Tudor True Crime: Murder in the Stuart Court

Summary

Not Just the Tudors – Tudor True Crime: Murder in the Stuart Court

Host: Professor Suzannah Lipscomb
Guest: Professor Alastair Bellany (Rutgers University)
Date: August 25, 2025
Podcast: History Hit

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Episode Overview

This episode explores the infamous Overbury Affair: the arrest and murder of courtier Thomas Overbury in the Tower of London in 1613, a scandal that shook King James I's court and reverberated through 17th-century English society and politics. Professor Suzannah Lipscomb interviews Professor Alastair Bellany, whose research and books on the topic have traced the mixing of scandal, politics, crime, and media at the Stuart court. Together, they discuss the key figures involved, the motives, the ripple effects, and how the case was represented, both officially and in clandestine literature.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Setting the Scene: Who Was Thomas Overbury?

• Background: Overbury was the son of a judge, educated at the Inns of Court, and embedded in literary and political circles.
• Rise to Court: His close friendship with Robert Carr, King James's favorite, granted Overbury access to the highest echelons of Jacobean power. When Carr became central to the King's patronage, Overbury gained influence by proximity.
  • “What gets him access to the court of the King is a friendship he seems to have forged...with a young man called Robert Carr...the dominant favorite young man at the court.” — Prof. Bellany (05:06)

2. Rivalries and Romance – The Downfall

• Tensions: Carr began an affair with Frances Howard, Countess of Essex, whose family was on the rival side at court. Initially, Overbury supported the liaison, even reportedly writing love letters for Carr, but later feared it endangered his political standing.
  • “Overbury sees it as a political threat because Frances' birth family, the Howards, sit on the other side of the political divide at court.” — Prof. Bellany (06:56)
• Estrangement & Imprisonment: Overbury’s criticism alienated Carr and Frances. King James, possibly tired or jealous of Overbury, offered him an ambassadorship; Overbury refused and was imprisoned for contempt. He expected a brief stay, but Carr never secured his release.
• Murder Plot: Frances Howard, angered at Overbury’s slights and interference, sought a more permanent solution—poison.

3. The Death and the Scandal Emerges

• Overbury's Death: Overbury died in the Tower, initially thought to be of natural causes or disease (possibly syphilis). There was little immediate uproar, and rumors about the cause of death abounded.
  • “His passing is generally unlamented…Rumors are spread that he dies of an unmentionable disease, so the French pox or syphilis.” — Prof. Bellany (10:21)
• Political Shifts: Carr, now Earl of Somerset, married Frances Howard. For about a year, Carr was at the apex of court influence.
• A New Favorite: Factions who lost influence responded by promoting George Villiers. Overbury's murder resurfaced as a tool in political maneuvering against Carr.

4. The Investigation & Trials

• How the Plot Unfolded Publicly: The Lieutenant of the Tower, Jervis Elwes, revealed rumors of poisoning, setting off a full investigation.
• Case Against Frances Howard: Through intermediaries, Frances Howard sent Overbury poisoned food. When that failed, an apothecary’s apprentice delivered a lethal poisoned enema.
  • “The case is easy to reconstruct against the Countess Frances Howard...a whole array of poisoned goodies...eventually...an enema in disguise, medical treatment…and this finished the job.” — Prof. Bellany (14:26)
• Carr's Involvement: Evidence was much weaker; his implication came mainly from his suspicious behavior and proximity to Frances’s actions.
• Trial Outcomes:
  • Lower-class accomplices (Turner, Weston, Elwes, Franklin) were hanged.
  • Frances and Carr were found guilty but spared execution—she confessed, he didn’t. Both were instead imprisoned and later released.
  • “So the minor characters, the less powerful characters hang and the two powerful aristocrats live.” — Prof. Bellany (17:26)

5. The Aftermath and the Media Sensation

• Official Narrative: Printed pamphlets and books (essentially censored and permitted by the crown) painted the episode as an example of justice triumphing over crime, focusing blame on lower-born characters.
  • “Most of these are fairly tame…they’re presented in classic early 17th-century crime literature format: ‘here are some wicked crimes brought to light by royal justice.’” — Prof. Bellany (19:37)
• Underground Literature: Unofficial manuscript materials—verses, rumors, transcripts—spread widely, focusing on rumored court corruption, gossip, and even seditious critiques of the monarchy.
  • “There’s also a thriving underground media system...handwritten copies...include everything from detailed transcripts...to scabrous libellous verse attacking the two main aristocratic protagonists.” — Prof. Bellany (22:32)
• Gender, Ambition, and Scandal: Literature painted Frances as subverting gender and sexual norms (lust, witchcraft) and Carr as the personification of the corrupt favorite, prompting veiled criticism of King James’s judgment.

6. Political and Religious Ramifications

• Manipulating Justice and Mercy: Many felt the sparing of Carr and Frances arose from their knowledge and potential to blackmail or reveal court secrets. This undercut the court’s narrative of impartial justice.
  • “There was a real issue about the sparing of the Somersets, which contemporaries are aware of…it somewhat undercuts the royal image...because this implies that everyone involved in the murder had to pay the same price.” — Prof. Bellany (34:07)
• Lasting Impact on the Monarchy: The affair tarnished the monarchy’s reputation, casting doubt on James’s ability to control his court, and set precedents for further scandals, especially with George Villiers (later Duke of Buckingham) rising as royal favorite.
  • “A lot of these same stories and anxieties get repeated through the 1620s…references…a continuous pattern.” — Prof. Bellany (37:21)

7. Echoes into the Civil Wars

• Long Shadows: The affair was continuously referenced in later decades and became part of anti-Catholic and anti-court narratives during the build-up to the Civil War.
  • “There is a connection…you can make the argument that the Overbury affair both causes and exposes certain political dynamics or contradictions which continue to be exposed…over the next couple of decades.” — Prof. Bellany (42:44)
• Conspiracy Theories: The Overbury case even spawned conspiracy theories about Catholic plots at the very heart of the Stuart court, linking back to the Gunpowder Plot and feeding into wider Protestant anxieties.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On King James’s Difficult Role:

  • “The king is shocked to find out that this has been happening, even that people close to him were involved in such heinous crimes. But the king, as soon as he figured out what was going on…unearthed this crime, he’s brought it to light.” — Prof. Bellany (27:04)

• On Gendered Scandal:

  • “Stories told about Frances Howard are essentially stories about a woman who’s subverted all the norms of patriarchally defined womanhood...overpowering lust...witchcraft...plotting death...” — Prof. Bellany (27:04)

• On Rumors of Catholic Plots:

  • “The Overbury affair…is the first big case where a story about a political popish plot is centered inside the court, not outside it. And that’s a very kind of dangerous sign of the volatility of early Stuart political culture.” — Prof. Bellany (48:32)

• On the Aftermath for the Monarchy:

  • “It doesn’t mean that the monarchy’s doomed or that the king’s authority is completely shocked, but it’s compromised. And that’s an interesting process…” — Prof. Bellany (41:23)

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Key Timestamps

• 00:00–01:50 — [Ads, skipped]
• 01:51–04:44 — Introduction; background on Thomas Overbury and setting the episode theme.
• 04:45–06:43 — Overbury’s entry into court and relationship with Robert Carr.
• 06:43–09:58 — Carr’s romance with Frances Howard; estrangement and Overbury’s imprisonment.
• 09:58–14:24 — Overbury’s death, initial rumors, rise of George Villiers, investigation begins.
• 14:24–17:15 — The evidence and case against Frances Howard and Carr.
• 17:15–19:20 — Outcomes of the trials, fates of minor and major characters.
• 19:20–24:20 — The scandal in media; popular vs. underground literature.
• 26:26–34:07 — Analysis of literature’s meanings; gender, ambition, and the monarchy’s image.
• 34:07–37:13 — Guilt, pardoning, and speculation about lost secrets.
• 37:13–41:23 — The long-term blow to the monarchy and persistent scandals.
• 42:28–48:32 — Lasting connections to anti-Catholic politics and the Civil War.
• 49:18–End — Closing remarks.

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Conclusion

The Overbury Affair stands as a pivotal early modern true crime, exposing and accelerating fissures in the Stuart monarchy and court culture. Beneath its layers—ambition, jealousy, romance, and murder—lay deep anxieties about royal power, gender, and religion that would echo through English politics for decades, culminating in the Civil War. Professor Bellany’s nuanced account reveals how the crime was as much about media, rumor, and the loss of trust in monarchy as it was about the murder itself.

Transcript

[Professor Susannah Lipscomb]

Hello, I'm Professor Susannah Lipscomb. If you'd like Not Just the Tudors ad free to get early access and bonus episodes, sign up to historyhit with a historyhit subscription. You can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries, including my own recent two part series A World Torn the Dissolution of the Monasteries and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com subscribe.

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[Podcast Host / Interviewer]

Hello.

[Professor Susannah Lipscomb]

I'm Professor Susannah Lipscomb and welcome to Not Just the Tudors From History hit podcast in which we explore everything from Anne Boleyn to the Aztecs, from Holbein to the Huguenots, from Shakespeare to samurais, relieved by regular doses of murder, espionage and witchcraft. Not, in other words, just the Tudors, but most definitely also the Tudors. The notion of crime causing a media sensation is nothing new. Crime belongs exclusively to the lower orders, wrote Oscar Wilde. I don't blame them in the smallest degree. I should fancy that crime was to them what art is to us, simply a method of procuring extraordinary sensations. If you travelled back 400 years or so to Stuart, Britain in the years following 1615 and picked up a broadside much like a newspaper or perhaps a printed play or poem, you would find the sensational true crime story of the death of Thomas Overbury, a courtier in the reign of King James vi. And first Thomas Overbury was a lawyer, poet and essayist who died in the Tower of London in 1613. As rumors of the circumstances of his death began to swirl, they caused a sensation, leading to a scandal that rocked the monarchy to its core. Think of the furore surrounding the British royal family in recent times when its members have been accused of certain misdemeanors, and you'll have some small sense of the shock that Overbury's death alleged to be a murder caused. All this month on Not Just the Tudors, I'm delving into our archives to revisit some of the extraordinary true crimes that shook England in the early modern period. We've already looked at the murders of Christopher Marlowe and Amy Dudley, but today we turn to the death of Thomas Overbury. Was it a murder? If he was murdered, was anybody ever held to account? And why did his death threaten the monarchy? In January 2024, I was delighted to welcome to the podcast Alastair Bellany, professor of History at Rutgers School of Arts and Sciences in New Jersey in the usa. Professor Delany specializes in the political culture of early modern England and is the author of the Murder of King James I and the Politics of Court Scandal in Early Modern England. News, Culture and The Overbury Affair, 1603-1660. I'm Professor Suzanne Lipscomb and you're listening to Not Just the Tudors from History Hit. Professor Bellamy, welcome to Not Just the Tudors.

[Professor Alastair Bellany]

Delighted to be here.

[Podcast Host / Interviewer]

Now we are of course going to discuss the political significance of Thomas Overbreed's death in our conversation today. And I hope we'll talk about how it was represented in contemporary literature. But could we start by establishing some of the sort of key facts about the case? So some biographical information. Who was Thomas Overbury and how had he come to be at the court of James vi?

[Professor Alastair Bellany]

And first, Thomas Overbury was the son of a quite well known lawyer who later became a judge. And Overbury goes to university, he goes to the Inns of Court. He hangs out the Inns of Court with lots of the bright lights of the late Elizabethan early jacket being literary scene. But he's clearly a man on the make. And what gets him access to the court of the King is a friendship he seems to have forged in Edinburgh at the very end of Elizabeth I's reign with a young man called Robert Carr. And Robert Carr was at that point in the entourage of the Isle of Dunbar. He was the son of a laird, a noted supporter of Mary Queen of Scots. And when in 1603, Dunbar accompanies James VI down to London. When James takes the English throne, Carr comes with him. And a year later, Carr is appointed to the royal bedchamber. And that access to the king that Carr has from 1604, which grows in frequency and intensity over the coming years, is Overbury's entree into high politics. So it's the friendship with Karr that gives him access to other powerful people and makes other powerful people think that he's someone worth knowing. And he's someone worth knowing because, and this is the most important thing, round about 1607 or so, it becomes clear to everyone that the King has uniquely favored Ka Ka has become the dominant favorite young man at the court, and that a lot of power and patronage, money and policy is going to run through him. So Overbury, as a friend of Karr, suddenly becomes a person of interest to a lot of powerful men at the Jacobean court.

[Podcast Host / Interviewer]

So given it's a long standing friendship, why did the relationship between Overbury and Carr turn sour? He's Viscount Rochester by this point. And how did that lead to Overbury being imprisoned in the Tower of London?

[Professor Alastair Bellany]

It's a story of romance round about 1611, 1612, we don't know when Carr begins a dalliance with a married woman, Frances Deborah, the Countess of Essex. And at the beginning, Overbreeze happy to go along. There's some evidence suggests that Overy writes Kar's love letters for him, a kind of Cyrano de Bergerac mode. But as the relationship becomes more serious, Overbury sees it as a political threat because Francis, birth, family, the Howards sit on the other side of the political divide at court. Around about 1612, 1613. And as Karr's relationship with Francis deepens, Overbury begins to fear for his political future. And he says some very unwise things which alienates his friend. At the same time as this is happening, the King is also growing tired of overbreed. There's probably an element of jealousy in that. And the King, in many ways, he imagined his relationship with Karl as a kind of tutor and a mentor, as someone creating out of nothing this powerful figure. And Overbury has the same idea that he's going to be the tutor and mentor of Karl. And there are various political agendas that Overbury's pushing that the King doesn't like. And what brings Overbury down, first of all, is probably that he annoys the King and the King wants him out of court. And the King offers him a pretty nice way out. He offers him an ambassadorship. It's not clear where Some people say France, which is very nice. Some people say Muscovy, which might be less of a plum position. But Overbury refuses, and the King, whether genuinely outraged or strategically outraged, treats this as contempt, and he orders Overbury put into the Tower. Now, Overbury's assuming that it'll be a brief state, that his friend Karl will use his influence on the King to get him released. But Karl doesn't do that. Karr has another agenda. So overbreeze in the tower in April 1613. The king is angry at him. And what Karl wants to do is to get overbreeze, essentially to recognize the facts of life, that the relationship with Francis is growing. There's a plot afoot to have Francis divorce her current husband, the Earl of Essex. She will then marry Karr, and that will bring Kaa into the orbit of Francis family, the Howards. And basically what Karr tells Overbury over the course of the summer of 1613 is just agree that this is okay, that you're not going to cause trouble, that you'll allow this to go ahead. And eventually Overbreed capitulates and says, all right, we'll do it. And he's still not released. And so at that point, we don't know why. Perhaps the King is putting his foot down. Perhaps Karl is also still bitter. But what we do know, what's also been happening while these various plots have been going on, is that Francis, who has been bitterly attacked by Overbury and is resentful of his influence over Karr, resentful of the kind of insults to her honor, has been plotting to find a more permanent solution to the Overbury problem and has been trying to poison him.

[Podcast Host / Interviewer]

On the 14th of September, 1613, Overy dies in the tower. This is six months after he'd been imprisoned. But his death doesn't provoke a scandal immediately. Can you tell me about the rumors that began to emerge? You may have hinted at one of them already there, including those about King James's involvement, which provoked him to order an investigation.

[Professor Alastair Bellany]

At the time of Albabri's death in September 1613, his passing is generally unlamented. Even among his political allies at court, he was known as an abrasive figure, caustic, arrogant, and there are poems written at the time of his death which, frankly, revel in his demise. Rumors are spread that he dies of an unmentionable disease, so the French pox or syphilis. It's widely rumored his body has to be examined because he dies in a royal prison in the Tower. And there's a kind of routine proto autopsy. The coroner has to take a look at it. And the body is in a fairly disgusting state of decay. He's clearly been seriously ill. Some of the signs on the body might later be interpreted as traces of something dubious, but at the time it was. He's probably died of this kind of sexually transmitted disease. And in many ways he's out of the way. And for nearly two years he's buried. And Carr he's made the Earl of Somerset. In December 1613, he marries Frances after her first marriage is nullified in a kind of embarrassing and prolonged ecclesiastical hearing. But she's free to marry him. They marry 26th of 12-16-13 in a lavish court wedding. And for about a year, Harr is the most powerful man at the English court and is in close collaboration with Francis's father, the Earl of Suffolk, and her great uncle, the Earl of Northampton, who have complete policy agenda that they want to push the King towards that Kara's helping them get. And so Overbury is out of the way. He's forgotten in many ways. And then, this being the Jacobean court, those who felt they'd lost out with this sort of reorientation of the favorite towards the Howards begin to plot to bring him down. And their instrument is another handsome young man, this one an Englishman called George Villiers. He was introduced to the king in 1614, and by early 1615, it's clear that the King likes George and is beginning to give him office at court. And Har is understandably very nervous and very angry and confronts the King. And there's a series of blazing rows between the two. There's a remarkable letter that James sends Carr rebuking him for his ingratitude and his behavior. And throughout most of 1615, there's a kind of seesaw at court. It's probable that the King is thinking about how I'm going to balance these different factions. I'm going to keep two favorites with their clusters of political supporters, and I'm not going to allow either of them think they can wield influence over me. But in that kind of situation, then the revelation about Overbury emerges. So Overbree's ghost suddenly reappears on the scene. And it's long been a mystery exactly how this happens, but it seems that what happens is that the Lieutenant of the Tower, a man called Jervis Elwes, in an interview with the King's Secretary of State, Ralph Winwood, tells Winwood that, yeah, back in 1613, when I first became Lieutenant of the Tower, I discovered A plot to murder Overbury, but I stopped it from happening. And Winwood sits on this information for a while and then decides in the early autumn of 1615 that it's probably time to tell the King about this. And this is clearly a move by Wynward to try and tilt that balance back towards George Villiers group and the men who are trying to bring Carr down. And he tells the King that the Lieutenant of the Towers claimed there was a poisoning plot to kill Overbury. And again in another interesting moment, the King decides that he's going to take this seriously and he asks Winwood to talk to Elwes again. And this time Elwis starts humming and hawing and saying I'm not entirely sure I stopped the plot. And this opens the floodgates. And the King essentially asks a group of lawyers and administrators at court to conduct an investigation. And fairly soon a whole cast of characters have been hauled in front of the King's judges and are beginning to name names. And very quickly they name Robert Carr and his wife as instruments behind the plot.

[Podcast Host / Interviewer]

Now on what grounds were they accused?

[Professor Alastair Bellany]

It's difficult to fully separate what they may have done with the stories and the prosecution case about what they did. There's kind of two things we can think about. One is what do we think they actually did? And then what was the argument made at the time and the evidence produced? And the case is easy to reconstruct against the Countess Frances Howard. And the case against her is essentially that she wanted over Brudet and through a number of intermediaries she helped smuggle into the Tower, send to the Tower a whole array of poisoned goodies, tarts and jellies which looked like gifts for the prisoner but were laced with arsenic and rosecra and other kind of poisonous substances. Frances was also alleged to have worked with her close friend, a woman called Ann Turner, to get access to poison suppliers. Ann Turner was the widow of a London physician and thus presumably had knowledge in the sort of chemistry supply side of London Apothecary's. And the goal originally was that these poisons would be smuggled. Overby's keeper, a man called Richard Weston, would make sure he ate the pies and jellies. But this initial attempt at poisoning apparently didn't work. Overby got ill. There's some vivid descriptions of the symptoms of poisoning but he didn't die. And eventually, and the evidence here is from Richard Weston, the keeper, eventually they decided that they were going to skip lacing the jellies and the pies and they bribed an apothecary's apprentice to come in and deliver an enema in disguise, medical treatment. And this enema contained mercury supplement or another poison, and this finished the job. That's the case there. The case against Robert Carr is a lot weaker, and that case is mostly hinged on the fact that his behavior in 1613 is suspicious. He engineers Overbury's imprisonment. The King's kind of nicely written out of this particular story. It's Carr tricking his old friend into offending the King, then keeping him in the prison while his wife killed him. And there are various rumors about all kinds of explosive political secrets that Overbury had about Carr that Carr wanted to keep silent. But again, the evidence of a direct involvement in the murder for Carr is very weak. And his trial lasts longer than any of the trials. He doesn't have a defense lawyer, but he defends himself and he never confesses, unlike his wife. When Frances Howard eventually comes to court, put on trial in May 1616, she confesses to having done it. So there were reasons for her to confess. It would save her a date with the hangman. But at the same time, it seems pretty good evidence that she had at least thought she was trying to kill Oakbury, even if, given all the sort of nasty diseases going around the Tower of London, he might have actually died of something else.

[Podcast Host / Interviewer]

So to clarify, what is the outcome of the trial then, Francis Howard has confessed what happens to Ann Turner and what happens to Carr?

[Professor Alastair Bellany]

In the first wave of trials in the autumn of 1615, the plebeian characters mostly get put on trial. The keeper, Richard Weston, is tried first. He has to be tried first because he's the principal. Everyone else is technically his accessory in the murder. He's tried, convicted, executed. And Turner tried, convicted, executed. Jervis Elwes, the Lieutenant of the Tower, tried, convicted, executed. The most colorful of the criminals, man called James Franklin, who probably supplied poisons, was tried, convicted, executed. There was an attempt to put a quite senior courtier called Thomas Monson on trial. They tried to do it twice. They started proceedings and then shut up shop very quickly. And eventually Monson is never put on trial. So all this happens in October, November, early December 1615. And then there's a gap. And during that gap, there's a lot of political maneuvering at court and a lot of wondering about how on earth they're going to stage the trial of the King's former favorite and his wife, who's from one of the most powerful, oldest aristocratic families in the country. And there's a lot of Evidence of them being very careful about how they're going to do it, what they're going to say, what they're not going to say. But eventually they're put on trial in May 1616 in Westminster Hall. They're tried by a jury of their peers, so it's essentially the House of Lords. And they're both convicted. Frances after confessing, Carr after adamantly insisting on his innocence. Two months later, she gets a royal pardon. He doesn't get pardoned until 1624, but they are kept in the Tower of London, fairly nice conditions through 1622 when they're released. So the minor characters, the less powerful characters hang and the two powerful aristocrats live.

[Podcast Host / Interviewer]

But the furore surrounding the overbrief was not quieted down by the trial or the executions. And I imagine, much to James's frustration. Can you give some idea of the sort of literature that was being published to help us understand the nature of 17th century media?

[Professor Alastair Bellany]

Yeah, One of the really interesting things about the Obree Fair is that it is probably one of the first big 17th century media scandals and it's a great opportunity to see how the media works and how it covers an explosive political event. So there are a number of things to distress. First of all, all the trials are public, they're open, they're well attended. They're attended by people who go to take notes, transcripts to circulate. And there's a lot of talk, particularly in London, about what's going on, the talk of the town for several months. These trials, the executions, are also big public events with large crowds of witnesses. So there are two types of reporting on the scandal that get circulated. On one level there's probably about 15, 16, 17. Some of them are last printed books and pamphlets which discuss the case. Most of these are fairly tame in that they're presented in Classic Early 17th century crime literature format, which is here are some wicked crimes, but they've been thankfully brought to light by royal justice, avenged by royal justice. And now hopefully, these repentant criminals might find forgiveness in the arms of God. And these printed pamphlets, none of which can really appear without official approval, also mostly steer clear of talking anything about the Earl of Somerset and wife, about Carr and Francis, that's too dangerous. They focus on the lowborn criminals and they tell stories about their paths to murder. And many of them are highly moralized stories of a corrupt youth with minor vices. Sir Jervis Elwes has this wonderful supposed confession in which he finds the root of his path to the gallows. In his. How does he put it? Essentially, his prideful vanity in his handwriting, that he loved the fact that he could write a good script and this was opening his soul to the sort of the sin of pride. And this led him down a cascading series of greater and greater sins until he's conniving in murder. And Turner, famously, the stories told about her all starts with her obsession with fashion and invention of a new style of ruff for women in which they'll be starched and dyed yellow to set off the kind of pale complexions that were in fashion. And again, this is literature which explain how this obsession with surface and with artifice, again, is a symptom of this deep lying sin of pride that, once set into motion, is almost inevitably going to lead her down a path into lust and adultery and witchcraft and murder. So there's a lot of this literature out there. It's making the scandal into a huge effect. It's not just a murder scandal, it's about outrageous fashions. It's about arrogance and ambition and witchcraft.

[Podcast Host / Interviewer]

And lust and calligraphy. Don't forget that one that leads you.

[Professor Alastair Bellany]

To pass a murder indeed. So just be careful next time you get your fountain pen out and looking admiringly at the script. So this stuff is more or less blisset. It's officially published. It steers clear from attacking the aristocrats. It steers clear from drawing too many overt connections between what's been going on at court and the King's stewardship of the court and of the realm. However, there's also a thriving underground media system. You see it in the 16th century, the beginnings of it, but the early 17th century sees it accelerate in scope, and it sees it become richer, more intensive, more wider spread. And these underground media essentially avoid the censorship system, so they don't even bother trying to get it printed. So this media is usually circulated in handwritten copies, not all of them as neatly written as Jervis Elvis, I imagine, and includes everything from detailed transcripts of the court proceedings to scabrous libellus verse attacking usually the two main aristocratic protagonists. Newsletters are also circulating information about the scandal. These are often things that if you've got a relative or a friend who's in London picking up news from the chatter in the streets or outside the court, they'd be expected to write regular letters home to relatives in the countryside describing the latest news. And a lot of these letters include stories of rumors and gossip and some of the more kind of pointed political criticism of what's going on. So there's a lot of material circulating in manuscript and being devoured across the country.

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[Podcast Host / Interviewer]

I was struck reading your book by what you've alluded to there in part the sort of variety of messages in the contemporary literature about James and his court and those convicted for murder. The literature on Anne Turner. Some of it's presenting her as a victim of the excesses and corruptions of the court, as if she's been groomed by a manipulative Francis Howard for her end. Other literature sets her out as a popish plotter determined to bring down a Protestant king. Can you explain a little bit more about these sort of ideas and themes that have emerged from your analysis of the literature? I suppose I'm asking what's the political meaning or meanings of the literature?

[Professor Alastair Bellany]

Yeah, I think the main thing is what you just said, that what's striking about it is the kind of multiplicity of meanings. There are many stories told about this scandal. There's a story that the authorities want to tell, and it's a story that's picked up in particular in the sort of speeches given during the trials by the king's judges. And mostly that story is a story of royal justice in action, that the king is shocked to find out that this has been happening, even that people close to him were involved in such heinous crimes. But the king, as soon as he figured out what was going on, and again, there's a lot of stress that the king drew almost kind of supernatural inspiration, understood what was at the heart of this conspiracy with just the beginning of the information that was leaked to him. And so the trials that are presented, as the king has unearthed this crime, he's brought it to light. He will try it. He will then impose justice. And what justice means is that the guilty should die, but that the king should take care, that they have an opportunity to repent and perhaps find a way to be saved. And that's the kind of version that the court is putting out. And you can pick that up, particularly in the printed material. So that's one version of the story. But then there are lots of small versions, little mini stories about some of the characters involved and why it is they committed this terrible crime of murder. In particular, the stories told about Robert Kahn, Frances Howard. There's a kind of male story. There's a kind of female story, a story of kind of male political corruption. Story of female political corruption. The stories told about Frances Howard are essentially stories about a woman who's subverted all the norms of patriarchally defined womanhood. She's depicted as lustful, adulterous. Tired of one husband, she adulterously pursues Kar as her lover. So overpowering is her lust that she resorts to witchcraft to create potions that will render her first husband impotent and get her a nullity for her marriage, and that will allow her to control a second husband. When she is angered by Overbree, her kind of feminine irrationality leads her to plot his death. And then she resorts to similar techniques, to charms and spells and poisons. And so there's an image there of kind of gender disorder. The stories told about tar are interesting. They're stories about the ways in which the normal political way of things has been upended or subverted by the rise to immense power and authority of someone who lacks both the blood, so the aristocratic background and the virtue to appropriately and effectively wield any kind of political responsibility. And so the master sin for Robert Carr in some of these writings is his sin of ambition, that he's a low born man. And they tend to exaggerate the obscurity of his birth. The fact that he's Scottish allows these mostly English commentators to assume that even the son of a Scottish laird is mean and base. But the images of Carr have him this man of ambition. And as he crawls up kind of rungs of power at court, he's, according to these stories, perfectly willing to engage in dishonorable behavior. His portrayal of Overbury is often read as the portrayal of the virtuous courtier Overbree, now long dead. Everyone forgets how nasty he was. He's now the perfect virtuous courtier who was betrayed by his friend. And that kind of betrayal of masculine friendship is particularly unnerving. But what makes the stories about Kah problematic politically is that particularly in the libelous poetry, someone has got to ask the question, if this man is socially obscure, if he has no particular political talents or virtue, how does he end up the most powerful man at court? That ultimately is a question to be asked of the king. And the answers you get in some of the libelous poems tread very carefully around the kind of suspicion that there's a sexual relationship between the king and his favorite, but come very close to saying that there's a libel which says that Karl was promoted for his fair face, or that his face set the king afire and caused the king to lose his political judgment. So there is a general reluctance to implicate the king directly. But often when they're talking about Kars rise, they have to figure out what's the king's responsibility here. And so at the same time as the king is being depicted by his judges as this agent of righteous justice, there's this countercurrent of anxiety about what's the king's responsibility for the rise of this man who turns out to be a murderer? What kind of king is it who allows women to run around the court embarrassing other men, committing adultery, dabbling in witchcraft? What does it tell us about the king's role as a kind of the patriarchal head of the nation? And the king himself had written earlier that one measure of a king's moral fiber is the morality of his court. And so as these stories get told about the courtiers and they don't explicitly talk about the king. They're raising all these kind of implicit questions about the responsibility of the king for the misdeeds of his courtiers.

[Podcast Host / Interviewer]

Given that there is that kind of implicit anti monarchy, or at least anti court vibe to the literature and circulation, do we know if James and his counselors tried to put a stop to this bad pr?

[Professor Alastair Bellany]

They don't seem to have made overt attempts. I think if you the kind of person who wrote and circulated and consumed this kind of material, it was good for you. That the state really had no means of quashing circulation. Historians is annoying because if they'd arrested a lot of people, we'd know a lot more about who wrote this stuff and how it got circulated. I think that there was a sense that they could manage the scandal through. Through the public medium of the trials and the executions, which had a very clear message. And clearly, when they were leading up to the trial of Carr and Francis Howard in the spring of 1616, they were thinking far more strategically about the messages that would come out in that trial and about what they wanted to avoid, particularly Carr saying there was concerns that Carr might just spill secrets. He'd been at the heart of world governance for a long time. He knew where all the bodies were hid at the early Stuart court, and so there was concerns about managing that. But there's no overt evidence of attempts to interfere with stuff in the press, so preventing things being published. And there's no evidence of a kind of overt policing attempt to try and deal with the manuscript material that's circulating widely.

[Podcast Host / Interviewer]

So two questions coming from that, then. One, I'd like to know in the end whether you think that Frances Howard was guilty. And two, were Francis and Robert not executed in part because they perhaps had things to spill, Maybe their silence was born.

[Professor Alastair Bellany]

Well, Francis guilt, the preponderance of the evidence would suggest, yes, probably a canny lawyer might have made the case that they actually know there was no concrete evidence of what Overbury died of. But she confesses, all the evidence about the instruments, the people they hire essentially to do the dirty work, lead back to her. Yeah. In terms of the pardon, it's clear that the decision to spare them is made probably before the trials happen, that it's a lot easier to spare Frances because she confessed. And the show of repentance almost immediately changes her image from the wicked woman to the repentant. And it was relatively easy to make the case that mercy might be shown silencing them. There was speculation, there was clearly an Unease among some contemporaries about the fact that the Somersets were spared. This went against the rhetoric that the King's judges had been preaching since the autumn previously, which is that murder is a heinous crime. The blood of the innocent calls to God for vengeance. The King is God's agent of justice. On a the King will deliver divine justice. And famously, Richard Weston makes a remark about I hope you're making a net that will catch the big fishes as well as the small fish. He knows that he's a nobody in this and that there are powerful political interests at work. And so there is a real issue about the sparing of the Somersets, which contemporaries are aware of. And it somewhat undercuts the royal image of what's going on, because this is frankly, all the kind of religious arguments they use about justice and murder and punishment. All this stuff implies that everyone involved in the murder had to pay the same price. So there is speculation, and some of that speculation about what it means, pardon means, what the sparing means, finds its way into print by the late 1640s, early 1650s, in a very different political world, where it's a lot safer to talk about the misdeeds of monarchy, there's theories who was the real criminal. There were theories that I think you can find in the 1650s that James May have been involved in Overbury's murder. It's a theory that's picked up again in the 19th century by a lawyer called Andrew Amos, who wrote a kind of big book about the Overby scandal, in which he decides that James in fact orders Overbury's murder and that R and Francis Howard become scapegoats in a certain way, but they're cooperation means that they will live. So I think the main thing we can say is that the sparing of the Somersets is problematic. It raises questions rather than closing them down. It angers certain people and it compromises the story that the King's judges had wanted to tell, the story that had distanced James from the scandal. And this ended up re implicating him, making it a lot harder to see him as a cad victim of his courteous misdeeds. Less easy to see him as a kind of morally upright administrator of divine justice.

[Podcast Host / Interviewer]

Given that James has been re implicated by sparing them, in the short term, does he cleanse the court and rebuild.

[Professor Alastair Bellany]

His reputation in the very, very short term, very quickly, a lot of the same issue recurring. Politically speaking, the one thing that the overview scandal does do is that it installs George Villiers as the supreme and Uncontested favorite at court. And that fact shapes the next dozen years of English history. He becomes the Duke of Buckingham. He is quite remarkably able to move from James I's side to Charles I's side. And the installation of Buckingham as royal favorite is of massive political importance in terms of king's reputation and the court's reputation. I think what's important is that a lot of the scandalous behavior that is unearthed by the Overbury prosecution, unorthodox religious leanings, dabblings in witchcraft, rampant ambition, dissimulation, corruption, even the use of kind of poison as a political weapon, all of these behaviors become part of a picture of the court that sticks, partly because other courtiers get implicated in similar scandalous behaviors. And Bucky himself, relatively quickly, certainly by the end of the 16 teens, becomes the topic of underground political attacks that last through the rest of his life and which charge him with a whole range of scandalous behaviors, many of which also been leveled at Carr and Francis Howard. So basically, Buckingham is involved in witchcraft. Buckingham is lustful and adulterous. Buckingham is a crypto Catholic. Buckheim is a man of ambition, plucked out of nowhere and climbing the rungs of court without either virtue or blood to sustain him. A lot of these same stories and anxieties get repeated through the 1620s. And so in many ways, the overbreed lesson gets both implicitly remembered every time these new scandals are talked about, and sometimes it's explicitly referenced that people talk back, and they're already connecting these two sets of scandalous courtiers together and seeing a continuous pattern. And so I think you can make the argument that this is a real challenge to James I's authority. Some of the things said about James in the early 1620s and his relationship with Buckingham go much further in terms of making overt sexual allegations than conversations about James and Robert Carr. But there's a kind of continuity in which James's image as a wise, disciplined, moral Protestant monarch is eroded. It becomes possible to question it. And there are political decisions he makes that just add to the problem. When he decides that he's not going to go to war against Spain in the late 16 teens, early 1620s, is he going to pursue a marriage alliance with Spain to end war in Europe? In many ways, an entirely admirable strategy, but which looks to many of his subjects as a kind of portrayal of the very essence of what Protestant kingship's about and worries about. Why is he doing this? Why is he so soft? Popery and the Antichrist. And it's because he's ruled by his favorites. You can look back and see what happened in the Overbury case, where crypto Catholic and Catholic courtiers were implicated in those scandals. So a series of stories get told and set into place by the Overbury scandal, which can be reignited, retriggered by sort of new events. And so it doesn't get forgotten, it doesn't get tucked away. It doesn't mean that the monarchy's doomed or that the king's authority is completely shocked, but it's compromised. And that's an interesting process, particularly when we're trying to think over the long term about how the authority of the monarchy gets shaken and compromised in the decades before that authority collapses in the Civil War.

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[Podcast Host / Interviewer]

You say that it's always being recalled, this Overbury affair. Did James and his heirs ever really recover from it? Can we find connecting threads, however slender, between the scandal and the British Civil Wars?

[Professor Alastair Bellany]

Yeah, I think we can. But is a complicated story, rather than a kind of simplistic story that massive scandals happened, monarchy is compromised, and then 25 years later, there's a political crisis that leads to the Civil War. Partly it's about memory, and partly, as I said earlier, that memory is about the kind of recurrence of scandal, at least through Buckingham's career, through 1628, 1629, in which some of these same scandalous tropes get recycled in images of the court. It's also a story about kind of the continued circulation of writings about the urban reaffir. So these manuscript verse libels, for instance, are collected in miscellaneous and commonplace books by readers across the country. And they continue to circulate, to be borrowed, copied, written down, shared. Through the 1630s. We know that people were copying down poems about Robert Kahn, Francis Howard, long after the overt political sell by date. So the way that these materials circulate guarantees them a kind of long life. So there's a connection there. The other way I think you can look at connection is that you can make the argument that the Overbury affair both causes and exposes certain political dynamics or contradictions which continue to be exposed and stretched and reworked over the next couple of decades. So the example that, when I was working on this, particularly struck me was the question of what contemporary Protestants would have called Opry. So Catholicism, false religion. And the Opry fair has a number of interesting Catholic elements in it. Frances Howard's public Catholic. Many in her family are Catholic or crypto Catholic. And that was part of the political dynamic at court. It's one of the reasons that Overbury, for instance, was very unnerved by the prospect of his friend Robert Carr getting involved with the Howard family. And during the prosecution of the case, a story emerges and then peaks and then fades, which turns the scandal into something even more disturbing than it was originally. And this is a story that essentially says that Overbury's death was part of a pattern and that there was a massive Catholic plot at work, organized, financed by the Spanish and run at court by Robert Carr and by his Howard relatives. Begins as a rumor. Judges allude to it in the trial. The story went that the first victim here was James I's eldest son, Henry, who died in November 1612 at a very young age, and whose death was profoundly upsetting to many and triggered a few speculations about what had happened, including rumors of poison. But now the story that started circulating in the autumn of 1615 is that Henry was the first victim, Overbury was the next. And the plan was that Carr would orchestrate the mass poisoning of the remainder of the royal family. And in its most elaborate version, this rumor, which is circulated in reports and newsletters, has that the Earl of Somerset and his wife. So Carr and Frances Howard were expecting a child when they were arrested. In fact, that child was born while they were in arrest. The daughter called Anne. But the rumor was that there was no child. Pregnancy was being faked, but there would be a christening for a changeling child smuggled in. And at this christening, a whole bunch of the overream murder characters would cater the event, and all the foods would be laced with poison, but the poison would be slow acting this is one of the things that contemporaries loved about poison talk is that poison was magical. You could design any poison to do anything. So the poison would be delivered at the christening, but wouldn't start working for several months. But at the christening, the King's wife, Prince Charles, all the leading Protestant aristocrats of the nation would be poisoned. And Edward Coke, one of the King's judges, who gets wind of this coins his own little phrase. He calls this the powder poison. So it's just like the gunpowder plot of 1605, an attempt by the Catholics to wipe out the Stuart dynasty. And the plot talk mentioned that once everyone died off, Robert Carr would be the Spanish puppet king in England and Scotland. So it's an over the top conspiracy theory, but it has a kind of plausibility to it. People don't just laugh it off. Makes sense because there's Catholics involved. Poisoning. Yeah, it's the thing that Catholics do. It makes sense. Francis great uncle, the Earl of Northampton. Yeah, Catholic, probably. And so there was a lot of kind of smoke around this, which looked popish or crypto popish. So it became easy to imagine this kind of Protestant nightmare of Catholic plotting. And so for a while, this rumor runs with it. And for a while the King's judges think, oh, this adds to our picture. Because if this is like the Gunpowder Plots, another example of wicked Catholics trying to kill our staunchly Protestant king and God once again intervening to thwart their wickedness. And there's a point in which James looks like, again, he's reinvested with kind of Protestant charisma by the fact that Catholics are out to kill him. But in the short term, it doesn't stick. What it looks like is a lesson in how deeply corrupted the King's court is by Catholic individuals, Catholic interests. And so there's a story that historians like to tell about the origins of the Civil War, which is that anti Catholicism is embedded in English Protestant culture. But it's only when anti Catholicism gets turned against the court that it becomes politically explosive. And that clearly happened by 1640-41 that Charles I's regime is implicated in a Popish plot. But we can see the ease with which that can happen in the Overbury affair, the ease with which this kind of anxiety about Catholic infiltration, ease about anxiety with which bad actors can get access to believers of power and to the King's person, and how easily they could infiltrate court with a Catholic political agenda, whether that's arbitrary taxation or marriage alliance with Spain or whatever. And the Overbury affair. It's the first big case where a story about a political popish plot is centered inside the court, not outside it. And that's a very kind of dangerous sign of the volatility of early Stuart political culture.

[Podcast Host / Interviewer]

Thank you so much for that. It was an amazing explanation of a complicated case and its implications.

[Professor Susannah Lipscomb]

And do remember to go back and listen to our last two episodes investigating true crimes of the early modern period, the alleged murders of Christopher Marlowe and Amy Dudley. Next time, the story of a murderous family, the Geese. Thank you for listening to this episode of Not Just the Tudors from History Hit. And to my producer Rob Weinberg, we are always eager to hear from you, including receiving your brilliant ideas for subjects we can cover. So do drop us a line and Not Just the [e-mail] and I look forward to joining you again for another episode. Next time on Not Just the Tutors From History Hit.

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