This book traces and analyzes the story of a scandal, involving allegations of adultery, incest, and attempted murder by poison, made by Anne, Lady Roos against Frances, Countess of Exeter. Since Anne was the daughter of Sir Thomas Lake, James I’s Secretary of State, and her husband, William Cecil, Lord Roos, was a great-grandson of Lord Burghley and close relative of the king’s leading minister, Robert Cecil, earl of Salisbury, the feud pitted two leading court families against each other. It generated an abundance of gossip and ended in an investigation and Star Chamber trial presided over by the king in person. Johanna Luthman attempts both to narrate the complicated story of how the quarrel originated and developed, and to contextualize it by examining its connection to various aspects of court politics, society, and culture, thereby opening a “window into the early Stuart world” by tracing the many ramifications of a single scandalous episode (xxiv).

After a prologue summarizing the main outlines of the story, Luthman furnishes a brief history of the Cecil family, and then describes the ten years Lord Roos spent on the Continent, starting in 1605 when he was fifteen years old. Although the intention was to equip him for a diplomatic career, he aroused suspicions by having overly friendly relations with European Catholics. The book next recounts Sir Thomas Lake’s early career, culminating in his appointment as Secretary of State in 1616 and his marriage to Mary Ryder, who had a formidable reputation as a difficult woman. After returning to England, Roos married the fifteen-year old Anne Lake, a union intended to forge an alliance of mutual convenience between the Cecils and her father. Shortly thereafter, in 1616, James I appointed Roos to lead an embassy to congratulate Philip III of Spain on the conclusion of a double marriage connecting two of his own children to the royal family of France.

While Roos welcomed the assignment, he had difficulty raising the money required to support his embassy, and ended up borrowing £6000 from his new father-in-law, on the security of his manor of Walthamstow. The Lakes claimed that Roos agreed to transfer ownership of Walthamstow to his wife and her children, while Roos and his Cecil relatives later denied that this was the case. This property dispute gave rise to a venomous family quarrel and probably contributed to difficulties between Roos, his wife, and her parents after he returned from Spain. The Lakes took Anne into their own custody at their country estate at Cannons (Middlesex). Roos’s attempt to retrieve her in an early morning raid ended in a brawl between his followers and those of Anne’s brother, Sir Arthur Lake. Luthman devotes a chapter to conflicting accounts of this incident and the ways in which the Lakes used it to portray Roos as lacking in the masculine qualities of a proper husband and household head.

In August 1617, Roos again left for the Continent, without first procuring a royal license to do so, leaving behind his wife and a tangle of debts. He spent the next several months hiding from English authorities, who wanted to force his return, before dying in Naples, a convert to Catholicism, in June 1618. Back in England, his grandfather, Thomas Cecil, earl of Exeter, and father, William Cecil, second Lord Burghley, became embroiled with the Lakes in disputes over his debts and properties, including Walthamstow. At this juncture, Lady Roos made the scandalous accusation that, while visiting Exeter’s country seat of Wimbledon in the summer of 1616, her husband had committed adultery with the countess, who had then tried to keep the affair hidden by twice attempting to murder her with a poisoned enema. The fact that the countess was twenty-nine years younger than her septuagenarian husband lent some plausibility to the story. Exeter sprang to his wife’s defense, while Lady Roos embellished her tale by claiming to have extracted a written confession from the countess. She also subsequently claimed that an estranged servant of the Exeters warned her against a third attempt to kill her.

The Countess of Exeter eventually appealed to the king to clear her honor by conducting a thorough investigation, which James proceeded to do. The resulting exhaustive interrogations of witnesses soon revealed the dubious nature of Lady Roos’s evidence and, in a personal interview with the king, she confessed to having fabricated her story. James triumphantly presided over a trial that exonerated the countess, while leading to Lake’s dismissal from office and his imprisonment, along with his wife and daughter, in the Tower of London.

While Luthman does a good job of untangling the scandal and its immediate background, her efforts to use it as a “window into the early Stuart world” are not always as sure-footed. The background information she provides, on topics ranging from Jacobean court politics to contemporary ideas about gender roles, December and July marriages, and poison is accurate but not particularly original or penetrating. While informative to general readers, it will not tell those familiar with the period very much that they do not already know. Several topics arguably deserved deeper examination. More might have been made of the role of European travel in equipping young men with good connections for careers serving the crown, and the numerous pitfalls, involving misadventures connected to things like gambling and womanizing, and potentially ruinous expenses incurred while abroad or later in attendance at court that might lead to disaster. Roos is an excellent example of a man with all the right connections who squandered his opportunities through fecklessness, inability, and an attachment to baroque Catholicism. The role of servants in aristocratic households, and their ability either to serve or damage their employers through their often-intimate knowledge of family secrets, also merited closer attention. But despite some missed opportunities, this is a useful study.