Elizabeth and Leicester

by Sarah Gristwood

  ‘Certainly, my Lord, as little while as I have been here, I have heard divers tales of her that maketh me to judge her to be a strange woman of mind,’ Blount adds, significantly. He had talked with Pirto (presumed to be Amy’s maid) and one who ‘doth dearly love her’. Asking Pirto what she thought of the matter, ‘either chance or villainy’, Pirto swore ‘very chance, and neither done by man nor by herself’. It is interesting that Pirto’s mind seems to have leapt to suicide independently. Amy, she said, ‘was a good virtuous gentlewoman, and daily would pray upon her knees; and divers times she [Pirto] saith that she hath heard [Amy] pray to God to deliver her from desperation’. That, said Blount, sounded as if Amy might have ‘an evil toy’ - a dangerous idea - in her mind. ‘No, good Mr. Blount, said Pirto, do not judge so of my words; if you should so gather, I am sorry I said so much.’ Given the treatment meted out to suicides in the sixteenth century - unsanctified burial and ‘shards, flints and pebbles’ in place of ‘charitable prayers’, as the priest says in Hamlet - Pirto’s hasty backtrack is not surprising.

  To unravel what had happened to Amy ‘passeth the judgement of any man’, Blount warned Robert, adding again: ‘but truly the tales I do hear of her maketh me to think she had a strange mind in her; as I will tell you at my coming’. It is a tantalizing rider. He adds that the jury seem both wise (for countrymen) and able; and if anything rather enemies to Anthony Forster than the reverse, which speaks well for their impartiality. ‘I have good hope they will conceal no fault, if any be.’ Robert cracked back a reply the very next day: until he hears how the matter falls out ‘I cannot be in quiet’. Again, he urges that the jury should ‘earnestly, carefully and truly deal in this matter . . . so shall it well appear to the world my innocency’.

  On the thirteenth Blount wrote again - promising, annoyingly, to bring Dudley a report in person, the very next day. So far the jury, he says, ‘be very secret; and yet do I hear a whispering that they can find no presumptions of evil . . . mine own opinion is much quieted; the more I search of it, the more free it doth appear unto me . . . the circumstances and as many things as I can learn doth persuade me that only misfortune hath done it, and nothing else.’

  Robert was hearing much the same thing, as he wrote in a last, undated, letter (from Windsor; clearly he was back at court, if briefly). ‘I have received a letter from one Smith, one that seemeth to be the foreman of the jury . . . and for anything that he or they by any search or examination can make in the world hitherto, it doth plainly appear, he saith, a very misfortune; which for mine own part, Cousin Blount, doth much satisfy and quiet me.’ But he does not want to leave it there.

  None the less, because of my thorough quietness and all others’ hereafter, my desire is that they may continue in their inquiry and examination to the uttermost, as long as they lawfully may; yea, and when these have given their verdict, though it be never so plainly found, assuredly I do wish that another substantial company of honest men might try again for more knowledge of troth.

  The Queen would seem to have vetoed this idea of a second coroner’s inquest. But Robert was right to fear that the affair would not die easily. Everyone, in fact, immediately latched on to one theory: that of Robert as murderer - or at the very least as instigator of murder.

  The curious thing is that de Quadra seems not to have been among them. His reportage of the event, at the time, was quite singularly free of shock or horror. His long letter of the eleventh starts off on his conversation with Elizabeth about the question of an Imperial marriage and moves on to the conversation in which Cecil so unexpectedly voiced his fears. Then he reports the important conversation with the Queen: he had managed to have a word with her as she came in from hunting, and she told him Robert’s wife was dead or nearly so, but asked him to say nothing about it. De Quadra then discoursed briefly upon the question of the succession in England before adding, by way of ending, ‘Since this was written the death of Lord Robert’s wife has been given out publicly. The Queen said in Italian “Que si ha rotto il collo.” [She has broken her neck.] It appears that she fell down a staircase.’ This is the first suggestion as to the nature of Amy’s injuries.

  Not ‘Lord Robert’s wife has died’, note, but ‘the death has been given out publicly’. Is it possible the whole edifice of guilt which has been constructed on the basis of de Quadra’s letter was founded on nothing more than a misconception? It has always been assumed that his so-damning conversation took place before the eighth, before Amy’s fall. But nothing in the actual letter of the eleventh compels this reading. It is just as possible that the conversation took place after news reached court on the ninth, when Elizabeth knew that something had happened, knew the construction that could be placed on it, but had not yet decided what her public response would be. (As for the ‘dead or nearly’ - do we know that Amy died instantly?)

  If this were so, then Cecil, too, would certainly have known of Amy’s fall; and would presumably have had to think very fast, in order to turn a potential disaster into an opportunity. Robert Dudley a blameless widower, free to marry, would be a catastrophe for him - and, he must have thought, for the country. But if Cecil could seize the chance to blacken the image of Robert Dudley, then disaster might be turned to advantage. It is worth remembering how successfully William Cecil (and in time his son) would later use this technique of taking an existing situation and giving it a ‘spin’ that turned it to their advantage; how skilfully they applied it against the gunpowder plotters, against the Scots Queen Mary.

  Cecil had every reason to wish to persuade de Quadra of Robert’s villainy. As he suggested to de Quadra that Robert was trying to poison his wife, he urged the ambassador that King Philip should throw all his influence against a match between Robert and Elizabeth. Later in the letter, de Quadra advised his king that if the two should marry, and Elizabeth lose her throne because of it, then - according to Cecil - ‘the true heir to the crown’ was the Earl of Huntingdon, whose heir was Robert’s brother-in-law, adding that he was a determined heretic and a probable friend to the French . . . It is as if every single thing Cecil said had been calculated to set the Spanish against the idea of Elizabeth’s marrying Robert Dudley.

  There is another possibility, which also leaves Robert - indeed, anyone! - innocent of murder, but casts the blame for the smear campaign differently. De Quadra himself was not wholly an impartial witness. Not only were ambassadors at the mercy of a court rumour mill they never dared ignore and of Englishmen with their own agendas who might deliberately leak information, true or false; they might have also their own fish to fry. Urging on his master the case for military intervention - fearful lest England make an alliance with France - de Quadra had a vested interest in painting the situation there as black as possible; an interest so powerful as even to prompt him, perhaps, to fudge the timing of his various conversations . . . A century ago, several historians of repute were already suggesting that de Quadra himself set out to suggest Elizabeth and Robert’s guilt ‘by a deft economy of dates’, though the idea seems to have disappeared a little from currency since.

  On 22 September Amy was buried at the Church of Our Lady in Oxford (some reports say she had already been interred once, at Cumnor, and then dug up to be more ceremoniously put away). This time, at least, she was buried with all the ceremony of velvet and scutcheons, full processional and feasts for the mourners; of ‘Rouge Crosse pursuivant’ and ‘Lancaster herald in his long gown, his hood on his head’. It cost Robert Dudley two thousand marks. He has, again, been blamed in the centuries since for not having attended the funeral himself; but in the sixteenth century personal mourners were usually of the same sex as the deceased. Nor were his movements entirely at his own command; he would have needed the Queen’s permission to travel to Oxford, and exhibit himself thus publicly.

  In his exile at Kew, Robert had received a few solicitous visitors (besides the tailor to fit him with mourning). Among them had been William Cecil, who came within a few days, to assure
Robert of his support. To this rival, perhaps even enemy, Robert wrote, rather touchingly, his thanks, and pleas for his intercession with the Queen.

  Sir, I thank you much for your being here, and the great friendship you have showed toward me I shall not forget . . . the sooner you can advise me thither [the sooner Cecil could get him permission to travel to court] the more I shall thank you. I am sorry so sudden [a] chance should breed in me so great a change, for methinks I am here all this while, as it were, in a dream, and too far, too far from the place where I am bound to be. I pray you help him that sues to be at liberty out of so great a bondage.

  Of course, support on Cecil’s part for Robert would make his allegations to de Quadra sound a little oddly. Somewhere, there is hypocrisy. But certainly Cecil was now in a good position to ask for favours. Robert’s disaster was his route back into the Queen’s confidence; in this crisis, impelled by self-preservation to keep Robert at arm’s length, Elizabeth turned immediately back to her secretary.

  The news spread slowly through Europe. On 23 September Randolph, the English ambassador to Scotland, was writing to Cecil about ‘the slanderous reports of the French’ (Scotland’s old allies); and on 10 October (news sent by Cecil on 20 September having taken almost a fortnight to arrive) came the first of many letters from Sir Nicholas Throckmorton, the English ambassador to the French court itself.

  A busy correspondent, Throckmorton had a responsible position in these months, when England was trying to conclude an important treaty with France; and he was not the man to make the least of any responsibility.15 An ambitious individual and an old ally of Cecil’s, he, like Cecil, believed Elizabeth should be guided by wiser heads. A convinced and longtime supporter of Elizabeth’s accession, he had none the less taken it upon himself to write her a detailed list of guidelines (instructions, even) for her behaviour in her new reign; having earlier been the one to warn Thomas Seymour off his pretensions. From the start, he clearly took the affair of Amy Dudley’s death as evidence of just how far wrong a female monarch - left to her own devices - could possibly go.

  His letter to Cecil on the tenth is full of lamentation about the rumour of foul play: ‘which as it was strange indeed, so has it been and is yet discoursed of here at pleasure, and liberally enough of the malicious French . . . God forbid that the rumour thereof should prove true.’ On the same day he wrote to another English correspondent of the ‘dishonourable and naughty reports ... which every hair of my head stareth at and my ears glow to hear’. People there were relishing the stories, he said, and ‘Some let not to say, what religion is this that a subject shall kill his wife, and the Prince not only bear withal but marry him?’

  Yet on the same day, Throckmorton also wrote to Robert himself of ‘the cruel mischance late happened to my Lady your late Bedfellow, to your discomfort. But for that God hath thus disposed of things, the greatest of your . . . [grief? trouble?] being assuaged, and the remembrance thereof partly worn, I will no further condole with your Lordship, thereby to renew your grief.’ The bulk of the letter is concerned with a horse Robert has given him, a coming tilt, and his urgent desire to be back in England, which he hopes Robert might promote . . . for Throckmorton was also on friendly terms with Robert Dudley.

  In a letter to Cecil on the twenty-eighth Throckmorton writes his private opinion of Robert Dudley: ‘I do like him for some respects well, and esteem him for many good parts and gifts of nature that be in him.’ Yet ‘if that marriage take place . . . our state is in great danger of utter ruin and destruction . . . the Queen our Sovereign discredited, contemned, and neglected; our country ruined, undone, and made prey’. He had already told Cecil, appalled, that Mary, Queen of Scots had joked that the Queen of England was about to marry her horsekeeper, who had killed his wife to make a place for her.

  It is worth noting that the concern of all these men (like that of Robert himself) seems, throughout, to be with reputation rather than reality. They cared what was thought of Dudley; and, by implication, of the Queen. In their letters, at least, they show no concern with the fundamental question whether he really had done his wife to death. Was it matter too dangerous to be written? Were they really that cynical? Or were they convinced of his innocence?16

  On 17 October Throckmorton wrote to Cecil that all men ‘take it for truth and certain she will marry Lord Robert Dudley, whereby they assure themselves that all foreign alliance and aid is shaken off, and do expect more discontentation thereby among yourselves. Thus you see your sore, God grant it do not with rankling fester too far and too dangerously.’ But at the beginning of that month, Cecil had told de Quadra that the Queen had informed him she would not marry Robert Dudley. She probably failed to say as much to Robert Dudley. In the face of his repeated pressure she agreed to raise him to the peerage. But when the time came, in one of her famous histrionic gestures, she took a knife and slashed up the letters patent.

  We know of the incident from Throckmorton’s secretary Robert Jones, whom the ambassador had sent back to London to remonstrate about the same old matter. In a long letter back to the ubiquitous Throckmorton, Jones manages to convey something of the tense and puzzled atmosphere around the court. Robert himself quizzed Jones about what the Queen of Scots had said; it’s hard to know whether it was tantalizing him, or galling him like a bite from a horse fly. When Jones had an interview with Elizabeth herself, in exasperation, or confusion, she tried to laugh the matter away, turning from side to side in embarrassment, as Jones reported vividly. She told him that the question of Amy’s death had been tried in the country, and that the coroner’s verdict showed it ‘should neither touch his honesty nor her honour’. He added: ‘The Queen’s Majesty looketh not so hearty and well as she did by a great deal, and surely the matter of my Lord Robert doth much perplex her.’ The marriage was never likely to take place, as being too widely opposed, ‘and the talk thereof is somewhat slack’.

  It sounds as though the death of Amy Dudley had left Elizabeth herself as perplexed as any. Perhaps she blamed Robert, for having been at least the inadvertent means of getting her into this mess. Her repeated refusal over the next few months to give him his earldom (even saying she wanted no more Dudleys - a family who had been traitors for three generations - in the House of Lords) smacks of anger and resentment, as well as mere concern for public opinion. But then, any pressure to advance a favourite to more power and independence would be enough to make her angry - and her impulses were often contradictory. It is hard to believe she really thought he had indeed murdered his wife. (If he had, then she herself was at least morally guilty.) Perhaps she saw Robert, like herself, as mere victim of a monstrous chance; believed that malign fate killed Amy Dudley. Or perhaps she suspected - even, conceivably, knew - that another person was guilty.

  What did happen to Amy Dudley? There can at this date be no certainty. There is a good case for saying that it is impossible ever really to solve a historical mystery, that the task is akin to that of proving a negative. You just don’t know what evidence is missing ... and this mystery in particular is bricks without straw; a postmodern detective story where every piece of evidence crumbles to your touch. But let us at least try to clear the air a little; first, by examining the case for and against the most popular historical suspect, Robert Dudley.

  Here the Blount letters are key. Unless these letters are to be taken as fakes, or as a subtle piece of double bluff intended to be ‘leaked’ to a sceptical third party, they surely exonerate Robert completely. It is perhaps unfortunate that the letters as they survive, in the Pepys Library in Cambridge, are not the originals, but contemporary copies, written in a hand that may be that of Blount but is not that of Robert Dudley. When the case came up for re-examination some years later, we hear that Blount has been asked to ‘do’ something by the investigators. To provide these copies? One cannot wholly exclude the possibility that the letters are forgeries; but if Robert and his supporters were going to the trouble of inventing a correspondence, surely they would
have cooked up something that cleared him completely - and, for the sake of verisimilitude, have bothered to fake two different hand-writings! 17 There is in the end no more (and no less) reason to mistrust the Blount letters than any other piece of historical testimony.

  Whatever faint question marks hang over them, the Blount letters still play a major place in the study of the case. The coroner’s report was lost for centuries, along with the all-important depositions he received. Instead we hear that John Appleyard (that half-brother of Amy’s who had been summoned to Cumnor) some years later queried the jury’s judgement. He was rumoured to have been saying that ‘he had not been satisfied with the verdict of the jury at her death, but that for the sake of Dudley he had covered the murder of his sister’. When haled before the privy council he denied having of his own volition said any such thing, and told instead a rambling story of a mysterious stranger who, the year before at Hampton Court, had taken him across the Thames to meet a third party, who offered to pay him a thousand pounds to spread a murder story. From the Fleet prison, Appleyard - told to produce any evidence he had - instead asked for a written copy of the coroner’s verdict, and declared himself satisfied when he had seen it: ‘Not only such proofs testified under the oaths of 15 persons how my late sister by misfortune happened of death, but also such manifest and plain demonstration thereof as hath fully and clearly satisfied and persuaded me.’ Appleyard could have been under pressure to recant; but then he could indeed have been bribed to make the original allegation, at a time when Robert was beset by enemies.18 Again, nothing is conclusive. We are left with supposition and suggestion merely.