Letter from Mr. Chamberlain to Sir O. Carleton; March 6, 1616. State Papers. Also given in the “Grand Oyer of Poisoning,” by Andrew Amos, Esq.
To this gloomy apartment, the wretched countess was consigned; her trial was fixed for the fifteenth of May. But when that day drew near, when the stage in the middle of Westminster Hall was completed, the scaffolding around it finished, and when seats had been purchased at the rate of four or five pieces each—that being an ordinary price—and when even a lawyer and his wife, as Mr. Chamberlain, the writer of the letter from whom these details are collected, states, agreed to give two pounds for himself and his wife for ten days, and fifty pounds was given for a corner that “would scarcely contain a dozen,” the eager public was disappointed. The trial was put off till the twenty-second of the same month.[115]
See State Paper Office. Domestic, 1616. This letter is printed in Nichols’s Progresses.
Lady Somerset’s sudden illness was assigned as the cause of this delay. Upon warning being given her that her trial was to come on on Wednesday, “she fell to casting and scouring, and so continued the next day very sick,” her illness being ascribed partly to trepidation, partly to the suspicion of her having taken poison. But she recovered to make, as the same eye-witness remarks, shorter work of it, by confessing the indictment; and “to win pity by her sober demeanour,” “more curious and confident than was fit for a lady in such distress; and yet she shed, or made shew of, some tears divers times.” Contrary to the usual practice in criminal trials, no invectives were urged against her, it being the King’s pleasure that no “odious nor uncivil speeches” should be given. The general opinion was, that in spite of her manifest guilt, this miserable culprit would not suffer the penalty of the law. It must have been a singular sight to have beheld the Earl of Essex, her former husband, a spectator among the titled crowd at the arraignment; the first day, privately—the second “full in Somerset’s face.”
Lady Somerset was sentenced “to be hanged by the neck till she was stark dead.” When the fatal cap was assumed, and the decree uttered, she bore herself with more calmness than her husband; who, upon sentence of death being passed upon him, was so appalled that, when asked what he should say to avert that decree, he would “stand still upon his own innocence,” and could hardly be brought to refer himself to the King’s mercy. He was afterwards induced to rest upon that point; to write to the King, entreating that the judgment of “hanging should be changed to that of heading;” “and that his daughter might have such lands as the King did not resume.”[116]