The coachman yelled and flicked his whip to force our passage through Westminster Palace Yard. A bleeding bear, salivating dogs, a half-blind baron: their deaths entertainment for the crowd. That was the moment I fully understood that I might be next.

The horses whinnied in fear as the coach was rocked by the mob. I shrank into the dark interior but the drapes were thrown up and the door opened. I was pulled out, the press of people shouting, grabbing, ripping at my dress. Was I to die here at the hands of a vengeful mob? Officers of the court arrived to push back the crowd. Briefly, I felt the light of the cold October morning pressing on my face before I was bundled forward.

Westminster Hall was dark and quiet after the crowds, but there was no time to stop and calm myself, to put my clothes and hair back in order before I was marched through the huge, soaring space, blinded at intervals by shafts of light from windows set high in the walls. As my eyes adjusted, I saw that hundreds, even thousands, of people were staring at me from tiered benches set on scaffolding, six rows high. I had become a player, a lone woman denied the script.

Whispering began as I passed so that by the time I neared the boards of the King’s Bench there was a storm of chatter and calling out. I kept my eyes lowered in modesty and terror, looking briefly to right and left for my oldest children, Frankie or Robert Carr, even Arthur or my brother Eustace and sister Mary, or Mr. Palmer. I saw no one I knew.

I was ushered to the Bench. I heard Lord Chief Justice Coke announced, followed by a jury not of my peers but of nobles. With lowered eyes, all I could see were clerks with their writing desks round their necks; it frightened me to know that these proceedings would be read for evermore. Before my arrest I had read libels and pamphlets every day that besmirched men’s honor, even that of the King, by twisting events to make any point the writer wished. Would someone look back at this time and think those broadsheets and these notes from the trial were truthful because they had survived when a lone voice can only fade?

A clerk called for silence and began to recite the date, the seventh day of November, sixteen hundred and fifteen, my full name and that of my dead husband, and then the arraignment, in a flat voice that slightly lulled me into a state of hopeful confidence, for it sounded so unlikely.

“… that she did comfort, aid and assist Mr. Richard Weston in the poisoning of Sir Thomas Overbury while that latter was held close prisoner in the Tower of London resulting in the death of Sir Thomas on the fifteenth day of September in the year of Our Lord sixteen hundred and thirteen.”