Who gave it, who corrupted the servant, who told Weston of these things I can give your Majesty no account; neither can I directly say that he ever named any as an actor in the business but only Mrs. Turner."

This was poor Helwys's story. His wrong-doing was lacking courage to denounce Weston to Monson and Northampton and the King at the time. But he was under the belief that the whole business was being engineered by the Howards and the King's favourite, possibly with the tacit consent of the King himself. So to save his conscience and the life of his prisoner he kept his eyes open, looked closely after Weston, but, as he believed, was in the end outwitted by Reeve, the apothecary's boy, who was afterwards smuggled out of the country by Paul de la Bell and died in Brussels.

Upon receipt of this letter the King made up his mind to act. It is not by any means clear that he foresaw how far the matter would endanger Somerset's life, and it seems fairly clear from after events that he never believed him to be guilty of murder or to be an accessory to murder. But his first idea seemed to be that the investigation would humble Somerset and his friends. and probably enable him to cast off his old favourite without further trouble.

Sir Ralph Winwood was given charge of the business, and he wrote immediately to the Lord Chief Justice, Sir Edward Coke, to start upon the examinations of Dr. Mayerne, Paul de la Bell, the French apothecary, the Lieutenant of the Tower, Mrs. Turner, Weston, and Sir Thomas Monson, noting with grim complacency that "only mean persons being yet accused, their strict trial will best vindicate the great persons who may be indirectly implicated."

From that moment the Earl and Countess of Somerset were doomed, and the smaller wretches, who had ministered to Frances Howard's passion and the Earl of Northampton's plots, were left to wriggle in the meshes of the law, and no assistance or protection from

the great ones they had served could save them from destruction.

Even then it is possible that Somerset by timely submission might have averted ruin, and the appetite of the law might have been satisfied with the mean victims and allowed the great persons to be vindicated. But the command had fallen into bad hands for his interests. Coke was of the Pembroke faction. Moreover, a marriage was to be arranged between Frances, daughter of Sir Edward Coke, and John, brother of Sir George Villiers. Then Coke was thirsting for an opportunity to emerge from the shade into which Bacon's intrigues had thrust him. In those days even an elderly Chief Justice was not immune from the lust of publicity. Truly, it may be said, the stars in their courses fought against Somerset.

Chapter XXIII: Coke Takes Command

IR EDWARD COKE is a household word in

SEnglish law. We remember his Institutes, his

arguments in Shelley's Case, and his Reports. He was now a man of sixty-three and Lord Chief Justice of the King's Bench. He had stood out against the King and his prerogatives. He had been a popular figure in Parliament. In the reign of the great Queen he had entertained her at his palace at Stoke Poges and presented her with gifts of jewels. But in these modern times he ran the risk of being elbowed out by new men with new ideas. That young upstart, Francis Bacon, had run him close for the office of Attorney-General, and had now succeeded him in that office, having persuaded the King to give Coke a place of less profit as a kind of discipline in order to make him more obsequious and less likely to oppose the King's wishes.

When Coke got orders to proceed to inquire into the Overbury case he regarded it from one point of view and that only. It was a chance to advertise his own merits, to restore him to the King's regard, and to make him by the grace of God the successor of old Lord Ellesmere, who must soon be relinquishing the great seal. He had been a foul and rancorous prosecutor, and his conduct in the prosecution of Raleigh was notorious and infamous. He took the same brutal pleasure, as Jeffreys did in after years, in bullying prisoners and witnesses and, as the latter used to say with a chuckle, "giving them a rough lick with his tongue.'

Bacon, too, as the case went on, saw his way to advancement by his conduct of it. For Somerset and his wife, for whom in the days of their vanity he had made feasts

and masques, he now prepared indictments, interrogatories, and wily legal snares. Neither of these men conducted the cases with any real effort to promote the ends of justice. To both of them the matters were popular dramas to which crowds would be attracted, and they were star legal artists playing for their own advancement with selfish skill and efficiency. Or as a sportsman would say, the affair was a grand man-hunt in which the destruction of the prisoners was to lead to the crowning of the huntsmen with golden laurels.

For never before, or indeed since, in our legal history did a series of trials create such popular excitement. For two terms nothing was talked of but the Overbury case and the criminality or innocence of those who stood their trial. Even to-day a considerable literature exists of historians, lawyers, and other dryasdusts poring over the undecipherable State papers in the hopeless task of discovering the truth of the whole business. Coke and Bacon between them have successfully made that impossible.

Nevertheless, let us try and remember the commandment and praise famous men and our fathers in the law. At least it may be said of Coke that he plunged into the Overbury investigation with energy and industry. There exist to-day, it is said, over a hundred examinations taken in his own handwriting. Alas, that we should find in some of the depositions of the accused, alterations and interlineations in my lord's handwriting improving the testimony of the victims to their own undoing! But these things were perhaps customary and not without precedent.

Coke fastened with avidity on to the wretched Weston, the first examinee to be brought before him. He had been arrested forthwith. Then Mrs. Turner was taken into custody and placed for the present in the care of Alderman Jones. These two had heard rumours of troubles coming to them some time previously, and had met secretly in Hertfordshire. Weston had received a

message to meet Mrs. Turner at Ware, and had journeyed there to a tavern, where he expected to find her. She, with the instinct of a hunted animal, had merely left word that she was to be found at Hogston, whither he followed her. They met and discussed a common story, and Weston was to see the lieutenant and sound him on the subject. Like a fool he told Helwys of his journey to Ware, and it was probably on this occasion he told him further details of the story of the apothecary's boy. All these things Helwys, in the full belief that if he told the truth no harm would befall him, set down in his depositions.

Coke, having these before him, listened with grim pleasure to Weston's colourless lies, and then opened out upon him an explosive battery of noxious facts for the poor wretch to answer and explain. After half a dozen examinations, carefully corrected and amended by himself, Coke had as many stories of Weston to choose from as any inquisitor could desire.

Following Mrs. Turner, Helwys himself was sent for, and then the man Franklin, who had supplied Mrs. Turner with the poison. Then witnesses were examined, not only touching Overbury's career and death, but concerning the poisoning of Prince Henry, a business which Coke believed he would discover and prove before this investigation was over.

So the old man went on nosing out all he could learn of these crimes, or suspected crimes, hoping to make himself popular in the country among those who feared the workings of witchcraft and poisoning, and indispensable to the King in discovering criminals among his own household who might at any moment have done away with him and his family.

But, clever lawyer that he was, he had not the tact and instinct of adulation that made his rival, Bacon, beat him in the race for honours.

His allusions to Prince Henry's death were deeply resented by the King. If there was anything in these