(This is an edited version of an article that appeared in Royals Monthly, December 2024)

Picture the scene. It’s 1559, and at Whitehall Palace, England’s newly crowned Queen Elizabeth, the vivacious, redheaded daughter of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn, is dancing with Robert Dudley, the very definition of a dashing young lord.

At 26 (a year older than Elizabeth), Lord Robert is tall, handsome and charismatic, with flashing dark eyes. One historian described him as ‘all soft words and whirlwind charm.’ Elizabeth’s nickname for Robert is ‘Eyes’, and she draws a pair like this  ôô  on her letters to him.

Elizabeth and Robert were childhood pals and had much in common. Both had a parent who was beheaded for treason, and both narrowly avoided the block themselves after being imprisoned in the Tower of London by Elizabeth’s sister, Queen Mary Tudor.

On the day Elizabeth became Queen, Dudley rushed to her side, literally mounted on a white charger, and she made him her Master of the Horse, a position that brought with it close proximity to the monarch.

Now, in 1559, a golden age was dawning, and the mood at court was optimistic and bright. And Elizabeth was in love. Day after day she and Robert rode together, danced together, and whispered in alcoves. There was only one problem: Robert had a wife.

He’d married Amy Robsart when they were both seventeen. Was it a marriage typical of the time, made for political reasons? Not at all! They married for love. Or, as Elizabeth’s chief advisor, William Cecil, said, with a disapproving sniff, it was ‘a carnal marriage, begun for pleasure.’ This was unusual for a powerful family like the Dudleys, but the match seems to have met with parental approval as there was a sumptuous celebration with King Edward VI in attendance.

Leicester and Amy Robsart at Cumnor Hall (1866) by Edward Matthew Ward. Fantasy portrait after Walter Scott’s novel Kenilworth

Elizabeth kept Robert by her side – but Amy wasn’t welcome. By now, nine years into their marriage, Amy was suffering ‘a malady in one of her breasts’. Rumours of an affair were rife, and it was understood that if Amy died, Elizabeth would like to marry Robert.

Those rumours intensified when Elizabeth organised for Robert to have rooms adjoining hers. The scandalised Spanish ambassador reported that ‘[Lord Robert] does whatever he likes … and it is even said that her majesty visits him in his chamber day and night.’

There is, however, no evidence that Elizabeth and Robert were lovers – Elizabeth was of course famously known as the Virgin Queen. When she thought she was dying, she swore that, ‘though she loved him dearly … nothing unseemly had ever passed between them.’

The pressure was on for Elizabeth to make a political marriage, and her advisers rubbed their hands at the thought of foreign princes competing for her hand. But Elizabeth wouldn’t commit. She said, ‘I would rather be a beggar and single than a queen and married.’ The Spanish ambassador wrote that she was, ‘Keeping Lord Robert’s enemies and the country engaged with words until this wicked deed of killing his wife is consummated.’

Dudley was unpopular with the English nobility. They feared his power, and encouraged the gossip to discredit him. Robert considered his life to be in danger, and wore a coat of chain mail under his clothes.

Such was the atmosphere at court when, in September 1560, news reached Robert, who was with the Queen at Windsor, that Amy had been found dead at the foot of a flight of stairs at her country residence near Oxford.

Immediately there was ‘grievous and dangerous suspicion, and muttering’. Dudley was deeply shocked, and dreading ‘the malicious talk that I know the wicked world will use’.

Mystery still surrounds Amy’s death. Was it murder, suicide, or an accident?

The day that Amy died, she had insisted all her staff should go to the local fair. This was unusual. Robert’s steward, who reported her death, said: “[Amy] would not that day suffer one of her own sort to tarry at home, and was so earnest to have them gone to the fair, that [if anyone] made reason of tarrying at home she was very angry … [it] maketh me think she had a strange mind in her.”

This insistence on being left alone led to speculation that Amy may have committed suicide. Several people, including her maid and Robert, raised the possibility that she was suffering from depression.

The coroner’s verdict was that Amy, ‘being alone … accidentally fell precipitously down’ the stairs. She had sustained two head injuries and had broken her neck, ‘on account of which [she] died instantly; … and thus the jurors say on their oath that the Lady Amy … by misfortune came to her death …’

In other words, it was an accident. Although a fall down a short flight of stairs might not normally be fatal, Amy’s spine could easily have broken if her cancer had spread.

Most historians dismiss the accusations of murder. Robert’s letters are given as proof of his innocence, as they show that he was bewildered by her death.

Many believed Dudley now hoped to marry Elizabeth. But the circumstances of Amy’s death meant Elizabeth could not take the risk. And Robert knew his reputation was in tatters. The scandal reverberated out across Europe, and Elizabeth had to distance herself from him.

Their relationship evolved into what one historian called ‘a sentimental friendship.’ They were emotionally dependent on each other throughout their lives. Elizabeth called him ‘Bonny Sweet Robin’ and told the French ambassador ‘I cannot do without my Lord Robert, for he is like my little dog.’ She made him Earl of Leicester, and showered him with lands and property, including Kenilworth Castle.

For years Robert held out hope that Elizabeth would marry him. In vain, diplomats offered him foreign princesses to remove him from her side. He remembered how, when Elizabeth was eight years old, she’d told him she would never marry, and finally admitted defeat.

In 1578, aged 46, Robert married Elizabeth’s cousin, Lettice Knowles – in secret. When Elizabeth found out she was furious, calling Lettice a ‘she-wolf’ and Robert a ‘traitor’ and a ‘cuckold’. She banished Lettice (but not Robert) from court.

Robert died in 1588. Elizabeth was distraught, and locked herself in her rooms until Cecil had the doors broken down. She treasured Robert’s final message, which she inscribed ‘his last letter’ and kept in a casket by her bed until her death.

You can read my version of how a modern-day version of Elizabeth’s and Robert’s relationship plays out (does she marry him?), in my retelling Sister to Sister.