ABSTRACT
After their marriage in 1606 Frances Howard and Robert Devereux were separated. She returned to her family, he continued his education, which was completed by the increasingly obligatory tour abroad between 1607 and early 1609. The marriage quickly deteriorated after Essex’s return to claim his bride, and early in 1613 moves were set on foot for its annulment. There are very few documented facts concerning Frances’s conduct during these intervening years. They can briefly be summarised.
On 2 February 1609 she danced in Jonson’s The Masque of Queens.
On 5 June 1610 she performed in Daniel’s masque Tethys Festival, the Queen’s celebration of Prince Henry’s installation as Prince of Wales, in the role of ‘the nymph of Lea’.
Sometime before September 1611 she wrote two letters, one to her confidante Mrs Anne Turner, the other to the conjuror Simon Forman pleading with them to help her in her attempts to win a lord (assumed to be Robert Carr) to her love, and inhibit the desires of her husband. (These letters became public in 1615 during the trials for the Overbury murder.)
In 1612 John Chamberlain reported that, at the Twelfth Night masque, Lwe Restored, Frances and her younger sister discomfited the gendemen masquers by refusing to dance with them in the revels. 1
The divorce hearings charted the various places at which Frances Howard and Essex stayed during their life together.
During the Overbury trials Weston and Franklin alleged that there had been a number of meetings between Frances Howard and Robert Carr at various places during the year or so before the divorce hearings.
Three items of less direct testimony survive. On 25 July 1610 Samuel Calvert wrote to William Trumbull, suggesting that the Earl of Essex had cause to look to his lady ‘for they say plots have been laid by [her] to poison him’. 2 In 1612 Philip, Earl of Montgomery wrote to the lords of the Privy Council to deny that he had sought to obtain some unspecified favour from the Countess of Essex which might impugn her virtue. 3 In 1613 the divorce case was halted for a while as Mary Woods accused Frances Howard of having approached her for a powder to poison her husband.
These are the only direct and contemporaneous testimonies to her actions between her marriage and the beginning of the annulment proceedings. But she has been charged with much more. It has been suggested:that she had an affair with Prince Henry;
that she was generally promiscuous;
that her relationship with Robert Carr was consummated before the divorce was secured.
All historians who have attempted to narrate the course of events leading up to the divorce and the Overbury murder have relied heavily upon the accounts published later in the seventeenth century by Arthur Wilson, Anthony Weldon, Godfrey Goodman, William Sanderson, Francis Osborne and others. It is almost entirely from them that the mud is added to the few pieces of straw that constitute documented fact. Beatrice White appositely comments on these ‘histories’:So much of the intimate history of James’s reign has been distorted by the scandalmongering of partisan writers of the Commonwealth and Restoration that it is difficult to separate truth from fiction. An originally hazardous remark is repeated so often and with such a ring of conviction that it gains at last the credit of authority. 4
But all the caution in the world cannot inhibit narrators of Frances Howard’s history from relishing the scandalous details that these writers offer, so that no account is above slipping in comments from them as if they were attested fact.