Elizabeth and Leicester

by Sarah Gristwood

  One thing perhaps suggestive of Robert’s innocence is his very passivity in the first days after his wife’s death. He behaved like a man baffled, rather than one who had a response ready. But to the more pressing of his posthumous detractors, even this did not argue that he was not expecting Amy’s murder. To them, it merely suggests that he was not expecting it to happen at quite this time or in quite this way.

  It may be interesting to compare two authors on the subject: both writing in the nineteenth century, the heyday of speculation about Robert and Amy. Between them, they print virtually all of the documents quoted above; but the two make their selections very differently.

  George Adlard, whose Amye Robsart and the Earl of Leicester was printed in London in 1870, gives the Blount correspondence in full, while discussing contemporary (and subsequent) reaction in curiously modern terms - as image-making rather than indictment. Adlard believes Robert Dudley innocent, and subscribes, with caution, to the suicide theory. He is the writer most often cited by modern historians in their source notes today.

  By contrast, Walter Rye, whose The Murder of Amy Robsart: A Brief for the Prosecution was published in Norfolk (Amy’s territory) in 1885, makes only passing reference to the Blount correspondence, which he takes to be a series of covert suggestions on Robert Dudley’s part that Blount should lean on the jury. He does, however, quote Throckmorton’s letters in detail (and repeatedly cites Cecil, whom he takes to be an unimpeachable authority). His work is much less considerable than Adlard’s; indeed, it might hardly be worth discussing, except that it stands as a good exemplar of the other side’s theory.

  Amy was to have been poisoned (so this theory runs); but she was so careful that this attempt failed, and the assassins therefore turned instead to direct violence. Amy was indeed desperate, but not because she was suicidal in any way; because she knew her husband was trying to poison her. It all looks rather shaky if you remember that the only named source of the poison rumour is Cecil, and if you decide there is any reason to suspect Cecil’s veracity. To Rye, Robert Dudley was a likely poisoner because he was alleged to have poisoned several other people in the years ahead; so many, indeed, that he takes four pages to run through them all. But these allegations were made in what came to be known as Leicester’s Commonwealth, a scurrilous pamphlet, by an anonymous Catholic author, printed late in Robert’s life with the patent intention of doing him harm;19 and before that in another anonymous tract, the recently discovered Journal of matters of state, in circulation soon after Amy’s death.

  So what, then, about the other possible causes of Amy Dudley’s death? I am inclined to ignore the possibility of complete misadventure - that a happy, healthy Amy simply happened to fall down the stairs so awkwardly that, against the odds, she broke her neck. It’s not impossible, but it leaves every other oddity of the case unaccounted for. Still, natural causes are a possibility.

  Reports described Amy as suffering from ‘a malady in one of her breasts’ - presumably breast cancer. This may have been what Elizabeth meant, in saying Amy would soon be dead. Modern medicine has been co-opted to suggest that untreated cancer could have led to cancerous deposits breaking away from the original tumour to settle on Amy’s spinal column, causing an abnormal brittleness. Not only could a short fall have been fatal, but even the slight series of shocks involved in a walk downstairs could possibly (according to the theory put forward by Professor Ian Aird in 1956) have fractured a vertebra. This image of a kind of spontaneous skeletal collapse - like the mummy in an old horror movie - may sound unlikely, but it receives more credence than the other medical theory: that Amy suffered an aortic aneurism. (According to this scenario, the increasing enlargement of an artery could have caused pain and swelling in the chest, the resulting erratic blood flow to the brain leading to irrational fits of anger or depression, until sudden rupture caused death and, obviously, a consequent fall: no forensic medicine of the sixteenth century could tell whether, when Amy’s neck snapped, she was dead already.) Aird’s attention, he said, was first caught by a claim, made in Leicester’s Commonwealth, that Amy’s terrible supposed ‘fall’ had yet mysteriously not been violent enough to disturb ‘the hood that stood upon her head’. Coming from that publication, the detail itself has to be treated sceptically. (The Spaniards, by contrast, had been told that Amy had been found with a dagger wound on her head - unlikely to be literally true, since a knife to the scalp is no way of killing anybody, but perhaps suggesting the mark of a fall.) None the less, if Aird’s supposition were correct, Amy may simply have collapsed where she stood, and her fall been a less disruptive affair.

  Faint circumstantial evidence of illness comes from a letter written to Robert after the event by his brother-in-law the Earl of Huntingdon. In a postscript added to a routine note, he makes surprisingly casual reference to ‘the death of my lady your wife’. ‘I doubt not but long before this time you have considered what a happy hour it is which bringeth man from sorrow to joy, from mortality to immortality, from care and trouble to rest and quietness, and that the Lord above worketh all for the best to them that love him.’ The ‘long before this time’ may refer to all the other deaths Robert had known, rather than specifically to Amy - but it is true that the tone is unsurprised, brisk and unfussy, as if her death had been foreseen within the family.

  If Amy were ill but not suicidal, of course, we would have to assume that she sent her servants away because her condition made her desperate for that commodity so rare in Elizabethan times: privacy. Or we could dismiss her hysterical (and anachronistic) insistence on solitude as an irrelevance. But it may be helpful to see Amy’s illness not as a primary cause of her death, but as an underlying condition that either gave her a reason to wish to end her life, or brought other factors into play.

  Of the two theories that remain to us - suicide, or murder by a third party - both (given Amy’s illness as a precondition) can be fitted to the evidence we have, entirely. They are the only two theories of which this is true.20 The others may fit most of the facts, but they leave some ends hanging very oddly.

  The fashionable theory of recent years has been death by the hand of that third party. But we have not returned to the old nineteenth-century assumption of Robert’s guilt; the century whose perceptions were coloured by Sir Walter Scott’s long-influential Kenilworth and its picture of blackest villainy. Though Robert Dudley can never conclusively be dismissed as the villain of the piece,21 there is, as we have seen, one other candidate, to whom the natural death of Robert Dudley’s wife would have represented a threat, not an opportunity. It is possible to read Robert’s insistence that the jury act without respect of persons as reflecting his suspicion that there existed such another guilty party. Someone determined Robert Dudley should be blamed; someone who saw the prospect of his marriage to Elizabeth as disastrous for the country. The notion of William Cecil’s guilt became popular in the last part of the twentieth century. Perhaps that reflects the modern love of a conspiracy theory. Perhaps it is just that he makes so convincing a hate figure for our times: the faceless Whitehall mandarin, capable of any covert villainy.

  Cecil had the best motive. One has only to think of Cecil’s position before Amy’s scandalous death; and his very different position after it. He was at once the person who seemed to have foreknowledge of Amy’s death, and the chief beneficiary of it. He is a constant presence throughout the story: the Queen’s comforter; Throckmorton’s correspondent; the first leaker, before the event, of homicide rumours to Europe (so uncharacteristic, so stupid, if it really were a leak); the one known source of the poison theory. In his later, private, memo about Robert Dudley’s unsuitability as Elizabeth’s husband, he describes Robert as ‘infamed’ by his wife’s death - not as guilty of it. An odd emphasis, since he was notching up every possible score against Robert - unless he knew Robert to be not guilty.22

  But if Cecil actually had Amy murdered in order to damage Robert Dudley, the risks he ran were huge. He was gambling that El
izabeth’s reputation would not be irreparably damaged by association, and gambling that her disgrace would not affect the status of the Protestant religion, of which she was the most visible exponent. On the other hand, if Amy were really terminally ill, then Cecil’s motive becomes all the stronger. If she were going to die anyway, it was vital that she should die in such a manner as not to open the way for Robert’s marriage to Elizabeth. Or did the thought that Robert might soon be a blameless widower frighten someone other than Cecil, someone for whom Cecil was an obvious tool and ally?

  If Cecil were guilty of murder, the open question (as it is if Robert was the murderer) must be to what degree, if any at all, Elizabeth knew or guessed at what was going on. She would later manage ‘not to know’ about a death - that of the Queen of Scots - even when she had herself signed the death warrant. Of course, this takes us straight back to the heart of the sixty-four-thousand-ducat question itself: did Elizabeth really want to marry - to marry even Robert Dudley? It has been said she had Amy killed because she wanted to make him available. It is conceivable that, on the contrary, she had Amy killed to put him out of court; so that she could avoid marrying him, without losing him completely. It would, perhaps, have been out of character for her to have acted alone in this, and directly. But a half-and-half position, of the kind Elizabeth always favoured? She would probably not have had to utter the words, to admit the actual intent. A hint, a half-breathed wish, might do it - the ‘Who will rid me of this turbulent priest?’ theory.

  If Amy were gravely ill (or even amenable to a divorce) - if Robert told her he would soon be free - did Elizabeth see it as a promise, or a threat? It used to be assumed that her feelings about Amy’s life and death were identical with those of Robert. That is a huge assumption - and unwarrantable, actually. We have here some benefit from hindsight. Elizabeth’s contemporaries still, at this point in her life, assumed that she - that any natural woman - must and would want to marry. We have the great advantage of knowing what happened in the next four decades; knowing of her deliberate policy of single blessedness, her trumpetings of virginity.

  But if Elizabeth were in any way aware of what would happen, then she was running even more of a risk than Cecil. And, even more importantly, she was crazy to have anything remotely resembling the conversation de Quadra reported. And although she was clearly distressed in the weeks afterwards, it was not quite the behaviour she usually exhibited when (as after the death of Mary, Queen of Scots) she felt herself guilty. In the end, there is nothing more than circumstantial evidence to suggest even Cecil’s guilt, let alone Elizabeth’s complicity.

  It is interesting to see how things work out if one turns, instead, to the possibility of suicide. There is evidence beyond those rumours of breast cancer that something was wrong with Amy. The reports of the ambassadors, of Blount, of Pirto-via-Blount and even of Leicester’s Commonwealth all tend that way. Amy’s insistence upon being left alone at Cumnor that day gives considerable weight to the suicide theory. Leicester’s Commonwealth said that Dr Bayly, a noted Oxford physician, was called to prescribe because Amy was so ‘sad and heavy’. The point the tract was trying to draw was that Bayly refused, since he was so afraid his medicine might be used as cover for poison, but the basic information contained is just this: that Amy was very melancholy. She had, of course, good reason to be - her husband’s relationship with the Queen, quite apart from any malady.

  The flustered statement of Amy’s devoted maid tells us her mistress had been depressed in recent months; and though Pirto insisted Amy would never have taken her own life, she would say (even think) that, wouldn’t she? Suicide was an appalling crime to the sixteenth century, punished by unsanctified burial at the public crossroads and damnation for all eternity. And the maid’s initial point was that Amy was desperate, praying to God to deliver her out of her melancholy.

  Against this has been offered the shortness and shallowness of the ‘pair’ of stairs concerned (a flight broken by a landing in the middle), which would have made death extremely chancy. That might have meant she would not die instantly . . . But, no-one has ever said she did die instantly. The staircase at Cumnor has long been destroyed, so no-one can measure it. And if Amy were ill then the state of her health, besides providing one motive for suicide, may indeed have come into play. A fall might have killed her that would not have killed someone healthy.

  She cannot have been wholly sunk in melancholy that autumn. The letter to her tailor, ordering a velvet gown, was written only a fortnight before her death. But a fortnight is more than long enough for a dark mood to come upon one; nor would Amy have been the first or the last woman to turn to shopping in an attempt to cheer herself up. (A Spanish report has been cited alleging that Amy was ‘playing at tables’, gambling, when she left the room and went to her death, which if true would hardly sound suicidal - but that report was made only in 1584, in a document that may be the nucleus for Leicester’s Commonwealth.) Hers may have been a half-hearted attempt at suicide rather than a determined plan - what Adlard, writing in the Victorian age when suicide was still a crime, elegantly glossed as ‘an involuntary act of self-destruction’ under the influence of ‘an aberration of mind’; or what one modern coroner calls ‘parasuicide’. (The coroner adds, moreover, that the ‘ideation’ of Amy’s death, right down to the reaction of her friends and relatives, fits the pattern of suicide precisely.) If Amy were distressed by her husband’s relationship with the Queen, there may have been the well-known element of ‘then they’ll be sorry’. Lastly, if Amy were ill and taking medicine, one might have to query the effect, on the mind as well as the body, of cordials, stored in leaden vessels, that combined red wine and laudanum; of medical treatments that, besides such arcane but probably anodyne ingredients as powdered crabs’ eyes or pigeon dung, might involve arsenic or mercury. Without more information, we cannot really factor this possibility into the equation, but neither can we discount it entirely.

  The more we read Blount’s letters, the more it sounds as if he were edging around the suicide theory. And in an age when suicide was a mortal sin, Robert’s repeated insistence that the jury should speak as they found, without fear or favour to any living person, might be read as a message they should not hesitate to record a verdict of suicide if necessary.

  Clearly they did not do so; if they had, Amy could not have been given her lavish Christian burial. But sympathy for the deceased - or fear of the living - may have come into play; the Queen would not have enjoyed having it known Amy had been driven to act so desperately (which may have accounted for her uncertainty over what to say to de Quadra). And even in death, ‘great ones’ have more licence - as Hamlet’s Gravedigger said of Ophelia, so shrewdly:

  First Gravedigger : Is she to be buried in Christian burial that wilfully seeks her own salvation?

  Second Gravedigger: I tell thee she is, therefore make her grave straight. The coroner hath sat on her, and finds it Christian burial . . .

  Will you ha’ the truth on’t? if this had not been a gentlewoman, she should have been buried out o’ Christian burial.

  Though Shakespeare was not born at the time of Amy’s death, his birth in the area of Dudley influence, and his work with actors - like James Burbage - who had been in Robert’s own company, the Earl of Leicester’s Men, make it likely he would have been familiar with the story.

  If Amy Dudley committed suicide, then William Cecil was guilty of nothing more than a little ‘black PR’. And no-one in the Elizabethan battle for hearts and minds ever baulked at fighting dirty. But much, as always, depends on the real mystery that was Elizabeth’s mind. If one could evaluate that, then one might be better placed to evaluate the scanty evidence as to the solution of the Amy Dudley mystery.

  That mind was never more incalculable than in the period immediately ahead - the few years that followed the death of Amy Dudley. The scandal fired by the affair did not quickly die away. But just when one might have expected Elizabeth to become more circumspect with Rob
ert, she became less so. She spoke of her affection for him more openly than ever, now that the furore seemed to make him as unmarriageable as ever a living wife could have done. There was always something of the bully in Elizabeth, as there had been in her father. Those who had given her an inch found themselves missing an ell, and she probably never enjoyed her Robin more than when she had him at a disadvantage. Who knows whether he understood this clearly? He did understand Elizabeth, perhaps better than anybody. But he was also the child of his age - replete with the generic confidence of the sixteenth-century male.

  Robert’s position had changed, superficially giving him more freedom of action; in fact possibly far less. But something had changed for Elizabeth, too. She had gained from her ability to surmount this crisis; from the establishment of where her private pleasures and her monarchical responsibilities came in her priorities. She had, in this, demonstrated the difference between her and her sister Mary. She behaved like someone who had survived a dangerous situation (as she had, in that she was still on the throne), but, more, like someone who found herself freed from a problem. She had, in fact, the slightly dizzy confidence of someone who - whether or not she had actually done anything to achieve it - found she had been granted a victory.

  7

  ‘Maiden honour and integrity’ 1560-1561

  IN ONE OF ELIZABETH I’S ACCOUNT BOOKS THERE IS RECORDED THE purchase of a bed. Its wooden frame was carved, painted and gilded; its tester and valance of cloth of silver figured with velvet. The curtains were tapestry, trimmed with gold and silver lace, and buttons of precious metal. For the headpiece, crimson satin had been brought from Bruges and capped with ostrich feathers shimmering with gold spangles. At her palace of Richmond (so a later visitor noted with wonder) Elizabeth slept in a boat-shaped bedstead with curtains of ‘sea water green’, quilted with light brown tinsel; at Whitehall, the bed itself was worked in woods of different colours and hung with Indian painted silk. In the Elizabethan house, with its scanty list of solid furnishing and extensive catalogue of textiles, the bed was an important and emotive item - witness Shakespeare’s famous bequest of his ‘second best bed’ to his wife. But in Elizabeth’s case the question, of course, is whether she slept in hers alone, or whether Robert Dudley ever shared it with her.