To Shield the Queen (30 page)

Rumours that her husband Sir Robin Dudley had arranged it were rife, although the panic-stricken letter which he wrote afterwards to his cousin Thomas Blount goes a long way towards exonerating him.

It is possible that the theory advanced by Professor Ian Aird in the
English Historical Review
, 1956, is correct. Professor Aird observed that if Lady Dudley really did have cancer, she may have suffered from the secondary effect of brittle bones, which could have caused her neck to snap spontaneously, or as the result of a fall which would not have been fatal to a healthy person.

It is a fact that the queen regarded Lady Catherine Grey with dislike and was so angry when she found that Lady Catherine had clandestinely married Lord Hertford, that she put them both in the Tower.

Sir Thomas Smith prospered under Elizabeth on the whole, and in the early 1560s he went to Paris as her ambassador (not always a comfortable post). Although they were generally united in their loyalty to Elizabeth, Smith did at one point have a quarrel, cause unknown, with Sir William Cecil. The Earl of Derby was always apparently loyal to Elizabeth, although Cecil regarded him with suspicion—perhaps because of his strong Catholic leanings, perhaps for some other reason.

I have taken the liberty of inventing explanations for both of these mysteries.