OVERBURY, SIR THOMAS, an English courtier, famous for his genius and the tragical history of his life, was the son of Nicholas Overbury of Boorton-on-the-Hill in Gloucestershire, and was born in 1581 at Compton Scorfen, the Warwickshire seat of his maternal grandfather. The early part of his career was one continued course of success. Having enrolled as a gentleman commoner of Queen's College, Oxford, he distinguished himself in philosophy and logic, took the degree of Bachelor-of-Arts in 1598, and came out into the world adorned with every scholar-like accomplishment. On his removal to London for the purpose of studying law in the Middle Temple, he found favour with the lord treasurer, Sir Robert Cecil, and a prospect of court preferment seemed to be opening up before him. The sudden disappointment of these hopes, by driving him to travel, was only the means of securing his ultimate success. He sojourned in different places both at home and abroad, acquiring foreign languages, inspecting foreign governments, liberalizing his manners and opinions, and marking those varied phases of life which he afterwards described with such fidelity and wit in his book of Characters. After his return to court, his polished bearing, polite attainments, and large experience, recommended him to the friendship of Robert Carr, an acquaintance to whom he had been introduced shortly before in
Edinburgh, and who was now the rising favourite of James I. The travelled and accomplished scholar soon became the bosom confidant and indispensable oracle of the illiterate minion. He dictated his love epistles, supplied him with opinions and plans of action, took charge of all his secrets, and with absolute sway ruled the will that ruled the king. The result was, that those who wished to honour and propitiate the favourite, honoured and propitiated the favourite's master. James I. made him a knight in 1608; the court poets, with Ben Jonson at their head, ascribed to him every attainment and every virtue under heaven; statesmen craved his counsel; and princes sought his society.
Sir Thomas Overbury had now climbed to the pinnacle of power, and, like most other successful aspirants, he was seized with a giddiness which suddenly brought him down headlong. His imperious pride could not brook the thought that any one should be a fellow sharer with him in the affection of Carr, now Viscount Rochester. Therefore, although his conscience had not prevented him from writing the letters and sentimental ditties which had won for his friend the unlawful love of the profligate Countess of Essex, yet no sooner was it proposed to close this intrigue by marriage than he took the most decided measures of opposition. He exhorted Carr, by all his hopes of continued prosperity, not to take such a step; he wrote the famous poem called The Wife, for the express purpose of showing him the contrast between a chaste and an immodest spouse; and in express terms he denounced the countess as "a strumpet, and her mother and brother as bawds." It was this interference, and especially the epithets of infamy, that determined his fate. The countess planned a scheme of deadly vengeance; her infatuated lover Rochester, who feared the divulging of the secrets intrusted to his confidant, and her uncle the Earl of Northampton, who aspired to step into the doomed courtier's place, became her accomplices; and it is even said that the king, highly offended at the arrogant bearing of his minion's friend, was privy to the plot. In April 1613, accordingly, Overbury was offered a foreign ambassadorship; by the advice of Rochester he was induced to decline it; and on the 21st of the same month he was apprehended on the charge of disobeying the king's commands, and conveyed a close prisoner to the Tower. The victim was now in the clutches of his murderers, and was destined to expiate his offence by a death of aggravated and protracted pain. He was consigned to a dismal dungeon; his condition was deceitfully kept secret from his friends; not even a priest was allowed access to him; and a ruffian named Weston, who had been hired expressly on account of his knowledge of drugs, was appointed to be sole attendant. Then a process of slow poisoning was commenced. The daily food of the unconscious prisoner was tainted with deadly powders; the very water that he drank was poisoned, and inflamed the ever-burning thirst it was intended to allay; for three months and six days his strong constitution continued to be racked and wasted under the combined action of different drugs; and on the 15th September 1613, when he had become a mere skeleton, covered with a mass of sores, a clyster put an end to his life. The murderers, although successful at first in concealing their guilt, and although favoured by certain unaccountable circumstances connected with the deed, were at length, after the lapse of two years, overtaken by retribution. They were all tried and condemned. The four under-assassins, including Weston, suffered the penalty of the law; and Carr and his wife, now the Earl and Countess of Somerset, although pardoned by the king, were afterwards punished, the former by the loss of the royal favour, the latter by a most painful and loathsome death.
The tragical fate of Sir Thomas Overbury drew atten-
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tion to his works, which were not published till after his death. His poem of The Wife, though over-elaborated and stiff both in thought and in diction, passed through sixteen editions before 1653, called forth numerous imitators, and is still valuable on account of its discriminating knowledge of human life, and its profound and high-toned moral sentiments. His other principal work, the Characters, was also admired for the happy and ingenious conceits, and the graphic delineations, which it occasionally displays amid its crowd of over-strained witticisms and unnecessary details. An incomplete edition of Overbury's productions, under the title of his Miscellaneous Works, was published in London in 1632, and was frequently reprinted. The latest and best edition is that published in the Library of Old Authors, accompanied with a Life of Overbury by Rimbault, London, 1856.