'Death and the Virgin' - Elizabeth, Dudley and the Mysterious Fate of Amy Robsart by Chris Skidmore

A brilliant study of the greatest unsolved Tudor mystery — the suspicious death of Amy Robsart, the wife of the only man Elizabeth I ever loved
The Sunday Times review by John Guy

Amy Robsart’s unexplained death at the age of 28 is the greatest unsolved Tudor mystery. Married at 17 to Lord Robert Dudley, she was found lying at the foot of a stone spiral staircase on September 8, 1560, while lodged at Cumnor Place, near Oxford. Her neck was broken, her headdress curiously intact. Was it an accident? Did Amy commit suicide? Or was she murdered to clear the way for Dudley, Elizabeth I’s childhood friend and lifelong favourite, to marry the queen?

London had long been ablaze with rumours about Dudley and Elizabeth. Dudley, said the Spanish ambassador, “does whatever he likes with affairs, and it is even said that her Majesty visits him in his chamber day and night”. Elizabeth would only listen to Dudley and had kissed him in public. It was said that Amy had been ill, and that Dudley had tried to poison her.

Death and the Virgin is a meticulous account of Amy’s death and its aftermath. Skidmore writes brilliantly and his research is impeccable. He refuses to rely on the Victorian printed abstracts of Tudor documents that so often omit large chunks of the material, and insists on returning to the archives. He rules out suicide on the grounds that Amy, despite sending her servants to a fair on the day of her death, was expecting a visit from her husband shortly and had sent a fresh order to her dressmaker.

Skidmore suspects foul play, because the coroner’s report, a dramatic new discovery published here for the first time, shows that Amy had two serious head wounds, one of them two inches deep. Although the sharp edges of stone stair treads could be lethal and the coroner’s jury reached a verdict of accidental death, Skidmore’s sleuthing reveals that the foreman, Sir Richard Smith, had once been Elizabeth’s servant; that Dudley knew another juror personally; and that Thomas Blount, his agent, dined with two more jurors before they reached their verdict.

After several thrilling plot twists, everything boils down to the reliability of two seemingly independent sources. In 1584, a notorious Catholic lampoon called Leicester’s Commonwealth — for in 1564 Elizabeth created her favourite Earl of Leicester — claimed that a servant of Dudley’s henchman, Sir Richard Verney, had murdered Amy. This echoes an identical charge made by John Hales, who kept a secret political diary before 1563. But Hales had no inside information. He didn’t even recognise Dudley when he met him one day in the street. Alas for Skidmore, both sources repeat common gossip. Verney certainly knew Amy, since she’d stayed at his house in Warwickshire in 1559. Maybe he had been sent to steer her towards a divorce and ended up murdering her? But this is speculation and no intruder was spotted at Cumnor Place that day.

Skidmore wisely ends on a cautious note, telling us that he seeks to explore all possible clues, but “clues they must remain”. Since Dudley strained every nerve to discover the true cause of Amy’s death in an effort to save his reputation, few readers will conclude there was a murder plot. Most, however, will agree with Skidmore that Amy was treated shamefully. When she died, her husband hadn’t visited her for over a year, and on his few previous visits (according to Hales), he was commanded by Elizabeth to go dressed in black and “to say [on his return] that he did nothing with her”.

The lasting significance of the scandal is that Elizabeth would become the Virgin Queen: she couldn’t marry the only man she ever really loved and keep her throne. The tragedy is that, even had Amy lived, in Elizabeth’s eyes and Dudley’s, she was dead already.