Elizabeth and Leicester

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.

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.

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).

‘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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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 Elizabeth’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.

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:

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 Robert, 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.