Chapter 12

The Body at the Bottom of the Stairs 1560

In 1810 a ruinous house called Cumnor Place, in Oxfordshire, was finally pulled down. Legend has it that one of the reasons that this once grand home had fallen into disrepair, and for its demolition, was that it was haunted by the restless soul of a former occupant, Amy Robsart. Since Amy’s lifeless body was discovered at the bottom of the stairs in the house on Sunday 8 September, 1560, exactly what happened to her has been the subject of fevered speculation. And the mystery surrounding her sudden death remains as potent more than 400 years on as it was in the Elizabethan era with many still believing that the 28-year-old was callously murdered.

Cumnor Place dated back to the fourteenth century and had been in the possession of Abingdon Abbey before the dissolution. By the time Amy moved in, during December 1559, it was being leased to Sir Anthony Forster. He was an associate of Robert Dudley the dashing gentleman Amy had married with great pomp and ceremony at the royal palace at Sheen back in 1550, when they were both just eighteen. Amy, described as ‘beautiful’ by one Elizabethan source, had been born in 1532 and was from a well-heeled background – the only child of Sir John Robsart, Sheriff of Norfolk and Suffolk. Dudley was from an extremely powerful family, being the son of the Duke of Northumberland who had risen to power under Henry VIII and his son Edward.

It seems that initially the couple were very much in love, but shortly after their union Dudley ended up in the Tower of London, through his involvement in the unsuccessful attempt to have Lady Jane Grey declared queen. Narrowly avoiding execution, he spent months in prison. Dudley eventually worked himself back into favour with the new queen, Mary, but had financial difficulties and, in the following years, spent a good deal of time abroad fighting the French. He and Amy spent a lot of time living apart and the couple had no children together.

The death of Amy Robsart. Illustration by WF Yeames for The Graphic, 29 September, 1877 (Copyright Look and Learn)

Once Elizabeth had acceded to the throne in 1558, Dudley’s fortunes soared. They had been childhood friends and Dudley was immediately made Master of the Horse, his equine responsibilities including everything from organising military operations to tournaments and even helping the monarch off her steed when hunting. He quickly became one of Elizabeth’s favourite courtiers and continued to spend a lot of time away from home, especially as the sovereign discouraged wives from attending court. Dudley did, however, keep Amy well supplied with gifts and she received income from his estates. She kept her own household, complete with around ten servants, periodically moving between different homes owned by friends and family across the South of England.

Early into Elizabeth’s reign there were rumours that the unmarried Elizabeth had fallen in love with Dudley. In April 1559, the Spanish ambassador, Count de Feria, wrote: ‘During the last few days, Lord Robert has come so much into favour that he does whatever he likes with affairs. It is even said that Her Majesty visits him in his chamber day and night.’ His successor, Alvaro de la Quadra, said there was talk of Dudley divorcing Amy in order to marry the queen. There were even whispers that the pair had produced illegitimate offspring. There is no doubt that Amy would have been aware of the rumours surrounding her husband. Dudley spent less and less time with her. In fact, the last time he saw his wife before she died was in the summer of 1559.

On the morning of her death Amy sent all her servants off to a fair in Abingdon while she remained at Cumnor, apparently disgruntled that a fellow resident, Mrs Odingsells, insisted on staying behind. Also remaining was an elderly woman called Mrs Owen, who dined with Amy a little later. That afternoon, Amy’s body was discovered by one of the household’s servants who had returned from the fair. The two other women seem to have retired to their chambers and been unaware of anything untoward happening.

One of Dudley’s retainers, a man called Bowes, who was present, immediately set off for Windsor Castle where Dudley was attending on the queen to inform him of the tragedy. The day after the murder, Dudley wrote an apparently anguished letter to his steward, Thomas Blount, who, coincidentally, had already left for the vicinity of Cumnor on business the day before. In the letter he says, ‘There came to me Bowes, by whom I do understand that my wife is dead and as he sayeth 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.’ He asked Blount to ‘use all the devices and means you can possible for the learning of the troth’ and asked him to make sure that the coroner chose the ‘discreetist and most substantial men’ for the jury to get to the ‘bottom of the matter’. By the time Blount arrived on 10 September, the coroner had already sworn in the jury who had begun their investigations, viewing Amy’s body at Cumnor. Soon, Blount was reporting to Dudley that, as far as he could tell, they could ‘find no presumptions of evil’. His own enquires had led him to believe that ‘misfortune hath done it and nothing else.’

Portrait of Robert Dudley, by Jacobus Houbraken, 1738. Dudley was suspected of murdering his wife (Courtesy Wellcome Library, London)

The official coroner’s report found that on leaving her bedroom Amy had descended by a set of ‘steyres’ and accidentally fell to the very bottom where she sustained two ‘dyntes’ on the head. One of these injuries was about an inch deep, the other two inches in depth. The impact of the fall had also broken Amy’s neck the report found, the effect of which, according to the inquest jurors, was to have caused instantaneous death. There were no other marks on Amy’s body. The conclusion was that Amy had died through ‘misfortune’.

So was Amy’s death simply an accident? While her injuries do seem to have been compatible with a fall, the lack of other bruising and the severity of the two deep gashes on her head seem suspicious. Of course, her wounds might have been exactly the same whether she had fallen or been pushed. Reports suggest that the stone flight of stairs which she was thought to have tumbled down may have had as few as eight steps. If Amy died from an accidental fall, had she simply tripped on her dress, missed her footing or was there another cause?

There is some evidence that Amy was unwell and that this might have caused a sudden fall. In his letter of April 1559, de Feria had referred to ‘a malady in one of her breasts’ adding that court gossip had it that ‘the Queen is only waiting for her to die to marry Lord Robert.’ This has led to the suggestion that Amy might have been suffering from breast cancer which had spread to her bones. It’s thought that this might have made them fragile, causing the vertebrae in her neck to suddenly snap while she was descending the stairs. Yet there is no firm evidence that Amy was gravely ill. While one ambassador says she has been ‘ailing for some time’ another report states that she was ‘not ill at all, she was very well’.

Could Amy’s mental health have been to blame? It has been suggested that her despair at the romance between Dudley and Elizabeth could have led her to suicide. Whether she was still in love with Dudley or not, the situation might certainly have put her under a lot of stress. She may have believed her life was in peril. Tellingly, when Blount had arrived at Cumnor he quizzed Amy’s personal maid, Pirto, asking her if she thought Amy’s death was ‘chance or villainy’ to which she replied, ‘by very chance, and neither done by man or herself’ but added that she had heard Amy ‘pray to God to deliver her from desperation’. When Blount asked if her mistress might have had an ‘evil toy’ in her mind she backtracked. She was careful not to imply that Amy had committed suicide which was, after all, both a crime and a sin. Writing to Dudley, Blount spoke of ‘divers tales that had made him think her ‘a strange woman of mind.’

No-one could have blamed Amy for being depressed, but was she low enough to kill herself? Aside from the fact that throwing oneself down a stairwell is not a very reliable form of suicide, a key piece of evidence is that, just two weeks before her death, Amy wrote to her tailor ordering alterations to be made to a gown, not perhaps the actions of someone with self-murder in mind. Research by the Mayo Clinic in the United States has shown that the modern suicide rate for patients with depression is between just two and nine percent and there’s no reason to think that it would have been much different in Tudor times. Indeed, given that most people were religious and suicide meant eternal damnation, rates might have been much lower. It’s more likely that there is another explanation for Amy’s untimely end.

Interestingly, the verdict of the inquest that Amy’s death was misfortune was somewhat caveated by the phrase ‘in so far as it is possible at present for them to agree’ which leaves open the possibility of some other cause and suggests some heated debate among the jurors. For many who have analysed the case the essential problem with both the notion that Amy’s death was an accident, perhaps caused by illness, or suicide is not only that the evidence is limited but that it just seems too convenient for a young woman like Amy to have suddenly perished in such a manner at a time when it would have been very useful to a number of people if she disappeared. It’s also very possible that the wounds she suffered could have been inflicted by a weapon and that she had been placed at the bottom of the stairs to make it look like she had fallen. The possibility that Amy was murdered cannot be excluded.

Who might the perpetrator have been? Within days of Amy’s death, rumours began to swirl that Amy had indeed been murdered. Thomas Lever, a senior member of the clergy in Coventry, wrote of, ‘grievous and dangerous suspicion, and muttering.’ Chief among the suspects was her own husband, Lord Robert. He was deemed to have the perfect motive, in that it would give him the freedom needed to marry the queen and there is little doubt that he was desperate to do so. In fact, even before her death, the idea that Robert planned to murder Amy was being discussed at the highest level. In November 1559, the Imperial ambassador Baron Bruener wrote: ‘I have been told by many persons he is trying to do away with her by poison’ while de Quadra spoke of Dudley sending poison to his wife and planning the ‘wicked deed’. Indeed just days before Amy died, Elizabeth’s chief advisor, William Cecil, told him that he understood Dudley was thinking of ‘destroying’ his wife. On the continent it was being taken as fact that Dudley was responsible, with Sir Nicholas Throckmorton, the English ambassador to France, lamenting how people there were amazed that Dudley could kill his wife and that the queen would not only ‘bear withal but marry with him.’ He added that even Mary Queen of Scots had joked that Elizabeth was about to ‘marry her horse-keeper, who had killed his wife to make room for her.’

Dudley himself knew that Amy’s death would reflect badly upon him. In his letter to Blount on hearing the news, he urges him to quickly find out how ‘this evil should light upon me’ as he knows there will be much gossip adding, ‘I have no way to purge myself of the malicious talk that I know the wicked world will use.’ His immediate concern for his own position may appear unseemly but his reaction to the death does seem to be one of genuine shock and a desire to know the truth. When it looked probable that the inquest would judge Amy’s death accidental, he even spoke of organising an additional panel, to include Amy’s half-brothers, to search for more evidence.

Nevertheless, it has been claimed that he was actually trying to sway the jury ‘so shall it well appear to the world my innocency.’ At one point the jury’s foreman, Richard Smith, took the unusual step of writing to Dudley to reassure him that the verdict would be ‘misfortune’. This man had been a servant of the queen herself which opens up the possibility that not only Dudley, but Elizabeth herself, was somehow involved in a conspiracy. Adding weight to this idea is one of de Quadra’s letters, which seems to suggest that the queen had told him that Robert’s wife was ‘dead or nearly so’ before the actual fact. A few days later, Elizabeth announced Amy’s death to the court indicating it was an accident – before the inquest had completed its enquiries. In his talks with de Quadra, Cecil had also seemed to imply that both Dudley and the queen were involved in a plot to kill Amy.

Queen Elizabeth I, from an oil painting by Henry Gillard Glindoni. (Courtesy Wellcome Library, London)

While Dudley and Elizabeth might have had the motive to kill Amy, they were both too experienced politically not to know that if suspicion fell upon either of them, the ensuing scandal might make marriage impossible. This is, of course, exactly what happened. Elizabeth realised the potential damage to her reputation and while Dudley continued to be given titles and honours, including being made the Earl of Leicester in 1564, the queen continued to blow ‘bothe hote and colde’ romantically with the eventual result that Dudley got married again, to someone else. Despite what he is reported to have said prior to Amy’s death it is clear from other statements that even William Cecil didn’t think Dudley was actually responsible for it.

Yet suspicions that Dudley did do it dogged him for the rest of his life. These sparked back into life dramatically in 1567, when John Appleyard, Amy’s half-brother, raised again the view that his sister might have been murdered, with the implication that Dudley was behind it. He retracted the allegations after a short spell in prison and reading the official coroner’s report. Later, in 1584, Catholic enemies of Dudley published a highly libellous pamphlet which became known as Leicester’s Commonwealth. This claimed that one of Dudley’s retainers, Sir Richard Verney, had gone to Cumnor under Dudley’s orders to kill Amy and that he, along with another man, had broken Amy’s neck before placing the body at the bottom of the stairs. Her hood was said to have been undisturbed about her head – a detail not recorded by the inquest. While the sensational accusations were built on a similar account, written in the 1560s, their author’s motivation has to be in question, not least because Leicester’s Commonwealth wildly accused Dudley of a string of other murders too.

Was there an attempt by those who did not want Dudley to marry Elizabeth to destroy his hopes by killing Amy? Many English nobles were set against the match and hoped that Elizabeth would marry one of the suitors from Europe’s royal families busily vying for her hand. Perhaps the man who had most to gain was Cecil himself, who had recently been out of favour with the queen and thought her union with Dudley would bring ‘manifest ruin’. He would certainly have had the power and contacts to make sure the murder was carried out in secret. Killing Dudley himself might be too obvious, but organising Amy’s death would mean suspicion naturally fell on Dudley, especially after the rumours that Cecil had been spreading in the previous months. If Cecil was responsible, it was a big risk both for himself and his queen and might have the opposite effect in that she might marry Dudley after all. Cecil’s stock certainly rose after the murder and ultimately he achieved his end in that the marriage never happened. In 1566, Cecil wrote to the Privy Council telling them that Dudley could not marry Elizabeth because he was ‘infamed by the death of his wife.’

Portrait of Sir William Cecil, first Lord of Burghley, from a painting by Marcus Gheeraerts the younger in the Bodleian Library, Oxford - artist unknown. (Courtesy Wellcome Library, London)

Cecil is not the only one who might have been inclined to order Amy’s assassination. Foul play by foreign powers or even other English candidates for Elizabeth’s hand cannot be discounted. It’s also possible that there was another culprit, one with a motive that remains unknown to history. This would explain why almost everyone involved seems to have been slightly wrong-footed by her sudden demise. Amy had virtually no relationship with Dudley at the time of her killing. Could she have a secret lover? Was that why she needed the velvet gown so urgently and the real reason she sent the servants away? Did they quarrel? Could the mysterious Mrs Odingsells or Mrs Owen, who seem to have been the last people known to have seen her alive, been hiding something?

Whatever the truth, Amy was buried in the Church of St Mary the Virgin at Oxford in a lavish funeral paid for by Dudley. He was not present, though nothing should be read into this as, in the sixteenth century, it was customary for the chief mourner to be of the same sex.

For many years afterwards, the chilling apparition of a beautiful woman at the bottom of the stairs caused consternation at Cumnor and even efforts by a string of parsons were said not to have been enough to exorcise Amy’s ghost.