Kitabı oku: «The Valet's Tragedy, and Other Studies», sayfa 8

There is every reason to believe, on the Pitt Place evidence, combined with the making of his will, that Lord Lyttelton had really, for some time, suffered from alarming attacks of breathlessness, due to what cause physicians may conjecture. Any one of these fits, probably, might cause death, if the obvious precaution of freeing the head and throat from encumbrances were neglected; and the Pitt Place document asserts that the frightened valet DID neglect it. Again, that persons under the strong conviction of approaching death will actually die is proved by many examples. Even Dr. Hibbert says that ‘no reasonable doubt can be placed on the authenticity of the narrative’ of Miss Lee’s death, ‘as it was drawn up by the Bishop of Gloucester’ (Dr. William Nicholson) ‘from the recital of the young lady’s father,’ Sir Charles Lee. Every one knows the tale. In a preternatural light, in a midnight chamber, Miss Lee saw a woman, who proclaimed herself Miss Lee’s dead mother, ‘and that by twelve o’clock of the day she should be with her.’ So Miss Lee died in her chair next day, on the stroke of noon, and Dr. Hibbert rather heartlessly calls this ‘a fortunate circumstance.’

The Rev. Mr. Fison, in ‘Kamilaroi and Kurnai,’ gives, from his own experience, similar tales of death following alleged ghostly warnings, among Fijians and Australian blacks. Lord Lyttelton’s uneasiness and apprehension are conspicuous in all versions; his dreams had long been troubled, his health had caused him anxiety, the ‘warning’ (whatever it may have been) clinched the matter, and he died a perfectly natural death.

Mr. Coulton, omitting Walpole’s statement that he ‘looked ill,’ and never alluding to the Pitt Place description of his very alarming symptoms, but clinging fondly to his theory of Junius, perorates thus: ‘Not Dante, or Milton, or Shakespeare himself, could have struck forth a finer conception than Junius, in the pride of rank, wealth, and dignities, raised to the Council table of the sovereign he had so foully slandered – yet sick at heart and deeply stained with every profligacy – terminating his career by deliberate self-murder, with every accompaniment of audacious charlatanry that could conceal the crime.’

It is magnificent, it is worthy of Dante, or Shakespeare himself – but the conception is Mr. Coulton’s.

We do not think that we have provided what Dr. Johnson ‘liked,’ ‘evidence for the spiritual world.’ Nor have we any evidence explanatory of the precise nature of Lord Lyttelton’s hallucination. The problem of the authorship of the ‘Junius Letters’ is a malstrom into which we decline to be drawn.

But it is fair to observe that all the discrepancies in the story of the ‘warning’ are not more numerous, nor more at variance with each other, than remote hearsay reports of any ordinary occurrence are apt to be. And we think it is plain that, if Lord Lyttelton WAS Junius, Mr. Coulton had no right to allege that Junius went and hanged himself, or, in any other way, was guilty of self-murder.

VI. THE MYSTERY OF AMY ROBSART

1. HISTORICAL CONFUSIONS AS TO EVENTS BEFORE AMY’S DEATH

Let him who would weep over the tribulations of the historical inquirer attend to the tale of the Mystery of Amy Robsart!

The student must dismiss from his memory all that he recollects of Scott’s ‘Kenilworth.’ Sir Walter’s chivalrous motto was ‘No scandal about Queen Elizabeth,’ ‘tis blazoned on his title-page. To avoid scandal, he calmly cast his narrative at a date some fifteen years after Amy Robsart’s death, brought Amy alive, and represented Queen Elizabeth as ignorant of her very existence. He might, had he chosen, have proved to his readers that, as regards Amy Robsart and her death, Elizabeth was in a position almost as equivocal as was Mary Stuart in regard to the murder of Darnley. Before the murder of Darnley we do not hear one word to suggest that Mary was in love with Bothwell. For many months before the death of Amy (Lady Robert Dudley), we hear constant reports that Elizabeth has a love affair with Lord Robert, and that Amy is to be divorced or murdered. When Darnley is killed, a mock investigation acquits Bothwell, and Mary loads him with honours and rewards. When Amy dies mysteriously, a coroner’s inquest, deep in the country, is held, and no records of its proceedings can be found. Its verdict is unknown. After a brief tiff, Elizabeth restores Lord Robert to favour.

After Darnley’s murder, Mary’s ambassador in France implores her to investigate the matter with all diligence. After Amy’s death, Elizabeth’s ambassador in France implores her to investigate the matter with all diligence. Neither lady listens to her loyal servant, indeed Mary could not have pursued the inquiry, however innocent she might have been. Elizabeth could! In three months after Darnley’s murder, Mary married Bothwell. In two months after Amy’s death Cecil told (apparently) the Spanish ambassador that Elizabeth had married Lord Robert Dudley. But this point, we shall see, is dubious.

There the parallel ceases, for, in all probability, Lord Robert was not art and part in Amy’s death, and, whatever Elizabeth may have done in private, she certainly did not publicly espouse Lord Robert. A Scot as patriotic as, but less chivalrous than, Sir Walter might, however, have given us a romance of Cumnor Place in which Mary would have been avenged on ‘her sister and her foe.’ He abstained, but wove a tale so full of conscious anachronisms that we must dismiss it from our minds.

Amy Robsart was the only daughter of Sir John Robsart and his wife Elizabeth, nee Scot, and widow of Roger Appleyard, a man of good old Norfolk family. This Roger Appleyard, dying on June 8, 1528, left a son and heir, John, aged less than two years. His widow, Elizabeth, had the life interest in his four manors, and, as we saw, she married Sir John Robsart, and by him became the mother of Amy, who had also a brother on the paternal side, Arthur Robsart, whether legitimately born or not.* Both these brothers play a part in the sequel of the mystery. Lord Robert Dudley, son of John, Duke of Northumberland, and grandson of the Dudley who, with Empson, was so unpopular under Henry VII., was about seventeen or eighteen when he married Amy Robsart – herself perhaps a year older – on June 4, 1550. At that time his father was Earl of Warwick; the wedding is chronicled in the diary of the child king, Edward VI.**

*Mr. Walter Rye in The Murder of Amy Robsart, Norwich and London, 1885, makes Arthur a bastard. Mr. Pettigrew, in An Inquiry into the Particulars connected with the Death of Amy Robsart (London, 1859), represents Arthur as legitimate.

**Mr. Rye dates the marriage in 1550.

Rye, pp. 5, 36, cf. Edward VI.‘s Diary, Clarendon Society. Mr. Froude cites the date, June 4, 1549, from Burnet’s Collectanea, Froude, vi.

p. 422, note 2 (1898), being misled by Old Style; Edward VI. notes the close of 1549 on March 24.

Amy, as the daughter of a rich knight, was (at least if we regard her brother Arthur as a bastard) a considerable heiress. Robert Dudley was a younger son. Probably the match was a family arrangement, but Mr. Froude says ‘it was a love match.’ His reason for this assertion seems to rest on a misunderstanding. In 1566-67, six years after Amy’s death, Cecil drew up a list of the merits and demerits of Dudley (by that time Earl of Leicester) and of the Archduke Charles, as possible husbands of Elizabeth. Among other points is noted by Cecil, ‘Likelihood to Love his Wife.’ As to the Archduke, Cecil takes a line through his father, who ‘hath been blessed with multitude of children.’ As to Leicester, Cecil writes ‘Nuptiae carnales a laetitia incipiunt, et in luctu terminantur’ – ‘Weddings of passion begin in joy and end in grief.’ This is not a reference, as Mr. Froude thought, to the marriage of Amy and Dudley, it is merely a general maxim, applicable to a marriage between Elizabeth and Leicester. The Queen, according to accounts from all quarters, had a physical passion or caprice for Leicester. The marriage, if it occurred, would be nuptiae carnales, and as such, in Cecil’s view, likely to end badly, while the Queen and the Archduke (the alternative suitor) had never seen each other and could not be ‘carnally’ affectionate.*

*Froude, ut supra, note 3.

We do not know, in short, whether Dudley and Amy were in love with each other or not. Their marriage, Cecil says, was childless.

Concerning the married life of Dudley and Amy very little is known. When he was a prisoner in the Tower under Mary Tudor, Amy was allowed to visit him. She lost her father, Sir John, in 1553. Two undated letters of Amy’s exist: one shows that she was trusted by her husband in the management of his affairs (1556-57) and that both he and she were anxious to act honourably by some poor persons to whom money was due.* The other is to a woman’s tailor, and, though merely concerned with gowns and collars, is written in a style of courteous friendliness.** Both letters, in orthography and sentiment, do credit to Amy’s education and character. There is certainly nothing vague or morbid or indicative of an unbalanced mind in these poor epistles.

*Pettigrew, 14, note 1.

**Jackson, Nineteenth Century, March 1882, A Longleat MS.

When Elizabeth came to the throne (1558) she at once made Dudley Master of the Horse, a Privy Councillor, and a Knight of the Garter. His office necessarily caused him to be in constant attendance on the royal person, and the Knighthood of the Garter proves that he stood in the highest degree of favour.

For whatever reason, whether from distaste for Court life, or because of the confessed jealousy with which the Queen regarded the wives of her favourites – of all men, indeed – Amy did not come to Court. About 1558-59 she lived mainly at the country house of the Hydes of Detchworth, not far from Abingdon. Dudley seems to have paid several visits to the Hydes, his connections; this is proved by entries in his household books of sums of money for card-playing there.* It is also certain that Amy at that date, down to the end of 1559, travelled about freely, to London and many other places; that she had twelve horses at her service; and that, as late as March 1560 (when resident with Dudley’s comptroller, Forster, at Cumnor Place) she was buying a velvet hat and shoes. In brief, though she can have seen but little of her husband, she was obviously at liberty, lived till 1560 among honourable people, her connections, and, in things material, wanted for nothing.** Yet Amy cannot but have been miserable by 1560. The extraordinary favour in which Elizabeth held her lord caused the lewdest stories to spread among all classes, from the circle of the Court to the tattle of country folk in Essex and Devonshire.***

*Jackson, ut supra.

**For details see Canon Jackson’s ‘Amy Robsart,’ Nineteenth Century, vol. xi. Canon Jackson used documents in the possession of the Marquis of Bath, at Longleat.

***Cal. Dom. Eliz. p. 157, August 13, 1560; also Hatfield Calendar.

News of this kind is certain to reach the persons concerned.

Our chief authority for the gossip about Elizabeth and Dudley is to be found in the despatches of the Spanish ambassadors to their master, Philip of Spain. The fortunes of Western Europe, perhaps of the Church herself, hung on Elizabeth’s marriage and on the succession to the English throne. The ambassadors, whatever their other failings, were undoubtedly loyal to Philip and to the Church, and they were not men to be deceived by the gossip of every gobemouche. The command of money gave them good intelligence, they were fair judges of evidence, and what they told Philip was what they regarded as well worthy of his attention. They certainly were not deceiving Philip.

The evidence of the Spanish ambassadors, as men concerned to find out the truth and to tell it, is therefore of the highest importance. They are not writing mere amusing chroniques scandaleuses of the court to which they are accredited, as ambassadors have often done, and what they hear is sometimes so bad that they decline to put it on paper. They are serious and wary men of the world. Unhappily their valuable despatches, now in ‘the Castilian village of Simancas,’ reach English inquirers in the most mangled and garbled condition. Major Martin Hume, editor of the Spanish Calendar (1892), tells us in the Introduction to the first volume of this official publication how the land lies. Not to speak of the partial English translation (1865) of Gonzales’s partial summary of the despatches (Madrid, 1832) we have the fruits of the labours of Mr. Froude. He visited Simancas, consulted the original documents, and ‘had a large number of copies and extracts made.’ These extracts and transcripts Mr. Froude deposited in the British Museum. These transcripts, compared with the portions translated in Mr. Froude’s great book, enable us to understand the causes of certain confusions in Amy Robsart’s mystery. Mr. Froude practically aimed at giving the gist, as he conceived it, of the original papers of the period, which he rendered with freedom, and in his captivating style – foreign to the perplexed prolixity of the actual writers. But, in this process, points of importance might be omitted; and, in certain cases, words from letters of other dates appear to have been inserted by Mr. Froude, to clear up the situation. The result is not always satisfactory.

Next, from 1886 onwards, the Spanish Government published five volumes of the correspondence of Philip with his ambassadors at the English Court.* These papers Major Hume was to condense and edit for our official publication, the Spanish State Papers, in the series of the Master of the Rolls. But Major Hume found the papers in the Spanish official publication in a deplorably unedited state. Copyists and compositors ‘seem to have had a free hand.’ Major Hume therefore compared the printed Spanish texts, where he could, with Mr. Froude’s transcripts of the same documents in the Museum, and the most important letter in this dark affair, in our Spanish Calendar, follows incorrectly Mr. Froude’s transcript, NOT the original document, which is not printed in ‘Documentos Ineditos.‘** Thus, Major Hume’s translation differs from Mr. Froude’s translation, which, again, differs from Mr. Gairdner’s translation of the original text as published by the Baron Kervyn de Lettenhove.***

*Documentos Ineditos para la Historia de Espana. Ginesta, Madrid, 1886.

**Spanish Calendar, vol. i. p. iv. Mr. Gairdner says, ‘Major Hume in preparing his first volume, he informs me, took transcripts from Simancas of all the direct English correspondence,’ but for letters between England and Flanders used Mr. Froude’s transcripts. Gairdner, English Historical Review, January 1898, note 1.

***Relations Politiquesdes Pays-Bas et de l’Anqleterre sous le Regne de Philippe II. vol. ii. pp. 529-533. Brussels, 1883.

The amateur of truth, being now fully apprised of the ‘hazards’ which add variety to the links of history, turns to the Spanish Calendar for the reports of the ambassadors. He reaches April 18, 1559, when de Feria says: ‘Lord Robert has come so much into favour that he does whatever he likes with affairs, and it is even said that her Majesty visits him in his chamber day and night. People talk of this so freely that they go so far as to say that his wife has a malady in one of her breasts and the Queen is only waiting for her to die to marry Lord Robert.’

De Feria therefore suggests that Philip might come to terms with Lord Robert. Again, on April 29, 1559, de Feria writes (according to the Calendar): ‘Sometimes she’ (Elizabeth) ‘appears to want to marry him’ (Archduke Ferdinand) ‘and speaks like a woman who will only accept a great prince, and then they say she is in love with Lord Robert, and never lets him leave her.’ De Feria has reason to believe that ‘she will never bear children’ *

Sp. Cal. i. pp. 57, 58, 63; Doc. Ineditos, 87, 171, 180.

Mr. Froude combines these two passages in one quotation, putting the second part (of April 29) first, thus: ‘They tell me that she is enamoured of my Lord Robert Dudley, and will never let him leave her side. HE OFFERS ME HIS SERVICES IN BEHALF OF THE ARCH DUKE, BUT I DOUBT WHETHER IT WILL BE WELL TO USE THEM. He is in such favour that people say she visits him in his chamber day and night. Nay, it is even reported that his wife has a cancer on her breast, and that the Queen waits only till she die to marry him.‘*

*Froude, vi. p. 199. De Feria to Philip, April 28 and April 29.

MS. Simancas, cf. Documentos Ineditos, pp. 87, 171, 180, ut supra.

The sentence printed in capitals cannot be found by me in either of de Feria’s letters quoted by Mr. Froude, but the sense of it occurs in a letter written at another date. Mr. Froude has placed, in his quotation, first a sentence of the letter of April 29, then a sentence not in either letter (as far as the Calendar and printed Spanish documents show), then sentences from the letter of April 18. He goes on to remark that the marriage of Amy and Dudley ‘was a love match of a doubtful kind,’ about which we have, as has been shown, no information whatever. Such are the pitfalls which strew the path of inquiry.

One thing is plain, a year and a half before her death Amy was regarded as a person who would be ‘better dead,’ and Elizabeth was said to love Dudley, on whom she showered honours and gifts.

De Feria, in the summer of 1559, was succeeded as ambassador by de Quadra, bishop of Aquila. Dudley and his sister, Lady Sidney (mother of Sir Philip Sidney), now seemed to favour Spanish projects, but (November 13) de Quadra writes: ‘I heard from a certain person who is accustomed to give veracious news that Lord Robert has sent to poison his wife. Certainly all the Queen has done with us and with the Swede, and will do with the rest in the matter of her marriage, is only keeping Lord Robert’s enemies and the country engaged with words until this wicked deed of killing his wife is consummated.’ The enemies of Dudley included the Duke of Norfolk, and most of the nation. There was talk of a plot to destroy both Dudley and the Queen. ‘The Duke and the rest of them cannot put up with Lord Robert’s being king.‘* Further, and later, on January 16, 1560 (Amy being now probably at Cumnor), de Quadra writes to de Feria that Baron Preyner, a German diplomatist, will tell him what he knows of the poison for the wife of Milort Robert (Dudley), ‘an important story and necessary to be known.‘** Thus between November 1559 and January 1560, the talk is that Amy shall be poisoned, and this tale runs round the Courts of Europe.

*Sp. Cal. i. pp. 112-114.

**Relations Politiques, Lettenhove, ii. p. 187.

Mr. Froude gives, what the Calendar does not, a letter of de Quadra to de Feria and the Bishop of Arras (January 15, 1560). ‘In Lord Robert it is easy to recognise the king that is to be… There is not a man who does not cry out on him and her with indignation.‘* ‘She will marry none but the favoured Robert.‘** On March 7, 1560, de Quadra tells de Feria: ‘Not a man in this country but cries out that this fellow’ (Dudley) ‘is ruining the country with his vanity.‘*** ‘Is ruining the country AND THE QUEEN,’ is in the original Spanish.

*Froude, vi. p. 311.

**Relations Politiques, ii. 87, 183, 184.

***Sp. Cal. i. p. 133. Major Hume translates the text of Mr. Froude’s transcript in the British Museum. It is a mere fragment; in 1883 the whole despatch was printed by Baron Kervyn de Lettenhove.

On March 28 (Calendar), on March 27 (Froude) de Quadra wrote to Philip – (Calendar) – ‘I have understood Lord Robert told somebody, who has not kept silence, that if he live another year he will be in a very different position from now. He is laying in a good stock of arms, and is assuming every day a more masterful part in affairs. They say that he thinks of divorcing his wife.‘* So the Calendar. Mr. Froude condenses his Spanish author THUS:** ‘Lord Robert says that if he lives a year he will be in another position from that which he at present holds. Every day he presumes more and more, and it is now said that he means to divorce his wife.’ From the evidence of the Spanish ambassadors, it is clear that an insurance office would only have accepted Amy Robsart’s life, however excellent her health, at a very high premium. Her situation was much like that of Darnley in the winter of 1566-67, when ‘every one in Scotland who had the smallest judgment’ knew that ‘he could not long continue,’ that his doom was dight.

*Sp. Cal. i, p. 141.

**Froude, vi. p. 340.

Meanwhile, through the winter, spring, and early summer of 1560, diplomatists and politicians were more concerned about the war of the Congregation against Mary of Guise in Scotland, with the English alliance with the Scottish Protestant rebels, with the siege of Leith, and with Cecil’s negotiations resulting in the treaty of Edinburgh, than even with Elizabeth’s marriage, and her dalliance with Dudley.

All this time, Amy was living at Cumnor Place, about three miles from Oxford. Precisely at what date she took up her abode there is not certain, probably about the time when de Quadra heard that Lord Robert had sent to poison his wife, the November of 1559. Others say in March 1560. The house was rented from a Dr. Owen by Anthony Forster. This gentleman was of an old and good family, well known since the time of Edward I.; his wife also, Ann Williams, daughter of Reginald Williams of Burghfield, Berks, was a lady of excellent social position. Forster himself had estates in several counties, and obtained many grants of land after Amy’s death. He died in 1572, leaving a very equitable distribution of his properties; Cumnor he bought from Dr. Owen soon after the death of Amy. In his bequests he did not forget the Master, Fellows, and Scholars of Balliol.* There is nothing suspicious about Forster, who was treasurer or comptroller of Leicester’s household expenses: in writing, Leicester signs himself ‘your loving Master.’ At Cumnor Place also lived Mrs. Owen, wife of Dr. Owen, the owner of the house, and physician to the Queen. There was, too, a Mrs. Oddingsell, of respectable family, one of the Hydes of Denchworth. That any or all of these persons should be concerned in abetting or shielding a murder seems in the highest degree improbable. Cumnor Place was in no respect like Kirk o’ Field, as regards the character of its inhabitants. It was, however, a lonely house, and, on the day of Amy’s death, her own servants (apparently by her own desire) were absent. And Amy, like Darnley, was found dead on a Sunday night, no man to this day knowing the actual cause of death in either case.

*Pettigrew, pp. 19-22.

Here it may be well to consider the version of the tragedy as printed, twenty-four years after the event, by the deadly enemies of Lord Robert, now Earl of Leicester. This is the version which, many years later, aided by local tradition, was used in Ashmole’s account in his ‘History and Antiquities of Berkshire,’ while Sir Walter employed Ashmole’s account as the basis of his romance. We find the PRINTED copy of the book usually known as ‘Leicester’s Commonwealth’ dated 1584, but probably it had been earlier circulated in manuscript copies, of which several exist.* It purports to be a letter written by a M.A. of Cambridge to a friend in London, containing ‘some talk passed of late’ about Leicester. Doubtless it DOES represent the talk against Leicester that had been passing, at home and abroad, ever since 1560. Such talk, after twenty years, could not be accurate. The point of the writer is that Leicester is lucky in the deaths of inconvenient people. Thus, when he was ‘in full hope to marry’ the Queen ‘he did but send his wife aside, to the house of his servant, Forster of Cumnor, by Oxford, where shortly after she had the chance to fall from a pair of stairs, and so to break her neck, but yet without hurting of her hood, that stood upon her head.’ Except for the hood, of which we know nothing, all this is correct. In the next sentence we read: ‘But Sir Richard Verney, who, by commandment, remained with her that day alone, with one man only, and had sent away perforce all her servants from her, to a market two miles off, he, I say, with his man, can tell how she died.’ The man was privily killed in prison, where he lay for another offence, because he ‘offered to publish’ the fact; and Verney, about the same time, died in London, after raving about devils ‘to a gentleman of worship of mine acquaintance.’ ‘The wife also of Bald Buttler, kinsman to my Lord, gave out the whole fact a little before her death.’

*Pettigrew, pp. 9, 10.

Verney, and the man, are never mentioned in contemporary papers: two Mrs. Buttelars were mourners at Amy’s funeral. Verney is obscure: Canon Jackson argues that he was of the Warwickshire Verneys; Mr. Rye holds that he was of the Bucks and Herts Verneys, connections of the Dudleys. But, finding a Richard Verney made sheriff of Warwick and Leicester in 1562, Mr. Rye absurdly says: ‘The former county being that in which the murder was committed,’ he ‘was placed in the position to suppress any unpleasant rumours.‘* Amy died, of course, in Berkshire, not in Warwickshire. A Richard Verney, not the Warwickshire Sir Richard, according to Mr. Rye, on July 30, 1572, became Marshal of the Marshalsea, ‘when John Appleyard, Amy’s half-brother, was turned out.’ This Verney died before November 15, 1575.

*Rye, p. 55.

Of Appleyard we shall hear plenty: Leicester had favoured him (he was Leicester’s brother-in-law), and he turned against his patron on the matter of Amy’s death. Probably the Richard Verney who died in 1575 was the Verney aimed at in ‘Leicester’s Commonwealth.’ He was a kind of retainer of Dudley, otherwise he would not have been selected by the author of the libel. But we know nothing to prove that he was at Cumnor on September 8, 1560.

The most remarkable point in the libel avers that Leicester’s first idea was to poison Amy. This had been asserted by de Quadra as early as November 1559. The libel avers that the conspirators, ‘seeing the good lady sad and heavy,’ asked Dr. Bayly, of Oxford, for a potion, which they ‘would fetch from Oxford upon his prescription, meaning to have added also somewhat of their own for her comfort.’ Bayly was a Fellow of New College; in 1558 was one of the proctors; in 1561 was Queen’s Professor of Physic, and was a highly reputable man.* He died in 1592. Thus Bayly, if he chose, could have contradicted the printed libel of 1584, which avers that he refused to prescribe for Amy, ‘misdoubting (as he after reported) lest if they poisoned her under the name of his potion, he might after have been hanged for a cover of their sin.’

*Pettigrew, p. 17, citing Wood’s Ath. Ox. i. P. 586 (Bliss).

Nothing was more natural and innocent than that Bayly should be asked to prescribe, if Amy was ill. Nothing could be more audacious than to print this tale about him, while he lived to contradict it. But it seems far from improbable that Bayly did, for the reasons given, refuse to prescribe for Amy, seeing (as the libel says) ‘the small need which the good lady had of physic.’

FOR THIS VERY REFUSAL BY BAYLY WOULD ACCOUNT FOR THE INFORMATION GIVEN BY CECIL TO DE QUADRA ON THE DAY OF AMY’S DEATH. AND IT IS NOT EASY TO EXPLAIN THE SOURCE OF CECIL’S INFORMATION IN ANY OTHER WAY.

We now reach the crucial point at which historical blunders and confusions have been most maddeningly prevalent. Mr. Pettigrew, writing in 1859, had no knowledge of Cecil’s corroboration of the story of the libel – Amy in no need of physic, and the intention to poison her. Mr. Froude, however, published in his History a somewhat erroneous version of de Quadra’s letter about Cecil’s revelations, and Mr. Rye (1885) accused Dudley on the basis of Mr. Froude’s version.*

*Froude, vi. pp. 417-421.

Mr. Froude, then, presents a letter from de Quadra of September 11, 1560, to the Duchess of Parma, governing the Netherlands from Brussels, ‘this being the nearest point from which he could receive instructions. The despatches were then forwarded to Philip.’ He dates de Quadra’s letter at the top, ‘London, September 1l.’ The real date is, at the foot of the last page, ‘Windsor, September 11.’ Omitting the first portion of the letter, except the first sentence (which says that fresh and important events have occurred since the writer’s last letter), Mr. Froude makes de Quadra write: ‘On the third of THIS month’ (September 1560) ‘the Queen spoke to me about her marriage with the Arch Duke. She said she had made up her mind to marry and that the Arch Duke was to be the man. She has just now told me drily that she does not intend to marry, and that it cannot be.’

When, we ask, is ‘just now’?

Mr. Froude goes on: ‘After my conversation with the Queen, I met the Secretary, Cecil, whom I knew to be in disgrace. Lord Robert, I was aware, was endeavouring to deprive him of his place.’ Briefly, Cecil said to de Quadra that he thought of retiring, that ruin was coming on the Queen ‘through her intimacy with Lord Robert. The Lord Robert had made himself master of the business of the State and of the person of the Queen, to the extreme injury of the realm, with the intention of marrying her, and she herself was shutting herself up in the palace to the peril of her health and life.’ Cecil begged de Quadra to remonstrate with the Queen. After speaking of her finances, Cecil went on, in Mr. Froude’s version: ‘Last of all he said they were thinking of destroying Lord Robert’s wife. THEY HAD GIVEN OUT THAT SHE WAS ILL; BUT SHE WAS NOT ILL AT ALL; SHE WAS VERY WELL, AND WAS TAKING CARE NOT TO BE POISONED…’ [The capitals are mine.]

This is the very state of things reported in ‘Leicester’s Commonwealth.’ Cecil may easily have known the circumstances, if, as stated in that libel, Bayly had been consulted, had found Amy ‘in no need of physic,’ and had refused to prescribe. Bayly would blab, and Cecil had spies everywhere to carry the report: the extent and precision of his secret service are well known. Cecil added some pious remarks. God would not permit the crime. Mr. Froude goes on: ‘The day after this conversation, the Queen on her return from hunting told me that Lord Robert’s wife was dead or nearly so, and begged me to say nothing about it.’ After some political speculations, the letter, in Froude, ends, ‘Since this was written the death of Lord Robert’s wife has been given out publicly. The Queen said in Italian “Que si ha rotto il collo” [“that she has broken her neck”]. It appears that she fell down a staircase.’