Not our period, but Amy Robsart’s is a story that has always fascinated me.
Did she fall, or was she pushed…? I think we all have our theories. I believe Dudley was behind it and shot himself in the foot, so to speak, because Elizabeth took fright. She already knew she was playing with fire, and Amy’s suspicious (and too convenient) demise was too much. Rather late in the day, the ultra-cautious character of Elizabeth’s Tudor grandfather, Henry VII, came to the fore.
We don’t know that she was sick. All we know is that there were rumours of a convenient illness of an abandoned wife living in a backwater in rather peculiar circumstances. Why did she not have an establishment of her own? And if she was so ill, why did Elizabeth not send the royal physician(s) to her? It would have been great PR. A woman who goes jaunting about the countryside and is buying pretty new dresses doesn’t sound too sick to me.
[…] the third episode, covering that should be most relevant to late mediaevalists. It began with the Amy Robsart mystery, concluding that her death would most benefit William Cecil. Then came Ernest Augustus, […]
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