Elizabeth and Leicester

by Sarah Gristwood

  Increasingly, though, as time passed, observers took the threat of a King Robert more seriously. There were more reports that the only bar to the match was the life of Amy Dudley. In January 1560, the new Spanish ambassador de Quadra could write that ‘If there be any other who knows the Queen’s purpose it is my Lord Robert, in whom it is easy to recognize the King that is to be.’ De Quadra saw no hopeful outcome for such a match: the English people themselves would surely ‘do something to set this crooked business straight. There is not a man who does not cry out on him and her with indignation.’ None the less, Elizabeth ‘will marry none but the favoured Robert’.

  At the beginning of March, Elizabeth, so de Quadra complained, was treating the Spanish envoy ‘like a dog’. He was in no doubt of whom to blame. Forget Robert’s earlier offer of himself as the Habsburgs’ intermediary: Lord Robert, the Spanish ambassador wrote now, was ‘heartless, spiritless, treacherous and false. There is not a man in England who does not cry out upon him as the Queen’s ruin.’ All the same, Robert appeared to be treating de Quadra with a measure of confidence: casting out lures to see what foreign backing he could recruit, probably. By the end of the same month, ‘Lord Robert says that if he lives a year he will be in another position from that which he at present holds. Every day he presumes more and more, and it is now said that he means to divorce his wife.’ On another occasion, the ambassador reported a different story: that Amy was to be poisoned, the gossip coming ‘from a person who is accustomed to giving me veracious news’. The same tale was passed on by the Imperial ambassador, de Quadra’s ally. But rumours of poison at sixteenth-century courts were two a penny.

  To such a point were the names of Dudley and the Queen coupled that on 29 April ambassadors were writing from Madrid that the government there had given them warning of a plot to murder Elizabeth and Robert together. That summer, the chief opponent to their marriage was sent out of the way. Penmen were out of favour - the Queen said she wanted a swordsman to set against these scribes. And so William Cecil was sent north to the Scottish court, to try to establish more friendly relations with that country. (The close alliance between the Scots to the north and the French to the south had long posed a threat to England’s security.) It may well have been Robert who urged Elizabeth to send Cecil north, while the court set out on a summer progress that was more than usually pleasurable and heady. When Cecil returned at the end of the summer, he was horrified to find the Queen ungrateful for the very favourable terms he had managed to pull off, and Robert even more in the ascendancy.

  On 13 August one Anne Dowe, of Brentford, was imprisoned for claiming that the Queen had borne Robert’s child; on 27 August Cecil wrote to his friend Randolph, talking of resigning. It is in this context that the famous events of that September must be seen.

  6

  ‘So sudden a chance’ Autumn 1560

  ON ONE DAY IN EARLY SEPTEMBER, SO DE QUADRA WROTE IN A letter of the eleventh, William Cecil had been speaking to him - the agent of a foreign power! - with what seemed to be a most extraordinary and uncharacteristic frankness.

  He [Cecil] perceived the most manifest ruin impending over the Queen through her intimacy with Lord Robert. The Lord Robert had made himself master of the business of the State, and of the person of the Queen . . . Of Lord Robert, he said twice that he would be better in Paradise than here . . . Last of all he said that they were thinking of destroying Lord Robert’s wife. They had given out that she was ill; but she was not ill at all, she was very well, and taking care not to be poisoned.

  Later in the same letter, de Quadra wrote something even more extraordinary. ‘The day after this conversation the Queen, on her return from hunting, told me that the Lord Robert’s wife was dead, or nearly so, and begged me to say nothing about it.’ And the ambassador added a prescient rider: ‘Assuredly it is a matter full of shame and infamy, but for all this I do not feel sure she will immediately marry him, or indeed that she will marry him at all.’

  In other words, or so it has always seemed, at some time after 4 September (the date of de Quadra’s previous letter) and certainly by the eleventh, Queen Elizabeth told the Spanish ambassador that Robert Dudley’s wife was about to die. On the eighth, Amy Dudley was found dead or dying at the bottom of a staircase.

  This is the conjunction of events that has served to blacken the reputation of Elizabeth and - far more strongly - Robert for posterity; damning, it seems, in that the conversation is usually assumed to have dated from the earlier part of the week between the ambassador’s letters. But why - if murder were really what she meant - would Elizabeth announce it, and to the man most likely to send the damaging news straight to the heart of Catholic Europe? It is as unlikely as . . . well, as Cecil’s odd and uncharacteristic garrulity.

  Who was Amy Dudley? There are no certain portraits, no contemporary descriptions of Amy herself to be found, and very little correspondence. Our mental image of her owes most to the enduring influence of Sir Walter Scott’s novel Kenilworth, and that pre-Victorian piece of anachronism was of course pure fantasy. (Renamed after Scott’s publishers rejected Cumnor Place as too unromantic a title, it conflates the death of Amy Dudley with Elizabeth’s visit to Robert at Kenilworth Castle a decade and a half later.) So if we see Amy as meek - pale, perhaps; diminutive, maybe - we have to remember it is just as possible she was hefty, red-cheeked and fiery. Our sole piece of evidence comes from the Imperial ambassador who once said that Robert, despite his pretensions to Elizabeth’s hand, had ‘a beautiful wife’ already. But he had probably not even seen Amy Dudley.

  There is, nevertheless, a certain amount we can deduce about her relationship with her husband. Back in 1553 she had been granted permission to visit Robert in the Tower, and to tarry there as long as the Lieutenant thought suitable. The implication is, at the least, that at this point the two Dudleys might still be expected to crave each other’s company. Only two years before his wife’s death, in July 1558, Robert was to be found writing in detail about the proposed rental of a house in Norfolk, with its grazing lands and sheep pens, where he presumably proposed to live with Amy. We cannot automatically assume that all vestige of marital loyalty had quite died away.

  The plan to set up home in Norfolk had fallen through when the events of autumn 1558 made it clear Robert would soon have other matters to attend to, and since then Amy’s life had been spent moving between the houses of friends and family: Hertfordshire - Lincolnshire - Bury St Edmunds - Camberwell. It was probably quite a cheerful life in the short term, nor was it so unusual in the sixteenth century, when most great aristocratic households were peripatetic. It was, on the other hand, possibly not a way of life she would wish to continue indefinitely.

  True, Amy came rarely to court - but the Queen discouraged the visits of all courtiers’ wives, not just those of Amy Dudley. (And to be fair to Elizabeth, aside from her wish to be queen bee, there was a very real question of overcrowding.) In the first months of Elizabeth’s reign, Robert’s account books show a steady stream of gifts and messages to his wife: ‘certain hackneys for my lady’, 10s for hose ‘for my lady’s boy’, 20s to furnish a horse to carry Amy’s own clothes, 35s for russet taffeta ‘to make my lady a gown’; a hood, a chain - these were probably presents, since Amy (an heiress in her own right) seems to have herself paid the bulk of her household expenses; 100s ‘delivered to my lady by your lordship’s commandment’. (This last, rivetingly if irrelevantly, comes right after 5s to Lord Darby’s [Derby’s] servant ‘for bringing your lordship puffins’.)

  The two were clearly not often together at this time. ‘Item to Johns for his charges riding to Mr Hyde’s to my lady.’ ‘Item to Langham for ii days’ board and wages attending upon my lady at Christchurch your lordship being at Windsor.’ But there was obvious friendly contact - even personal contact. (In a separate account book: 22s ‘for spices bought by the cook when your Lordship rode to my lady’s’.) Recent researches into this period of their lives have revealed that Robert visite
d Amy at Mr Hyde’s in the spring of 1559 (just when his relationship with Elizabeth first attracted comment!), and that she visited London some six weeks after that. There is, however, no evidence of their meeting after that summer.

  One of the two extant letters of Amy’s own is a note to a London tailor, with orders for a velvet gown ‘with such a collar as you made my rose taffeta gown’. Even that serves to show that she had once a bustling and prosperous existence beyond her role as the pale and tragic ghost of legend. The only personal letter of hers that survives was written to her husband’s steward and concerns ‘the going of certain sheep’ at their estate in Siderstern, the price of the wool to be had from the sheep, and her husband’s desire to ‘see those poor men satisfied’ even at the cost of a less than profitable sale. The interest lies in Amy’s admission that she had forgotten to speak to Robert about the matter before he left, ‘he being sore troubled with weighty affairs, and I not being altogether in quiet for his sudden departing’. We have here a couple with problems on their mind - with diverging spheres of interest, perhaps - but yet, a wife who can order her husband’s affairs with authority. And the ‘sudden departing’ may have been for any cause - even for his going to the French wars with Philip - depending on when, precisely, the (undated) letter was written. But if we do not know what Amy was thinking in those months, when the infrequency of his visits might be taken to reflect the waning of his interest, then we hardly know what her husband was thinking, either. It is possible that Robert Dudley did not clearly envisage his ideal future, or what would be necessary to bring it about, when he set out to court Elizabeth. (It sounds a little like the wilful blindness that spasmodically affected her father, King Henry.)

  In the spring or summer of 1560, Amy moved to Cumnor Place near Abingdon and Oxford. The house had been leased (from the family of the former royal physician, Dr Owen) by Robert’s treasurer and longtime associate Anthony Forster. The grey stone building, dating from the fourteenth century and once the infirmary and summer retreat of a monastic foundation, was subsequently bought by Forster - described on his tomb in the local church as ‘a very amiable man, very learned, a great musician, builder, and planter’ - and he had probably already started to give it a gloss of Elizabethan modernity. Allowed to decay over subsequent centuries, it was finally pulled down. What echoes of the Dudley connection survive in today’s Cumnor - like the legend that nine local priests were once called to exorcise Amy’s restless ghost - probably owe more to literature than to history.14 And information enough survives - an illustration displayed in the church, brooded over by a contemporary statue of Elizabeth that Robert may have commissioned, since he once owned the house where it was found - to suggest that, medieval or no, Cumnor Place was far from the lonely, echoing pile of popular mythology.

  But of course, Amy Dudley’s name is known not for anything about her life; merely for the manner of her death. Yet even on that, our sources of information are quite extraordinarily limited, considering the huge edifice of story that has been built upon them. The main piece of direct evidence has always been the letters exchanged, immediately after Amy Dudley’s death, between Robert and a man called Thomas Blount - ‘Cousin Blount’ - Robert’s chief household officer and longtime satellite of the Dudley family. It was he to whom Robert first turned when a messenger from Forster’s household arrived at the court, then in Windsor, to tell him his wife was dead. As he wrote - on the evening of 9 September - Blount appears to have been already headed towards Cumnor; and it was upon him that Robert relied for as much news as could be gleaned.

  Cousin Blount, - Immediately upon your departing from me there came to me Bowes, by whom I do understand that my wife is dead, and, as he saith, by a fall from a pair of stairs. Little other understanding can I have of him. The greatness and the suddenness of the misfortune doth so perplex me [that] until I do hear from you how the matter standeth, or how this evil should light upon me, considering what the malicious world will bruit [gossip], as I can take no rest. And, because I have no way to purge myself of the malicious talk that I know the wicked world will use, but one, which is [that] the very plain truth be known, I do pray you, as you have loved me, and do tender me and my quietness, and as now my special trust is in you, that [you] will use all the devices and means you can possible for the learning of the troth; wherein have no respect for any living person.

  Robert has often been blamed that his first concern, with his wife dead, was for his own reputation. His wholehearted concern was for ‘my case’, when the woman he had once loved was dead and cold. But if he were as aware of image and spin as his career suggests (and few Elizabethan courtiers were ignorant of these matters), he would have understood instantly just how this blow would strike him most shrewdly. It has been seen as suspicious that he jumped instantly to the possibility of foul play. But he knew his world. He has been blamed for not instantly setting off for Cumnor; had he done so, of course, the allegation would have been that he wanted to supervise the cover-up in person. And since it was probably on Elizabeth’s orders that he had left court and confined himself at Kew (where, the year before, Elizabeth had granted him ‘a capital mansion, called the Dairy House’), there was little he could do except to send frantic word that there should be an inquiry into Amy’s death, which he declared would vindicate him completely.

  He urged Blount that the coroner should be charged

  to make choice of no light or slight persons, but the discreetest and [most] substantial men, for the juries, such as for their knowledge may be able to search thoroughly and duly, by all manner of examinations, the bottom of the matter, and for their uprightness will earnestly and sincerely deal therein without respect: and that the body be viewed and searched by them; and in every respect to proceed by order and law . . . For, as the cause and manner thereof doth marvellously trouble me, considering my case many ways, so shall I not be at rest till I may be ascertained [how the matter doth stand], praying you, even as my trust is in you, and as I have ever loved you, do not dissemble with me, neither let anything be hid from me, but send me your true conceit and opinion of the matter, whether it happened by evil chance or by villainy.

  More convincing yet was the fact that (he added in a postscript) he had sent for Amy’s half-brother Appleyard, ‘and other of her friends’ to go to Cumnor, ‘that they may be privy and see how all things do proceed’.

  In fact, much of Robert’s letter to Blount was unnecessary. By the time it reached him, Blount knew of Amy’s death already. On the eleventh (the day when, from Windsor, Elizabeth officially announced Amy’s death, and put the court into mourning) he wrote to Robert: ‘The present advertisement I can give to your Lordship at this time is, too true it is that my Lady is dead, and, as it seemeth, with a fall; but yet how or which way I cannot learn.’

  The night after he left Robert at Windsor (and after meeting Bowes on the way), Blount lodged at an inn at Abingdon, ‘and, because I was desirous to hear what news went abroad in the country, at my supper I called for mine host, and asked him what news was thereabout’. This was a little disingenuous, perhaps (like Polonius’ advice, or the proverbial sprat to catch mackerel). And it has been thought odd that Blount’s first concern, like Robert’s own, was with what the people thought; odd how ready he seems to have been to behave like an agent in enemy territory. But his technique worked. The landlord told him a great misfortune had happened within three or four miles of the town: ‘he said, my Lord Robert Dudley’s wife was dead: and I axed how; and he said, by a misfortune, as he heard, by a fall from a pair of stairs; I asked him by what chance; he said, he knew not: I axed him what was his judgement, and the judgement of the people; he said, some were disposed to say well, and some evil.’

  The greatest argument for a sheer accident, the landlord said, sprang from Forster’s reputation for honesty. Blount went on pressing. ‘Mythinks, said I, that some of her people that waited upon her should somewhat say to this. No sir, said he, but little; for it was said that
they were all here at the fair, and none left with her.’ Then, in response to Blount’s astonished query (a great lady, left unattended?), the landlord came out with an intriguing piece of information. ‘It is said how that she [Amy] rose that day very early, and commanded all her sort to go [to] the fair, and would suffer none to tarry at home; and thereof is much judged.’ No-one spells out what is judged, precisely. But if there were any suspicion of suicide, then there would be this sympathetic veil of vagueness.

  Indeed, Blount reports, he has now had this confirmed by the servants themselves. They ‘affirmed that she would not that day suffer one of her own sort to tarry at home, and was so earnest to have them gone to the fair, that with any of her own sort that made reason of tarrying at home she was very angry’. She was even angry with Mrs Odingsells (a widow living in the house, and one in whose own family house Amy had often stayed), when she said that this day, Sunday, was no day for gentlewomen to go to the fair, and that she preferred the (presumably less crowded) Monday. They asked who would keep Amy company if everyone indeed went to the fair, and she said she would dine with Mrs Owen (who, having been wife to the house’s former owner, Henry VIII’s physician, was possibly too elderly for a fair’s frivolity).