loubel, Reeves's master, of having
prepared the poisonous injection, nor Sir Theodore Mayerne, the
King's physician, of having been party to its preparation. Yet
it was demonstrably the injection that killed Overbury if he was
killed by poison at all. It is certain that the poisons sent to
the Tower by Turner and the Countess did not save in early
instances, get to Overbury at all--Elwes saw to that--or Overbury
must have died months before he did die.

According to Weldon, who may be supposed to have witnessed the
trials, Franklin confessed ``that Overbury was smothered to
death, not poisoned to death, though he had poison given him.''
And Weldon goes on to make this curious comment:

Here was Coke glad, how to cast about to bring both ends
together, Mrs Turner and Weston being already hanged for killing
Overbury with poison; but he, being the very quintessence of the
law, presently informs the jury that if a man be done to death
with pistols, poniards, swords, halter, poison, etc., so he be
done to death, the indictment is good if he be but indicted for
any 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 my lord Coke's law as Overbury was without any law.

Though you will look in vain through the reports given in the
State Trials for any speech of Coke to the jury in exactly these
terms, it might be just as well to remember that the
transcriptions from which the Trials are printed were prepared
UNDER Coke's SUPERVISION, and that they, like the confessions of
the convicted, are very often in his own handwriting.

At all events, even on the bowdlerized evidence that exists, it
is plain that Anne Turner should have been charged only with
attempted murder. Of that she was manifestly guilty and,
according to the justice of the time, thoroughly deserved to be
hanged. The indictment against her was faulty, and the case
against her as full of holes as a colander. Her trial was
`cooked' in more senses than one.

It was some seven months after the execution of Anne Turner that
the Countess of Essex was brought to trial. This was in May. In
December, while virtually a prisoner under the charge of Sir
William Smith at Lord Aubigny's house in Blackfriars, she had
given birth to a daughter. In March she had been conveyed to the
Tower, her baby being handed over to the care of her mother, the
Countess of Suffolk. Since the autumn of the previous year she
had not been permitted any communication with her husband, nor he
with her. He was already lodged in the Tower when she arrived
there.

On a day towards the end of May she was conveyed by water from
the Tower to Westminster Hall. The hall was packed to
suffocation, seats being paid for at prices which would turn a
modern promoter of a world's heavyweight-boxing-championship
fight green with envy. Her judges were twenty-two peers of the
realm, with the Lord High Steward, the Lord Chief Justice, and
seven judges at law. It was a pageant of colour, in the midst of
which the woman on trial, in her careful toilette, consisting of
a black stammel gown, a cypress chaperon or black crepe hood in
the French fashion, relieved by touches of white in the cuffs and
ruff of cobweb lawn, struck a funereal note. Preceded by the
headsman carrying his axe with its edge turned away from her, she
was conducted to the bar by the Lieutenant of the Tower. The
indictment was read to her, and at its end came the question:
``Frances Howard, Countess of Somerset, how sayest thou? Art
thou guilty of this felony and murder or not guilty?''

There was a hushed pause for a moment; then came the low-voiced
answer: ``Guilty.''

Sir Francis Bacon, the Attorney-General--himself to appear in the
same place not long after to answer charges of bribery and
corruption--now addressed the judges. His eloquent address was a
commendation of the Countess's confession, and it hinted at royal
clemency.

In answer to the formal demand of the Clerk of Arraigns if she
had anything to say why judgment of death should not be given
against her the Countess made a barely audible plea for mercy,
begging their lordships to intercede for her with the King. Then
the Lord High Steward, expressing belief that the King would be
moved to mercy, delivered judgment. She was to be taken thence
to the Tower of London, thence to the place of execution, where
she was to be hanged by the neck until she was dead--and might
the Lord have mercy on her soul.

The attendant women hastened to the side of the swaying woman.
And now the halbardiers formed escort about her, the headsman in
front, with the edge of his axe turned towards her in token of
her conviction, and she was led away.

% VI

It is perfectly clear that the Countess of Somerset was led to
confess on the promise of the King's mercy. It is equally clear
that she did not know what she was confessing to. Whatever might
have been her conspiracy with Anne Turner it is a practical
certainty that it did not result in the death of Thomas Overbury.
There is no record of her being allowed any legal advice in the
seven months that had elapsed since she had first been made a
virtual prisoner. She had been permitted no communication with
her husband. For all she knew, Overbury might indeed have died
from the poison which she had caused to be sent to the Tower in
such quantity and variety. And she went to trial at Westminster
guilty in conscience, her one idea being to take the blame for
having brought about the murder of Overbury, thinking by that to
absolve her husband of any share in the plot. She could not have
known that her plea of guilty would weaken Somerset's defence.
The woman who could go to such lengths in order to win her
husband was unlikely to have done anything that might put him in
jeopardy. One can well imagine with what fierceness she would
have fought her case had she thought that by doing so she could
have helped the man she loved.

But Frances Howard, no less than her accomplice Anne Turner, was
the victim of a gross subversion of justice. That she was guilty
of a cruel and determined attempt to poison Overbury is beyond
question, and, being guilty of that, she was thoroughly deserving
of the fate that overcame Anne Turner, but that at the last she
was allowed to escape. Her confession, however, shackled
Somerset at his trial. It put her at the King's mercy. Without
endangering her life Somerset dared not come to the crux of his
defence, which would have been to demand why Loubel had been
allowed to go free, and why the King's physician, Mayerne, had
not been examined. To prevent Somerset from asking those
questions, which must have given the public a sufficient hint of
King James's share in the murder of Overbury, two men stood
behind the Earl all through his trial with cloaks over their
arms, ready to muffle him. But, whatever may be said of
Somerset, the prospect of the cloaks would not have stopped him
from attempting those questions. He had sent word to King James
that he was ``neither Gowrie nor Balmerino,'' those two earlier
victims of James's treachery. The thing that muffled him was the
threat to withdraw the promised mercy to his Countess. And so he
kept silent, to be condemned to death as his wife had been, and
to join her in the Tower.

Five weary years were the couple to eat their hearts out there,
their death sentences remitted, before their ultimate banishment
far from the Court to a life of impoverished obscurity in the
country. Better for them, one would think, if they had died on
Tower Green. It is hard to imagine that the dozen years or so
which they were to spend together could contain anything of
happiness for them--she the confessed would-be poisoner, and he
haunted by the memory of that betrayal of friendship which had
begun the process of their double ruin. Frances Howard died in
1632, her husband twenty-three years later. The longer lease of
life could have been no blessing to the fallen favourite.

There is a portrait of Frances Howard in the National Portrait
Gallery by an unknown artist. It is an odd little face which
appears above the elaborate filigree of the stiff lace ruff and
under the carefully dressed bush of dark brown hair. With her
gay jacket of red gold-embroidered, and her gold-ornamented grey
gown, cut low to show the valley between her young breasts, she
looks like a child dressed up. If there is no great indication
of the beauty which so many poets shed ink over there is less
promise of the dire determination which was to pursue a man's
life with cruel poisons over several months. It is, however, a
narrow little face, and there is a tight-liddedness about the
eyes which in an older woman might indicate the bigot. Bigot she
proved herself to be, if it be bigotry in a woman to love a man
with an intensity that will not stop at murder in order to win
him. That is the one thing that may be said for Frances Howard.
She did love Robert Carr. She loved him to his ruin.

IV: A MODEL FOR MR HOGARTH

On a Sunday, the 5th of February, 1733, there came toddling into
that narrow passage of the Temple known as Tanfield Court an
elderly lady by the name of Mrs Love. It was just after one
o'clock of the afternoon. The giants of St Dunstan's behind her
had only a minute before rapped out the hour with their clubs.

Mrs Love's business was at once charitable and social. She was
going, by appointment made on the previous Friday night, to eat
dinner with a frail old lady named Mrs Duncomb, who lived in
chambers on the third floor of one of the buildings that had
entry from the court. Mrs Duncomb was the widow of a law
stationer of the City. She had been a widow for a good number of
years. The deceased law stationer, if he had not left her rich,
at least had left her in fairly comfortable circumstances. It
was said about the environs that she had some property, and this
fact, combined with the other that she was obviously nearing the
end of life's journey, made her an object of melancholy interest
to the womenkind of the neighbourhood.

Mrs Duncomb was looked after by a couple of servants. One of
them, Betty Harrison, had been the old lady's companion for a
lifetime. Mrs Duncomb, described as ``old,'' was only sixty.[16]
Her weakness and bodily condition seem to have made her appear
much older. Betty, then, also described as ``old,'' may have
been of an age with her mistress, or even older. She was, at all
events, not by much less frail. The other servant was a
comparatively new addition to the establishment, a fresh little
girl of about seventeen, Ann (or Nanny) Price by name.

[16] According to one account. The Newgate Calendar (London
1773) gives Mrs Duncomb's age as eighty and that of the maid
Betty as sixty.

Mrs Love climbed the three flights of stairs to the top landing.
It surprised her, or disturbed her, but little that she found no
signs of life on the various floors, because it was, as we have
seen, a Sunday. The occupants of the chambers of the staircase,
mostly gentlemen connected in one way or another with the law,
would be, she knew abroad for the eating of their Sunday dinners,
either at their favourite taverns or at commons in the Temple
itself. What did rather disturb kindly Mrs Love was the fact
that she found Mrs Duncomb's outer door closed--an unwonted
fact--and it faintly surprised her that no odour of cooking
greeted her nostrils.

Mrs Love knocked. There was no reply. She knocked, indeed, at
intervals over a period of some fifteen minutes, still obtaining
no response. The disturbed sense of something being wrong became
stronger and stronger in the mind of Mrs Love.

On the night of the previous Friday she had been calling upon Mrs
Duncomb, and she had found the old lady very weak, very nervous,
and very low in spirits. It had not been a very cheerful visit
all round, because the old maidservant, Betty Harrison, had also
been far from well. There had been a good deal of talk between
the old women of dying, a subject to which their minds had been
very prone to revert. Besides Mrs Love there were two other
visitors, but they too failed to cheer the old couple up. One of
the visitors, a laundress of the Temple called Mrs Oliphant, had
done her best, poohpoohing such melancholy talk, and attributing
the low spirits in which the old women found themselves to the
bleakness of the February weather, and promising them that they
would find a new lease of life with the advent of spring. But
Mrs Betty especially had been hard to console.

``My mistress,'' she had said to cheerful Mrs Oliphant, ``will
talk of dying. And she would have me die with her.''

As she stood in considerable perturbation of mind on the
cheerless third-floor landing that Sunday afternoon Mrs Love
found small matter for comfort in her memory of the Friday
evening. She remembered that old Mrs Duncomb had spoken
complainingly of the lonesomeness which had come upon her floor
by the vacation of the chambers opposite her on the landing. The
tenant had gone a day or two before, leaving the rooms empty of
furniture, and the key with a Mr Twysden.

Mrs. Love, turning to view the door opposite to that on which she
had been rapping so long and so ineffectively, had a shuddery
feeling that she was alone on the top of the world.

She remembered how she had left Mrs Duncomb on the Friday night.
Mrs Oliphant had departed first, accompanied by the second
visitor, one Sarah Malcolm, a charwoman who had worked for Mrs
Duncomb up to the previous Christmas, and who had called in to
see how her former employer was faring. An odd, silent sort of
young woman this Sarah, good-looking in a hardfeatured sort of
way, she had taken but a very small part in the conversation, but
had sat staring rather sullenly into the fire by the side of
Betty Harrison, or else casting a flickering glance about the
room. Mrs Love, before following the other two women downstairs,
had helped the ailing Betty to get Mrs Duncomb settled for the
night. In the dim candle-light and the faint glow of the fire
that scarce illumined the wainscoted room the high tester-bed of
the old lady, with its curtains, had seemed like a shadowed
catafalque, an illusion nothing lessened by the frail old figure
under the bedclothing.

It came to the mind of Mrs Love that the illness manifesting
itself in Betty on the Friday night had worsened. Nanny, she
imagined, must have gone abroad on some errand. The old servant,
she thought, was too ill to come to the door, and her voice would
be too weak to convey an answer to the knocking. Mrs Love, not
without a shudder for the chill feeling of that top landing,
betook herself downstairs again to make what inquiry she might.
It happened that she met one of her fellow-visitors of the Friday
night, Mrs Oliphant.

Mrs Oliphant was sympathetic, but could not give any information.
She had seen no member of the old lady's establishment that day.
She could only advise Mrs Love to go upstairs again and knock
louder.

This Mrs Love did, but again got no reply. She then evolved the
theory that Betty had died during the night, and that Nanny, Mrs
Duncomb being confined to bed, had gone to look for help,
possibly from her sister, and to find a woman who would lay out
the body of the old servant. With this in her mind Mrs Love
descended the stairs once more, and went to look for another
friend of Mrs Duncomb's, a Mrs Rhymer.

Mrs Rhymer was a friend of the old lady's of some thirty years'
standing. She was, indeed, named as executrix in Mrs Duncomb's
will. Mrs Love finding her and explaining the situation as she
saw it, Mrs Rhymer at once returned with Mrs Love to Tanfield
Court.

The two women ascended the stairs, and tried pushing the old
lady's door. It refused to yield to their efforts. Then Mrs
Love went to the staircase window that overlooked the court, and
gazed around to see if there was anyone about who might help.
Some distance away, at the door, we are told, ``of my Lord Bishop
of Bangor,'' was the third of Friday night's visitors to Mrs
Duncomb, the charwoman named Sarah Malcolm. Mrs Love hailed her.

``Prithee, Sarah,'' begged Mrs Love, ``go and fetch a smith to
open Mrs Duncomb's door.''

``I will go at all speed,'' Sarah assured her, with ready
willingness, and off she sped. Mrs Love and Mrs Rhymer waited
some time. Sarah came back with Mrs Oliphant in tow, but had
been unable to secure the services of a locksmith. This was
probably due to the fact that it was a Sunday.

By now both Mrs Love and Mrs Rhymer had become deeply
apprehensive, and the former appealed to Mrs Oliphant. ``I do
believe they are all dead, and the smith is not come!'' cried Mrs
Love. ``What shall we do, Mrs Oliphant?''

Mrs Oliphant, much younger than the others, seems to have been a
woman of resource. She had from Mr Twysden, she said, the key of
the vacant chambers opposite to Mrs Duncomb's. ``Now let me
see,'' she continued, ``if I cannot get out of the back chamber
window into the gutter, and so into Mrs Duncomb's apartment.''

The other women urged her to try.[17] Mrs Oliphant set off, her
heels echoing in the empty rooms. Presently the waiting women
heard a pane snap, and they guessed that Mrs Oliphant had broken
through Mrs Duncomb's casement to get at the handle. They heard,
through the door, the noise of furniture being moved as she got
through the window. Then came a shriek, the scuffle of feet.
The outer door of Mrs Duncomb's chambers was flung open. Mrs
Oliphant, ashen-faced, appeared on the landing. ``God! Oh,
gracious God!'' she cried. ``They're all murdered!

[17] One account says it was Sarah Malcolm who entered via the
gutter and window. Borrow, however, in his Celebrated Trials,
quotes Mrs Oliphant's evidence in court on this point.

% II

All four women pressed into the chambers. All three of the women
occupying them had been murdered. In the passage or lobby little
Nanny Price lay in her bed in a welter of blood, her throat
savagely cut. Her hair was loose and over her eyes, her clenched
hands all bloodied about her throat. It was apparent that she
had struggled desperately for life. Next door, in the
dining-room, old Betty Harrison lay across the press-bed in which
she usually slept. Being in the habit of keeping her gown on for
warmth, as it was said, she was partially dressed. She had been
strangled, it seemed, ``with an apron-string or a pack-thread,''
for there was a deep crease about her neck and the bruised
indentations as of knuckles. In her bedroom, also across her
bed, lay the dead body of old Mrs Duncomb. There had been here
also an attempt to strangle, an unnecessary attempt it appeared,
for the crease about the neck was very faint. Frail as the old
lady had been, the mere weight of the murderer's body, it was
conjectured, had been enough to kill her.

These pathological details were established on the arrival later
of Mr Bigg, the surgeon, fetched from the Rainbow Coffee-house
near by by Fairlow, one of the Temple porters. But the four
women could see enough for themselves, without the help of Mr
Bigg, to understand how death had been dealt in all three cases.
They could see quite clearly also for what motive the crime had
been committed. A black strong-box, with papers scattered about
it, lay beside Mrs Duncomb's bed, its lid forced open. It was in
this box that the old lady had been accustomed to keep her money.

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