OVERBURY, SIR THOMAS (1581-1613), English poet and essayist, and the victim of one of the most sensational crimes in English history, was the son of Nicholas Overbury, of Bourton on-the-Hill, and was born in 1581 at Compton Scorpion, near Ilmington, in Warwickshire. In the autumn of 1595 he became a gentleman commoner of Queen's college, Oxford, took his degree in 1598 and came to London to study in the Middle Temple.
About the year 16oi, being in Edinburgh on a holiday, he met Robert Carr, then an obscure page to the earl of Dunbar; and the two youths came up to London together. When Carr attracted the attention of James I., in 16o6, by breaking his leg in the tilt-yard, Overbury had for some time been servitor-in ordinary to the king. He was knighted in 1608, and in 1609 trav elled in France and the Low Countries. When Carr was made Lord Rochester in 161o, the intimacy between the two was maintained.
But early in 1611 the Court became aware of the mutual attraction between Rochester and the youthful countess of Essex. To this intrigue Overbury was from the first violently opposed, and expressed his opinion of the countess in unmeasured terms. But Rochester was now infatuated, and he repeated to the countess what Overbury had said. Overbury also wrote, and circulated widely in ms., the poem called The Wife, which was a picture of the virtues which a young man should demand in a woman. The situation now resolved itself into a duel for the person of Rochester between the mistress and the friend. Over
bury was thrown into the Tower on April 22, 1613, on a charge of disrespect to the king. Lady Essex, however, was not satisfied with his imprisonment; she was determined that "he should return no more to this stage." She bribed the gaoler, aided by Mrs. Turner, the widow of a physician, and by an apothecary called Franklin, to poison Overbury with copper vitriol. His constitution long withstood the timid doses they gave him, and he lingered until Sept. 15, 1613, when more violent measures put an end to his existence.
Two months later Rochester, now earl of Somerset, married Lady Essex. More than a year passed before suspicion was aroused, and when it was, the king showed disinclination to bring the offenders to justice. In the trial which followed, the plot was discovered. The four accomplices were hanged; the countess of Somerset pleaded guilty but was spared, and Somerset himself was disgraced. Meanwhile, Overbury's poem, The Wife, was published in 1614, and ran through six editions within a year. Much that must be spurious was added to the gathering snow ball of Overbury's Works, the most famous of which are the Characters.
See C. Whibley, Essays in Biography (1913) ; E. A. Parry, The Overbury Mystery (1925).