The great oyer of poisoning : the trial of the Earl of Somerset for the poisoning of Sir Thomas Overbury, in the Tower of London, and various matters connected therewith, from contemporary mss / by Andrew Amos.

  • Amos, Andrew, 1791-1860.
Date:
1846
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The great oyer of poisoning : the trial of the Earl of Somerset for the poisoning of Sir Thomas Overbury, in the Tower of London, and various matters connected therewith, from contemporary mss / by Andrew Amos. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    served on this occasion; and if the details had been preserved, we should have found that King James had strenuously exerted himself in flinging the Bride’s left: stocking, sewing her up in the sheets, quaffing sack posset, drawing through the wedding-ring, playing a reveille matin, if he did not also, as he did in compliment to Sir T. Herbert and his lady, visit the newly-married pair before they rose from their bed. We are told by an eye-witness, that the King and Queen, at the Ear] of Somerset’s marriage, tasted hypocras* and wafers in the Chapel with the Bride and Bridegroom, and that gloves were liberally dis- tributed, and, in particular, that “a very fair” pair of gloves, worth 3/., was given to Secretary Winwood, whose wedding-dress, consisting of a doublet hose and cloak all black, cost fourscore pounds. A nuptial sermon was preached by the Dean of Westminster; and one of his hearers tells us, what we might have conjectured, that, like another “ soft Dean” who “never mentioned Hell to ears polite,” the gist of the discourse was the com- mendation, to use the writer's own words, “ of the young couple, glancing also at the praise of * See “Strutt’s Manners and Customs,” vol. iii. p. 74, for the “ Crafte to make Hypocras ;” Brand’s “ Popular Antiquities,” vol. li. p. 65, for the benediction on the hypocras. In Shakspere’s “Taming of the Shrew,” Petruchio, after quaffing the muscadel at his marriage, throws the sops in the sexton’s face.