December 28, 2009 • 22 mins
Elizabeth I never married. Instead, she encouraged (and avoided) many suitors without making a commitment. Additionally, many people believed Elizabeth was in love with a man named Robert Dudley. Learn more about Elizabeth's great love in this episode.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Katie Lambert and I'm Sarah Downey and we've talked
about Queen Elizabeth the first and a couple of podcasts.
(00:20):
So you know that her reputation was that of the
virgin Queen, and it's a reputation she worked very hard
to maintain all throughout her life and it's one that
served her well. Yeah, she was a game player. She
encouraged suits from all sorts of princes and fellow englishmen
and deflected them adeptly. She never married, but she did
(00:43):
have one great love and his name was Robert Dudley.
And to give a little background on Robert, they've been
friends since they were children. He said later in life.
I have known her better than any man alive since
she was eight years old. And to sort of build
up the myth that they shared, they both spent time
in the tower together. It's unlikely that they ever saw
(01:03):
each other there. Elizabeth was kept under very tight security
and m Robert was actually married at the time, but
it plays into the romantic myth. Of course, they're both doomed.
They're both imprisoned, and yet they find love quite close
to home. But again it never happened, but you can
understand why someone might be attracted to Robert. He was
(01:25):
six ft tall, very attractive, um dark skinned. Some called
him the Gypsy, which I really love because Elizabeth, of
course is the Rose, exactly gypsy Rose. Sarah thought this
was really funny. Brother. He has red brown hair and
a mustache. He's very active, He danced and sang, was
a wonderful conversationalist. He was very well educated. But he's
(01:47):
also from a rather traitorous family. He's the son of
Northumberland who is involved in treason, so he doesn't have
the best pedigree when it comes to being loyal to
the monarch. And he is of course of too common
birth to be considered an appropriate suitor for a queen,
so that's something will keep in mind. But he was
(02:08):
married to someone else, a woman named Amy, and it
was a love match and a very happy marriage, at
least at first. So that's Robert and Elizabeth's personal history.
But he makes his public entrance into her life when
she appoints him master of the Horse the day after
she is sents to the throne and if you don't
(02:29):
know what that job is, uh, it's it's pretty important.
It's to purchase breed, train and maintain the queen and
the courts horses. And for somebody like Elizabeth who goes
on a grand progress every year, that's a big deal.
He also had to organize state processions and entertainment like
tournaments and banquets. So there's a bit of an event
planner and he's good at it. Yes, he's very good
(02:51):
at it. So in time Robert becomes more important to
the Queen. She's asking him about state affairs and he's
influencing her and her dealings with the clergy. Most days
together they're writing and hunting. And she didn't try to
keep any of this secret. She was really open about
how much she admired him and how great of a
(03:12):
guy she thought he was. She praised him publicly. She
would dance with him at balls. None of this was shady. Yeah,
and and this is Elizabeth is trying to make it
so open so that people won't talk about it. So
there's nothing suspicious. And we have to remember from our
our Early Life of Elizabeth podcast, she's involved in a
(03:35):
shady relationship with a married man in her teens and
it almost ruins her. It almost it almost gets her killed,
it almost drops her from the line of succession. So
she's not going to make mistakes like that anymore. But gossip,
of course, simply happens, and as the Queen was in
Robert's chamber day and night, people started saying that she
(03:56):
was only waiting for his wife to die so she
could marry him. And also, remember that everyone wanted Elizabeth
to get married, it was inconceivable that she would stay single.
She however, didn't want to for a lot of possible reasons,
which we talked more about in her Early Life podcast,
but some of them were just not wanting to give
up to her power, because of course, a husband was
(04:18):
considered sovereign over his wife, and Elizabeth really enjoyed being
who she was, and she associated marriage with death, and
she was probably quite frightened of childbirth, as as a
tutor woman would be. It's no surprise so many women
died in childbirth at the time. But despite all of
this gossip, because of court etiquette, it's not like Elizabeth
(04:41):
ever would have really been alone with Robert. There's no
evidence of a sexual relationship between them, and again, at
the time there wasn't a good reliable method of contraception,
so it's very likely if she were having sex with him,
we would have very physical evidence to show for it.
But Robert continues to raise eyebrow, and Elizabeth really helps
(05:02):
this when she bestows on him the Order of the Garter,
which is far beyond his qualifications, and he also gets
to a mansion in Q, he gets land, he gets money,
and he's still acting in a somewhat political role despite
the fact that that's not his job, and giving her advice,
she keeps him in line. She makes it very clear
(05:22):
that she is the boss and he is her underling.
But nonetheless people are suspicious of him and his influence
because who knows how far it ranges, and who knows
just how ambitious he is well, and on a personal level,
it really does seem like true love. If you look
at their letters, you can see the regard they have
for each other, and she addresses him as her bonnie
(05:44):
sweet Robin. And of course the benefit for her is
that he's already married, but his wife Amy is in
the country, so she can have all the funds she
wants without all the marriage stuff that she is so
afraid of yeah, and and entertain the ambassadors who are
seeing the suit of their foreign princes without having a
(06:04):
legitimate guy on the side who might be a suitor
himself exactly. So they're using each other a little bit.
And Robert continues to a send he's doing very well
for himself. He does get Knight of the Garter and
eventually attains the completely uncoveted role of one of the
most hated men in England. And I was saying to
(06:24):
Sarah earlier, it's so funny to see a guy as
the hated favorite instead of say, somebody like Madame Pombadour
and the French Kings. It's really interesting. He's resented, he's feared,
he's distrusted, and his personal characteristics don't really help this
image of him, because he is kind of snobbish and
very ambitious, and he makes himself the gateway to the Queen.
(06:47):
If you want to see her first, to have to
go through Dudley, and it's not easy. And he even
tries to sabotage some marriage arrangements for her, you know,
saying it wasn't a good idea for England, or uh.
The suitor himself isn't a good man, just befuddling everything,
(07:07):
but he clearly is again her favorite. And her old governess,
who is the one who helped extricate her from that
first an appropriate relationship, begs her to stop this what's
going on with Robert and to please get married and
produce an heir for England. But Elizabeth, and this is
a poignant moment, says that she has so little joy
(07:28):
in her life aside from him, and so much sorrow.
So he's, you know, her one special thing she has
to herself in this life of governing England. But the
gossip goes beyond just sort of court um disapproval, and
the stuff that the town people are saying can get
pretty nasty. It's rumored that she goes on progress every
(07:51):
year to give birth to Robert's child, and she's got
about five by now or something. She sounds a bit difficult,
and she stir only punishes the people who who are
talking about her like that, but again she's not shy
about how she feels about him. At one point, they're
staying at Whitehall and Robert said his rooms were damp,
so the Queen gave him a suite next to her
(08:13):
she's flaunting it. She's not behaving herself in a modest
sort of way because she thinks, you know, she's the
monarch and who are they to question what she's doing
because she knows she's not doing anything quote unseemly, so
no one should be questioning her when she's you know,
acting perfectly innocently with her core favorite. There is talk
of Robert, though, trying to poison his wife or get
(08:35):
his marriage dissolved so he can marry the queen, and
this is when his wife comes back into the story.
So Elizabeth doesn't like Amy Dudley and Robert only has
the one house at Q and Elizabeth likes to go
and visit him there, so Amy isn't allowed to be
in her own house. She's shuttled around between friends and family,
(08:57):
and Robert and Amy don't see each other very much.
He tries to make it up to her by sending
her gifts all the time, but she's a sad, lonely lady.
And by September fifteen sixty we do have evidence from
contemporary accounts that she was very depressed. We don't know
if that's because she was ill. There were a lot
(09:18):
of rumors at the time that she had a malady
in her breast, or if it was because her unhappy
marriage and her husband's relationship with Queen. But on September eight,
fift sixty, Amy unusually sends all of her servants away
to a religious fair, and some of them objected because
it was a Sunday and they didn't think it was appropriate,
but she forces them to go, and she's angry when
(09:40):
one of them decides to stay with her. And when
they come back from the fair, they find the body
of Amy Dudley at the foot of a shallow set
of stone stairs with a broken neck. So this obviously
changes the game a lot between Elizabeth and Dudley, and
when they're both told, Elizabeth is completely shocked, speechless, and
(10:03):
Dudley seems confused. He asked for an inquiry into her death,
which of course they needed, and Elizabeth goes into her
mode of propriety and she makes the news public. She
says publicly that it was an accident and sets up
an inquest, and then she sends him away, knowing that
it looks bad that he's with her. He needs to
stay away until she hears from the corner, so Dudley
(10:25):
thinks Amy has been murdered, and he doesn't seem too
sad about it, but he desperately wants to clear his name.
Some people, on the other hand, are thinking that it
was suicide because Amy was so upset, either over potential
illness or because of Dudley an Elizabeth, but because suicide
is immortal sin, they're keeping that to themselves for the
(10:47):
most part. And the corner's verdict is accidental death. But
Dudley again is convinced that it's murder and he wants
another verdict he has to clear his name, but Elizabeth
says that one is enough, and Dudley's invited back to court,
and Elizabeth orders the court to mourn for a month.
But people still guilty, guilty, and they continue to think
(11:07):
he's guilty for pretty much the rest of his life.
In the nineteen hundreds, her coffin was exhumed, but there
was only dust in it. It's the theme to all
of our podcasts, euming the body. The only thing Amy, Dudley,
and marywether lewis possibly having common. A modern suggestion is
perhaps that you know, in some cases of breast cancer,
it can weaken your bones and a little fall like
(11:30):
that could do something as serious as break your neck.
But it's also possible that it was murder, and we
have one main suspect. Yeah, the only person who would
actually benefit from the death of Amy Dudley was William Cecil,
who's Elizabeth's chief adviser, who hates Dudley and doesn't want
to see him anywhere near the Queen, And with the
(11:51):
taint of this mysterious death on him, it's absolutely impossible
for Elizabeth to marry Dudley now, even if she'd wanted
to before the people would revolt. She needs to get
rid of him. Everyone's up in arms that she's in
a relationship with a possible murder. The foreign courts of
Europe are completely appalled, and so she has to put
head over heart. So when it comes time for the
(12:14):
public ceremony to raise Dudley to the peerage, she cuts
up the papers and referenced his traitor as family, all
in front of him. So that is just a slap
in the face. Yeah. If if raising him to Master
of the Horse was the public declaration of their friendship,
their close friendship, this is the public declaration of Elizabeth's disapproval.
(12:35):
So Dudley is a bit out in the cold, and
for some reason, his tactic is to try to get
in good with King Philip. He wants him on his
side to help make his suit to Elizabeth, and tells
Philip that he'll help restore Catholicism to England if Philip
helps him, which of course is not going to happen,
and Cecil thwarts his efforts in any way possible, as
(12:57):
he will continue to do for the rest of his life.
And Dudley is still hoping that the Queen will marry him,
but she's playing with him, giving him a nice apartment
next to hers one minute and then making a joke
about how he's just her little dog the next, very humiliating.
He's not doing too badly as far as say pensions
and privileges are going, but he can't have what he wants,
(13:20):
which is marriage to Elizabeth, partly for love and partly
for ambition. She does eventually raise him to the peerage,
though after that humiliating incident um, and this time she
tickles his neck when she does it. She's such a
flirting text. So he becomes the Earl of Lester, and
he's one of the four most powerful men in England
(13:40):
along with Norfolk, Sussex and William Cecil. And now that
he is one of the most powerful men in England
and not kind of low of birth, he does have
some supporters. People are really worried that Elizabeth hasn't decided
on the succession yet, and she's middle aged by this point,
(14:00):
at least by Renaissance standards, and they want her to
marry somebody and have an air. So the game playing continues,
and Deadly fears that she had made up her mind
to wed some great prince. He tells someone else, so
he raises the stakes and he starts up a flirtation
with Latisse Devereaux, the Countess of Essex, who's a cousin
(14:21):
of Elizabeth's and very beautiful to write, and the motive
supposedly is to make Elizabeth jealous and see if she
really wants to marry him. This backfires spectacularly. Elizabeth begins
to give her attention to another young man at court
and they have a giant fight. Elizabeth yells at Robert,
I have wished you well, but my favor is not
(14:41):
so locked up for you that others shall not participate.
Thereof which is a line I plan to remember, but
they reconcile, both of them in tears, which is characteristic
of their very passionate relationship. But you can't this kind
of that level of passion can't be sustained. Yeah, these
huge fights and then these amatic makeups. Um, they can't
(15:02):
keep on doing this. And in a sense for the
two of them, this part of their relationship is when
things change. Deadley is tired of the court. He's tired
of all the little scandals and the political intrigues, and
he's completely exhausted by Elizabeth's games, as anyone would be,
I think, and it's beginning to become clear to him
that she will never marry him. He hasn't accepted it yet,
(15:25):
but he's got you know, a little inkling. Well. He's
tired of being blamed too, for being the one who
makes all her marriage arrangements fall through. She uses him
for that, but he's he's tired of being her scapegoat.
She likes to do things like banish him from court
and then send him a letter saying he should never
leave her side, and then he comes back, and after
(15:47):
a while she throws him at again and invites him back.
It's tiring, just to read about, much less to be
part of. My favorite detail is at one point, Cecil
is comparing Robert to an archduke, and he makes up
an actual chart of their pros and cons to show
that Dudley simply isn't as good as the archduke. We
were joking it would have mustache pro on wife murder.
(16:12):
The idea of them getting married seems more and more
remote as time goes by, but those rumors never stop.
It's always swirling around that maybe maybe he'll be the one,
because again, she's really really good at this. She's such
a manipulator. And I kept thinking as I was researching this,
and maybe this is something about me more than her.
But I don't hate the player, hate the game, because
(16:35):
she is such a good little player. And this whole
time she's entertaining different suitors and never really has any
serious intentions of accepting any of them as a husband.
So as their relationship changes, they become they do lose
some of that passion and they become more like an
old married couple who kind of vickers at each other
and they're fond of each other and um. But around
(16:58):
seventy two, he as a secret marriage to Lady Sheffield,
so he's moved on to a certain extent and he
Lady Sheffield have a baby together after this secret marriage.
And Dudley, also known as Lester from this point on
because he is the Earl of Leicester, wanted to acknowledge him,
but he couldn't because Elizabeth thought it was a bastard
(17:20):
and probably honestly would have flipped out if she'd known
that he married someone else. So he calls the son
the Badge of his sin for the rest of his life,
even though he's so desperately wanted an air and not
that his relationship with the Queen has ended. During her
progress in fifteen seventy five, which ended at Kennelworth, she
told him that she couldn't see the formal garden from
(17:40):
her window, so overnight he had a completely new one
set up where she could see it. Yeah, he really
plays the role at the Cavalier well, sometimes with Elizabeth,
but that same year he starts up again with latisse Um,
who is married and nights aren't supposed to sleep with
other knights wives, so this is pretty scandalous. But eventually
(18:02):
her husband dies and she's pregnant by Lester, so he
marries her. But if his marriage to Lady Sheffield was real,
and there's a lot of evidence to suggest that it was,
he was a big amist, and then this baby really
wouldn't be legitimate, and he really wanted that legitimate air.
Elizabeth found out about this marriage, I when sure if
he told her, if someone else told her. But she
(18:23):
was brokenhearted and felt completely betrayed by him. But they
come to a certain arrangement of sorts, and if he'll
continue to be her favorite, be her night and pretend
nothing happened, basically turned Latise into an amy that old
wife who stays with her relatives and friends. Um. Then
(18:45):
Elizabeth will pretend that nothing happened either, and it all
I'll be okay. But she doesn't quite stick to that,
because Elizabeth hates Latise now, who really should have okayed
her marriage with Elizabeth in the first place. But Elizabeth
actually boxes her ears when Latisse shows bit court in
her fancy clothes and tells her as but one sun
lights the east, so I shall have but one queen
(19:05):
in England, at which point I think Lester realizes what
he's done, setting him up, setting himself up between these
two women. Despite this seeming accord between Lester and the Queen.
She is in a perpetual bad mood according to everyone
at court. She keeps him away from his wife whenever
she can, and just in general is nasty to be around.
(19:25):
Lester finally gets what he wants, though, which is an
heir by Latise, a son who Robert adores, but he
unfortunately dies quite young um and then Lester himself dies,
probably of stomach cancer on September, rumored to have been
poisoned by Latise, who had a lover, but who knows
(19:49):
about that. Elizabeth was completely devastated by his death. She
locked herself in her room for days, and she took
the last letter that he wrote her and labeled it
last Letter and put it in a little box by
her bed, where it stayed until the day she died.
And he left her a rope of six pearls. We've
kind have been tracing the roots of Elizabeth Pearl Elizabeth's
(20:11):
pearls in these podcasts, but among other things, that she
wears these pearls in her Armada portrait. And let us
say also that Elizabeth got her revenge on Latisse. Lester
died with debts and the Queen made sure that Latisse
had to auction off everything they owned to pay them,
which wasn't that coolness And that ruthlessness goes along with
(20:36):
how we usually think of Elizabeth, which is bigger than life,
the virgin Queen Glory Anna, always managing things just just
quite right. But it's interesting to look at her relationship
with Robert because it is so human and it shows
that human side of someone who tries to almost strip
(20:57):
it from her public persona. And in one way she
could have had him because he wanted her and he
loved her, and he would have married her. But in
another she couldn't, and not just because most of her
people were against it and he wasn't suitable, but he
wouldn't have been nearly as wonderful husband as he was
a companion to her. He was really ambitious, and Cecil
(21:18):
for one, was afraid he'd be a jealous and unkind husband.
And it was funny doing the research watching their relationship evolve,
because you have all the same petty you know, jealousies
and insecurities and little fights that plague any relationship, but
they're magnified to this royal scale with state importance. So
I think that about wraps up the life of Elizabeth
(21:41):
recovered it right, I think we're pretty much done with
her for now. That be on the lookout for Mary,
Queen of Scott's, and Lord Darnley, and you can be
looking for the Stewarts and the Tutors to be popping
up and the stuff you missed in history blog can
go to blogs not how stuff works dot com to
look for them, or on her homepage at www dot
how staff works dot com. For more on this and
(22:03):
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in History Class blog on the how staff works dot
com home page
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Katie Lambert and I'm Sarah Downey and we've talked
about Queen Elizabeth the first and a couple of podcasts.
(00:20):
So you know that her reputation was that of the
virgin Queen, and it's a reputation she worked very hard
to maintain all throughout her life and it's one that
served her well. Yeah, she was a game player. She
encouraged suits from all sorts of princes and fellow englishmen
and deflected them adeptly. She never married, but she did
(00:43):
have one great love and his name was Robert Dudley.
And to give a little background on Robert, they've been
friends since they were children. He said later in life.
I have known her better than any man alive since
she was eight years old. And to sort of build
up the myth that they shared, they both spent time
in the tower together. It's unlikely that they ever saw
(01:03):
each other there. Elizabeth was kept under very tight security
and m Robert was actually married at the time, but
it plays into the romantic myth. Of course, they're both doomed.
They're both imprisoned, and yet they find love quite close
to home. But again it never happened, but you can
understand why someone might be attracted to Robert. He was
(01:25):
six ft tall, very attractive, um dark skinned. Some called
him the Gypsy, which I really love because Elizabeth, of
course is the Rose, exactly gypsy Rose. Sarah thought this
was really funny. Brother. He has red brown hair and
a mustache. He's very active, He danced and sang, was
a wonderful conversationalist. He was very well educated. But he's
(01:47):
also from a rather traitorous family. He's the son of
Northumberland who is involved in treason, so he doesn't have
the best pedigree when it comes to being loyal to
the monarch. And he is of course of too common
birth to be considered an appropriate suitor for a queen,
so that's something will keep in mind. But he was
(02:08):
married to someone else, a woman named Amy, and it
was a love match and a very happy marriage, at
least at first. So that's Robert and Elizabeth's personal history.
But he makes his public entrance into her life when
she appoints him master of the Horse the day after
she is sents to the throne and if you don't
(02:29):
know what that job is, uh, it's it's pretty important.
It's to purchase breed, train and maintain the queen and
the courts horses. And for somebody like Elizabeth who goes
on a grand progress every year, that's a big deal.
He also had to organize state processions and entertainment like
tournaments and banquets. So there's a bit of an event
planner and he's good at it. Yes, he's very good
(02:51):
at it. So in time Robert becomes more important to
the Queen. She's asking him about state affairs and he's
influencing her and her dealings with the clergy. Most days
together they're writing and hunting. And she didn't try to
keep any of this secret. She was really open about
how much she admired him and how great of a
(03:12):
guy she thought he was. She praised him publicly. She
would dance with him at balls. None of this was shady. Yeah,
and and this is Elizabeth is trying to make it
so open so that people won't talk about it. So
there's nothing suspicious. And we have to remember from our
our Early Life of Elizabeth podcast, she's involved in a
(03:35):
shady relationship with a married man in her teens and
it almost ruins her. It almost it almost gets her killed,
it almost drops her from the line of succession. So
she's not going to make mistakes like that anymore. But gossip,
of course, simply happens, and as the Queen was in
Robert's chamber day and night, people started saying that she
(03:56):
was only waiting for his wife to die so she
could marry him. And also, remember that everyone wanted Elizabeth
to get married, it was inconceivable that she would stay single.
She however, didn't want to for a lot of possible reasons,
which we talked more about in her Early Life podcast,
but some of them were just not wanting to give
up to her power, because of course, a husband was
(04:18):
considered sovereign over his wife, and Elizabeth really enjoyed being
who she was, and she associated marriage with death, and
she was probably quite frightened of childbirth, as as a
tutor woman would be. It's no surprise so many women
died in childbirth at the time. But despite all of
this gossip, because of court etiquette, it's not like Elizabeth
(04:41):
ever would have really been alone with Robert. There's no
evidence of a sexual relationship between them, and again, at
the time there wasn't a good reliable method of contraception,
so it's very likely if she were having sex with him,
we would have very physical evidence to show for it.
But Robert continues to raise eyebrow, and Elizabeth really helps
(05:02):
this when she bestows on him the Order of the Garter,
which is far beyond his qualifications, and he also gets
to a mansion in Q, he gets land, he gets money,
and he's still acting in a somewhat political role despite
the fact that that's not his job, and giving her advice,
she keeps him in line. She makes it very clear
(05:22):
that she is the boss and he is her underling.
But nonetheless people are suspicious of him and his influence
because who knows how far it ranges, and who knows
just how ambitious he is well, and on a personal level,
it really does seem like true love. If you look
at their letters, you can see the regard they have
for each other, and she addresses him as her bonnie
(05:44):
sweet Robin. And of course the benefit for her is
that he's already married, but his wife Amy is in
the country, so she can have all the funds she
wants without all the marriage stuff that she is so
afraid of yeah, and and entertain the ambassadors who are
seeing the suit of their foreign princes without having a
(06:04):
legitimate guy on the side who might be a suitor
himself exactly. So they're using each other a little bit.
And Robert continues to a send he's doing very well
for himself. He does get Knight of the Garter and
eventually attains the completely uncoveted role of one of the
most hated men in England. And I was saying to
(06:24):
Sarah earlier, it's so funny to see a guy as
the hated favorite instead of say, somebody like Madame Pombadour
and the French Kings. It's really interesting. He's resented, he's feared,
he's distrusted, and his personal characteristics don't really help this
image of him, because he is kind of snobbish and
very ambitious, and he makes himself the gateway to the Queen.
(06:47):
If you want to see her first, to have to
go through Dudley, and it's not easy. And he even
tries to sabotage some marriage arrangements for her, you know,
saying it wasn't a good idea for England, or uh.
The suitor himself isn't a good man, just befuddling everything,
(07:07):
but he clearly is again her favorite. And her old governess,
who is the one who helped extricate her from that
first an appropriate relationship, begs her to stop this what's
going on with Robert and to please get married and
produce an heir for England. But Elizabeth, and this is
a poignant moment, says that she has so little joy
(07:28):
in her life aside from him, and so much sorrow.
So he's, you know, her one special thing she has
to herself in this life of governing England. But the
gossip goes beyond just sort of court um disapproval, and
the stuff that the town people are saying can get
pretty nasty. It's rumored that she goes on progress every
(07:51):
year to give birth to Robert's child, and she's got
about five by now or something. She sounds a bit difficult,
and she stir only punishes the people who who are
talking about her like that, but again she's not shy
about how she feels about him. At one point, they're
staying at Whitehall and Robert said his rooms were damp,
so the Queen gave him a suite next to her
(08:13):
she's flaunting it. She's not behaving herself in a modest
sort of way because she thinks, you know, she's the
monarch and who are they to question what she's doing
because she knows she's not doing anything quote unseemly, so
no one should be questioning her when she's you know,
acting perfectly innocently with her core favorite. There is talk
of Robert, though, trying to poison his wife or get
(08:35):
his marriage dissolved so he can marry the queen, and
this is when his wife comes back into the story.
So Elizabeth doesn't like Amy Dudley and Robert only has
the one house at Q and Elizabeth likes to go
and visit him there, so Amy isn't allowed to be
in her own house. She's shuttled around between friends and family,
(08:57):
and Robert and Amy don't see each other very much.
He tries to make it up to her by sending
her gifts all the time, but she's a sad, lonely lady.
And by September fifteen sixty we do have evidence from
contemporary accounts that she was very depressed. We don't know
if that's because she was ill. There were a lot
(09:18):
of rumors at the time that she had a malady
in her breast, or if it was because her unhappy
marriage and her husband's relationship with Queen. But on September eight,
fift sixty, Amy unusually sends all of her servants away
to a religious fair, and some of them objected because
it was a Sunday and they didn't think it was appropriate,
but she forces them to go, and she's angry when
(09:40):
one of them decides to stay with her. And when
they come back from the fair, they find the body
of Amy Dudley at the foot of a shallow set
of stone stairs with a broken neck. So this obviously
changes the game a lot between Elizabeth and Dudley, and
when they're both told, Elizabeth is completely shocked, speechless, and
(10:03):
Dudley seems confused. He asked for an inquiry into her death,
which of course they needed, and Elizabeth goes into her
mode of propriety and she makes the news public. She
says publicly that it was an accident and sets up
an inquest, and then she sends him away, knowing that
it looks bad that he's with her. He needs to
stay away until she hears from the corner, so Dudley
(10:25):
thinks Amy has been murdered, and he doesn't seem too
sad about it, but he desperately wants to clear his name.
Some people, on the other hand, are thinking that it
was suicide because Amy was so upset, either over potential
illness or because of Dudley an Elizabeth, but because suicide
is immortal sin, they're keeping that to themselves for the
(10:47):
most part. And the corner's verdict is accidental death. But
Dudley again is convinced that it's murder and he wants
another verdict he has to clear his name, but Elizabeth
says that one is enough, and Dudley's invited back to court,
and Elizabeth orders the court to mourn for a month.
But people still guilty, guilty, and they continue to think
(11:07):
he's guilty for pretty much the rest of his life.
In the nineteen hundreds, her coffin was exhumed, but there
was only dust in it. It's the theme to all
of our podcasts, euming the body. The only thing Amy, Dudley,
and marywether lewis possibly having common. A modern suggestion is
perhaps that you know, in some cases of breast cancer,
it can weaken your bones and a little fall like
(11:30):
that could do something as serious as break your neck.
But it's also possible that it was murder, and we
have one main suspect. Yeah, the only person who would
actually benefit from the death of Amy Dudley was William Cecil,
who's Elizabeth's chief adviser, who hates Dudley and doesn't want
to see him anywhere near the Queen, And with the
(11:51):
taint of this mysterious death on him, it's absolutely impossible
for Elizabeth to marry Dudley now, even if she'd wanted
to before the people would revolt. She needs to get
rid of him. Everyone's up in arms that she's in
a relationship with a possible murder. The foreign courts of
Europe are completely appalled, and so she has to put
head over heart. So when it comes time for the
(12:14):
public ceremony to raise Dudley to the peerage, she cuts
up the papers and referenced his traitor as family, all
in front of him. So that is just a slap
in the face. Yeah. If if raising him to Master
of the Horse was the public declaration of their friendship,
their close friendship, this is the public declaration of Elizabeth's disapproval.
(12:35):
So Dudley is a bit out in the cold, and
for some reason, his tactic is to try to get
in good with King Philip. He wants him on his
side to help make his suit to Elizabeth, and tells
Philip that he'll help restore Catholicism to England if Philip
helps him, which of course is not going to happen,
and Cecil thwarts his efforts in any way possible, as
(12:57):
he will continue to do for the rest of his life.
And Dudley is still hoping that the Queen will marry him,
but she's playing with him, giving him a nice apartment
next to hers one minute and then making a joke
about how he's just her little dog the next, very humiliating.
He's not doing too badly as far as say pensions
and privileges are going, but he can't have what he wants,
(13:20):
which is marriage to Elizabeth, partly for love and partly
for ambition. She does eventually raise him to the peerage,
though after that humiliating incident um, and this time she
tickles his neck when she does it. She's such a
flirting text. So he becomes the Earl of Lester, and
he's one of the four most powerful men in England
(13:40):
along with Norfolk, Sussex and William Cecil. And now that
he is one of the most powerful men in England
and not kind of low of birth, he does have
some supporters. People are really worried that Elizabeth hasn't decided
on the succession yet, and she's middle aged by this point,
(14:00):
at least by Renaissance standards, and they want her to
marry somebody and have an air. So the game playing continues,
and Deadly fears that she had made up her mind
to wed some great prince. He tells someone else, so
he raises the stakes and he starts up a flirtation
with Latisse Devereaux, the Countess of Essex, who's a cousin
(14:21):
of Elizabeth's and very beautiful to write, and the motive
supposedly is to make Elizabeth jealous and see if she
really wants to marry him. This backfires spectacularly. Elizabeth begins
to give her attention to another young man at court
and they have a giant fight. Elizabeth yells at Robert,
I have wished you well, but my favor is not
(14:41):
so locked up for you that others shall not participate.
Thereof which is a line I plan to remember, but
they reconcile, both of them in tears, which is characteristic
of their very passionate relationship. But you can't this kind
of that level of passion can't be sustained. Yeah, these
huge fights and then these amatic makeups. Um, they can't
(15:02):
keep on doing this. And in a sense for the
two of them, this part of their relationship is when
things change. Deadley is tired of the court. He's tired
of all the little scandals and the political intrigues, and
he's completely exhausted by Elizabeth's games, as anyone would be,
I think, and it's beginning to become clear to him
that she will never marry him. He hasn't accepted it yet,
(15:25):
but he's got you know, a little inkling. Well. He's
tired of being blamed too, for being the one who
makes all her marriage arrangements fall through. She uses him
for that, but he's he's tired of being her scapegoat.
She likes to do things like banish him from court
and then send him a letter saying he should never
leave her side, and then he comes back, and after
(15:47):
a while she throws him at again and invites him back.
It's tiring, just to read about, much less to be
part of. My favorite detail is at one point, Cecil
is comparing Robert to an archduke, and he makes up
an actual chart of their pros and cons to show
that Dudley simply isn't as good as the archduke. We
were joking it would have mustache pro on wife murder.
(16:12):
The idea of them getting married seems more and more
remote as time goes by, but those rumors never stop.
It's always swirling around that maybe maybe he'll be the one,
because again, she's really really good at this. She's such
a manipulator. And I kept thinking as I was researching this,
and maybe this is something about me more than her.
But I don't hate the player, hate the game, because
(16:35):
she is such a good little player. And this whole
time she's entertaining different suitors and never really has any
serious intentions of accepting any of them as a husband.
So as their relationship changes, they become they do lose
some of that passion and they become more like an
old married couple who kind of vickers at each other
and they're fond of each other and um. But around
(16:58):
seventy two, he as a secret marriage to Lady Sheffield,
so he's moved on to a certain extent and he
Lady Sheffield have a baby together after this secret marriage.
And Dudley, also known as Lester from this point on
because he is the Earl of Leicester, wanted to acknowledge him,
but he couldn't because Elizabeth thought it was a bastard
(17:20):
and probably honestly would have flipped out if she'd known
that he married someone else. So he calls the son
the Badge of his sin for the rest of his life,
even though he's so desperately wanted an air and not
that his relationship with the Queen has ended. During her
progress in fifteen seventy five, which ended at Kennelworth, she
told him that she couldn't see the formal garden from
(17:40):
her window, so overnight he had a completely new one
set up where she could see it. Yeah, he really
plays the role at the Cavalier well, sometimes with Elizabeth,
but that same year he starts up again with latisse Um,
who is married and nights aren't supposed to sleep with
other knights wives, so this is pretty scandalous. But eventually
(18:02):
her husband dies and she's pregnant by Lester, so he
marries her. But if his marriage to Lady Sheffield was real,
and there's a lot of evidence to suggest that it was,
he was a big amist, and then this baby really
wouldn't be legitimate, and he really wanted that legitimate air.
Elizabeth found out about this marriage, I when sure if
he told her, if someone else told her. But she
(18:23):
was brokenhearted and felt completely betrayed by him. But they
come to a certain arrangement of sorts, and if he'll
continue to be her favorite, be her night and pretend
nothing happened, basically turned Latise into an amy that old
wife who stays with her relatives and friends. Um. Then
(18:45):
Elizabeth will pretend that nothing happened either, and it all
I'll be okay. But she doesn't quite stick to that,
because Elizabeth hates Latise now, who really should have okayed
her marriage with Elizabeth in the first place. But Elizabeth
actually boxes her ears when Latisse shows bit court in
her fancy clothes and tells her as but one sun
lights the east, so I shall have but one queen
(19:05):
in England, at which point I think Lester realizes what
he's done, setting him up, setting himself up between these
two women. Despite this seeming accord between Lester and the Queen.
She is in a perpetual bad mood according to everyone
at court. She keeps him away from his wife whenever
she can, and just in general is nasty to be around.
(19:25):
Lester finally gets what he wants, though, which is an
heir by Latise, a son who Robert adores, but he
unfortunately dies quite young um and then Lester himself dies,
probably of stomach cancer on September, rumored to have been
poisoned by Latise, who had a lover, but who knows
(19:49):
about that. Elizabeth was completely devastated by his death. She
locked herself in her room for days, and she took
the last letter that he wrote her and labeled it
last Letter and put it in a little box by
her bed, where it stayed until the day she died.
And he left her a rope of six pearls. We've
kind have been tracing the roots of Elizabeth Pearl Elizabeth's
(20:11):
pearls in these podcasts, but among other things, that she
wears these pearls in her Armada portrait. And let us
say also that Elizabeth got her revenge on Latisse. Lester
died with debts and the Queen made sure that Latisse
had to auction off everything they owned to pay them,
which wasn't that coolness And that ruthlessness goes along with
(20:36):
how we usually think of Elizabeth, which is bigger than life,
the virgin Queen Glory Anna, always managing things just just
quite right. But it's interesting to look at her relationship
with Robert because it is so human and it shows
that human side of someone who tries to almost strip
(20:57):
it from her public persona. And in one way she
could have had him because he wanted her and he
loved her, and he would have married her. But in
another she couldn't, and not just because most of her
people were against it and he wasn't suitable, but he
wouldn't have been nearly as wonderful husband as he was
a companion to her. He was really ambitious, and Cecil
(21:18):
for one, was afraid he'd be a jealous and unkind husband.
And it was funny doing the research watching their relationship evolve,
because you have all the same petty you know, jealousies
and insecurities and little fights that plague any relationship, but
they're magnified to this royal scale with state importance. So
I think that about wraps up the life of Elizabeth
(21:41):
recovered it right, I think we're pretty much done with
her for now. That be on the lookout for Mary,
Queen of Scott's, and Lord Darnley, and you can be
looking for the Stewarts and the Tutors to be popping
up and the stuff you missed in history blog can
go to blogs not how stuff works dot com to
look for them, or on her homepage at www dot
how staff works dot com. For more on this and
(22:03):
thousands of other topics, visit how stuff works dot com
and be sure to check out the stuff you missed
in History Class blog on the how staff works dot
com home page
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