ABSTRACT
In the last months of the year 1615, all Londoners spoke about one and only one topic: the greatest scandal of the reign of King James I. Two years earlier, the King’s favourite, Robert Carr, Earl of Somerset, had wed the beautiful Lady Frances Howard, recently divorced from the Earl of Essex, on the grounds of an unconsummated marriage. The King allegedly used his influence to impose a court ruling that many deemed groundless. In September 1615 the true scandal burst out: Carr’s friend, Sir Thomas Overbury, who had been imprisoned in the Tower of London and died there before the end of the procedure, was thought to have been poisoned by Lady Frances’s henchmen. This triggered a series of trials that fully occupied the public opinion until May 1616.
