Overbury, SIR THOMAS, was born in 1581 at Compton-Scorpion, in Ilmington parish, Warwickshire, his father being squire of Bourton-on-the-Hill in Gloucestershire. After three years at
Queen's College, Oxford (1595-98), he studied awhile at the Middle Temple, and travelled then on the Continent, returning an accomplished gentleman. In 1601 at Edinburgh he met Robert Carr, then page to the Earl of Dunbar, and the minion afterwards of James I., who knighted him in 1607, and in 1611 made him Viscount Rochester. The two became inseparable friends, and Overbury himself was, through Carr's influence, knighted in 1608, the year before his second visit to France and the Netherlands. Meanwhile, in 1606, the lovely but profligate Frances Howard (1592-1632) had married the third Earl of Essex (q.v.), and during his two years' absence had intrigued with more than one lover—Carr the most favoured. Overbury had played pander to their guilty intercourse; but Carr now telling him that he purposed to get Lady Essex divorced from her husband, and then to marry her, he strongly deprecated the idea, declaring she might do for a mistress but not for a wife. Carr informed Lady Essex what Overbury had said of her; she became furious for revenge, and offered Sir Davy Wood (between whom and Sir Thomas there was a standing feud) £1000 to assassinate him—an offer prudently declined, except under royal assurance of pardon. So on 21st April 1613 Overbury, on a most trivial and illegal pretext—his contemptuous refusal to go on an embassy—was thrown into the Tower, where on 15th September he was poisoned. Three months later Carr (just created Earl of Somerset) and his paramour were married with great pomp, and the whole affair was soon to appearance forgotten. But in the autumn of 1615, after Villiers had largely supplanted Somerset, an enquiry was instituted, and four of the humbler instruments were promptly hanged—among these Mistress Anne Turner in her starched yellow ruff. In May 1616 the countess pleaded guilty, and the Earl was found guilty; but by an amazing stretch of the royal prerogative they were pardoned. In 1622 they were even released from the Tower; and Somerset survived till 1645.
Overbury's works, all published posthumously, include The Wife (1614), a didactic poem; Characters (1614), whose conceits are not lacking in epigrammatic point; and Crumms fall'n from King James's Table (1715). They were collected in 1856 by E. F. Rimbault, with a Life prefixed. See also Andrew Amos, The Great Oyer of Poisoning (1846); Gardiner's History of England; Spedding's Studies in English History (1886); and other works cited at JAMES I., BACON, and COKE.