Alastair Bellany. The Politics of Court Scandal: News Culture and the Overbury Afair, 1603-1660. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. xvii + 312 pp. $70.00, cloth, ISBN 978-0-521-78289-0.

Reviewed by David Underdown

Published on H-Albion (May, 2002)

Sex and Violence at the Court of King James capable of doing. But he made the mistake of op‐ Revisionists used to tell us that there wasn't posing Carr's marriage to the glamorous Frances much serious criticism of the government in early Howard, daughter of the Earl of Sufolk, an al‐ seventeenth-century England. That curious idea liance that would cement his ties with the power‐ has become less fashionable recently, but one ful, pro-Spanish, Howard clan. The problem was group of the revisionists' successors continues to that Frances was already married, to the Earl of insist that it's to the inner workings of the royal Essex, and that she took an implacable dislike to Court rather than to Parliament or the "country" the censorious Overbury. So while the proceed‐ that we should turn if we want to understand Stu‐ ings leading to the annulment of her marriage art politics. Alastair Bellany's splendid new book went forward (Essex had to be humiliated by on the Overbury afair and its many public repre‐ proving that he was impotent), Overbury was ma‐ sentations suggests that the Court historians may neuvered into disobeying a royal order to accept a be right--though not, I suspect, in quite the way diplomatic appointment and put in the Tower. that they have intended. There he was poisoned by people employed by Frances, possibly with the knowledge of the Earl Sir Thomas Overbury was the mid-level of Somerset, as Carr had now become. Three courtier whose murder in the Tower in 1613 led months after Overbury's death Carr and Frances to the downfall of James I's favorite, Robert Carr, were married, in perhaps the most lavishly ex‐ when the crime was uncovered two years later. travagant of Jacobean court weddings, celebrated Overbury had been Carr's indispensable assistant in masques and verses by some of the greatest lit‐ in the young man's transformation from hand‐ erary luminaries of the age: Jonson, Campion, some royal bedfellow to apparently serious states‐ Chapman, Donne. man; he read the foreign dispatches for him, drafted the letters, and did much of the hard work In 1615 it all came out, and there ensued a se‐ that his patron was either disinclined to do, or in‐ ries of sensational public trials culminating in H-Net Reviews those of the disgraced Somerset and his Countess. court intrigues which led to Carr's replacement as Several of the lesser participants were duly royal favorite by George Villiers, the future Duke hanged, but as one of them had feared, James I of Buckingham, and this he does with great skill. and his judges made "a net to catch the little fshes He also surveys the mechanisms--the authorized and let the great ones go" (p. 233). The Earl and accounts of trials, the unauthorized narratives in Countess were indeed found guilty of murder, but newsletters and less professional correspondence, were pardoned by the King and allowed to live the scandalous verse libels that circulated so out their lives in secluded disgrace. Scholars have widely in both oral and written form--by which generally accepted their guilt, though in 1993 reports of the afair were transmitted from the David Lindley, in The Trials of Frances Howard, Court to a large and socially diverse audience. The argued that the lady's ofence lay as much in her Overbury scandal became so important because a representation as the stereotypical sexually inde‐ voracious public appetite for news already exist‐ pendent woman so much feared by contempo‐ ed both in London and the provinces. raries as in whatever had been proved against Thomas Cogswell, Richard Cust, and other his‐ her on unassailable evidence. The narrative of torians have taught us a good deal about the cir‐ her crimes, carefully constructed by the Chief Jus‐ culation of political news in Jacobean England, tice, Sir Edward Coke, and the Attorney-General, and Bellany's case-study confrms their fndings. Sir Francis Bacon, certainly contained all the in‐ But even to those familiar with the general con‐ gredients of the most melodramatic Jacobean tours of the "news culture" of the period, the tragedy: poison, sorcery (Frances consulted the amount of discussion generated by the afair may magician Simon Forman on how to make Essex come as something of an eye-opener. Among impotent), the promotion of provocative and un‐ much else Bellany provides the clearest and most feminine styles of clothing, and worst of all suspi‐ intelligible account that we yet have of the "pow‐ cions of Catholicism. The trials brought before the der poison plot" about which Coke kept dropping public a sordid picture of court immorality and dark hints during the trials. disorder. Carefully combing through a wide variety of The afair has attracted plenty of attention sources, he clarifes the paranoid suspicions that from that day to this, but it has generally been the tragically early death of Prince Henry, James's marginalized by political historians, who have Protestant and staunchly anti-Spanish heir, had tended to see it as simply a seventeenth-century been the result of a sinister Catholic conspiracy in version of our own supermarket tabloid sensa‐ which Robert Carr was himself involved; that tionalism. It was, Bellany shows, much more than Overbury knew enough about this for the conspir‐ that. He is perhaps a bit too lenient towards Carr, ators to have to dispose of him; and that their in‐ and towards Frances Howard's great uncle, the tention was to go further and poison James and powerful Earl of Northampton, who undoubtedly his Queen and enable the Catholics to seize power knew more about the murder than would have during the resulting confusion, thus achieving by been good for him if he had not himself conve‐ poison what Guy Fawkes had failed to do by gun‐ niently died in 1614. But the guilt or innocence of powder. Unfortunately for James there later the Somersets and their Howard relatives is not emerged some carefully coded suspicions that he Bellany's main concern. What he is interested in is himself knew something about his son's murder; the deployment of the scandal in political dis‐ on this, Bellany might have made more of Sir An‐ course, and his purpose is to use it to interrogate thony Weldon's story about the King's panic when important aspects of early Stuart political culture. he thought that Somerset might uncover the plot This requires him to explore the complicated

2 H-Net Reviews during his trial. Weldon was writing thirty years Bellany notes, was alleged to have been poisoned later, but he had been in the Court at the time, by Buckingham in a conspiracy in which the and got the story from the Lieutenant of the Tow‐ Duke's Catholic mother played a major role. This er, Sir George More, who was in a good position to aspect of early Stuart history was for too long re‐ know. At all events, the fact was that the popish garded as ridiculous and as having afected only plot was spawned within the Court, not outside it the stupid and credulous. In recent years it has as in 1605, and James's subsequent pardon of become harder to dismiss it in this way; after Bel‐ Somerset made it hard to present the episode as a lany's book it will be impossible to do so. repeat performance of the earlier one in which a In the short-term history of factional court virtuously Protestant King providentially escapes politics, the scandal hastened the downfall of one from being poisoned by evil Catholics. Instead it royal favorite (Carr) and the establishment of an‐ presented that "image of a popishly corrupted other (Villiers). But it did not lead, as for a time in royal court" which eventually played such an im‐ the autumn of 1615 seemed possible, to a major portant role in the undermining of the Stuart shift in James I's policies towards the anti- monarchy (p. 210). Catholic, anti-Spanish stance advocated by the Bellany sometimes piles on more details of Earl of Pembroke and the "patriot" group which court intrigue and foreign policy than the non- had hailed Carr's disgrace. More important was its specialist will fnd easily digestible, but his story long-term contribution to enduring beliefs in is dramatic enough to compensate for this. One James I's tolerance of court corruption, moral dis‐ useful part of his book is its engagement with the order, and popery. now-familiar gender implications of court politics. James's successor cleaned up the immorality, Like Lindley, Bellany shows how conveniently but in other ways Charles I's court presented Frances Howard could be used in libels and other (rightly or wrongly) the same impression of public discussions of the scandal to typify the con‐ popish infuence which he inherited from his fa‐ ventional image of the sexually-emancipated dis‐ ther. The groundwork for this had surely been orderly woman whose independence and moral laid by the strong residue of Jacobean court scan‐ libertinism threatened the basis of the patriarchal dal left in the political memory. Bellany's rich and system. Frances and her confdante Mrs. Turner perceptive analysis of the Overbury story's sur‐ also provided sensational examples of the way in vival in the plays, pamphlets, and libels is thus a which sorcery and witchcraft were continually major contribution to our understanding of the stalking the land, and their promotion of the fa‐ Stuart period. It will also surely be of interest to a mous yellow rufs and other foreign fashions un‐ wider circle of historians studying the relation‐ dermined the submissive modesty expected of ship between high politics and public opinion. Let virtuous English ladies. Bellany rightly connects us hope that Cambridge will soon bring out a pa‐ the afair with the debate over gender roles that perback edition that ordinary readers can aford. became so acrimonious a few years later, a debate which was indeed partly triggered by the Over‐ bury afair, in the misogynist tirades of such au‐ thors as Thomas Tuke and Joseph Swetnam. The associations between unruly women, popery, poi‐ son, and witchcraft lived on in Protesant paranoia for years to come, as the work of Frances Dolan (regrettably absent from the book's bibliography) has also recently reminded us. James himself, as

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Citation: David Underdown. Review of Bellany, Alastair. The Politics of Court Scandal: News Culture and the Overbury Afair, 1603-1660. H-Albion, H-Net Reviews. May, 2002.

URL: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=6231

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