“Where is she?” he shouts and then, even louder, “Where is she? Where is she?”
“Where’s who?” I ask, scared out of my wits. I cast a glance at Owain who is still staring into the fire and hasn’t noticed.
“Where is she?” bellows the man in the portrait, stepping out of it and onto the mantel piece. I jump to my feet, terrified.
“I don’t know. Where’s who? Who do you mean?”
To my horror the man in the black clothes jumps down from the mantelpiece and strides menacingly towards me.
“I don’t know who you mean. Where’s who?” I’m sick with fear. To my concern he now turns away from me and strides towards Owain.
“Where is she? Where is she? Here she is.”
“Grandmother, grandmother look at this. Just look!”
What are my grandchildren doing in my dream. In my dream! I’m wakening, thank God, and they come rushing towards me.
“Grandmother, you were dreaming I think. You were shouting ‘No, No! Go away’.” They laugh.
“Look at this!” Young Philip opens his hand to show me a painted brooch.
“Philip, where did you get this? Who gave it to you?”
“A gentleman on a fine horse came riding by, grandmother. He gave me this brooch and said, “Give this to your grandmother from me. He looked very ill and when I asked him if he would like a glass of beer, he smiled and said, ‘God bless you lad but no. I have to make a long journey to Kenilworth and then to take the waters in Derbyshire and I fear I will not return. You will see your grandmother gets this?’ I said I would and he rode off very slowly back to his friends who were waiting for him.”
“You’re a good boy Philip. I think I know the man who gave you this.”
I look at the pretty carved and painted brooch in my hand. It was Amy’s. And there is a gilly flower for eternal love and an oak leaf intertwined. The oak leaf is a joke as the Latin for oak is quercus robur and Amy always said that stood for Robert, the oak on whom she could always depend.
What Happened to Everyone in Our Story
Sir Anthony Forster – bought Cumnor Place a year after Amy’s death and lived there with his wife until he died, obviously unafraid of any ghosts that may inhabit the old house. After his death the Place stood unoccupied or was occasionally occupied by farmers who never stayed for long. It gradually fell into disrepair. Then Sir Walter Scott wrote his novel Kenilworth and interest in Cumnor was revived as tourists flocked to the area ……. but it was too late since the Earl of Abingdon, who now owned the Place, had demolished it a few years earlier! It was said that he was ready to hang himself for losing the opportunity of a lucrative source of income!
Sir Richard Verney – died claiming that all the hounds of hell were after him according to the gossip of the time, and this was taken as a sure sign of his guilt by the gullible public. This ‘information’ was published in a libellous pamphlet, Leicester’s Commonwealth, in 1583, probably instigated by Dudley’s Catholic opponents. Robert Dudley was by this time a determined Puritan and follower of the teachings of Calvin.
John Appleyard – Amy’s half brother who together with her illegitimate brother, Arthur Robsart, had been called by Robert Dudley to Cumnor Place to assist in the inquiry into her death – later called the inquest jury’s findings into question and thought that his sister had been murdered. He was in dispute with Robert Dudley at the time over money matters. After spending a month in the notorious Fleet prison, he claimed that he had read the jury’s finding and was now satisfied.
William Cecil – later Lord Burleigh, did not resign as he had threatened and continued to be Elizabeth’s first minister until he died. Once the threat of a marriage between the Queen and Dudley was over, the two men respected each other and worked well together with no apparent animosity.
Sir Henry Sidney and Mary Sidney, Robert’s sister – spent much of their life out of each other’s company due to Henry’s commission in Ireland although they remained married. Mary had suffered from smallpox, contracted while she was nursing Elizabeth through the same disease; this left her horribly disfigured and some said that she wore a mask to hide her face and that her husband found it hard to look at her. They both died in 1586.
Sir Philip Sidney – son of Henry and Mary, named after Philip II of Spain, Queen Mary’s husband – had a distinguished career in the service of Queen Elizabeth and was a writer and poet like his mother. He was the apple of his uncle Robert’s eye but was killed while serving with him in the Low Countries. Philip was only thirty two and Robert was devastated by his nephew’s death which was tragically in the same year Philip’s parents died.
Sir Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester – waited for the Queen for many years after Amy’s death. She made him Earl of Leicester in, what many saw, as an attempt to ennoble him and befit him for marriage to her. But Elizabeth realised that such a marriage would divide her kingdom and possibly lose her the crown. Robert had an illegitimate son whom he brought up in a way befitting the son of a nobleman and even allowed him to spend time with his natural mother, a very ‘modern’ arrangement. He later secretly married another woman, Lettice Knollys, a young, good looking and widowed lady-in-waiting at Elizabeth’s court. Elizabeth was furious, banished Lettice from court and never forgave her. It seemed that Robert and Lettice were very happy, bringing up her four children from her previous marriage as their own and then having the son and heir that Robert Dudley so longed for. But their joy was short lived. Robert’s beloved ‘noble Imp’ died aged three in 1584.
Robert was by Elizabeth’s side during the crisis of the Armada and stage managed her appearance at Tilbury when, riding a magnificent prancing horse, she famously addressed her troops. This was his last duty.
Two months later Robert was passing through Oxford, on his way to Kenilworth Castle, a gift from the Queen, when he died. He had just written to Elizabeth, the letter of a friend writing to another friend, and had intended to take the waters in Buxton with the hope of easing his painful, crippling condition.
Lettice married again after Robert’s death – one Christopher Blount, son of Cousin Thomas Blount! But when she died she asked to be buried in the same tomb as Robert, whom she described as the best and kindest of husbands.
The Duke of Norfolk – Robert’s old enemy, who once claimed that he would hit Robert in the face with his racquet after the Queen lovingly wiped the sweat from her favourite’s brow during their tennis match, was executed for treason in 1572.
Elizabeth I – never married and became known as the Virgin Queen. Two years after Amy’s death she contracted small pox which, she knew, may lead to her death. Small pox was a disfiguring disease but such was the strength of Elizabeth and Robert’s friendship that she wanted him at her bedside, where he remained throughout her illness. She had appointed Robert to govern in the interim period should she die. She later described him as her ‘little dog’, never far away from his mistress as everyone at court knew. This was not what Robert wished to hear and eventually, after their love affair, he began to re-evaluate his life, leading to his decision to marry Lettice Knollys.
Throughout Elizabeth’s reign England was in the grip of a ‘mini ice age’, sixty years of severely cold winters and rainy summers. Towards the end three consecutive failed harvests meant that the majority of the poor people were dying of starvation. People were ready for a change just as they had been at the end of Mary’s reign when the bad summers and poor harvests were just beginning. When Elizabeth died, a letter from Robert, written a few days before his death, was found in a box at her bedside; it was wrapped in ribbon and on the outside Elizabeth had written ‘His last letter’.
Ironically Elizabeth died in 1603 at the Palace of Richmond, otherwise known as ‘Sheen’, where Amy and Robert had celebrated their wedding more than fifty years earlier.
Katherine Grey and Ned, Earl of Hertford – Their love affair ended in tragedy. Ned’s sister Jane Seymour (named after her famous royal aunt) died at the
tragically young age of nineteen and so the only witness to their wedding was lost, the priest being by then untraceable. Katherine was pregnant but still their marriage had to be hidden from the Queen and, to Katherine’s misery, her young husband was sent on a diplomatic mission to Paris. She had no one to help her or to confide in. But the pregnancy could not be hidden for long and, when Elizabeth found out, she suspected that the marriage of Katherine and Ned had been a plot against her. Katherine was put in the Tower as was Ned, after being recalled from France. Here the warders allowed them to see each other and Katherine became pregnant again. Elizabeth, incensed with rage, split up the whole family, declaring their two sons to be illegitimate. Heartbroken at the separation from her husband and older son, Katherine, it was said, starved herself to death. Ned outlived both his sons and lived into his eighties. Ironically Ned and Katherine’s descendants had a greater claim to the throne than did James I (James Stuart, son of Mary Queen of Scots) whom Elizabeth named as her successor but who should have been debarred from the succession under the terms of Henry VIII’s will. Our present royal family is descended from the Stuarts.
Owain and Kat, Amy’s companion – were fictional characters; that is to say they did not exist in real life. But among the ten or so servants that Amy had with her at Cumnor Place surely she deserved to have a ‘Kat’ to speak for her!
In our story they lived happily ever after like a prince and princess in one of Owain’s folk stories.
And apologies to the Spanish Ambassador, Bishop de la Quadra, who was a real person and obviously enjoyed spreading the gossip about Milord Robert, whom he disliked, and Elizabeth, whom he later described as a ‘baggage’. He was never documented as being involved in any plot against Robert ….. as far as we know ….. The Ambassador was finally dismissed and sent home in disgrace by Elizabeth after one of the Spaniards claimed that his master had spread the rumour that the Queen and Robert had secretly married! Presumably he did this to undermine Elizabeth and stir up trouble against her.
The Manner of Amy’s Death is primarily a work of fiction fleshed out on a skeleton of fact.
The Real Story – How Did Amy Die?
Because of Amy’s strange behaviour on the day of her death, Thomas Blount, writing to Robert, seemed to think that suicide was a possibility – not that he was willing to put such scandalous thoughts in writing. It would have constituted a disgrace for Robert if Amy had put her soul in peril by committing self murder. He simply hinted at dark things, regarding Amy’s state of mind, that he wished to discuss with his master in private but which he could not set down in a letter.
Amy was a devout young woman who was seen on her knees praying for deliverance – but from what? This has been the subject of much discussion. Perhaps it was because of Robert’s reportedly scandalous behaviour with Elizabeth or perhaps it was because she was seriously ill. But would this have led to the mortal sin of suicide? A more sinister possibility is that she was praying fearfully to be spared from being murdered.
Was she in a frame of mind to commit suicide? Only fifteen days previous to her death, she had written an upbeat letter to her tailor, William Edney of London, asking that he alter the neckline of one of her dresses so that it was like one that he had made for her some time earlier. And Robert was himself still sending her the sort of pretty ‘accessories’ that she liked so much, embroidered slippers and hoods. So Amy was still interested in her appearance. The fact that she asked for the dress to be altered as a matter of some urgency has led to speculation that she was expecting to meet someone, possibly her husband, in the very near future. As far as we know though, there was no letter purporting to be from Robert or anyone else. This was pure speculation on my part!
We should consider that, if suicide had been her intention, Amy could have chosen other, more certain, ways of killing herself rather than throwing herself down a short flight of stairs – an upstairs window, for example, or drowning in the pond or even taking poison in the form of herbs. Remember that she had suffered a dread of being harmed by poison to such an extent that it had been court gossip a year earlier, so it would seem that she had a strong sense of self preservation and was not suicidally inclined.
So was Amy murdered? Amy had previously suspected an attempt on her life by poison so this would seem to be a distinct possibility .… only .… it was common at the time for gentlemen or gentlewomen to suspect they were being poisoned whenever they suffered a stomach upset! Given the level of hygiene in Elizabethan England or the lack of knowledge concerning the safe preservation of food or indeed the use of potentially poisonous herbs, plucked from the field by the kitchen boy to disguise the taste of meat that was past its use-by date, it was hardly surprising that enteritis was a common illness. So it is possible that Amy had simply eaten something that disagreed with her and that the members of the court, jealous of Robert’s place in the Queen’s affections, had exaggerated Amy’s fears by gossiping of attempted murder.
In many ways Robert’s shock and horror when he heard the news of Amy’s death and realised how he would be implicated as a murderer tends to eliminate him as a suspect. Cecil too, while fearing the increasing influence of Robert Dudley with the Queen, would have realised that any clumsy murder plot would also implicate Elizabeth, to whose service he was devoted. And if this was a murder, it was certainly performed in a clumsy way – two blows to the head and a broken neck. Not very subtle!
So this only leads to the possibility of an accident. Or does it? Would a person falling down a short flight of steps succeed in knocking two holes in their head, one two inches deep, and in breaking their neck (and, it is assumed, spinal cord) as well? It has been suggested that the ‘maladie of the breast’, referred to by the Spanish ambassador in his dispatches, could have been breast cancer and that, had the disease metastasised, it could have spread to the bones of the spine, resulting in Amy’s neck breaking very easily when she banged her head in the fall downstairs. This would have meant that Amy was suffering from breast cancer for some years before she died, still aged only twenty eight. Yet breast cancer is, according to the Macmillan web site, very rare in women under thirty five.
What’s more, Amy had travelled from Lincoln to Hertfordshire, Hertfordshire to London, London to Essex or Sussex, then to Warwickshire and on to Oxfordshire in the two years before she died, considerable journeys for a sick woman especially when we remember that she would have travelled either by horse or in a litter, a type of cart which had no springs or any kind of suspension - coach springs had not been invented in Amy’s lifetime. These would have been very tedious, uncomfortable and tiring journeys for an invalid.
And would a woman who was in the terminal stages of breast cancer have taken such an interest in clothing and fashion?
It seems to me that Amy’s ‘maladie of the breast’ was a common complaint in Elizabethan times, ‘sorenes of the breast’ or mastitis, a very painful condition which most women suffer in silence. This condition can occur after a stillbirth or late miscarriage when the milk glands in the breast become blocked due to the fact that there is no baby to feed. Had Amy suffered from such a condition then Robert would certainly have known about it and it may have inhibited any physical relations between them on the few occasions when Robert’s work at court enabled them to live together as man and wife, thus also explaining why there were no living children and why Robert felt entitled to tell others (have a little grumble maybe) about his wife’s condition. We do not know whether they had any sort of personal tragedy such as a miscarriage but such events were quite unremarkable at a time when infant mortality was common as indeed was the mortality of the mother.
Given that Amy did not have tumours in the bones of her neck, it would seem that her injuries from such a short fall were severe. Sadly the coroner’s report does not say where the head injuries were located nor whether there was prolific bleeding from the site of injury. If, as the report says, the depth of one of the injuries was indeed that of two thumbs (or inche
s) there must have been copious amounts of blood at the site of her death. Yet nothing was reported. Indeed it was later stated that her bonnet was still in place upon her head when she was found. This may or may not be true but a two inch gaping wound must surely have meant that some sharp object had penetrated both the flesh and bone of her skull. Again it is a great pity that the building was demolished two hundred years ago and that the scene of her death cannot be re-examined.
For Amy to suffer a deep head wound which penetrated the skull she must have encountered a protruding object on the way down.
But then where was the blood? Or had someone already ‘tidied’ up the body, mopped up the mess and placed a clean bonnet on Amy’s head? Had Amy, indeed, been attacked in another part of Cumnor Place, in the garden maybe, and her body placed at the foot of the stairs in a clumsy attempt to make her death seem like an accident? This brings us back to the same question.
Was Amy murdered?
One last thought. Since the recent discovery of the coroner’s report, emphasis has been placed on the use of the word ‘dyntes’ or dints to describe Amy’s head injuries and this has been taken to imply that they were sustained in a violent way. However this word was still used in the North of England as little as fifty years ago to mean an indentation. A metal kitchen utensil would be described as ‘dinted’ if it had been bashed in a little by rough usage. So when the coroner described Amy’s head as having two dints, one to the depth of two thumbs, could he have meant that the indentation in her skull was two thumbs across, especially if the injury was on the back of her head – a common site of impact for accidental falls down stairs? In other words, could Amy’s death have been an accident after all?
The Manner of Amy's Death Page 19