Great Unsolved Crimes

by Rodney Castleden

  On the evening of 8 September 1560, his wife, Amy Robsart, was found dead at the foot of a staircase at Cumnor Hall.

  Her death was a great scandal. Not only was it a sudden and suspicious death that might well have been murder – Robert Dudley was the great favourite of the queen, Elizabeth I, and Dudley wanted to marry her instead. The death of Amy Robsart, or Amye Duddley as she signed herself in letters, was very timely as far as Dudley was concerned. The queen had her twenty-seventh birthday the day before Amy’s death and she was clearly infatuated with Dudley. There had been speculation, not only in England but in courts all over Europe, that if Dudley should ever be widowed or divorced he would become Elizabeth’s king-consort. It had been openly discussed and there was no surprise at all when Amy was found dead: only scepticism about the explanation that it had been an accidental fall.

  A pamphlet of the time gave the common view of Robert Dudley. ‘When he was in full hope to marry the queen, he did but send his wife aside to the house of his servant, Forster of Cumnor, where shortly after she had the chance to fall from a pair of stairs and break her neck, but yet without hurting of the hood that stood upon her head.’ The ‘pair of stairs’ did not mean there were only two steps for her to fall down, which would have defied credibility completely, but a returning staircase with two flights and a landing halfway up. It was even so clearly a fall down a short flight of steps. In the circumstances, it was an accident that should have resulted in a few bruises at worst.

  An inquest was held and its verdict was that Amy had died accidentally. Amy’s body was buried immediately at Cumnor. Presumably her burial was recorded in the parish register, though this was subsequently destroyed. Later, Dudley arranged a full-scale funeral for his wife in Oxford, but the coffin buried afterwards in the Church of St Mary the Virgin in Oxford High Street was, when it was opened in the twentieth century, found to be empty.

  What the queen made of Amy Robsart’s death is not known for certain. She was fully aware of the political damage to herself of what appeared to have happened. She certainly did not want it to appear that she had connived with her favourite to marry him as soon as he had murdered his wife. She immediately acted against Dudley in Council, though the detail of this action are not known as the Council’s minutes for that year have disappeared.

  Many historians of the period are pro-Elizabeth to a point where they will not countenance the possibility that the queen knew what was in Dudley’s mind, that she knew beforehand that he was going to arrange his wife’s murder. One result of that has been a certain amount of bending of evidence, much of it involving adjusting dates. One Elizabethan scholar, for instance, described a conversation as taking place ‘probably on 8 September’ when it is known to have happened on 6 September, two days before Amy Robsart’s death. This may sound like a minor detail of no importance, but there is a great deal of difference between discussing someone’s sudden death on the Sunday, when they are known to be dead, and discussing it two days beforehand. Then it clearly shows foreknowledge. The fact is that Elizabeth was sufficiently infatuated with Robert Dudley to turn a blind eye to his plan to murder his wife.

  Exactly how Amy Robsart was killed is not known. She may have died as a result of being strangled, smothered or having her neck broken. A fall down the stairs could not conceivably have been the cause, so we may suspect that an expert assassin was hired, though another suspect exists. On the day when Amy Robsart died it is known that there were two other people at Cumnor Hall with Amy: Mrs Odingsell and Mrs Owen.

  Mrs Odingsell was described as ‘the widow that liveth with Antony Forster’. She seems to have been Antony Forster’s housekeeper. She was also the aunt of Richard Verney, who had been Dudley’s page and was still devoted to serving Dudley’s interests. It is probable that either Richard Verney or his hireling was the murderer. Verney had been summoned by Dudley in the previous April, when there were rumours that there was a plot to poison Amy. Verney had been for some reason unable to travel to see Dudley, and wrote him a letter of apology, adding that he would ‘always be to my best power advanced in any your affair or commandment where opportunity offereth.’ It may have been no more than elegant politeness, but he was saying that he would do anything to help Dudley.

  A document of unknown provenance says: ‘Sir Richard Verney who, by commandment, remained with her [Amy] that day alone, with one man only, and had sent away perforce all her servants from her, to a market two miles off, he, I say, with this man, can tell how she died.’ The writer of the pamphlet said that the other man in question was killed in prison, where he was sent for some other crime, because he threatened to tell what happened. Verney himself did not live very long. He died in London after a period raving about devils. Verney’s presence at Cumnor Hall would have aroused no suspicion. Accompanied by a friend, he was simply calling on his aunt at Cumnor Hall one Sunday. Mrs Odingsell wanted to stay in the house, even though there was a fair that day at Abingdon. It was Our Lady’s Fair, and Amy made a point of sending all the servants to it.

  One theory is that Amy used the fair as a pretext to get the house to herself, so that she could commit suicide by throwing herself down the stairs. But she did not in the end have the house entirely to herself. When Mrs Odingsell protested that she should not go to the fair but stay to be with her, Amy answered that ‘Mrs Owen could bear her company at dinner.’

  Mrs Owen was either the widow of Dr Owen the royal physician who had been the previous tenant, or his daughter-in-law. She was occupying some of the rooms at Cumnor Hall, which was still regarded as the family house in spite of its being let to the Forsters. Maybe Amy wanted the house emptied so that she could have a confidential conversation over supper with the one person she trusted, someone who was outside the circle of friends and retainers attached to or appointed by her untrustworthy husband. Mrs Odingsell herself may have been an accomplice to the murder. Her motive in wanting to remain in the house may have been to preoccupy Mrs Owen while her nephew and his friend killed Amy. Mrs Odingsell seems to have been successful in isolating Mrs Owen, because the body was not found until late evening when the servants returned from the fair. The murder probably happened much earlier in the day and the body was arranged in the position at the foot of the flight of stairs where the servants were to find it. Mrs Odingsell may only have needed to say to Mrs Owen that Amy had decided to go to the fair herself and that would been enough to confine Mrs Owen to her rooms.

  The layout of Cumnor Hall was unusual. When it had become a private house earlier in the sixteenth century, several doors in the sanatorium had been sealed up. It was said that on some pretext Amy was persuaded to exchange her usual bedroom for one that had one of these blocked doorways at the head of the bed. It was easy to disguise or conceal doors at this time as it was common to cover walls with tapestries and other hangings. Amy was unaware that there was a secret door behind her bed. It was easy for her murderer to enter the room without her knowing, come up behind her and strangle or smother her before she knew what was happening. Significantly, in the aftermath of Amy’s death, Dudley gave huge grants of land to Forster in as many as fifteen counties. With this wealth he was able to buy Cumnor Hall and almost completely rebuild it. This make-over ensured that all traces of the existence of secret doors were removed. Another precaution was the clause in Forster’s will that enabled Dudley to buy Cumnor Hall from his heirs – and Dudley in due course bought it.

  Amy had been twenty-seven when she died, the same age as both Robert Dudley and Queen Elizabeth. Robert had known Amy since they were seventeen, but he had known Elizabeth since childhood. After the murder of Amy, Robert Dudley was lucky not to find himself in the Tower, even if only for appearance’s sake. He had been in the Tower once before, at the time of the Lady Jane Grey crisis. Lady Jane Grey was the wife of Robert Dudley’s elder brother, Lord Guildford Dudley. Robert Dudley had been deeply implicated in the thrust to put Jane on the throne; it was he who had proclaimed Jane queen at King’s Lynn
. When Mary Tudor prevailed, Jane, Robert’s brother Guildford and Robert’s father the Duke of Northumberland were all executed in the Tower. Robert himself was imprisoned, and very lucky to escape with his life.

  While in the Tower, Amy administered the Dudley estates. She was allowed to visit him though it is not known how often she did so. While Robert Dudley was in the Tower, he met the princess Elizabeth, who was also a prisoner there, and it was then that they fell in love. On her accession to the English throne, Elizabeth made Robert Dudley her Master of Horse. This meant that he had to be in continual attendance on her at court, so it was a way of keeping him near her. The Spanish ambassador reported in the spring of 1559, ‘Lord Robert has come so much into favour that he does whatever he likes with affairs, and it is said that Her Majesty visits him in his chamber night and day. People talk of this so freely that they go so far as to say that his wife has a malady in one of her breasts and the queen is only waiting for her to die to marry Lord Robert.’ Because of the way the situation was developing, the Spanish sent a new ambassador to London that summer, Alvaro de Quadra, the Bishop of Aquila, with the special task of watching Dudley. He reported in the autumn, ‘I have heard from a certain person who is accustomed to give veracious news that Lord Robert has sent to poison his wife. Certainly all the queen has done in the matter of her marriage is only keeping Lord Robert’s enemies and the country engaged with words until this wicked deed is consummated.’

  In January 1560, de Quadra reported that England was getting restive with the uncertainty over the queen’s intentions and even more over Lord Robert Dudley’s. It seems everyone was waiting for news of Amy’s death. Dudley had tried to enlist the help of the Professor of Physics at Oxford, Dr Bayly, asking him to prescribe something for Amy, ‘meaning also to have added somewhat of their own for her comfort.’ Bayly, according to de Quadra, would have nothing to do with it, suspecting, probably correctly, that Dudley was planning to add something lethal to his medicine and that he, Bayly, would find himself taking the blame for Dudley’s crime. When this version of events was published in a pamphlet, the cautious Bayly was still alive and he did not contradict it. De Quadra also reported that people in England in general were critical of Dudley’s behaviour, because what he was planning to do would ruin the queen.

  Dudley may have sensed that the queen was getting nervous about all the publicity and was on the brink of rejecting him to save her own position. That may have caused him to act when he did. There was also, just three weeks before the murder, the scandalous public accusation by Anne Dowe of Brentford that the queen had had a child by Dudley. There were widespread rumours that Dudley had slept with the queen. Dudley may have realized that he needed to be free of Amy so that he could marry Elizabeth without delay.

  By the first week in September the quarrel between Dudley and William Cecil, the queen’s secretary, had intensified. Cecil was so unnerved by what was happening that he spoke unguardedly to de Quadra.

  I met the Secretary Cecil, whom I knew to be in disgrace. Lord Robert, I was aware, was endeavouring to deprive him of his place. He [Cecil] 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 a port if 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 affairs to him and meant to marry him. He said he should ask leave to go home, though he thought they would cast him into the Tower first. He ended by begging me in God’s name to point out to the Queen the effect of her misconduct and to persuade her not to abandon business entirely, but to look to her realm; and then he repeated to me twice over that Lord Robert would be better in Paradise than here. Last of all, he said they were thinking of destroying Lord Robert’s wife. They had given out that she was ill; but she was not ill at all; she was very well and taking care not to be poisoned.

  The next day, the Saturday, was the queen’s birthday. The Spanish ambassador managed to have a conversation with her. He reported, ‘The queen told me on her return from hunting that lord Robert’s wife was dead, or nearly so, and begged me to say nothing about it.’ If true, this was damningly revealing. The queen knew that Amy was ‘nearly dead’ on Saturday. Amy was found dead late on Sunday evening and official news of her death did not reach Windsor until Monday. By then, de Quadra had not sent his letter, and he was able to add a postscript as follows. ‘Since this was written the queen has published the death of Lord Robert’s wife and has said in Italian, Si ha rotto il collo. She must have fallen down stairs.’ Why the queen should have made this comment in Italian is not known. It suggests to me that she was already trying to distance herself from what had been done. From de Quadra’s comments, which there is no particular reason to distrust, it is clear that the queen knew what was going to happen and colluded with Dudley in his plan to murder his wife. Elizabeth, the queen, was an accessory to murder, an accessory before the fact. Once this is realized, the reason for Cecil’s extreme anxiety about the queen’s conduct becomes clear; he knew she was plotting with Dudley to destroy his wife.

  There was widespread condemnation of Dudley and the queen. Nobody believed that Amy’s death was accidental. A week afterwards, one of the great preachers of the time, Dr Leaver, wrote that ‘the country was full of mutterings and dangerous suspicions, and there must be an earnest searching and trying of the truth.’ When it emerged that Dudley fully intended to marry the queen as soon as possible, English ambassadors in France and Scotland frantically signalled that this must be prevented if the prestige of the English court was to be sustained abroad. The foreign courts were even more scandalized than the English. Throckmorton, the English ambassador in Paris, was so humiliated by what the French were saying about his queen and about England that he wanted to crawl away and die. He reported this back and was sternly rebuked from London, in a letter which he annotated before filing it, ‘A warning not to be too busy about matters between the queen and Lord Robert.’

  In January 1561, it looked as if the marriage would go ahead. Dudley’s brother-in-law went to de Quadra with an outrageous proposal. In principle it was a plea for Spain to endorse and support Elizabeth’s marriage to Lord Robert; in return, Elizabeth would return England to Catholicism. De Quadra was understandably astonished and bewildered by this, and had to refer back to Philip of Spain. The decision was made for a papal nuncio to come to England, meet the queen and hear from her direct what she had in mind. This was to take place in April 1561. Like a magician, Cecil cleverly produced a Catholic plot before that could take place. It was a very minor plot to re-establish Catholicism in England, but Cecil managed to make it sound sinister and threatening to Protestant lords. ‘The way is full of crooks,’ he wrote, and he knew because he was one of them. In Council, he managed to establish that anyone who met the nuncio when he arrived would be guilty of treason. The use of the word treason was enough to clinch the matter. The nuncio would not be met. The Queen would not offer to turn the country Catholic. The queen would not solicit the support of Spain, Dudley’s single ally. The queen would not be able to marry Dudley after all.

  In this cunning way, Cecil succeeded in blocking the marriage that the queen appeared to have risked so much to bring about. He took a remarkable risk. It has even been suggested by some historians that Cecil himself may have been responsible for organizing Amy Robsart’s murder in order to precipitate the crisis. Cecil had gradually slid out of favour with the rise of Robert Dudley. Cecil knew that if Dudley were to become king-consort it was probable that all of his work would be undone. In fact relations between Cecil and Dudley had deteriorated to a point where it was unlikely that Cecil could survive if the marriage took place.

  Cecil may have reasoned that he would save the queen from a politically disastrous marriage – and so save the kingdom – by sabotaging the courtship. That scotching the queen’s marriage to Dudley would save his own position, and possibly save him from a miserable end in the Tower, was an added incenti
ve. If he could make the malicious rumours that Dudley was plotting to do away with his wife come true, the queen would have to drop Dudley. In some ways, Amy Robsart’s death was more to Cecil’s advantage than to anyone else’s. The scandal it was certain to cause would make it impossible for the queen to go ahead and marry Dudley. So perhaps it was Cecil who hired Verney or someone else to kill Amy. The snag with this theory is that there is absolutely no documentary evidence to support it.

  Another theory that has been put forward is that Amy Robsart’s death was linked with her medical condition. We are told that she suffered from some sort of chest ailment. This could have been breast cancer or perhaps an aortic aneurism. Breast cancer sometimes produces porous bones. If Amy’s bones were unusually fragile, it would, after all, be possible for her to break her neck by falling a short distance down a low flight of stairs. The idea that Amy broke her own neck, committing suicide by throwing herself downstairs, is less plausible, as she could not have known about the porosity of her bones. She could therefore not have known that a fall down a short flight of stairs would be sufficient. It is a very unlikely mode of suicide.

  The likeliest explanation for Amy Robsart’s death remains deliberate murder at the orders of her husband, with the connivance of the queen. There was never any attempt by the queen to deny that Amy was murdered. She always spoken of Amy’s death in a heartless way. There can be little doubt that Elizabeth I knew that Amy was going to be murdered. She very likely encouraged Robert Dudley to hasten matters. Dudley very likely commissioned his ex-page Richard Verney to carry out the murder, and Verney in turn enlisted the help of another man (unnamed), who was later killed in prison after threatening to publish the truth of what had happened.