Read To Shield the Queen Online
Authors: Fiona Buckley
Tags: #Fiction, #General, #Mystery & Detective
To Shield the Queen (30 page)
“I mean, dear Mistress Blanchard, that when I pointed that trio out to you and encouraged you to notice that Peter Holme—I too know his name now—was not of equal social status to the others, I merely wanted to instruct you in habits of observation. I had heard rumours about the threat to Lady
Dudley—I said that at the time. I felt that anyone who went to that household should be alert, for their own sake. But I had no knowledge, then, that Derby, Smith and Holme were conspiring together. When I first heard of Lady Dudley’s death, I believed that her husband could be responsible. You sensed the conspiracy yourself, Mistress Blanchard. I think you have an instinct for nosing out such things. Do you intend to remain at court?”
“Yes, my lord.”
De Quadra bowed. “I shall be very very careful of you,” he said.
Rumours that her husband Sir Robin Dudley had arranged it were rife, although the panic-stricken letter which he wrote afterwards to his cousin Thomas Blount goes a long way towards exonerating him.
It is possible that the theory advanced by Professor Ian Aird in the
English Historical Review
, 1956, is correct. Professor Aird observed that if Lady Dudley really did have cancer, she may have suffered from the secondary effect of brittle bones, which could have caused her neck to snap spontaneously, or as the result of a fall which would not have been fatal to a healthy person.
On the other hand, there were many people at Queen Elizabeth’s court who viewed the prospect of a marriage between the queen and Dudley with absolute horror. If there were any danger that Amy might obligingly die and release him, then the temptation to
help her out of the world and create a scandal at the same time, was certainly there.
It is a fact that the queen regarded Lady Catherine Grey with dislike and was so angry when she found that Lady Catherine had clandestinely married Lord Hertford, that she put them both in the Tower.
Sir Thomas Smith prospered under Elizabeth on the whole, and in the early 1560s he went to Paris as her ambassador (not always a comfortable post). Although they were generally united in their loyalty to Elizabeth, Smith did at one point have a quarrel, cause unknown, with Sir William Cecil. The Earl of Derby was always apparently loyal to Elizabeth, although Cecil regarded him with suspicion—perhaps because of his strong Catholic leanings, perhaps for some other reason.
I have taken the liberty of inventing explanations for both of these mysteries.
Amye Robsart and the Earl of Leycester
by George Adlard (1870).
The Elizabethan World
by Lacey Baldwin Smith (Houghton Mifflin Company, 1991).
The Reign of Elizabeth
by J. B. Black from
The Oxford History of England
, edited by Sir George Clark (Oxford University Press, 1988).
Mary Queen of Scots
by Antonia Fraser (Mandarin Paperbacks, 1989).
The Elements of Herbalism
by David Hoffman (Element Books, 1990).
Elizabeth and Essex
by Elizabeth Jenkins (Panther, 1972).
Elizabeth the Great
by Elizabeth Jenkins (Victor Gollancz, 1968).
A History of Oxfordshire
by Mary Jessup (Phillimore, 1975).
Elizabeth I
by Wallace MacCaffrey (Edward Arnold, 1993).
Seven Hundred Years of English Cooking
by Maxine McKendry, edited by Arabella Boxer (Treasurer Press, 1985).
Elizabethan England
by Alison Plowden (Reader’s Digest Association, 1982).
The Tudor Age
by Jasper Ridley (Guild Publishing by arrangement with Constable & Co., 1988).
Elizabeth I
by Anne Somerset (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1991).
All the Queen’s Men
by Neville Williams (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1972).
The Tudor Age
by James A. Williamson (Longman, 1979).
Originally published in Great Britain by Orion
First published in hardcover in the United States in 1997
by Scribner
SCRIBNER BOOKS, a division of Simon & Schuster Inc.
1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020
Copyright © 1997 by Fiona Buckley
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Scribner, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020
ISBN: 0-671-01531-1
ISBN: 978-1-43913945-5 (ebook)
First Scribner Books printing November 1998
SCRIBNER and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster Inc.
Cover art by Harry Bliss