A Net for Small Fishes

by Lucy Jago

  26

  When Alderman Smith came to tell me that there would be a trial, I was too numb to respond. Weston had not withstood Coke and the forces behind him. At the sight of the coach in which I was to travel to the King’s Bench, completely draped in black cloth, all courage deserted me.

  ‘It is a hearse.’

  The coachman attempted to herd me inside but I refused. I would be unable to see out. If my children were waiting on the route, I would miss them. He sneered openly and I felt all the terror of recent weeks press upon me. My attire spoke of trustworthiness and honesty: a smart black dress with simple, yellow collar and a black hat pinned on to carefully arranged hair. What had been said and written about me as I sat alone and undefended in the cell, that even a coachman treated me with contempt?

  ‘If you do not mount, you will be constrained and carried in,’ he said.

  I could not will myself into it.

  ‘The drapes allow you safe and anonymous passage,’ said Alderman Smith, gently clasping my elbow. He helped me up, staying the coachman’s hand as he went to slam the door, closing it softly himself. The black cloth was pulled down and I was in darkness.

  Although I could not see, the sounds told me where I was. On King Street, the rumble of the wheels was dampened by straw. I was yards from Frankie’s apartment. Did the children know I was passing? Did she? I strained to hear their shouts. I longed to see them; I pictured Frankie, statuesque and remote, my children gathered around her, remonstrating with the driver and pulling me from the blackness; all I could hear were the sounds of daily life and it amazed me that beyond the darkness, life continued.

  The coachman yelled and flicked his whip to force our passage through Westminster Palace Yard. A bleeding bear, salivating dogs, a half-blind baron: their deaths entertainment for the crowd. That was the moment I fully understood that I might be next.

  The horses whinnied in fear as the coach was rocked by the mob. I shrank into the dark interior but the drapes were thrown up and the door opened. I was pulled out, the press of people shouting, grabbing, ripping at my dress. Was I to die here at the hands of a vengeful mob? Officers of the court arrived to push back the crowd. Briefly, I felt the light of the cold October morning pressing on my face before I was bundled forwards.

  Westminster Hall was dark and quiet after the crowds, but there was no time to stop and calm myself, to put my clothes and hair back in order before I was marched through the huge, soaring space, blinded at intervals by shafts of light from windows set high in the walls. As my eyes adjusted, I saw that hundreds, even thousands, of people were staring at me from tiered benches set on scaffolding, six rows high. I had become a player, a lone woman denied the script.

  Whispering began as I passed so that by the time I neared the boards of the King’s Bench there was a storm of chatter and calling out. I kept my eyes lowered in modesty and terror, looking briefly to right and left for my oldest children, Frankie or Robert Carr, even Arthur or my brother Eustace and sister Mary, or Mr Palmer. I saw no one I knew.

  I was ushered to the Bench. I heard Lord Chief Justice Coke announced, followed by a jury not of my peers but of nobles. With lowered eyes, all I could see were clerks with their writing desks round their necks; it frightened me to know that these proceedings would be read for evermore. Before my arrest I had read libels and pamphlets every day that besmirched men’s honour, even that of the King, by twisting events to make any point the writer wished. Would someone look back at this time and think those broadsheets and these notes from the trial were truthful because they had survived when a lone voice can only fade?

  A clerk called for silence and began to recite the date, the seventh day of November, sixteen hundred and fifteen, my full name and that of my dead husband, and then the arraignment, in a flat voice that slightly lulled me into a state of hopeful confidence, for it sounded so unlikely.

  ‘… that she did comfort, aid and assist Mr Richard Weston in the poisoning of Sir Thomas Overbury while that latter was held close prisoner in the Tower of London resulting in the death of Sir Thomas on the fifteenth day of September in the year of Our Lord sixteen hundred and thirteen.’

  ‘Mistress Turner,’ said Lord Chief Justice Coke very loudly. ‘Do you not know that to wear a hat in this place is an insult to the members of the jury whose greatness far exceeds your own? Remove it at once!’

  I fumbled to remove the hat, placed so precisely to denote myself a gentlewoman, as Lord Coke feigned mounting irritation to a rising gale of laughter from the audience. Cheeks scalding, I had no choice but to pull it off. Hair straggled around my face and I pictured the first time I had met Frankie in her chamber, with her lunatic tresses. I felt entirely naked, my messy head uncovered in public. I tried to pin the stray hairs back to recreate an impression of calm control and honesty. As there was nowhere else, I placed the hat on the floor by my feet and pulled from my purse a black silk square, which I tied over my head. But the armature of my appearance had been shattered. Lord Coke appeared satisfied with his opening salvo.

  ‘Mistress Turner,’ he boomed, not looking at me but to the crowd and jury, a well-rehearsed performer. ‘You are here on trial for your life’ – he paused to allow the audience to react –‘as accessory to the poisoning unto death of Sir Thomas Overbury. You are accused of the wilful destruction of a creature made in God’s image, the worst of crimes, employing the worst of weapons, to inflict the worst of deaths. How do you plead?’

  I lifted my face.

  ‘Not guilty, my lord.’

  Lord Coke looked down at the bench before him and appeared to puzzle a small point of order, waiting for silence to fall again. He knew how to caress his audience. This man judging me had also collected the statements and evidence for this trial and was able to dismiss anything that disproved his accusations and retain everything that supported them. I was guilty until I could prove my innocence but I had no means to make a case for myself and who would dare speak up for me?

  ‘If you persist in your claim of innocence, I have no choice but to put to you the evidence we have gathered to the contrary, to the detriment of your honour and that of other persons known to you. Will you not change your plea?’ This harrying made Coke appear eager for my welfare and the restitution of my good name. It made him seem beneficent while I knew him to be seeking only his own glory through my downfall, whether I be guilty or not. I shook my head in so small a manner that I was taken by surprise when Coke bellowed in response, as if rallying troops to march.

  ‘So be it! I say these crimes are the result of implacable malice, being the malice of a woman. Let us establish what manner of creature is this that stands before us. You who pretend to be goodwife, friend and mother but are truly a whore, a sorcerer, a witch, a bawd, a Papist, a felon and a murderer!’

  The crowd erupted. What manner of man would address a gentlewoman in this fashion? I had no idea what he meant and could neither speak nor shake my head.

  ‘Let us begin with “whore”. Is it true that you were married to George Turner, medical doctor and member of the Royal College of Physicians, an honourable man by all accounts?’ I nodded, relieved to have some good said of me. ‘Is it also true that you conducted an adulterous relationship with one Sir Arthur Waring during the last years of your marriage, without discretion, such that it was known to your husband, who was inveigled in his Will into leaving the sum of ten pounds to Sir Arthur, to buy a ring inscribed “Let Fate Unite the Lovers”?’

  The crowd jeered and abused me; I heard it over the rushing of blood in my head. The Lord Chief Justice could not prove me a murderess, for there was no proof, but he could destroy my reputation and thereby damage Frankie and Robert Carr by their closeness to me. ‘Speak up, Mistress Turner. A goodwife or an adulteress? Did you have carnal relations with Sir Arthur Waring, over a period of several years, while married to your husband?’

  I remained mute. There was no defence, except that many others, of every rank of society, did the s
ame. To the crowd gathered here it was of no matter that I had loved my husband and that I had begun an adulterous liaison only with his blessing after George himself was incapacitated. They would think it all a very Catholic carry-on, and nothing could save me from that brand, ‘adulteress’.

  The edifice of respectability that I carefully maintained, that was necessary and normal in the world, crumbled in the face of his next statement. ‘The Court has been informed that your three youngest children are the bastards of Sir Arthur Waring. Do you deny it?’

  ‘My children are good and obedient. Why do you drag them into these proceedings?’ I said, my voice shrill even to my own ears. The audience gasped so loudly that I felt sucked back, as if into a whale’s mouth. What sort of woman argued back to a judge? I pictured the faces of my youngest three. They knew only that Arthur came to see them from time to time, not that he was their father. Now the shame of illegitimacy would blight their lives. In that moment my hatred for him was even greater than my terror. If he had accepted responsibility for his own children, I would not now be on trial for my life.

  ‘It is well known that the devil Adultery opens the door to the devil Murder. Adultery is not a private sin but a crime against the common weal,’ declared Coke. ‘Obedience, subjection and propriety are the attributes of a godly woman.’ He raised his eyebrows at the Jury, as if they were his partners at tennis. ‘And now to your role as sorcerer.’ The crowd quietened, anxious to miss nothing.

  ‘I put it to you, Mistress Turner, that you conspired with one “Dr” Forman, a notorious necromancer, conjuror of devils and caster of false horoscopes, to bewitch Sir Arthur Waring into acting in accordance with your own cupidity and lust. When Sir Arthur failed to marry you after your husband’s death, you asked Dr Forman to conjure devils to torment your lover until he submitted to your will. What say you?’

  Coke was telling the Jury that I was a witch, no different from those hanged in Pendle. My body felt too heavy for me to keep upright. I needed a chair, a hand to hold, a friend or a lawyer to put my case so I need not speak. Here were only hostile or curious onlookers at a show better than anything playing at the Globe.

  I shook my head. All I could do now for myself, for Frankie and for my children, was to maintain my silence.

  ‘Again, denials! If we believed every depraved person who denied their crime, our gallows would be dismantled and our state with it. Crimes of the nature you have committed are grievous not only unto their innocent victims but also unto the very fabric of England; they strike at the heart of all we hold dear and would bring us to barbarity and lawlessness were we to let them go unpunished, such that virtue and prosperity would leave these shores and render us no better than animals. You, who would deceive your husband, who would have another man’s children without shame, who would conjure devils to torment your lover – you are a whore, a sorcerer, and I put it to you that you are also a witch!’

  Lord Coke punctuated his accusations with violent shakes of his outstretched arm, as if ridding himself of some foul creature gripping on to his hand. It was clear to all assembled that this case had inspired him to greater wrath than any he had dealt with before, greater even than that of Guy Fawkes and the Powder Plotters, for here was evil hidden amongst the petticoats of a woman.

  The crowd was alive with excitement. They hushed only when Lord Coke indicated that a witness was to be brought in. From behind a wooden screen entered Simon Forman’s widow who, with great hesitation, approached the Bench when invited.

  ‘State your name,’ said Coke gently.

  ‘Mistress Anne Forman.’

  ‘What have you to relate of the Widow Turner?’

  Anne Forman spoke with great show of humility and timidity.

  ‘Mistress Turner came to see my husband many times and oft went to his study, being there closeted with him several hours at a time.’ The audience hissed its disapproval.

  ‘Was the Widow Turner always alone in her visits to your husband?’

  ‘On one occasion she came with the Countess of Somerset, the Countess of Essex as was.’

  ‘Let us be clear,’ Coke said. ‘You saw with your own eyes the Countess of Somerset, Lady Frances Howard, previously the Countess of Essex before the annulment of her first marriage, daughter of the present Lord Treasurer of England, at your house by Lambeth Marshes, there to consult with your husband?’

  ‘Yes, sir … My lord.’ To declare Anne Forman a liar, because she only saw Frankie masked, would be to prove I had been there.

  ‘To what purpose?’

  ‘She hated her husband – her last one, I mean, not this one – and wanted free of him.’ The noise from the onlookers was too great for her to continue. Lord Coke did not stifle the crowd’s disapproval. Eventually, Mistress Forman was able to continue. ‘I have a letter here from her to my husband.’ The clerk stepped forward to read it but Coke beckoned him over and took the letter himself. It was clear from the ease with which he read Frankie’s hand, and the exaggerated outrage of his expression, that he had seen this before. He read it aloud.

  ‘“Sweet Father, I crave your love although I hope I have it and shall always deserve it. Please send me what you promised, for it remains as ever here. My lord is merry and drinks with his men; he abuses me as doggedly as before and I begin to think I shall never be happy in this world. Please, keep the Sweet Lord unto me and, if you can, send me some good fortune, for truly I have need of it and be careful you name me not to any body, for we have so many spies, that you must use all your wits, for the world is against me, and the heavens favour me not. If I be ungrateful, let all mischief come unto me. Give Mistress Turner warning of all things but no one else for fear others may tell my father and mother, and fill their ears full of tales.

  Your affectionate, loving daughter, Frances Essex.”

  ‘Who is “the Sweet Lord” that Lady Frances would have Forman keep faithful to her? Of course, the man to whom she is now married, Robert Carr, Earl of Somerset. And who the gentleman she claims “abuses” her? Her then husband, Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex. See how she signs herself? Daughter!’ thundered Coke. ‘She calls Forman “Sweet Father”, she who is daughter to the King’s own Lord Treasurer, and all because the woman standing here introduced Lady Frances to a user of black magic and sorcery. I say to you, this woman is a witch!’

  Again, the audience brayed and yelled, crude as groundlings in the theatre yard. Coke motioned to the clerk who went to a small trestle and pulled a black cloth from it. Underneath lay several objects. He showed one to the jury, some of whom stared while others looked away in distaste. The clerk then gave it to Coke who held it up for all to see. It was a statue of two figures, cast from black lead, a man and a woman, naked and lying belly to belly.

  ‘These copulating figures were used by Dr Forman and Mistress Turner for their spells. Here is the brass mould from which it, and others one must assume, were made. Were hairs, or nail clippings, or some such given in to the lead to make the figures more potent?’ asked Coke, not waiting for an answer but seeking to plant the thought into the minds of the Jury.

  Next, the clerk brought around a black scarf, covered in white crosses, then a parchment with the names of the Trinity written upon it, and another on which was stretched a piece of what appeared to be skin, bearing the word ‘corpus’, along with names of the devils Lord Coke accused Forman of conjuring to torment Robin Carr and Arthur Waring if they proved unfaithful towards Frankie or me.

  A doll was held aloft, sumptuously apparelled in a silk dress held together with pins, the French Baby I had made with a garment design for Forman’s wife.

  ‘A puppet, into which pins are stuck to cause pain to whatever unfortunate the witch Turner wishes to torment!’ shouted Coke. The crowd strained forward for a better view and a mighty crack issued from the scaffold. The spectators screamed and began pushing and yelling to get off the precarious structure before it collapsed on them.

  ‘The Devil is here!’ they cried.


  ‘He is angered by the exposure of his works!’

  Those on the lowest tier of benches began running to the doors, pushing off the spectators trying to scramble down from the benches above. A couple of people fell and made a great clatter as they tumbled.

  I jumped at the sound of a mighty hammering. It was Lord Justice Coke, banging his gavel with all his strength. The clerks of court, several of whom looked shaken and afraid, called for order. The boards on the scaffolding were checked and, with much fussing and testing, the crowd reassembled. Lord Coke contained his irritation, wanting the crowd on his side to add weight to his lurid accusations in the absence of any proof.

  ‘What say you of these tools of witchcraft?’ he asked me.

  ‘I know them not. The doll is but a—’

  ‘You had nothing from Forman?’ interrupted Coke.

  ‘Only simples.’

  ‘Simples? Simples for your own health?’ Here I stumbled, realising too late that I had better say nothing. ‘For whom were they intended? For Sir Arthur Waring?’

  I made no sound or movement; anything I said or did would be interpreted in an evil light.

  ‘So when a man fails to do as you want,’ Coke continued, ‘you avail yourself of a sorcerer to make potions, knowing not what substances be in them, and give them to your victims?’ Coke turned to the jury with a look of weary triumph, as if he hated the world of women.

  Mistress Forman spoke then, without invitation. ‘Your lordship, after your visit I searched the house one more time.’ I wished that I truly were a witch, for then I could strike this woman dumb. Mistress Forman was a fool, destroying her dead husband’s reputation along with mine. His bravery and success in treating victims of plague would be quite forgotten and she would forever be known as the wife of a sorcerer and necromancer. What honour was there in that? ‘I found this.’ From a pocket at her belt Mistress Forman pulled a small notebook covered in worn green linen, bound with a lace. I had read this notebook on nearly every visit to Forman; it was a list he kept of adulterous courtiers and the names of their lovers. She handed it to a clerk who unwound the lace, opened the page and read.