Dan Snow's History Hit - The Death of Amy Dudley

Episode Date: March 17, 2023

On 6 September 1560, Amy Robsart Dudley died after falling down a staircase at Cumnor Place in Oxfordshire. But did she fall? Was she pushed? Or did she throw herself down the stairs? These questions exercised Tudor courtiers and foreign ambassadors at the time. The truth mattered because Amy was the wife of Queen Elizabeth I’s leading courtier and very close friend, Robert Dudley, and his wife’s death could clear the way for Elizabeth to marry Dudley. But in practice, the circumstances of Amy’s death precluded any possibility of a royal marriage. In this episode of Not Just the Tudors, Professor Suzannah Lipscomb talks to Dr. Joanne Paul - author of the acclaimed book The House of Dudley - to discuss what really happened - was it an accident, suicide or murder?This episode was edited and produced by Rob Weinberg.**WARNING: This episode contains descriptions of suicide**If you'd like to learn more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe to History Hit today!Download the History Hit app from the Google Play store.Download the History Hit app from the Apple Store.

On the 6th of September 1560, Amy Robsart Dudley fell down a case of stairs at Cumnor Place in Oxfordshire and died. But even that simple statement bears scrutiny. Did she fall? Was she pushed? Or did she throw herself down those stairs? That was exactly the sort of question that Tudor courtiers, servants, and foreign ambassadors were asking at the time. It mattered because Amy was the wife of Elizabeth I's leading courtier and close friend, some said very close friend, Robert Dudley. Amy's death was sought by many to clear the way for the Queen to marry her Robin, but in practice, the infamous circumstances of the death precluded any royal marriage for Dudley. So what really happened? Was it accident, suicide or murder?

Having started to explore this question with Dr Joanne Paul recently for my documentary The Royals, A History of Scandals, I've invited her back onto the podcast where we have the liberty of a little more time to discuss the case in greater detail. It's timely indeed because Dr Paul's acclaimed book on the Dudley family, The House of Dudley, is released in paperback at the end of March 2023. The House of Dudley is released in paperback at the end of March 2023. Here's a reader review of it that I came across on Twitter today. I've not read a book that gives such a sense of how easy it was to rise and fall under the Tudors. This book does such a good job of covering the Tudor period,

but shifting the focus to the Dudley family lends it a more unpredictable air, writes Simon Beale. Was the Tudor court so unpredictable that being the wife of a courtier, one might end up dead? Let's find out. Dr Paul, Joanne, welcome to Not Just the Tudors. It is an absolute pleasure, as always, to speak to you. You're a wonderful scholar and you're wonderful at sharing all your research with people, not least in your latest book, The House of Dudley. And today we're going to be picking up on one of the themes of that. So welcome back. Thank you. I appreciate you having me back a few times. I guess I must be doing something right. And yeah, we're going to talk about another aspect of the House of Dudley that we only barely touched on, I think, last time.

You're absolutely right. I think you are our most frequent guest now. Do I get like a pin or something? Yes, the prize will be coming through the post. Yeah. So it's a delight to see you again. So today we're going to be talking about the death of Amy Robsart Dudley and whether it was an accident, suicide, murder, who possibly by. So maybe we can start by talking about who Amy was. Amy, we know her as the wife of Robert Dudley, who becomes Earl of Leicester, who is rumoured, of course, to have been a paramour of Elizabeth I.

She was born in June 1532, in the same month as her future husband. They were about an age when they got married, just shy of their 18th birthday. And she was the daughter of a country gentleman in Norfolk. And so this is quite a young match between her and Robert. There's a lot of suggestions that it's a love match. There are advantages on either side. Robert is the son of an earl at the time who becomes a duke. Amy carries a lot of property with her, particularly in Norfolk, East Anglia, where the Dudleys don't have a lot of property and they don't have a lot of sway. So it makes sense on all sorts of levels. But even at the time,

there is the suggestion that it is a love match, or as William Cecil will later put it, a carnal marriage, that these are two teenagers in love, essentially. And what do we know beyond that suggestion, if anything, about the nature of her relationship with Robert Dudley, whether it was a happy marriage or not? We know precious little about Amy at all. We can take guesses at her education. We can take guesses at her personality, her likes, her dislikes. And when it comes to their relationship, again, a lot of it is guesswork. So the suggestion that they were madly in love as young people is just a suggestion. We don't know for sure. They seem to have had a solid relationship later on when Robert

is imprisoned in the tower. For instance, Amy is there petitioning for his release. We know that to have been the case. And they do spend a significant amount of time together. That dwindles with the arrival of Elizabeth I on the scene. And once he joins her court, they don't see very much of each other. We also know that they don't have any children and that this is a significant pressure on them both. Because they're married for 10 years, aren't they? Over 10 years without any children. And we can look, for instance, at Robert's elder brother, Ambrose, whose second wife, who is contemporary to Amy, her sister-in-law, suffers a phantom pregnancy at the middle of the century, around the same time that Mary I suffers her phantom pregnancy. And that, of course, comes with a pressure to be pregnant,

to produce a child. And so the fact that Amy's sister-in-law is feeling that amount of pressure, we can assume that she must have felt some as well. And her sister-in-law, Elizabeth, is abandoned in the end by Robert's brother, Ambrose, and she dies not long after Amy. So we can see that there is a huge amount of expectation that Amy would produce a child. And so that Robert and Amy have what we'll go to Cecil again, calls a sterile marriage, is probably a mark against her, something that she probably feels very keenly. I'm really struck by the fact that we're going to be talking about her death, and yet here's a woman whose life we know so little about oh we know far more about her death than her life

and far more has been written about her death than her life the sources just aren't there really we have two letters that she wrote during her life they tell us certain things they tell us that she probably had a fairly good education her writing is very clear and of the standard of the time They tell us certain things. They tell us that she probably had a fairly good education. Her writing is very clear and of the standard of the time. They tell us that she was involved in her husband's affairs. She's writing about the production of wool on their lands and ensuring that happens and that gets to them.

She's sending orders for a dress to be made. So she is involved, a mistress of a household in that way. But beyond that, it's only two letters, and there's very little you can get from that. The other relationship we need to talk about, of course, is the relationship between Robert Dudley and Elizabeth I. What's going on there? I wish I could tell you. The things that we do know, we know that as soon as Elizabeth comes to the throne, Robert is made her master of the horse, and that this is a very close position. It gives a sense of personal proximity to the monarch, to Elizabeth. There's a great image of her coronation, and she's sat in the litter after a huge parade of people come before

her and a huge parade come after. But in that image of her in the litter, there are two men who are very close to her physically. And that's Robert and his brother Ambrose. And I think that really is a very visual representation of how important they were to her and to the reign. And it wasn't long after she came to the throne and was crowned that the rumours begin that Robert might be courting her and that she might return his affection as well. And there are rumours that they will marry, that there is something illicit going on between the two of them. And there was access there.

There was possibility of something happening, though, as Elizabeth herself says, she's always under the eye of everyone. And so people would know if something happened. That could be her protesting a bit too much, but there were rumours that something was going on. But of course, every time there was a rumour that the pair would marry and that Robert would become king, someone would go, he's already married, though. He would have to do away with his wife in order for that to happen. Which sets up what happens 22 months after Elizabeth comes to the throne in early September 1560. Can we talk about that day, the day about which we know such strange things? Tell us what happened that day. From the information that was gathered after her death,

we know that Amy rose very early that morning and seemed in a very strange mood. She ordered all of her servants to go to a fair nearby. And that in itself wouldn't necessarily be strange, except she insisted that all of them go, that she'd be left entirely alone in the house. And when some of them protested that surely that didn't make sense, they shouldn't leave her, she apparently became very angry and put her foot down and ordered that they all go. became very angry and put her foot down and ordered that they all go. So they all went to the fair. When they returned, that's when they found her at the bottom of a flight of stairs with a broken neck and two injuries to her head. And of course, immediately called for the authorities and a coroner and a jury were put together to investigate. He concluded that it was an accident, that she

fell down the stairs, that the primary cause of death was the broken neck and not the two head injuries. So there was a coroner's inquest and I know that the coroner's report was found actually only quite recently, wasn't it, in 2008 by Stephen Gunn. What did the coroner conclude about Amy's death? Reading the coroner's report, it's a difficult exercise because one has to take a grain of salt with every reading of a source. And the fact that these two head injuries existed seems to perhaps contradict the idea that it was the broken neck that did it. that it was the broken neck that did it. The question becomes whether she broke her neck falling down the stairs and then sustained the two injuries to her head, or whether the two injuries to her head preceded the broken neck.

Because the report describes the two injuries to her head as one being, and it literally uses a thumbs deep in the Latin, which is about an inch if you think from tip of your thumb to the first knuckle is about an inch. One is about a quarter of a thumbs deep, so a quarter of an inch deep, which is not very deep. The other is two thumbs deep or two inches deep, which is very deep head wound. So it brings up the question of whether she was struck before she fell down the stairs or whether she hit something that did that damage to her head while falling down the stairs. One would hope that the coroner's report would

solve the mystery. I think it just deepens it. That's a really important source. But you also mentioned that she felt angry when her servants contested her wanting to be left alone. What source is that coming from? That's coming from the letters of Robert Dudley's servant, who is sent by Robert to investigate essentially what happens when Robert hears about the death of his wife. And that's a man named Thomas Blunt. And Blunt had been on his way to see Amy anyway, as a servant of the household. And as he was riding out from where Robert was with the court, he sees another Dudley servant coming towards him, who is racing towards Robert

to tell him this news. And so he gets this news from this servant, but continues on his way. And then is stopped by a servant coming from Robert, who tells him that he is to investigate, he is to find out what happened and what people are saying about it. And that's very important. He wants to know not just what happened that day, what might have happened to Amy, but what the sort of the gossip of the town is, because that can be very important in the 16th century in determining a murder conviction. So he stops at Abingdon on the way to Cumnor, which is where Amy died and where the fair was where she had sent all her servants was at Abingdon. And he interrogates essentially the innkeeper. He poses as just a traveller on his way to Gloucester and asks him all these questions about the news of the town. And then when the innkeeper tells him about Amy, he asks him,

what do you think happened? What are people saying about it? What are servants saying? Oh, they weren't there. Why weren't they there? And gets a lot of information from him. And then he continues the next day on to Cwmnor and starts to hold interviews, essentially, with various servants and get information from them as well. And we're very fortunate we have all of his letters back to Robert, where he details word for word, these conversations that he has. Yes, that's an incredible insight that you've got your on-the-scene detective really going around and interviewing everybody concerned. What else comes out of those letters that you think is pertinent? One of the most important interviews that Blunt has is with someone named Mrs. Pictou, who appears to have been an attendant of Amy's of

some kind, a maidservant. And Blunt sits down with her and asks her essentially, what do you think happened? And you get the sense from the letter that Pictou is very nervous, for good reason. She's obviously distraught. She cared very much about her mistress. And so she says, I do judge it very chance. I think it was an accident, essentially, that it was a mishap of some kind. And then she says, and neither done by man nor by herself. Now, the suggestion that it might have been done by someone else, that it might have been a murder, had already come up. That can't help but have come up. But the suggestion that Amy might have done it to herself, Blunt reacts very strongly to this and presses this point and asks her if Amy, in the words are,

had an evil toy in her mind, and a toy is a plan, if she planned to kill herself. And then Pictou responds, no, do not judge so of my words. If you so should gather, I'm sorry I said so much. It just reads very like a slip and that she's trying to recover from that slip. She talks too about Amy being a good woman who prays every night to be delivered from her troubles. And it's difficult on the one hand, that could just be the prayers of a good Christian woman for whom all life is tribulation and deliverance comes through going to heaven and God's grace. On the other hand, we could read into that that she especially felt that she was in some sort of particular turmoil and trouble and wished to be delivered from that, which points us to this sense that Amy was really distressed and might have wished

an end for herself. If we think first of all then about the coroner's conclusion, infortuny ad mortem, by misfortune came to her death, how convincing do you think it is that she had an accident? You've mentioned the evidence of the wounds. Is it easy to slip down a case of Tudor stairs? One would think so, especially in all the clothing that women had to wear. The staircase doesn't exist anymore and so we can't go and see it. But one assumes that it was perhaps a stone staircase. Even if it were made out of wood, it may have been worn down. And so the idea that one could slip makes sense.

The counter-argument to the falling down the stairs has often been in one of, I think it's Robert's letters, he talks about Amy falling down a pair of stairs. And so the idea that one would break one's neck and sustain two very traumatic head injuries falling down two stairs is, of course, very unlikely. But that's not what that phrase means, a flight of stairs, which if one tripped and fell down a flight of stairs, particularly if they were stone, or if there were various hangings on the wall or sharp edges, it's easy to see how one could sustain certainly a broken neck, perhaps head injuries. The issue with the head injuries and why I keep going on about them is the way they describe it as two inches deep. One imagines not a gash, but something more like a stab wound. And

if that's the case, it's difficult to see how that would have happened had she just tripped and fallen. And the fact that they seem to want to downplay the head injuries to me always reads, I don't want to say it's suspicious, but it raises questions that they want to focus on the broken neck and not the head injuries, that the broken neck is the cause of death. I've read somewhere that it was eight steps. Do you have any evidence of that or is that just something apocryphal? I'm not aware of any evidence of that it's particularly eight steps. That might have come from an attempt to understand the layout of the house,

but I don't think any of the sources specify that it's eight steps. Do we know anything about the coroner? That feels like we ought to ask this at this point as well. The coroner is a man named John Pudsey and he's from a nearby town. He's a man of some status,

but it's important, I think, to remember that in the Tudor period, the coroner was not a profession. It's someone who is selected from respected men of the area, who is then going to lead a jury of 15 similarly selected men to decide what they think happened. They sometimes consult a medical professional, even a midwife potentially, with a woman's death. And even the entire town might come and view the corpse and give their opinions, which is why Robert was so concerned that Blunt find out the gossip and the feeling of the town was in regards to Amy's death. So they're not professionals by any stretch, and they're essentially guessing about what happened. They are also influenced not professionals by any stretch, and they're essentially guessing about what happened.

They are also influenced not only by the people of the town, but people in power. No one wants to give a verdict that would displease someone who has the ability to promote or demote them. That seems very important. Let's think then about the possibility that Amy killed herself. How likely is throwing oneself down the stairs a practical method of suicide? It's not a very common one. Don't know if there are any other examples from the time of that being a method for suicide, that sort of self-harm often comes about in a fit of passion. It's not necessarily a form of suicide that one has planned, but rather one that comes about out of desire to inflict harm on oneself and a feeling of distress. In which case, it doesn't necessarily line up with her dismissing her servants for the day.

That seems like more of a plan. But of course, we can't dismiss it. And it's still the case that Amy had spent a lot of time alone, that she must have been aware of the rumors at court about her husband. There were also rumors that she was to be poisoned, that Robert or someone else was going to kill her, that in some way, shape or form, she was going to be done away with. And when we remember that their marriage appears to have begun from a place of real affection, the tragedy of it all, I think,

starts to come out. And we're faced with that image that Pictou describes of her praying nightly to be delivered from her troubles. And I think that's really helpful also in terms of pointing out how when you're working on this period, one so often comes across a little phrase, four words or something, on which great edifices of speculation have been built. And yet these phrases are completely unsubstantiated or corroborated by other sources. And it's obviously very important to do the imaginative work of thinking about whether they could be true. But it's impossible in the end to conclude that they definitely are. Yes, there's a rumour, again, we're getting these largely from ambassadors' letters. If you want the gossips of the Tudor court, they're ambassadors constantly picking

up pieces of information. They're also constantly being fed pieces of information. And we have that very clearly in the case of Amy. One of them writes about someone going around the court who has always voraciously spreading rumour and sharing bits of information. And he's told him things about Amy and Robert. One of them talks about malady in one of Amy's breasts, which has led to speculation that she had breast cancer. This has supported the idea that the fall down the stairs would have broken her neck. Breast cancer can often lead to brittleness of the bones, and they can be easily broken.

Aside from this one line, however, we don't have a lot of information, and this ambassador didn't know anything about Amy Robesart's breasts, really. It was just a fragment of information that he'd picked up, maybe even misheard. We don't know. There's also the suggestion that she is ill because she's being poisoned. And so there is another suggestion that she's unwell, and that's linked to the idea that she's being poisoned. But then another letter talks about her avoiding poison and that she has all her food tasted and that she's being very smart about it. There's just so many layers of rumor and gossip. It's very difficult to get anything real. And I understand the impulse because there's so little information.

And it's such a great mystery because it cuts to the very heart of power in the Tudor court at the time because, of course, it reflects on Elizabeth, on her choices of those she has near her, on the person that she might be considering marrying, might even be sharing a bed with. And so it's so important to try to understand what happened. And so these little phrases, as you say, get picked up and there is an attempt to turn them into an answer because we just don't have any answers. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Alan Orjanaga.

And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries. The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research from the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings, Normans, kings and popes,

who were rarely the best of friends, murder, rebellions, and crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit wherever you get your podcasts. so the other possibility of course is that it's neither accident nor suicide but instead murder so let's recap the evidence for that there is a significant amount of evidence to suggest that it could be a murder.

It does line up with Amy sending the servants away, that she may have been meeting someone, that she might have known someone was coming and didn't want anyone in the house. It lines up with the injuries to her head, as well as the fall down the stairs. And it lines up with the injuries to her head, as well as the fall down the stairs. And it lines up with the larger contextual situation whereby she was in the way, and there was a lot of attention on her, as well as on her husband. And that killing Amy didn't necessarily ensure that Robert would marry the Queen. What it did, and we see that in the weeks and months

following her death, was disgrace Robert, ensure in many ways that he would never be taken seriously as a suitor to the queen. And so murder ends up making a lot of sense out of the information that we have. And it is the thing that most consistently appears in those ambassador's letters, the rumours of the court and men who are at the heart of everything like William Cecil. Other people saying, look, Robert Dudley must have done it because he stands to benefit from his wife being out of the way. there are any letters that put it that frankly, and that succinctly, but certainly that is the assumption on the part of many. Where you see that, I think, most strongly is actually outside of the English court. So you see it in the French court, for instance, Nicholas Throckmorton, who is the English ambassador to France at the time, talks about his ears burning, being on fire with all the horrible things that are being said about Elizabeth's

court and about Robert and about the death of Amy. And he writes almost in a panic, what am I supposed to say to try to quash these rumours? And the person he's writing to responds saying, pathetically, that must be difficult. And there are a lot of rumours here too, but the Queen will put a lie to all of them. And so this idea that the Queen is going to come in and make sure that the official line is that Amy suffered an accident, that it was a misfortune. And that, of course, is the official line that the coroner has so neatly provided. But you're suggesting that in practice, this would have actually wrecked Robert's chances for further intimacy with the Queen.

With hindsight, we can see that was definitely the case. At the time, there were still a lot of rumours that he would marry the Queen. And of course, that doesn't really go away until he himself marries years later. There are several attempts he makes, it appears, at least, to try to convince her. She says various things at various points about marrying him. She is very good at suggesting she'll marry this person and then that person and vacillating. But the point is that is taken seriously. The Spanish ambassador seems convinced just a few months after that Robert will marry the queen

and tells Philip II that he better get behind this because it's going to happen. As it happens, though, and as we can tell from the rumours in the French court, if Elizabeth had married a man who, by the way, also had at one point been convicted of treason, his brother, father and grandfather had all been executed for treason. So there's this larger context going on as well. And who was rumoured to have killed his first wife, that puts her in a very vulnerable position, and she won't be taken very seriously. When we look, too, later at the advice that she gives Mary, Queen of Scots, when she marries Bothwell, who is rumoured to have killed Darnley, we can see that Elizabeth is advising Mary not to

make a mistake like this, that that reputationally will destroy her. And in many ways, it does. So Elizabeth knows that she can't go there and she mustn't go there, or at least she seems to know that later on. So who then, if we were to test then the theory that it was murder, but not by Dudley, who then stood to benefit? Today we say follow the money. I think in the 16th century we say follow the power. Often follow who becomes closer to the monarch because of an event. And it's hard not to focus in and look at William Cecil in this context. Before the court knows about the death of Amy, he's talking very loudly and to people of great influence, the Spanish ambassador, about people deciding that they are going to kill Amy Robsart, that she will end up dead. And in the same breath, he talks about

Robert being better in paradise than here, that Robert should be killed as well. So at this point, he is very clearly not a friend of Robert Dudley's and doesn't really want him anywhere near the Queen. I think Cecil is very afraid that Elizabeth will in fact marry Robert Dudley. And so he essentially gets what he wants out of the death of Amy Robsart. And it's he who swoops in the days after her death to comfort Robert. And they actually have a much closer relationship after this than they had previously. And so it all seems to work out for Cecil in a way that if he didn't plan it, it looks like he did. A lot of people minded about the prospect of Robert marrying Elizabeth. And again, it's important to remember that 1560 is only seven years after the Jane Grey-Dudley coup,

when Robert's father, with him involved as well, supplanted Mary I and put the Nine Days Queen, as she's known, Lady Jane Grey, who is in fact Lady Jane Dudley, on the throne. And the whole family, essentially, all the male members of the family are convicted of treason. His brother is executed, his father is executed, and Robert's imprisoned in the Tower for a long time. So to many, he is a traitor and remains a traitor. He's also not from particularly high birth. And by marrying Robert, Elizabeth would be eliminating the possibility of a diplomatic marriage, say to the French or to the Spanish or whoever it might be. There were many people knocking on her door, Sweden as well. And so marrying Robert doesn't benefit anybody aside from Robert and maybe

Elizabeth if she likes him. Whereas I think Cecil, we can see he's a very political mind. He's a very deliberate mind. And he would want a more politically advantageous marriage for Elizabeth. He also doesn't like Robert very much, I think, just personally. They don't really get on. It's quite a grand charge against one of England's foremost politicians, though, one of the great men of the Elizabethan age that we're calling him a murderer. I think Cecil avoided getting his hands dirty. That being said, he did often instruct others to get their hands dirty for him. And we know, especially later in the reign, we think of Walsingham as the spymaster, and certainly that was true. But Cecil

was also intimately involved in the torture of Catholics, who he saw as traitors. He writes in favour of a sort of pre-emptive justice when it comes to threats to the reign. It's not inconsistent with the sort of black and white thinking he had around the protection of Elizabeth and the protection of the reign. I'm not saying he did it, but the question was who benefits, and the answer is William Cecil. We know that the coroner concludes accidental death and we can understand why they would want to cover up a potential murder. Why might they have wanted to obscure the possibility that Amy died by suicide? I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr Eleanor Janaga.

And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries. The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research. From the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings. Normans. Kings and popes. Who were rarely the best of friends. Murder.

Rebellions. And crusades. Find out who we really were. By subscribing to Gone Medieval medieval from history hit wherever you get your podcasts we see the same impulse in picto's quick renunciation of her words if you took so much from my words i'm sorry i said so much It's because suicide in the 16th century was a deeply shameful and sinful topic. Self-murder, as it was thought of, was far worse than the murder of someone else because it was one of the worst betrayals of the gift of life that God had given you. Christians were meant to see their

lives as a sort of prison from which they wished to escape. They weren't meant to take very seriously the things going on in their mortal lives and to fixate instead on the heavenly. But that didn't mean that they were meant to do anything in order to bring that about. Someone who committed suicide could be posthumously convicted which would mean the forfeiture of goods and lands and they would be buried outside of church grounds. Effectively they would be excommunicated after their death and it would bring a great shame to the entire family and so picto is very quick to try to rub out any suggestion of suicide when she's talking to blunt blunt to his credit still communicates this to robert though which i think is another reason why we can take his letters

so seriously and if it were the case that the coroner, that the jury, thought that there was a possibility of suicide, there would be a great incentive to cover that up and to name it an accident in order to keep Robert Dudley and all of his various clientele and allies happy with them. So the context of this woman's situation, being one that was unhappy, being one in which she may or may not have been physically unwell, but certainly was isolated apart from her husband, unable to have children in a period where a lot of

emphasis was put on doing that, and unlikely to if she didn't spend any time with him all of that is concomitant with the possibility of suicide except we come back again to the wounds is there any way that she could have hit i don't know one of those things one used for cleaning your boots or something that was stuck into a corner at the bottom of the stairs and hit that as she went down is there any way in which those wounds could have been sustained by self-murder? We have to keep open the possibility that they could have been sustained while falling down the stairs, whether that was an accident or self-inflicted, because we just don't know enough about the wounds, we don't know enough about the staircase and what was around.

And you end up having to go to feelings about things, which as historians, we don't do. We never put in print, I'm happy to talk about what my feeling is about these things and accept the letters and emails and tweets that will result. But certainly the fact of the matter is that we don't know and that many things are possible. Okay, so two questions then. How far can you go with the evidence towards the conclusion? And extrapolating from that evidence, where would you as a historian end up if you had to put your money on an answer? I think based on the information that we have, we can't eliminate any of the three possibilities that we started with, which I know is a bit frustrating, and why people are a continually are so interested in this case and be end up clinging on to bits of information to try for an answer, because it is just so tempting to do. I think that we can, with some level of confidence, eliminate, or at least downplay, the possibility that Robert Dudley murdered his wife. I think that's highly unlikely. He was a

man who had spent his entire life in the court, he would have known that it wouldn't have benefited him. There would have been other ways to end his marriage or to continue his favour with the Queen and to continue his upward rise without a mysterious death of his wife. That didn't do him any favours, and he would have known it wouldn't have done him any favours, I think, having spent a long time with him. So I think that one can be put to the side. Any other possibilities, though, I think it's fairly open season. And this is a story which lends itself perhaps more than to fiction, because that's where we can start to play with the possibilities. If I had to go from the evidence alone, I think the most likely possibility is that it's a murder

and that it's a murder conducted by one of robert's enemies whether that's william cecil or one of his many other enemies and as i said he had quite a few what ends up being the least likely scenario, I think, is the suggestion that the coroner himself comes to, which is that it's a misfortune, that it's an accident. In many ways, that ends up being the least likely scenario for how Amy Robesart Dudley died. The last thing I want to ask you is about the consequences of this. Essentially, does Amy's death create the Virgin Queen? The death of Amy Robsart may have been one of the factors in Elizabeth I never marrying, because it's certainly one of the reasons that she doesn't marry Robert Dudley. Cecil himself later puts in a list of reasons why the Queen can't marry Robert. He adds that Robert is infamed by the death of his wife. And so we know that this sort of stigma remains with Robert.

And Elizabeth not being able to marry arguably the only man in the world she ever really wanted to marry, may have for that reason not married anyone else. Now there are all sorts of other factors. Elizabeth may have decided as a child that she never wanted to marry. Politically, there were many reasons why she wanted to play various suitors off against each other and retain all of these suits for her hand. But Elizabeth undoubtedly cared very deeply for Robert and Robert for her. We have his last letter to her that he wrote just before his death in 1588, and she kept that by her bedside until her own death and wrote on it in her own hand his last letter. So there was a real deep connection between the two of them and it may have been that

one of the many tragedies involved in the death of Amy, which include of course Amy's own death and the fact that we know so little about her life, was the fact that Robert and Elizabeth, because of it, also had to remain apart and were never able to fully realize what may have been a very loving and very romantic relationship. Well, thank you so much, Dr. Joanne Paul, for joining us to talk about this ever-mysterious case and to try and unpick for us the threads so that we can get a sense of what we can possibly make of the thing. Thank you so much. Thank you for having me back on. Maybe we can make it four next time, four visits that I've been here.

And thanks to my producer, Rob Weinberg, and researcher Esther Arnott. And thanks to you for listening to Not Just the Tudors from History Hit. We're always eager to hear your suggestions for podcast subjects. So drop me a line at notjustthetudors at historyhit.com or on Twitter at notjusttudors. And please rate, rank, bestow multiple stars

and comment on this podcast wherever you listen, including on Spotify. It really helps more people find not just the Tudors. And one more thing. If you'll allow me a moment of modesty, do check out my new TV series. It's called The Royals, A History of Scandals. It's on more four. I'm probing the history of royal scandals across the centuries by talking to experts about the role that press, parliament and the public have played in generating outrage and spreading

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