To this end he ordered that she should be hanged in that garb she had made
so fashionable. This was duly done, while as a further condemnation of the
fashion to which the judge had taken exception the hangman wore yellow
bands and cuffs.
It is said that the fashion of wearing yellow starched linen died with
her.
After the execution of Mrs. Turner and Weston came the trial of Franklyn,
who confessed that poison had not been the cause of Overbury's death.
Weldon, who in 1755, published a history of the Kings of England describes
how Franklyn and Weston "came into Overbury's chamber and found him in
infinite torment with the contention between the state of nature and
working of the poison, and it had been very like that nature had got the
better in that contention ... but they, fearing it might come to light by
the judgment of physicians that foul play had been offered him, consented
to stifle him with bed-clothes, which accordingly was performed. And so
ended his miserable life, with the assurance of the conspirators that he
died of poison, none thinking otherwise but these two murtherers."
The account given by Weldon of the manner in which the Lord Chief Justice
received this confession is well worth quoting: "And now poor Mrs. Turner,
Weston and Franklyn began the tragedy. Mrs. Turner's day of mourning being
better than her life, for she died very penitently and showed much modesty
in her last act. After that died Weston, and then was Franklyn arraigned,
who confessed that Overbury was smothered to death not poisoned to death,
though he had poison given him.
"Here was Coke glad to cast about to bring both ends together, Mrs. Turner
and Weston being already hanged for killing Overbury by poison, but he
being the very quintessence of the law presently informed the jury that if
a man be done to death with pistol, poinard, sword, halter, poison, etc.,
so he be done to death, the indictment holds good, if but indicted for one
of those ways; but the good lawyers of those times were not of that
opinion, but did believe that Mrs. Turner was directly murthered by Lord
Coke's law as Overbury was without any law."
After the trial and execution of the minor prisoners came the trial of the
Countess of Somerset, the instigator of the crime, before the House of
Peers.
The Clerk of the Crown asked her, "Frances Countess of Somerset, art thou
guilty of the felony and murder, or not guilty?"
And she, making obeisance to the Lord High Steward, answered "Guilty," in
a low timid voice.
The Attorney-General, Sir Francis Bacon, then praised King James in a
fulsome manner, and held out hopes of pardon to the prisoner. The Lord
Chief Justice Coke also talked in servile terms of the king, whose
instructions for the investigation of the murder, he declared, "deserved
to be written in a sunbeam."
The Clerk of the Crown now asked the Countess "if she had any cause to
allege why sentence of death should not be passed upon her."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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