The Murder of Amy Robsart

The Spanish Ambassador claimed that Queen Elizabeth I mentioned the death of a rival before the news arrived that she was indeed dead.  The rival was Amy Robsart, wife of Robert Dudley.  Robert Dudley was the love of Elizabeth's life.  But what the Queen of England knew about the suspicious death of a woman she could have harboured no love for cannot be said for certain over four centuries after the fact.  Was she was involved, if only peripherally?  Did the Spanish Ambassador have any reason to implicate her?  Exactly what happened to Amy Robsart stirs up debate today: was the Queen of England do anything to bring about the death of another for personal gain?  As far as the queen and her lover Robert Dudley were concerned, Amy was an inconvenient woman.

Amy married Lord Robert Dudley on 4 June 1550, three days before her eighteenth birthday.  Edward VI, the 'boy king', the only legitimate son of Henry VIII, attended the wedding.  The groom was the fifth son of John Dudley, 1st Duke of Northumberland.  It was a good match for the daughter of a prosperous gentleman farmer, but neither Dudley nor Amy cared: they married for love, unusual in Tudor times (and beyond) when arranged marriages were the norm.

Edward VI was a Protestant, worth mentioning only because as the teenaged king wasted away, he was forced to consider who would inherit the throne.  Lady Jane Grey was the eldest of three sisters, a distant cousin.  She was well educated and known for her intellect, but what mattered apart from her bloodline was that she, like Edward, was a Protestant.  Lady Jane became queen in July 1553, not Princess Mary, the elder of two daughters of Henry VIII: Mary was a devout Catholic.  Edward had no desire for England to be brought back into the Catholic fold after his death.

Dudley's father the Duke of Northumberland had everything to do with Jane becoming Queen: she was one of his daughters-in-law, having married his son Guilford the previous May.  (As it so happened, he took part of a treble wedding, with Jane and her sisters opting for the same ceremony.)  

Queen Jane reigned for nine days; both she and her husband were executed.  So was her father-in-law Northumberland.  But Robert Dudley kept his head, confined to the Tower of London, where a childhood friend was being held: Princess Elizabeth.  Elizabeth was the younger sister of Queen Mary, arrested on her orders: Elizabeth was strongly suspected of plotting to overthrow the queen.

Amy was permitted to visit her husband in the Tower.  He was released; Elizabeth was buried in the English countryside for a year under house arrest, summoned to court in 1555 to wait upon her sister the queen, who believed herself to be pregnant.  The trouble was that no one agreed with her.

Mary was so desperate for an heir that she stopped menstruating and began putting on weight; a cynic at court claimed this was nothing more than 'wind'.  Perhaps more to the point, Mary was married to a first cousin, Philip II of Spain, who had as little to do with his wife as possible.  But she was never pregnant.  And time was running out: Mary was in her early forties, and in poor health.  Elizabeth would almost certainly become queen, and England would revert to the Protestantism Mary brutally attempted to suppress during her short reign, earning the sobriquet 'Bloody' for ordering hundreds of Protestants burnt at the stake.

Mary died in November 1558 and Elizabeth became, allowing mathematician, astronomer and astrologer Doctor John Dee (who had tutored her close friend Dudley and his siblings) to choose the most propitious day for her coronation.  Dudley took part, given a place of honor in the coronation procession.  

While Elizabeth and Dudley had known one another since childhood (they were almost exactly the same age), there is every reason to believe that they embarked on a long-term love affair at this time; Amy does not seem to have mattered very much to the new Queen of England.  If anything, Elizabeth envied Amy: she was married to Dudley.  (This was not an isolated incident: Elizabeth was openly jealous of other women.)  But while Elizabeth was in love with Dudley, there is no evidence that he loved her.  But he was ambitious, allowing Elizabeth to effectively banish Amy from court while keeping him close by.  Dudley, possibly racked with guilt, wrote to Amy in the countryside and sent her presents.  Meanwhile, more than one courtier speculated that he and the queen would marry after his wife died.

Not surprisingly, Amy became severely depressed.  Worse, she developed a lump in one of her breasts.  Ill, depressed and desperately lonely, Amy turned to religion, praying to God to relieve her misery.  This was no secret: the women who waited on Amy were well aware of her state of mind.  And so were others, as it would turn out. 

September in England is a particularly lovely time of year.  Dudley was with Elizabeth at Windsor Castle; she had just celebrated her twenty-seventh birthday.  Meanwhile, Amy was at Cumnor Place, the rented manor house that more or less served as her prison.  She was in a bad mood that morning: when told by one of the women who served her that she could not go to a country fair (almost certainly because of her deteriorating health) she retorted that she would do as she pleased.  Almost certainly feeling too ill to make a point, she agreed to stay at home with just one serving woman for company, allowing everyone else who waited on her to go to the fair.  When they returned, Amy was dead.

It had the makings of a tragic accident: Amy, ill and weak, had lost her footing at the top of the stairs.  Dudley was sent word.  Oddly, his steward, Thomas Blount, was already on his way to Cumnor Place; Dudley quickly wrote a letter that he sent post-haste with a messenger on horseback, instructed to catch up with Blount.  But why did Dudley send Blount to Amy before receiving word that she had died?  True, he wrote to her, and regularly.  He sent presents, well aware of Amy's weakness for finery.  Was Blount dispatched to make certain that Amy was dead?  Falling down a flight of stairs was not an automatic death sentence.  And if Amy was indeed murdered, her killer (or killers) knew that: not only was her neck broken, she had two serious head wounds. 

Elizabeth, approaching thirty, was under pressure to marry and provide England with an heir.  Dudley was not universally popular - there were those who took it for granted that he and Elizabeth would marry once Amy died - but he was a better prospect than Philip II.  Philip had married one queen of England and saw no reason why he should not marry another, but Elizabeth would never agree: she had no desire for England to become a vassal state.  Nor did she want England to become a Catholic country once more; Londoners at least had not forgotten the stench of burnt flesh at Smithfield.  And Elizabeth knew her mother Anne Boleyn had helped convince her father Henry VIII to proclaim himself the Supreme Head of the Church in England.  (Elizabeth never spoke of her mother, sent to the chopping block on trumped-up charges of adultery and incest before Elizabeth celebrated her third birthday.  But she wore a miniature of Anne Boleyn around her neck, hidden under the many wonderful dresses she was famous for.)  

Thomas Blount arrived at Cumnor Place having read the letter Dudley sent.  Dudley wanted an inquest.  Proof of his innocence?  Possibly.  But if he arranged for Amy to die, what else could he do?  Failing to demand an inquest would have been odd, possibly arousing suspicion.  Blount genuinely wanted to know what had happened, making his concern over Amy's state of mind clear when he questioned her maid Mrs Picto.  How had Amy died? Chance? Or villainy? 

Mrs Picto replied that Amy had died accidentally.  Then she contradicted herself: Amy had been suicidal.  Then she panicked:  

'No, good Mr Blount', she began, 'do not judge so of my words; if you should so gather, I am sorry I said so much.'

Was this the statement of a good servant, one loyal to the memory of her mistress and as such heartily sorry to have suggested the possibility of suicide?  Or did Mrs Picto know Amy had been murdered?  (If she was, it is worth mentioning that the house was not broken into; who let the killer of killers in?)  In this case, a clever woman would have deliberately sent Blount on the wrong path.  And what he said next would have been reassuring: 

'My Lord, it is most strange that this chance should fall upon you. It passeth the judgment of any man to say how it is, 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.'

Tales?  Not one but several?  Who was gossiping about Amy?  And why was Thomas Blount aware she was depressed?  The answer is obvious: Lord Robert Dudley had filled his mind with anecdotes of Amy and the depression she suffered so keenly from.  Blount had obviously considered the possibility of suicide, thanks to what he'd been told.  And he seems to have been a gossip, as his comments (and letters to Dudley) reveal.  If Dudley planned to have Amy killed, he appears to have planted ideas in his steward's head, the same steward he planned to send to Cumnor Place after the deed was done.  In other words, poor Blount was a pawn, one moved into place to make the men of the jury believe that Amy may have taken her life, not had it taken from her.

Blount stayed put.  He was encouraged that several jurors were not friends of Anthony Forster, who owned Cumnor Place.  Blount found that reassuring: none would cover for Forster.  Was there a reason that Forster might have needed protection? Did Blount suspect him of having something to do with Amy's death?  

Those who do not believe Amy was murdered point to the lump in her breast.  She may very well have had breast cancer; Elizabeth's chief advisor William Cecil believed Amy had a perfectly healthy body, telling others that Dudley planned to poison his wife, by now an inconvenient woman.  But Cecil would have been in a precarious position if Dudley became Elizabeth's consort.  

If Amy was dying, why would Dudley risk his position (and life) by arranging her murder? One must remember that Dudley was an ambitious son of a highly ambitious man, gone but not forgotten.  And if Amy was indeed running out of time, could it be that she was simply not dying quickly enough to suit her husband?  Dudley was in a precarious position as the favorite: Elizabeth was far more likely to marry for political reasons than for love.  Philip II wanted to marry her.  Who else might?  And Cecil, the most powerful man at court, was expected to arrange a marriage of state.  If Elizabeth was forced to cast Dudley to one side, he would be finished.    

The inquest went as expected.  Amy was believed to have fallen down the stairs and broken her neck.  The fact that her headdress was perfectly in place was ignored.  The two mysterious (and deep) head wounds were duly noted.  Her death was ruled accidental in August 1561 (the report was rediscovered in 2008), long after Amy was buried in style.  (The funeral cost Dudley the equivalent of well over $1,000,000 in 2020.)  Even so, it should be noted that the jury foreman, Sir Richard Smith, may have served the queen.  Five years passed.  Dudley was now Earl of Leicester, given the title to make him more attractive to the queen's cousin Mary, Queen of Scots.  Oddly, given his elevated social status, he gave one 'Mr Smith' an expensive present: yards of black silk for a suit.  England has never produced significant quantities of silk; those who could afford it bought Italian or French silk.  And silk was in demand: London haberdasher Baptist Hicks (whose brother Michael became William Cecil's secretary) relied on an English agent in Florence to stock his shop at the Sign of the White Bear in Cheapside (London) with the best silks money could buy.  And black silk was highly sought after, possibly because it was especially expensive, repeatedly dipped in the dye for optimal saturation. 

The new Earl of Leicester had been proposed as a husband for Mary, Queen of Scots.  By this time, there was no question that he and Elizabeth would be married.  The death of Amy Robsart was a scandal at court.  Courtiers speculated that Dudley had had his wife murdered so he could marry the queen.  The Spanish Ambassador muddied the matter further with a claim that the queen had mentioned the death of Amy the day before it happened.  (And he was not alone in believing that Elizabeth may have been involved, so eager was she to marry the love of her life.)  The scandal made marriage impossible; the Queen of England could not be seen as having helped murdered a rival.  If Elizabeth would have married, she would have married Dudley.  (When he married her vivacious younger cousin Lettice Knollys many years later, Elizabeth was apoplectic.)  But when Dudley died, he left one of his most valuable possessions to Elizabeth: eight long strands of magnificent pearls worn as a necklace.  He left Lettice with debts.  The legacy meant much more at the time; prior to the discovery of diamond mines in India, Brazil and South Africa, pearls were the most sought-after gem in Europe.  Elizabeth promptly commissioned a portrait, ostensibly to mark the English victory over the 'Invincible' Armada in 1588.  But the real reason may have been to mark a long-awaited victory over a rival.


© Katja Anderson 2020

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