Amy Robsart

Amy, Lady Dudley (néeRobsart; 7 June 1532 – 8 September 1560) was the first wife of Robert Dudley, who later became Earl of Leicester, favourite of Elizabeth I of England. In the variable spelling of the day, her name also was spelled as Amye Duddley. She is primarily known for her death, allegedly by falling down a flight of stairs in her home, the circumstances of which were regarded as suspicious at the time, and have often been so subsequently. Amy Robsart was an heiress, as the only child of a substantial Norfolkgentleman.

At nearly 18 years of age, she married Lord Robert Dudley, a son of John Dudley, 1st Duke of Northumberland. In 1553, Robert Dudley was condemned to death and imprisoned in the Tower of London, where Amy Dudley was allowed to visit him. After his release the couple lived in straitened financial circumstances until, with the accession of Elizabeth I in late 1558, Dudley became Master of the Horse, an important court office. It was rumoured that the Queen soon fell in love with him and there was talk that Amy Dudley, who did not follow her husband to court, was suffering from an illness, and that Elizabeth would perhaps marry her favourite should his wife die. The rumours grew more sinister when Elizabeth remained single against the common expectation that she would accept one of her many foreign suitors.

Amy Dudley lived with friends in different parts of the country, having her own household and hardly ever seeing her husband. In the morning of 8 September 1560, at Cumnor Place near Oxford, she insisted on sending away her servants, and later was found dead at the foot of a flight of stairs with a broken neck and two wounds on her head. The coroner's jury's finding was that she had died of a fall downstairs; the verdict was "misfortune", accidental death. The most widely accepted modern explanations of her death have been breast cancer and suicide, although a few historians have probed murder scenarios. The medical evidence of the coroner's report, which was found in 2008, is compatible with accident as well as suicide and other violence.

Amy Dudley's death caused a scandal. Despite the inquest's outcome, Robert Dudley was widely suspected to have orchestrated his wife's demise, a view not shared by most modern historians. He remained Elizabeth's closest favourite, but with respect to her reputation she could not risk a marriage with him. A tradition that Sir Richard Verney, a follower of Robert Dudley, organized Amy Dudley's violent death evolved early, and Leicester's Commonwealth, a notorious and influential libel of 1584 against Robert Dudley, by then Earl of Leicester, perpetuated this version of events. Interest in Amy Dudley's fate was rekindled in the 19th century by Walter Scott's novel, Kenilworth (1821), which presented her death as murder, and numerous adaptations of this for the stage, and in art, which typically took the same line.