Life of Elizabeth I

by Alison Weir

  In other words, she might have committed suicide.

  'No, good Mr Blount', declared Pirgo, 'do not judge so of my words; if you should so gather, I am sorry I said so much. It passeth the judgement of man to say how it is.' Suicide, in those days, was regarded as a mortal sin leading to eternal damnation: truly the last refuge of the desperate. Blount seems to have felt that Pirgo was not denying that Amy had taken her own life, but regretting that she had confided in him. He himself apparently believed that suicide should not be ruled out, and he concluded his letter to Dudley by urging him to turn from sorrow to joy in his innocence, which fearless enquiry would soon reveal, and then 'malicious reports shall turn upon their backs'.

  Whilst the coroner's investigation was being carried out, the Queen rarely appeared in public, but confined herself to her apartments, concealing her anxieties from her courtiers. On the few occasions when she did emerge, she appeared pale and agitated.

  At Kew, Dudley fretted with anxiety, agitating helplessly over the coming coroner's verdict, while at a court throbbing with speculation his enemies drew the obvious conclusion and settled back to enjoy his discomfiture. Aware of what was being said about him - for he was allowed to receive visitors, among them his tailor come to fit him out in mourning - Dudley found the long hours of enforced idleness mental torture. His greatest fear was not that the finger of suspicion would be forever pointing at him, although that was bad enough, but that the Queen would decide never to admit him to her presence again. It was one thing to conduct an affair with a married man, but quite another to associate with one reputed to have murdered his wife.

  Blount's letter reached Dudley on the 12th, and around the same time he received a surprise visit from William Cecil, who had been restored to the Queen's confidence almost as soon as the favourite was out of the palace door: it was natural that, at a time of crisis, Elizabeth should turn to her wise and reliable Secretary for advice and support. Cecil concealed his triumph well; he had come, he said, to offer his condolences on Lord Robert's sad loss, and he spent the visit murmuring the platitudes demanded at such times by convention and good manners.

  Dudley was touched by Cecil's solicitude, and grateful for his apparent support, and soon afterwards he hastened to write to express his thanks for such kindness on the part of his rival and to enlist his help in asking the Queen if he could return to court:

  Sir, I thank you much for your being here, and the great friendship you have showed toward me I shall not forget. I am very loath to wish you here again, but I would be very glad to be with you. I pray you let me hear from you what you think best for me to do. If you doubt, I pray you, ask the question for the sooner you can advise me [to travel] thither, 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. Forget me not, though you see me not, and I will remember you and fail you not.

  Around the same time, Dudley wrote again to Thomas Blount, begging for news: 'Until I hear from you again how the matter falleth out in very truth, I cannot be quiet.' Then he wrote to the coroner's jury, urging them to do their duty without fear or favour.

  On 13 September, Blount replied with the encouraging news that the jury, having taken great pains to uncover the truth, could find 'no presumptions of evil. And, if I judge aright, mine own opinion is much quieted.' Blount was now persuaded that 'only misfortune hath done it, and nothing else'. Dudley, anticipating the verdict, felt impelled to write to the foreman of the jury, Mr Smith, to see if he could glean any idea of how the official enquiry was progressing. Mr Smith's reply was noncommittal.

  Around this time Dudley received a sympathetic letter from the Earl of Huntingdon, his brother-in-law, who wrote: 'I understand by letters the death of 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 maketh all for the best to them that love Him.' These were conventional expressions of comfort for the bereaved, which may have expressed the family's view that Amy's death had been a merciful release from suffering.

  Dudley's torment did not last long: a few days later the coroner pronounced a verdict of accidental death - we do not know the exact wording because no document relating to the inquest survives. The Queen's opinion, as expressed to a secretary, was that the verdict left no room for doubt, an opinion with which Cecil and others, including Robert's brother-in-law, Sir Henry Sidney, heartily concurred.

  But for Dudley himself, this was not enough. He had hoped that the coroner's enquiry would expose Amy's murderer and thus clear his own name. Now, fearing that there was still room for others to draw malicious conclusions, he pressed for a second jury to be empanelled, so that the investigation could be continued. The Queen, however, whose relief was palpable, felt that one verdict was sufficient, especially since the coroner had acquitted Dudley from all responsibility for the tragedy. She did not hesitate to invite him back to Windsor, restoring him to full favour and making it clear that, as far as she was concerned, the matter was closed. As a mark of respect, she ordered the court into a month's mourning for Amy Dudley.

  Others were not so certain of Dudley's innocence. While most people had been shocked at the news of his wife's death, many had not - given the rumours - been surprised. It was generally felt that the evidence laid before the coroner had been insufficient to exonerate the favourite from guilt, and that 'the very plain truth' remained to be exposed. On 17 September, a renowned Puritan minister, Thomas Lever, Rector of Coventry and Master of Sherborne Hospital, wrote to the Council to inform them that 'in these parts' the country was full of 'grievous and dangerous suspicions and muttering of the death of her which was the wife of my Lord Robert Dudley, and there must be an earnest searching and trying of the truth'.

  This feeling persisted even after Dudley arranged a lavish ceremonial funeral for his late wife. Many had believed that her body had been buried with almost unseemly haste at the parish church near Cumnor Place, but there is no proof of this, as the church registers are lost. On 22 September, Amy's body was lying in state at Gloucester Hall in Oxford, and it was taken from there, on that day, and laid to rest beneath the choir of the Church of St Mary the Virgin in Oxford. The Queen sent her friend Lady Norris to represent her. Dudley did not attend, since custom decreed that the chief mourners at a funeral be of the same sex as the deceased. In 1584, in Leycester's Commonwealth, it was alleged that the preacher, in his sermon, referred to 'this lady so pitifully slain' but contemporary sources do not refer to this. In the twentieth century Amy Dudley's coffin was exhumed and opened, but was found to contain only dust.

  During the fraught days between her death and funeral, de Quadra had found it difficult to find out what was happening. Few courtiers would talk to him, and he heard only damning rumours and wild speculation, which led him to conclude, as did many other people, that the Queen had colluded in murder. 'Assuredly it is a matter full of shame and infamy. Likely enough a revolution may come of it. The Queen may be sent to the Tower, and they may make a king of the Earl of Huntingdon, who is a great heretic, calling in a party of France to help them.' It was obvious that if Elizabeth married Dudley now, she would launch herself on a headlong course to disaster. As for Dudley, rumour had condemned him of plotting to kill his wife even before Amy's death; predictably, few accepted that she had died of accidental causes.

  How did Amy Dudley meet her death?

  There is no dispute that she died as a result of a broken neck. She was found at the bottom of a staircase, and the obvious conclusion would have been that she had fallen down those stairs, and that her death was due, as Dudley's supporters asserted, to an act of God. Yet it was claimed at the time that the steps were too shallow to have caused a fatal injury,
and this led many people to deduce that someone, with malice aforethought, broke her neck and then placed her body at the foot of the stairs to make her death appear accidental. Her husband, as we have seen, was the chief suspect.*

  Leycester's Commonwealth openly accused Dudley of the murder, alleging that he hired an assassin to do the deed, and names this man as Richard Verney. Verney, who was Mrs Owen's nephew, had once been Dudley's page, and was staunchly loyal to him. Leycester's Commonwealth asserted that, by Lord Robert's 'commandment', Verney remained with her [Amy] that day [8 September] alone, with one man only, and had sent perforce all her servants from her to a market two miles off.' This was incorrect, as it was Amy herself who had sent her servants away, and they went to a fair. Nevertheless, the anonymous author claimed that

  * Amy Dudley's half-brother, John Appleyard, would later let it be known that he possessed secret information about her death, but 'had for the Earl's sake covered the murder of his sister', hinting that Dudley, by then Earl of Leicester, was in some way implicated. But his motive was clearly the desire to profit financially, either from Dudley in return for remaining silent, or In the form of monetary rewards from the Earl's enemies. In 1567, suspected of fraud. Appleyard was committed to the Fleet Prison with orders to produce any relevant evidence concerning Lady Dudley's death, the Council having furnished him with a copy of the coroner's findings. Immediately, he backed down and stated he was fully satisfied that his sister's death had been an accident.

  Verney, and the other man who was with him, could 'tell how she died.' Conveniently, Verney had since died himself, in London, raving incoherently about demons 'to a gentleman of worship of my acquaintance', and the mysterious accomplice was sent to prison for another offence and later murdered there because he had 'offered to publish' the truth about Amy's death.

  It is impossible to check many of the details in this account since they are so vague. Verney's movements and whereabouts on 8 September cannot be traced. The only contemporary mention of him in connection with Dudley dates from the previous April, when the latter sent for Verney and Verney had to write and apologise for not being able to come. He added, 'I and mine shall always be to my best power advanced in any your affair or commandment where opportunity offereth.' It would be unwise to read too much of significance into these words.

  It is, of course, possible that Verney's aunt Mrs Owen was privy to a murder plot; it was she with whom Amy dined on that day, and she who was the last recorded person to see Amy alive. Possibly Amy had already arranged to dine with Mrs Owen when she ordered her servants to go to the fair. Could Mrs Owen have persuaded her that there was a good reason why they should be alone? It is perhaps significant that there is no record of Amy being angry with Mrs Owen for staying at home.

  Amy was certainly unusually anxious to be rid of her servants. Was she expecting a secret visitor? Could that visitor perhaps have been someone sent by her husband to discuss an annulment of their marriage? Such a development had been rumoured that year, and in view of the damage such rumours could do, it would have been natural for Robert to insist that Amy receive her visitor in private, with perhaps the discreet Mrs Owen present as a witness or chaperone. Or was Amy led to believe that a visitor was coming, when something more sinister was planned? On the other hand, one could also speculate that she was so depressed, and possibly so ill, that she was desperate for some peace and quiet with a sympathetic friend to whom she could confide her fears, without the constant presence of servants about her.

  We should consider the behaviour of Mrs Odingsells, who stoutly refused to go to the fair, much to Amy's chagrin. Was she in league with those who sought to do Amy harm, or even with Mrs Owen? Had these two ladies, about whom we know very little, conspired to help an assassin? Was Mrs Odingsells deputed to let him in, while Mrs Owen kept Amy occupied at table, or with the game of backgammon that she was said to have been playing before she died? There are no answers to these questions, for they are mere speculation and theory.

  If Amy was murdered before being laid at the foot of the stairs, how was it done? When Cumnor Place was converted into a gentleman's house after the Dissolution of the Monasteries, some building work was carried out and several doors were blocked up. There was a tale current after Amy's death that she had been persuaded - by whom is not clear - to lodge in a room that had a secret doorway behind the bedhead. It was through this doorway, it was claimed, that her murderer came into the room. Or perhaps the killer came upon her as she sat at table with Mrs Owen.

  Some time after Amy's death, Anthony Forster was rewarded for good service by Robert Dudley, who gave him lands in fifteen counties, enabling Forster to purchase Cumnor Place and virtually rebuild it. Some believed, then and later, that Forster had been Dudley's accomplice in the murder, and that this was his reward, but there is no other evidence for this. When Forster died in 1572, Dudley bought the house from his heirs, having been given the option to do so in Forster's will. Why he should have wanted Cumnor, with its unpleasant associations, is not clear.

  Several people, notably Blount, attributed Amy's death to suicide. She had been depressed and, according to her maid, in a state of near desperation before she met her end. Robert's neglect and his very public relationship with the Queen could have accounted for this, or Amy could have been in the last stages of breast cancer, suffering pain for which there was no palliative then, as well as the resulting emotional trauma. The theory that she took her own life is therefore a credible one, and would explain why she was so anxious to get her servants out of the house.

  No one at the time thought to attribute Amy's death to natural causes, but since 1956, when a new theory was suggested by Professor Ian Aird, most modern historians have done so. Aird considered the possibility that Amy was suffering from breast cancer; the 'malady in one of her breasts' had first been referred to by de Quadra in April 1559. This disease, as it progresses, causes in about fifty per cent of sufferers a weakening of the bones due to cancerous deposits that break away from the original tumour and are carried through the bloodstream to settle on the bones, particularly the spine, which becomes unnaturally brittle. Thus, if Amy was in the last stages of the disease, even the slight exertion required to walk down a flight of stairs could have caused a spontaneous fracture of the vertebrae. However, if this theory is correct, it offers no explanation of Amy's unusual behaviour on the day of her death. Nor does the less commonly accepted modern theory, that she suffered from an aortic aneurism, the terminal enlargement of an artery from the heart, which causes pain and swelling in the chest, and mental aberrations - including depression or fits of anger - resulting from erratic blood-flow to the brain. Sudden slight pressure can cause the bursting of the aneurism, bringing instantaneous death. The resultant fall could, in Amy's case, have caused her neck to break.

  Whether due to natural causes or not, Amy Dudley's death was certainly convenient, but not, ironically, for the person whom many supposed expected to benefit from it. Most people believed that her husband had killed her in order to marry the Queen, and thus far he had a motive for doing so. Yet even he, thick-skinned as he often was, could not have been so stupid as to think he would get away with it, and if she were indeed dying of cancer, he had no need to do anything. On the day before her death, the Queen told de Quadra that Lady Dudley was dead, or nearly so. If Elizabeth was involved in a murder plot, she was hardly likely to announce the death of the victim before she was certain that it had happened, or even refer to it - she was far too clever for that. Yet her announcement would make more sense if she had been told by Dudley that the end was near. The behaviour of the Queen and Dudley after the event suggests that they were both shocked and bewildered by the news, and both did their utmost to ensure that Amy's death was thoroughly and objectively investigated.

  That Dudley's chief concern was to clear his own name is understandable, given what people were saying about him, and it proves that he was well aware of what the consequences would be, and what was
at stake if a credible explanation was not arrived at. It was in his interests that his wife should die a natural death, and the evidence suggests that she might shortly have done so. He was hardly likely to have gone to the trouble of having her killed, or allowing her body to be left in such suspicious circumstances.

  The Queen did not interfere in the coroner's enquiry, and if she appeared to be initiating a damage limitation exercise after the verdict, that was understandable, since tongues had not been stilled and were deeminq her guilty by association because of her intimacy with Dudley. If she had had any real wish to marry him now that he was free, it was unlikely that she would be able to do so and hold on to her throne. Some of her courtiers, knowing how she had so far shied away from marriage, were of the opinion that the news of Lady Dudley's death was not welcome to her, since Lord Robert might now begin to press his suit in earnest, and even though she loved him, she might not be prepared to surrender her independence. Such an iinpasse could only cause conflict, and the courtship dance that she had so perfected with her foreign suitors might not serve her so well when it came to a man with whom she was emotionally involved.

  The fact remains that there is no factual evidence whatsoever to implicate either the Queen or Dudley in his wife's death. Neither gained anything but trouble and ill-fame from it, and the almost universal belief in his guilt was to bedevil Dudley until the end of his days.

  One man did profit from the death of Amy Dudley, and that was William Cecil. He was swiftly restored to favour as soon as the news was known and his rival banished from court, and when he visited Dudley at Kew he did so in the comfortable knowledge that their positions had been reversed and that he now had the upper hand. In such circumstances he could afford to be magnanimous.