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

without delay.
    By the first week in September the quarrel between Dudley and William Cecil, the queen’s secretary, had intensified. Cecil was so unnerved by what was happening that he spoke unguardedly to de Quadra.
     
I met the Secretary Cecil, whom I knew to be in disgrace. Lord Robert, I was aware, was endeavouring to deprive him of his place. He [Cecil] said the Queen was conducting herself in such a way that he thought of retiring. He said it was a bad sailor who did not enter a port if he saw a storm coming on, and he clearly foresaw the ruin of the realm through Robert’s intimacy with the Queen, who surrendered all affairs to him and meant to marry him. He said he should ask leave to go home, though he thought they would cast him into the Tower first. He ended by begging me in God’s name to point out to the Queen the effect of her misconduct and to persuade her not to abandon business entirely, but to look to her realm; and then he repeated to me twice over that Lord Robert would be better in Paradise than here. Last of all, he said they were thinking of destroying Lord Robert’s wife. They had given out that she was ill; but she was not ill at all; she was very well and taking care not to be poisoned.
     
    The next day, the Saturday, was the queen’s birthday. The Spanish ambassador managed to have a conversation with her. He reported, ‘The queen told me on her return from hunting that lord Robert’s wife was dead, or nearly so, and begged me to say nothing about it.’ If true, this was damningly revealing. The queen knew that Amy was ‘nearly dead’ on Saturday. Amy was found dead late on Sunday evening and official news of her death did not reach Windsor until Monday. By then, de Quadra had not sent his letter, and he was able to add a postscript as follows. ‘Since this was written the queen has published the death of Lord Robert’s wife and has said in Italian, Si ha rotto il collo. She must have fallen down stairs.’ Why the queen should have made this comment in Italian is not known. It suggests to me that she was already trying to distance herself from what had been done. From de Quadra’s comments, which there is no particular reason to distrust, it is clear that the queen knew what was going to happen and colluded with Dudley in his plan to murder his wife. Elizabeth, the queen, was an accessory to murder, an accessory before the fact. Once this is realized, the reason for Cecil’s extreme anxiety about the queen’s conduct becomes clear; he knew she was plotting with Dudley to destroy his wife.
    There was widespread condemnation of Dudley and the queen. Nobody believed that Amy’s death was accidental. A week afterwards, one of the great preachers of the time, Dr Leaver, wrote that ‘the country was full of mutterings and dangerous suspicions, and there must be an earnest searching and trying of the truth.’ When it emerged that Dudley fully intended to marry the queen as soon as possible, English ambassadors in France and Scotland frantically signalled that this must be prevented if the prestige of the English court was to be sustained abroad. The foreign courts were even more scandalized than the English. Throckmorton, the English ambassador in Paris, was so humiliated by what the French were saying about his queen and about England that he wanted to crawl away and die. He reported this back and was sternly rebuked from London, in a letter which he annotated before filing it, ‘A warning not to be too busy about matters between the queen and Lord Robert.’
    In January 1561, it looked as if the marriage would go ahead. Dudley’s brother-in-law went to de Quadra with an outrageous proposal. In principle it was a plea for Spain to endorse and support Elizabeth’s marriage to Lord Robert;