Of the mode of this discovery, differing accounts are given. According to Carte, Winwood derived the information of Somerset’s guilt, from Archbishop Abbot, who detected it in some papers found in a trunk, which was brought to the Archbishop by a servant of Overbury’s. See Carte’s Hist. Eng. vol. ii. p. 43. Sir Symonds D’Ewes declares that the foul deed was disclosed by Sir Thomas Elwis, Lieutenant of the Tower, to Secretary Winwood, acknowledging and excusing his own connivance in the affair, and laying the instigation of it to the account of Somerset and his wretched wife.—D’Ewes’s MS. Journal in Bishop Goodman’s Life, vol. iv., p. 144. Footnote 102: Published in Somers’s Tracts, vol. ii. Footnote 103: Somerset was even accused of having poisoned Prince Henry; but Coppinger, a former servant of his, who accused him of that crime, was said to be “cracked in his wits.” State Papers, vol. cxxxvii., p. 27. By all these circumstances Villiers wisely profited during his early days of favour; and happy had it been for him had he never forgotten the lesson thus afforded him in the awful tragedy of Somerset’s career; more awful, perhaps, than if the secret sins of the wretched Earl had been visited with a signal retribution from the hand of power. There is something in this miscreant’s forlorn and protracted existence, after all that in life is valuable—honour, peace of mind, influence—were gone, that is more desolate and appalling to the fancy than if the Tower had for ever enclosed him, or the executioner claimed his life as a penalty for his sins. The unpunished murderer walking abroad, shunned by all, is a sort of moral leper; desolate in his freedom, and chastised even by the silence and avoidance of his fellow men. That Villiers took any active part in the measures which ensued, his bitterest foes have not ventured to allege. Young, devoted to pleasure, indifferent, at this time, to gain, ambitious, but not grasping, he enjoyed at this period that general esteem, the absence of which he bitterly felt in after life. Those who hated Somerset turned to Villiers, and found him full of courtesy and of generous impulses. Those who were on the point of offering bribes to Somerset discovering that Villiers had the ear of the King, applied to him, and obtained gratuitously what they sought. The country, as well as the Court, was ringing with complaints of the Lord Chamberlain’s extortions, when the accidental illness and remorse of an apothecary’s boy decided his fate. That individual, employed by his master to administer the dose to Overbury, fell ill at Flushing, and the whole mystery, with all its concomitants, was revealed. “A small breach thus being made, Somerset’s enemies, like the rush of many waters, rise up against him, following the stream.” Thus does Arthur Wilson well express the ruin of one who, for two years, had succeeded in defying curiosity and keeping the secret of his crime unrevealed.