The Trials of Frances Howard

Fact and Fiction at the Court of King James

David Lindley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9781135082239
• Subtopic: Historiography
• Index: History

David Lindley re-examines the murder trials of Frances Howard and the historical representations of her as `wife, a witch, a murderess and a whore', challenging the assumptions that have constructed her as a model of female villainy.

Chapter 1
The first trial: An arranged marriage

On 5 January 1606 Frances Howard was married to Robert Devereux, third Earl of Essex. This wedding is the starting point for the study of Frances Howard in two respects: firstly, at a narrative level, it initiated the series of events that was to lead to her trial and condemnation for the murder of Thomas Overbury a decade later; and secondly, the way it was arranged, and the terms within which it was celebrated, direct attention to many more general issues about the ideology of marriage, the place of women and the nature of court politics in early modern England. These cultural assumptions were significantly to determine the representation of Frances Howard’s later career, and analysis of them is therefore also vital preparation for this book’s discussion.

To modern eyes this marriage would seem doubly blighted. Not only was it an arranged marriage, engineered for political and dynastic purposes, but also the couple themselves were both very young at the time of the ceremony.¹ In this respect Frances Howard’s marriage was typical of her family. Her father, Thomas Howard, Earl of Suffolk, had himself obeyed the injunction of his father, the fourth Duke of Norfolk, who advised the eleven-year-old boy in 1572 to take Mary Dacre as his wife. When she died in 1578 she was still only fifteen.² Suffolk reiterated the pattern in arranging the destinies of his own children. At the same time as Frances’s marriage to Robert Devereux was planned, her younger sister was affianced to William Cecil, Lord Cranborne, the son of the Earl of Salisbury (the marriage was finally concluded in 1608). In 1606 Suffolk also contracted his eldest son Theophilus to the daughter of the Earl of Dunbar when she was but six years old:

with the full assent and good-liking of Theophilus Lord Walden, and also with the full assent and good-liking of Lady Elizabeth Hume that a marriage should heareafter in good time be solemnized between them, if it should please God, within three months after the said Lady Elizabeth should accomplish the age of twelve years.³

One might wonder how far a girl of six might be able to assent to a future marriage, but the crucial phrase is the last. Children were assumed competent in law to give their own consent to marriage once the woman reached twelve, the man fourteen. ‘If a formal engagement was entered into earlier, it could be broken by either party at the age of consent’ as Lawrence Stone points out.⁴ The parents obviously wanted to leave as little room as possible for the youngsters to disavow their politically advantageous match. (Ironically, of course, the fact that Frances and Robert were – just – above the age of consent at the time of their wedding had important consequences when its annulment came to trial seven years later.) But it was not just in prosecuting such youthful unions that Suffolk made earnest attempts to secure advantageous alliances. At Christmas 1605 Frances Howard’s elder sister Elizabeth had been married to William, Lord Knollys only a few months after his first wife died. The bride was about eighteen, her husband fifty-eight. Suffolk, it seems, was quite prepared to ignore the other standard objection to forced marriages – the comic stereotype of January and May.⁵

In seeking to make ‘good’ marriages for his family Suffolk was endeavouring to do no more nor less than most parents in the upper levels of his society. Arranged marriages, with varying degrees of complacence on the part of the couples involved, were commonplace. In prosecuting the matches so young, however, Suffolk was flying somewhat against the practices of his age. If it was ever thought that the projected marriage of the fourteen-year-old Juliet in Shakespeare’s play was typical of the period, recent researches have established conclusively that the average age at first marriage was surprisingly late. In most of English society couples characteristically married in their mid- to late twenties.⁶ Compared with the lower orders, the pressures of dynastic ambition were greater upon the upper classes, while there was less need for them to wait until financial competence on the part of those wishing to be married was assured. But even here the average age crept up between the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Lawrence Stone suggests that ‘by the early seventeenth century very young aristocratic marriages were becoming rare’.⁷ Though there were precedents for Suffolk’s eagerness to marry his children young, he was behaving somewhat unusually.

In all such marriages children, boys and girls alike, were pawns in parental power-games. It is no coincidence that Suffolk embarked upon a flurry of matrimonial arrangements in the early years of James’s reign. The arrival of the new king had signalled a restoration of the Howard family to positions of power and influence, and the need to consolidate his rising political fortunes would have seemed particularly pressing. In pursuit of such ambition the marriage of Frances Howard to the Earl of Essex must have seemed ideal. Robert Devereux was the son of the second Earl of Essex, also named Robert, the last great favourite of Queen Elizabeth. In February 1601, thwarted, as he saw it, by the influence of the Cecil faction at court, smarting from his failures in Ireland and his repudiation by the Queen, the second Earl had attempted rebellion, riding into London and hoping to raise the citizens against the queen’s ‘evil advisers’. The rising, described by Lawrence Stone as ‘that absurd fiasco of gang-warfare and semi-rebellion’,⁸ but rather more richly analysed by Mervyn James as the ‘last honour revolt’, having its roots in an older (and increasingly threatened) concept of aristocratic honour and privilege,⁹ had proved a spectacular flop. Despite the admiration in which the people undoubtedly held the Earl of Essex, neither they, nor many of the aristocracy in other respects allied to him, were prepared to put their ties to the Earl above their duty to the Queen. They knew a crack-brained plot when they saw one. The Earl was arrested, tried and executed along with some few of his followers. Frances’s father was closely involved in his arrest, but the chief instrument in Essex’s destruction was held to be Robert Cecil.

After James’s accession in 1603, Robert Cecil and the Howard family seemed decisively to have outmanoeuvred the former associates of the Earl of Essex in the race for court appointments. As Neil Cuddy observes: ‘Although James sweetened some survivors of the defeated Essex faction with considerable patronage, he thereafter gave them neither office nor influence.’1¹⁰ The old ‘Essexians’, however, remained an identifiable grouping, and their rivalry with the Howards will be a constant feature of this narrative. The King was keen to try to ameliorate this friction, for he had been in correspondence with the second Earl of Essex before he began dealings with Cecil, and immediately upon his assumption of the throne had met Robert, taken him in his arms and kissed him, ‘loudly declaring him the son of the most noble knight that the English had ever begotten’.¹¹ For Suffolk, therefore, a marriage of his daughter to Essex’s son would seem appealing, both gratifying the King and claiming the Earl for his family’s interest. Arthur Wilson in his History described the political situation thus:

the Treasurer Salisbury, that great Engine of the State to whom all wheels moved, held an intimate correspondence with the House of Suffolk … And being mindful of the asperity and sharpness that was betwixt him, and the late Earl of Essex, he thought it a good Act of Policy and Piety, and therefore he was a great means in marrying the young Earl of Essex to the Lady Frances Howard … that the Fathers Enmity might be closed up by the sons Nuptial Fraternity. The Earl of Essex was fourteen years of Age, and she thirteen, when they married, too young to consider, but old enough to consent.¹²

Wilson was writing well after the event, but the Venetian ambassador suggested at the time a similar political ambition when he wrote:

the marriage of a daughter of the Chamberlain [Suffolk] to the Earl of Essex is to be celebrated on New Year’s Day; and his Majesty intends to be present. Six months later another daughter of the Chamberlain is to marry a son of Lord Salisbury. The object is to reconcile the young Earl of Essex to Lord Salisbury if possible. Essex is but litde the friend of Salisbury, who was the sole and governing cause of the late Earl’s execution. Nothing is more earnesdy desired by Salisbury than not to leave this legacy of hatred to his son, for though Essex is not rich nor in enjoyment of the power Lord Salisbury wields, yet if the latter were to die his son would not succeed to the influence and authority which his father possesses, whereas Essex has an infinite number of friends all devoted to the memory of his father; and there is no doubt but that, when the Earl of Essex is a litde older, suggestions and persuasions to revenge will not be wanting. Lord Salisbury hopes by creating ties of relationship to cancel the memory of these ancient enmities; many, however, are of opinion that this is too feeble a medicine for so great an ill.¹³

These accounts imply that the marriage of Frances Howard was not only an attempt to hijack the Earl of Essex before he came of age and could be dangerous, but was part of a larger political and factional design in which the Earl of Suffolk acted as a middleman, offering two of his daughters as the instruments to forge a chain linking the old adversaries. Salisbury himself had been working to influence the young Essex, who had been made a ward of the Crown, and therefore technically came under his guardianship in his role as Master of Wards. He had had some success, since Essex had become ‘the closest of friends’ with Salisbury’s son, Lord Cranborne, and had begun himself to correspond with Cecil.¹⁴ Suffolk’s daughters must have seemed convenient counters for the most influential of all early Jacobean politicians to use to cement his control. For Suffolk himself the double marriage of his daughters hitched him ever more firmly to the powerful figure of Salisbury.

What the young Earl himself felt about the match is nowhere recorded. There is a tantalisingly vague letter addressed to him from Edward Reynolds which suggests that Essex’s friends themselves may have wanted to see him safely married. He refers to whisperings he has heard about the Earl’s conduct:

that your Lordship hath of late somewhat declined from that path wherein heretofore you have, without straying, directed your steps, and a litle blemished your honor by the company of some persons, that have abused the goodness and facility of your noble nature.¹⁵

Reynolds might, of course, have been anxious about Essex’s friendship with Cranborne, but the letter indicates, if nothing else, a sense of the need for Essex to be settled down.

We know absolutely nothing, either, of Frances Howard’s views on the match. She therefore makes her debut on the court stage at the age of thirteen entirely as a function and symbol of the ambitions of her parents. As we will see, her subordination to the demands of factional politics is to be a constant and significant feature of her history, as it was for the great majority of upper-class women in her society.

The fact that this was a politically highly charged marriage is signified by the way its celebration was accompanied by two elaborate court masques, and consideration of those entertainments offers instructive insight into the ideology that underpinned the match, at both a political and a personal level. Historians, until very recendy, have been dismissive of the court masque. They have tended to concur in the view (held also by many in the early seventeenth century) that the genre was merely an expression of the conspicuous extravagance and superficial vanity of the Jacobean and Caroline courts. But this verdict has been challenged and qualified in recent years. Rehabilitation of the genre began with attention to the literary ambition of the authors of the masque, focusing on the artistic ingenuity that went into the fashioning of the words, music and staging of the entertainments, and unravelling the intricacies of the learned and arcane allegories that sustained the devices. More recendy, commentators have concentrated on the precise political context of individual masques to reveal their embodiment of the ideology of the court and to uncover ways in which the performances might figure the designs and political desires of the king, or contrariwise might encode, in however devious and indirect fashion, the political positions of particular noblemen and women who sponsored or took part in them.¹⁶ The court masque, then, while it might merely seem sycophantically to idealise the court, was in fact attempting to steer and control the understanding of the audience. Jonson, Jones and other purveyors of masques, if one may anachronistically borrow a term from current politics, were the ‘spin-doctors’ of the Jacobean court, and their work a species of political image-making. Their entertainments are therefore a valuable point of access to the ways in which the politics of the Jacobean court in general and this marriage in particular were represented to, and read by contemporaries.

When Jonson published Hymenaei, the wedding-night masque for Frances Howard, he prefaced it with one of his most significant statements of the theory that underpinned and justified the whole enterprise of masquing. Jonson argues that the ephemeral spectacle of the masque is but the surface or ‘body’ of the show, while its real justification is the ‘soul’ of which this surface is only a shadow. He claims:

This it is hath made the most royal princes and greatest persons, who are commonly the personators of these actions, not only studious of riches and magnificence in the outward celebration or show, which rightly becomes them, but curious after the most high and hearty inventions to furnish the inward parts, and those grounded upon antiquity and solid learnings; which, though their voice be taught to sound to present occasions, their sense or doth or should always lay hold on more removed mysteries. (p. 75)

The preface as a whole is built on a number of oppositions: between body and soul, voice and sense, occasion and mystery, ignorance and learning. Jonson argues that so long as the arcane ‘mystery’ directs the merely occasional, th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 The first trial: An arranged marriage
• 2 Interlude: Filling in the blanks
• 3 The second trial: Seeking an annulment
• 4 Interlude: Celebration
• 5 The third trial: Murder
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Index