April 13, 2023 • 61 mins
Queen Elizabeth and Robert Dudley were still super into each other after Amy Robsart died, but marrying would be too scandalous. But despite taking on her own suitors, Elizabeth was still incredibly jealous when Robert Dudley hooked up with other ladies! But did Elizabeth and Robert ever actually - you know - DO it?? We dive into all the craziest theories, from trauma and stepdads to incest and Shakespeare. It's never a dull day in Queen Liz's court!
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey everybody, Hey, plus romance. I'm Diana, I'm Eli. How
are you today? How am I today? Well, it's a
rainy day here in Atlanta, UM, which is whatever. I mean.
You know, we've been have a nice weather. Weather small talk,
you know what, I like it? You know what I'm
conditioned to think. Weather small talk is bad because we
(00:22):
always kind of laugh about it. But it's a universal
experience that we can all relate to well, and if
you think about it, yeah I will. In history, it
was like the number one most important thing to know. True.
It's like if you think about like farmers in the
sixteen hundreds, the weather was actually incredibly important topic. And
so you come in and be like, m how long
(00:44):
you think this snow is gonna last? Don't like to
look at that sky. I hope this sun keeps coming up.
We could use some rain. I mean, you know what
I mean. We need the r now. It seems silly
because we have climate control, climate control. The climate has
never been more out of the climate. I just mean,
I know, but but I hope we're moving away from it.
You know what else we should move away from? Yeah,
this conversation, that's right, So we can move towards our
(01:07):
episode today. Yeah, we told y'all in part one all
about Robert Dudley, Lord Robert Dudley and Queen Elizabeth the
first long history together and the murder mystery surrounding Robert's
wife Amy robs Heart, which of course we decided was
obviously the fault of the ghost of Bloody Mary the
first Amy clearly went into the bathroom in the dark. Yeah,
(01:29):
like a fool, Yes has met the same fate. Was
very happy. We got a review, a new review where
someone was telling me that they also are very scared
of Bloody marries Yill even years years later. That mays
me feel a little bit better about my silly paranoia. Well, anyway,
the aftermath of all that Amy Rob's Heart stuff is
(01:51):
just as interesting. There's really clearly never a dull day
in Queen Elizabeth's court. Robert had several interesting lady love
and legal troubles in his future, Elizabeth had some fun
suitors herself. It's basically tutor tender around there. Wow. Um. Plus,
there's so many wild theories about the Virgin Queens to
(02:11):
cover as well, So let's find out how it all
played out with our star Cross lovers yeah, let's go. Hey,
their friends come listen. Well, Elia and Diana got some
stories to tell. There's no matchmaking a romantic tips. It's
just about ridiculous relationships. A lover might be any type
of person at all, and abstract cons at our concrete wall.
(02:34):
But if there's a story with the Second Clans ridiculous
role mass a production of iHeartRadio. Okay, So, as we
said at the end of part one, with the death
of Amy robs Hard, Lord Robert and Queen Elizabeth were
free to marry. Finally, my wife is dead. Now I'm happy, happy,
(02:54):
you know. Um. But they could not get married without
destabilizing Elizabeth rained too much and possibly fomenting a rebellion
against her because of all the scandal about whether or
not they had murdered this lady and stuff. Right, it
basically would have looked like they absolutely did if they
went and got married immediately after admitting to it. Yeah,
(03:14):
but even so, they simply could not stop flirting and
causing gossip because they just were so into each other. Right,
And in fifteen sixty one, Elizabeth was bedridden with a
swelling sickness as they called it, made her body swell
so conspiracy theories immediately sprang up, saying that she's not sick,
(03:34):
she's actually pregnant with Robert's child. Oh my goodness. And
we're going to get more into that later. So don't
forget that. Yeah, I mean like swelling sickness. Come on,
I mean I get that every time we go out
from Mexican food. I mean it could have been dropsy
or something, sure, or maybe she ate too much. People
gets Wait, did people get dropsy? I've only ever dealt
(03:55):
with it in the fish tank. People do, and then
you see the if you see pictures, it's insane how
big they swell up. Their feet look insane or their
hands or whatever. It looks really crazy, really sad when
it happens to fish. I didn't know what happened to people.
I'm pretty Yeah. Well the more you know, the more
you know, the less you want to know, well, the
less so true. So yeah, at any rate, all of
(04:18):
this scandal around them just refused to die. It does
not matter how many years went by, you know what
I mean. People were just always willing to believe that
the two of them were up to something. Yeah. So
as a result, matchmaking started anew for both Elizabeth and
Lord Roberts. Okay, For years, the Royal Council kept encouraging
Robert to give up on marrying Elizabeth by suggesting various
(04:40):
foreign princesses as his bride as like a consolation prize
for the Queen. I guess, so, like just marry the
Swedish Light or whatever. Yeah. In fact, Elizabeth herself proposed
that Robert Mary Mary, Queen of Scotts. She went to Mary,
Queen of Scott's, and was like, hey, if you marry Roberts,
I'll make you my air. And this would of course
(05:02):
unify Scotland and England, and it would neutralize one of
Elizabeth's greatest rivals. Sure, so she said absolutely, and she
said she could do this on just one condition. Mary
would have to come live in Elizabeth's court so that
she could keep Robert, her favorite courts Air, by her side,
as she always liked to have. I love it. She's like,
(05:23):
marry this guy and then come live with me so
I can keep flirting with your husband. It's like when
I see an adorable dog that needs an adoption, and
I try to go get my best friend to adopt
the dogs that I can still hang out with the dog. Yeah,
but I don't have to take care of total same energy.
Perfect Mary, Queen of Scott's, please come adopt sweet little Robert.
Look at his little tail wagging. He's so cute and
(05:45):
I just want to scratch his head, but I don't
want to have to feed him. So Elizabeth went ahead
and made Robert the Earl of Leicester and gave him
a bunch of land in fifteen sixty three so that
he would be a more acceptable husband to Mary. And
Mary actually seemed like she might kind of go for it.
But there was one little hiccup in this plan, and
that's that Robert was like, no, and no, no, I'm
(06:08):
not marrying Mary, Queen of Scott's. He unequivocally refused to
marry this woman. He was dead set against it, at
least partly because he was still holding on to hope
that he might one day get to marry Queen Elizabeth.
So instead of going along with her plan, he went
and helped a guy named Henry Stewart, Lord Darnley, win Mary,
(06:29):
Queen of Scott's hand, which eventually Lord Darnley did, which
I mean would be It sounds like a classic rom
com set up yes, like, oh, I, oh, you're going
to have to marry this woman. Oh yeah, not if
she falls in love with my friend who just came
to town first. That's right, except this turned out to
be a really ill fated man. Well yeah, yeah, a
(06:50):
rom com with a really dark sequel. Yeah. But you know,
Robert was not just like pining away in his celibate
bedroom or anything like that waiting for the queen. Okay,
hey's a real handsome women loved him, sure, So he's
flirting with several ladies in the court, including Elizabeth's cousin,
Latise Knowles, who was the Countess of Essex, and she
(07:11):
was Her name is spelled l E t Tice, so
it's Lettuce, let us, let us and I could not
stop reading it as let us the whole time we're
going through this. So but anyway, it's Latise apparently knows
she was the Countess of Essex, and she was Elizabeth's
most beautiful lady in waiting. But in fifteen sixty eight,
(07:33):
Robert Dudley started having an affair with a different lady
in waiting. Her name was Douglas Sheffield and she was
newly widowed. Okay, Douglas Douglas Douglass, Douglass the last Douglass.
So anyway, Robert and Douglas were together for several years.
Douglas even gave birth to Robert's illegitimate son, who was
(07:53):
also named Robert, in fifteen seventy four. They only had
five names to choose from, serious she had to like
spin the wheel something. Now, Douglas was getting a lot
of marriage proposals, but she was waiting for one from
Robert Sure, like, all these dudes want to marry me,
but I only want one man. I only had a
son with one of them. But this proposal never came,
(08:16):
and Robert explained to her in a letter he wrote
her where he was. Basically, he was just encouraging her
to marry someone else. And he told her, you know,
I know it's really strange of me to threaten my
own family name and household by not getting married and
having legitimate children and heirs, you know, for my property
and everything. But he said he could not do it
because quote, if I should marry, I am sure never
(08:38):
to have the Queen's favor. So he just knew that
the jealousy of Elizabeth was going to be real crazy
for him, right, because Elizabeth was not she would not
marry him, but she was kind of not happy about
him flirting with anybody else. A bit of a trap.
But Robert was also getting a little tired of waiting
for Elizabeth to make up her mind about whether or
(08:59):
not she'd take him or not. As he said, he
had no opportunity to build up his own family while
he was waiting in the wings for the queens. So
in fifteen seventy five, Robert decided to go for it.
He threw a huge nineteen day long festival at his castle, Kennilworth,
which he was building up as a quote wonder house
(09:20):
for her majesty and I love a historical party, so
Christian had include all these details. Yeah, this party had
a Lady of the Lake like some I guess, some
woman dressed up holding a sword in the water swimming around.
They had a swimming paper mache dolphin that had a
little orchestra and its belly plan. They had fireworks that
(09:41):
were said to be heard twenty miles away. Of course,
they were holding hunts. We're all going to get together,
go out and find some foxes. And then they had
entertainment that was popular at the time, like bear baiting. Good.
It always makes for a fun party. Oh so fun.
I love to make a bear really mad. Yeah, that's
what I like. And then, of course the scenery was spectacular.
(10:04):
Brought all the best decorators out. He had a artificial
lake and castle. He also had a Renaissance garden, and
English Heritage dot Com says that when Queen Elizabeth complained
that she could not see this garden from her lodgings
in the estate, Robert's gardeners worked all night to create
a little pop up version of it right under her window. Wow,
(10:27):
pulled out all the stops. Now, this was the longest
Queen Elizabeth had ever stayed at one of her courtier's houses.
And the final entertainment was to be this masquerade where
actors would have been commissioned to urge Elizabeth to marry
their generous host, Lord Robert Dudley, but the mask was
(10:48):
rained out. And even though one of these actors was like,
I got a job, I'm gonna do it, and he
ran after Elizabeth in the rain, pleading for her to
wait and stay and talk to Robert, but she refused
to do it, and she wrote off parties over I'm
out of here. I've been here nineteen days. I don't
know if you heard, but I'm a queen and I
got work to do. It's true. So this had been
(11:10):
Robert's most ostentatious proposal and it came to nothing. Now,
some historians believe that as much as this party was
a proposal to Elizabeth, it was also kind of a
request to let Robert marry somebody else. All right, He's
kind of like, this is my final thing, it's your
final answer, and yeah, we're good, right, like we know
it's all good. Yeah, And that might be because Robert
(11:30):
had a certain lady in mind to be the next
Missus Dudley, because ten years before, as we mentioned, he
had flirted with Latise knows let us. You know, I've
flirted with let us a few times myself too, but
I end up going for French fries. And Latisse was
married to the Earl of Essex at the time. And now,
(11:53):
of course, since it's Robert Dudley, he could not do
anything without the rumor mill kicking into gear, and they
started saying that Latise had two children with Robert, but
had aborted one of them to prevent her husband finding
out about the affair, just one, yeah, the other one.
They're like, she's just lying to him. You've had one
(12:18):
child that I don't know how you had him about
a second one and I'm going to start to get suspicious.
Must now again, zero evidence for any of this. Okay,
he just flirted with her and everybody ran with it.
It's almost like they had nothing to do back then.
But gossip true, very true. Then. When Latis's husband, the
Earl of Essex, died in fifteen seventy six, the rumor
(12:41):
mill said that Robert deadly had poisoned him so he
could marry Latise. Never mind that the Earl of Essex
was in Ireland at the time trying to colonize it
and definitely died of dysenterry during an epidemic. Oh yeah,
so there's like no way that Robert had anything to
do with his right. But one thing that the gossips
did get right was that Robert and Latise were in love.
(13:05):
History extra dot com says that Robert had flirted with
Latise back in fifteen sixty five, deliberately to fan the
Queen's jealousy and get her to finally marry him. So
you know, don't you hate it seeing me hang out
with this girl while you got You can lock it
down if you want. She's so beautiful and she's into me.
But when the widowed Latis visited Kenilworth in fifteen seventy seven,
(13:29):
her and Robert's feelings for each other grew so intense that,
even knowing how much the Queen would dislike it, they
went ahead and started planning their wedding, and that meant
that Robert would have to formally end things with his
baby mama Douglas Sheffield. So you know, I've been telling
you and I'm not going to marry you, but we
actually really I'm trying to get serious with somebody else.
(13:50):
Now I'm gonna marry someone else. Right, It is a
little I do imagine that Douglas had a bit of
a moment of huh, because he's like, I can't marry
you or else the Queen will get marrit me. But
I am going to marry this other lady even if
the Queen gets mad at me. So I feel like
there's no way to read that other than you didn't
want to marry me specifically. Yeah, Well, they did come
(14:12):
to an amicable agreement about the young little Robert Sheffield
Junior his custody. He stayed in Robert Dudley's houses. He
was extremely well educated, and he had permission to go
see his mother whenever she wanted to see him. And
Douglas herself remarried in fifteen seventy nine to Sir Edward Stafford.
So everything turned out all right for Lady Douglas, that's right. Yeah,
(14:35):
So it was all clear for Robert and Latisse's wedding,
which took place in September fifteen seventy eight. Some accounts
say that Latise was pregnant with Robert's child at the time,
but kind of the only proof for this is that
she wore a loose fitting gown to get married in. Otherwise,
there's no historical evidence for a child at all. It's
(14:55):
historical evidence to me that she wanted to be comfortable,
That's what I said. Also, there wedding date coincided with
the end of the traditional two year morning period for widows,
and they had planned it for over a year. So
this is like no shotgun affair when he knocked her
up and he had to get married or something. But
only the bride's parents and the groom's brother Ambrose were
present at the ceremony, and everybody was sworn to secrecy
(15:19):
because they were all just so afraid of what the
Queen would do when she found out that her boy
toy was married, which unfortunately did not take very long.
Of course, a French ambassador reported on their marriage only
two months after it, and then Elizabeth was told a
few months after that, and her reaction was immediate. She
was like incandescent with rage. Right, she even ordered Robert
(15:42):
thrown into the Tower of London. She's not going to
imprison him, but the new Earl of Essex, who is
Latisse's son and Robert's stepson, Robert Devereaux another Robert, Sorry, guys,
he intervened and he convinced Elizabeth that that was a
bad move. Probably's like, honey, you can't just be thrown
people into jail. Were getting married. That's kind of crazy. Yeah,
(16:03):
not to mention, I think it says something publicly about
y'all's relationship. If you're this reactive, that's right what I see.
You know, I could see her upset, you know, more
than just being in love with him, but like he
also like is her best friend since they were kids,
and he didn't tell her he got married. I mean,
you know that's probably a factor as well. I'm just
(16:23):
saying it's part of it. It's not like that's why
she got married instead of her love for him. But
I just think that that didn't help. No, I agree.
I would just say she needs to look inward because
it's her he's not. He probably did want to tell
Harry what I mean, right, but she's too crazy. Yeah.
So Robert did not get thrown in prison, but he
(16:44):
did have to leave court in disgrace. Sam Meanwhile, Latise
was called to court to bear the brunt of Elizabeth's wreath.
Elizabeth raged at her, calling her a she wolf and
a flouting wench she boxtra years before finally banishing her
from court for life. Jez, Yeah, just cruel. And Latisse
(17:08):
had to retire to the Dudley's country house, and she
stayed there for years, and she still called herself the
Countess of Essex, and she lived as discreetly as she could.
But in fifteen eighty one she gave birth to Robert's son,
another Robert, called Lord Denby, and they moved permanently to
the Dudley's house in London and that made the Queen
(17:30):
mad all over again. I guess it was like, you're
flaunter in my face now, Yeah, you know, I got
to look at her sometimes now. Latis's social life was
severely curtailed because everyone knew the Queen hated her guts,
so you didn't want to get seen hanging out with
the Queen's number one enemy. Every time she did anything,
Elizabeth would get angry. One time, Queen Elizabeth became furious
(17:51):
because she heard Latise was planning to join Robert in
the Netherlands with a procession of people and carriages even
bigger than the Queen's. And it turns out none of
that was true. Latise wasn't planning to go to the
Netherlands at all. But this poor girl really could not
lift a finger without pissing off the Queen, and this
lasted for the rest of Elizabeth's life. Sucks. Not the
(18:13):
kind of person you want to be, constantly looking at
everything you do and easily mad about it. Not really.
It's like I think I'll just make a sandwich today,
and then a royal proclamation just announced from the Queen.
All women who make sandwiches suck. Stupid and ugly. Yeah,
I don't know, but she sacrificed a lot to be
with Robert. You know, I don't know that she expected this,
(18:36):
but they definitely expected to not be her favorite. I mean,
even the thing with the Netherlands, Like, even stuff that
she doesn't do, she's encouraging the wrath about right, which
I'm sure there was some like you know, shenanigans where
some courtiers like, I want her to be mad at Robert,
so let me tell her about let us doing something
or Latise doing something. Yeah. It's like it's like when
(18:57):
someone has a dream about you and they're mad at you,
but I didn't do it. You're like, well, I don't care.
I need a minute before I'm okay with you. But
even though Queen Liz was equally pissed off at Robert
for getting married, she only showed him a cold shoulder
for a few months before welcoming him back to the
fold and all his responsibilities at court. Sure's best, that's
(19:18):
bestie exactly. She's like, I'm just gonna put all my
anger on the wife. But this was actually pretty important
because Elizabeth was in serious negotiations to finally marry somebody
in fifteen seventy five, and that was Francois, the Duke
of Angou, and we will tell you all about that
right after these royal proclamations. Here you hear you, welcome
(19:46):
back to the show. That guy's strong, and that guy's
done with this job as the royal crier. He's like, okay,
I'm ready to retire. Yeah, So Queen Elizabeth and Francis
the Duke of Anjou. We're actually a whole episode suggestion
from a listener named Daniel Fields through emails, So thank you, Dan,
(20:06):
will be since we're doing all this Queen Elizabeth stuff,
we decided to throw it into this episode. But I'm
glad that you told us about him. Now we already
know we were talking in part one and this episode
that Elizabeth, you know, is being courted from near and far.
She's a queen, okay, people want to marry her. When
she ascended the throne, she had publicly declared that she
would never marry and that she would remain a virgin
(20:28):
for her whole life. But no one really believed her.
You know. They're like, you're a young woman, your Queen
of England. We're gonna get married and have some babies,
But as she got older, the people of England revered
her more and more for her virginity, which to me
makes it a lot harder for her to choose to
get married. I feel like, if you have this whole
cult of personality about something about you, it's really hard
to like not have that thing anymore. But honestly, really
(20:51):
the main thing was that Elizabeth knew if she got married,
her husband was in charge. Queen or no queen. You know,
he would own all her money, all her stuff, all
her children, and all her body. And she knew what
that meant. He could cut her damn head off if
he wanted to. She's like, yeah, daddy did it several times. Okay,
She's like fully traumatized growing up in King Henry's house. Okay, yeah,
(21:13):
if Henry the Eight's your dad, you just you have
a different outlook on marriage than the rest of us,
all of it. You're like, I don't know, but this guy,
Francois was a serious contender, largely because his name was Francois.
That's the most romantic man ugandad. Elizabeth was forty six
years old at this point, and she knew her time
(21:35):
to get married was running out Francois might be her
last suitor. Some of her favorite courtiers, including Robert Dudley
and Sir Francis Walsingham, opposed the marriage to Francois because
Francois was French, I believe it or not. And Elizabeth,
of course wasn't very likely to have any children at
this point, so if she died while married to him,
(21:57):
which was definitely possible because Sis was nearly half her
age at twenty four, England would fall under French control.
Just whoops, all of somewhere in different country now too. Yeah,
and Francois also was Catholic, and if you remember part one,
getting Elizabeth on the throne to begin with, was this
(22:19):
whole Catholic Protestant mess. Now Walsingham was able to point
out to Elizabeth that the French Catholics, under the orders
of Francois's own mother, Catherine de Medici, had just murdered
a bunch of Protestant hugueen nuts in the Saint Bartholomew's
Day massacre after the French king's Catholic sister married a
(22:42):
Protestant in fifteen seventy two. So he's like, that's what
happened if the French king's sister married a Protestant. If
Francis here marries a Protestant, I eat you, Queen Elizabeth,
They're gonna pop off. They're gonna act real crazy and
do something nuts. Yeah, you know, he might be worried
too about English Protestants like Catholics. He's like, either way,
(23:04):
it's a bad situation. Nobody's happy when the Catholics and
the Protestants get together in sixteenth century England. But Elizabeth
seems to have been truly fond of Francois. He had
been scarred by smallpox as a young child. He was
also short, with kind of a curved spine, so you know,
he was described to her as being quote amazingly ugly. Oh,
(23:28):
which is so rude. Heads up, girl, you're about to
meet a guy, and I don't want you to flinch,
so freak out. But he's fucking crazy looking. But she
said that he appeared handsome to her. But mainly I
think the attraction seems to be that he was just
very witty and intelligent, and he was really capable of
keeping up with her in conversation. He didn't have a
lot of pretension about him right, So they really got along,
(23:51):
you know, on a personality level. He gave her a
frog shaped earring that she wore all the time, and
she called him affectionate nicknames, either Monsieur or her frog.
Oh no, one is sure if the frog one is
because of the earring or because frog was a derogatory
term for French people at the time. Okay, And like,
(24:14):
I guess she was like trying to be funny because
because now I'm like, what him? Why is I don't
know where that came from anyway, And it must be
said that Elizabeth did like a little play acting. She
loved to get melodramatic, and she was very contradictory. She
loved to fuck with people also, so sometimes she would
(24:35):
like one day, you know, they'd be like, don't marry Francois,
and she'd be like, oh, it is my one true love,
you know, and like run off. And then another day
they'd be like, fine, you can marry him. She'd be like, oh,
I would never you know. She was just always, oh,
my god, the world. And of course we already know
(24:57):
that she was, you know, kind of messing with all
her pass suitors as well the other foreign princes she
was kind of playing around, pretending to be interested in them,
but she sort of used it as like foreign policy stuff.
And this is pretty similar because over the six years
that she and Francois recording, Elizabeth was able to create
a strong alliance with France and make friends with the
Queen Mother, Catherine de Medici. And then when she decided
(25:20):
not to marry Francois, it was partly due to how
much the English people would really hate having a French
Catholic king, but it was also because the French were
about to get into it with the Dutch, and by
adroitly kind of extricating herself from an engagement, Elizabeth managed
to avoid England getting involved with this Dutch French problem
(25:41):
those war's back then, it was just drive me so crazy.
Oh sorry, honey, I'm off to fight in a war
against the Dutch. Oh no, why are we at war
with the Dutch? I don't know. Some lady married a guy,
and now where all I have to go die in battle?
Now we all have spears through our eyes. So anyway,
(26:02):
she might have just been kind of using this engagement
for foreign policy reason. Yeah, but she did have enough
affection for Francois to write him a poem when their
courtship officially ended in fifteen eighty one. So let's go
down to poetry corner and hear Queen Elizabeth the first
poem on Monsieur's departure. I grieve, and dare not show
(26:26):
my discontent. I love, and yet am forced to seem
to hate. I do, yet dare not say I ever meant.
I seem stark mute, but inwardly do prate. I am
and not I freeze, and yet am burned. Since from
myself another self I turned. My care is like my
shadow in the sun, follows me, flying flies when I pursue,
(26:50):
it stands and lies by me. Doth what I have done?
His too familiar care doth make me ru it? No
means I mind to rid him from my breast, till
by the end of things it be suppressed. Some gentler
passions slide into my mind, for I am soft and
made of melting snow. Or be more cruel love, and
(27:13):
so be kind, let me float or sink, be high
or low, or let me live with some more sweet content,
or die, And so forget what love er meant. No,
she's really stuck in the middle here. Yeah, I like
this poem. Yeah, it kind of shows her sort of
contradictory nature, Like she clearly feels an internal thing. It's
(27:36):
not just external forces. Why she has internal contradictions, right,
also external contradictions. So it's kind of a cool like
tug of war poems. Yeah, exactly why am I? Why
am I so stuck feeling you know this way and
that way? Why can't I just either get what I
want or not have it? Yeah? I also love I
seem stark mute, but inwardly do prate. She's like, I'm
(27:59):
not saying a word, but inside right, I know. Right.
So Elizabeth stayed single and Robert was married to Latise,
who Elizabeth still paid it, and even when Robert and
Latise's three year old son died suddenly in fifteen eighty four,
Elizabeth could not bring herself to forgive Latise, right, but
(28:22):
she was still very close with Robert himself, and in fact,
he became Lord Stewart in fifteen eighty seven, which meant
he was basically in charge of the palace, like all
the food, all the sanitization, just everything, like you know,
non judicial, right, yeah, not legislative. He is in charge
of the maintaining the whole palace. Yeah. Fun fact, this
(28:46):
sanitization issue actually in the palace was so bad that
Robert Dudley sat down and had a conversation about it
with Elizabeth's godson, John Harrington, who was then inspired to
invent the first flush toilet. I had no idea dated
back that far. Um. Is that why we call him
(29:06):
John's Some people say that, but there's no evidence for that,
But I think it is. John apparently is like Americans,
so they're like, they're Americans. Didn't know anything about John here.
Maybe Americans learned that. We're like, O, why aren't we
naming it after that guy? He did a great job.
What's funny too, is that he invented the flush toilet,
but what he didn't have was the U bend and
the pipes. Oh yes, we have now, so you couldn't
(29:28):
avoid the odor. So that was what. But it's so
interesting that the dates back that far, they had no idea.
I guess a flush in a stink is better than
no flush. No flush. That was that was one of
Asop's fables. I think right, a flush in a stink
is better than no flush. That's the moral of the
story today, okay, but the real headline here is about
(29:51):
a whole other guy, entirely someone who was shipwrecked and
rescued by the Spanish. They detained him because they thought
he was an English bye, so they took him to Madrid,
where he claimed that he was none other than Arthur Dudley,
the secret love child of Robert Dudley and Queen Elizabeth
(30:12):
the First What he told King Philip's secretary who interrogated
him that Elizabeth's governess kat Ashley, had given him as
a baby to her servant, who raised him sixty miles
outside of London as a gentleman. But on the servant's deathbed,
he confessed to Arthur about his royal origins. My boy,
(30:34):
your whole life. I never told you you're the heir
to the throne of England. Gotta go have fun with that. Arthur,
of course, was terrified for his life if that secret
came out. A real um, a real uh? Who is
the kid in Game of Thrones? Barrathian? Yeah, one of them?
(30:57):
But wait us not friend Lee Richard Boris, I don't know,
Craig Philip, I'm gonna say every name. Just let me
know when I hit it. I don't know, Samuel, Jennifer
yep is Jennifer all right, Jennifer Barrafi, thank you. So
Arthur is scared for his life obviously this if the
(31:19):
secret comes out, they would definitely like lock him up
or something worse. So he traveled to Spain, but then
there he got shipwreck, captured, etc. Etc. Here we are,
which this is a very simplified version of his story.
His story was incredibly convoluted. He talked about several people
that he could name that were in the court that
were Sir Robert Dudley, that were Lord Robert Dudley's like
(31:43):
members of his household or his servants or whatever. And
his birthday, he did say, was fifteen sixty one, which
would have coincided when Elizabeth had her swelling sickness. Oh
my good. So there was something, you know, there was
some details that seemed very plausible, and then some other
things were like huh, you know, it's a little convoluted.
So it's a real, very convoluted story he gave them.
(32:04):
I'm kind of seeing the opening of thor Ragnarok sort of,
but like it's this guy, it's this Arthur Dudley character.
In the chair being interrogated by the Spanish. Right now,
he turns with the camera and he's like, I bet
you're wondering how I got here. Let me take you back. Well,
Arthur's story, despite some of these exciting details or whatever,
(32:25):
did not really impress King Philip's secretary or anyone else
in Spain. The King's secretary who examined him, he told Philip,
you know, I think Arthur's a spy, or if he's
not a spy, the Queen and her quarter are using
him in some type of way to benefit them, Like
they're just super paranoid about what Elizabeth's up to. So
he's like, let's just keep this guy under lock and
key and prevent him from escaping, just in case he's
(32:46):
a spy. Sure, And after that, Arthur was never heard
from again. We still don't know what happened to him.
He either he could have perished in a Spanish prison,
or maybe he really was a spy working for Sir
Francis Walsingham and eventually escaped and resumed his real identity.
And so there never was on Arthur Dudley to trade. Okay, Now, again,
(33:08):
historians are also extremely skeptical that he was Elizabeth's illegitimate child.
They largely agree that she was just too closely watched
to hide a whole pregnancy, and once she went into labor,
there's just no way that all the ladies in waiting, courtiers, doctors, servants, midwives,
whatever that would have been called to help her out
would have been able to keep that secret to themselves
(33:29):
for very long. This would have been the most sellable
secret in the land. They're like, look, we all know
that the downstairs workers are the most gossipy people in
the ballast, okay, and if someone offered them the right
amount of money, you know, so it's pretty unlikely. And
I kind of agree. I think it at all points
to Arthur being a spy because his story was so
(33:51):
convoluted and had some real details and some not real
so it felt like he was trying to send them
on a little bit of a wild goose tape, giving
himself time to gaborbet that's that's what it looked like him.
I like it. I like it. Speculation station Arthur Dudley
was his by okay, and his real name. Meanwhile, Robert
(34:11):
Dudley was off all wrapped up with some complicated history
with the Dutch, and then he was named Lieutenant and
Captain General of the Queen's Armies and Companies in fifteen
eighty eight when the Spanish Armada was threatening. But in
September of that year, Robert Dudley died unexpectedly at the
age of fifty five. Historians have alternately said that it
(34:35):
might have been stomach cancer or malaria that killed him.
Latise Dudley, his wife, was devastated, and of course, his
side piece, Queen Elizabeth the First, was inconsolable. She actually
locked herself in her room for several days until William
Cecil had the door broken down. Yike. Even though she
(34:56):
never did marry him, historians said, including Sue and Dorian,
in her book Elizabeth the First and Her Circle, that
he quote remained at the center of Elizabeth's emotional life
and that he was likely the one true love of
Elizabeth's life. When Queen Elizabeth herself died, it was discovered
that she had saved Robert's final handwritten letter to her.
(35:20):
On the outside she had written his last letter and
she kept it inside a silver casket by her bedside. Wow,
she really did love him, she really did. But did
she ever physically love him and they ever got on.
We're going to get into that sexy story right after this.
(35:47):
Welcome back to the show, everybody. Okay, So is this
a will they won't they never did, or is this
a Monica Chandler secret sex situation? Of course, we can't
really know unless we go back in time and drill
ape pole in the Queen's bedroom, which the super creepy
of us. Yes, so we won't do it. But on
her deathbed, according to English heritage dot com, the Queen
(36:09):
solemnly swore the quote. Though she loved him dearly, nothing
unseemly had ever passed between them. Okay, and many scholars
say that she was at most a shameless flirt but
really never did anything else, really actually did stay a
virgin her in her life. Okay. But despite the total
(36:30):
lack of evidence that she ever did anything sexual with anyone,
there are tons of conspiracy theories about her illegitimate children
with a variety of men. Some people thought that every
time the Queen did a progress, anytime she left the
palace and went anywhere else, it was covered for her
to have to give birth to some wow other kids.
I was like, she's just littering children all over England's
(36:52):
for something she couldn't walk out the doors people be
like last week, Yeah, well that's so much she's she's
a really good baby maker. So there's just tons of
you know, theories about all these illegitimate children she had
with a variety of men, including Robert Dudley, but also
her stepfather and her son with her stepfather. Oh okay,
(37:15):
hold on what now? Yeah, so first let's talk about
the stepfather. Remember Queen Elizabeth's fathers King Henry the eighth,
and when he died, Thomas Seymour, who was the brother
of one of Henry's other wives and Elizabeth's stepmother, Jane Seymour,
wrote to Elizabeth and asked her to marry him, and
(37:37):
Elizabeth Tudor politely declined, saying that, oh, I'll be mourning
my father for two years, and also I'm only thirteen,
so I'm probably too young for you anyway. So a
month later, Thomas married Catherine Parr, another one of Henry
the Eighth's ex wives, his sixth wife. They had been
old flames and they were actually planning to get married
(37:59):
before King Henry the eighth snatched her up. Yeah, Catherine
was like, I guess it's God's will that I marry
the king. Right. So Katherine Parr was close with her
stepdaughter Elizabeth, and she invited the then fourteen year old
girl to come live with her and Thomas. And then,
according to testimonies from fifteen forty nine from Elizabeth's governess
(38:20):
kat Ashley, a few days after Elizabeth got there, Thomas
visited the girl in the early morning while she was
still in her bed, and he would quote make as
though he would come at her, and she would shrink
back from him. And the next day she woke up
earlier to avoid being in bed when Thomas came by,
(38:42):
but she was still in her nightgown, so he showed
up bare legged in his nightclothes and slapped Elizabeth on
her butt. Another time, he actually climbed right into bed
with Elizabeth. So she continued to wake up earlier and
earlier each day to avoid him, and if she was
already dressed, he would just say good morning and go
(39:03):
on with his day. Super creepy, very weird behavior, very
weird behavior, and Catherine Parr did not put a stop
to any of this. In fact, she would sometimes tickle
Elizabeth alongside Thomas Seymour, and one time she even held
her down while Thomas cut a gown off her body
quote in a hundred pieces. It's not clear how she
(39:26):
held her down, like if she was like it was
like a friendly hug, or if she's like holding her
down like this forceful thing. Right, but it's something weird
like that was she's sort of participating with Thomas in
this behavior. But then another time she comes into this
empty room where Thomas and Elizabeth are embracing in some way.
I don't know if they were kissing or hugging or what,
(39:47):
but they were in an embrace, and Catherine Parr was
heavily pregnant at the time with Thomas's kid, and she
became very furious at seeing him and Elizabeth together. Okay,
after that, Elizabeth went to live somewhere else, and history
extra dot com says it's not clear if she was
sent away or if she chose to leave. So now,
with all of this story, some scholars think that Thomas
(40:11):
Seymour was sexually harassing, if not abusing, Elizabeth sounds like it,
and that it turned her off from sex forever. That's
what kind of made her go fuck this, Yeah, sounds
like it. I would believe that, But Smithsonian Magazine points
out that there was no concept of adolescence in the
fifteen hundreds, and that at fourteen years old, Elizabeth would
(40:31):
have been perceived as a grown woman, not just by
other people, but also by herself. Sure, okay. She also
did have some affection for Thomas. He apparently was an
incredibly popular guy, like, he's very charming and handsome. Everybody
liked him. So it's been suggested that she did not
mind his treatment, that she laughed it off, that she
even liked it, or that she had a bit of
a crush on him. I have a hard time with
(40:54):
this sort of thing because I think women laugh when
they're uncomfortable all the time as a way to kind
of be like, oh you please stop. You know, the
fact that she had a crush on him, people said
it because she would blush when his name was mentioned,
I mean, which could mean she had a crush on him.
It could mean that she was embarrassed to think about
her stepfather coming into her room with her dick hanging
(41:14):
out of nightgown. I don't know. Yeah, there's a lot
of ways to interpret that uncomfortable. Yeah, and you. I mean,
you've heard many times women say, you know how much
easier it is to just kind of roll with it,
even though you hate what's happening, than it is to
try and protest or say not. It's dangerous to say no. Yeah. Well,
(41:35):
Thomas's ambition ended up getting him killed. He was always
trying to get the young King Edward to name him
Lord Protector instead of Thomas's own older brother, the Duke
of Somerset, and one night Thomas tried to sneak into
the King's room and in the process he woke up
one of King edwards pet spaniels, who started barking. Thomas
(41:59):
had with him either a pistol or a knife, and
he used it to kill the dog. So already he's
like villain of the week. Hate him, But it was
too late. The dog had woken up the King and
his various attendants, who were all like, uh, what are
you doing in the King's bedchambers with a weapon? Okay,
So the courtiers decided that he had planned to murder
(42:22):
young King Edward and then mary his stepdaughter Elizabeth and
put her on the throne. Now that is supposedly why
they were asking Elizabeth's governess about her relationship with Thomas,
because both of them, Thomas and Elizabeth, were under suspicion
of conspiring together to kill King Edward. So that was
when kat Ashley gave them all these dirty stories about
(42:45):
Thomas and how he treated Elizabeth when she was young.
But it's ben said that kat Ashley, this governess, was
just trying to make Elizabeth look as innocent as possible
with her testimony, So she might have overblown Tom his
inappropriate behavior couldn't look bad to make him look bad,
So it could just be, you know, these stories that
(43:07):
we're hearing about the creepy things he did were just that,
like stories that were kind of inflated a little bit
to sort of separate Elizabeth from his crimes. I don't know.
That's another thing where it's like you're trying to throw
dirt on a good man's name. Yea, there's it's a
total it's impossible to know for sure. Yeah, but according
to the Prince Tutor theory, Elizabeth did have an affair
(43:31):
with her stepfather, Thomas Seymour, had a teen pregnancy and
gave birth to his child, who was then placed in
John Devere's home and grew up to become Edward Devere,
the seventeenth Earl of Oxford, who is purported to be
the real Shakespeare, this guy who you played one. I
(43:52):
played Edward Devere in a show. Yeah. We'll get into
that in a second. Yeah. So there are a ton
of Shakespeare scholars out there who think there was no
William Shakespeare, there's no one guy named William Shakespeare, that
that was actually just the pen name of one or
more other guys, other authors. They posit that it could
be Edward de Vere who we're talking about right now,
(44:13):
also Christopher Marlowe, Edmund Spencer, or Sir Francis Bacon, who
was also supposedly the Queen's illegitimate son with Robert Dudley
and the true heir to the throne. And the truth
is all hidden within the plays and sonnets if you
just read them right. We did a show with our
theater company years back called Shake and Bake, and it
(44:33):
was where we just mashed up a bunch of different
Shakespeare characters and plot lines together to kind of do
sort of this Shakespearean sketch show. And it was narrated
by these four characters, Sir Francis Bacon, Edward de Vere,
Christopher Marlowe, and this stoner version of a guy named
Bill Shakespeare, whose name they were all using, yeah to
(44:54):
write wrote the Weed. Yeah. We did a bunch of
research for that show where we came up with those characters,
and there's not a lot of sturdy evidence to support
that any of them were the real Shakespeare. No, and
even crazier the theory, the Prince Tudor theory further says
that Edward de Vere grew up to have an incestuous
(45:15):
affair with his own mother, Queen Elizabeth, and that she
gave birth to his kid, Henry Rothsley, the third Earl
of Southampton, which would be a really gross thing for
her to do. Well. As Eli said, there's just not
much evidence for any of this, except for again just
reading Shakespeare's works with a certain lens, like it's like, oh,
(45:35):
He's wrote this play that takes place in this area,
and there's these names in it that Sir Francis Bacon
was also in that place and knew some of those people,
so it must be really Sir Francis talking about his
own life or whatever. There was one guy named Percy
Allen who did confirm his findings, thank you very much,
by using a medium to contact the spirits of Edward
(45:57):
de Vere, Queen Elizabeth the First, Sir Francis Bacon, and
William Shakespeare, who all said that he totally nailed it
and got it all completely right. But I'm so confused
because if his whole thing is that there is no Shakespeare,
so how did he contact the spirit of Shakespeare? Oh yeah,
maybe he's like, no, I contacted the stoner and his name,
(46:17):
but like he ain't no writing, right, I'm William Shakespeare,
but I never wrote a word a day in my life,
that's right. I don't even know how to read it.
But Elizabeth's, to some inexplicable determination to remain a virgin
has led to so many insane theories too. Some people
believe that Elizabeth actually died as a child and was
(46:39):
replaced by a young boy, and they didn't want the
secret to get out. So this kid never married or
had a love affair, all right, listen, Like King Henry
the Eighth wind it been like, we'll figure it out.
We'll just figure it out. I need a son, so
we'll figure it out. Put a boy in there. We'll
just tell everybody we were wrong. There's no way that
some people think that Elizabeth actually was having sex and
(47:01):
leaving illegitimate children all around the nation. Like we mentioned before,
the poet Ben Johnson theorized that she had quote a
membrana on her that made her incapable of having sex,
so literally, like her vagina was sealed up. He's like,
I don't know, I'm speculation station vagina didn'tata. Nobody had
(47:24):
said this, but what if Queen Elizabeth's like, look, there's
teeth down, there's a big chomping mom. I can't I
can't be heaven mind of its own. King Phillips did
come off in my vagina. They're like, I'm traveling to
Japan for a steel dildo. Well, finally break that demon's teeth. Well,
most of the more down to earth theories simply point
(47:48):
to her childhood. Right, It's clear why she wouldn't want
to get married and give up her power to a
man when you know her dad was King Henry the Yight,
and there's all these bettings, and you know she lost
grandmother and two stepmothers to childbirth as well, so she
might have also just seen sex as too risky. Right,
So she's like even if I didn't want to get
(48:09):
married and just took a bunch of lovers, I don't
want to get pregnant. I'm very scared to get pregnant.
I could see that. There's also, again this sort of
cult of personality that she built around this virgin queen
title right from the very beginning of her reign, all
the way until she died in sixteen oh three. So
she might have just been working to maintain that image
because it was working for her. She also knew that
(48:30):
an air could be used against her. That happened with
her as the center of plots quite a few times. Right,
she was young, right, Look, she even said the quote
is something about, like I know how a second person
as I have been can be used against somebody. Yeah,
I mean to me. I think that she just had
a negative relationship with sex. She had a very confusing
(48:52):
emotional relationship with Robert Dudley, and kind of I wonder if,
like the way he kind of didn't want to marry,
he didn't want to marry for a while until he
finally went with Lettuce. If you know, Queen Elizabeth just
had a stronger version of that of like, I don't
want to get involved because I might get to marry
(49:15):
Robert one day. You know. I also wonder if she's
seen so many women kind of I don't know. I
wonder if she's like, if I have sex, I might
really like it, and that means I'll make bad decisions,
oh you know, from men around me, and they'll end
up turning on me. Because there's so many women who
did you know they've were into King Henry and they
did you know, or any other men in the court.
(49:36):
Sure it happened. There were tons of relationships happening all
around her. Mary Queen of Scott's is a really great
example because she married Henry and then didn't like him
and there was this whole scandal about it. She ends
up getting executed ultimately, and that was because she was
trying to rebel. But it still didn't help, Like the
whole marriage thing did not help. So I think she
just sees a lot of examples of this inn't working out.
(49:56):
And I like being the Queen of England. So that's
my goal is just hey, the Queen of England. Yeah,
she was the whole thing. She was like country before
all right, I want to see a beam of Queen
Elizabeth's portrait if this country before kunt see, Yeah, if
you say the C word with a British accent, it's
(50:17):
okay because it's not a big deal over there. They
love it over there. In the US. This episode is
now like NC seventeen, the worst thing we could say. Well,
I think speculation Station, I do believe that she may
remained a virgin. I think she had a ton of
good reasons to not have sex or get married, and
she definitely did not, And she just loved flirting and
being thought of. It is very beautiful and and messing
(50:39):
with these men all the time, but never really wanted
to pull the trigger. That's my feeling. Okay, I don't
know about you. Uh, since we're in Speculation Station, I
gotta go with the demon. Oh oh yeah, the demon
in her vagina. Yeah. I like that she had vagina dentata.
She had to go get a steel dildo from Japan.
But yeah, that's the problem. Yeah, nobody Goldo from van Yeah,
(51:00):
She's like, honestly, I'd rather have the demon. Maybe that
demon was her best friend after Robert Dudley. You know,
you gave her some really good advice and helped her
bring England into a brighter era. I don't know, yes, yes, okay, Well,
Robert Dudley and Queen Elizabeth are dead now in our
story and also in real life, there's still some loose
(51:25):
ends to tie up. Oh sure, because first of all,
I want to tell you about Latisnoles Dudley, the Countess
of Leicester. Now, after Robert Dudley died, she was left
well provided for because again, good guy, right, But less
than a year later she married his servant and friend,
Sir Christopher Blunt. Now, some people, I'm sorry, are you
(51:46):
telling me that there was a Lettuce Blunt out there somewhere?
Let us blood, sign me up. Love it. Now. People
do not think much of her doing this, but Latis said,
you know, I'm just a defenseless widow. I gotta have
some man around. You know. That's how she felt, Okay whatever.
By all accounts, they had a pretty happy marriage. But
(52:06):
I don't think they were having anything going on before
Robert died or anything like that. I think she really
loved Robert a lot. Yeah, but even though Robert is
dead now, Queen Elizabeth still refused to speak to her
or like forgive her or let her come back, like
she was just like you're iced out still for life. However,
Latisa's son from her first marriage, Robert Devereaux, the second
Earl of Essex, was Elizabeth's new favorite courtier. Even though
(52:30):
they were thirty years apart in age, they flirted pretty shamelessly,
and of course people immediately had all the speculation that
they were fucking too oh wow, which Elizabeth probably loved.
Oh she should be like, oh, boy, your son and
I are getting along great fastically. Oh there's rumors that
I'm sleeping with your son. How funny. Wow, she really
(52:51):
went for this lady. Yeah, I know. But whatever love
Elizabeth had for young Robert Devereaux, it didn't save him
when he fell out of favor for his own secret
marriage to Sir Francis Walsingham's daughter, or when he abandoned
his military post without permission. He was disgraced, and then
he got all sulky and decided to rebel against Elizabeth
(53:14):
in sixteen oh one, so she had him imprisoned and
Latise stayed nearby, which might have been dumb, because Elizabeth,
of course got really angry when she heard reports that
Latise and young Robert were waving to each other from
their windows, she wouldn't even let this lady wave at
her sponn Yeah. So finally both Robert Devereaux and Sir
(53:39):
Christopher Blunt were executed. So poor Latise lost both her
son and her third husband or has she called him
quote my best friend on the same day. That is
so petty. Clearly got a really strong personality and a
very strong will. Yeah, but I feel sorry for her.
(54:00):
That's worry. She just gets short straw. So poor Latise,
you know, she's left with no one now. But she
did outlive every other character in this story. And she
died at the ripe old age of ninety one. And
then she was buried next to Robert Dudley with the
epitaph that she commissioned, reading quote the best and dearest
(54:20):
of husbands. Oh oh, that's really nice, and who knew
ninety one? I thought let us will did a lot
faster than that. She stayed crispy? Did you stay crispy? Baby?
She gave me that healthy crunch every sandwich needs. I
wish she'd married the Earl of sandwich. Let us sandwich amazing?
(54:40):
All right? Now, finally, remember Robert Dudley's baby Mama Douglas
sheffields you have not talked about her in a while, Yeah, Douglass,
but just as a quick refresher. She had married Sir
Stafford back in fifteen seventy nine, and she and Robert
Dudley had been totally cool co parenting their kid, Sir
Robert dud Right. It was a no m a situation
(55:01):
until after the Queen died and Sir Robert Dudley decided
to sue to get his father's now defunct Earls of
Leicester and Warwick titles, because since Sir Robert Dudley was illegitimate,
he could not inherit them or the property that they
came with, So he told the courts that Robert Dudley
and Douglas Sheffield were secretly married in fifteen seventy three,
(55:24):
which makes his marriage to Latise and her subsequent inheritance
of all his property upon his death null and the void.
Oh boy, so Douglas got into this. She sent a
letter to the court detailing her supposed marriage to Robert Dudley,
but she said the ten plus witnesses to it were
all dead and just worked around a test. Sorry, they
(55:46):
all died. She also, you know, she just couldn't remember
the name of the efficient or the exact date of
the ceremony. She just said, it was, you know, in
winter time, the best day of my life, the most
important day of my life, when I married my love,
Sir Robert Lord, Robert Dudley, right on a some day
(56:06):
by some guy. I don't say. It was a Tuesday,
and I remember it was cold. It was the tenth,
maybe the eleventh, who knows, October or November something like that.
She tried to explain her own big miss marriage in
fifteen seventy nine, because of course she was married somebody
else too, by saying that Robert was going to poison her,
(56:28):
and she got married for her personal safety. So poor
Robert Dudley here, he's dead and he's still getting accused
of murder for real. Oh my god. She also said
that Robert offered her money and she initially refused, but
then he got mad and said he could cut her
off without a penny, so she decided, fine, I'll take
the money. Okay, But I mean, the court did not
(56:51):
believe this story, and I mean, do any of us
believe the story? Robert Dudley is not that kind of guy.
I don't think he's no. And also a lot of
this evidence I stretched to even call it evidence, it's
not evidence. A crazy story. It seems to me like
she's like I can say anything I want about Robert
Dudley and people will believe me. I'm gonna say he
tried to poison me. They'll be like, sure he did,
(57:12):
because he tried to poison all these other people. Like
why wouldn't they have you know what I mean something
on that rumor mill about Yes, it really feels like
that just a shameless cash grab. True. Well, of course
Latis won this case, and she walked out of the courtroom,
probably bent down over Sir Robert's ear, and said, I
wish you well the group of her time, of her time, Latis,
(57:38):
let us scoop, let us scoop. Well, let us get
out of this episode. Where right? So yeah, that's the story.
So that's the two part story of Queen Elizabeth and
her one true love Robert Dudley. Yeah, and I will say,
if Elizabeth really did love attention and fucking with people,
which it seems she did, she really won at life.
(57:58):
Because not many people can say that. There are a
bunch of scholars still trying to figure out if they
got laid four hundred plus years after they died. That's true.
We should all hope for such a few Yeah, in
twenty five hundred, I hope they're still, Like, you know,
I wonder what Diana's sex life is like. Well, I'll
have to be more specific in my journals, all right, Yeah,
(58:21):
that would help. Yeah, the scholars of tomorrow, the scholars
of tomorrow helping them today. Well, if they dig out
this episode, they'll have a lot more information about Queen
Elizabeth the First, that's for sure. Well, I hope you
enjoyed this episode. I'm looking into it. It was so interesting.
I don't know if I'm just feeling sorry for Robert
(58:41):
Dudley because he's a possible ancestor of mine, but I'm
oway here thinking he has not been treated right. He
was a super cool guy. I'm glad to know that
he was one of your ancestors, because I mean, again,
I think that a lot of the bad things people
said about him, we're we're slander. Yeah, and he's sure
he had his flaws like any man. Sure, but he
(59:04):
was supposed to be an excellent husband right to the
people who married him. A great stepfather, dad of an
illegitimate A good friend to people who are friends with him.
He was always very loyal, throwing parties right, being fun,
and probably didn't poison any of his lovers. Probably not.
And if he didn't, he's great. And if he did,
you know, we'll reevaluate him. Think about that later. I
(59:26):
also was thinking, I wonder if he didn't get a
lot of respect because he's like, you know, the master
of the horse, and then he did like parties, and
then he was like basically like a butler. Oh. Yes,
so they were just like, oh, Robert, you know, he
freaking deals with the queen right and makes her happy,
and he like does the parties. But we are the politicians. Yeah,
we are doing the real work of running the cut,
(59:47):
you know what I mean, right, even though like managing
the queen must have been actually incredibly important, probably more
difficult than managing you know, international relations. Oh my god.
And they would even write to him sometimes when he
wasn't at court and be like, hey, I hope your
comeback soon. Between real four we're all we're all suffering.
Please come back, stactor. I love the court wants your presence.
(01:00:12):
So anyway, Robert Dudley Party. That's all I know, right,
And thanks again to Daniel Fields for selling us the
story about Elizabeth and francois that we were able to
include it here, and my parents for suggesting this episode
so they would finally have a reason to listen to. Yeah.
Do you think your dad made it through to the
end of episode two? No? No, Hey dad, if you're
still there, thanks for listening, Thanks for listening. We exonerated him,
(01:00:37):
did my duty by the family, right, So yeah, let
us know what you thought. We hope you enjoyed this
story as much as we did, and we always love
hearing from you, so please reach out. Our email address
is Raddick Romance at gmail dot com. That's right. You
can find us on Instagram. I'm at Oh Great, it's Eli.
I'm at Sanamite Boon and the show is at Riddick
Romance and you are awesome. We really appreciate you for
(01:00:58):
listening and we can't wait to bring you another episode soon.
We'll catch it in so long, friends, it's time to go.
Thanks for listening to our show. Tell your friends neighbor's
uncle's in dance to listen to a show. Ridiculous role
Dance
Hey everybody, Hey, plus romance. I'm Diana, I'm Eli. How
are you today? How am I today? Well, it's a
rainy day here in Atlanta, UM, which is whatever. I mean.
You know, we've been have a nice weather. Weather small talk,
you know what, I like it? You know what I'm
conditioned to think. Weather small talk is bad because we
(00:22):
always kind of laugh about it. But it's a universal
experience that we can all relate to well, and if
you think about it, yeah I will. In history, it
was like the number one most important thing to know. True.
It's like if you think about like farmers in the
sixteen hundreds, the weather was actually incredibly important topic. And
so you come in and be like, m how long
(00:44):
you think this snow is gonna last? Don't like to
look at that sky. I hope this sun keeps coming up.
We could use some rain. I mean, you know what
I mean. We need the r now. It seems silly
because we have climate control, climate control. The climate has
never been more out of the climate. I just mean,
I know, but but I hope we're moving away from it.
You know what else we should move away from? Yeah,
this conversation, that's right, So we can move towards our
(01:07):
episode today. Yeah, we told y'all in part one all
about Robert Dudley, Lord Robert Dudley and Queen Elizabeth the
first long history together and the murder mystery surrounding Robert's
wife Amy robs Heart, which of course we decided was
obviously the fault of the ghost of Bloody Mary the
first Amy clearly went into the bathroom in the dark. Yeah,
(01:29):
like a fool, Yes has met the same fate. Was
very happy. We got a review, a new review where
someone was telling me that they also are very scared
of Bloody marries Yill even years years later. That mays
me feel a little bit better about my silly paranoia. Well, anyway,
the aftermath of all that Amy Rob's Heart stuff is
(01:51):
just as interesting. There's really clearly never a dull day
in Queen Elizabeth's court. Robert had several interesting lady love
and legal troubles in his future, Elizabeth had some fun
suitors herself. It's basically tutor tender around there. Wow. Um. Plus,
there's so many wild theories about the Virgin Queens to
(02:11):
cover as well, So let's find out how it all
played out with our star Cross lovers yeah, let's go. Hey,
their friends come listen. Well, Elia and Diana got some
stories to tell. There's no matchmaking a romantic tips. It's
just about ridiculous relationships. A lover might be any type
of person at all, and abstract cons at our concrete wall.
(02:34):
But if there's a story with the Second Clans ridiculous
role mass a production of iHeartRadio. Okay, So, as we
said at the end of part one, with the death
of Amy robs Hard, Lord Robert and Queen Elizabeth were
free to marry. Finally, my wife is dead. Now I'm happy, happy,
(02:54):
you know. Um. But they could not get married without
destabilizing Elizabeth rained too much and possibly fomenting a rebellion
against her because of all the scandal about whether or
not they had murdered this lady and stuff. Right, it
basically would have looked like they absolutely did if they
went and got married immediately after admitting to it. Yeah,
(03:14):
but even so, they simply could not stop flirting and
causing gossip because they just were so into each other. Right,
And in fifteen sixty one, Elizabeth was bedridden with a
swelling sickness as they called it, made her body swell
so conspiracy theories immediately sprang up, saying that she's not sick,
(03:34):
she's actually pregnant with Robert's child. Oh my goodness. And
we're going to get more into that later. So don't
forget that. Yeah, I mean like swelling sickness. Come on,
I mean I get that every time we go out
from Mexican food. I mean it could have been dropsy
or something, sure, or maybe she ate too much. People
gets Wait, did people get dropsy? I've only ever dealt
(03:55):
with it in the fish tank. People do, and then
you see the if you see pictures, it's insane how
big they swell up. Their feet look insane or their
hands or whatever. It looks really crazy, really sad when
it happens to fish. I didn't know what happened to people.
I'm pretty Yeah. Well the more you know, the more
you know, the less you want to know, well, the
less so true. So yeah, at any rate, all of
(04:18):
this scandal around them just refused to die. It does
not matter how many years went by, you know what
I mean. People were just always willing to believe that
the two of them were up to something. Yeah. So
as a result, matchmaking started anew for both Elizabeth and
Lord Roberts. Okay, For years, the Royal Council kept encouraging
Robert to give up on marrying Elizabeth by suggesting various
(04:40):
foreign princesses as his bride as like a consolation prize
for the Queen. I guess, so, like just marry the
Swedish Light or whatever. Yeah. In fact, Elizabeth herself proposed
that Robert Mary Mary, Queen of Scotts. She went to Mary,
Queen of Scott's, and was like, hey, if you marry Roberts,
I'll make you my air. And this would of course
(05:02):
unify Scotland and England, and it would neutralize one of
Elizabeth's greatest rivals. Sure, so she said absolutely, and she
said she could do this on just one condition. Mary
would have to come live in Elizabeth's court so that
she could keep Robert, her favorite courts Air, by her side,
as she always liked to have. I love it. She's like,
(05:23):
marry this guy and then come live with me so
I can keep flirting with your husband. It's like when
I see an adorable dog that needs an adoption, and
I try to go get my best friend to adopt
the dogs that I can still hang out with the dog. Yeah,
but I don't have to take care of total same energy.
Perfect Mary, Queen of Scott's, please come adopt sweet little Robert.
Look at his little tail wagging. He's so cute and
(05:45):
I just want to scratch his head, but I don't
want to have to feed him. So Elizabeth went ahead
and made Robert the Earl of Leicester and gave him
a bunch of land in fifteen sixty three so that
he would be a more acceptable husband to Mary. And
Mary actually seemed like she might kind of go for it.
But there was one little hiccup in this plan, and
that's that Robert was like, no, and no, no, I'm
(06:08):
not marrying Mary, Queen of Scott's. He unequivocally refused to
marry this woman. He was dead set against it, at
least partly because he was still holding on to hope
that he might one day get to marry Queen Elizabeth.
So instead of going along with her plan, he went
and helped a guy named Henry Stewart, Lord Darnley, win Mary,
(06:29):
Queen of Scott's hand, which eventually Lord Darnley did, which
I mean would be It sounds like a classic rom
com set up yes, like, oh, I, oh, you're going
to have to marry this woman. Oh yeah, not if
she falls in love with my friend who just came
to town first. That's right, except this turned out to
be a really ill fated man. Well yeah, yeah, a
(06:50):
rom com with a really dark sequel. Yeah. But you know,
Robert was not just like pining away in his celibate
bedroom or anything like that waiting for the queen. Okay,
hey's a real handsome women loved him, sure, So he's
flirting with several ladies in the court, including Elizabeth's cousin,
Latise Knowles, who was the Countess of Essex, and she
(07:11):
was Her name is spelled l E t Tice, so
it's Lettuce, let us, let us and I could not
stop reading it as let us the whole time we're
going through this. So but anyway, it's Latise apparently knows
she was the Countess of Essex, and she was Elizabeth's
most beautiful lady in waiting. But in fifteen sixty eight,
(07:33):
Robert Dudley started having an affair with a different lady
in waiting. Her name was Douglas Sheffield and she was
newly widowed. Okay, Douglas Douglas Douglass, Douglass the last Douglass.
So anyway, Robert and Douglas were together for several years.
Douglas even gave birth to Robert's illegitimate son, who was
(07:53):
also named Robert, in fifteen seventy four. They only had
five names to choose from, serious she had to like
spin the wheel something. Now, Douglas was getting a lot
of marriage proposals, but she was waiting for one from
Robert Sure, like, all these dudes want to marry me,
but I only want one man. I only had a
son with one of them. But this proposal never came,
(08:16):
and Robert explained to her in a letter he wrote
her where he was. Basically, he was just encouraging her
to marry someone else. And he told her, you know,
I know it's really strange of me to threaten my
own family name and household by not getting married and
having legitimate children and heirs, you know, for my property
and everything. But he said he could not do it
because quote, if I should marry, I am sure never
(08:38):
to have the Queen's favor. So he just knew that
the jealousy of Elizabeth was going to be real crazy
for him, right, because Elizabeth was not she would not
marry him, but she was kind of not happy about
him flirting with anybody else. A bit of a trap.
But Robert was also getting a little tired of waiting
for Elizabeth to make up her mind about whether or
(08:59):
not she'd take him or not. As he said, he
had no opportunity to build up his own family while
he was waiting in the wings for the queens. So
in fifteen seventy five, Robert decided to go for it.
He threw a huge nineteen day long festival at his castle, Kennilworth,
which he was building up as a quote wonder house
(09:20):
for her majesty and I love a historical party, so
Christian had include all these details. Yeah, this party had
a Lady of the Lake like some I guess, some
woman dressed up holding a sword in the water swimming around.
They had a swimming paper mache dolphin that had a
little orchestra and its belly plan. They had fireworks that
(09:41):
were said to be heard twenty miles away. Of course,
they were holding hunts. We're all going to get together,
go out and find some foxes. And then they had
entertainment that was popular at the time, like bear baiting. Good.
It always makes for a fun party. Oh so fun.
I love to make a bear really mad. Yeah, that's
what I like. And then, of course the scenery was spectacular.
(10:04):
Brought all the best decorators out. He had a artificial
lake and castle. He also had a Renaissance garden, and
English Heritage dot Com says that when Queen Elizabeth complained
that she could not see this garden from her lodgings
in the estate, Robert's gardeners worked all night to create
a little pop up version of it right under her window. Wow,
(10:27):
pulled out all the stops. Now, this was the longest
Queen Elizabeth had ever stayed at one of her courtier's houses.
And the final entertainment was to be this masquerade where
actors would have been commissioned to urge Elizabeth to marry
their generous host, Lord Robert Dudley, but the mask was
(10:48):
rained out. And even though one of these actors was like,
I got a job, I'm gonna do it, and he
ran after Elizabeth in the rain, pleading for her to
wait and stay and talk to Robert, but she refused
to do it, and she wrote off parties over I'm
out of here. I've been here nineteen days. I don't
know if you heard, but I'm a queen and I
got work to do. It's true. So this had been
(11:10):
Robert's most ostentatious proposal and it came to nothing. Now,
some historians believe that as much as this party was
a proposal to Elizabeth, it was also kind of a
request to let Robert marry somebody else. All right, He's
kind of like, this is my final thing, it's your
final answer, and yeah, we're good, right, like we know
it's all good. Yeah, And that might be because Robert
(11:30):
had a certain lady in mind to be the next
Missus Dudley, because ten years before, as we mentioned, he
had flirted with Latise knows let us. You know, I've
flirted with let us a few times myself too, but
I end up going for French fries. And Latisse was
married to the Earl of Essex at the time. And now,
(11:53):
of course, since it's Robert Dudley, he could not do
anything without the rumor mill kicking into gear, and they
started saying that Latise had two children with Robert, but
had aborted one of them to prevent her husband finding
out about the affair, just one, yeah, the other one.
They're like, she's just lying to him. You've had one
(12:18):
child that I don't know how you had him about
a second one and I'm going to start to get suspicious.
Must now again, zero evidence for any of this. Okay,
he just flirted with her and everybody ran with it.
It's almost like they had nothing to do back then.
But gossip true, very true. Then. When Latis's husband, the
Earl of Essex, died in fifteen seventy six, the rumor
(12:41):
mill said that Robert deadly had poisoned him so he
could marry Latise. Never mind that the Earl of Essex
was in Ireland at the time trying to colonize it
and definitely died of dysenterry during an epidemic. Oh yeah,
so there's like no way that Robert had anything to
do with his right. But one thing that the gossips
did get right was that Robert and Latise were in love.
(13:05):
History extra dot com says that Robert had flirted with
Latise back in fifteen sixty five, deliberately to fan the
Queen's jealousy and get her to finally marry him. So
you know, don't you hate it seeing me hang out
with this girl while you got You can lock it
down if you want. She's so beautiful and she's into me.
But when the widowed Latis visited Kenilworth in fifteen seventy seven,
(13:29):
her and Robert's feelings for each other grew so intense that,
even knowing how much the Queen would dislike it, they
went ahead and started planning their wedding, and that meant
that Robert would have to formally end things with his
baby mama Douglas Sheffield. So you know, I've been telling
you and I'm not going to marry you, but we
actually really I'm trying to get serious with somebody else.
(13:50):
Now I'm gonna marry someone else. Right, It is a
little I do imagine that Douglas had a bit of
a moment of huh, because he's like, I can't marry
you or else the Queen will get marrit me. But
I am going to marry this other lady even if
the Queen gets mad at me. So I feel like
there's no way to read that other than you didn't
want to marry me specifically. Yeah, Well, they did come
(14:12):
to an amicable agreement about the young little Robert Sheffield
Junior his custody. He stayed in Robert Dudley's houses. He
was extremely well educated, and he had permission to go
see his mother whenever she wanted to see him. And
Douglas herself remarried in fifteen seventy nine to Sir Edward Stafford.
So everything turned out all right for Lady Douglas, that's right. Yeah,
(14:35):
So it was all clear for Robert and Latisse's wedding,
which took place in September fifteen seventy eight. Some accounts
say that Latise was pregnant with Robert's child at the time,
but kind of the only proof for this is that
she wore a loose fitting gown to get married in. Otherwise,
there's no historical evidence for a child at all. It's
(14:55):
historical evidence to me that she wanted to be comfortable,
That's what I said. Also, there wedding date coincided with
the end of the traditional two year morning period for widows,
and they had planned it for over a year. So
this is like no shotgun affair when he knocked her
up and he had to get married or something. But
only the bride's parents and the groom's brother Ambrose were
present at the ceremony, and everybody was sworn to secrecy
(15:19):
because they were all just so afraid of what the
Queen would do when she found out that her boy
toy was married, which unfortunately did not take very long.
Of course, a French ambassador reported on their marriage only
two months after it, and then Elizabeth was told a
few months after that, and her reaction was immediate. She
was like incandescent with rage. Right, she even ordered Robert
(15:42):
thrown into the Tower of London. She's not going to
imprison him, but the new Earl of Essex, who is
Latisse's son and Robert's stepson, Robert Devereaux another Robert, Sorry, guys,
he intervened and he convinced Elizabeth that that was a
bad move. Probably's like, honey, you can't just be thrown
people into jail. Were getting married. That's kind of crazy. Yeah,
(16:03):
not to mention, I think it says something publicly about
y'all's relationship. If you're this reactive, that's right what I see.
You know, I could see her upset, you know, more
than just being in love with him, but like he
also like is her best friend since they were kids,
and he didn't tell her he got married. I mean,
you know that's probably a factor as well. I'm just
(16:23):
saying it's part of it. It's not like that's why
she got married instead of her love for him. But
I just think that that didn't help. No, I agree.
I would just say she needs to look inward because
it's her he's not. He probably did want to tell
Harry what I mean, right, but she's too crazy. Yeah.
So Robert did not get thrown in prison, but he
(16:44):
did have to leave court in disgrace. Sam Meanwhile, Latise
was called to court to bear the brunt of Elizabeth's wreath.
Elizabeth raged at her, calling her a she wolf and
a flouting wench she boxtra years before finally banishing her
from court for life. Jez, Yeah, just cruel. And Latisse
(17:08):
had to retire to the Dudley's country house, and she
stayed there for years, and she still called herself the
Countess of Essex, and she lived as discreetly as she could.
But in fifteen eighty one she gave birth to Robert's son,
another Robert, called Lord Denby, and they moved permanently to
the Dudley's house in London and that made the Queen
(17:30):
mad all over again. I guess it was like, you're
flaunter in my face now, Yeah, you know, I got
to look at her sometimes now. Latis's social life was
severely curtailed because everyone knew the Queen hated her guts,
so you didn't want to get seen hanging out with
the Queen's number one enemy. Every time she did anything,
Elizabeth would get angry. One time, Queen Elizabeth became furious
(17:51):
because she heard Latise was planning to join Robert in
the Netherlands with a procession of people and carriages even
bigger than the Queen's. And it turns out none of
that was true. Latise wasn't planning to go to the
Netherlands at all. But this poor girl really could not
lift a finger without pissing off the Queen, and this
lasted for the rest of Elizabeth's life. Sucks. Not the
(18:13):
kind of person you want to be, constantly looking at
everything you do and easily mad about it. Not really.
It's like I think I'll just make a sandwich today,
and then a royal proclamation just announced from the Queen.
All women who make sandwiches suck. Stupid and ugly. Yeah,
I don't know, but she sacrificed a lot to be
with Robert. You know, I don't know that she expected this,
(18:36):
but they definitely expected to not be her favorite. I mean,
even the thing with the Netherlands, Like, even stuff that
she doesn't do, she's encouraging the wrath about right, which
I'm sure there was some like you know, shenanigans where
some courtiers like, I want her to be mad at Robert,
so let me tell her about let us doing something
or Latise doing something. Yeah. It's like it's like when
(18:57):
someone has a dream about you and they're mad at you,
but I didn't do it. You're like, well, I don't care.
I need a minute before I'm okay with you. But
even though Queen Liz was equally pissed off at Robert
for getting married, she only showed him a cold shoulder
for a few months before welcoming him back to the
fold and all his responsibilities at court. Sure's best, that's
(19:18):
bestie exactly. She's like, I'm just gonna put all my
anger on the wife. But this was actually pretty important
because Elizabeth was in serious negotiations to finally marry somebody
in fifteen seventy five, and that was Francois, the Duke
of Angou, and we will tell you all about that
right after these royal proclamations. Here you hear you, welcome
(19:46):
back to the show. That guy's strong, and that guy's
done with this job as the royal crier. He's like, okay,
I'm ready to retire. Yeah, So Queen Elizabeth and Francis
the Duke of Anjou. We're actually a whole episode suggestion
from a listener named Daniel Fields through emails, So thank you, Dan,
(20:06):
will be since we're doing all this Queen Elizabeth stuff,
we decided to throw it into this episode. But I'm
glad that you told us about him. Now we already
know we were talking in part one and this episode
that Elizabeth, you know, is being courted from near and far.
She's a queen, okay, people want to marry her. When
she ascended the throne, she had publicly declared that she
would never marry and that she would remain a virgin
(20:28):
for her whole life. But no one really believed her.
You know. They're like, you're a young woman, your Queen
of England. We're gonna get married and have some babies,
But as she got older, the people of England revered
her more and more for her virginity, which to me
makes it a lot harder for her to choose to
get married. I feel like, if you have this whole
cult of personality about something about you, it's really hard
to like not have that thing anymore. But honestly, really
(20:51):
the main thing was that Elizabeth knew if she got married,
her husband was in charge. Queen or no queen. You know,
he would own all her money, all her stuff, all
her children, and all her body. And she knew what
that meant. He could cut her damn head off if
he wanted to. She's like, yeah, daddy did it several times. Okay,
She's like fully traumatized growing up in King Henry's house. Okay, yeah,
(21:13):
if Henry the Eight's your dad, you just you have
a different outlook on marriage than the rest of us,
all of it. You're like, I don't know, but this guy,
Francois was a serious contender, largely because his name was Francois.
That's the most romantic man ugandad. Elizabeth was forty six
years old at this point, and she knew her time
(21:35):
to get married was running out Francois might be her
last suitor. Some of her favorite courtiers, including Robert Dudley
and Sir Francis Walsingham, opposed the marriage to Francois because
Francois was French, I believe it or not. And Elizabeth,
of course wasn't very likely to have any children at
this point, so if she died while married to him,
(21:57):
which was definitely possible because Sis was nearly half her
age at twenty four, England would fall under French control.
Just whoops, all of somewhere in different country now too. Yeah,
and Francois also was Catholic, and if you remember part one,
getting Elizabeth on the throne to begin with, was this
(22:19):
whole Catholic Protestant mess. Now Walsingham was able to point
out to Elizabeth that the French Catholics, under the orders
of Francois's own mother, Catherine de Medici, had just murdered
a bunch of Protestant hugueen nuts in the Saint Bartholomew's
Day massacre after the French king's Catholic sister married a
(22:42):
Protestant in fifteen seventy two. So he's like, that's what
happened if the French king's sister married a Protestant. If
Francis here marries a Protestant, I eat you, Queen Elizabeth,
They're gonna pop off. They're gonna act real crazy and
do something nuts. Yeah, you know, he might be worried
too about English Protestants like Catholics. He's like, either way,
(23:04):
it's a bad situation. Nobody's happy when the Catholics and
the Protestants get together in sixteenth century England. But Elizabeth
seems to have been truly fond of Francois. He had
been scarred by smallpox as a young child. He was
also short, with kind of a curved spine, so you know,
he was described to her as being quote amazingly ugly. Oh,
(23:28):
which is so rude. Heads up, girl, you're about to
meet a guy, and I don't want you to flinch,
so freak out. But he's fucking crazy looking. But she
said that he appeared handsome to her. But mainly I
think the attraction seems to be that he was just
very witty and intelligent, and he was really capable of
keeping up with her in conversation. He didn't have a
lot of pretension about him right, So they really got along,
(23:51):
you know, on a personality level. He gave her a
frog shaped earring that she wore all the time, and
she called him affectionate nicknames, either Monsieur or her frog.
Oh no, one is sure if the frog one is
because of the earring or because frog was a derogatory
term for French people at the time. Okay, And like,
(24:14):
I guess she was like trying to be funny because
because now I'm like, what him? Why is I don't
know where that came from anyway, And it must be
said that Elizabeth did like a little play acting. She
loved to get melodramatic, and she was very contradictory. She
loved to fuck with people also, so sometimes she would
(24:35):
like one day, you know, they'd be like, don't marry Francois,
and she'd be like, oh, it is my one true love,
you know, and like run off. And then another day
they'd be like, fine, you can marry him. She'd be like, oh,
I would never you know. She was just always, oh,
my god, the world. And of course we already know
(24:57):
that she was, you know, kind of messing with all
her pass suitors as well the other foreign princes she
was kind of playing around, pretending to be interested in them,
but she sort of used it as like foreign policy stuff.
And this is pretty similar because over the six years
that she and Francois recording, Elizabeth was able to create
a strong alliance with France and make friends with the
Queen Mother, Catherine de Medici. And then when she decided
(25:20):
not to marry Francois, it was partly due to how
much the English people would really hate having a French
Catholic king, but it was also because the French were
about to get into it with the Dutch, and by
adroitly kind of extricating herself from an engagement, Elizabeth managed
to avoid England getting involved with this Dutch French problem
(25:41):
those war's back then, it was just drive me so crazy.
Oh sorry, honey, I'm off to fight in a war
against the Dutch. Oh no, why are we at war
with the Dutch? I don't know. Some lady married a guy,
and now where all I have to go die in battle?
Now we all have spears through our eyes. So anyway,
(26:02):
she might have just been kind of using this engagement
for foreign policy reason. Yeah, but she did have enough
affection for Francois to write him a poem when their
courtship officially ended in fifteen eighty one. So let's go
down to poetry corner and hear Queen Elizabeth the first
poem on Monsieur's departure. I grieve, and dare not show
(26:26):
my discontent. I love, and yet am forced to seem
to hate. I do, yet dare not say I ever meant.
I seem stark mute, but inwardly do prate. I am
and not I freeze, and yet am burned. Since from
myself another self I turned. My care is like my
shadow in the sun, follows me, flying flies when I pursue,
(26:50):
it stands and lies by me. Doth what I have done?
His too familiar care doth make me ru it? No
means I mind to rid him from my breast, till
by the end of things it be suppressed. Some gentler
passions slide into my mind, for I am soft and
made of melting snow. Or be more cruel love, and
(27:13):
so be kind, let me float or sink, be high
or low, or let me live with some more sweet content,
or die, And so forget what love er meant. No,
she's really stuck in the middle here. Yeah, I like
this poem. Yeah, it kind of shows her sort of
contradictory nature, Like she clearly feels an internal thing. It's
(27:36):
not just external forces. Why she has internal contradictions, right,
also external contradictions. So it's kind of a cool like
tug of war poems. Yeah, exactly why am I? Why
am I so stuck feeling you know this way and
that way? Why can't I just either get what I
want or not have it? Yeah? I also love I
seem stark mute, but inwardly do prate. She's like, I'm
(27:59):
not saying a word, but inside right, I know. Right.
So Elizabeth stayed single and Robert was married to Latise,
who Elizabeth still paid it, and even when Robert and
Latise's three year old son died suddenly in fifteen eighty four,
Elizabeth could not bring herself to forgive Latise, right, but
(28:22):
she was still very close with Robert himself, and in fact,
he became Lord Stewart in fifteen eighty seven, which meant
he was basically in charge of the palace, like all
the food, all the sanitization, just everything, like you know,
non judicial, right, yeah, not legislative. He is in charge
of the maintaining the whole palace. Yeah. Fun fact, this
(28:46):
sanitization issue actually in the palace was so bad that
Robert Dudley sat down and had a conversation about it
with Elizabeth's godson, John Harrington, who was then inspired to
invent the first flush toilet. I had no idea dated
back that far. Um. Is that why we call him
(29:06):
John's Some people say that, but there's no evidence for that,
But I think it is. John apparently is like Americans,
so they're like, they're Americans. Didn't know anything about John here.
Maybe Americans learned that. We're like, O, why aren't we
naming it after that guy? He did a great job.
What's funny too, is that he invented the flush toilet,
but what he didn't have was the U bend and
the pipes. Oh yes, we have now, so you couldn't
(29:28):
avoid the odor. So that was what. But it's so
interesting that the dates back that far, they had no idea.
I guess a flush in a stink is better than
no flush. No flush. That was that was one of
Asop's fables. I think right, a flush in a stink
is better than no flush. That's the moral of the
story today, okay, but the real headline here is about
(29:51):
a whole other guy, entirely someone who was shipwrecked and
rescued by the Spanish. They detained him because they thought
he was an English bye, so they took him to Madrid,
where he claimed that he was none other than Arthur Dudley,
the secret love child of Robert Dudley and Queen Elizabeth
(30:12):
the First What he told King Philip's secretary who interrogated
him that Elizabeth's governess kat Ashley, had given him as
a baby to her servant, who raised him sixty miles
outside of London as a gentleman. But on the servant's deathbed,
he confessed to Arthur about his royal origins. My boy,
(30:34):
your whole life. I never told you you're the heir
to the throne of England. Gotta go have fun with that. Arthur,
of course, was terrified for his life if that secret
came out. A real um, a real uh? Who is
the kid in Game of Thrones? Barrathian? Yeah, one of them?
(30:57):
But wait us not friend Lee Richard Boris, I don't know,
Craig Philip, I'm gonna say every name. Just let me
know when I hit it. I don't know, Samuel, Jennifer
yep is Jennifer all right, Jennifer Barrafi, thank you. So
Arthur is scared for his life obviously this if the
(31:19):
secret comes out, they would definitely like lock him up
or something worse. So he traveled to Spain, but then
there he got shipwreck, captured, etc. Etc. Here we are,
which this is a very simplified version of his story.
His story was incredibly convoluted. He talked about several people
that he could name that were in the court that
were Sir Robert Dudley, that were Lord Robert Dudley's like
(31:43):
members of his household or his servants or whatever. And
his birthday, he did say, was fifteen sixty one, which
would have coincided when Elizabeth had her swelling sickness. Oh
my good. So there was something, you know, there was
some details that seemed very plausible, and then some other
things were like huh, you know, it's a little convoluted.
So it's a real, very convoluted story he gave them.
(32:04):
I'm kind of seeing the opening of thor Ragnarok sort of,
but like it's this guy, it's this Arthur Dudley character.
In the chair being interrogated by the Spanish. Right now,
he turns with the camera and he's like, I bet
you're wondering how I got here. Let me take you back. Well,
Arthur's story, despite some of these exciting details or whatever,
(32:25):
did not really impress King Philip's secretary or anyone else
in Spain. The King's secretary who examined him, he told Philip,
you know, I think Arthur's a spy, or if he's
not a spy, the Queen and her quarter are using
him in some type of way to benefit them, Like
they're just super paranoid about what Elizabeth's up to. So
he's like, let's just keep this guy under lock and
key and prevent him from escaping, just in case he's
(32:46):
a spy. Sure, And after that, Arthur was never heard
from again. We still don't know what happened to him.
He either he could have perished in a Spanish prison,
or maybe he really was a spy working for Sir
Francis Walsingham and eventually escaped and resumed his real identity.
And so there never was on Arthur Dudley to trade. Okay, Now, again,
(33:08):
historians are also extremely skeptical that he was Elizabeth's illegitimate child.
They largely agree that she was just too closely watched
to hide a whole pregnancy, and once she went into labor,
there's just no way that all the ladies in waiting, courtiers, doctors, servants, midwives,
whatever that would have been called to help her out
would have been able to keep that secret to themselves
(33:29):
for very long. This would have been the most sellable
secret in the land. They're like, look, we all know
that the downstairs workers are the most gossipy people in
the ballast, okay, and if someone offered them the right
amount of money, you know, so it's pretty unlikely. And
I kind of agree. I think it at all points
to Arthur being a spy because his story was so
(33:51):
convoluted and had some real details and some not real
so it felt like he was trying to send them
on a little bit of a wild goose tape, giving
himself time to gaborbet that's that's what it looked like him.
I like it. I like it. Speculation station Arthur Dudley
was his by okay, and his real name. Meanwhile, Robert
(34:11):
Dudley was off all wrapped up with some complicated history
with the Dutch, and then he was named Lieutenant and
Captain General of the Queen's Armies and Companies in fifteen
eighty eight when the Spanish Armada was threatening. But in
September of that year, Robert Dudley died unexpectedly at the
age of fifty five. Historians have alternately said that it
(34:35):
might have been stomach cancer or malaria that killed him.
Latise Dudley, his wife, was devastated, and of course, his
side piece, Queen Elizabeth the First, was inconsolable. She actually
locked herself in her room for several days until William
Cecil had the door broken down. Yike. Even though she
(34:56):
never did marry him, historians said, including Sue and Dorian,
in her book Elizabeth the First and Her Circle, that
he quote remained at the center of Elizabeth's emotional life
and that he was likely the one true love of
Elizabeth's life. When Queen Elizabeth herself died, it was discovered
that she had saved Robert's final handwritten letter to her.
(35:20):
On the outside she had written his last letter and
she kept it inside a silver casket by her bedside. Wow,
she really did love him, she really did. But did
she ever physically love him and they ever got on.
We're going to get into that sexy story right after this.
(35:47):
Welcome back to the show, everybody. Okay, So is this
a will they won't they never did, or is this
a Monica Chandler secret sex situation? Of course, we can't
really know unless we go back in time and drill
ape pole in the Queen's bedroom, which the super creepy
of us. Yes, so we won't do it. But on
her deathbed, according to English heritage dot com, the Queen
(36:09):
solemnly swore the quote. Though she loved him dearly, nothing
unseemly had ever passed between them. Okay, and many scholars
say that she was at most a shameless flirt but
really never did anything else, really actually did stay a
virgin her in her life. Okay. But despite the total
(36:30):
lack of evidence that she ever did anything sexual with anyone,
there are tons of conspiracy theories about her illegitimate children
with a variety of men. Some people thought that every
time the Queen did a progress, anytime she left the
palace and went anywhere else, it was covered for her
to have to give birth to some wow other kids.
I was like, she's just littering children all over England's
(36:52):
for something she couldn't walk out the doors people be
like last week, Yeah, well that's so much she's she's
a really good baby maker. So there's just tons of
you know, theories about all these illegitimate children she had
with a variety of men, including Robert Dudley, but also
her stepfather and her son with her stepfather. Oh okay,
(37:15):
hold on what now? Yeah, so first let's talk about
the stepfather. Remember Queen Elizabeth's fathers King Henry the eighth,
and when he died, Thomas Seymour, who was the brother
of one of Henry's other wives and Elizabeth's stepmother, Jane Seymour,
wrote to Elizabeth and asked her to marry him, and
(37:37):
Elizabeth Tudor politely declined, saying that, oh, I'll be mourning
my father for two years, and also I'm only thirteen,
so I'm probably too young for you anyway. So a
month later, Thomas married Catherine Parr, another one of Henry
the Eighth's ex wives, his sixth wife. They had been
old flames and they were actually planning to get married
(37:59):
before King Henry the eighth snatched her up. Yeah, Catherine
was like, I guess it's God's will that I marry
the king. Right. So Katherine Parr was close with her
stepdaughter Elizabeth, and she invited the then fourteen year old
girl to come live with her and Thomas. And then,
according to testimonies from fifteen forty nine from Elizabeth's governess
(38:20):
kat Ashley, a few days after Elizabeth got there, Thomas
visited the girl in the early morning while she was
still in her bed, and he would quote make as
though he would come at her, and she would shrink
back from him. And the next day she woke up
earlier to avoid being in bed when Thomas came by,
(38:42):
but she was still in her nightgown, so he showed
up bare legged in his nightclothes and slapped Elizabeth on
her butt. Another time, he actually climbed right into bed
with Elizabeth. So she continued to wake up earlier and
earlier each day to avoid him, and if she was
already dressed, he would just say good morning and go
(39:03):
on with his day. Super creepy, very weird behavior, very
weird behavior, and Catherine Parr did not put a stop
to any of this. In fact, she would sometimes tickle
Elizabeth alongside Thomas Seymour, and one time she even held
her down while Thomas cut a gown off her body
quote in a hundred pieces. It's not clear how she
(39:26):
held her down, like if she was like it was
like a friendly hug, or if she's like holding her
down like this forceful thing. Right, but it's something weird
like that was she's sort of participating with Thomas in
this behavior. But then another time she comes into this
empty room where Thomas and Elizabeth are embracing in some way.
I don't know if they were kissing or hugging or what,
(39:47):
but they were in an embrace, and Catherine Parr was
heavily pregnant at the time with Thomas's kid, and she
became very furious at seeing him and Elizabeth together. Okay,
after that, Elizabeth went to live somewhere else, and history
extra dot com says it's not clear if she was
sent away or if she chose to leave. So now,
with all of this story, some scholars think that Thomas
(40:11):
Seymour was sexually harassing, if not abusing, Elizabeth sounds like it,
and that it turned her off from sex forever. That's
what kind of made her go fuck this, Yeah, sounds
like it. I would believe that, But Smithsonian Magazine points
out that there was no concept of adolescence in the
fifteen hundreds, and that at fourteen years old, Elizabeth would
(40:31):
have been perceived as a grown woman, not just by
other people, but also by herself. Sure, okay. She also
did have some affection for Thomas. He apparently was an
incredibly popular guy, like, he's very charming and handsome. Everybody
liked him. So it's been suggested that she did not
mind his treatment, that she laughed it off, that she
even liked it, or that she had a bit of
a crush on him. I have a hard time with
(40:54):
this sort of thing because I think women laugh when
they're uncomfortable all the time as a way to kind
of be like, oh you please stop. You know, the
fact that she had a crush on him, people said
it because she would blush when his name was mentioned,
I mean, which could mean she had a crush on him.
It could mean that she was embarrassed to think about
her stepfather coming into her room with her dick hanging
(41:14):
out of nightgown. I don't know. Yeah, there's a lot
of ways to interpret that uncomfortable. Yeah, and you. I mean,
you've heard many times women say, you know how much
easier it is to just kind of roll with it,
even though you hate what's happening, than it is to
try and protest or say not. It's dangerous to say no. Yeah. Well,
(41:35):
Thomas's ambition ended up getting him killed. He was always
trying to get the young King Edward to name him
Lord Protector instead of Thomas's own older brother, the Duke
of Somerset, and one night Thomas tried to sneak into
the King's room and in the process he woke up
one of King edwards pet spaniels, who started barking. Thomas
(41:59):
had with him either a pistol or a knife, and
he used it to kill the dog. So already he's
like villain of the week. Hate him, But it was
too late. The dog had woken up the King and
his various attendants, who were all like, uh, what are
you doing in the King's bedchambers with a weapon? Okay,
So the courtiers decided that he had planned to murder
(42:22):
young King Edward and then mary his stepdaughter Elizabeth and
put her on the throne. Now that is supposedly why
they were asking Elizabeth's governess about her relationship with Thomas,
because both of them, Thomas and Elizabeth, were under suspicion
of conspiring together to kill King Edward. So that was
when kat Ashley gave them all these dirty stories about
(42:45):
Thomas and how he treated Elizabeth when she was young.
But it's ben said that kat Ashley, this governess, was
just trying to make Elizabeth look as innocent as possible
with her testimony, So she might have overblown Tom his
inappropriate behavior couldn't look bad to make him look bad,
So it could just be, you know, these stories that
(43:07):
we're hearing about the creepy things he did were just that,
like stories that were kind of inflated a little bit
to sort of separate Elizabeth from his crimes. I don't know.
That's another thing where it's like you're trying to throw
dirt on a good man's name. Yea, there's it's a
total it's impossible to know for sure. Yeah, but according
to the Prince Tutor theory, Elizabeth did have an affair
(43:31):
with her stepfather, Thomas Seymour, had a teen pregnancy and
gave birth to his child, who was then placed in
John Devere's home and grew up to become Edward Devere,
the seventeenth Earl of Oxford, who is purported to be
the real Shakespeare, this guy who you played one. I
(43:52):
played Edward Devere in a show. Yeah. We'll get into
that in a second. Yeah. So there are a ton
of Shakespeare scholars out there who think there was no
William Shakespeare, there's no one guy named William Shakespeare, that
that was actually just the pen name of one or
more other guys, other authors. They posit that it could
be Edward de Vere who we're talking about right now,
(44:13):
also Christopher Marlowe, Edmund Spencer, or Sir Francis Bacon, who
was also supposedly the Queen's illegitimate son with Robert Dudley
and the true heir to the throne. And the truth
is all hidden within the plays and sonnets if you
just read them right. We did a show with our
theater company years back called Shake and Bake, and it
(44:33):
was where we just mashed up a bunch of different
Shakespeare characters and plot lines together to kind of do
sort of this Shakespearean sketch show. And it was narrated
by these four characters, Sir Francis Bacon, Edward de Vere,
Christopher Marlowe, and this stoner version of a guy named
Bill Shakespeare, whose name they were all using, yeah to
(44:54):
write wrote the Weed. Yeah. We did a bunch of
research for that show where we came up with those characters,
and there's not a lot of sturdy evidence to support
that any of them were the real Shakespeare. No, and
even crazier the theory, the Prince Tudor theory further says
that Edward de Vere grew up to have an incestuous
(45:15):
affair with his own mother, Queen Elizabeth, and that she
gave birth to his kid, Henry Rothsley, the third Earl
of Southampton, which would be a really gross thing for
her to do. Well. As Eli said, there's just not
much evidence for any of this, except for again just
reading Shakespeare's works with a certain lens, like it's like, oh,
(45:35):
He's wrote this play that takes place in this area,
and there's these names in it that Sir Francis Bacon
was also in that place and knew some of those people,
so it must be really Sir Francis talking about his
own life or whatever. There was one guy named Percy
Allen who did confirm his findings, thank you very much,
by using a medium to contact the spirits of Edward
(45:57):
de Vere, Queen Elizabeth the First, Sir Francis Bacon, and
William Shakespeare, who all said that he totally nailed it
and got it all completely right. But I'm so confused
because if his whole thing is that there is no Shakespeare,
so how did he contact the spirit of Shakespeare? Oh yeah,
maybe he's like, no, I contacted the stoner and his name,
(46:17):
but like he ain't no writing, right, I'm William Shakespeare,
but I never wrote a word a day in my life,
that's right. I don't even know how to read it.
But Elizabeth's, to some inexplicable determination to remain a virgin
has led to so many insane theories too. Some people
believe that Elizabeth actually died as a child and was
(46:39):
replaced by a young boy, and they didn't want the
secret to get out. So this kid never married or
had a love affair, all right, listen, Like King Henry
the Eighth wind it been like, we'll figure it out.
We'll just figure it out. I need a son, so
we'll figure it out. Put a boy in there. We'll
just tell everybody we were wrong. There's no way that
some people think that Elizabeth actually was having sex and
(47:01):
leaving illegitimate children all around the nation. Like we mentioned before,
the poet Ben Johnson theorized that she had quote a
membrana on her that made her incapable of having sex,
so literally, like her vagina was sealed up. He's like,
I don't know, I'm speculation station vagina didn'tata. Nobody had
(47:24):
said this, but what if Queen Elizabeth's like, look, there's
teeth down, there's a big chomping mom. I can't I
can't be heaven mind of its own. King Phillips did
come off in my vagina. They're like, I'm traveling to
Japan for a steel dildo. Well, finally break that demon's teeth. Well,
most of the more down to earth theories simply point
(47:48):
to her childhood. Right, It's clear why she wouldn't want
to get married and give up her power to a
man when you know her dad was King Henry the Yight,
and there's all these bettings, and you know she lost
grandmother and two stepmothers to childbirth as well, so she
might have also just seen sex as too risky. Right,
So she's like even if I didn't want to get
(48:09):
married and just took a bunch of lovers, I don't
want to get pregnant. I'm very scared to get pregnant.
I could see that. There's also, again this sort of
cult of personality that she built around this virgin queen
title right from the very beginning of her reign, all
the way until she died in sixteen oh three. So
she might have just been working to maintain that image
because it was working for her. She also knew that
(48:30):
an air could be used against her. That happened with
her as the center of plots quite a few times. Right,
she was young, right, Look, she even said the quote
is something about, like I know how a second person
as I have been can be used against somebody. Yeah,
I mean to me. I think that she just had
a negative relationship with sex. She had a very confusing
(48:52):
emotional relationship with Robert Dudley, and kind of I wonder if,
like the way he kind of didn't want to marry,
he didn't want to marry for a while until he
finally went with Lettuce. If you know, Queen Elizabeth just
had a stronger version of that of like, I don't
want to get involved because I might get to marry
(49:15):
Robert one day. You know. I also wonder if she's
seen so many women kind of I don't know. I
wonder if she's like, if I have sex, I might
really like it, and that means I'll make bad decisions,
oh you know, from men around me, and they'll end
up turning on me. Because there's so many women who
did you know they've were into King Henry and they
did you know, or any other men in the court.
(49:36):
Sure it happened. There were tons of relationships happening all
around her. Mary Queen of Scott's is a really great
example because she married Henry and then didn't like him
and there was this whole scandal about it. She ends
up getting executed ultimately, and that was because she was
trying to rebel. But it still didn't help, Like the
whole marriage thing did not help. So I think she
just sees a lot of examples of this inn't working out.
(49:56):
And I like being the Queen of England. So that's
my goal is just hey, the Queen of England. Yeah,
she was the whole thing. She was like country before
all right, I want to see a beam of Queen
Elizabeth's portrait if this country before kunt see, Yeah, if
you say the C word with a British accent, it's
(50:17):
okay because it's not a big deal over there. They
love it over there. In the US. This episode is
now like NC seventeen, the worst thing we could say. Well,
I think speculation Station, I do believe that she may
remained a virgin. I think she had a ton of
good reasons to not have sex or get married, and
she definitely did not, And she just loved flirting and
being thought of. It is very beautiful and and messing
(50:39):
with these men all the time, but never really wanted
to pull the trigger. That's my feeling. Okay, I don't
know about you. Uh, since we're in Speculation Station, I
gotta go with the demon. Oh oh yeah, the demon
in her vagina. Yeah. I like that she had vagina dentata.
She had to go get a steel dildo from Japan.
But yeah, that's the problem. Yeah, nobody Goldo from van Yeah,
(51:00):
She's like, honestly, I'd rather have the demon. Maybe that
demon was her best friend after Robert Dudley. You know,
you gave her some really good advice and helped her
bring England into a brighter era. I don't know, yes, yes, okay, Well,
Robert Dudley and Queen Elizabeth are dead now in our
story and also in real life, there's still some loose
(51:25):
ends to tie up. Oh sure, because first of all,
I want to tell you about Latisnoles Dudley, the Countess
of Leicester. Now, after Robert Dudley died, she was left
well provided for because again, good guy, right, But less
than a year later she married his servant and friend,
Sir Christopher Blunt. Now, some people, I'm sorry, are you
(51:46):
telling me that there was a Lettuce Blunt out there somewhere?
Let us blood, sign me up. Love it. Now. People
do not think much of her doing this, but Latis said,
you know, I'm just a defenseless widow. I gotta have
some man around. You know. That's how she felt, Okay whatever.
By all accounts, they had a pretty happy marriage. But
(52:06):
I don't think they were having anything going on before
Robert died or anything like that. I think she really
loved Robert a lot. Yeah, but even though Robert is
dead now, Queen Elizabeth still refused to speak to her
or like forgive her or let her come back, like
she was just like you're iced out still for life. However,
Latisa's son from her first marriage, Robert Devereaux, the second
Earl of Essex, was Elizabeth's new favorite courtier. Even though
(52:30):
they were thirty years apart in age, they flirted pretty shamelessly,
and of course people immediately had all the speculation that
they were fucking too oh wow, which Elizabeth probably loved.
Oh she should be like, oh, boy, your son and
I are getting along great fastically. Oh there's rumors that
I'm sleeping with your son. How funny. Wow, she really
(52:51):
went for this lady. Yeah, I know. But whatever love
Elizabeth had for young Robert Devereaux, it didn't save him
when he fell out of favor for his own secret
marriage to Sir Francis Walsingham's daughter, or when he abandoned
his military post without permission. He was disgraced, and then
he got all sulky and decided to rebel against Elizabeth
(53:14):
in sixteen oh one, so she had him imprisoned and
Latise stayed nearby, which might have been dumb, because Elizabeth,
of course got really angry when she heard reports that
Latise and young Robert were waving to each other from
their windows, she wouldn't even let this lady wave at
her sponn Yeah. So finally both Robert Devereaux and Sir
(53:39):
Christopher Blunt were executed. So poor Latise lost both her
son and her third husband or has she called him
quote my best friend on the same day. That is
so petty. Clearly got a really strong personality and a
very strong will. Yeah, but I feel sorry for her.
(54:00):
That's worry. She just gets short straw. So poor Latise,
you know, she's left with no one now. But she
did outlive every other character in this story. And she
died at the ripe old age of ninety one. And
then she was buried next to Robert Dudley with the
epitaph that she commissioned, reading quote the best and dearest
(54:20):
of husbands. Oh oh, that's really nice, and who knew
ninety one? I thought let us will did a lot
faster than that. She stayed crispy? Did you stay crispy? Baby?
She gave me that healthy crunch every sandwich needs. I
wish she'd married the Earl of sandwich. Let us sandwich amazing?
(54:40):
All right? Now, finally, remember Robert Dudley's baby Mama Douglas
sheffields you have not talked about her in a while, Yeah, Douglass,
but just as a quick refresher. She had married Sir
Stafford back in fifteen seventy nine, and she and Robert
Dudley had been totally cool co parenting their kid, Sir
Robert dud Right. It was a no m a situation
(55:01):
until after the Queen died and Sir Robert Dudley decided
to sue to get his father's now defunct Earls of
Leicester and Warwick titles, because since Sir Robert Dudley was illegitimate,
he could not inherit them or the property that they
came with, So he told the courts that Robert Dudley
and Douglas Sheffield were secretly married in fifteen seventy three,
(55:24):
which makes his marriage to Latise and her subsequent inheritance
of all his property upon his death null and the void.
Oh boy, so Douglas got into this. She sent a
letter to the court detailing her supposed marriage to Robert Dudley,
but she said the ten plus witnesses to it were
all dead and just worked around a test. Sorry, they
(55:46):
all died. She also, you know, she just couldn't remember
the name of the efficient or the exact date of
the ceremony. She just said, it was, you know, in
winter time, the best day of my life, the most
important day of my life, when I married my love,
Sir Robert Lord, Robert Dudley, right on a some day
(56:06):
by some guy. I don't say. It was a Tuesday,
and I remember it was cold. It was the tenth,
maybe the eleventh, who knows, October or November something like that.
She tried to explain her own big miss marriage in
fifteen seventy nine, because of course she was married somebody
else too, by saying that Robert was going to poison her,
(56:28):
and she got married for her personal safety. So poor
Robert Dudley here, he's dead and he's still getting accused
of murder for real. Oh my god. She also said
that Robert offered her money and she initially refused, but
then he got mad and said he could cut her
off without a penny, so she decided, fine, I'll take
the money. Okay, But I mean, the court did not
(56:51):
believe this story, and I mean, do any of us
believe the story? Robert Dudley is not that kind of guy.
I don't think he's no. And also a lot of
this evidence I stretched to even call it evidence, it's
not evidence. A crazy story. It seems to me like
she's like I can say anything I want about Robert
Dudley and people will believe me. I'm gonna say he
tried to poison me. They'll be like, sure he did,
(57:12):
because he tried to poison all these other people. Like
why wouldn't they have you know what I mean something
on that rumor mill about Yes, it really feels like
that just a shameless cash grab. True. Well, of course
Latis won this case, and she walked out of the courtroom,
probably bent down over Sir Robert's ear, and said, I
wish you well the group of her time, of her time, Latis,
(57:38):
let us scoop, let us scoop. Well, let us get
out of this episode. Where right? So yeah, that's the story.
So that's the two part story of Queen Elizabeth and
her one true love Robert Dudley. Yeah, and I will say,
if Elizabeth really did love attention and fucking with people,
which it seems she did, she really won at life.
(57:58):
Because not many people can say that. There are a
bunch of scholars still trying to figure out if they
got laid four hundred plus years after they died. That's true.
We should all hope for such a few Yeah, in
twenty five hundred, I hope they're still, Like, you know,
I wonder what Diana's sex life is like. Well, I'll
have to be more specific in my journals, all right, Yeah,
(58:21):
that would help. Yeah, the scholars of tomorrow, the scholars
of tomorrow helping them today. Well, if they dig out
this episode, they'll have a lot more information about Queen
Elizabeth the First, that's for sure. Well, I hope you
enjoyed this episode. I'm looking into it. It was so interesting.
I don't know if I'm just feeling sorry for Robert
(58:41):
Dudley because he's a possible ancestor of mine, but I'm
oway here thinking he has not been treated right. He
was a super cool guy. I'm glad to know that
he was one of your ancestors, because I mean, again,
I think that a lot of the bad things people
said about him, we're we're slander. Yeah, and he's sure
he had his flaws like any man. Sure, but he
(59:04):
was supposed to be an excellent husband right to the
people who married him. A great stepfather, dad of an
illegitimate A good friend to people who are friends with him.
He was always very loyal, throwing parties right, being fun,
and probably didn't poison any of his lovers. Probably not.
And if he didn't, he's great. And if he did,
you know, we'll reevaluate him. Think about that later. I
(59:26):
also was thinking, I wonder if he didn't get a
lot of respect because he's like, you know, the master
of the horse, and then he did like parties, and
then he was like basically like a butler. Oh. Yes,
so they were just like, oh, Robert, you know, he
freaking deals with the queen right and makes her happy,
and he like does the parties. But we are the politicians. Yeah,
we are doing the real work of running the cut,
(59:47):
you know what I mean, right, even though like managing
the queen must have been actually incredibly important, probably more
difficult than managing you know, international relations. Oh my god.
And they would even write to him sometimes when he
wasn't at court and be like, hey, I hope your
comeback soon. Between real four we're all we're all suffering.
Please come back, stactor. I love the court wants your presence.
(01:00:12):
So anyway, Robert Dudley Party. That's all I know, right,
And thanks again to Daniel Fields for selling us the
story about Elizabeth and francois that we were able to
include it here, and my parents for suggesting this episode
so they would finally have a reason to listen to. Yeah.
Do you think your dad made it through to the
end of episode two? No? No, Hey dad, if you're
still there, thanks for listening, Thanks for listening. We exonerated him,
(01:00:37):
did my duty by the family, right, So yeah, let
us know what you thought. We hope you enjoyed this
story as much as we did, and we always love
hearing from you, so please reach out. Our email address
is Raddick Romance at gmail dot com. That's right. You
can find us on Instagram. I'm at Oh Great, it's Eli.
I'm at Sanamite Boon and the show is at Riddick
Romance and you are awesome. We really appreciate you for
(01:00:58):
listening and we can't wait to bring you another episode soon.
We'll catch it in so long, friends, it's time to go.
Thanks for listening to our show. Tell your friends neighbor's
uncle's in dance to listen to a show. Ridiculous role
Dance
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