Sir Thomas Overbury was much too cool-minded, too intelligent, to indulge in threats unless he was certain of the grounds, and solid upon them, upon which he made those threats. He had too great a knowledge of affairs not to know that the commission would be a packed one, too great an acquaintance with the strategy of James to believe that his lonely evidence, unless of bombshell nature, would have a chance of carrying weight in a court of his Majesty's picking. And, then, he was of too big a mind to put forward evidence which would have no effect but that of affording gossip for the scandal-mongers, and the giving of which would make him appear to be actuated by petty spite. He had too great a sense of his own dignity to give himself anything but an heroic role. Samson he might play, pulling the pillars of the temple together to involve his enemies, with himself, in magnificent and dramatic ruin. But Iachimo--no. In the welter of evidence conflicting with apparent fact which was given before the commission and in the trials of the Great Oyer, in the mass of writing both contemporary and of later days round the Overbury mystery, it is hard indeed to land upon the truth. Feasible solution is to be come upon only by accepting a not too pretty story which is retailed by Antony Weldon. He says that the girl whom the jury of matrons declared to be virgo intacta was so heavily veiled as to be unidentifiable through the whole proceedings, and that she was not Lady Essex at all, but the youthful daughter of Sir Thomas Monson. Mrs Turner, we do know, was very much a favourite with the ladies of Sir Thomas Monson's family. Gossip Weldon has a funny, if lewd, story to tell of high jinks indulged in by the Monson women and Mrs Turner in which Symon, Monson's servant, played an odd part. This Symon was also employed by Mrs Turner to carry food to Overbury in the Tower. If the substitution story has any truth in it it might well have been a Monson girl who played the part of the Countess. But, of course, a Monson girl may have been chosen by the inventors to give verisimilitude to the substitution story, simply because the family was friendly with Turner, and the tale of the lewd high jinks with Symon added to make it seem more likely that old Lady Monson would lend herself to such a plot.