The Elizabethans (10 page)

They had not grown up together, but they had known one another long before their spell as gaol-birds in the Tower.

They were the same age. ‘I have known her better than any man alive since she was eight years old,’ he would later claim.
¹⁹
When Henry VIII contracted his final marriage, to Catherine Parr, the small ceremony was witnessed by the new Queen’s friend, Jane Dudley – Robert’s mother. When Catherine Parr took in hand the education of Princess Elizabeth, and introduced her to the Cambridge dons – Cheke, Grindal, Ascham and Buckley – who taught her children of the courtiers joined these ‘royal schools’ and Robert Dudley was taught alongside the Princess. He learned mathematics with her (though she was far cleverer than he was), he learned riding and dancing with her.
²⁰
At the age of thirteen he officially joined the household of her brother, Edward VI. At seventeen he married Amy, daughter of a Norfolk squire named Sir John Robsart, and Princess Elizabeth was present at the wedding. (So too in all likelihood was a twenty-nine-year-old lawyer, William Cecil, now a member of Edward VI’s court, who dismissed Dudley’s union to Amy as ‘a carnal marriage, begun for pleasure and ended in lamentation’.
²¹
)

So Robert and Elizabeth had been very close from childhood. Of course, he would not have been a Dudley if he had not made full political capital out of this. In their long and complicated relationship, much of which was played out – with deliberate exhibitionism on both sides – in public, they both depended upon, and exploited, one another.

From the first, Elizabeth’s easy intimacy with her favourite caused rage among those courtiers who automatically distrusted a Dudley, and – to a wider circle, spreading by rumour throughout Europe – scandal. Dudley was a very handsome young man (
giovane bellissimo
), reported the Venetian Ambassador, ‘towards whom in various ways the Queen evinces such affection and inclination that many persons believe that if his wife, who has been ailing for some time, were to die, the Queen might easily take him for her husband.’
²²

Count de Feria, the Spanish Ambassador, wrote to Philip II, who, when married to Mary Tudor, had expressed his lust for his sister-in-law Elizabeth:

Lord Robert has come so much into favour that he does whatever he likes with affairs and it is even said that her Majesty visits him in his chamber day and night. 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. I can assure your Majesty that matters have reached such a pass that I have been brought to consider whether it would not be well to approach Lord Robert on your Majesty’s behalf, promising him your help and favour and coming to terms with him.
²³

The gossip about the Queen and Dudley, and more specifically the widely held view that they were waiting for his neglected young wife to die, reached an unpleasant crisis when on Sunday, 8 September 1560, Dudley’s wife Amy died, aged twenty-eight. She was found lying dead at the bottom of the staircase at Cumnor Place, near Oxford. It is a curious incident and it is worth recording the facts of the case, in so far as they are known.

First, perhaps, one should note that Amy Dudley fell down a single flight of not particularly steep stairs, and that this broke her neck. This suggests that the cause of death was a ‘spontaneous’ or ‘pathological’ fracture of the spine.
²⁴
Amy Dudley was too young for this to have been caused by ageing or osteoporosis, but it is possible that she had cancerous deposits in her bones, which made them brittle. The Count de Feria, the Spanish Ambassador, in the letter just quoted of 18 April 1559, used the Spanish phrase
enferma y mala de un pecho
; the use of the indefinite article –
a
breast – suggesting that a mammary gland was intended, not the chest in general.

Second, attention should be drawn to the positioning of Cumnor Place. It was not a large house. It had been a sanatorium for the monastery in Abingdon. It belonged to William Owen, whose father had been one of Henry VIII’s doctors (hence, perhaps, his getting the sanatorium when the monastery was dissolved). Owen let it to Anthony Forster, who was the Chief Controller of Robert Dudley’s household and a personal friend. Amy moved in during the early part of 1560, having previously rented a house at Denchworth, near Abingdon, from a Mr Hyde.

Cumnor Place might well have been divided into separate dwellings, but the household there consisted of Mrs Odingsells (a widowed sister of Mr Hyde), Mrs Owen (wife of the owner, who acted as a housekeeper) and Mr and Mrs Forster. The house was therefore occupied by a group of friends. It was not a remote,
²⁵
lonely country place, but a village house, easily accessible from the church and from another building that adjoined it. It was built around a small quadrangle, and the fateful staircase led from the first floor of one wing – the west wing – of the building.

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.

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.