What If Elizabeth I Had Married Robert Dudley? (The Decision That Nearly Broke Her)

[00:00:00]Okay, today we need to talk about a staircase. September 1560, a house called Comeer Place out in Oxfordshire.

[00:00:08]At the bottom of a short flight of stairs, there's a woman. She's lying there with her neck broken. Her name is Amy Robsart. She's about 28 years old.

[00:00:19]And [snorts] here is the first [music] weird thing. The whole household had been sent off to the fair that day. She had basically insisted that her servants all go leave the house and go off to the fair. So the house was all but empty and then there she is at the bottom of the stairs. Now look, people fall downstairs. It happens. It happens a lot more when your stairs are stone and your shoes are leather and there's no such thing as a handrail. So on its own, this is a sad accident [music] and nothing more except for who Amy was married to because Amy Robsart is the wife of Robert Dudley. Robert Dudley is the man that half of Europe was convinced that the queen of England was in love with and they were not wrong. So the one woman in the entire country who stands to benefit most from Amy Robart being dead is Queen Elizabeth I. So that's why people have not let this one go for the past 500 years. We're going to talk about it today. And I actually have done lots of other videos before on Amy Robsart. We've done videos on talking about the mystery of Amy Robart. We've talked about Amy Robart herself. We've talked about her a lot. I'll link to those videos in the description. But one thing we haven't done is a what if of what if Elizabeth would have married Robert Dudley after Amy was gone and how that would have changed Dingling cuz I love these little what if videos.

[00:01:55][music] So get comfy, settle in. We are going to talk today about what if Queen Elizabeth would have married Dudley after Amy Robart.

[00:02:12]Hey friend, welcome back to the Renaissance English History Podcast. I am your host Heather. I've been podcasting on Tutor England since 2009 with my show, which makes me the original Tutor History podcaster. I am as always delighted, just thrilled that you are here with me today to talk about Amy Robart and specifically what England would have looked like if Elizabeth had married Robert Dudley. Before I get into it, one quick thing. If you like this sort of story, the kind where the tidy version that you got in school turns out to be hiding something much stranger underneath, go ahead and hit subscribe because I do these most days of the week and I would love to have you along for them. All right, let's dig in. Let's start with the two kids who'd known each other forever. Let me back up because you have to understand who Elizabeth and Robert were to each other. And it's not what you would think. This wasn't some cold political calculation. Elizabeth and Robert had known each other since they were children, actual children.

[00:03:12]They had grown up in the same orbit.

[00:03:14]They'd been tutored in the same world.

[00:03:17]And both of them, the two of them had been prisoners in the Tower of London at the same time back during Elizabeth's sister Mary's reign when Elizabeth was one accusation away from losing her head. So they had a history, the kind of history that you can't manufacture. And then she becomes queen in 1558. And almost the first thing she does is give Robert Dudley one of the best jobs at court. She makes him the master of the horse. I know that sounds like he's in charge of the stable, and technically he is, but what it actually meant was that he was near her constantly. Every time she rode, every time she hunted, every procession, he was right there by design, touching her, being very close to her, helping her get on her horse.

[00:04:07]She built her days around this man. And people noticed. Ooh, people noticed. The Spanish ambassador is writing letters home that are honestly just pure gossip.

[00:04:18]He's reporting that the queen and Lord Robert are all over each other, that she can't stay away from him, that this is a scandal in the making. This is the ambassador of a major world power and he's basically writing a tabloid column, like a TMZ thing about his co-workers and I love it. So that's the situation.

[00:04:41]Two people who genuinely, visibly, embarrassingly wanted each other in front of the entire court, in front of every foreign diplomat taking notes.

[00:04:51]There was, however, just any problem. He was already married. He had a wife. He had Amy. And the marriage by 1560 seems to have gone pretty cold. Amy was mostly living away from court while Robert stayed near the queen. So already this is uncomfortable and already the gossip has an edge to it. But before Amy died, the rumor going around was not just that Robert and Elizabeth were in love. The rumor was that Robert was planning to get rid of his wife. There are reports months before Amy's death of people saying out loud that Lord Robert meant to poison his wife so that he could marry the queen. Let's just think about that for a second. The gossip predicted it and then the wife turns up at the bottom of the staircase in the empty house. Can you even imagine a worse possible way for that to happen? If someone had sat down and tried to design the single most damaging version of this death, they could not have done it any better. It didn't matter what actually happened on those stairs. The official verdict when they held the inquest was that it was an accident, and it may very well have been. She may have had an illness that made her fragile. There's a theory about that. She also may simply have fallen. People do fall. We'll probably never know. And honestly, I don't think that's particularly the interesting question. I mean, it is.

[00:06:27]There's other videos about that. But the truth was never the thing that actually mattered here. The suspicion was the thing that mattered. And the suspicion is what was catastrophic. So now we are at the heart of the whole thing. The moment that Elizabeth has to choose, the obstacle is gone. The one person standing between Elizabeth and the man that she loved has just been removed from the chessboard. She's the queen.

[00:06:55]She has the power to marry whoever she wants. She has, as far as anybody can tell, the actual feelings and the door is now wide open. And she said no. So, I need you to understand how much I think about this. She said no, not because she'd fallen out of love with him, because by every account, she stayed devoted to this man for the rest of her life. She said no because of the timing.

[00:07:23]Because the exact event that set him free was the exact event that made him impossible to marry.

[00:07:34]Think about what marrying him in 1561 would have said. It would have told every person in England and every court in Europe that the queen and her lover had killed his wife to clear the road.

[00:07:47]It would have turned the whispered rumor into confirmed fact. Marrying Robert Dudley after Amy died in that house would not have looked like a love story.

[00:07:58]It would have looked more like a confession. And this is the part where it's a really brutal thing for Elizabeth to have to work out in her own head.

[00:08:06]She's what about 27 years old at this point. She's been queen for barely 2 years. She is young. She's unmarried.

[00:08:14]She's a Protestant woman on a throne that a huge number of powerful people flatly do not believe a woman should be sitting on by herself. She is holding that throne by the tip of her fingernails. And the one personal thing that she wants, the one human comfort is the exact thing that could knock her off of it. The wanting was the danger. The love was a liability.

[00:08:40]I don't think we give her enough credit for how cold and clear that decision was. She did the math and the math was heartbreaking and she chose the crown.

[00:08:50]Every single time we roll our eyes at the virgin queen like it was some kind of marketing gimmick, we're missing that it started right here on these stairs with a choice that did cost her something very real. Okay, let me take a breath for a second because I want to tell you about a thing that I actually built. It's called the tutor scroll.

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[00:10:14]Okay, so back to Elizabeth. All right, this is a what if. So, let's actually play it out. Let's say she doesn't do the cold, clear, correct thing. Let's say she's 27 and she thinks, "To heck with all of you. I'm the queen and I'm going to marry who I like, King Robert.

[00:10:33]What happens next?" Well, a few things could have happened. And this is where it gets really interesting because it doesn't all break one way. First, there is the Dudley problem. And this is a big one. Robert's family is radioactive. I mean, you look at the Dudleys, even back to Henry VII's reign, the beginning of Henry VII's reign with Empson and Dudley. Um, these people, this family is just kind of radioactive. Robert's father was executed for treason for trying to put Lady Jane Gray on the throne. His grandfather was executed for treason earlier, too, a generation earlier, though that one was more of a stitch up because he'd been Henry VIIth's most hated tax collector, and Henry VII threw him to the wolves to buy himself some easy goodwill. But the point holds either way. This is a family with two straight generations of men who ended up on the scaffold for treason.

[00:11:27]Also then his brother Guilford Dudley also for treason. Again, not fair, but there it is. So putting a Dudley right next to the throne again that fast is exactly the thing that will make the old nobility deeply, deeply nervous. Do the great families fracture into factions?

[00:11:45]Does the court tear itself apart over a jumped up favorite from a traitor family? Very possibly. Yes.

[00:11:54]Second, the murder cloud never lifts.

[00:11:56]Not ever. If she marries the man whose wife died alone in a locked house, then the they killed Amy Robsard stops being gossip and becomes the founding story of her reign. Every Catholic court in Europe that already wanted an excuse to call her illegitimate, to call her a bastard heretic with no right to the throne now has the perfect one handed to them gift wrapped. Her entire reign was a 40-year fight over legitimacy. This would have poured gas all over it.

[00:12:29]Third, and this follows from that, does it hand her enemies the actual excuse that they needed? Grumbling about a queen is one thing. Grumbling about a queen who married her lover over his wife's fresh grave is another. That's the kind of thing that turns muttering into a rising. There were plenty of people who would have loved a reason and this could very well have been it. But here's where it really opens up for me because so far we've only been talking about what she loses at home. Marrying Dudley doesn't just change England, it changes England's whole position in the world. And I don't think I understood how much until I actually sat down and looked at what Elizabeth had spent the next 20 years doing.

[00:13:13]Because here's the thing about the Virgin Queen. She didn't just decline to marry. She turned not marrying into her foreign policy. She weaponized it. And it might be the single cleverest thing that she ever did. Look at it from Europe's side for a second. An unmarried queen sitting on the throne of England is the most valuable prize on the whole continent. Whoever marries her folds England into their family, their alliance, and eventually, everyone assumes, their religion. So, every Catholic power in Europe spends two solid decades desperate to land her. And Elizabeth just dangles it. She lets them all hope for 20 years. And the list of men that she strings along is a little bit incredible. Early on, there's Eric of Sweden. And then there's the Archduke Charles of Austria, Hapsburg. And the Hapsburg part is the whole point because keeping a Hapsburg hopeful keeps Spain and the Holy Roman Empire, friendly towards her at the exact moment that she is a broke, isolated Protestant queen who cannot afford a single enemy. Then in the 1570s, she swings towards the French. First, the Duke of Anju. And when that falls apart, his baby brother Francis, the Duke of Allenson, this short little man that she nicknamed her frog. She strung the French along with that one all the way into the early 1580s. She was in her late 40s by then.

[00:14:44]Everybody in Europe knew there was never going to be a baby out of it. And she was still running the negotiation. Like, that takes a lot of nerve. And here's why it worked. Every one of those courtships was a stall. Every year the French spent hoping to marry into England was a year that France was not lining up with Spain to crush her. Every year that the Hapsburgs thought that they had a shot was a year that they left her alone. That warming with France in the early 1570s, the treaty of Wah, the whole defensive alliance against Spain, all of that runs right alongside the Anju marriage talks. She did foreign policy through flirtation, through maybe through ask me again next year. She bought England 20 years of survival with a hand she never once intended to actually play. Now marry Robert Dudley in 1561 and every single piece of that is gone. She will have taken the most valuable card in European diplomacy and burned it in year three of her reign on a Protestant nobody from a family of convicted traders. The stall is over before it even starts. Now she has to do foreign policy the hard way with real commitments and real alliances and actual choices and no more maybe to hide behind. And honestly, it's worse than just losing a tool. Because marrying a committed Protestant right out of the gate tells Philip of Spain exactly where England stands immediately at the precise moment that she is the weakest and the least able to defend herself. No more keeping him hopeful with a Hapsburg match. So, does he move earlier? Does the great reckoning with Spain come in 1566 instead of 1588, years before England has the navy or the money or the nerve to survive it? That is not a small change. That might be the whole ball game. And then there's Mary. You know, we were going to come back to Mary.

[00:16:43]Mary, Queen of Scots, flees into England in 1568. And for the next 19 years, she is the son that every single Catholic plot orbits around. the Rulfi plot, the Throck Morton plot, the Babington plot, one after another after another until it finally ends with her head on the block in 1587.

[00:17:04]And I'll be honest, I always just sort of assumed that Mary was dangerous just because she was Mary, because she was charismatic and beautiful and Catholic and royal, but that's not really it. The thing that actually made Mary lethal was the empty cradle. That's like the whole thing. Because Elizabeth had no child, so Mary wasn't just some Catholic troublemaker in a comfortable prison in the countryside. Mary was the heir like we saw with her son. She was the next one in line, the queen and waiting, the readymade replacement sitting right there. And that is what gave every one of those plots its shape. They all said the same exact thing underneath. And Elizabeth and Mary is standing right there already. and England snaps straight back to Rome overnight with nobody able to stop it. Mary's entire power came from the fact that behind Elizabeth there was nothing. No son, no daughter, just a Catholic cousin with a claim and a whole lot of very motivated friends. So now let's go back and fill the cradle. Say Elizabeth marries Dudley in 1561. Say she has a son by 1563, 1564. a Protestant boy raised Protestant growing up right through this entire period. And watch what happens to Mary.

[00:18:24]She just deflates because now if you assassinate Elizabeth, you don't get Mary, you get a Protestant prince and a regency council and a country that carries on calmly exactly as it was.

[00:18:37]Look at what happened with Edward V 6.

[00:18:38]He was even more Protestant than Henry.

[00:18:41]So the plots lose their whole reason to exist. Why would anybody gamble their life murdering a queen when her Protestant child simply inherits the second she's gone? The entire Catholic underground has nothing left to aim at.

[00:18:54]Mary sits in her English house as a sad, harmless exile instead of a weapon that can be used at any time. And maybe in that version, Elizabeth never actually has to sign the death warrant at all because that tormented her more than almost anything she ever did. Ordering the execution of an anointed queen, her own blood, her own cousin. Maybe a nursery full of little heirs means that Mary is simply never dangerous enough to be worth ending. Can you believe that the scandalous, reckless, supposedly career-ending marriage might have been the exact thing that saved Mary, Queen of Scots's life? So, let's look at what the wrong choice actually buys her. It buys her an air. An air buys a stable succession. The stable succession diffuses Mary. Diffusing Mary means maybe no execution, no 19 years of plots, no decades of parliament on its knees begging her to please, please, please sort out who comes next. The reckless romantic choice, the one every adviser she had would have screamed at her not to make, might have been the one that actually secured the entire realm.

[00:20:02]And the careful, correct, brilliant choice she really did make. The one that saved her throne on those stairs in 1560 is the very same choice that left the cradle empty and handed Mary every last ounce of her power. You see the trap that she was in? That's the thing that I can't get past. There's no clean answer anywhere in this. Every single road out of that staircase costs her something enormous.

[00:20:31]Marry him. You might lose your throne, your alliances, your one shield against Spain. Don't marry him. You spend the rest of your life childless, hunted by plots, holding your foreign policy together with flirtation and nerve, and finally forced to kill your own cousin just to stay alive. She was 27 years old, guessing in the dark with the entire future of England riding on which disaster she was willing to live with.

[00:20:57]And she just had to pick one. Now, here's how it actually ends. And I promise you, history wrote this ending better than I ever could. She never married him, of course. She never married anybody. Robert Dudley stayed the closest man to her for the rest of his life, right there at her side through everything for nearly 30 more years. He married other people. It didn't change what they were to each other. And then in 1588, right after the Armada, right after the greatest triumph of her whole reign, he died. And after Elizabeth herself died years later, they found a small box by her bed. Inside it was his last letter to her. And on the outside of it, in her own handwriting, she had written three words, his last letter. She'd kept it by her bed until the day she died. So that's where I will leave her. She made the decision that saved her throne. the cold, correct, brutal one back on those stairs in 1560.

[00:21:58]And she carried what it cost her in a little box next to where she slept for the rest of her life. I think about that box. I think about the fact that the most powerful woman in the world made the call that a woman in power often has to make even now. The call where the thing that you want gets turned into a weapon against you. So you give it up.

[00:22:17]You keep the job. You carry the wanting around in private where it can't be used. That's not a tutor problem. Watch any woman in public life for like a week or more and you'll see some version of it. She just did it first. She did it in the box by her bed and she never let go.

[00:22:33]Anyway, that's what I've been thinking about and I'm glad you're thinking about it now, too. Make sure you leave me a comment and let me know what you think about it. I would love to hear your thoughts. Two quick things before we go.

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[00:23:03]Actually, I think iPhone's going to go live to the world first and Android will be quickly following. Anyway, you can email Heatherlandcast.com if you would like to be one of the first people in.

[00:23:12]Thank you to those who are already testing it. I am so excited about it and thank you for being here. I mean that.

[00:23:19]I'm so grateful for you. If you would like to keep digging into that Amy Robart mystery, you might want to check out the video that I did with Jill from the Murder Mystery Podcast, True Crime Podcast. You can check that out right here or here [snorts] is a video that YouTube thinks you'll like. Thank you again for being here. Remember from my friend, you are deeply loved. I'm so glad I share the planet with you. You make the world a better place and I'm grateful we got to spend this time with each other today talking about Amy Robart. I will be back again very soon.

[00:23:45]In the meantime, don't forget to drink your water. Goodbye friend.