Frances (Howard) Carr, Countess of Somerset

The queen of hearts, she baked some tarts
All on a summer's day;
The knave of hearts, he stole those tarts,
And took them quite away!

Suffolk's daughter Frances Howard first married the Earl of Essex. The marriage was unhappy (she said unconsummated). For a time, rumor amorously linked the countess with the Prince of Wales-one of her husband's close friends.

There is a story that once, when the Prince was offered the chance to be gallant with a glove dropped by a lady, he refused with distaste, remarking that he did not wish to touch it, as it had been "stretched by another." The lady in question has been taken by some to be Frances Howard.

Whatever did or did not happen with the Prince, Frances Howard's marriage to Essex was annulled. Soon afterward, she married King James's favorite (and the Prince's enemy), Robert Carr, Earl of Somerset.

Meanwhile, the Prince of Wales suddenly died. Though the modern consensus is that he probably died of typhus or typhoid, whispers of poison almost immediately began to circulate.

A few years later, Frances pleaded guilty to murder before the House of Lords in the most salacious sex-and-murder scandal of the Jacobean era. Among the crimes she admitted to was the delivery of poisoned tarts to the victim, Sir Thomas Overbury, while he was imprisoned in the Tower of London. After pleading innocent, her husband was tried and found guilty. The distraught king commuted their death sentences to imprisonment.