Part III: Dramas of the Law XXII. Sir Ralph Winwood Dines Out XXIV. Richard Weston Stands Mute XXV. The Trial of Richard Weston XXVI. The Butterfly on the Wheel. XXVII. The Confessions of Mrs. Turner XXVIII. The Martyrdom of Gervase Helwys XXXII. The Arraignment of Lady Frances XXXIII. The Terror of the King XXXIV. The Earl Defends his Honour Chapter I: Thomas Overbury T HAT an Overbury should become the centre of a Court intrigue, the victim of a tragedy, and the hero of an unsolved mystery, founded on rumours of adultery, murder, and witchcraft, instances the methods of the tricksy fingers of fate moulding the destiny of a common mortal. For an Overbury in the age of Elizabeth stood for all that was respectable, professional, well-to-do, and provincial-one had almost written early Victorian. The Overbury family were of the noble fellowship of the landed gentry. For in the days of Elizabeth, as in the early days of Victoria, landed gentry were thought to be co-eternal with the everlasting hills. Human eyes could not see, human minds could not conceive, the gradual erosion that preceded the inevitable landslide. There had always been Overburys on the Wolds of Gloucestershire. At the dawn of the seventeenth century Nicholas was the head of the family and the squire of Bourton-on-the-Hill. In his youth he had been a student of law, a swinge-buckler in the Temple, entertaining the bona-robas at taverns and fighting the fruiterers at the back of Gray's Inn. Then he had sown his wild oats and returned to Gloucestershire, wooed and won a Warwickshire neighbour's daughter, Mary Palmer of Compton-Scorpion, and settled down to a steady, professional career. To-day he was a bencher of the Middle Temple, Recorder of the City of Gloucester, and a Judge in Wales, riding the circuit time and again with his old clerk, John Guilby. His was the true way of an Overbury. There were three sons of the marriage, Thomas, Giles, and Walter. The two younger did well in the world and were rewarded by undistinguished knighthoods for loyal services of silence in Parliaments. The four girls, Frances, Mary, Margaret, and Meriall, you can picture in the still-room, or sewing in the window-seat, or accompanying their parents across the park to church, waiting for the husbands who duly arrived to carry them across the country to be mothers of new races of landed gentry in other counties. Thomas was a youth of ambition and rejoiced the hearts of his parents by his studious ways and temperate demeanour, though these at his age were against family precedent. He became a gentleman commoner at Queen's College, Oxford, where he graduated at the age of sixteen. There he was noted for his proficiency in all the scholastic exercises of his day. He attended Greek lectures, sat at the feet of rhetoricians, was acclaimed a master of sophisms, declamations, and skilful verses made in learned tongues. He early decided that knowledge was power, and cast himself for a leading part in the world of government, setting out to build himself a lordly career outside the curtilage of his Gloucestershire estate. He would leave the care of that to his father and brothers, and in due time he would be their patron as Sir Robert Cecil, the Queen's Secretary, was his patron and pattern to-day. To this end he sacrificed his youth and knew nothing of the bona-robas and the cock-pit, and even shunned the Christmas dancing and the masques. But he was punctual at the moots and readings at the Middle Temple, and continued in London his Oxford studies. The pride of learning and literary achievement gave him almost more self-confidence than was requisite for his years, so that some who were above him in station, though below his stature of knowledge, regarded him with jealousy and spoke of him as insolent. He begins his interesting career at the age of twenty, in the year 1601. Oxford and the Temple and the |