Forbidden History - The Mysterious Death of Amy Robsart

Episode Date: February 25, 2025

TW: The following episode contains discussion of suicide, please listen with care.  Amy Robsart, the wife of Queen Elizabeth I’s favourite, Robert Dudley, was found dead at the bottom of a staircase in 1560. Whispers of murder and conspiracy spread across England; was it a tragic accident or a calculated killing so Dudley could marry the Queen? In this episode, we take a look at the mystery surrounding Amy’s suspicious death and examine the theories that still have historians wondering today.  Cast List: Tracy Borman: Royal Historian & Chief Curator at Historic Royal Palaces  Prof. Michael Green: Forensic Pathologist  Prof. Steven Gunn: Historian Andrew Rose: Barrister & QC Dr. Susan Doran: Author & Senior Research Fellow at Oxford University  Ciaran O’Keefe: Criminal Psychologist Eric Meyers: Narrator  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the Forbidden History Podcast. This program is presented solely for educational and entertainment purposes. It contains mature adult themes. Listener discretion is advised. England, 1560. In a house in the picturesque village of Comnor in Oxfordshire, Amy Dudley, wife of the Queen's favorite Robert Dudley, lay dead at the bottom of a flight of stairs.

If official accounts of the time are to be She believed Amy died from an accidental fall, but the suspicious circumstances surrounding her death had led many to question whether it was really an accident or something more sinister. There are two slightly unusual features of Amy Dudley's inquest report. These are possibly blows to the head before she fell down the stairs which could go with an explanation that involved her being murdered. There are a number of potential suspects in the murder of Amy Rob Sott. Some people now think that Amy's death may have had something to do with Queen Elizabeth

the First. Lord Robert Dudley's relationship with the Queen was pretty well known. People were bound to be a bit suspicious of his wife dying since it was clear that he might have liked to marry the Queen and possibly the Queen might have liked to marry him. While others say that she was murdered on the orders of William Cecil, England's Secretary of State. For me, the Prime suspect was William Cecil. He had most to gain from the death of Amy Robsart. And there are even those that believe there's evidence to suggest that Lady Amy took her own life. So what happened to Amy Dudley? Queen Elizabeth I was no stranger to controversy during her reign.

Rumours about her private life spread like wildfire through the royal court. Many people question whether she did indeed deserve the title the Virgin Queen. Virgin Queen. Stories of her liaisons with male courtiers could be put down to idle gossip. But when the wife of her supposed lover was found dead in suspicious circumstances, it caused a huge scandal that remains to this day. Amy Robsart was the wife of Robert Dudley. Now he was Elizabeth the first great favourite, so much so that it was rumoured that they planned to marry, despite the fact that Robert already had a wife. Lady Amy was born during the reign of Henry VIII into a wealthy family in the Norfolk

she spent most of her childhood at Stanfield Hall in Norfolk but would also from time to time attend the court of King Edward the 6th with her father Sir John Robsart. It was likely that on one of these visits she met her future husband, Robert Dudley. Dudley was an educated and talented young man from a respected family, an appealing prospect for the young lady Amy. She married Robert Dudley, the son of the Earl of Warwick, who later became the Duke of Northumberland. The wedding was a lavish affair.

Among the guests who attended were high nobility of the time, including King Edward the 6th of England, and a young Princess Elizabeth, the future Queen Elizabeth I. Robert and Elizabeth had known each other from an early age. They first met his children when they attended the royal classroom together and had remained good friends ever since. When Elizabeth was finally crowned Queen of England,

Robert Dudley was soon given a position at the Royal Court. In the early years of Elizabeth's reign, he became noted as one of the Queen's favourites, in fact the Queen's favourites and someone who the Queen was falling in love with. Robert's increasing political involvement meant he was having to spend more and more time with the Queen. We can be pretty sure that their relationship was a special one, an emotional one, as well as the fact that he was her master of the horse,

and consequently was expected to spend a lot of time with her. The close relationship that grew between Robert and Elizabeth caused a great deal of controversy at the Royal Court. Robert Dudley had apartments here at Hampton Court, which were very close to Elizabeth's own. Suspiciously close, some courtiers said he could have had easy access to the Queen's bedchamber. Their relationship was the source of much speculation.

It was said that they were having an affair that they planned to marry. Robert Dudley wanted to marry the Queen and the Queen would have married Robert had he been single. And at one point she turned to the Duke of Norfolk and said to him that she would be married. What she meant by that was that she was thinking that Dudley would be able to get some annulment. After all, he'd been married for ten years and there had been no children. And there had been annulments of many marriages within that kind of time. So it may have been that she was thinking that a marriage would be possible,

but the circumstances were such that that could not happen. News of scandal traveled fast in Elizabethan England. It seems more than likely that Amy would have heard reports of what her husband was up to. It's hard to believe she wasn't aware of it. Her husband very rarely visited her during the time that Elizabeth was on the throne. She hadn't seen him for a year at the time of his death.

She would almost certainly have heard rumors. I mean, rumors fly around in that period when there's an absence of newspapers. It's hard to believe that she didn't feel depressed and concerned about her future. At that time, it would have been deemed unacceptable for Elizabeth as Queen of England to marry a man who had just left his wife for her. But an exception could be made if that man was a widower. And on the 8th of September, 1560, news reached Robert at the royal court that his young wife, Lady Amy, was dead.

Amy was found at the bottom of a flight of stairs. Now, the official reason was that she'd fallen and broken her neck, but those stairs were very small. There were only a few steps in them. It would have been very difficult for her to have died in that way, so it's possible that she was murdered and then placed at the bottom of the stairs. The circumstances surrounding Amy's death led to accusations against her husband, so Dudley called for a coroner's inquest to be held. The jury was assembled, and witnesses were.

were questioned. Eventually, a verdict of accidental death was reached. Now, the coroner's report has only recently come to light, and it showed that she had two injuries to the back of her head. That's consistent with the theory that in fact, it wasn't an accident, it was murder. Amy Dudley's coroner's report had remained lost in the National Archives for nearly 450 years. But in 2010, Dr. Stephen Gunn of Oxford University rediscovered the report during a research trip. I found the coroner's inquest report into Amy Dudley's death in the National Archives. I was looking for inquest reports into deaths of people doing archery practice,

and then I found the inquest into Amy Dudley. It was filed in a different year from the year that people were expecting to find it. When I found it, it was immediately obvious that it was Amy Dudley and that it described the death that we all knew of. about with her falling downstairs and breaking her neck. What I didn't know was that no one had found it before. I think I just assumed that because this was a famous accidental death, people must have gone and looked for it and then realized that it didn't necessarily tell you anything very different from what the other accounts of the death told us.

The coroner's report gave the usual details of the incident. But most interesting of all is that it stated that Amy had suffered injuries that were previously unknown. This is the coroner's inquest report into Amy Dudley's death, and it's in the standard format that 16th century coroner's inquest reports were written up in. So it tells us where the inquisition was held and when. It tells us who the coroner was, who held it. It tells us who the jurors were, who gave the verdict about what had happened to Amy. Their names are all listed here. And then it says what they said on their oath about what had happened to Amy.

And it talks about her falling down the stairs, but crucially also it talks about the injuries that they found on her body, that she had broken her neck falling down the stairs and that that had killed her, but also that she had these two other injuries, which we didn't know about before we found the coroner's inquest report, injuries described as dense, they said, using the English word in her head. And they described, as coroner's inquest juries often did, the depth of those wounds, which suggests they were actually looking at the wounds on the body. One wound in her head a quarter of an inch deep, and the other one two inches deep. Some people now believe that the injuries reported by the coroner are consistent with bludgeoning.

There are two slightly unusual features of Amy Dudley's Inquest Report. So one of them is the people who sat on the jury. Normally the people who sat on Inquest Report juries in the 16th century would be respectable but not very important men in towns, often tradesmen of one sort or another, artisans and so on. Amy Dudley's report has people of that status, but it also has three gentlemen on it. That's not unheard of, but it suggests that they wanted a serious body of people so that people couldn't say, oh, those were just stray people you dragged in off the street who'd say anything you wanted them to say. What we do have are copies of letters

from her husband, Lord Robert Dudley, to his local agent Thomas Blount, encouraging Blount to see the investigation carried out properly and to encourage him to have respectable, believable people on the jury. You could think that, or you could think these are the kind of people who would have political connections who maybe could be influenced to come up with the right kind of a verdict that would suit Robert Dudley. The other unusual thing about Amy Dudley's inquest report is that the jurors asked not to give their verdict when they were first summoned. And in the end, they gave it almost a year after the accident happened. Now, that's unusual, because most inquest reports happened within a few days of the death, and the jurors would

immediately give their verdict on what they thought had happened. So the delay might give us reason to be suspicious. On the other hand, it's not all the that unusual. Maybe one in 50, something like that. Inquests in the 1560s had some kind of postponement or delay to them. So the idea that the jurors would want to make slightly further inquiries before they came up with a definitive verdict is not necessarily a cause for suspicion. On the other hand, if you want to read conspiracy and suspicion into it, that provides exactly the time lag that you would need for all sorts of negotiations and settlements to take place to make sure that the convenient verdict was the one that was entered.

The most unusual new discovery, really, from the coroner's inquest report was the presence of these two dents or holes in Amy Dudley's head. These dents complicate the question of how she died further because, of course, she might have got those dents in her head falling down the stairs, or particularly because one of them was quite deep. They said two inches deep. These are possibly blows to the head before she fell down the stairs, which could go with an explanation that involved her being murdered.

It's easy to see why Robert Dudley would be put under suspicion. But what would a modern-day lawyer, pathologist and criminal psychologist, make of Amy's death? Professor Michael Green is a forensic pathologist with over 40 years' experience. His job is to determine the cause of death and whether it was accidental or foul play. Amy Robsart, there are allegations that she was murdered. I don't think there's anything to support this,

but I think it's almost impossible to decide whether it was an accidental death or a natural death leading to the fall. If we consider first the possibility of accident, the people who looked at the body said that she'd broken her neck. I don't think this is necessarily so. A freshly found body before stiffening, right? The Higar develops, the head's surprisingly mobile and a layman could well say broken.

She's got injuries to the back of her head. If you're going to break your neck, you hit your chin, and you either stretch it to destruction up at the top end, one and two, or sometimes down at five and six. But I don't think that's likely. Natural death, small percentage of the population have weaknesses at the various junctions of the blood vessels, vessels, the arteries at the base of the brain, and these as you get older, blow out and

form a bleat, which is called a very ameurysm. Sooner or later, one of these can go pop. It is quite possible in a woman of 28 that this is what happened. Dr. Kieran O'Keefe is a criminal psychologist. His job is to establish whether the crime matches the psychological profile of the suspect. If Robert was involved in the killing of Amy, it wouldn't be a crime of passion because there would be a lot of planning involved in that because ultimately they were making it out to look as though A, it was a suicide or B, it was an accident. Because of her illness, potentially they could argue it was suicide, but either way, you're talking about planning. So I wouldn't call it a crime of passion.

In terms of how far somebody would actually go to that lengths of killing their wife, simply because they're in love with somebody else and it was seen as an easy way out. Yes, that could happen. That really could happen. It's interesting to talk about the psychology of an individual that would see that as the only possible solution to what's going on. You'd have to be dealing with somebody who hasn't explored the other possibilities, who sees the only possible outcome as being murder.

And for that reason, I would say you're dealing with mental health problems. If he seen that that's the only way out, then yes, potentially I could see there being problems with Robert. Andrew Rose is a former lawyer and Queen's Council. He specialises in piecing together historic evidence. There would have had to have been an inquest. It was a sudden, violent and unexplained death. And you would have expected a jury to be impaneled. And in those days, the jury would not have been drawn from the general population.

There would have been minor gentry, local gentry, yeoman. farmers, people of some substance, they would all have had to be male, because that was the rule in those days. So unless there's some specific evidence that the jury was packed with people who were to find things in a certain way, it would look not particularly out of the ordinary. The coroner had a freehold appointment in those days, and he owed his appointment to the monarch. So it was part of the whole system of government, really before parliamentary democracy, was even thought of. So they're a very ancient institution, and I say they owe their existence to the monarch, which meant in those days the government. So no doubt coroners in the 15, 16th, 17th

centuries kind of kept a good eye open on the way in which things are going in Whitehall and may well have acted accordingly in sensitive cases. Is there really sufficient evidence to suspect Robert Dudley of playing a part in his wife's death? Some people now believe that Amy may have been assassinated by one of her husband's enemies. Tracy Borman is Joint Chief Curator at Historic Royal Palaces. She doesn't believe that Amy was killed to allow Robert to marry Queen Elizabeth. She believes Amy was killed to stop the marriage. Robert Dudley was the great favorite of Queen Elizabeth I.

It was rumored that they were in love and planned to marry. But there was a problem. Robert was already married to Amy Robesart. But two years into Elizabeth's reign, Amy was found dead in their home, Kumna Place in Oxfordshire. Now she was found at the bottom of a flight of stairs. Had she fallen, was it just an accident? Had Elizabeth I first ordered her death, or indeed her own husband, Robert Dudley. I think the real culprit was William Cecil. William Cecil, Lord Burley, was Secretary of State for England, and Chief Advocate

to the Queen. Dudley and Cecil were very much at odds on how best to move the country forward, and Cecil worried about the influence Dudley seemed to have over the Queen. He was Robert Dudley's great rival at court. He had no intention of letting Robert Dudley marry Elizabeth I. So he had his wife murdered because he knew that would create a scandal and that the marriage could never happen after that. after that. There are a number of potential suspects in the murder of Amy Robsart, including her own husband, who it was well known wanted to marry the Queen, or maybe Elizabeth I first herself, bumped off her rival.

But for me, the prime suspect was William Cecil. He had most to gain from the death of Amy Robsart. Cecil was the great rival of Robert Dudley. He therefore had no intention of letting him marry the Queen. So if he got rid of Robert's wife in a scandalous way such as this, he knew that Elizabeth would never be able to marry Robert Dudley. Could Amy have been pushed down the stairs to implicate her husband and ruin his plans to marry the queen?

It has been suggested that somebody threw Amy down the stairs. I don't think a professional murderer in his right mind is going to do this because the chances of killing somebody by throwing them down the stairs are in fact pretty slim. Most of them are going to survive and are going to tell everybody what you've just done to them. The other thing, of course,

if there had been any struggle, you would have thought there would have been grit marks on the arms or defence injuries to the hand or she would have been roughed up a bit and what I have seen done is a head injury inflicted first

and then the body thrown down the stairs. Would William Cecil really have had Amy killed for his own political gain. I think William Cecil could have employed a third party to do this particular act in the circumstances described. He was pretty adept at covering his track, other matters. And as we know today, there are cases where hit men are employed.

Where people are big people, high public persona and everything else to go with it, kings, presidents, heads of corporations, Maffiosey bosses, they can be kept clean. They, a word, a nod, might suffice for something pretty terrible to happen. But the main thing is to ensure that the boss and everything else don't date of their hands. There won't be an identifiable chain of evidence to them. That'll be the aim, but sometimes because it doesn't always work out that way. William Cecil was a ruthless and powerful man in Elizabethan England.

His dislike for Dudley and his politics, gave him ample motive to want to stop any potential plans of him marrying the queen. But having Amy killed in a way that could be considered accidental seems an unlikely way to frame his enemy. Could there be another reason behind what happened to Amy on that fateful day? One that doesn't involve murder, or even an accidental fall. Is it possible the distraught young Amy took her own life? Dr. Susan Duran is an author and senior research fellow at Oxford University.

She believes that Amy may have been suffering from depression at the time of her death. She was, I think, depressed at her husband's absence and the rumors surrounding him. There's evidence that on the day that she died, she sent away her maid servants and men's servants to the fair at Abingdon. And she grew very angry when one of her gentlewoman didn't want to go. We also know that Amy had been saying prayers asking God to deliver her from her sad situation. Although it was declared that Amy died from an accidental fall, the circumstances surrounding her death have led many to question the official account. Was she murdered on the orders of her husband, Robert Dudley,

so that he could be free to marry Queen Elizabeth I? Could it be that she was the victim of a political assassination? carried out to stop Dudley's plans to wed Elizabeth. With the rumors of Amy's death still circulating to this day, it's hard to separate fact from fiction. But is there any real evidence to prove that Amy was a victim of murder? When you hit somebody on the back of the head, you might render them unconscious. But then when you throw them down the stairs,

you've got no guarantee that they're going to break the neck at the bottom. They may very well wake up the next morning and remember who it was who hit them. It's a possibility, but it's one that I'd exclude. My own feeling about Amy is that she has died of either an unfortunate accident and tripped, or she has had a subarachnoid, but whilst I can't exclude murder completely,

I think it unlikely, and again, if she'd been assaulted, I think that the jury of seven to 15, People good and true who were asked to look at the body unless they'd been paid off first would have seen injuries to their hands, grip marks on the forearms, something like that. So can't exclude foul play, but it's low down on my list of possibilities. Should we simply accept the findings of the coroner's report? Our problem in interpreting the events behind 16th century coroner's inquest is that we're as much dependent as people, or at least

central government was at the time on what the jurors said had happened. So it's perfectly possible that juries, for example, reporting on what was probably a suicide reported it as an accident, different kinds of suicides left more room for juries to err on the side of generosity in blaming that it was probably an accident. Once they'd done that, then we're none the wiser. We can't get back behind what the jurors said in order to understand. in order to understand what had really happened. The Elizabethan royal court was, among other things, a place where people came to exchange news

and of course gossip. With all eyes firmly on the Queen and those close to her, and regardless of whether it was true or not, it wouldn't have taken long for word to spread about her relationship with Robert Dudley. So with over 450 years having passed, how do we separate the truth from the line? and the innocent from the guilty. Experts seem to agree that while there's room for speculation that Robert Dudley may have had his wife murdered so he could marry the queen, it seems to be an extreme measure

as there were other alternatives he could have explored, such as divorce or annulment. He would also have been aware that suspicion would have fallen on him. So we have a young healthy woman, no evidence of natural disease, We don't think she's been drinking. She's at the bottom of the stairs. Either she's tripped over her long dress or night dress and fallen and got herself a bleed within her skull. The injuries to the back of the head, I don't think, matter at all.

They look worse than they really are because when you bruise the back of your head, you get a big soggy swelling. And the layman who feels that it says, oh dear, I can stick my fingers into this. So that's just post-mortem and nothing to worry about. So whoever is alleged to have killed Amy, as far as I'm concerned, is off the hook. While William Cecil would almost certainly have wanted to put a stop to Dudley marrying Elizabeth,

he would have understood that killing Lady Amy would not just have made Dudley a suspect, but the Queen too, which in turn would have weakened his own position at court. Cecil, who some historians have suggested might have arranged her death in order to discredit Dudley with the Queen, that just doesn't hold up to my mind, because Cecil would have realized that the Roman Catholics would have taken advantage of this in order to discredit Elizabeth, and that was the last thing that he wanted. With his wife deceased, Robert Dudley was now free to marry Elizabeth. But by now, the chances of having a future together was looking bleak. His circumstances were very difficult.

His relationship with the Queen was pretty well known. People were bound to be a bit suspicious of his wife dying since it was clear that he might have liked to marry the Queen and possibly the Queen might have liked to marry him. Although she was going to stand by Dudley, she didn't believe he was guilty of the murder. Nonetheless, it was going to be very difficult to marry him because it would bring her dishonour and possibly accusations that she had been complicit in the murder. She dithered.

She dithered for a couple of months about what to do. It was only a few months afterwards. She decided marriage would be impossible in those kinds of circumstances. There were rumours at the French court that she was behind the murder. People were laughing behind her back. In the end, Dudley remained as her. her very close friend, her dearest brother, as she caused him. And she gave him great honors.

He was raised to the Oldham of Lester. He was given properties of great worth. He was given all kinds of rewards and honors. He became the leading man at her court. And he had to make do with that instead of taking the queen's hand. Dudley did eventually remarry when he wed a woman called Letis Knowles, a maid of honor to the Queen. When Elizabeth found out about the marriage, she is reported to have banished Dudley's new wife from the royal court. Famously, the Queen never took a husband. She reigned on the throne

for 44 years, guiding England through war, political troubles, and religious turmoil. Elizabeth I first died in 1604, married only to her country and her people.