The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
Meet the Jacobean Thelma and Louise
In 1615, were Anne Turner and Frances Howard guilty of murder, or simply of daring to be different?
In 1615, a doctor’s widow and a countess were arrested for the murder of the courtier Sir Thomas Overbury. Allegations of witchcraft, adultery, poisoning, treason and corruption at the highest level sparked the greatest scandal of the Jacobean era. Their trials proved better drama than anything at The Globe. “Here is now such hurrying to Westminster Hall to see the great lady arraigned as it distracts everybody’s mind from anything else,” wrote Sir Charles
Montagu, who watched the countess’s trial from a specially erected tiered scaffold. The best seats cost a ruinous £10 for two. The presiding judge, Lord Coke, pronounced their crime “the most heinous and hateful offence that hath happened in this our times” and declared the doctor’s widow (and the countess by association) to be a “whore, a bawd, a sorcerer, a witch, a papist, a felon and a murderer”.
That they could poison a courtier out of lust, vanity and spite fitted 17th-century ideas of the innate sinfulness of women. As Lawrence Hyde, prosecutor at the countess’s trial stated, the crime was the result “of implacable malice, being the malice of a woman”.
More surprising is that almost all accounts of the murder since, by historians or novelists, have accepted the women’s guilt – even though their trials would be considered a gross miscarriage of justice today. Most have relied on chronicles published several decades after the arrests, by men highly partisan to crown or commonwealth, who scored political points by adding gossip and hearsay to untrustworthy prosecutions. So, who were this Thelma and Louise of the 17th century?
There are few indisputable facts about either of them. Anne Turner, 39 at the time of her arrest, was the widow of a debt-ridden court doctor, mother of six, lover of a knight in the Prince of Wales’s court and credited with inventing a saffroncoloured
starch adopted in the highest echelons at court. Her friend, Frances Howard, Countess of Essex (called Frankie or Frank by her family), was the beautiful daughter of Thomas Howard, Earl of Suffolk and great-niece of Henry Howard, Earl of Northampton, two of James I’s closest advisers.
The women’s alleged crime was that they had poisoned Overbury to prevent him ruining Frankie’s efforts to annul her first marriage in order to marry instead Overbury’s best friend and patron, Robert Carr. Overbury was in the Tower at the time of his death, September 1613, incarcerated for refusing King James I’s offer to be ambassador to the Russian court. Foul play was not at the time suspected, for he started his sentence already ill. Frankie’s annulment was granted, and she and Carr were married at Christmas, Anne and her children moving into their household. Yet within two years, they were arrested.
Researching my novel, A Net for Small Fishes, what most interested me was reclaiming the complexity of the women’s experience. To do that, I had to question much of the standard tale and attempt to rebuild their world, to delineate the horizons of possibility and desire that Frankie and Anne inhabited.
Take the painting of Frances Howard by William Larkin, hanging in the National Portrait Gallery – how should we read it? Highly reputable contemporary historians have written of the sitter’s “unabashed sexuality and menacing gaze”, her “coldly appraising stare” and that “she was no doubt aware of the erotic contrast between her imprisoning lace cartwheel ruff” and her almost naked breasts. With a little digging, an entirely different story comes to the fore.
Frankie was just 13 or 15 (depending which source you favour) when she was married off to the 14-yearold Earl of Essex. He was immediately sent on a European tour and returned three years later, suffering from pox and unable to consummate the union. Once old enough to know her own mind, Frankie fell in love with Carr, the King’s favourite. Through his closeness to the monarch, he was the “primum mobile” (prime mover) around whom the court circled. “We are almost worn out in our endeavours to keep pace with this fellow in duty and labour to gain favour, but all in vain,” wrote Frankie’s father.
It is not known when and how Anne met Frankie, but for me the clue is around the countess’s neck.
Anne is credited with introducing the saffron-coloured ruffs that replaced the vogue for “gooseturd” (a greenish tint) and blue in the 1610s, and remained the height of fashion until 1625. The colour was a bold and complex fashion statement that reeked not of eroticism, but of rebellion.
Saffron was the colour of mantles worn by the Catholic Irish, the dye coming from Spain, England’s traditional enemy. For elite English women, a saffron ruff smacked provocatively of poverty because the mantles were worn by Irish of all classes (the colour often intensified by long soaking in urine, which helped keep down lice and fleas, for those with few changes of clothes) and also of masculinity, for it was worn by men as well as women. The Dean of Westminster, on the King’s orders, banned women from his pews who wore “masculine” fashions, including saffron ruffs. (Perhaps because his own Queen sported them, the King then had to explain to the Dean that “his meaning was not for yellow ruffs, but for other manlike and unseemly apparel”.)
Anne used her cleverness at “fashioning” to keep her children out of the gutter, and herself at court. Unlike Frankie, she clung to the edges of gentility. Her husband died in 1610, in debt, forcing a move from respectable Fetter Lane to a ramshackle building in Paternoster Row, close to the prostitutes on Love Lane and debtors’ prisons on Wood Street, Bread Street and Poultry. London was the thirdlargest city in Europe. Filthy, overcrowded alleys and tenements, haunted by starvation and plague, pressed close to inconceivable wealth.
Courtiers isolated themselves from the lower orders by creating a world of extravagance that very few could afford to join. We know that the clothes Frankie wears in the portrait cost 10 times what her maid earned in a year. The costumes worn for her wedding masque came to £118 9s, while a full-length portrait of the Countess of Rutland, by a first-rate European painter, only cost £20 – about the same as her stockings and shoes. Clothes were a way of catching the King’s eye; Anne’s talents were thus much in demand among courtiers scrabbling for lucrative estates and commercial opportunities, or to press him for that rarest gift – a divorce.
Frances was just 13 when she was married off to the 14-year-old Earl of Essex
Had Frankie had a discreet affair, as so many did, we would not have heard of her. But she wanted something more honest and, at that time, almost unthinkable. “I hear a speech, and it is written also, of their annulling the marriage between the earl of Essex and his lady. God will punish, I fear me, and that sharply, our land for these crying sins,” wrote Sir John Throckmorton, one of many voices raised against it. Divorce was so “wilful” an act that it showed Frankie capable of anything, certainly of committing adultery with Carr, and as Coke then said at the trial of one of her “accomplices”: “adultery did often produce murder”.
The friendship between Anne and Frankie was of mutual benefit and comfort, and ultimately of mutual daring and destruction. A novelist must attempt to capture complexity, to tease out the lived experience, remembering that “a birth certificate is not a birth”, as Hilary Mantel puts it. An interpretation that feels truthful to the known facts and to human behaviour, sifting through the fragmentary and biased historical record, is that Frankie and Anne were convicted and demonised less for a possible murder than because they dared to do something other than what was expected of them. As Oscar Wilde said: “The one duty we owe to history is to rewrite it.”
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PUDDIN’ RACE
And finally, can you match up these Rabbie Burns quotations?
Some hae meat and canna eat, /And some wad eat that want it,
But Mousie, thou are no thy-lane, /In proving foresight may be vain:
We twa hae paidl’d in the burn, /Frae morning sun till dine;
But pleasures are like poppies spread, /You seize the flower, it’s bloom is shed;
Farewell to the Highlands, farewell to the North, /The birth-place of Valour, the country of Worth
A
C
But seas between us braid hae roar’d /Sin’ auld lang syne.
Or like the snow falls in the river, /A moment white – then melts for ever.
Wherever I wander, wherever I rove, /The hills of the Highlands for ever I love.
The best laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men, /Gang aft agley.