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"My goal," writes Alastair Bellany, in the introduction to
this superb and challenging book, "has been to write an ethnography
of early Stuart political culture through a detailed study of the making
and meaning of one significant event" (23). The result of this rather
ambitious program is an effective fusion of meticulous scholarly attention
to clearly defined old historical questions (who knew what when, what
caused what) with an interest in issues of representation more typical
in some ways of literary scholarship in the cultural studies or new historicist
mode.
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The event in question - the Overbury affair - is really a cascade of
interconnected events that merged in the political imagination of early
Stuart England into one spectacularly sordid scandal. First, eyebrows
were raised by the controversial annulment, in 1613, of the marriage of
Frances Howard and Robert Devereaux, third earl of Essex, and by Howard's
subsequent remarriage to Robert Carr, earl of Somerset and favourite to
King James I. This was followed by revelations, in 1615-16, concerning
the couple's alleged involvement in the poisoning of Carr's associate
Sir Thomas Overbury in the Tower of London that culminated in a series
of public trials in which Carr, Howard, and several accomplices were convicted.
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The first full chapter of the book reads like a revisionist historian's
study of the Overbury affair, carefully situating the meaning of the unfolding
scandal in terms of the personalities and clashing factions of the Jacobean
court. This chapter will prove valuable to anybody interested in the factional
politics of mid-Jacobean England, but it offers little hint of the more
historiographically innovative approach to the meaning of the scandal
that informs the remainder of the study. Most of Bellany's book focuses,
instead, upon the ways in which the Overbury scandal was reported, upon
the ways in which accounts of it resonated with received stereotypes about
court corruption, and upon its persistence in the cultural memory as a
touchstone for anti-court sentiment.
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Because this is such an interesting book and one with so many important
insights to offer, it makes sense to take up each of its chapters in turn.
Chapter two attempts (with great success, I think) to reconstruct as much
as possible the ways in which news of the Overbury scandal might have
circulated: orally, in various kinds of manuscripts, and in the numerous
printed texts designed to capitalize on widespread fascination with the
scandal and its players. More broadly, Bellany here examines Jacobean
news culture by contextualizing surviving evidence about the circulation
of Overbury materials with a wealth of more anecdotal evidence about the
ways in which gossip, news, and libel were disseminated within London
and to the provinces. In addition to demonstrating that news of the Overbury
scandal was widely and rapidly circulated, the chapter discusses the dissemination
of Overbury material in relation to and as an example of the growth of
a politically uncontrollable news culture during the first half of the
seventeenth century.
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In chapters three to five, Bellany turns his attention to the ways in
which the scandal surrounding the Overbury affair was represented in the
news accounts, manuscript libels, and various printed treatments that
survive. Bellany's mastery of the texts of scandal is impressive. This
middle portion of the book asks what the scandal meant to contemporaries,
and seeks to find answers by uncovering connections between representations
of the scandal and "the cultural assumptions that shaped them and
conditioned their reception" (137). Chapter three, for example, attempts
to analyze the symbolic meaning for contemporaries of the elements that
become the focus of various accounts of the scandal - the horror of poison,
Frances Howard's sexual promiscuity, Carr's unruly ambition, the alleged
use of witchcraft by Howard and her associate Anne Turner, Turner's propensity
for unnecessary sumptuary display, and so forth. Poison, to give just
one example, was associated both with lurid histories of Roman imperial
corruption and with scheming Italian courtiers and the cloaked villainy
of Jesuits. This means that news of poison at court would have evoked
a much larger - if somewhat nebulous - impression of court corruption,
and also that contemporaries might have seen the unfolding scandal as
terrifying confirmation of pre-existing stereotypes.
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This section of Bellany's book respectfully draws on and extends the
kind of analysis undertaken some years ago in David Lindley's book The
Trials of Frances Howard, but where Lindley treated misogynistic stereotype
as the master key to the scandal's meaning, Bellany tends to see all of
its scandal tropes as offshoots of English paranoia about "the master
deviance of popery" (147). Chapter four brings the connection between
the Overbury scandal and the fear of popery into clearer focus, examining
the formation and dissemination of a conspiracy theory that saw the Overbury
murder as part of a much larger Popish plot to kill the royal family and
seize the throne for King Carr. This outlandish-seeming conspiracy theory,
Bellany argues, was plausible to many contemporaries, including the prosecutor
Sir Edward Coke, because it tapped into deeply felt pre-existing fears
about the likelihood of popish plots.
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Chapter five discusses the ways in which narrative accounts of the various
Overbury trials - composed in late 1615 and early 1616 as the scandal
was unfolding - tapped into and were structured by deeply engrained and
culturally sanctioned narratives of providential justice in which secret
murder is miraculously revealed and its perpetrators brought to trial
and ultimately executed. These narratives, as Bellany brilliantly argues,
offered a powerfully compelling way to think about the Overbury murder,
one that could counteract the scandal's association with court corruption
by casting James himself as the agent of providence overseeing the administration
of justice with Solomon-like impartiality. Capitalizing upon the affective
power of this narrative structure, though, required the public execution
of justice upon the bodies of the guilty, and James finally refused to
execute either Carr or Howard. Bellany discusses the crown's attempt to
script "scenarios for mercy" (241), but argues that the failure
to execute the Somersets undermined the legitimating potential of the
rhetoric of providential justice in ways that were remembered long after
1616.
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The sixth and final chapter examines the afterlives of the Overbury scandal:
the way memory of the scandal was accommodated to and shaped by subsequent
political tensions. Of particular interest here is Bellany's suggestion
that the luridness of the Overbury scandal may have helped lay the imaginative
groundwork for resentment of Buckingham during the Spanish Match crisis
and beyond. The basic argument is that the scandal tropes - popery, poison,
corrupt sexuality, etc. - prominent in the libels surrounding Buckingham
resemble those mobilized during the Overbury trials, and that this may
demonstrate a meaningful continuity to anti-court sentiment. This seems
very plausible to me, though this portion of the book is a bit too hasty
to really cement the case. This chapter also looks at a number of accounts
of the Overbury scandal written during the 1650s (and later) with an eye
toward explicating the different polemical purposes to which the scandal
could be bent.
- The book's dust jacket claims that "by situating the Overbury case
in both short- and long-term political contexts, the book suggests that
court scandal deserves a place among the cultural origins of the English
revolution." It is true that Bellany seeks - in the wake of challenges
posed by revisionist historiography - to revisit and reassess Lawrence Stone's
contention that court scandal undermined the moral authority of the early
Stuart court and thus paved the way for civil war. But Bellany is in fact
extremely measured and cautious throughout about the role played by scandal
in delegitimating the crown: "the extent of deligitimation is hard
to measure" he writes, "and it is much easier to track the possible
contours of the process than prove a direct link from scandal to delegitimation
and on to revolution" (22-23). Such caution notwithstanding, one of
the really interesting things about Bellany's approach is his willingness
at least to consider carefully the notion that the kind of political ideas
represented in libels and pamphlets and plays may have had a causal impact
within political culture. Because it does consider this possibility, The
Politics of Court Scandal in Early Modern England is a truly interdisciplinary
book, one whose approach to early modern culture should be a welcome provocation
to historians and literary scholars alike.
