Gossip as History: The Murder of Amy Robsart.

In This Series:

• Gossip as History: Anne Boleyn,      Part 1
• Gossip as History: The Murder of Amy Robsart.
• Gossip as History: Figure Flingers, Poisoners and Shrovetide Plays.
• Gossip as History: The Letters of John Chamberlain.

For all Robert Dudley, the Earl of Leicester, was a very public man, surprisingly little is known about his private life.  That he was dashing and charismatic was widely acknowledged.  Queen Elizabeth I kept him close to her from the beginning of her reign.  That he became the country’s foremost general upon the passing of the old generation of the Earl of Sussex and Lord Hunsdon is well known.

Always, somehow, Elizabeth’s attachment was of the heart.  He claimed to have known her since she was eight years old.  Both were prisoners in The Tower for a time in 1554.  If she ever considered marrying, as Queen, it was with Leicester.  But she slowly became aware that such an arrangement would be untenable.  And, if it was untenable with him, it was untenable with any of her subjects.  Instead she would reward him above all men and expect him to realize his bounds.  He failed from time to time to meet his obligation and a spat occurred much like a lovers’ spat.  It was their version of a marriage.

As Leicester gained his earldom and various other lavish gifts from the hand of the Queen, the traditional nobility grew furiously jealous.  He was a younger son of a treasonous family.  They were eldest sons of families whose treasons were forgotten in the far more distant historical past.

As his power grew so did his pride.  Never quite sure the Queen would not change her mind and marry the man she clearly loved, that pride was an even more fearful thing to the traditional nobility, even more infuriating.  Everything he did went beyond the pale.  Rumors swirled around him so thickly that he was reputed to be utterly without conscience.

The first sudden death Leicester was rumored to have caused was that of his wife, Amy Robsart, in 1560.  In that year, it was still not clear whether the Queen would marry.  But certainly not her beloved Leicester if he were married.  Robsart  fell down “a pair of stairs,”[1] at the Dudley estate Cumnor Place, breaking her neck. 

Dudley (not yet created Earl of Leicester) had been attending at Court at the time, as was his constant habit.  He made a point of not contacting the members of the inquest lest he be thought to have affected it.  He directed that a second inquest should be undertaken to verify the findings of the first.  The Queen sent him away in an attempt to squelch the rumors that were sure to be spread.

His agent in this was his servant Thomas Blount who sent him a letter three days after Robsart’s death recounting a conversation with a local man:

I asked him what was his judgment and the judgment of the people. He saide, “some weare disposed to saie well, & some evill.”

The whole town was talking.  Some suspected an evil act had been committed upon his wife.  The inquest would return a verdict of accidental death.

Add to all of this that Robsart is suspected to have been suffering from late stages of breast cancer.  She was very weak, and probably in considerable pain, and had sent away all the servants in the house for the day to a nearby fair.  Blount himself suggests once, during the correspondence, that she might not have been in her proper mind.

We do not have a floor layout or description precise enough to know what “a pair of stairs” amounted to.  It sounds, however, like she most likely threw herself down from the highest story she could manage, in the gap between ascending flights of stairs.  Her husband and family hoped for a finding of “accident” rather than “suicide” so she could receive a Christian burial.

If the townspeople whispered, the nobility that was already furious with Leicester’s rise and dreading the prospect he might become their king were far more direct.  They were eager to spread the worst rumors to the ambassadors of the countries resident at Court. Passing along just such rumors, to the home office, was a main part of the job of an ambassador.

William Cecil, the Queen’s Secretary of State, was soon receiving reports. “The bruits be so brim, and so maliciously reported here,” Nicholas Throckmorton wrote, from Paris, “touching the marriage of the lord Robert, and the death of his wife, that I know not where to turn me, nor what countenance to bear.”[2]  Thomas Chaloner wrote from the Spanish Court where he was temporarily filling in:

I assure you, sir, thies folks are brode mowthed, where I speke of oon to[o] much in favor as I estem… To tell you what I conceive, as I count the slawnder most false, so a young princess canne not be to[o] ware.[3]

The Queen’s reputation was in danger of being shredded as well.  She was reputed not only a Jezebel but a murderess.

By 1583, the year of the libelous book Leicester’s Commonwealth the purported murder of Robsart was reputed to be just one of many.  Over 20 years of accusations of the worst kind were gathered up to publish to the world.   An exile English Catholic community, in France and the Netherlands, finding plenty of encouragement and support from England’s frenemies, presented the case that the heinous Earl of Leicester had been a murderous and dishonorable master of deception from the start.  His every honor was, in fact, a repackaged crime.

More than a century after the Earl’s death, in 1588, Elias Ashmole plagiarized the unsubstantiated  Commonwealth account of the murder of Robsart in his Antiquities of Berkshire,[4] and it became settled history.  The entire story of the insidious Machiavellian Earl — the story concocted by furiously jealous enemies — became settled history… and largely remains so to this day.

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[1] Pettigrew, Thomas.  An Inquiry Into the Particulars Connected with the Death of Amy Robsart (1859). 28. “Immediately upon your departing from me there came to me Bowes, by whom I do understands that my wife is dead, &, as he saithe, by a falle from a paire of stayres:…” Lord Robert Dudley to Thomas Blount. September 9, 1559.

[2] Lingard. Lingard - The History of England From the First Invasion by the Romans to ..., (1883). VI.69n. October 28, 1560.

[3] Ibid. December 6, 1559.

[4] Ashmole, Elias. Antiquities of Berkshire (1719), Vol. I, 149 —154.

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• The Fascinating Itinerary of the Gelosi Troupe, 1576.  June 10, 2019.  “The Spanish soldiers had not been paid and unpaid soldiers tend to rob and loot.  The citizens were prepared to give them a fight.  Violent flare ups were occurring everywhere.”
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• The Battle Over Shakespeare's Early and Late Plays. September 24, 2018. “The answers to the post-Oxford dilemma, of course, are three.”
• Stratford Shakespeare’s Undersized Grave.  July 22, 2018.  “Mr. Coll’s considers this evidence to support an old rumor that Shakspere’s head had been stolen in 1794.  But I submit that he is merely making his observation based upon a coincidence.”
• Check out the English Renaissance Article Index for many more articles and reviews about this fascinating time and about the Shakespeare Authorship Question.