The Mysterious Murder In The Tudor Court | Elizabeth: Killer Queen | Real Royalty

[Music] september the 8th 1560 the discovery of a young woman's body is about to shock elizabethan england the death of amy robsart will threaten elizabeth's reputation and it will ultimately destroy the tudor dynasty with amy's death that elizabeth became the virgin queen it was amy's death that changed the course of history forever amy is found dead at the foot of a staircase the authorities claim she broke her neck accidentally falling down stairs [Music] now by extraordinary chance the coroner's report has been unearthed after 450 years it suggests foul play the magic word amy popped out of the middle of the document and that's the point where i realized what it was i was looking at it it's a eureka moment it's a huge eureka moment for any historian the document contains the explosive revelation that amy had other serious injuries if i carried out this examination i think i'd be saying to the officer investigating to mount a full-scale murder inquiry elizabeth the first we know her as the virgin queen one of england's most famous monarchs her 45-year reign was seen as a stable golden age for the country [Music] but the kingdom she inherited was far from secure mary tudor had just died her reign of terror had earned her the label bloody mary england was weak and crippled by debt on november the 17th 1558 messengers raced to hatfield house to bring elizabeth the news that she was now queen the legend is that first here was robert dudley riding predictably enough a beautiful white horse i'm sure it was a stallion and galloped up and told her that her sister had died and she was now queen of england at last elizabeth had got to where in her view she was born to be aged just 25 elizabeth had to take command of her country [Music] her first appointment was william cecil who had been her chief secretary and advisor all through the years of waiting uh for mary to die ruthless and fiercely protestant william cecil became the most influential man in the country she called cecil spirit and in a sense that sort of signifies that she's not in interested in him physically at all but it's also that he's her kind of guiding light that he's a better self he has a an idea of the world that she doesn't have persuading elizabeth to choose the right husband is one of cecil's chief concerns they thought it would be a disaster to have a woman rule on her own because surely a woman couldn't possibly know how to govern a kingdom foreign suitors circle the queen like vultures even king philip of spain the most powerful man in europe is eager to marry elizabeth there's terrific pressure on elizabeth to marry and have children on the other hand there's terrific pressure on her not to choose the wrong husband had she married someone too powerful then england might just have found itself a satellite of another country for the tudor dynasty to survive it is vital that elizabeth produces an heir yet her thoughts are elsewhere she had fallen for the wild charms of robert dudley she nicknamed him eyes his enemies called him the gypsy elizabeth immediately made robert dudley master of her horse now that in one sense means that he's responsible for the royal stables which is the transport of the court so it's an incredibly responsible position but it also means that he's responsible for the real fun things like hunting and jousting whereas a lot of the other men around her would have appeared with hands full of papers and you know worried brows and a mouthful of problems he'd have appeared as as as an invitation to play dudley and elizabeth's playfulness was beginning to worry many in the royal court it's the first time since she said she's come to the throne she's shown any interest in any in any man and it's a very clear interest and of course it's it's a very emotional one and it'll remain from that point on so in that sense he is a sorry almost a surrogate husband it's the fact she's an unmarried woman there's a sexual side to it you wouldn't see between a male king and his master the horse elizabeth was behaving like a young woman in love not a queen with a country to govern are they having an affair behind the scenes or what and it's from the spaniards and the austrians that we get most of the gossip in the spring of 1560 elizabeth had told spanish ambassador that she couldn't have given an audience because she was ill he found out later she'd gone to watch dudley play tennis and he did he wasn't very amused elizabeth even has dudley's bed chamber moved next to hers they read together hunt together and behave like a courting couple their really passionate time that the time when everyone was terrified that she would marry him the time when half the country thought she was in any case sleeping with him was probably the first two years of her reign when she was so besotted with robert dudley that it was hard to see how she would ever make any convincing agreement to marry anyone else but for most of elizabeth's advisors her courtiers and her subjects dudley was a poor choice of partner elizabeth's relationship with dudley was always bound to be controversial controversial because elizabeth was an unmarried queen and therefore whoever became her husband would be of enormous political significance controversial also because of who dudley was his father had been executed for treason his grandfather had been executed for treason and with a track record like that people thought you really couldn't trust the dudley family any further than you could throw them most contemporaries would have felt that robert dudley was almost the most unsuitable husband that you could come up with for elizabeth dudley was competing with foreign princes like king philip of spain leader of the most powerful nation in europe so dudley spared no expense to dazzle his queen and elizabeth was anything but a cheap date he spent a staggering sum he spent tens of what would in today's money have been tens of thousands of pounds [Music] dudley was playing high stakes to woo the queen it was the biggest gamble of his life the prize to be king of england as the autumn days grew shorter william cecil was certain england faced a dark future if elizabeth were to marry dudley but one person stood in the way of cecil's nightmare vision a woman barely known to elizabeth amy robsart robert dudley's wife they had married 10 years before she was aged 28 in charles-less although amy was living little more than 40 miles from court her husband had not visited for over a year he was with the queen constantly elizabeth hated the gentleman at court to bring their wives with them she was intensely jealous of them she wanted to be you know the queen bee in the hive of the court it was even more the case for robert dudley that his wife just would not be welcome in the presence of elizabeth in 1560 whispers at court grew darker in march dudley was rumored to be divorcing amy in september william cecil told the spanish ambassador that the queen and dudley 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 were elizabeth and her lover plotting to kill amy the court is alive with rumors elizabeth is so obsessed with her lover she is abandoning her office and the country people were prosecuted and severely punished for gossip about the queen some people said that they were lovers some people said that they were married some people even said that she'd had a child by him and the child had been hidden away william cecil now sidelined is at his wit's end dudley his arch rival is gaining power daily all foreign marriages look impossible in desperation cecil plots against the relationship cecil told the spanish ambassador he perceived the most manifest ruin impending over the queen through her intimacy with lord robert cecil elizabeth's chief minister knew the spanish ambassador would tell everyone perhaps the resulting outcry might stop the young lovers william cecil was really an arch enemy of robert dudley and therefore hated the idea that he was closer to elizabeth than than he himself was and indeed feared very much that elizabeth would go an extra step and actually marry robert dudley which would have been a disaster for william cecil it would have effectively ended his political career and therefore he did whatever he could to end their liaison but on september the 9th 1560 elizabeth and dudley's affair was blown apart by news of amy's death the 28 year old had been found dead at the foot of a staircase with a broken neck was it an accident or something more sinister what happened that day remains one of the great unsolved mysteries of the tudor age historian chris skidmore has now reopened this coldest of cold cases through a series of startling discoveries i think the fascinating thing about amy robstar's death is not just that she was found dead and no one was there to witness her end but the full range of possibilities of how she could have died whether it was suicide accident or murder and there is really got all the ingredients of a proper agatha christie thriller amy never had her own home instead robert dudley moved her between the houses of his senior servants she died while staying with dudley's servant anthony foster here in the oxford village of cumner at cumner place the question of how and why amy died has gripped generations of writers and historians the house features in a famous victorian novel kennel worth so walter scott wrote this 19th century thriller about the deadly love triangle between elizabeth dudley and amy the door of the countess's chamber opened and in the same moment the trapdoor gave way there was a rushing sound a heavy fall a faint groan and it was all over varney called in at the window is the bird caught is the deed done oh god forgive us replied anthony foster of course it's completely made up a complete fiction as scott intended it to be but it didn't stop victorians reading this in their droves it became a bestseller of its day twins came here they wanted to see come to a place feel and experience the place where amy had died and met her death so what happened to the stairs where amy was discovered the staircase is now gone in 1810 kamna place was ripped down the site has since become the village graveyard only a few ruined walls remain although the building was demolished 200 years ago chris can still discover fascinating clues about the staircase archaeologist edward impe was born in kamla as a child he was gripped by amy's story and he built a detailed model of camel place so edward on the model you have here um whereabouts would amy have been staying well it's essentially guesswork but one would guess that she was given the grandest apartment then where would they have been in the village and that would be the great chamber which is here so i suspect that's where she was lodged where would the staircase have been that um amy met a fateful end the stairs were in under this corner of the building here in other words at the very west end of the north range and we know that from this plan the model is based on a sketch made by antiquarian samuel license in 1805 before come the place was demolished i think it's possible you could fall down a stair like that and die um there's a stone stair with sharp edges to the steps um but um beyond that really i mean that's about the limit of what i think the the archaeology if you like in the architecture can tell you from this unpromising scrap of evidence modern technology allows us to reproduce what the staircase in the sketch might have looked like so here's your plan the little portion of the staircase that we've got and we can view it three-dimensionally and i can just start making up the treads and building up the staircase what you can say is it's a dangerous staircase and lots of sharp edges essentially the model shows that halfway down the stairs there is a small landing a dividing wall between the two flights of stairs made it almost impossible to fall all the way from the top of the stairs to the bottom every year in england and wales more than 600 people die after falling downstairs most of these were elderly in amy's age group those aged between 25 and 30 there were just four deaths we can't rule out the fact that amy could have died accidentally falling down a set of stairs only eight steps highs three castles like that do happen but it does seem highly unlikely the body at the foot of the stairs is almost an exam question for forensic pathologists we'd be looking for signs first of all um that somebody has actually come down these stairs and so on stone steps concrete steps such as these um hard somewhat rough surface somebody falling down the stairs might leave traces of that full in the form of parts of them um hair blood fragments of skin perhaps it'll be a careful examination to see if there's any sign of that are they young or old do they have a history of drink problems drug abuse again something that might put them unsteady on their feet a young woman being found dead at the foot of the stairs i would say is in itself a suspicious circumstance and these days would almost invariably warrant further investigation these statistics suggest it is improbable that a healthy young woman like amy robsart would have died from a staircase fall but was amy really in good health one envoy wrote that she'd been ailing for some time another dispatch said she had a melody in one of her breasts the question of amy robeson's health is one of the central issues of this whole story she might have had some form of cancer possibly breast cancer which had led to the thinning of her bones which meant that when she just lost her footing possibly even on the last stair that her neck might have cracked which might meant that she collapsed dying but collapsed quite neatly as it were with her gown down and a hood still on that there wasn't a great head over heels fall down the stairs and historians have liked that explanation for a long time if amy really was suffering from advanced cancer it would explain dudley's chilling remark six months before amy's death that if he live another year he will be in a very different position from now perhaps he and elizabeth knew that amy had just months left to live but chris gidmor believes that the cancer theory simply doesn't fit the known facts about amy's last months alive we know that in the final two years of her life amy moved from place to place she started in hartfordshire at home of william hyde then went off to richard bernie's house up in uh warwickshire then finally down to come to place this sort of movement around and about doesn't seem like the movements of a woman who may have had terminal breast cancer even if she were somebody with multiple secondary cancer deposits in her bones that in itself is not going to cause her in itself to be unsteady on her feet and is not going to be a situation where if she were to fall over she is going to end up with a fractured neck and this is simply not something that we see so whilst it's an interesting theory i i fear it's it's speculative and not much more than that and there's one other telling touching detail which challenges the cancer theory it's written by amy herself one of two surviving letters that allow us to glimpse who she really was longleat one of the most impressive elizabethan houses in england is the home to this precious document it was found by chance more than 300 years after amy's death so what we have here is a letter from amy dudley herself to her taylor and what's intriguing about it is both that it's one of the only two letters of her own to survive and the fact that it was written a bear fortnight before her death this is to desire you to take such pains for me as to make this gown of velvet which i send you with such a collar as you made the russet taffeta gown you sent me last if she were indeed gravely ill you might ask whether she would have been writing off to you know order a new expensive gown it gives us a sense that even that close to her death from whatever cause she was still a living breathing interested woman and i think that that's very valuable because it lets us see a bit of amy herself and not just as this passive victim of other people's machinations is it possible amy wanted the dress because she was hoping to be reunited with robert for the first time in over a year she'd heard that he would be at windsor with the court just 40 miles from kumner there are very few references to amy's state of health that survive and those are reports from court rumors the spanish ambassador was told by william cecil in september 1560 that she was quite well so if cancer didn't kill amy robsart what did [Music] to get closer to the elusive truth about amy robsart's death chris skidmore has been re-examining what happened that september over four centuries ago it was here at windsor castle on the 9th september 1560 robert lubda discovered that his wife amy was found dead his inner turmoil is revealed in letters sent to his friend and retainer thomas bland just hours after hearing of the events incumbent [Music] cousin blood immediately after your departure from me they came to me both by whom i do understand that my wife is dead and as he saith by a fall from a pair of stairs little other understanding can i have of him dudley's in a cleanliness state of in quite a emotional spin the problem is is that it looks almost as if he's more worried about his effect on his position than necessary regret or sadness over the death of his wife there's something slightly forensic about his approach to him the greatness and the seriousness of the misfortune that so perplexed me until i do hear from you how the matter standeth or how this evil should light upon me considering what the malicious world shall brew it as i can have no rest desperate for answers dudley ordered his servant thomas blound to ride to cumner thomas bloems immediately begins his own investigation a jury had begun to assemble but blunt wanted to find answers particularly from amy's servants when did you leave my ladyship's house at midday sir to catch the best of the fair sir what state was she in well enough she was busy she had her accounts and books to do sir was she troubled did she have strange heirs no sir not that i did notice what blount's question uncovered was extraordinary when amy died come the place should have been a hive of activity but blount discovered to his shock that amy had been alone thomas brown began his investigations into doing each servant we have a record of him talking to mrs pichto amy's mate found that amy had woken up early that morning before dawn she woke up in an angry mood she was most angry sir for some reason she insisted that the house be cleared there was a fair at nearby abingdon and all the servants were going to go but she insisted that everybody go that she have the house to herself we will not leave you mistress it is not proper way to the fair it's a very extraordinary thing for a woman of that period to demand this is a time where people live with servants the servants are living you almost always sleep with somebody you always have a bed fellow the idea that you'd want the house to yourself is really quite extraordinary it's a modern notion we can imagine it but at the time that's a very odd thing to demand come mary she will not be broke but that wasn't all that blount discovered amy for several weeks have been praying in desperation to god powering according to mrs pikto at which point blount was amazed he asked if she had an evil toy in her mind meeting did she have suicidal thoughts she was a good and virtuous woman and daley would pray on her knees and ask god to deliver her from her desperation the tudor's attitude to suicide was extreme tudor society believed that those who committed suicide were possessed by the devil therefore they weren't given a christian burial and instead their bodies stripped naked and buried at a crossroads with a stake driven straight through their heart to a devout tudor woman like amy suicide was unthinkable and the letter to her tailor corroborates this view that picture of a desperate amy longing to be out of her her present situation maybe even out of her life doesn't quite fit with the woman who was sending off to have a dress address altered [Music] nor does suicide square with where she was found the stare of that type would be an incredibly unsuitable place to try and commit suicide so i think that can be pretty much ruled out i mean there are plenty of ways in coming you can kill yourself without falling down without throwing yourself down a shallow flight of stairs so an accident seems improbable suicide does not fit the known facts which leads murder the fragments of evidence that survive say amy had a broken neck but strangely no other injuries for over 400 years historians scoured the archives searching in vain for amy's inquest report the testimony from witnesses who inspected her dead body chris skidmore believed it was lost forever but then he received a tip-off stephen gunn was my former supervisor one day he emailed just out of the blue to say chris i think you'd be interested in this document stephen gunn was studying the decline of archery in tudor times he was scouring the records for deaths due to archery in order to find those i had to read every accidental death report and i was starting to notice all kinds of other interesting accidents people killed in football matches people killed falling out of church towers bell ringing people killed mauled by performing bears and then in one of these reports i spotted the name amy and read on and realized that it was the coroner's inquest on amy's accident well the email dropped through in my inbox i opened it up couldn't believe my eyes i mean this really was historical goal which is not the sort of thing you get every day the magic word amy popped out of the middle of the document and that's the point where i realized what it was i was looking at this is amy's long-lost coroner's report revealing exactly how amy died we knew amy was found with a broken neck and no marks on her body and her clothing and headdress intact but the report says she also had two massive head wounds written in latin it uses an old english word to describe the wounds dints vocab didn't that's the english word didn't switch in old english means a blow to the head often by a sword or in battle and so what's fascinating here is actually gives the depth of the head wounds so that we have here that the um the dense one is half a thumb length deep because they're actually measuring the wound's stick of thumb to actually measure it the other wound on her head is two thumb lengths deep and that's an enormous wound to have in the base of a skull if amy had a two-inch deep wound to the top of her head i'd be looking for some sort of mace ball on the end of a chain with spikes on it some sort of halberd or spear something of that sort of nature um to cause this sort of penetrating injury to the skull it does suggest that these maybe puncture wounds so rather than being sort of slash wounds that actually the depth of the wound in particular being two thumb lengths deep um it's just a puncture wound to her skull somehow which opens the whole question of whether amy could have been hit on the head her neck broken and then her body laying at the bottom of the set of stairs in order to create the semblance of an accident i think i'd be saying to the officer investigating to to mount a full-scale murder inquiry i'm really sorry that she was murdered so brutally and although i'm thrilled to discover it and although i have in a sense a detective's excitement i also have a kind of friend's grief for it in a strange way which is that you know she was a woman who had done nothing to deserve being murdered except for being married to a man that the queen of england was in love with and it seems to me really wrong that she should have suffered such a penalty for being in that position england was alive with rumors the queen was linked to a murder the scandal surrounding amy's death was clearly extremely serious for elizabeth after all it was so convenient for elizabeth if she really wanted to marry robert dudley that robert dudley was no longer married that people would have suspected either that she had had a hand in organizing things or even if she hadn't that she'd had a hand in covering up whoever had organized it with dudley mired in scandal elizabeth now turned to william cecil to help her ride out the storm everyone in england was asking who stood to gain by amy's murder less than a fortnight after her death amy's funeral procession crossed these cobbles the event cost robert dudley the equivalent of a hundred thousand pounds it would have been quite a spectacle to behold every single wall of the church would have been draped in black linen right down to the floor same time there would have been hundreds of wax tapers if not thousands in every window in every corner of the church and towards the chancery was amy's body the preacher at amy's funeral gave the sermon and it was later reported that he slipped up saying amy had been pitifully murdered certainly for those here the mourners at the funeral have been certainly surprised by his choice of words the only person missing was amy's husband robert dudley was this the sign of a guilty man [Music] if dudley was to murder his wife he would have been a widower single once more and free to marry the queen as a result he would not only become the queen's husband but the king of england at first glance dudley seems the most likely killer he had everything to gain from amy's death and so did those around him robert dudley would have had what's called a retinue a band of followers who are absolutely dedicated to his calls we have documents showing that they were willing to go out in the streets of london with daggers fighting other nobleman's retinues they were certainly let's say a bunch of thugs who would have done their masters bidding whatever the calls so did their master ever give the order dudley and his wife may not have been close he was rumored to have tried to divorce amy but he surely didn't need to kill her the besotted queen would do anything for him why not a null his marriage her father henry viii had simply dissolved his marriage to catherine of aragon would dudley have risked committing a crime so easily exposed if i was robert dudley and i was going to kill my wife i would have killed her and got rid of the body that would have been infinitely more satisfactory from robert's point of view than signaling a murder which means everybody has to say well who's most likely to murder her which means everybody says for the last 500 years probably robert that would be a ridiculous thing to do if you're robert dudley it'd be the last thing to do and of course the consequence of being regarded as her most likely murderer is that the one thing that he wants which is to marry elizabeth becomes absolutely impossible to him because elizabeth's reputation cannot be damaged by the widespread belief that she's married a man who murdered his first wife evidence in dudley's defense comes from the letters he wrote soon after his wife's death dudley's reaction when he hears his wife has died is very very interesting because really his reaction then is the strongest evidence we have for his innocence robert wrote immediately to blunt in a tone of complete and utter astonishment and consternation dudley wasn't expressing grief but is clearly worried about the damage to his reputation blanc's not asked to hide anything but in a sense let the you know let the truth out and then send a dudley who in that sense had no doubts about his own innocence and you know possibly worried that his enemies might do something it is a little hard very hard to read those letters and believe that robert dudley ordered amy's death at kumner that day but what if dudley's henchmen took matters into their own hands and killed amy i think we have to think in what way would a servant say well my master wouldn't be fantastic if his wife was suddenly dead if her life was ended and then my masters the king then i myself will rise up a court it's all about power and the nature of power and the abuse of that power one such loyal lieutenant stands out his name sir richard verney in the 1970s a discovery was made at the british library this contemporary account of amy's death clearly identifies a prime suspect how the lord robert's wife break her neck at forster's house in oxfordshire 1560 a gentleman being gone forth to affair how be it it was thought she was slain for severni was there that day and whilst the deed was doing was going over the fair and tarried there for his man hath thou dan qathurni yay quoth the man i have made it sure here we have evidence that vernee was here at kumner at the time when amy died and that he'd arranged her death this pious man is thought to be richard verney's father with his six sons one of these boys will become sir richard verney this is the only image known of him could this be amy robsart's killer but would robert dudley have tolerated one of his servants committing such a risky crime my suspicion is there's so much at stake here for dudley that if he thought that was the case he himself might have brought richard verney to justice i really think that dudley would have done anything to clear his name so who else stood to gain by amy's death the other person in the love triangle was elizabeth the first could the queen of ordered the death of her rival [Music] we clearly have no forensic evidence from the crime scene but there may be clues in amy's odd behavior on the morning of her death [Music] she had sent away all her servants leaving the house empty the perfect time for an assassin to strike would make her clear the house to whom would she respond with some obedience if her husband sent her a message and told her that he wanted to see her quite alone and that no one was to be in i think she would have cleared the house for robert dudley i think she would have cleared the house for william cecil because he's a man of such importance possibly other people at court certainly she would have cleared the house at the request of the queen amy was preventing the queen from marrying the man she loved could elizabeth have committed a crime of passion elizabeth had an incredibly fiery temper i think inherited from both her father henry viii and her mother ann berlin and she was capable of lashing out at those around her honestly you're absolutely incompetent get out some of the most notorious involve her ladies and waiting when she um one day stabbed one of the ladies in the back of her hand with a fork for serving her ill at dinner and she broke another lady's finger in a fit of temper when the said lady had dared to marry without elizabeth's consent that usually was the cardinal offense that was guaranteed to send elizabeth into an absolute furion she was once described by the imperial ambassador as being the colour of a corpse when she heard about the misdoings of one of her ladies elizabeth certainly may have had inside knowledge about amy's death a letter from the spanish ambassador to his master king philip of spain makes an extraordinary claim amy's death had not been made public but the queen seemed to know the details the spanish ambassador uh speaks to the queen and she says that amy dudley is dead or nearly so so you have this sudden idea this the ambassador suddenly gets the impression that amy dudley who he thought was perfectly well is at the point of death if not dead already and that the queen knows this before all of that information had officially come to court so would the queen of england really have risked her reputation and ultimately her throne for love she certainly had a very vindictive streak and she was very strong-willed and she was capable of extreme cunning so i think she had the right attributes but i think elizabeth was far too much of a pragmatist to have taken such a drastic step um of involving herself in in a murder which in the in the very closeted world of the tudor court which was riven with spies the secret would have come out i think if elizabeth really had been involved and i don't believe that she would have ever taken such a great risk she was she was a very calm collected politician i don't think it would have entered her rationale to take a step as drastic as to order somebody's murder so the queen and robert dudley seem unlikely to have had amy killed who else had the authority to order her assassination we may never be certain of the identity of the killer that would require finding a 450 year old confession but it is clear who benefited most from amy's death [Music] i believe cecil murdered amy dudley and i think he did it for in his view very good reasons it's william cecil who makes the absolute connection between amy dudley's death robert's reputation and the impossibility of robert ever being able to marry the queen amy is murdered in such a suspicious way that everybody believes it's robert and that disqualifies him from marriage with the queen if you think cecil capable of that it's a really brilliant plan it really is it's a really brilliant plan before amy's death cecil had been close to resigning after her death his fortune soared and never dipped again however chris skidmore is not convinced that amy's death was arranged by cecil for him it's a conspiracy theory too far well there's no doubt that cesar was an astute political operator um it may have been that he used amy's death to his full advantage but i don't think that that implies that he arranged for amy's death it simply wouldn't make sense for him to have left robert dudley a widower unable to marry the queen whilst amy's head wounds make murder seem a likely explanation historians dispute who had the greatest motive to kill her the uncovering of amy's autopsy suggests over four centuries on further evidence may still await discovery whether or not cecil ordered amy's murder her death certainly achieved the effect that he wanted but robert dudley did not give up his attempts to woo elizabeth [Music] in 1575 he threw the party of the century for elizabeth at kennel worth castle [Music] a very large amount of money was indeed spent it is the big part of elizabeth's reign there's no doubt about that it may well have been that this was robert's last throw of the dice we know about the firework display and the italian pyrotechnics expert who'd originally apparently planned to fire live cats and dogs out of his machines but was fortunately dissuaded from that a banquet of 300 different dishes another pageant which had aryan riding on the back of this gigantic mechanical dolphin with six musicians concealed in its belly a large number of people attended uh most many of them actually had to be put up in warwick i mean it completely swamped kernel worth town and there has been an assumption that among them was a boy from stratford william shakespeare there are allusions to these pageants in some of his plays particularly midsummer night's dream [Music] but all the expense the lavish party and gardens were wasted on elizabeth dudley had come closer to her than any other man ironically the death of his wife also killed his chances of ever winning the queen's hand elizabeth had decided to stay as history remembers her the virgin queen [Music] and the tudor dynasty died with her in the end this shall be for me sufficient that a marble stone shall declare that a queen having reigned such a time lived and died a virgin would elizabeth have remained the virgin queen had amy robson not been murdered amy's life scarcely left any impact on history but her death ricocheted down the centuries [Music] she is the third part of a love triangle which you know she had no part in whatsoever you know he neglected her he left her he never even provided her with a proper house an establishment of her own they didn't have children together and for me in many ways she kind of served as a model of wives who are betrayed by husbands husbands who get more glamorous lives and better offers elsewhere [Music] amy's tomb is hidden away in a corner of oxford's university church does this seem an appropriate grave for a woman whose life's so insignificant and yet in death marks one of the most significant events in tudor history it was with amy's death that elizabeth became the virgin queen it was amy's death that changed the course of history

Channel: Real Royalty

Views: 363,065

Keywords: real royalty, real royalty channel, british royalty, royalty around the world, royal history

Id: B5INmdOmgs4

Length: 47min 35sec (2855 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 07 2021