Renaissance Forum: v2no1 (Spring 1997): Julie Sanders

David Lindley. 1996 [1993]. The Trials of Frances Howard: Fact and Fiction at the Court of King James. London and New York: Routledge. 227 pp. 13 illus. ISBN 0-415-14424-8. Ł13.99 pb.

David Lindley's The Trials of Frances Howard was first published (to critical acclaim) in hardback in 1993. The paperback version was released in 1996. Yet this is not as untimely a review as those dates might suggest. With a new biography of Frances Howard just out (Anne Somerset, Unnatural Murder: Poison in the Court of James I, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1997), and a host of articles on her either just out or coming into print, the time is surely ripe to reassess the contribution that Lindley's seminal work has made to our understandings of Jacobean cultural history and, indeed, women's history.
The 'facts' of Frances Howard, the Countess of Somerset's life have been well-documented and critically well-rehearsed: her arranged marriage as a young girl in 1606 to the Earl of Essex, Robert Devereux; her 1613 suit for the annulment of that marriage on the grounds of her husband's impotence; her subsequent remarriage to Robert Carr, Earl of Somerset, a favourite at the court of King James I; and that couple's joint arrest for conspiring to murder Sir Thomas Overbury in the Tower of London in 1615. Howard pleaded guilty to the conspiracy in 1616 after a lengthy showtrial and was placed in the Tower along with her now crestfallen second husband until their release in 1622. Others accused were executed and the trial was, not surprisingly, a cause celebre of the period. Lindley carefully details these 'facts' and at one point even claims that he is persuaded of Howard's guilt; this is no investigation of 'rough justice' in that respect, but his concern in the book as a whole is less to offer a narrative of Howard's life than to explore the cultural and literary narratives that shaped contemporary, and subsequent, understandings of that life.
In his introductory chapter, Lindley acknowledges the influence of Hayden White's paradigm that all history is a series of stories or narratives. Readers would, however, be mistaken if they expected an undiluted New Historicist approach in the rest of the book -- one that would employ the Frances Howard 'story' as an anecdotal launchpad for reading related literary texts. Lindley's work is in some respects New Historicism in reverse: he is concerned instead to demonstrate how 'the simplified outlines of literary texts such as The Changeling . . . provide the matrices with which [Frances Howard's] . . . story can be expressed and comprehended'.
Lindley concedes the problematic status of his historical 'evidence' ; there are many gaps in the documentation of the period, not least the absence of any written record of Howard's 'confession'. The unreliability of such documents is of concern in our own cultural moment with the release of the Bridgewater Three and, at various points, Lindley draws revealing parallels with our era concerning the theatrical nature of legal proceedings, the power of public opinion in securing convictions, the ambiguous role of juries, and specific instances such as the judgements on Myra Hindley, the Moors murderer, whilst never effacing the central cultural differences between seventeenth-century operations of the law and our own. That air of theatricality is carried over into the book's structure with its three 'trials' (the arranged marriage, the impotence hearing, and the murder trial) interspersed with interludes and epilogues.
The textual outlines which Lindley employs to facilitate his project include a wide range of public and private theatre plays, both those which make explicit reference to the Howard affair, such as Middleton's The Witch and his co-authored The Changeling, and others which use related cultural stereotypes such as Webster's court dramas. He also musters for his purpose a large selection of contemporary poems and literary and artistic productions of both the popular and elite sectors of society (the illustrations to the text are particularly well handled). Centrally, he looks at court masques, including those written for both of Howard's marriages. It would be churlish of a reviewer who has her own critical investments in these matters to chide Lindley for the absence of specific texts from his catalogue which also refer to the Howard scandal -- plays such as Jonson's The Devil is an Ass, for example; it is rather a credit to Lindley that his work sparks off this kind of intellectual connection and inquiry in his readers. Similarly, Lindley produces rather more contained readings of Jonsonian masques than I would incline to but the value of his meticulous observations is not diminished by this.
The Trials of Frances Howard has recently been accused of 'aristocentrism' (by Diane Purkiss, in her The Witch in History Routledge, 1996) due to the scant attention it pays other figures in the murder trial, not least Anne Turner, the 'wise woman' executed for her part in Overbury's death. This would seem a little unfair since Lindley's focus is explicitly on Howard herself. In terms of the discipline of women's history this book has been groundbreaking in its deconstruction of stereotypical readings of women, witchcraft, and marriage. One of the most enlightening aspects of Lindley's analysis is the connection he draws between the midwives' physical investigation of Howard at the annulment hearings and the later association of her with witchcraft and enchantment.
This is an important book and will continue to be so; the current depth of academic interest in the Howard narratives is a testament to the subtle, nuanced, and intelligent readings Lindley produces of her symbolic function in both early Stuart culture and our own. There are, undoubtedly, other books yet to be written on related themes, not least a full-length study of the ambiguous role of Robert Carr himself in the whole affair, but Lindley's book will continue to be a touchstone by which to assay those other projects. This is not only an important document and an excellent teaching text; with its expert handling of all the best aspects of the disciplines of cultural and political history and literary criticism it is also a great read.

JULIE SANDERS
KEELE UNIVERSITY