English

Powder Poison: Royal Plot

“It has been written to prove that the real procurer of the murder of Sir Thomas Overbury was King James himself; that the instrument he employed for the purpose was Théodore Mayerne (Court physician); that the Countess of Somerset was also engaged at the same time in an ineffectual attempt to poison Overbury; that the King, hearing of this some two years after, determined to make her and her agents his own scapegoats; that accordingly he employed Coke and Bacon to get up a case against them, and manage the prosecution so as by fair means or foul, to ensure a conviction; that he or they then employed a clergyman [Dr. Whiting] to betray the victims into fake confessions of their own guilt, and published to the world false reports of those confessions, as well as an official account of the trial in which the truth was misrepresented in every way by the omission of circumstances which were favourable to the prisoners, by the invention of circumstances which made against them, and by a general license of ‘garbling;’ that the King’s motive for poisoning Overbury was a fear lest Overbury might in discontent reveal certain secret and unnamable vices to which Professor Amos supposed that t

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