Free GREAT UNSOLVED CRIMES (True Crime) by Rodney Castleden Page A

as fifteen counties. With this wealth he was able to buy Cumnor Hall and almost completely rebuild it. This make-over ensured that all traces of the existence of secret doors were removed. Another precaution was the clause in Forster’s will that enabled Dudley to buy Cumnor Hall from his heirs – and Dudley in due course bought it.
    Amy had been twenty-seven when she died, the same age as both Robert Dudley and Queen Elizabeth. Robert had known Amy since they were seventeen, but he had known Elizabeth since childhood. After the murder of Amy, Robert Dudley was lucky not to find himself in the Tower, even if only for appearance’s sake. He had been in the Tower once before, at the time of the Lady Jane Grey crisis. Lady Jane Grey was the wife of Robert Dudley’s elder brother, Lord Guildford Dudley. Robert Dudley had been deeply implicated in the thrust to put Jane on the throne; it was he who had proclaimed Jane queen at King’s Lynn. When Mary Tudor prevailed, Jane, Robert’s brother Guildford and Robert’s father the Duke of Northumberland were all executed in the Tower. Robert himself was imprisoned, and very lucky to escape with his life.
    While in the Tower, Amy administered the Dudley estates. She was allowed to visit him though it is not known how often she did so. While Robert Dudley was in the Tower, he met the princess Elizabeth, who was also a prisoner there, and it was then that they fell in love. On her accession to the English throne, Elizabeth made Robert Dudley her Master of Horse. This meant that he had to be in continual attendance on her at court, so it was a way of keeping him near her. The Spanish ambassador reported in the spring of 1559, ‘Lord Robert has come so much into favour that he does whatever he likes with affairs, and it is said that Her Majesty visits him in his chamber night and day. People talk of this so freely that they go so far as to say that his wife has a malady in one of her breasts and the queen is only waiting for her to die to marry Lord Robert.’ Because of the way the situation was developing, the Spanish sent a new ambassador to London that summer, Alvaro de Quadra, the Bishop of Aquila, with the special task of watching Dudley. He reported in the autumn, ‘I have heard from a certain person who is accustomed to give veracious news that Lord Robert has sent to poison his wife. Certainly all the queen has done in the matter of her marriage is only keeping Lord Robert’s enemies and the country engaged with words until this wicked deed is consummated.’
    In January 1560, de Quadra reported that England was getting restive with the uncertainty over the queen’s intentions and even more over Lord Robert Dudley’s. It seems everyone was waiting for news of Amy’s death. Dudley had tried to enlist the help of the Professor of Physics at Oxford, Dr Bayly, asking him to prescribe something for Amy, ‘meaning also to have added somewhat of their own for her comfort.’ Bayly, according to de Quadra, would have nothing to do with it, suspecting, probably correctly, that Dudley was planning to add something lethal to his medicine and that he, Bayly, would find himself taking the blame for Dudley’s crime. When this version of events was published in a pamphlet, the cautious Bayly was still alive and he did not contradict it. De Quadra also reported that people in England in general were critical of Dudley’s behaviour, because what he was planning to do would ruin the queen.
    Dudley may have sensed that the queen was getting nervous about all the publicity and was on the brink of rejecting him to save her own position. That may have caused him to act when he did. There was also, just three weeks before the murder, the scandalous public accusation by Anne Dowe of Brentford that the queen had had a child by Dudley. There were widespread rumours that Dudley had slept with the queen. Dudley may have realized that he needed to be free of Amy so that he could marry Elizabeth