Death and the Virgin Queen by Chris Skidmore

Author:Chris Skidmore
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group
Published: 2010-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

If suicide seems more than unlikely, what then was the ‘desperation’ that Amy had prayed to be delivered from? Was it her despair at the situation that had been developing between her husband and Elizabeth? Or was it something entirely different?

Here, the evidence of the ambassadors’ reports should be recalled. They suggest that, over the past two years since Elizabeth’s accession, Amy may have instead been suffering from some kind of physical illness. In 1559, the Venetian ambassador had written how ‘many persons believe that if his wife, who has been ailing for some time, were perchance to die, the Queen might easily take him for her husband’.13 Cecil too, in his conversations with de la Quadra days before Amy’s body was discovered, inferred that it had been ‘published that she was ill’. The most detailed description comes from de la Quadra’s report in April 1559 that already referred, seventeen months before Amy’s death, to ‘a malady in one of her breasts – in the original Spanish, ‘esta muy mala de un pecho’, implying that Amy’s illness was slowly killing her – ‘the queen is only waiting her death to marry Lord Robert’.14

If Amy had been suffering from an illness, perhaps it might indeed have been terminal – and the cause of the desperation from which she prayed to be delivered. Perhaps the disease might also have had a role to play in her fatal fall down the stairs at Cumnor. In particular, could some kind of ailment or physical weakness have been responsible for Amy having broken her neck from such a short fall, and still been found lying with her headdress intact upon her head?

For centuries the mystery puzzled historians, until fifty years ago when a novel theory was put forward by Dr Ian Aird. Aird suggested that Amy might have died from the consequences of a spontaneous fracture of her neck bone, which would have caused her to fall down the stairs and appear to have broken her neck without any impairment to her headdress. Aird considered that

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