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summer of 1615, it emerged that Overbury had not simply died in the Tower but had been murdered, by the unusual method of a poisoned enema. The lowdown on Overbury’s death had come from an apothecary’s assistant, who, before dying, had confessed that he had been paid £20 by the Countess of Essex to do the deed. An investigation produced an extraordinary story that the Lieutenant of the Tower had noticed that tarts and jellies and the like, delivered from the Countess for the prisoner, looked and smelled suspicious, especially when one of his own men had already confessed to attempting a poisoning. Scared of offending the most powerful woman in the country after the queen, the poor Lieutenant did what he could to protect the target of her fury by intercepting the lethal provisions and replacing them with food prepared by his own cook. But there was nointercepting (or even suspecting) an enema filled with mercury sublimate. Although Somerset himself had known nothing of the murder scheme, once confronted with the
fait accompli
, he made feverish attempts to cover up the traces of the crime, bribing where necessary, destroying documents where essential. With the appalled king pressing the investigation, going in person to the council and ‘kneeling down there desired God to lay a Curse upon him and his posterity if ever he were consenting to Overbury’s death’, the plot unravelled. Once exposed, the sinister cast of plotters – a crook-back apothecary from Yorkshire who had supplied Frances with a whole range of poisons, including ‘Powder of Diamonds’, white arsenic, and something called ‘Great Spider’, and Anne Turner, dress-designer-cum-procuress, famous for popularizing yellow-starched fabrics, who passed the poisons to Overbury’s gaoler – made the most lurid productions of John Webster seem understated by comparison. Confronted with the damning evidence, Frances broke down and pleaded guilty. Somerset, able with some conscience to plead not guilty of advance knowledge, was none the less convicted of having been at the very least an accessory after the deed. The commoners were, needless to say, given the horrible deaths reserved for poisoners; the nobles, of course, were spared by James and kept confined in the Tower, where Somerset contented himself with periodic exercises in interior redesign.
    To those out in the shires whose theology divided the world into the legions of Christ and the battalions of Antichrist, the Howard–Somerset affair, featuring as it did all the prime transgressions – fornication, murder, criminal suppression of the truth, perhaps even witchcraft – was the clearest evidence that the court was indeed a Stuart Sodom, an unspeakable sink of iniquity. Puritan manuals on the right ordering of the commonwealth never tired of stressing the patriarchal family as the building block of a just and godly state. It was surely not accidental that the chief mover in bringing the king’s attention to the likelihood of a hideous plot was himself an evangelical Protestant, Sir Ralph Winwood, the Secretary of State. To men like Winwood, the decency and integrity of the social and political order were at stake, for everything about that social order seemed to have been perverted in the Howard plot, involving as it did protagonists at the apex of the social and political pyramid. The proper deference of wife to husband had been demonstrably violated by the subjection of the pathetic Somerset to his frightening wife. Frances and her confederate Anne Turner seemed the incarnation of all the misogynist nightmares that haunted Jacobean culture: the insatiable, demonically possessed succubus, the fiend who destroyed through carnal congress. Could there be any doubt that the manner of poor Overbury’s death must have beendevised by the anally obsessed Devil? James himself seems to have concluded that Turner was, indeed, a sorceress.
    Seen in this