Herein perhaps he overshot the mark of wisdom, forgetting what an old writer has told us, that "the reason that many men want their desires is because their desires want reason."

Overbury was indeed fast swimming out into waters whose depths and currents he knew naught about. It was not likely that the great ones of the earth should allow him a monopoly of the patronage and power of the King's favourite without some share of the plunder. Nor was it probable that the King himself would be governed by " Carr's tutor" when his "little beagle pointed out to him the prick of the hare and the way puss was running. Overbury had many enemies at Court, and in the wantonness of his ambition made light of them and boasted, as a young man will do, of the certainty of his own future.

But those who were playing to checkmate him moved their pieces as old players of the game do, silently, without vaunt or comment. The Earl of Northampton, who always met him with compliment and soothed his vanity with discourse on his literary achievement and respectful questions of his opinion of foreign affairs, had weighed the fellow up and marked him for destruction. if he was fool enough to become troublesome.

For the Earl, though he cultivated the Prince as a plant of the future, knew that for the present the fruits must be gathered at Whitehall, where the gardener of the day was Sir Robert Carr. It suited him for the moment that the young Countess, who as married woman had the freedom of both Courts, should keep the Prince and Carr in her toils. The danger to herself was her affair, and he thought her mother's daughter should be heartless and selfish enough to look after her own safety.

Had Overbury been a man of clear vision he would have seen in Henry Howard a clever old spider of the State, and have known himself to be a fool fly, buzzing egregiously and heading for the cobweb. But the

wise youth tolerated the old Earl of Northampton with no gladness, and spoke of him openly as a tedious and forgotten folio of old-fashioned humanity whose only station was the shelf. The conceit of the fellow was no excuse for his extermination, but in those days it was a standing invitation to destruction.

Chapter VI: Henry Howard

H

ENRY HOWARD, son of the Earl of Surrey, the unhappy poet who sang the praises of the fair Geraldine, and grandson of the Duke of Norfolk, came into his kingdom as soon as James arrived at Theobalds from the north. He was then a man of sixty-four, and one that had known poverty and obscurity and losses. But James remembered his kindness to his martyred mother, and, as all Howards seem born to greatness, this Henry, at the last, became a Privy Councillor, the Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports, Lord Privy Seal, and Earl of Northampton, and was honoured with the Garter and made High Steward of the University of Oxford and Chancellor of Cambridge.

Flattery and dissimulation were the Earl's weapons, "a dangerous intelligencing man, a subtle Papist inwardly, who lieth in wait," as Bacon's mother warned her pushing son, knowing that he would be readily drawn into snares baited with honeyed words and promises of favour. He had graduated in the school of adversity. In his youth, when his family was in disgrace, and dinners ill to compass, he had been a constant saunterer in Paul's with many another place-hunter. When his companions made their way to the ordinaries and his fellow Paul-walkers deserted the Church, he would tighten his belt and make for the booksellers' stalls in the churchyard and turn over the folios and gossip with their sellers.

He was a well-read man, and wrote many essays and treatises himself, and had a pretty taste in the arts, especially architecture, and was reckoned a witty talker. These traits, combined with his skill in outward courtesies

and nimbleness in flattery, made him a favourite with James, despite the rumours of his attachment to the old religion.

And at the time of Carr's advancement he had just completed the building of Northampton House, which many will remember as Northumberland House, ere it was pulled down to make room for the modern avenue. If walls have ears, the bricks of that old building could have told us strange tales of goings and comings, plots and counter-plots, the mysteries of which still puzzle wise Dryasdust and his competitors in their historical

contests.

For James and Anna, his Queen, the good young Prince Henry, the gallant Somerset and his friend Overbury, the learned Dr. Mayerne, and many another of the persons of this drama, must have met and talked and banqueted at Northampton House.

Through the great rooms of the building flitted the pretty Frances, that merry girl but yet a child, fascinating all the great ones of the earth with her beauty and swaying them Circe-like to her will. And the darkhearted old scholar, as he laughed carelessly at her wayward antics and noted the pleasure of the King and Queen in her pretty ways, was hugging his ambitions and wondering to himself to what uses he should put her in his schemes of further greatness. I make no doubt that the plots against Overbury were hatched in that great pleasure-house that Henry Howard built in the days of his power and glory. Early in the century he had purchased a fair site in the village of Charing which reached from the Strand to the bank of the river. When the King came to the throne he was a man of wealth. And now he called together Bernard Jansen and Gerard Christmas and Moses Glover and other cunning craftsmen to build him a sumptuous palace of brick, the front of which should be in the highway, and wings forming a quadrangle were planned to stretch down to the river, which was walled, and here he had his jetty

and private landing-bridge. It was a square, heavy, dull building with lofty towers at the four angles of the site and three stories high. When you entered there was a wide hall; two noble staircases carried you to the first pillared corridor, and the walls were covered with pictures by the old masters and many family portraits.

But the room that the old man used for himself and his intimates was a library, well stocked with learned books, situated at the end of the eastern corridor with a large window having seats within looking out across the river on to the Surrey fields.

Howard was grieved to note that as Carr rose in the King's favour he neglected his house, after he found him so deep in the ship-building schemes which the Prince upheld and the King had no use for. As we have seen, he set his mind on the capture of Carr and determined to make use of his niece to bring the favourite to his heel without thought of her happiness or safety. Not desiring to be seen in the origin of the affair, he arranged with a good friend of his, named Copinger, to make a great feast for Carr, to whom he was well known, to which Lady Suffolk and her daughter were invited; but the Earl did not go himself, and the girl being seated near to Carr, that friendship was made between them which ended so tragically.

In Court circles new alliances, or rumours of alliances, are soon known, and when the Prince heard of Carr's advancement as a servant of his beloved Frances he was very wroth, and hastened to Northampton House to hear from her own lips that truths were lies. But she, with woman's wit and mastery, refused to be put on her defence, and the Earl laughing away the thing as naught and making some slighting jests about the favourite, the Prince's mind was, for the moment, set at rest.

But whatever may have been the state of the girl's heart when first flattered by Henry's princely advances, the arrow of Cupid had now struck home and Robin was indeed all her love. She had succumbed to his