This is the first detailed study of the political significance of the seventeenth-century's most notorious and sensational court scandal--the murder of Sir Thomas Overbury. Insisting that images of the scandalous court had serious political importance, the book retells the tale of Overbury's rise to power, his fall and murder in 1613, and the public revelation of the murder two years later. The book examines the production and circulation of news about the scandal and assesses the political significance of contemporary depictions of the affair.

This is the first detailed study of the political significance of the seventeenth century's most notorious and sensational court scandal - the Overbury murder. The book challenges earlier approaches to the history of court scandal, rejecting both the assumption that it inevitably undermined royal authority and the tendency to dismiss scandal as politically insignificant. The book adopts a multi-layered, interdisciplinary approach to the Overbury affair and its complex political meanings. It explores the factional politics that made and destroyed Overbury and his murderers, reconstructs the news culture through which information about the scandal circulated, analyses the creation and composition of the early Stuart 'public', and decodes the representations of the affair that were produced and consumed during 1615 16 and in subsequent decades. By situating the Overbury case both in short- and long-term political contexts, the book offers a reading of court scandal's place in the cultural origins of the English revolution.

A year after the death of James I in 1625, a sensational pamphlet accused the Duke of Buckingham of murdering the king. It was an allegation that would haunt English politics for nearly forty years. In this exhaustively researched new book, two leading scholars of the era, Alastair Bellany and Thomas Cogswell, uncover the untold story of how a secret history of courtly poisoning shaped and reflected the political conflicts that would eventually plunge the British Isles into civil war and revolution. Illuminating many hitherto obscure aspects of early modern political culture, this eagerly anticipated work is both a fascinating story of political intrigue and a major exploration of the forces that destroyed the Stuart monarchy.