In other words, if anyone had wished to murder Amy Dudley, they would have been taking a considerable risk (screams, someone entering the house unannounced) if they had done so by attacking her at Cumnor Place; and a flight of gradual wooden stairs would not be an obvious place to secure the victim’s death. This would not be like pushing the victim off a cliff. By far the likeliest explanation is that she tripped on a trailing dress and – suffering from cancer as she probably did – broke her neck spontaneously. This was the opinion of the coroner’s jury, which convened instantly.
There were, however, a few oddities in the case, and it is inevitable, given the intense gossip and speculation circulating about Dudley and the Queen, that the worst possible interpretations should have been placed upon the tragedy. One is that in the morning of Sunday, 8 September, Lady Robert directed her whole household to attend Abingdon Fair. Mrs Odingsells fussily remonstrated, apparently thinking it unsuitable that Amy be left alone. Amy dismissed all the servants – who did attend the fair – and she dined alone with Mrs Owen. One should like to have cross-examined Mrs Odingsells about this. Was she simply a tiresome fusspot? Had Amy Dudley promised herself a few quiet hours alone, and was it merely the officiousness of Mrs Odingsells that made Amy Dudley lose her temper, as she apparently did? Or were the women aware that Amy was ill? Were they fussing over her? Or – and here one enters the realm of pure speculation – did Amy have a lover? This would be the normal explanation for a young woman of twenty-eight wishing to dismiss even the servants who would clear away a meal. We shall never know precisely what happened. One modern biographer of Dudley comes close to hinting that William Cecil might have had a hand in her death. ‘The only person in England who might have gained from such a tragedy was William Cecil,’26 wrote Derek Wilson in Sweet Robin in 1997.
Certainly the Spanish Ambassador, Bishop de Quadra, making much of the bad relations between Cecil and Dudley, claimed that Cecil had confided in him. On 11 September the gossiping old bishop wrote to the Duchess of Parma that the Queen was, yet again, shilly-shallying over the question of marriage:
She had promised me an answer about the marriage by the third instant, and said she was certain to marry, but now she coolly tells me she cannot make up her mind and will not marry. After this I had an opportunity of talking to Cecil, who I understand was in disgrace, and Robert was trying to turn him out of his place. After exacting many pledges of strict secrecy he said the Queen was conducting herself in such a way that he thought of retiring. He said it was a bad sailor who did not enter port if he could when he saw a storm coming on, and he clearly foresaw the ruin of the realm through Robert’s intimacy with the Queen, who surrendered all her affairs to him and meant to marry him . . . He ended by saying that Robert was thinking of killing his wife, who was publicly announced to be ill, although she was quite well, and would take very good care they did not poison her. He said surely God would never allow such a wicked thing to be done.’
In the adjacent paragraph the bishop went on: ‘the next day the Queen told me as she returned from hunting that Robert’s wife was dead or nearly so, and asked me not to say anything about it. Certainly this business is most shameful and scandalous and withal I am not sure whether she will marry the man at once or even if she will marry at all as I do not think she has her mind sufficiently fixed. Cecil says she wishes to do as her father did.’27
A month later de Quadra was writing in slightly less frantic terms. This time to the King of Spain that ‘the Queen had decided not to marry Lord Robert’.28
Clearly, the death of Amy Robsart in such shady circumstances did make it impossible, in the short term, for Elizabeth to marry Robert Dudley, and did greatly strengthen Cecil’s hand. For, at court, when Dudley was down, Cecil was up. The Spanish bishop, like most addicts of gossip, perhaps passed on rumours because they made an exciting story rather than because they were true. But perhaps the ever-fluctuating rumour-machine reflected the flickering compass-needle of Elizabeth’s heart. Possibly she did, with a part of herself, wish to marry Robert Dudley and, with another part of herself, to marry the King of Spain. When Cecil said that she ‘wishes to do as her father did’, he perhaps expressed a genuine dread that she would become a female Henry VIII, a violent serial monogamist, who was capable of wedding on a whim and sending the unfortunate spouse to the block when the marriage hit the rocks. This might have been possible had she limited her spouse-victims to the English nobility, but she would have been faced with diplomatic difficulties if she had married a foreign prince and ended the relationship by murder.
Perhaps, however, it was not chance, but some instinct of common sense, that kept her single. If the death of Amy Dudley reduced the likelihood of Elizabeth’s marriage with her widower, it did not make Robert Dudley in the long term a less important figure in her life, nor did the powerful Dudleys diminish in their significance, as figures in Elizabeth’s life. In 1562, in common with many of her subjects, the Queen succumbed to the epidemic of smallpox that was sweeping through the southern counties of England. Elizabeth was at Hampton Court when symptoms of fever began. It was believed by medical opinion, or at any rate by Bishop de Quadra quoting the most pessimistic medical opinion,29 that so long as the eruptions did not come out, the patient was in mortal danger. He wrote to the Duchess of Parma, on 16 October, ‘Cecil was hastily summoned from London at midnight. If the Queen die, it will be very soon, within a few days at latest, and now all the talk is to be told her successor. Lord Robert has a large armed force under his control and will probably pronounce for his brother-in-law the Earl of Huntingdon.’
Though de Quadra’s medical diagnosis was premature, he was probably right in his political analysis. The Earl of Huntingdon, married to Dudley’s sister Catherine, was much the strongest Protestant candidate for the throne. In a minute to Philip II (15 October 1560) de Quadra quoted Cecil’s opinion that ‘they were devising a very important plan for the maintenance of their heresies, namely to make the earl of Huntingdon King in case the Queen should die without issue, and that Cecil had told the Bishop that the succession belonged of right to the earl as he was descended from the house of York’.30 Reading this letter, one could be back a hundred years in the Wars of the Roses and one sees what a nightmare would have ensued, had Elizabeth died of the smallpox in 1562. Had Cecil – and Dudley – declared for the Earl of Huntingdon on the grounds of his descent from that fifteenth-century Duke of Clarence drowned in malmsey wine by Richard III, it is equally likely that the rival claims of Jane Grey’s sister, Lady Catherine, would have been pressed.
By the terms of Henry VIII’s will, if his three children died without issue, Lady Catherine would be the next in succession, being a granddaughter of Henry’s sister, the Duchess of Suffolk. Catherine had been married (aged perhaps fifteen) to Henry Herbert, afterwards 2nd Earl of Pembroke, in the year (1553) that Northumberland had tried to make her sister, Lady Jane Grey, queen. This marriage had been purely part of Northumberland’s power-brokering – to consolidate aristocratic support around the Grey–Dudley axis. During Mary’s reign, Herbert was embarrassed by the alliance and, since the marriage was unconsummated, it could easily be annulled.
By the time Elizabeth became Queen, Lady Catherine Grey would have been in her late teens, probably nineteen. She was a scatter-brained, rather petulant girl, easily swayed by her emotions and by those who wished to manipulate her. Count de Feria, the Spanish Ambassador, found that she was ‘discontented and offended’ because she had not been given the official status of heir presumptive. Or was she discontented because his line of questioning had made her so? Clearly, Catherine took the very foolish risk of not behaving obsequiously at court. De Feria noted with satisfaction that Catherine had spoken ‘very arrogant and unseemly words in the presence of the Queen’. Time was, only five years before, when Catherine had seen her mother, the Duchess of Suffolk, given greater status than the Queen, and witnessed Princess Elizabeth obliged to walk out of a room after the Duchess.<
br />
This duchess, Frances, was, during the opening years of Elizabeth’s reign, in the last stages of illness. With recklessness that defies belief, she encouraged Catherine in a secret courtship with the young Earl of Hertford, who was probably no more than her age, possibly a year younger. Hertford was the son of the late Protector Somerset. He was almost ridiculously short of stature, but this is not always unattractive to women. His sister, Lady Jane Seymour, was one of Elizabeth’s favourite maids of honour. It was (still is) forbidden for any near-heir to the throne to marry without the sovereign’s permission. The Duchess wrote to the Queen that the marriage was ‘th’ onlie thinge that shee desired before her death and shold be an occasion to her to die the more quietlie’.31 It seems as though Duchess Frances died before completing this letter.
Jane Seymour continued to act as the lovers’ friend, and it was Jane who arranged their clandestine and, by definition, treasonable marriage in December 1560. She found a clergyman to read the marriage service (no one else present appeared so much as to catch his name). It was Jane who organised a secret wedding breakfast – ‘comfects and other Banquetting meates and beare and wyne’. No sooner had these been consumed than the young couple ‘unarrayed themselves’ and ‘went into naked bedd in the said Chamber where they were so married’. Once in bed they had ‘Companie and Carnall Copulation . . . divers tymes’ . . . and ‘laie sometimes on th’ outside of the Bedd and sometymes on th’ other’. The lightly pornographic nature of the testimony suggests it is invented or half-invented, based on servants’ tittle-tattle, but it gives the flavour of contemporary gossip about Lady Catherine. Similar gossip circulated, inaccurately, about the Queen and Dudley. But in that case it was not true, and this must have heightened Elizabeth’s jealous hatred of Catherine when, inevitably, the story leaked out. It is even quite possible that the whole union between these easily led, highly sexed teenagers was politically engineered by Dudley’s enemies when it was feared he would marry the Queen. That was what Bishop de Quadra thought. ‘Cecil was at the bottom of it.’32
For a few weeks the couple kept the marriage a secret, but they could not do so for long. When Cecil came to hear of it he warned the young earl that there were rumours of ‘good will’ between him and Catherine. Hertford denied it. Soon all the women of the court were jabbering of it. It was said (perhaps the story is apocryphal) that Blanche Parry, the Queen’s trusted Welsh attendant and lady-in-waiting, did her best to warn Catherine by telling her fortune and claiming to see in her palm that ‘the lines say, madam, that if you ever marry without the Queen’s consent in writing, you and your husband will be undone, and your fate worse than that of my Lady Jane [Grey]’.33
Catherine Grey was now pregnant. The Earl of Hertford had serious reason to panic. This was not just the usual panic that would afflict any boy of less than twenty who had got his girl ‘into trouble’. Even he, idiotic as he must have been, would now realise that what he had been doing was treasonable; that in a Tudor court, people had been beheaded for less than this. His own father had been beheaded on Tower Hill for treason, and the Seymours had been deeply distrusted as the enemies of the Dudleys and the Tudors ever since all the post-Reformation power-brokering of Edward VI’s reign. It was arranged that Hertford should be sent to France with Thomas Cecil, son of Mr Secretary Cecil. In every major crisis of Elizabeth’s reign there is William Cecil, trying to save the Queen, which often meant saving her from herself. There was much unconscious Polonius-like comedy in Cecil sending his son Thomas abroad with Hertford. This was the child he had had with his first wife, Mary Cheke. By now, Thomas was nineteen years old. Though Mildred, the thin-lipped bluestocking second wife, had borne him three children (two daughters and a son), only one – a daughter, Anne – had survived infancy. But in May 1561 she had a second son. (This was Robert, destined to succeed his father as Secretary.)
‘I have foreborne to send my son Thomas Cecil out of the realm for that I had no more [sons], and now that God hath given me another I am disposed to send him abroad, meaning only to have him absent about one year, so as, at his return, if God so grant, to see him married for that he shall then be full 20.’ So, Mr Secretary Cecil to Sir Nicholas Throckmorton, the British Ambassador in Paris. Cecil was candid enough to add, ‘I never showed any fatherly fancy to him but in teaching and correcting.’34 Cecil had the idea of making his son reside with Admiral Coligny, where it was hoped he would master French, as well as improving his horsemanship, playing the lute, dancing and perfecting his tennis. To the boy himself he imparted a tedious list of instructions, above all insisting upon the habit of daily prayer. ‘My meaning is that you shall use the manner of the Church of England in Latin.’
It goes without saying that Thomas Cecil did not heed much of this advice. By the end of a year his father felt obliged to catalogue his son’s vices as ‘slothfulness in keeping his bed, negligent and rash in expenses, careless in his apparel, an immoderate lover of dice and cards; in study, soon weary, in game never’.
In later years, the bad influence of the tiny Earl of Hertford was blamed for these habits of dissipation, unjustly according to the writer Thomas Seccombe.35 Cecil remained in Paris after the Earl had left, and found plenty of others with whom to indulge his juvenile tastes. Throckmorton kept his eye upon him, and took him into his own household. In July 1561 Throckmorton presented Cecil (and Hertford?) at the French court. It was just six months since King Francis II had died. His widow, not yet twenty years old, was still in France. Her mother, Mary of Guise, the Regent of Scotland, had died the previous year. Thomas Cecil was presented to her – Mary, Queen of Scots: tall, with a beautifully modulated voice and an instantaneous sexual appeal. Perhaps it was for this moment that William Cecil had really dispatched his son to Paris, for Cecil was obsessed by the Scottish queen and the danger she posed to Elizabeth’s power.36
Mary, having lost her young husband, felt sidelined in the French court by the new queen, Catherine de’ Medici. In her Scottish kingdom the Protestants who held power barely acknowledged her. In England, it was otherwise. Although she had no legal claim to the court – the will of Henry VIII did not mention her as a successor – she was the focus of hopes for those who wished to see England revert to Catholicism, and from the moment of Mary Tudor’s death, Mary Stuart, a great-granddaughter of Henry VII, declared herself to be the rightful Queen of England.
Meanwhile, Hertford was by now the father of a rival claimant to the throne of England, and in August the young man returned to London to face the awful consequences.
Things had not gone well for his wife, even though, before he left for France, Hertford had given Catherine a deed of jointure and settled on her £1,000 per annum. The first catastrophe was that Hertford’s sister, Lady Jane Seymour, died in 1561. The Queen was distraught and ordered a lavish funeral in Westminster Abbey. The sole surviving witness to Catherine Grey’s marriage to the Earl of Hertford was thereby buried, while Thomas Cecil and the Queen were on a progress through Suffolk and Norfolk. At Norwich, the Queen complained of the squalid conditions to which the presence of wives and children had reduced the cathedral close. She immediately drafted an ordinance to the Archbishops of Canterbury and York forbidding cathedral-clergy to marry. It was plainly contrary to the intentions of the founders.
Meanwhile, an exhausted Catherine Seymour, in the entourage of the Virgin Queen, was seven months pregnant. The Queen was seen to have taken a great dislike to Catherine, and she had probably heard the rumours. But she allowed the young fool to sweat it out. Desperate, Catherine confided in another of the women of the court, Elizabeth St Loe, always known as Bess, who wept, and reprimanded her for her foolishness, saying that ‘she was sorrie therefore because that shee had not made the Queene’s Majestie pryvie thereunto’.37
That night Catherine, disturbed by Bess St Loe’s failure to take her side, crept into the bedroom of her kinsman, Robert Dudley, and threw herself on his mercy. It was a fatally stupid thing to do. He could not poss
ibly keep such information to himself, and when he was obliged to tell the Queen, not only of the circumstances, but of how, where (his bedroom) and when (midnight) he knew them, it was an occasion for a Tudor hysterical outburst of gale force.
Catherine Seymour was dispatched at once to the Tower, where her child was born. So was Bess St Loe. Catherine, who had got herself into all this trouble by seriously considering herself worthy to take over the cares of government from the great Queen Elizabeth, now found that she had mislaid the essential deed of jointure from her husband. She could not remember the name of the clergyman who had married her. The one witness – Jane Seymour – was dead. When the Earl of Hertford returned from France he was also sent to the Tower. Their second child, rather touchingly named Thomas, after the Earl’s fellow Parisian reveller, was born on 10 February 1563. (The godfathers were two warders in the Tower.38) Elizabeth had the marriage, if it ever had been a legal marriage, annulled by the Archbishop of Canterbury. The children were declared bastards and the Earl of Hertford was fined a ludicrous £15,000, later commuted to £10,000. Rather like an extortioner of the modern criminal underworld, the Queen, ever avid for cash, in the event accepted £1,000 down.
This is the pair – the hopeless Catherine Grey and her diminutive earl – who would have been declared Queen of England and Consort, had Elizabeth died of smallpox in 1562. But she pulled through.
Dudley’s sister, Lady Mary Sidney, was the chief victim of that crisis. She, and Sybil Penne, the Queen’s childhood nurse, tended Elizabeth during the illness. Though the Queen was all but unscarred, Mary Sidney was less lucky. Her husband, Sir Henry Sidney, could recall, ‘I lefte her a full faire Ladye in myne eye at least the fayerest, and when I returned I found her as fowle a ladie as the smale pox could make her, which she did take by contynuall attendance of her majesties most precious person (sicke of the same disease) the skares of which (to her resolute discomforte) ever syns hath doss and doth remayne in her face.’39
The Elizabethans Page 8
