Robert Dudley’s Last Letter to Queen Elizabeth
The story of Queen Elizabeth and Robert Dudley is one of the most touching stories in Queen Elizabeth’s reign.
Childhood friends, Dudley had always been the queen’s favorite.
After the mysterious death of his first wife Amy Robsart, Dudley and Elizabeth grew apart.
The constant accusations had them both down as orchestrating Amy’s murder, so they could be together.
Dudley’s subsequent remarriage to the queen’s cousin Lady Lettice Knollys, had the brokenhearted Elizabeth in tears of rage.
Elizabeth banished them from Court.
Dudley was eventually forgiven, and Elizabeth summoned her childhood friend back to court, and to be in her constant presence.
Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, passed away on the 4th of September 1588, at Cornbury Park in Oxfordshire, he was 58 years old.
His health had not been good for some time.
Some accounts say he was suffering from malaria, or stomach cancer.
Just a few weeks earlier, he had rode through the Streets of London, with Elizabeth at his side, celebrating the defeat of ‘The Spanish Armada’.
Dudley’s death had come unexpectedly, hitting Queen Elizabeth harder than anything she had been through before.
A week before he died, Dudley had sent Elizabeth, what turned out to be his farewell letter, full of devotion and loyalty to his ‘Gloriana’.
The Letter reads…..
“I most humbly beseech your Majesty to pardon
your poor old servant to be thus bold, in sending to
know how my gracious lady doth, and what ease of
her late pains she finds, being the chiefest thing in
this world I do pray for, for her to have good health
and long life.
For my own poor case, I continue still your
medicine and find that it amends much better than
with any other thing that hath been given me.
Thus hoping to find perfect cure at the bath, with
the continuance of my wonted prayer for your
Majesty’s most happy preservation, I humbly kiss
your foot.
From your old lodging at Rycote, this Thursday
morning, ready to take on my Journey, by your
Majesty’s most faithful and obedient servant,
Leicester.”
Upon receiving the news of Dudley’s death, a deeply distressed Elizabeth locked herself in her apartments for several days, grieving for her best friend, and seeing nobody.
William Cecil, eventually had the door broken.
Robert’s last letter was Elizabeth’s most treasured possession.
She inscribed it “His last letter” and kept it in a locked casket by her bed, until she died in 1603.
Elizabeth and Dudley, the man she referred to as her “Eyes”, or as “Sweet Robin”, were ‘in love’ for most of their lives.
There is absolutely no real evidence that they were intimate, and on her deathbed, Elizabeth solemnly swore that ~
“though she loved him dearly…nothing unseemly had ever passed between them”.
📜 Cate Blanchett and Joseph Fiennes as Queen Elizabeth I and Robert Dudley in the 1998 film ‘Elizabeth’.
(Working Title Films)
