The Manner of Amy's Death (27 page)

       Ironically
Elizabeth died in 1603 at the Palace of Richmond, otherwise known as ‘Sheen’, where Amy and Robert had celebrated their wedding more than fifty years earlier.

Katherine Grey and Ned, Earl of Hertford
– Their love affair ended in tragedy.  Ned’s sister Jane Seymour (named after her famous royal aunt) died at the tragically young age of nineteen and so the only witness to their wedding was lost, the priest being by then untraceable.  Katherine was pregnant but still their marriage had to be hidden from the Queen and, to Katherine’s misery, her young husband was sent on a diplomatic mission to Paris.  She had no one to help her or to confide in.  But the pregnancy could not be hidden for long and, when Elizabeth found out, she suspected that the marriage of Katherine and Ned had been a plot against her.  Katherine was put in the Tower as was Ned, after being recalled from France. Here the warders allowed them to see each other and Katherine became pregnant again.  Elizabeth, incensed with rage, split up the whole family, declaring their two sons to be illegitimate.  Heartbroken at the separation from her husband and older son, Katherine, it was said, starved herself to death.  Ned outlived both his sons and lived into his eighties.  Ironically Ned and Katherine’s descendants had a greater claim to the throne than did James I (James Stuart, son of Mary Queen of Scots) whom Elizabeth named as her successor but who should have been debarred from the succession under the terms of Henry VIII’s will.  Our present royal family is descended from the Stuarts.

Owain and Kat, Amy’s companion
– were fictional characters; that is to say they did not exist in real life.  But among the ten or so servants that Amy had with her at Cumnor Place surely she deserved to have a ‘Kat’ to speak for her!

In our story they lived happily ever after like a
prince and princess in one of Owain’s folk stories.

And apologies to the Spanish Ambassador,
Bishop de la Quadra
, who was a real person and obviously enjoyed spreading the gossip about Milord Robert, whom he disliked, and Elizabeth, whom he later described as a ‘baggage’. He was never documented as being involved in any plot against Robert ….. as far as we know …..  The Ambassador was finally dismissed and sent home in disgrace by Elizabeth after one of the Spaniards claimed that his master had spread the rumour that the Queen and Robert had secretly married!  Presumably he did this to undermine Elizabeth and stir up trouble against her.

The Manner of Amy’s Death
is primarily a work of fiction fleshed out on a skeleton of fact.

Because of Amy’s strange behaviour on the day of her death, Thomas Blount, writing to Robert, seemed to think that suicide was a possibility – not that he was willing to put such scandalous thoughts in writing.  It would have const
ituted a disgrace for Robert if Amy had put her soul in peril by committing self murder.  He simply hinted at dark things, regarding Amy’s state of mind, that he wished to discuss with his master in private but which he could not set down in a letter.

       Amy was a devout young woman who was seen on her knees praying for deliverance – but from what?  This has been the subject of much discussion.  Perhaps it was because of Robert’s reportedly scandalous behaviour with
Elizabeth or perhaps it was because she was seriously ill.  But would this have led to the mortal sin of suicide?  A more sinister possibility is that she was praying fearfully to be spared from being murdered.

      
Was she in a frame of mind to commit suicide?  Only fifteen days previous to her death, she had written an upbeat letter to her tailor, William Edney of London, asking that he alter the neckline of one of her dresses so that it was like one that he had made for her some time earlier.  And Robert was himself still sending her the sort of pretty ‘accessories’ that she liked so much, embroidered slippers and hoods.  So Amy was still interested in her appearance.  The fact that she asked for the dress to be altered as a matter of some urgency has led to speculation that she was expecting to meet someone, possibly her husband, in the very near future.  As far as we know though, there was no letter purporting to be from Robert or anyone else.  This was pure speculation on my part!

    
  We should consider that, if suicide had been her intention, Amy could have chosen other, more certain, ways of killing herself rather than throwing herself down a short flight of stairs – an upstairs window, for example, or drowning in the pond or even taking poison in the form of herbs.  Remember that she had suffered a dread of being harmed by poison to such an extent that it had been court gossip a year earlier, so it would seem that she had a strong sense of self preservation and was not suicidally inclined.

       So was Amy murdered? 
Amy had previously suspected an attempt on her life by poison so this would seem to be a distinct possibility .… only .…  it was common at the time for gentlemen or gentlewomen to suspect they were being poisoned whenever they suffered a stomach upset!  Given the level of hygiene in Elizabethan England or the lack of knowledge concerning the safe preservation of food or indeed the use of potentially poisonous herbs, plucked from the field by the kitchen boy to disguise the taste of meat that was past its use-by date, it was hardly surprising that enteritis was a common illness.  So it is possible that Amy had simply eaten something that disagreed with her and that the members of the court, jealous of Robert’s place in the Queen’s affections, had exaggerated Amy’s fears by gossiping of attempted murder.  

      
In many ways Robert’s shock and horror when he heard the news of Amy’s death and realised how he would be implicated as a murderer tends to eliminate him as a suspect.  Cecil too, while fearing the increasing influence of Robert Dudley with the Queen, would have realised that any clumsy murder plot would also implicate Elizabeth, to whose service he was devoted.  And if this was a murder, it was certainly performed in a clumsy way – two blows to the head and a broken neck.  Not very subtle!

       So this only leads to the possibility of an accident.  Or does it?  Would a person falling down a short flight of steps succeed in knocking two holes in their head, one two inches deep, and in breaking their neck (and, it is assumed, spinal cord) as well
?  It has been suggested that the ‘maladie of the breast’, referred to by the Spanish ambassador in his dispatches, could have been breast cancer and that, had the disease metastasised, it could have spread to the bones of the spine, resulting in Amy’s neck breaking very easily when she banged her head in the fall downstairs.  This would have meant that Amy was suffering from breast cancer for some years before she died, still aged only twenty eight.  Yet breast cancer is, according to the Macmillan web site, very rare in women under thirty five.

      What’s more, Amy had travelled from Lincoln to Hertfordshire, Hertfordshire to London, London to Essex or Sussex, then to Warwickshire and on to Oxfordshire in the two years before she died, considerable journeys for a sick woman especially when we remember that she would have travelled either by horse or in a litter, a type of cart which had no springs or any kind of suspension - coach springs had not been invented in Amy’s lifetime.  These would have been very tedious, uncomfortable and tiring journeys for an invalid.

      
And would a woman who was in the terminal stages of breast cancer have taken such an interest in clothing and fashion?

       It seems to me that Amy’s ‘maladie of the breast’ was a common complaint in Elizabethan times, ‘sorenes of the breast’ or mastitis, a very painful condition which most women suffer
in silence.  This condition can occur after a stillbirth or late miscarriage when the milk glands in the breast become blocked due to the fact that there is no baby to feed.  Had Amy suffered from such a condition then Robert would certainly have known about it and it may have inhibited any physical relations between them on the few occasions when Robert’s work at court enabled them to live together as man and wife, thus also explaining why there were no living children and why Robert felt entitled to tell others (have a little grumble maybe) about his wife’s condition.  We do not know whether they had any sort of personal tragedy such as a miscarriage but such events were quite unremarkable at a time when infant mortality was common as indeed was the mortality of the mother.

       Given that Amy did not have tumours in the bones of her neck, it would seem that her injuries from such a short fall were severe.  Sadly the coroner’s report does not say where the head injuries were located nor whether
there was prolific bleeding from the site of injury.  If, as the report says, the depth of one of the injuries was indeed that of two thumbs (or inches) there must have been copious amounts of blood at the site of her death.  Yet nothing was reported.  Indeed it was later stated that her bonnet was still in place upon her head when she was found.  This may or may not be true but a two inch gaping wound must surely have meant that some sharp object had penetrated both the flesh and bone of her skull.  Again it is a great pity that the building was demolished two hundred years ago and that the scene of her death cannot be re-examined.

    
For Amy to suffer a deep head wound which penetrated the skull she must have encountered a protruding object on the way down.

       But
then where was the blood?  Or had someone already ‘tidied’ up the body, mopped up the mess and placed a clean bonnet on Amy’s head?  Had Amy, indeed, been attacked in another part of Cumnor Place, in the garden maybe, and her body placed at the foot of the stairs in a clumsy attempt to make her death seem like an accident?  This brings us back to the same question. 

      
Was Amy murdered?

       One last thought.  Since the recent discovery of the coroner’s report
, emphasis has been placed on the use of the word ‘dyntes’ or dints to describe Amy’s head injuries and this has been taken to imply that they were sustained in a violent way.  However this word was still used in the North of England as little as fifty years ago to mean an indentation.  A metal kitchen utensil would be described as ‘dinted’ if it had been bashed in a little by rough usage.  So when the coroner described Amy’s head as having two dints, one to the depth of two thumbs, could he have meant that the indentation in her skull was two thumbs
across,
especially if the injury was on the back of her head – a common site of impact for accidental falls down stairs?  In other words, could Amy’s death have been an accident after all?

Author’s note
:  If there had been magazines such as ‘OK?’ and ‘Hello?’ in Elizabethan times, the characters in our story would have featured every week on the front pages.  They were the glamorous and wealthy of their age; they were, for the most part, young and sometimes behaved scandalously, living life to the full and participating in life threatening sports and activities.  If ever anyone had a ‘walk on the wild side’, it was Elizabeth and her Master of the Horse, Robert Dudley, tall, rugged, darkly handsome and athletic, the ‘Daniel Craig’ of his day.  He drank, gambled on anything, played cards and tennis with his male companions, got into fights, creating mayhem at times with his gang of thuggish retainers, trained horses, rode and hunted better than any other man - and borrowed large amounts of money to finance his lavish lifestyle.  The young Queen, herself a better rider than most of her courtiers, was besotted with him. 

       There was only one problem; Robert Dudley was married.

       The well-to-do Elizabethans were not altogether unlike us.  They enjoyed good food, roast meat, meat pies, fish and sweet desserts.  They drank copious amounts of wine, beer and ale.  They loved fine clothes and liked to be seen in public dressed to kill in furs, velvet and satin.  They built impressive houses and went heavily into debt to fund these luxuries, just as we today are prepared to use our credit cards to have the lifestyle we want, whether we can afford it all or not!

       For the poor it was a different matter.  A mini Ice Age in the second half of the sixteenth century, from 1550 to 1610 approximately, caused widespread misery, malnutrition and starvation.  For these people stories of the excesses at court must have provided a degree of escapism from their own miserable lives.

       The tales filtered down from above.  Elizabethan gentlewomen and the Queen’s ladies-in-waiting at court had little to do but gossip; indeed they referred to their best friends as their ‘good gossips’.  The women’s chambers must have resembled the dormitories of a girls’ boarding school with teenagers and young women sitting up late at night, sharing each other’s bed to keep warm and talking about the latest scandal.  One Elizabethan gentleman, describing such groups of women living together in royal palaces without the benefit of garderobes emptying to the outside, thought the smell from the shared ‘close-stool’ (privy) would be so offensive that it was a complete turn-off for any amorously inclined gentleman who entered their chambers!  But even this did not deter those courtiers bent on a little illicit sex on the side. 

       Queen Elizabeth, however, was so particular about her personal cleanliness that she had a bath once a month, ‘even when she didn’t need to’! 

       High ranking servants often brought news of the goings on in other parts of the royal court; and so the gossip percolated downwards until it reached the men and women in the street.  Gossiping was one of the main forms of entertainment for everyone.