Sir Thomas Overbury's Curious Uncle

If Edward Palmer had had his way, there would be a branch of Oxford University on an island off the coast of Maryland. Palmer was a antiquarian, a collector of antique coins; William Camden, who taught at Westminster School (playwright Ben Jonson was one of his students) admired Palmer, referring to him as a 'curious and diligent Antiquarie'. Palmer, born in Gloucestershire, went up to Oxford at the age of fifteen. He did not take his degree from Magdalen College, possibly because he was a Roman Catholic. (Catholic men, while permitted to attend English universities, were barred from taking their degrees.) He married a cousin, Muriel Palmer, daughter of Richard Palmer of Compton Scorpion, Warwickshire and brought up at the eponymous manor house. Edward Palmer's sister married Sir Nicholas Overbury, who sat in Parliament, but is best remembered as the father of Sir Thomas Overbury, who became the lover of King James VI and I. As it so happened, King James openly favoured handsome young men, yet did his duty and fathered several children with his wife Anne of Denmark including his eventual heir, the impassioned art collector Charles I, destined to lose his head in front of the Italianate Banqueting House in Whitehall, designed by Inigo Jones. (Incidentally, Thomas Overbury met a bad end, poisoned on the order of the beautiful but evil Frances Carr, Duchess of Somerset; Overbury had advised his friend (and lover) Somerset not to marry Frances. She retaliated by asking King James (who had been the Earl of Somerset's lover) to send Overbury to Russia on a diplomatic mission, almost certainly aware he would refuse. After he refused, the king sent Overbury to the Tower; the Countess of Somerset sent a servant with delicacies to Overbury, who, too trusting for his own good, soon died in agony.) Overbury's uncle Edward Palmer was an investor in the Virginia Company and accordingly, acquired an island off the coast of Maryland he named for himself. The island (called Garrett's Island today) was not as desolate as one might imagine: John Pory, an intrepid English traveller to the New World wrote that there were 100 fur traders on it, which does not seem to have mattered to Palmer at all. Then in his seventies, his will dictated that in the event his children produced no heirs that their inheritance was to be used to found a university on the island, the 'Academia Viginiensis et Oxoniensis', the Academy of the Virgin (rather supports the idea that Palmer was a secret Roman Catholic) and Oxford. Curiously, Palmer wanted two painters resident at the university, but not to teach students; they were to instruct the faculty. The university would have been the oldest in America had it been built. But Palmer's estate was so badly managed after his death in 1624 that his dream never materialised.