H4-126 RSM I English-C. Wahr PREFACE T is certainly more than half a since I first heard the Overbury case discussed. I was at a London school and lived at home. I had the privilege, therefore, of dining at the Victorian hour of six at my father's table before he retired to his library and his briefs, when it was my lot to toil up long flights of London stairs to a little study of my own and home work as it was called. Many notable lawyers, juniors to Serjeant Parry in cases of importance, gladly came home with him from the Temple to dinner and consultation. I fancy they came the more willingly that at the dinner-table briefs and cases of the day were never mentioned, though the talk often turned on letters, plays, and history, in which my father was well read. As I remember, William Willis was with us that night. He was afterwards my brother judge-in those days a rising junior and eager politician, but, more to the purpose of the hour, a man steeped in Tudor writings and learned in the history of the Puritans. The talk turned on a recent edition of Overbury's Vision-I have the book still-and this led to criticism of Overbury's poem, "A Wife," and the "Characters," and thence, I suppose, to the story of his life. I remember no details of the literary talk, for it was not until the story of the murder came on the carpet that I began to listen with open ears and mouth. It seemed a fascinating story, and evidently there were two sides to it at least, as indeed there must be to make the balance of a well-told tale. For my father contended strongly in favour of the innocence of Somerset, and Willis firmly stood out for his guilt. My father, as I suspect to tease Willis, made fun of the great Coke, which shocked the Protestant in his learned junior and led to further controversy. Both joined voices, as I seem to remember, in condemnation of Francis Bacon's conduct of the case, which they agreed sinned against the sacred canons of advocacy. Returning to the facts of the Overbury Mystery, Frances Howard's name came into the talk, by which the two sides of the story were extended to meet a third, and, though I knew nothing of such things in those days, we were now on the edge of an eternal triangle. But at this moment my mother rose from the table and, looking across at me, said, "Teddy, it is time you went up to your home lessons." I opened the door for my mother and closed it after us with a pang of regret. It seemed hard to relinquish a romance of irregular lives for the squalid reality of still more irregular verbs. Nevertheless, I had made up my mind that the story should be "continued in our next." On the excuse that there were dictionaries and history books in my father's library which I might want to consult, and a fire ready on a winter afternoon when I returned from school, I had the run of the room before the dinner hour. This was the best time of the day. Not that I wasted these precious hours, I am glad to say, on scholastic gymnastics, since books of plays, romance, and biography seemed so much more to my purpose. On an upper shelf in the middle of a large bookcaseyou reached it by a three-step ladder-were six delightful volumes of trials. My father set great store by them and recommended the historical ones to my attention. We did not know then, I think, that they were collected by George Borrow. I read his narrative of the Overbury case without delay. I may have looked into the State Trials at the same time, but these reports were too technical for my unfledged taste. Borrow's dramas of the law were as vivid as Robinson Crusoe. From the first day that I read of the mystery of Overbury's death I recognised that here was a first-rate murder story full of strange and wicked plots, with the romance of a beautiful woman as the base of it. It was at a much later date that I returned to this fascinating story and began to collect materials for an edition of the trials. I found, as the school books say, that "historians differ," and I began to learn that a satisfactory history of the Overbury affair was pretty nigh impossible. For the story of Overbury is like the course of "a ship that passeth over the waves of the water, which when it is gone by, the trace thereof cannot be found, neither the pathway of the keel in the waves." In the State Trials themselves you seem to be on firm ground, but even here when you go to original records you discover that the reporters have been edited and the depositions of the witnesses tampered with. No two historians agree on their facts or on the interpretation thereof. The dramatis persona are gods or swine according to the political bias of their biographers. The learned Spedding and the faithful Gardiner are true historians. Each paints the same figure in ivory black or Chinese white according to the taste and fancy of the artist. Both pour contempt on the learned Amos, the patient lawyer, who ploughed and harrowed and sowed in these Tudor fields of mystery, yet both reap such armfuls of his harvest that they might-had they not been true scholars-have differed from his conclusions with more grateful courtesy. That Spedding's splendid hero, Francis Bacon, may remain splendid and something of a hero, the man of history has to elude the sad truth of the AttorneyGeneral's advocacy against Somerset, as he had, in an earlier volume, glossed over his hero's faithless conduct towards Essex. In much the same fashion the grand old Gardiner cannot even think evil of his beloved James I, and is inclined to bestow upon him the white flower of a blameless life, whilst Professor Amos regards him as a potential murderer, and Dr. William Harris, with Nonconformist energy and bias, pictures him as a vicious poltroon. The truth seems to be that historians often fail to get the atmosphere of the period they work in. Dryasdust, groping painfully among State papers, not unnaturally comes to the conclusion that what he has discovered with such difficulty must be real gold. He honestly believes that a minute, or draft, or treaty is more likely to represent facts than a statement in a letter, of one who knew, to a friend to whom he wished to send truthful news. But who with modern experience would place the historical value of a minute or draft of a department against the first-hand statement of a man who was an actor in the business? No one but an historian. Carlyle, we know, is not to-day's fashion, but he was right when he turned from the carefully drafted and craftily edited State papers of the seventeenth century to the news letters of the time, in search of truth. The State paper is, too often, dead lumber that has never lived. The letter from friend to friend is at least a human document. Of such letters Carlyle spoke hopefully. "Here," he says, "is an irregular row of beacon-fires, once all luminous as suns; and with certain inextinguishable erubescence still in the abysses of the deep, dead Night. Let us look here. In shadowy outlines, in dimmer and dimmer crowding forms, the very figure of the old dead Time itself may perhaps be faintly discernible here!" Truly you get real glimpses of the truths of things in news letters, and even in what are called the scandal chronicles of the time. What Mr. Pory writes to Sir R. Cotton, what Mr. Chamberlaine has to say about it all to Sir Ralph Winwood at the Hague, what Mr. Trumball, our resident in Brussels, learns of the affair, |