he was sent prisoner to the Tower, and put under the care of Sir Gervis Yelvis, then lord lieutenant.  The Countess being so far successful, began now to conceive great hopes of compleating her scheme of assassination, and drew over the Earl of Somerset her husband, to her party, and he who a few years before, had obtained the honour of knighthood for Overbury, was now so enraged against him, that he coincided in taking measures to murder his friend.  Sir Gervis Yelvis, who obtained the lieutenancy by Somerset’s interest, was a creature devoted to his pleasure.  He was a needy man, totally destitute of any principles of honour, and was easily prevailed upon to forward a scheme for destroying poor Overbury by poison.  Accordingly they consulted with one Mrs. Turner, the first inventer (says Winstanley of that horrid garb of yellow ruffs and cuffs, and in which garb he was afterwards hanged) who having acquaintance with one James Franklin, a man who it seems was admirably fitted to be a Cut-throat, agreed with him to provide that which would not kill presently, but cause one to languish away by degrees.  The lieutenant being engaged in the conspiracy, admits one Weston, Mrs. Turner’s man, who under pretence of waiting on Sir Thomas, was to do the horrid deed.  The plot being thus formed, and success promising so fair, Franklin buys various poisons, White Arsenick, Mercury-Sublimate, Cantharides, Red-Mercury, with three or four other deadly ingredients, which he delivered to Weston, with instructions how to use them; who put them into his broth and meat, increasing and diminishing their strength according as he saw him affected; besides these, the Countess sent him by way of present, poisoned tarts and jellies:  but Overbury being of a strong constitution, held long out against their influence:  his body broke out in blotches and blains, which occasioned the report industriously propagated by Somerset, of his having died of the French Disease.  At last they produced his death by the application of a poisoned clyster, by which he next day in painful agonies expired.  Thus (says Winstanley) “by the malice of a woman that worthy Knight was murthered, who yet still lives in that witty poem of his, entitled, A Wife, as is well expressed by the verses under his picture.”

  A man’s best fortune or his worst’s a wife,
  Yet I, that knew no marriage, peace nor strife
  Live by a good one, by a bad one lost my life.

Of all crimes which the heart of man conceives, as none is so enormous as murder, so it more frequently meets punishment in this life than any other.  This barbarous assassination was soon revealed; for notwithstanding what the conspirators had given out, suspicions ran high that Sir Thomas was poisoned; upon which Weston was strictly examined by Lord Cook, who before his lordship persisted in denying the same; but the Bishop of London afterwards conversing with him, pressing the thing home to his conscience, and opening all the terrors of another life to his mind,