General Excitement Respecting the Murder.

21

It is impossible to describe the ferment excited in the public mind by the disclosures which were necessarily made, and the rumours which were afloat. The excitement occasioned by the discovery of Palmer's crimes is still fresh in our recollection, although the attendant circumstances are by no means parallel. In the one case the criminal was a person in the middle ranks of life, and of very questionable character; in the other, the principal person accused was a nobleman, who was generally supposed to enjoy the unlimited confidence of his sovereign, and an almost absolute power over the kingdom. It was believed that he was not alone in his guilt; that he had accomplices in all ranks of life. His young Countess, the most beautiful woman in James's Court, and with whose infamy the whole country had rung a few years before, was a participator in his crime. He was associated in iniquity with Court milliners, apothecaries, discarded medicine boys. The mode, too, of perpetration of the crime was of a nature that had always been peculiarly hateful to the English people. They hated it because they thought it was a foreign practice-they hated it because they feared it above all other kinds of attack. For if a man were assaulted in the street, he might at least defend himself; and if he were seized on his bed by the midnight assassin, he might still struggle with his murderer. But to be assailed in so insidious and fearful a manner, to take in death with the daily bread necessary for their sustenance,-to drink it in a pleasant cup of sack,-to be poisoned by a pair of gloves, or by a saddle, or by smelling to a bouquet, was a dreadful idea, which made the stoutest men shudder; which filled their minds with uneasiness and suspicion, and almost made them loathe their repasts. For this reason the English had always regarded 'empoisonment' with peculiar abhorrence; it had been declared by Act of Parliament a species of treason, and a singularly painful and lingering death had been provided for its punishment: there were many whose fathers had seen poisoners, men and women, publicly boiled to death in Smithfield, being gradually immersed from their toes in order to protract their agony. There were circumstances besides, attendant on this affair, of a most mysterious nature; so that, besides envy and alarm, the love of the marvellous and the 'curiosity' of the people were stimulated. Moreover, recollections of strange passages within the last few years recurred; the story of the mysterious death of Prince Henry, the 'sweet babe,' as he was

The death of Prince Henry was attributed to poison. There was a post mortem examination of the body. It seems to be the general opinion that the prince died of a contagious fever; on which account the King and Queen were prevented from seeing him in his last illness. Mayerne attended him; and this

called,' who was only shown to this nation, as the Land of Canaan was to Moses, to look on, not to enjoy,' was revived, together with all the alarming rumours with which it had been connected. The attention of the public took a dangerous and suspicious turn. The public appetite, which, lately so harmless, gloated on tales of Court scandal, now fixed on dark and alarming topics; it recurred to the subject of Popery; it ran over in terror the list of popish crimes; it reflected on the gunpowder plot, and on the murder of Henry IV.; it muttered with horror the names of Ravaillac and Catherine de Medici.

While the public mind was in this state of feverish excitement, several important and suspicious events occurred, which converted the popular alarm into a downright panic. On the 27th of September, the Lady Arabella Stuart, so long and so barbarously confined in the Tower, died. Her death was at once ascribed to poison. Great men had an obvious interest in her death, and the people were now in a temper to believe great men capable of any enormity. On the day of her death, Richard Weston had been first examined. The next day he was interrogated again, and it was rumoured that he had then admitted having made an attempt to poison Sir Thomas Overbury. Other arrests now took place. Mrs. Turner, the inventor of yellow starch, which had gained her no favour with some of our Puritan ancestors, was taken up. James Franklin was also committed to custody. They were examined, and made revelations implicating others. A great many persons were now sent for and examined. The Chief Justice was observed to work with tremendous energy; and, indeed, what he had to do was enough to occupy all his time, and to put to the test all his acuteness. For, besides the various and extraordinary statements of the accused, other information poured in upon him from all sides; volunteers came forward, offering all manner of tales to him, raking up numberless half-forgotten circumstances of suspicion, and filling up their half-obliterated outlines with the wild inventions which the prevailing panic had aroused; for the minds of men were not now sufficiently cool to discriminate between reminiscences of facts and the fancies of the imagination, always so vivid in a time of popular excitement.

And now there was a pause; the Chief Justice ceased his examinations, and went down to Royston to see the King. But

physician was in the habit of inserting into his book of prescriptions minute descriptions of the temperament of his patients. One of these books is preserved in the British Museum; and it is a suspicious circumstance, that all the prescriptions relating to Prince Henry have been torn out, yet the same book contains prescriptions for the King, and for the Queen's horse.

Arraignment of Weston.

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the interval was far from being a calm. Information had ceased to transpire. The popular curiosity was no longer satisfied, and therefore grew more stimulated. The silence of Truth left the field open for Rumour. Reports got abroad which increased the interest. Then it was that the stories about great personages, which at first had only been loose surmises, grew to giant proportions, and prepared the people for the most astounding revelations. At length, on the 18th of October, the populace learnt with amazement that Robert Carr, the great and proud Earl of Somerset had been committed to the custody of the Dean of Westminster. This event wound the public alarm up almost to a frenzy. Weston's trial was fixed for the next day. The interval was a period of anxious excitement. Very few eyes closed that night in London. The citizens mounted guard with great watchfulness, they patrolled the streets, and examined every suspicious object; they set persons to watch the movements of the Papists, who were believed to be at the bottom of the plot. It was commonly reported that Northampton (himself a papist) and Somerset had conspired with the Spaniard to deliver up the navy, and that part of their scheme was to have poisoned the King and all the Protestants at the christening of the Countess of Somerset's child, of which she was expected shortly to be delivered. The Londoners were alive and vigilant all the night, and in the morning they poured into the Guildhall, where Weston was to be tried.

The Judges took their seats-the Lord Mayor in his robesthe Lord Chief Justice and the other Judges in their scarlet and ermine. As soon as the commission had been read and the grand jury sworn, the Lord Chief Justice addressed them in that solemn and dignified tone for which he was noted. His speech, though disfigured by the quaint affectations of the age, was deeply impressive-at times almost rising into a severe eloquence. It was listened to with breathless attention. Every word was caught up with eagerness. They listened while the Chief Justice-rightly revered as the oracle of English law-told how, of all felonies, murder is the most horrible; of all murders, poisoning the most detestable; and of all poisoning, the lingering poisoning. He told them it was an un-English crime, and his audience turned pale when he told them of the hideous perfection to which that diabolical art had been brought; how there were those who could give a poison which should reserve its deadly influence for one, or two, or three months, or longeraccording to the ingredients of which it was composed-and that this irresistible and insidious foe might be administered in odours or transmitted by mere contact. The grand jury, con

sisting of fourteen persons, then withdrew. In about an hour they returned and delivered in the bill of indictment endorsed billa vera. Immediately all eyes were turned to the bar, where the wretched prisoner was brought up. He was a man of about sixty years of age. His forehead was wrinkled with age, his hair sprinkled with grey. His countenance, though not wanting in a certain degree of comeliness, had a stern and grim expression, and was now distorted with terror. His face was deadly pale, his lips quivered, and his knees tottered as he stood at the bar while the indictment was read. It charged him with having murdered Sir Thomas Overbury in the Tower of London by administering various poisons-rosalgar, white arsenic, and mercury sublimate-on four different occasions. The prisoner was then asked, in the usual form, whether he was guilty of the murder, yea, or no. The poor wretch, instead of answering, became agitated, and in his distress screamed several times, 'Lord have mercy on me, Lord have mercy on me.'. At length he stammered out, Not guilty.' But when asked how he would be tried, instead of answering in the usual form, By God and my country,' he exclaimed that he referred himself to God-he would be tried by God alone. And though the Chief Justice spent an hour in persuading him to put himself upon his country, he could get no other answer out of him than that he referred himself to God. And now his patience was exhausted, so he proceeded to terrify the prisoner with a description of the lingering death with which the law punished those who refused to put themselves upon the trial of the law. He repeated all the harrowing details of that dreadful punishment; that he was to be stripped naked and stretched out on the bare ground; that heavy iron weights were to be laid upon him and gradually increased; that he was to receive no food but a morsel of coarse bread one day, and a draught of water from the nearest sink or puddle the next; and so to linger on as long as nature could linger out, adding that men had been known to live on in this torment for eight or nine days. Still the prisoner, to the mortification of the Judge and the rage of the populace, resolutely refused to put himself upon the country.

Coke knew very well that until the principal had been convicted, the accessories could not be tried. He began, therefore, to fear that his prey would escape him, and all his industry and labour prove useless. The audience, too, began to tremble lest their curiosity and love of blood should be unsatisfied by the long-expected disclosures, and their fury broke forth in a low cry

Realgar, red orpiment, a compound of arsenic and sulphur.

Coke's Illegal Proceedings.

25

of rage and disappointment when Coke told them that, until the principal had been convicted, the accessories could not be put upon their trial. The Chief Justice, therefore, determined to try the effect of a bold, a new, and an illegal proceeding. He said plainly that he knew the prisoner had been tampered with by some great ones-accessories to the fact, friends of the Howards, and then, amid the indecent cheers of his auditors, declared that their curiosity should, nevertheless, be satisfied, and commanded the Queen's Attorney (General?) Sir Lawrence Hyde, to state the case-reading the depositions of the witnesses and the confessions of the prisoner. Sir Lawrence Hyde at once obeyed. He unhesitatingly charged the Earl and Countess of Somerset with being the principal movers unto this unhappy conclusion,' and the audience stood aghast at his boldness when, raising his * voice, he called the Countess a rotten branch, which being lopt off, the noble tree of the Howards would flourish better. Then he proceeded with an orderly narrative of the case-ascribing the motive of the crime to the resentment of the Earl and Countess against Sir Thomas for his opposition to that adulterate marriage' between them. He described the machinations by which the King had been worked upon to commit Sir Thomas to the Tower-how the prisoner at the bar (who had formerly been the Countess's pander) was now promoted to the office of bravo, and sent as warder of the Tower to attend on Overbury-how Sir Thomas was kept so close that he scarce had the comfort of the day's brightness, neither was any suffered to visit him, father, brother, his best friends, were strangers to him from the beginning of his imprisonment unto the end. He then detailed the several attempts made to poison the victim-he moved the audience to tears by reading his sorrowful letters to Somerset entreating his liberty and expostulating with the Earl for allowing his old friend to be thus immured-he told how in his despair he fell sick-how the wicked Countess sent to offer him any delicacies he might fancy-how the sick man answered that he longed for luscious meals-tarts and jellies-which the Countess and Mrs. Turner poisoned and sent to him-how at length they gave him that fatal clyster which caused his soul to leave his poisoned body-and how his body was denied Christian burial, was then irreverently thrown into a pit digged in a very mean place within the precincts of the Tower. He was followed by Mr. Warre, who had been a fellow-student with Sir Thomas at the Temple, and described with all the warmth of youthful friendship his amiable manners, his wit, and his virtuous conversation and life, concluding with this bold sayingPereat unus, ne pereant omnes; pereat peccans, ne pereat