The kernel of the situation lies in the verdict of the jury of matrons.Her ladyship was declared to be a maid.If in the finding gossips and scandal-mongers found reason for laughter, and decent enough people cause for wonderment, they are hardly to be blamed.If Frances Howard was a virgin, what reason was there for fearing anything Overbury might have said? What knowledge had he against the suit that put Rochester and the Howards in such fear of him that they had to confine him in the Tower under such miserable conditions? In what was he so dangerous that he had to be deprived of his faithful Davies, that he had to be put in the care of a Tower Lieutenant specially appointed? The evidence given before the commission can still be read in almost verbatim report.It is completely in favour of the plea of Lady Essex.Sir Thomas Overbury's, had he given evidence, would have been the sole voice against the suit.If he had said that in his belief the association of her ladyship with Rochester had been adulterous there was the physical fact adduced by the jury of matrons to confute him.And being confuted in that, what might he have said that would not be attributed to rancour on his part? That her ladyship, with the help of Mrs Turner and the wizard of Lambeth, had practised magic upon her husband, giving him powders that went near to killing him?That she had lived in seclusion for several months with herhusband at Chartley, and that the non-consummation of the marriage was due, not to the impotence of the husband, but to refusal to him of marital rights on the part of the wife because of her guilty love for Rochester? His lordship of Essex was still alive, and there was abundant evidence before the court that there had been attempt to consummate the marriage.Whatever Sir Thomas might have said would have smashed as evidence on that one fact.Her ladyship was a virgin.
What did Sir Thomas Overbury know that made every one whose interest it was to further the nullity suit so scared of him--Rochester, her ladyship, Northampton, the Howards, the King himself?
Sir Thomas Overbury was much too cool-minded, too intelligent, to indulge in threats unless he was certain of the grounds, and solid upon them, upon which he made those threats.He had too great a knowledge of affairs not to know that the commission would be a packed one, too great an acquaintance with the strategy of James to believe that his lonely evidence, unless of bombshell nature, would have a chance of carrying weight in a court of his Majesty's picking.And, then, he was of too big a mind to put forward evidence which would have no effect but that of affording gossip for the scandal-mongers, and the giving of which would make him appear to be actuated by petty spite.He had too great a sense of his own dignity to give himself anything but an heroic role.Samson he might play, pulling the pillars of the temple together to involve his enemies, with himself, in magnificent and dramatic ruin.But Iachimo-- no.
In the welter of evidence conflicting with apparent fact which was given before the commission and in the trials of the Great Oyer, in the mass of writing both contemporary and of later days round the Overbury mystery, it is hard indeed to land upon the truth.Feasible solution is to be come upon only by accepting a not too pretty story which is retailed by Antony Weldon.He says that the girl whom the jury of matrons declared to be virgo intacta was so heavily veiled as to be unidentifiable through the whole proceedings, and that she was not Lady Essex at all, but the youthful daughter of Sir Thomas Monson.
Mrs Turner, we do know, was very much a favourite with the ladies ofSir Thomas Monson's family.Gossip Weldon has a funny, if lewd, story to tell of high jinks indulged in by the Monson women and Mrs Turner in which Symon, Monson's servant, played an odd part.This Symon was also employed by Mrs Turner to carry food to Overbury in the Tower.If the substitution story has any truth in it it might well have been a Monson girl who played the part of the Countess.But, of course, a Monson girl may have been chosen by the inventors to give verisimilitude to the substitution story, simply because the family was friendly with Turner, and the tale of the lewd high jinks with Symon added to make it seem more likely that old Lady Monson would lend herself to such a plot.
If there was such a plot it is not at all unlikely that Overbury knew of it.If there was need of such a scheme to bolster the nullity petition it would have had to be evolved while the petition was being planned--that is, a month or two before the commission went first into session.At that time Overbury was still Rochester's secretary, still Rochester's confidant; and if such a scheme had been evolved for getting over an obstacle so fatal to the petition's success it was not in Rochester's nature to have concealed it from Overbury, the two men still being fast friends.Indeed, it may have been Overbury who pointed out the need there would be for the Countess to undergo physical examination, and it may have been on the certainty that her ladyship could not do so that Overbury rested so securely--as he most apparently did, beyond the point of safety--in the idea that the suit was bound to fail.It is legitimate enough to suppose, along this hypothesis, that this substitution plot was the very matter on which the two men quarrelled.
That Overbury had knowledge of some such essential secret as this is manifest in the enmity towards the man which Lady Essex exhibited, even when he lay, out of the way of doing harm, in the Tower.It is hard to believe that an innocent girl of twenty, conscious of her virgin chastity, in mere fear of scandal which she knew would be baseless, could pursue the life of a man with the venom that, as we shall presently see, Frances Howard used towards Overbury through Mrs Turner.
