The Cradle King: The Life of James VI and I, the First Monarch of a United Great Britain
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From London, Somerset wrote to James, charging him of being ‘too faint in not resisting the superb judges’ wilfulness’ in ordering an investigation. James had no regrets. He had only to look to his conscience before God, and his reputation in the eyes of the world. ‘I confess I ever was and will be faint in resisting to the trial of murder, and as bold and earnest in prosecuting the trial thereof.’ He complained that ‘from the beginning of this business’ both Somerset and Suffolk had consistently behaved ‘quite contrary to the form that men that wish the trial of the verity ever did in such a case’. James rejected Somerset’s claim that such a commission was unlawful and his suggestion that the unsympathetic Ellesmere should be replaced on the commission, and reproached the Earl for his ‘so much scribbling and railing covertly against me and avowedly against the Chancellor’. ‘I never had the occasion to show the uprightness and sincerity that is required by a supreme judge as I have in this,’ he protested. ‘If the delation [accusation] prove false, God so deal with my soul as no man among you shall so much rejoice at it as I, nor never shall spare, I vow to God, one grain of rigour that can be stretched against the conspirators. If otherwise (as God forbid), none of you shall more heartily sorrow for it; and never king used that clemency that I will do in such a case.’ If, by serving his conscience, ‘I shall lose the hands of that family, I will never care to lose the hearts of any for justice sake.’ The reference to ‘that family’, the Howards, was not incidental. ‘Fail not to show this letter to your father-in-law,’ concluded the King, ‘and that both of you read it twice at least; and God so favour me as I have no respect in this turn but to please Him in whose throne I sit.’57
On Sunday 15 October, the commissioners appointed to put the case together – Coke, Ellesmere, Lennox and Lord Zouch – met for the first time to discuss what action they could take against the Earl and Countess. By the time of their second meeting on the following Tuesday, Somerset had made their job a lot easier. The previous day, using his official powers, he had sent a pursuivant, a constable and a locksmith to the house of Weston’s son with a warrant to search the premises; they confiscated some letters dealing with Mrs Turner. When the commission heard this, they ordered that the Somersets be restrained in their chambers.58 A day later, the Earl was removed to an effective house arrest at the Dean of Westminster’s residence. Now Somerset begged to have access to the King’s person, claiming that he had state secrets to tell him. James rebuffed him, saying that the trials must take place, but if the Somersets were truly innocent, then they would be cleared. If, however, they proved to be guilty, they should confess now and ask for mercy, since James would ‘follow the example of Almighty God who does not forgive sins until they be confessed and sorrowed for, no more can I show mercy where innocency is stood upon and the offence not made known by confession unto me’. James was aware a confession was to be preferred because, although the case against the Countess was very strong, Somerset had no known contact with some of the key players in the poisoning.
At the Countess’s request, James sent two Chamber servants, Viscount Fenton and the Earl of Montgomery, to see her on New Year’s Day 1616. There she confessed her part in Overbury’s murder, portraying herself as ‘a girl aggrieved and offended by the most unworthy things which he had said about her person’. But she also alleged that Somerset – who, as she pointed out, ‘at that time was not yet her husband’ – ‘neither knew anything about it, nor took any part in it’. She had kept the secret from him, knowing that he was ‘a very true friend of Overbury’.59 Indeed, Sarmiento reported on 20 January that there was very little provable against the Earl, except that he used the King’s name to recover papers just before he was arrested, and that he had entrusted papers of importance and jewels to a friend, hoping, in vain, that they would not be found. Among these were some of James’s own papers: an embarrassment to the King, which meant that ‘he now discharges all his anger against the Earl’, claiming that Somerset had failed to show him some papers from his ambassador Sir John Digby in Spain; other papers, from Northampton to Somerset, showed clearly the Earl’s sympathy for the Spanish and Catholic causes in England. From the jewels, James took ‘a very good chain of diamonds’, which he gave to Anna; the Queen passed it on to Villiers, who wore it constantly.60
James wanted Somerset to confess because a confession would have the added benefit of preventing one of Somerset’s outbursts in a packed court. As the date of the arraignment approached in May 1616, James made increasingly frantic attempts to persuade Somerset to talk – although, given the circumstances, the King was forced to resort to a series of confidential messengers and secret letters. First, he sent a personal messenger to Somerset in the Tower ‘with such directions unto him, as, if there be a spark of grace left in him, I hope they shall work a god effect’. He asked the new Lieutenant of the Tower, Sir George More, to allow him into Somerset’s presence ‘in such secrety [sic] none living may know of it and that, after his speaking with him in private, he may be returned back again as secretly’.61 When that attempt failed, James wrote to engage Mores services to persuade Somerset to do ‘that which is both most honourable for me and his own best’. More was to assure him, in James’s name, that if Somerset confessed his guilt to the commissioners before the trial, James would not only perform what he had promised through his previous messenger, but would ‘enlarge it’. More should remind Somerset that last winter he had confessed to Coke that ‘his cause was so evil likely as he knew no jury could acquit him’; that it was feared that the Countess would plead only ‘weakly for his innocency’; that the commissioners have ‘some secret assurance that in the end she will confess of him’ – all the while keeping James’s involvement secret. To More, James noted that he did not mean that Somerset should confess if he were innocent, ‘but ye know how evil likely that is’.62
Even with the ‘enlarged’ promises, More’s efforts failed, prompting a third letter from the King, lamenting Somerset’s recalcitrance, which was harming not only himself but James too. ‘God knows it is only a trick of his idle brain, hoping thereby to shift his trial. But it is easy to be seen that he would threaten me with laying an aspersion upon me of being, in some sort, accessory to his crime.’ Somerset should write or send a message to James ‘concerning this poisoning’ – but it must not be a private letter: ‘I cannot hear a private message from him without laying an aspersion upon myself of being an accessory to his crime.’ He asked More ‘to urge him, by reason, that I refuse him no favour which I can grant him without taking upon me the suspicion of being guilty of that crime whereof he is accused’.63 As the trial grew nearer, Somerset’s behaviour became more bizarre until, in a ‘strange fit’, he refused point blank to attend the trial. James insisted that unless he was ‘either apparently sick or distracted of his wits’ the trial was not to be delayed; if he was, then the trial would be adjourned for a few days, in which time ‘if his sickness or madness be counterfeited it will manifestly appear’.64
On 17 May, Lennox and Hay visited the Countess on James’s behalf, attempting in vain to push her to betray her husband’s involvement. They then moved on to the Earl, telling him how his wife’s confession had gained her ‘much merit’ and therefore ‘good hope of her life’, urging him to follow suit. Somerset was in no mood to bargain. ‘He had nothing to say,’ it was reported, ‘except that he complained that he had been so badly treated without any cause, and that he hoped so much from the prudence of the King and of those who counselled him, as that they would not permit so great an error to be committed as to bring him to trial, for if they took him there, since he knew that it would only be done that he might die there, he would say that which he knew in his own defence, without the King being able to complain of it, since he was the cause of it.’ Three hours of cajoling and threats that afternoon failed to move the Earl, as did a return visit by Hay the following Thursday, the day before the trial was due to start.65
The Countess was tried on 24 May 1616 in a p
acked Westminster Hall before an audience that included her ex-husband, the Earl of Essex.66 She pleaded guilty, making the prosecution’s task easy, and very remorsefully begged for the King’s mercy. The Earl’s arraignment the following day excited even more attention than that of his wife. ‘I was there at six o’clock in the morning,’ wrote John Chamberlain, ‘and for ten shillings had a reasonable place.’67 Attorney General Sir Francis Bacon laid out the case against Somerset, focusing on the Earl’s friendship with Sir Thomas Overbury, claiming it tipped perilously into communication of state secrets. Somerset, acting as Secretary, routinely acquainted Overbury with foreign correspondence to the King: ‘packets were sent, sometimes opened by my Lord, sometimes unbroken, unto Overbury, who perused them, copied them, registered them, made tables of them as he thought good.’ Indeed, Bacon argued, there was a time ‘when Overbury knew more of the secrets of state than the Council table did’. From these common secrets grew ‘common dangers’. Somerset and Overbury had such an intimate ‘inwardness’ that ‘they made a play of all the world besides themselves’, suspiciously giving codenames (‘ciphers and jargons’) to the King, Queen and other leading personalities, usually the domain of ‘such as work and practice against, or at least upon princes’. He did not charge Somerset with ‘any disloyalty’, however, ‘only I lay this for a foundation, that there was a great communication of secrets between you and Overbury, and that it had relation to matters of estate, and the greatest causes of the kingdom’. Theirs was ‘a friendship of ill men; which may be truly termed conspiracy and not friendship’.
Bacon related the history of events. Overbury was opposed to his master’s planned marriage, since he was likely to lose Somerset, so he tried to dissuade the Earl from the match. Finding him determined, however, Overbury turned to ‘stronger remedies’, threatening to expose ‘secrets of all natures’. Bacon identified Somerset’s ‘root of bitterness, a mortal malice or hatred, mixed with deep and bottomless fears’ as proceeding from a ‘fear of discovering secrets; secrets (I say) of a high and dangerous nature’.
Finally, seven hours after the opening of proceedings, Bacon finished presenting the prosecution case. At 5 p.m. Somerset answered the case against him, at length, but ‘very confusedly, insisting most upon those particulars which were least material’. One onlooker commented that his answers ‘were so poor and idle as many of the Lords his peers shook their heads and blushed to hear such slender excuses come away from him, of whom much better was expected’.68 Given Somerset’s ineptitude, Bacon did not even bother to sum up.69 After an hour’s deliberation, the peers returned a unanimous guilty verdict. Now Somerset chose to speak, saying to the Lords that ‘his case might be any of theirs hereafter, desired them to consider that it was but the testimony of two women of bad condition that had condemned him, protested upon his salvation that he never saw Weston’s face, and that he was innocent of that he was condemned’.70 John Chamberlain thought Somerset’s response strange: the sentence ‘did so little appal him that when he was asked what he could say why sentence should not be pronounced, he stood still upon his innocence, and could hardly be brought to refer himself to the King’s mercy’.71 Indeed, it was reported that when the sentence condemning him to death was read out, Somerset ‘kissed his hand and made a reverence with a look such as he might have had if he had been much favoured’, and he ‘took off from his neck and his leg the insignia of the Order of St George and the Garter’.72
While Somerset was being tried on 25 May, James was at Greenwich, ‘so extreme sad and discontented, as he did retire himself from all company, and did forbear both dinner and supper until he had heard what answer the Earl had made’.73 Anthony Weldon later alleged that James had spent the entire day in ‘restless motion’, ‘sending to every boat he saw landing at the bridge, cursing all that came without tidings’; to Weldon this was evidence that ‘all was not right, and there had been some grounds for his fears of Somerset’s boldness’.74 James still feared that Somerset might be prone to an outburst in court. ‘It seemed something was feared should in passion have broken from him,’ wrote Edward Sherburn, ‘but when his Majesty had heard that nothing had escaped him more than what he was forced to answer to the business then in hand, his Majesty’s countenance soon changed, and he hath ever since continued in a good disposition.’75 Whatever secrets about James Somerset knew, he had not spilled them, and he escaped with his life: both the Earl and Countess were held in the Tower until January 1622, after which they were permitted to reside at fixed places and ultimately granted formal pardons. Somerset never regained James’s affection and died in relative obscurity in July 1645.
Although the Earl did not damage the King directly during the trial, in the longer term the affair proved detrimental to James’s reputation. The bizarre murder of Overbury and the precipitous fall of the Earl fuelled public speculation about the precise nature of James’s relations with his male favourites.76 A teasing example of such speculation can be found in the diary of Simonds D’Ewes, a legal student at London’s Middle Temple, who recorded a conversation he had on 22 August 1622 with an old friend from his Cambridge days. D’Ewes told his friend about a letter found by Sir Edward Coke in Somerset’s casket, ‘for which since the King never loved him’. This odd titbit came at the end of a discussion about sodomy. ‘Of things I discoursed with him that were secret as of the sin of sodomy, how frequent it was in this wicked city, and if God did not provide some wonderful blessing against it, we could not but expect some horrible punishment for it.’ This was particularly likely since it was, ‘as we had probable cause to fear, a sin in the prince [James] as well as the people’. To back up his claim, D’Ewes related to his friend a ‘true story’ of a French usher in London ‘who had buggered a knight’s son and was brought into the Guildhall’ for trial. He would undoubtedly have received the death penalty, since sodomy was a capital felony, if Lord Chief Justice Montague had not intervened to save him – sent ‘by the King, as ’twas thought’.77
This foreign ‘familiar’ talk of James’s sodomy was alluded to once again in D’Ewes diary, on 2 October 1622, when he discussed a book that he described as ‘terrible and wholly against the King himself, accusing him of atheism, sodomy, etc…’.78 In 1615 there appeared in print what appeared to be yet another panegyric to James, entitled Corona Regia, supposedly written by the recently deceased Isaac Casaubon, who had spent his final years at the English court, and bearing the imprint of the King’s own printer, John Bill.79 In fact, both the authorial ascription and the printing house were fictitious: the publication was only a thinly veiled attack on James, written tongue in cheek – perhaps the most elaborated libel the King had had to face. What was regarded as the most damning passage is suggested by a copy of the book now in the British Library, in which a leaf has been torn out and a short passage on the bottom of the preceding page heavily scored.80 From another copy, we find that the censored passage gives a remarkably informed account of how James promoted a series of young, beautiful men – John Ramsay, who allegedly saved his life during the ‘Gowrie Conspiracy’ of 1600; Philip Herbert, who rose to become Earl of Montgomery; Robert Carr, later Earl of Somerset, and the latest favourite, George Villiers – only to drop each one when a younger, more beautiful man came along. In keeping with the text’s form of eulogy, however, the passage praises James’s policy of ‘advancing the beautiful’, because, after all, isn’t that only ‘exalting the good’?81
James reacted to this libel more passionately than to any other, launching an international search for its author, printer and publisher, assuming that the book originated in the Anglo-Catholic stronghold at Douai82 – as late as 1639 a Brussels bookseller named Jean de Perriet was claiming a reward for his identification of the guilty party.83 While the English court may have accepted the fact that James would always have a beautiful young man in his Bedchamber, it seems that James himself was far from happy to have the news broadcasted in print across Europe.
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/> With Somerset out of the picture, George Villiers became the undisputed focus of court life. While the old favourite waited for his trial in January 1616, the Earl of Worcester handed over to Villiers the post Somerset had coveted for himself: that of Master of the Horse. In April, he was appointed to the Order of the Garter, being installed in July, and in August he was elevated to the peerage as Baron Whaddon, Viscount Villiers. He was helped in this rise by a self-appointed adviser, Sir Francis Bacon: over the next few years Villiers and Bacon were to support each other in their careers, with Villiers providing Bacon with unparalleled access – albeit at one remove – to the King’s ear.84 To James, Villiers was ‘Steenie’, his St Stephen, because all who looked on the saint saw ‘his face as it had been the face of an angel’. The King, now fifty years old, was not shy of showing his affection for the young man. At a Twelfth Night revels, James was tiring of the conceited masque and shouted ‘Why don’t they dance? What did they make me come here for? Devil take you all! Dance!’ Villiers got up and ‘cut capers’, to the delight of the court. As the Venetian ambassdor said: ‘none came up to the exquisite manner’ of Villiers who ‘rendered himself the admiration and delight of everybody’. James suddenly regained his temper, patted Villiers’s face, kissed him and embraced him ‘with marks of extraordinary affection’.85