by Jones, Nigel
The slow poisoning of Sir Thomas Overbury is the most macabre murder case in the Tower’s history. It is one of John Webster’s Jacobean dramas made putrid flesh: full of sexual jealousy, revenge, intrigue, the occult and murderous sadism. The Howards knew that Sir William Wade, though a tough and cruel lieutenant, was also an honest man who did things by the book. There was no hope of inveigling him into a scheme to illicitly kill one of his charges, so he had to be removed. Using as an excuse Wade’s failure to prevent the temporary escape of Arbella Stuart from the Tower (see Chapter Thirteen, ‘Great Escapes’) Wade was fired and replaced by Sir Gervase Elwes, a lawyer and tool of the Howards to whom he paid a hefty £2,000 ‘thank-you’ for his preferment. It was not money well spent, as it would cost Elwes his life.
Frances Howard had her poisons – and her poisoners – ready. Her chief accomplice was her friend and confidante Mrs Anne Turner, a young widow, who had, as a sideline to her other interests as a brothel madam, caterer and poisoner, developed a combined starch and yellow dye which, thanks to her contacts at court (her brother was the king’s falconer), had made stiff yellow ruffs and sleeves extremely fashionable. Mrs Turner, in turn, employed a pox-ridden city apothecary, James Franklin, to make up the poisons to kill Overbury. The final step was to get Richard Weston, a servant of Mrs Turner, appointed as Overbury’s keeper in the Tower. His job would be to administer the poisons. Overbury did not yet know it, but he was now entirely at the mercy of his merciless enemies.
The conspirators moved cautiously and with devilish cunning. They even made Overbury complicit in his own death by suggesting that if he took small doses of poison – purgatives known as ‘vomits’ – and made himself ill, the king would look more sympathetically on his abject pleas to be released. Naively, Overbury went along with the plan, unaware that real, deadly, poisons were also being fed to him. On 6 May Mrs Turner passed a phial of green and yellow poison called rosalgar (red arsenic) to Weston, who was met by Sir Gervase Elwes as he carried the suspicious-looking substance to the Bloody Tower in one hand while bearing a bowl of Overbury’s supper soup in the other. ‘Shall I give it to him now?’ asked the warder. Elwes, either feigning innocence or genuinely ignorant, asked him what was in the bottle. ‘As if you did not know, sir,’ snorted Weston, going into the tower. ‘They will have me give it to him, first or last.’
Three days later, on 9 May, Weston mixed the arsenic into Overbury’s evening broth. The poor prisoner spent the rest of the night excreting, vomiting and retching. Weston demanded his reward from Mrs Turner, but was told he would only get it when Overbury was safely dead. ‘Perfect your work, and you shall have your hire,’ she said. Overbury continued to sicken, and three weeks later wrote to Carr, pleading for his former friend to use his influence with the king to get him out, and complaining of his illness. The favourite responded sympathetically, saying the time for his release was not yet right but as soon as possible he would ‘hasten your delivery’. In hindsight, that phrase has a very sinister ring. With the letter, Carr enclosed a white powder which he claimed would help Overbury’s sickness. The trusting man took it – and grew much worse, excreting sixty stools in one night.
Although the conspirators prevented his family and friends from seeing him, Overbury was attended by teams of doctors – some probably in the poisoners’ pay – who assured the patient that sickness and lassitude were part of a prisoner’s lot in the Tower. Among the doctors he consulted was King James’s personal physician, the celebrated Swiss Huguenot Sir Theodore de Mayerne. A piteous letter from Overbury describes his symptoms after a visit from Mayerne:
This morning, notwithstanding my fasting till yesterday, I find a great heat continues in all my body, and the same desire of drink and loathing of meat etc. I was let blood Wednesday 10 o’clock, yet today, Friday, my heat slackens not, the same loathing of meat, having eaten not a bit since Thursday sennight [fortnight] to this hour, and the same vomiting yesternight. About 8 o’clock after Mr Mayerns was gone I fainted.
On 1 July Weston administered another dose of arsenic, again mixing it into Overbury’s food, cooked in Elwes’ own kitchen. Three weeks later, ringing the poison changes, Weston took delivery of a dose of deadly mercury sublimate, a highly toxic metal compound often used to treat syphilis, which the poxed Dr Franklin had made up. The poison was sprinkled over tarts and jellies which Overbury had requested as delicious dainties. His suspicions beginning to stir, when Overbury left some of the delicacies untouched they quickly became black and furred.
By now, the previously strong and healthy thirty-two-year-old had become a wasted shadow of his former self. His tormented body, encrusted with sores, along with poisoned plasters, had erupted in a mass of boils and blisters, causing his callous killers to refer to him mockingly as ‘the Scab’. Yet still Overbury obstinately refused to die, and as long as he lived he was a deadly danger to the Howards. He knew too many of the dirtiest secrets of the spectacularly corrupt Jacobean regime, and, increasingly frustrated by his inability to plead his way out of the Tower, was threatening to spill some very messy beans.
His threat of blackmail sealed Overbury’s fate. With the annulment of Frances’s marriage to Essex still not granted, any statement from the dangerous and by now desperate prisoner could throw a spanner into the Howards’ plans. In September Elwes was ordered to move his dangerous charge to a dark dungeon with no windows, making it impossible for Overbury to communicate with the outside world. Here the final blow was dealt.
The ‘medicines’ prescribed for Overbury by Mayerne were prepared by his brother-in-law, an elderly Huguenot apothecary, Paul de Lobell, who lived conveniently close to the Tower in Lime Street. De Lobell used a young apprentice, William Reeve, to run the physic to the Tower. Reeve was paid a huge bribe of £20 by Mrs Turner to add a fatal dose of Franklin’s mercury sublimate to a clyster, or enema, which Weston gave to the doomed man, remaining with him throughout a pain-wracked night on 14/15 September. In extreme agony, Overbury finally expired at dawn.
As soon as Weston reported the death, the Howards rushed to bury the evidence. Northampton wrote to their agent Elwes:
Noble Lieutenant, if the knave’s body be foul, bury it presently [i.e. immediately]: I’ll stand between you and harm. But if it will abide the view, send for Lidcote [Sir John Lidcote was Overbury’s loyal brother-in-law] and let him see it to satisfy the damned crew. When you come to me, bring this letter again with you, or else burn it.
Elwes obediently did as he was ordered, and Overbury’s already decomposing corpse was buried at St Peter ad Vincula before sundown on the same day. Northampton, who had rushed to the Tower to make sure his bidding was done, reported to Carr with sadistic satisfaction:
He stank intolerably, in so much as he was cast into a coffin with a loose sheet over him. God is good in cutting off ill instruments from off the factious crew. If he had come forth they would have made use of him. Thus sweet lord, wishing you all increase of happiness and honour, I end. Your Lordship’s, more than any man. Henry Northampton.
Perhaps to explain why the dead man had been dosed with mercury, the Howards spread the story that he had died of ‘the pox’ – or syphilis, a disease often treated with mercury – but gossip about the murder could not be buried as quickly as the body. Too many people were in the know, and the Howards had too many enemies, for the secret to stay hidden for ever. For the moment, they enjoyed their triumph. A fortnight after Overbury’s death, the commission at last annulled Frances’s marriage, and she promptly wed her lover in London’s Chapel Royal amidst scenes of great magnificence. Ben Jonson penned a masque to celebrate the nuptials, and John Donne wrote an ode. The king, rejoicing in his catamite’s happiness, made Carr Earl of Somerset, and, though up to his goggle eyes in debt, managed to find £10,000 as a wedding present, and covered the bride in jewels. Frances herself, her face a picture of childlike innocence, and her fair hair tumbling over her shoulders as a sign of her unsullied virginity, walked up the aisle o
n the arm of her proud great-uncle, and fellow murderer, the Earl of Northampton. The impression of wide-eyed innocence was rather spoiled by Frances’s scandalously low-cut neckline which, in a first for fashionable court weddings, stopped only just short of her nipples.
Within months, however, it had all gone horribly wrong. Northampton died in June 1615, thereby escaping the fate that was about to overtake his co-conspirators. In the interim, an aggrieved William Wade, still smarting over his sudden dismissal from the Tower’s lieutenancy, had been quietly gathering information from his ex-employees there. The skilled interrogator had assembled a dossier of damning statements, all pointing to the murder of Overbury and a high-level cover-up. Wade took his evidence to the newly appointed Secretary of State, Sir Ralph Winwood, who initiated an inquiry.
Circumstances now conspired to make it convenient to revisit the Overbury case. Northampton’s death had left the Howard faction leaderless, and their pro-Catholic, pro-Spanish policy vulnerable. Moreover, the king had fallen out of love with Carr, and in love with another handsome young man, George Villiers, who had been pushed before the king by the anti-Howard Protestant faction. If the plot to kill Overbury can be seen as a Catholic conspiracy – both Northampton and the murderous Mrs Turner were Catholics – then the uncovering of the murder was a Protestant reaction. The main discoverers, Wade and Winwood, were devout Protestants, as was Sir Edward Coke, the Lord Chief Justice who presided over the Overbury trials, and Villiers was as much a Protestant puppet as Carr had been a Catholic one.
The lesser lights in the plot were picked off first. Under ferocious questioning Elwes cracked, admitting that Overbury had been poisoned. Elwes was hanged at his own request on Tower Hill, outside the fortress he had misgoverned. He interrupted his speech from the scaffold to implore a friend in the crowd to give up gambling – Elwes’ own great vice. Mrs Turner was hanged at Tyburn, mockingly dressed in the yellow ruff and sleeves she had made so popular. In her honour, the hangman was also arrayed in yellow. At her trial she had tearfully pleaded that she had only fallen into Frances Howard’s clutches after her husband’s death had left her penniless and unable to feed her children. But there was too much evidence of her own dabbling in witchcraft for her guilt to be doubted. Her judges branded her ‘a whore, a bawd, a sorcerer, a witch, a papist, a felon and a murderer’.
Overbury’s actual murderer, the warder Weston – who had been paid £180 by the countess for all his trouble – expressed the fear before his execution that the authorities had made a ‘net to catch little birds, and let the great ones go’. How right he was. The poxed apothecary, Franklin, was the fourth conspirator to suffer the extreme penalty. The evidence against him included a list of the full cocktail of poisons fed to Overbury. These included mercury sublimate; aqua fortis, a corrosive liquid made by distilling purified nitre with calcined vitriol (sulphuric acid); red and white arsenic; potash; powdered diamonds; crushed spiders; and another poison derived from insects, the irritant known as cantharides, or Spanish fly, which was added to an onion sauce with two partridges sent to Overbury from the court. Fed this sort of toxic diet, it’s a wonder that Overbury survived for six days, let alone the six months that he did hold out. Instead, according to a letter sent by Elwes to Frances Howard:
Madam, the Scab [Overbury] is like the Fox, the more he is cursed, the better he fareth … Sir Thomas never eat White Salt but there was White arsenick put into it: once he desired Pig and Mrs Turner put into it Lapis Costitus [potash].
Finally, it was the turn of the ‘Great Birds’. The evidence produced at the trials of the lesser conspirators by a gloating Attorney General, Sir Francis Bacon, had left no doubt as to the late Earl of Northampton’s guilt, and that of the Carrs, newly ennobled as the Earl and Countess of Somerset. They were charged with poisoning Overbury and tried before the House of Lords in May 1616. Frances, pale and trembling, was supported in the dock by Sir George More, who had succeeded the executed Elwes as lieutenant of the Tower. More was the father-in-law of the poet and churchman John Donne, who had composed verses celebrating the Carrs’ wedding. Since the evidence was overwhelming, the unhappy couple were quickly found guilty and sentenced to death. Frances had taken the precaution of becoming pregnant, so knew that she would not hang immediately as the law forbade the execution of pregnant women. She gave birth to a daughter, Anne, in the Tower.
As an extra refinement, Frances was lodged in the same cell in the Bloody Tower where her victim Overbury had suffered so cruelly. Realising this, she gave way to a fit of hysterics. Ralegh himself had recently been temporarily released, and the Carrs were allowed to cohabit in the Bloody Tower in adjoining chambers with a communicating door. Still officially under sentence of death, they were given considerable freedom, and the countess furnished her room with costly crimson velvet, and had three maids waiting upon her. Carr continued to wear the jewels and insignia that James had heaped upon him, and paid social calls to the imprisoned ‘Wizard Earl’ Northumberland in the Martin Tower.
It may have been the weight of accumulated strain and guilt over Overbury, or just the discovery in the Tower’s cramped confines that a little love goes a very long way, but soon the earl and countess discovered that they could not stand each other. The silence of the Bloody Tower was split by screaming rows, and before long the pair were cohabiting no more. By the time they were freed from the Tower – though kept under house arrest in the country – they were no longer on speaking or even screaming terms, and lived at opposite ends of their large Oxfordshire home. James finally pardoned the evil pair a few months before his own death in 1624. Frances died a painful death from cancer in 1632. Carr survived in obscurity until 1645.
It is still not clear how much James himself knew of the killing of Thomas Overbury. Though undoubtedly jealous of Overbury’s hold over Carr, and happy to see him in the Tower, it is unlikely – but not impossible – that he approved his slow murder. However, it was probably Carr’s knowledge of his sovereign’s secrets that lay behind James’s decision to pardon him. James had a dread of poisons and witchcraft, and though his personal physician, Dr Mayerne, treated Overbury, there is no evidence that the elderly Huguenot had been involved in the murder. On the other hand, James’s court was spectacularly corrupt and decadent, ruled by James’s perverse passions, and such was the toxic atmosphere there that the king was darkly suspected of having poisoned his own son Henry. Poison, literal or metaphorical, was the lifeblood of James’s court, and the Overbury murder its representative crime.
The ill wind of the Overbury scandal at least blew one Tower resident a little good – or so it seemed at first. Sir Walter Ralegh, who had been physically near the crime scene as Overbury’s neighbour in the Bloody Tower, had long bombarded the king and court with petitions for his release on the grounds that he could mount another expedition to the Amazon and bring back the untold wealth of El Dorado. James had never listened to these wild claims, but with his huge debts mounting, and the anti-Spanish Puritan Winwood as Secretary of State, he decided in desperation to release the hated old man from his long captivity and give him a chance both to redeem himself and to enrich the Crown. Ralegh was under no illusion that it was greed, rather than compassion, that motivated this meanest of monarchs.
In March 1616, Ralegh had his first taste of freedom in more than a decade. He was provisionally released from the Tower – albeit under surveillance – on condition that he mounted his gold-digging expedition.
Ralegh found a London much changed since his Tudor heyday. Nevertheless, helped by his son Wat, he worked with the energy of a man twenty years younger to build and equip a new ship, hopefully named the Destiny, to lead the fleet that would accomplish his dream. It took him time to finish the ship and recruit trusted men, led by his old skipper Lawrence Keymis – the faithful friend who had accompanied him up the Orinoco River half a lifetime before in 1595 and who now got his old job back. A year after leaving the Tower, Ralegh’s expedition was ready. He set sail from Pl
ymouth in March 1617.
Ralegh’s last adventure was a disaster from the start. Repeatedly blown back into the ports of his beloved Devon by contrary winds, he discharged fifty seamen as incompetent or insubordinate; and only in August did he finally get away. Putting in to the Canary Islands, Ralegh stopped one of his headstrong captains who wanted to plunder a Spanish ship. Ralegh was under strict instructions from James to avoid a clash with Spain. The aggrieved skipper returned to England and spread the lie that Ralegh had been the aggressor. En route across the Atlantic, the little fleet was stricken with fever, and some fifty sailors died, including Ralegh’s faithful secretary, John Talbot, who had made a fair copy of the History in the Tower. Ralegh himself went down with the disease, keeping to his cabin for four weeks.
Too ill to accompany his son Wat and the main party down the Orinoco to find El Dorado – or at least a goldmine that could be profitably plundered – Ralegh kicked his heels on the island of Trinidad anxiously awaiting news. When it came it was the worst. Against orders, the expedition had attacked a Spanish settlement, and the headstrong Wat had been shot dead leading the charge. Desperate to retrieve something from the disaster, Captain Keymis had sent Ralegh’s cousin George Ralegh blundering further into the jungle on the wild-goose chase after what young Wat had truthfully perceived as fools’ gold. Apart from a couple of looted ingots, they returned empty-handed.
Failure was complete and unmitigated, and now disgrace and death stared Ralegh in the face. Paralysed by the catastrophe, the indomitable spirit which had survived the Tower was utterly broken. He knew that in England he would face the wrath of the king, the scorn of his enemies – and the block. With a heavy heart, he steeled himself to break the news of their bereavement to Bess.