Virgins Lover

First published in The Times, London, Saturday September 11 2004.

On Saturday September 7th 1560 it was Elizabeth Ist's birthday, she was two years into her reign and only twenty-seven years old. She had just defeated England's greatest enemy after a stand-off in Scotland which forced her to find a new courage and perseverance, she was driving the Protestant religion into law against the opposition of all her bishops, she was re-valuing the almost-worthless currency - and she was passionately in love with a convicted traitor and married man.

Robert Dudley, her childhood friend, had been favourite at the court from the moment that, ahead of anyone else, he galloped on his white horse to Hatfield to tell her that her half-sister Mary Tudor was dead, and that she was the new Queen. Immediately, she made him Master of Horse, - the traditional job of the most favoured man at court - and so he took charge of all the parties, the hunts, the stables and even the great ceremonial of her coronation.

Dudley - nicknamed The Gypsy for his dark good looks - was never far from the side of the young Queen. He was the man she ran to when she thought she was being stalked by an assassin, he was the man she chose as her dancing partner, her constant companion; and half of Europe thought he was her lover.

Her old governess and now Keeper of the Queen's books went on her knees to beg the Queen to separate from Dudley and silence the gossips. Elizabeth, usually so careful of her reputation, swore that she and Dudley were not lovers, but demanded: if she wanted him - who should stop her? Meanwhile, the Queen's uncle Thomas Howard swore that he would murder Robert Dudley for bringing the Queen into disrepute, and Dudley was openly boasting that if he survived a year he would be in "a very different position". Everyone assumed he meant to be King. Half the court believed they were already married in secret, gossips in the country were whispering that the Queen's summer progress had been to hide her pregnancy.

Just at this moment, 444 years ago, with speculation at its most feverish, and the love affair at full heat, came the weekend of Elizabeth's birthday. Robert Dudley's neglected wife, Amy, was, as usual, staying with friends in Oxfordshire. Amy had been a wealthy heiress in Norfolk when she and Robert had first met when he was seventeen and she was perhaps five years his senior. Unquestionably, it was a marriage for love, there were advantages on both sides but it was known as a marriage "begun in joy". She must have been strikingly pretty to take the eye of such a highly-favoured young man - but there are no known portraits of her.

The couple probably grew apart as Robert pursued his family's ambitions and Amy stayed at home in Norfolk, and then during the years of the Dudley's defeat and shame when Robert was attainted as a traitor for his part in the Jane Grey plot, Amy stood by him and visited him in the Tower of London. When the sentence against him was lifted and he started a slow rise to favour, Amy did not go to court with him but stayed with her step-mother in Norfolk and with friends and family. When Elizabeth came to the throne the new Queen did not welcome wives at her flirtatious court, and the couple settled to life apart.

His rise to wealth and power was so rapid that in 1560 Robert had not yet bought or built a country house for his wife and she lived an unsettled life as a guest with one or another of his friends. They had no children and we can only speculate at how desolate Amy must have felt, travelling with her companion from house to house while the whole country believed her husband to be in love with the young Queen.

Amy's hosts believed her to be very low in spirits, and gossips said that she had a malady in her breast. A doctor refused to attend her because of his fear that she was being poisoned and he would be endangered whether he cured her, or if she died. Then, extraordinarily, Queen Elizabeth had an incredibly indiscreet conversation with the Spanish ambassador about her affection for Robert, implying that they would soon be free to marry since Robert's wife Amy was dead "or nearly so."

The ambassador, his head reeling, then had a conversation with Secretary William Cecil, the Queen's great advisor and confidante who begged him to tell the Queen she was heading towards ruin. Cecil warned that he would resign his post because the Queen was set on marrying Robert Dudley whose wife was being poisoned.

This would be extraordinary enough, but three days after these conversations, the court learned that Amy Dudley was dead. The Queen remarked, though no details had yet come to court, that Amy must have died of a broken neck.

Yet again Elizabeth was incriminatingly prescient. Amy Dudley had sent all the servants from the house on Sunday, and had been found on their return at the foot of a very short flight of stairs with her neck broken. The inquest assumed that she had fallen. Elizabeth ordered the court into mourning and Amy was given the full honours of a grand funeral at St Mary's Church, Oxford. Dudley, after the briefest of absences, returned to Elizabeth's court; but the shadow of the scandal followed him all his life.

The mystery of Amy Dudley's death is still unsolved four centuries later. Several culprits have been suggested: malignant cancer of the breast which would account for the reports of 'a malady' of the breast, and could have caused the thinning of the bones of her neck which might then have snapped after an accidental stumble, some people have accused Robert Dudley's agents, Elizabeth's agents, Cecil's agents, or to suicide.

Amy could have taken her own life: but she would have regarded it as a most terrible sin, certain to send her to hell. Also, though the stairs are long gone, they were said to be only a short sequence of steps. If she had a thinning of her bones due to cancer she could have broken her neck by stumbling on the stair, but this does not explain how Elizabeth could know, before the arrival of detailed report, that Amy's death was imminent, and would be caused by a broken neck; nor why Elizabeth should predict her death before the event. Clearly, Elizabeth knew before the fatal Sunday, that Amy would be dead of a broken neck.

Robert and Elizabeth could have plotted the murder together but its effect - which they would surely have foreseen - was to drive them apart. The clumsiness of the death incriminated Robert for the rest of his life; the inquest's verdict of accidental death failed to clear his name. Even Mary Queen of Scots in faraway Paris remarked with delight that: "The Queen of England is to marry the Master of her Horses who has killed his wife to make room for her."

Six years later, when Robert and the Queen were still passionately attached, Robert had still not lived down the scandal. In 1566 William Cecil wrote a six point memorandum to the Privy Council listing the reasons that Robert Dudley could not marry the Queen. Point no 6 read:
"IV He is infamed by the death of his wife."

So, not illness, not suicide, and not murder by Robert Dudley.

Clearly Elizabeth knew that Amy would die on Sunday 8th September, and she and Cecil deliberately planted evidence with the Spanish ambassador, to incriminate Robert Dudley and even slur Elizabeth herself.

Why should these two: the most wily and self-disciplined diplomats spill such scandal to the most indiscreet confidante, the most critical observer of English life and policy: the Spanish Ambassador? Not by accident. Cecil had resigned in all seriousness once before, to force the Queen into decisive action against the French in Scotland and confided, as far as we know, in nobody; certainly not a foreign ambassador.

Elizabeth had been involved in a dozen plots against her own half-sister and told nobody. Cecil had the greatest spy network in Europe. These were formidably secretive players. When Cecil told the ambassador that the Queen was determined to marry Dudley and that Amy would be poisoned, when the Queen remarked that Amy was dead, or nearly so, they were jointly incriminating Robert Dudley: smearing him with the crime of wife-murder.

Why should Elizabeth and her key advisor, put the man she loved in such shame that he could not aspire ever again to marriage with her and the throne of England? I believe it is because she loved him so much that she could not bring herself directly to refuse his proposal of marriage. She wanted to hold him at her side as her lover; but she did not dare to share the throne with him - or, as it later turned out - with anyone.

Once he was known as the man who murdered his wife he could not hope to marry the Queen, and he quickly learned that. But he could remain at court, forever her acknowledged favourite, forever hers, knowing that he could never be her husband and King Consort of England. As the historian Milton Waldman wrote in 1944 "His object was to marry her, hers was to keep him from doing so without finally refusing him."

If that was her plan: it succeeded. She loved him for all of her life, and despite his marriage eighteen years later to Elizabeth's cousin, Laetitia Knollys (another Boleyn girl. a red-head, and strikingly like the Queen) he undoubtedly loved Elizabeth for all his life. He wrote: "I have lived, and so will die, only hers." The last letter he wrote in his final illness in 1588 was to Elizabeth, telling her of his love for her, and when she died, fifteen years later, they found she had his letter by her bedside.