Note 183 — ANNALS (continued 3)

1618. March 1. Touching the News of the Time: Sir George Villiers, the new Favourite, tapers up apace, and grows strong at Court: His Predecessor the Earl of Somerset hath got a Lease of 90 years for his Life, and so hath his Articulate Lady, called so, for articling against the frigidity and impotence of her former Lord. She was afraid that Coke, the Lord Chief Justice (who had used such extraordinary art and industry in discovering all the circumstances of the poisoning of Overbury) would have made white Broth of them, but that the Prerogative kept them from the Pot: yet the Subservient Instruments, the lesser Flies could not break thorow, but lay entangled in the Cobweb; amongst others Mistress Turner, the first inventress of yellow Starch, was executed in a Cobweb Lawn Ruff of that colour at Tyburn, and with her I believe that yellow Starch, which so much disfigured our Nation, and rendered them so ridiculous and fantastic, will receive its Funeral. (Howell’s “Familiar Letters,” ed. Jacobs, 1890, p. 20).