by Brandy Purdy
The mystery, scandal, and speculation surrounding Amy’s death never really died. From time to time it would rear its ugly head, to the extreme dismay of Robert Dudley. Try as he might, he could never put it behind him.
Seven years after Amy’s death, her stepbrother John Appleyard attempted to blackmail Robert, who had finally obtained the earldom of Leicester in 1564, his ennoblement being a prerequisite to Elizabeth’s scheme to offer her “cast-off lover, the horse master who had murdered his wife to make room for her,” as a prospective bridegroom to her cousin and rival for her throne, Mary, Queen of Scots. It was a choice calculated to offend Mary and drive her straight into the arms of the dissipated pretty boy Lord Darnley, just as Elizabeth had intended all along. John Appleyard claimed that he “had for the Earl’s sake covered the murder of his sister.” He was speedily imprisoned in Fleet Prison and ordered to produce any evidence he had, whereupon he hastily recanted and announced that he was fully satisfied with the coroner’s verdict concerning his sister’s death.
In 1584 an anonymously authored and widely circulated book, a best seller in its day, known as Leicester’s Commonwealth: A Discourse on the Abominable Life, Plots, Treasons, Murders, Falsehoods, Poisonings, Lusts, Incitements, and Evil Stratagems Employed by Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, revived the scandal and accused Robert of a whole catalog of nefarious deeds, including paying one of his retainers, the staunchly loyal Sir Richard Verney, to go to Cumnor Place and murder Amy.
To this day, Amy’s death, and what, if any, role her husband played in it, remains shrouded in mystery. Murder, mishap, suicide, and an underlying medical cause, sudden as an aneurysm or chronic like cancer metastasized to the bones, leaving them brittle and vulnerable to sudden, spontaneous fracture, all remain much-discussed and debated theories. An attempt in 1947 to examine her body for clues proved unsuccessful, as renovations to the church in the centuries following her death had disturbed previous burials and made locating her remains impossible.
In December 1560 Lettice Knollys married Walter Devereux, the first Earl of Essex, after Robert Dudley refused to marry her. The morning light brought a harsh dose of reason to dispel the hot, angry lust of their night together, and a resurgence of Robert’s confidence that he could in time overcome Elizabeth’s timidity and that the scandal over Amy’s death would eventually fade and be forgotten. “If I were to marry you,” he bluntly told the naked and raging Lettice, “it would utterly ruin me. The Queen’s favor would be lost forever, and she would never forgive me!”
But Lettice had her revenge. After her first rendezvous with Robert—which she managed to coax him into repeating on several succeeding nights, when she crept into his room, dropped her cloak, and crawled naked into his bed—she adopted a rather lackadaisical approach to contraception and often forgot, or just did not bother, to drink her pennyroyal tea, rise from her lover’s bed and piss hard or jump vigorously up and down immediately after coitus, or to insert a small sponge soaked in lemon juice or vinegar prior to the act, and when she married Walter Devereux, with her smiling parents and her cousin the Queen looking on as witnesses, a child was already growing inside her. For the rest of his days Robert Dudley had to live with the knowledge that his firstborn son and namesake—Lettice named the boy Robert—the handsome, dark-haired lad who loved horses and should have been his own legitimate heir would grow up in the eyes of the world as another man’s son.
For several years following Amy’s death, Robert endeavored in vain to persuade Elizabeth to marry him, insisting that it was only fear and timidity that stayed her. In 1575 he hosted a series of spectacular entertainments for her at Kenilworth Castle during her annual Summer Progress. The grand finale was his last marriage proposal. As fireworks exploded in the midnight sky above them, Elizabeth sat on the rim of a great marble fountain, and a bare-breasted woman with pearl- and gilt-shell-bedecked golden hair clad in a shimmering green mermaid’s tail swam across and presented Elizabeth with a silver oyster shell in which an opulent ring rested on a bed of pink velvet. Robert Dudley took it and knelt at Elizabeth’s feet, offering her the ring, and his heart, as he asked, one last time, for her hand in marriage. Elizabeth rejected him. For Robert, it was the death blow to his most deeply cherished dream.
After indulging in a lengthy secret affair—and rumored secret marriage—with another of Elizabeth’s ladies, the beautiful and vulnerable Lady Douglass Sheffield, who bore him the boy he referred to as his “baseborn son,” Robert Dudley succumbed to the seductive charms of the widowed Lettice Knollys, and the couple were secretly married at Kenilworth in 1579, with the bride wearing a loose silken gown to conceal her swollen belly. They managed to keep their marriage a secret from the Queen for a year. Gossips laid another death at the newlywed couple’s door when rumors attributed the sudden demise of Lettice’s first husband to poison administered in the guise of medicine. Walter Devereux, the first Earl of Essex, died in Ireland, officially of dysentery, insisting that there was “something evil in his drink” and cursing his wife with his dying breath; his last wish was that their five children be removed from her custody and be raised by his kinsman, the Earl of Huntington, to save them from being corrupted by their mother.
Robert Dudley soon found himself in the uncomfortable position of being an accused bigamist when the much-wronged Lady Sheffield insisted that he had married her in a secret, late-night ceremony with three of his retainers as witnesses. But she was dissuaded from pressing her claims when all letters and proof of their marriage disappeared—stolen, she insisted, by Lord Robert’s henchmen. Fearing for her life and that of her son, when she began to suffer stomach pains, vomiting, and her beautiful blond hair began to fall out in clumps, Douglass became convinced that she was being poisoned and accepted a £700 bribe from Dudley in exchange for her silence and denial of their marriage to prevent his being persecuted for bigamy by the vengeful Queen.
Despite whatever personal triumph she may have felt at stealing her royal cousin’s paramour, Lettice Knollys gained little from her marriage. Branded “that She-Wolf” by the irate Elizabeth, Lettice was permanently banished from court. Elizabeth made sure that Robert was kept so busy that he seldom had time to visit his wife. Theirs was a marriage based on candlelight and shadows, the same perfume and similar gowns as those worn by Elizabeth, and creeping away before the honest morning light reminded Robert that the head on the pillow next to his was not a queen’s, only her whorish young cousin’s, whose similarity to the object of his desire was not, he had discovered, really enough. The couple’s only child, Robert’s namesake and only legitimate heir, Robert Dudley, Baron Denbigh, “that noble imp,” as Robert fondly called the boy, died of a sudden fever in 1584 when he was three years old. Rumors immediately erupted that the child had died of poison, given in the guise of medicine by Lettice, who wanted to ensure that her husband’s earldom would be inherited by her eldest son from her first marriage, the handsome and hotheaded Robert Devereux, the second Earl of Essex.
Robert Dudley, the Earl of Leicester, died on September 4, 1588, at the age of fifty-six, surviving just long enough to witness England’s triumph over the Spanish Armada. The cause of his death was variously ascribed to a malarial fever, poison administered by his own wife, the now middle-aged temptress Lettice, to free her to marry her handsome young lover, Christopher Blount, the couple’s Master of the Horse, and as a final act of spite against her cousin Elizabeth—marriage hadn’t entirely broken the bond between her and Robert, but death would—or cancer of the stomach; either way, many thought, remembering Amy, her cancer, and the rumors of murder and poison, that his death was justice in its most poetic form, and few truly mourned his passing.
After Amy’s death, Robert Dudley gave lands in fifteen counties to Sir Anthony Forster, which allowed him to purchase and renovate Cumnor Place, to make it a fit home for a country gentleman and his family. Many believed that this was Forster’s reward for having been a willing accomplice in Amy’s murder. After Forster
’s death in 1572, Robert Dudley bought Cumnor from his heirs, though he never, as far as is known, set foot there. But time was not kind to Cumnor, and it gradually crumbled into ruin. Rumors abounded that “a beautiful woman, superbly attired” haunted the staircase, and in the nineteenth century an exorcism was performed, with nine priests participating, to confine her spirit to the pond in the park, where afterward, curiously, the water never again froze. The desolate, roach- and rat-infested gray stone ruins were demolished in 1811, though after the publication of Sir Walter Scott’s novel Kenilworth in 1821, which shifted the tragedy’s setting to Kenilworth Castle to include the lavish entertainments Robert Dudley hosted there for Elizabeth, Victorians flocked to view the site where it had once stood.
Thomas Blount withdrew from court to lead a quiet life in the country. He died in 1568 after a fall from his horse; he struck his head upon a rock and never regained consciousness. Every year until his death he laid a single white rose and a shiny red apple on the plainly inscribed white marble slab of Amy’s tomb. He always lingered long enough to tell her a story.
In the same year, Richard Verney died raving mad, grasping frantically in blind terror at the robes of the priest attending at his bedside, begging him to save him, claiming to already feel the flames of Hell burning him and the claws of the demons trying to tear him to pieces and drag him down to Hell. Repeatedly he pointed at the foot of his bed, exclaiming: “There she is! I can see her now, her hair shimmering like gold in the dim torchlight, running for her life, glancing back over her shoulder; I’ll never forget the fear in her eyes. And the scream, surprised and terrified, as she missed the step, there where it veers suddenly, and fell, head over heels. I saw the flash of the gold embroidered on her gown and heard the sickening snap of her neck, the thud of her body, then silence. He was a great man, who deserved to be even greater, the only one to ever see greatness in me, and I wanted to help him achieve his destiny, but she was holding him back. I wanted to please him. I went there to kill her, God forgive me, but I didn’t; I never laid a hand on her, so why does she still, after all these years, continue to haunt me?”
The honest physician Dr. Walter Bayly, who refused to meddle where he could do no good and risk being hanged to cover another’s sin, prospered in the years following Amy’s death. In 1561 he was appointed Queen’s Professor of Medicine at Oxford University, where during her visits Elizabeth always attended his lectures with great interest. He eventually became a fellow of the College of Physicians and one of Elizabeth’s Physicians in Ordinary who attended her personally. Over the years he authored many books, including a well-received treatise on diseases of the eyes, and treated many illustrious patients. He ministered to both Elizabeth’s toothaches and Robert Dudley’s rheumatism as they gained in years and such ailments became the bane of their existence. One can only guess that the tragic specter of Amy hovered tensely between the much-maligned widower and the good doctor who had refused to become enmeshed in his schemes when Dr. Bayly accompanied the Earl of Leicester to take the waters at Buxton each summer. When the infamous book known as Leicester’s Commonwealth was published and made public Dr. Bayly’s refusal to dose Amy with the medicines her husband sent, Dr. Bayly retained a proud and honorable silence, never challenging or refuting the story. He died at the age of sixty-three in 1592, wealthy, respected, and esteemed, both as a doctor and a man, by family, friends, colleagues, and patients alike.
Lettice Knollys outlived them all, including her own son—the power-crazed Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, who played May to Elizabeth’s December in the last great romance of her life but lost his head when he tried to incite the people of London to rise against her and help him take her throne. He was beheaded in 1601, as was his fellow conspirator, his best friend and stepfather, Christopher Blount. Having long outlived her extraordinary beauty, Lettice died alone in her bed during the wee hours of the morning on Christmas Day 1634 at the age of ninety-three.
FURTHER READING
For those interested in the history of breast cancer, I highly recommend Bathsheba’s Breast: Women, Cancer, and History by James S. Olson.
Chris Skidmore’s Death and the Virgin provides the most detailed and thorough examination of the circumstances, mystery, and scandal surrounding the death of Amy Robsart Dudley and contains much information not found in earlier, previously published accounts.
A READING GROUP GUIDE
THE
QUEEN’ S
PLEASURE
Brandy Purdy
ABOUT THIS GUIDE
The suggested questions are included to
enhance your group’s reading of Brandy Purdy’s
The Queen’s Pleasure.
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
1. Discuss the marriage of Robert Dudley and Amy Robsart. They married very young; both were only seventeen. Was their marriage doomed from the start? What, if anything, could they have done to save their marriage? Though our modern-day concept of domestic abuse did not exist in Tudor times, do you think Robert Dudley, as depicted in this novel, was an abusive husband? If you were a marriage counselor and this couple was seated on your couch, what would you tell them?
2. Today Amy Robsart Dudley is mainly remembered because of the way she died, not how she lived. Very little is actually known about her, and the woman herself often emerges as a nonentity in both novels and nonfiction books; sometimes she is little more than just a name upon a page. How does the woman depicted in this novel compare with your previously formed ideas about the real Amy? Do you like or dislike her? Discuss her personality. What are her good qualities and flaws? How does marriage to Robert Dudley change her? How does her illness change her? How is the Amy of seventeen different from the Amy of twenty-eight?
3. Discuss Elizabeth’s feelings about romance, sex, and marriage. How were these ideas formed? Her desire for passion without the commitment and compromise, the give-and-take, of marriage sounds very modern, and it even leads her to consider an affair with a married man as a safe way to find what she is seeking. What do you think about this? Every time Elizabeth lets Robert kiss and caress her, she stops him before he goes too far, leaving him frustrated. Do you think she is emotionally incapable of a sexual relationship because of her past?
4. Discuss Robert’s relationship with Elizabeth. If she had not been queen, would he have still loved her? How great a role does his ambition play in their romance? Why is it so hard for Elizabeth, even when she knows what Robert is really like, to give him up?
5. Discuss the tale of Patient Griselda and its theme of wifely obedience. Robert orders tapestries illustrating the story, reads it aloud to Amy, orders her to repeatedly copy it out, and even stages a play based on it for Elizabeth. Why is he such a fan of this story? What does it mean to him? And what do you, as a modern woman or man compared to a Tudor-era one, think of it?
6. Do you think Amy would have had a happier life if she had given Robert a divorce when he asked her to? How would her life have been different? What do you think of the manner in which he asked her, the reasons he gave, and his suggestion that Amy might still be his mistress? How would you have reacted if you had been in Amy’s shoes?
7. Why does Amy dye her hair red and dress in imitation of Elizabeth? Discuss Robert’s violent reaction to this. Why does Amy try so hard in so many ways—the dyed hair, the mermaid gown, etc.—to win Robert back? Is he really worth it?
8. Discuss Amy’s illness and the medical treatments of the time. Medical science and our understanding and treatment of breast cancer have come a long way since Amy’s lifetime. If this story were set in modern times, how do you think it would be different? Would Amy have still become the central figure in one of British history’s greatest unsolved mysteries? Would she have had a more positive outlook and perhaps have become one of this disease’s survivors?
9. Having breast cancer causes Amy to fear that no man will ever desire her sexually again, that their desire will turn to disgust when they see her undressed. D
o you think this is a valid, realistic fear? Is this something modern-day sufferers still struggle with? What do you think would have happened if Amy had taken a lover? Should she have done so, or was she right to honor her marriage vows to Robert even after he betrayed her?
10. While staying at Compton Verney, Amy believes that she is being poisoned, though Robert insists it is just her imagination. Both also see the master of the house, Sir Richard Verney, in remarkably different ways—in Amy’s eyes he is a dark, sinister figure, but Robert paints him as a sentimental and cowardly man. Whom do you believe—Robert or Amy?
11. Certain characters appear in the book who may or may not be real, such as Red Jack the highwayman and the phantom gray friar who haunts Cumnor Place. Robert insists that the man Amy identifies as Red Jack is really a spice merchant, and the gray friar is supposedly a ghost that only the dying can see or just a story the servants tell to frighten the new housemaids. Do you believe these characters are real or only figments of Amy’s imagination? What does each one represent?
12. Robert insists that Amy take the hemlock pills he gives her even if they make her sick to the point of death. Why does he do this? Is he trying to heal her or to kill her? Is this a real remedy or murder masquerading as medicine?