That divinely appointed monarch King James the Sixth of Scotland and
First of England had an eye for manly beauty. Though he could contrive
the direst of cruelties to be committed out of his sight, the actual
spectacle of physical suffering in the human made him squeamish. Add
the two facts of the King's nature together and it may be understood
how Robert Carr, in falling from his horse that September day in the
tilt-yard of Whitehall, fell straight into his Majesty's favour. King
James himself gave orders for the disposition of the sufferer, found
lodgings for him, sent his own surgeon, and was constant in his visits
to the convalescent. Thereafter the rise of Robert Carr was meteoric.
Knighted, he became Viscount Rochester, a member of the Privy Council,
then Earl of Somerset, Knight of the Garter, all in a very few years. It
was in 1607 that he fell from his horse, under the King's nose. In 1613
he was at the height of his power in England.
Return we for a moment, however, to that day in the Whitehall tilt-yard.
It is related that one woman whose life and fate were to be bound with
Carr's was in the ladies' gallery. It is very probable that a second
woman, whose association with the first did much to seal Carr's doom,
was also a spectator. If Frances Howard, as we read, showed distress
over the painful mishap to the handsome Scots youth it is almost certain
that Anne Turner, with the quick eye she had for male comeliness and
her less need for Court-bred restraint, would exhibit a sympathetic
volubility.
Frances Howard was the daughter of that famous Elizabethan seaman Thomas
Howard, Earl of Suffolk. On that day in September she would be just over
fifteen years of age. It is said that she was singularly lovely. At that
early age she was already a wife, victim of a political marriage which,
in the exercise of the ponderous cunning he called kingcraft, King James
had been at some pains to arrange. At the age of thirteen Frances had
been married to Robert Devereux, third Earl of Essex, then but a year
older than herself. The young couple had been parted at the altar, the
groom being sent travelling to complete his growth and education, and
Frances being returned to her mother and the semi-seclusion of the
Suffolk mansion at Audley End.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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