On 25 May 1616, a series of trials for the murder of Sir Thomas Overbury came close to an end. Francis Bacon, prosecuting counsel, brought evidence against the Earl of Somerset. Robert Carr before his ennoblement, the earl was accused of poisoning a man who had been his best friend. Thought by many at the royal court to have had a culpable closeness with this same man, he was here in court being accused by Bacon of killing him: not actually because he opposed Carr’s marriage to Frances Howard, the usual reason given for the rift between them. Instead, Bacon makes dark allusions to Overbury knowing ‘secrets of state’ or even ‘secrets of nature’ that, if exposed, would have ruined Carr; ‘he therefore dealt violently with him,’ the prosecutor tells the court of Somerset’s peers with his customary rhetorical flourish, ‘to make him desist with menaces of discovery and the like’. The nobleman was, Bacon persuades the jury, guilty of a ‘stream of hatred [against Overbury] of a more deep nature’ than simply that resulting from jealousy over a woman.