on false pretences followed by his patron’s marriage to the divorced wife.  The grounds of his opposition may have been part private, part political.  His opposition was determined, and if he offered himself as witness before the Commission, he probably knew enough about the lady’s secret practisings to give such evidence as would frustrate her designs.  It was thought desirable, therefore, to get Overbury out of the way.  The King offered him a post abroad.  He was unwilling to accept it, and at last was driven to an explicit refusal.  The King was angry, and caused his Council to commit Sir Thomas Overbury to the Tower for contempt of His Majesty’s commands.  He was to be seen by no one, and to have no servant with him.  Sir William Wood, the Lieutenant of the Tower, was superseded, and Sir Gervase Helwys was put in his place with secret understandings, of which the design may only have been to prevent Sir Thomas Overbury from saying anything that could come to the ears of the world until the divorce was granted.  But Lady Essex wished Sir Thomas Overbury to be more effectually silenced.  She had tried and failed to get him assassinated.  Now she resolved to get him poisoned.  She obtained the employment of a creature of her own, named Weston, as his immediate keeper.  Weston falsely professed to Lady Essex that he had administered the poison she had given him, and that the result had been not death but loss of health.  There is much uncertainty about the evidence of detail and of the privity of others in the designs of Lady Essex, who seems at last to have completed her work by the agency of an apothecary’s assistant.  He gave the fatal dose in an injection, by which Overbury was killed ten days before the Commission gave judgment in favour of the divorce.  At Christmas the favourite married the divorced wife, having been created Earl of Somerset, that as his wife she might be Countess still.  In the following year, 1614, Sir Thomas Overbury’s “Characters” were published, together with his Character in verse of A Wife, who was described as “A Wife, now a Widow.”  This had been published a little earlier in the same year separately, without any added “Characters.”  When the Characters appeared they were described as “Many Witty Characters and conceited Newes written by himselfe and other learned Gentlemen his Friends.”  The twenty-one Characters in that edition were, therefore, not all from one hand.  Their popularity is indicated by the fact that in the next year, 1615, they reached a sixth edition.  Three more editions were published in 1616.  This was because interest in the book had been heightened by the Great Oyer of Poisoning, the trial in May 1616 of the Earl and Countess of Somerset for Overbury’s murder, of which both were found guilty, though the Countess took all guilt upon herself.  Then followed a tenth edition in 1618, an eleventh in 1622, a twelfth in 1627, a thirteenth in 1628, a fourteenth in 1630, a fifteenth in 1632, a sixteenth in 1638; and then a pause, the seventeenth