Later writers, wishing to denigrate Robert, often refer to his imagined penchant for killing his enemies with poison. If Robert had wanted to kill his wife, poison would, indeed, have done the trick. Small doses, ending with a sufficiently large one, would have caused Amy’s death in a way that mimicked a natural illness. But Robert would not have benefitted from Amy suffering a suspicious and unnatural death. Thus, if the timing, method and result of Amy’s death all acted against Robert, is it possible that someone else might have had a motive to kill her in such a way as to tarnish Robert, making it impossible for Elizabeth to marry him?
There were certainly members of the Privy Council who feared what would happen if Robert became king consort, including William Cecil, Henry Fitzalan, Thomas Howard and Thomas Radclyffe, 3rd Earl of Sussex. The timing would fit this hypothesis. Amy was in the final stages of her illness and any day might die in her bed, freeing Robert to woo the Queen in earnest. It was crucial that she die in a way that pointed the finger at her husband, but without the investigation of an open murder that would risk the true perpetrators being discovered.
If Amy’s death was the result of this type of plot, the plan worked perfectly. It could have been suicide, or an accident, or murder. In the end, the verdict was accidental death; however, the rumours of murder were damaging enough, spreading through England and the Royal Courts of Europe in a matter of days. If it could not be proved, it also could not be disproved. Robert’s reputation was irretrievably blemished: with Amy’s tragic death, the chance of Elizabeth and Robert marrying died as well.
The trouble with trying to identify a murderer among the English nobles is that so many of them might have had a motive. William Cecil, who, after falling out with the Queen over the Scottish negotiations, stood to lose his position in her Court and possibly lose his life in the Tower, was certainly doing everything he could to prevent a marriage between Robert and Elizabeth. Then there was Thomas Radclyffe, a member of the Court who was vehemently opposed to Robert, yet who, after Amy’s death, stated that he would love and serve whoever Elizabeth married. Had he engineered the death and its aftermath, he could utter such sanctimonious sentiments, secure in the knowledge that the husband would certainly not be Robert. Similarly, cousins Thomas Howard and Henry Fitzalan both hated Robert and they could have acted together in a Catholic-led conspiracy to end Robert’s chances of marrying the Queen.
However, it is hard to see how any noble or alliance of nobles could have managed such a plot without discovery. Although none of them would have committed the deed himself, no matter how carefully a plot is laid, there is always the risk of being caught. If one of the nobles arranged it, he would have used a servant, friend or co-conspirator, although any of these options carried the risk of someone turning informer. There were no successful plots against Elizabeth during her lifetime because her intelligence service was extremely vigilant and one of the plotters usually betrayed the plan, wittingly or unwittingly.
Nevertheless, Amy’s actions on the day might actually support the theory that she was the victim of a murder plot designed to look like an accident. She seemed to go to great lengths to make sure that everyone in Cumnor Place was out on that particular day, and when Mrs Owen and Mrs Odingsells declined, her angry outburst against Mrs Odingsells appears to have resulted in them not dining together. That meant Amy only had one dinner companion, and when she left the room to go down the stairs she was on her own. One reason for Amy to wish to be alone was that she was expecting a visitor.
A hypothetical scenario is that Amy was approached by a messenger, telling her there was a plot against her husband. This messenger may have arranged to come to the house on the evening of 8 September to bring Amy letters that she could send to Robert to warn him of the danger. However, as the messenger was afraid of being seen, could Amy arrange to be on her own that night? There was a fair in Abingdon and she could send her servants and friends there, saying she felt unwell and would not be joining them. At a prearranged time she could place a lighted candle in a window; the messenger would wait outside the house and creep in when he saw the light to meet Amy at the door at the bottom of the staircase. It would have been a simple job to snap her neck, arrange her artistically at the foot of the stairs and leave by the same way. According to information garnered for the enquiry, the hood of her robe had suspiciously not been ‘disarranged’: that is, was still over her head, which would be unlikely in an accidental fall down a staircase.
The tableau was perfect. If Amy’s death was deemed a suicide, Robert would be blamed for neglecting his ill wife and breaking her heart through his flirtations with Elizabeth. If the verdict was accidental death, Robert could be accused or at least suspected of a cover-up. If it was determined a murder, any investigation would centre on those at Court who hated or disliked Robert or, more satisfactorily, on Robert himself. Even without a firm conviction, the process would be time-consuming and enormously embarrassing for Robert.
Could one of the European Royal Courts have been responsible for plotting the murder? In 1560, Robert had one main rival for the Queen’s hand – Charles, Archduke of Austria. His foreign diplomats at the time believed that only Robert stood between a marriage between Charles and Elizabeth. Surely, if Robert were out of the running, Elizabeth would come to her senses and agree to marry him? The plot could have been hatched in Spain (which was part of the Holy Roman Empire ruled by Charles’s brother, Ferdinand I), well away from Cecil and his burgeoning secret service. The messenger would have had to speak English, but if he were in the employ of the Spanish he could have been on-board ship and on his way to Spain the day after the crime, before word reached Robert and the Court that Amy was dead.
Any investigation would falter if the planners and the perpetrator were out of the country. All that was necessary for their plan to succeed was that Robert should fall under suspicion, regardless of the outcome of any enquiry. The contents and timing of the letter from de Quadra to Philip would fit perfectly into the framework of a plan arranging the murder of Amy while making it look like an accident. The letter was very efficient in fuelling rumours that Robert had murdered his wife, supported by apparent ‘evidence’ supplied by Elizabeth and Cecil.
After the determination of the inquest, with Amy’s reputation safe from the taint of suicide, Robert was free to arrange a grand funeral and burial for his 28-year-old wife. On 20 September, her body was brought to Oxford, where her coffin rested in Worcester College. She was buried two days later in St Mary’s Church, Oxford. The funeral was suitably magnificent, with the church draped in black cloth, and fine apparel for Amy as well as the heralds attending the funeral procession. Money was no object, with ‘… the exchange of one hundred pounds of white money into gold, which was sent to Oxford for the charges of the burial’.22
Lady Margery Norris, a cousin of Alice, Anthony Forster’s wife, was the chief mourner at Amy’s funeral. She was accompanied by Sir Richard Blount, a close friend of Robert’s. Robert himself did not attend, as was the practice at the time. Custom held that a lady should act as chief mourner at another lady’s funeral, and the husband was not expected to be present. It is not safe to assume that guilt or remorse kept Robert away.
Exiled from the Court under a cloud of suspicion and rancour, Robert was grateful to his few supporters. Elizabeth’s Ambassador to the French Court, Sir Nicholas Throckmorton, wrote a tender letter to his friend:
I understand of the cruel mischance late happened to my lady your late bedfellow, to your discomfort … I will no further condole with your Lordship thereby to renew your grief, but only say that as we be all mortal … so is she gone before whither we must all follow to a place of more assurance and more quiet than can be found in this vale.23
Support also came from less likely sources. His previous rival William Cecil came to visit him. Although they had been in opposition, each striving to replace the other in the Queen’s counsel, Cecil was now supportive of his colleague. Robert wrote to Cecil,
‘I thank you much for your being here. And the great friendship you have showed towards me I shall not forget … I pray you let me hear from you what you think best for me to do … I beseech you sir, forget not to offer up the humble sacrifice you promised me.’24 The ‘humble sacrifice’ is presumably a deferential petition to the Queen, requesting permission to return to Court.
For her part, Elizabeth seemed to show suitable respect for Amy’s passing; a letter to Thomas Radclyffe, dated 6 October 1560 described Hampton Court as being ‘stuffed with mourners (yea many of the better sort in degree) for the Lord Robert’s wife’.25
Although many statesmen and diplomats believed Robert was innocent and that Amy’s death had been a tragic accident, others didn’t. Robert’s foreboding of rumours and conspiracy theories turned out to be accurate. By October, a month after Amy’s death, Sir Nicholas Throckmorton wrote to his English colleagues about the gossip openly circulating in France that she had been murdered.26 In letters to Robert and Cecil, he gave his opinion of what would result if Robert married Elizabeth at that time, ‘… the Queen our Sovereign discredited, condemned and neglected; our country ruined, undone and made prey.’27 The scandal was threatening to engulf political relations with European powers.
Throckmorton sent his secretary, Robert Jones, back to report to the English Court. In November, Jones arrived at Greenwich and reported to Cecil that Mary, Queen of Scots had said, ‘The Queen of England is going to marry the Master of her Horses, who has killed his wife to make room for her.’28 On 27 November, Jones told Elizabeth the same thing and reported that her reputation was being tarnished by the whole affair.
Elizabeth laughed, replying that the verdict had cleared Robert, who had been at Court when the death occurred and that none of his people had been at Cumnor. In Jones’s report of the conversation, he described the Queen as looking tired and ill, ‘surely the matter of my Lord Robert doth perplex her.’29 In December, Throckmorton wrote that the rumours were still persisting. Cecil wrote back, ‘I know surely that my Lord Robert himself hath more fear than hope, and so doth the Queen give him cause.’30 Cecil hoped that since Elizabeth was not obviously about to marry Robert, the rumours would eventually die out from lack of substance.
In fact, despite the passage of time, the rumours implicating Robert in Amy’s death would endure long after events. In 1567, seven years after Amy’s death, John Appleyard, her half-brother, fell out with Robert. Although he had received several posts through Robert’s influence, including Sheriff of Norfolk and Suffolk (in 1559, before Amy died), he claimed he had received only ‘fair promises’ and had not been rewarded by his brother-in-law as well as he imagined he should be.
He claimed that Robert’s followers had blackened his name for the offence of suggesting that his sister’s case be reopened, as he believed she had been murdered. He even asserted that ‘he had for the Earl’s sake covered the murder of his sister’. He would be imprisoned for his accusations, charged with being part of a plot to discredit Robert fabricated by Thomas Howard and Thomas Radclyffe, among others. On Appleyard’s release he submitted to the Court that he accepted that Amy’s death had, indeed, been an accident.31
Many years later, in a vitriolic attack on Robert Dudley called Leicester’s Commonwealth, published in 1584, the author recorded what purported to be an account of Robert’s life, but was, in fact, more of a character assassination. The text claimed that ‘this was my Lord’s good fortune to have his wife die at that time when it was like to turn most to his profit’.32
This false version of events became accepted as common knowledge and repeated in future publications, sometimes with additional scurrilous anecdotes. For example, in the Flores Calvinistici, published in the Netherlands in 1586, the author added the invention that Amy was ‘destroyed by a small nail thrust gradually into her head’. Future historians sometimes included quotations from Leicester’s Commonwealth, usually on the principle that there was no smoke without fire, despite the lack of proof for the purported facts.
Certainly just after Amy’s death, at the end of 1560, Elizabeth had reason to be concerned. She was well aware of public opinion at home and abroad. A full year before, in December 1559, Baron von Breuner, in his last report to Ferdinand I about Elizabeth’s marriage plans, had resignedly written that she would marry where she liked, ‘But herein she errs, for if she marry the said my Lord Robert, she will incur so much enmity that she may one evening lay herself down as Queen of England and rise the next morning as plain Mistress Elizabeth.’33
The conflict she must have felt between her desire to demonstrate her affection for Robert as well as her belief in his innocence and her understanding of the need to appease public opinion led to some contradictory behaviour.
In November 1560, two months after Amy’s death, she had papers drawn up that would finally give Robert a title: 1st Earl of Leicester. However, Elizabeth decided she could not grant him this reward at such a time. When she was due to sign them, she cut the papers up with a knife, saying in explanation that the Dudleys had been traitors for three generations.
Robert was furious, but Elizabeth reportedly patted him on the cheek, telling him, ‘No, no! The bear and ragged staff [Robert Dudley’s coat of arms] are not so easily overthrown.’34 However, Elizabeth also passed him over for another promotion in December, when Sir John Parry, Master of the Wards, died. Robert had hopes of being awarded this extremely lucrative appointment. Elizabeth gave it to Cecil instead.
Wider events were also having an impact on Elizabeth’s political decisions and marriage prospects. The King of France, François II, died in December 1560, leaving the 18-year-old Mary, Queen of Scots a widow and no longer Queen of France. She was now Elizabeth’s rival for marriage proposals from European royalty, and would soon return to rule Scotland. At the time, Scotland was torn between Catholic and Protestant factions, and the latter feared the Catholic Mary’s reign.
In December, a marriage was again proposed, this time formally, between Elizabeth and the Protestant James Hamilton, 3rd Earl of Arran, who was next in line for the Scottish crown after Mary. The Queen, ever diplomatic, praised Hamilton, but said she ‘was not disposed to marry’.35 This decision is in seeming contradiction to the fact that Elizabeth supported the Protestant rebels in Scotland and was wary of Mary, Queen of Scots, who had a claim to the English throne (they were cousins, descended from Henry VII). If Elizabeth should die childless, Mary was next in line to be Queen of England.
William Cecil hoped that Elizabeth would see reason and accept a husband, responding, ‘Well, God sent our mistress a husband and by time a son, that we may hope our posterity shall have a masculine succession. The matter is too big for weak folk and too deep for simple. The Queen’s Majesty knoweth of it, and so I will end.’36
In early 1561, the former Crown Prince and now King of Sweden, Eric XIV (King of Sweden 1560–68), also renewed his offer of marriage. The Swedish Court asked the English royal jeweller Dymock to come to Sweden with ‘jewels and patterns of jewels drawn on parchment’ and, to feel out the territory, took the opportunity to ask Dymock about the rumours that Elizabeth planned to marry Robert. Dymock reassured them, saying he had met with Kat Ashley, who he said had related to him that the Queen had said she would rather not marry, and certainly not Robert.
He continued, claiming that despite Robert giving the Queen an extravagant gift in the expectation of a title (probably a dukedom, to make him a more fitting consort for the Queen) and a large sum of money, he had in fact received no title and a small gift of land. Dymock told the Swedes that some of the Lords would surely support Eric’s suit and that he should push forward. He even claimed that Robert would also be in favour of a marriage between Eric and Elizabeth, especially if Robert were given the hand of Eric’s sister, Princess Cecilia, with a suitably large dowry.37 Eric appears to have taken much of this at face value since he continued his unwelcome wooing. He would also make an unsuccessful marriage proposal to Mary, Queen of S
cots.
In reality, Robert had no intention of reducing his pressure on Elizabeth to marry him, despite the evolving political outlook and his own changed fortunes. By January 1561, he had come up with a new scheme to persuade Elizabeth to overcome her fears and make him her husband. Ambassador de Quadra wrote to Philip II that Sir Henry Sidney, Robert’s brother-in-law, had approached him to tell him that the Queen was wishful to marry Robert, and suggested that if Philip supported the idea, Robert would become ‘like one of your own vassals’.38
As an extra bargaining point, Sidney remarked that Elizabeth was tired of the ranting of the extreme Protestant preachers, and that this might be a time to negotiate with her over how the state religion could develop in future. De Quadra, looking ahead, finished:
I have no doubt that if there is any way to cure the bad spirit of the Queen, both as regards religion and your Majesty’s interests, it is by means of this marriage, at least while her desire for it lasts … The general opinion, confirmed by certain physicians, is that this woman is unhealthy, and it is believed she will not have children, although there is no lack of people who say she has already had some, but of this I have seen no trace and do not believe it. This being so, perhaps some step may be taken in your Majesty’s interests towards declaring, as the Queen’s successor after her death, whoever may be most desirable to your Majesty.39
In February, Robert spoke directly to de Quadra, confirming what Sidney had said. De Quadra agreed to speak to the Queen, who told him she was indeed fond of Robert and that her subjects preferred that she marry an Englishman, although she had not definitely made her mind up to marry Robert – or anyone. Provocatively, she added in confidence that she would like to make de Quadra her confessor, as she had a secret she would like to tell him.
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