John Dudley: The Family Man

“Whatever else may be said of them, the Duke and Duchess of Northumberland produced a large and happy family.”1 Such a statement about a man who is best known for sacrificing his teenage son and daughter-in-law on the altar of insatiable ambition may seem odd; yet what historian Simon Adams expresses here is a universally held view among experts. The following documents will show us their reasons and at the same time give us some surprising insights into 16th century family life.

Essentially, John Dudley grew up as an orphan. When he was four or five years old, his father disappeared from his London home and moved to a Tower cell on a strange treason charge. Within the next 16 months Edmund Dudley composed a treatise defending absolute monarchy and planned his escape; he gave up the latter endeavour when Parliament did not confirm his attainder, which led him to believe in a royal pardon. Such hopes of the merciful character of Henry VIII proved futile, though, and Henry VII’s efficient and loyal financial officer lost his head on 17 August 1510. A year later the King arranged the marriage of Edmund’s widow, Elizabeth Grey, to Arthur Plantagenet, a bastard son of Edward IV who would become Viscount Lisle through his wife’s inheritance. The seven-year-old John Dudley and his two little brothers, Andrew and Jerome, may never have seen their mother again.

In 1512 John Dudley became the ward of Sir Edward Guildford, who took him into his household. It was usual for upper-class children to be given into another household for education at the age of seven or eight, and it may not have been of much practical difference to him whether his father was dead or alive; still, John Dudley never forgot the injustice of ‟my poor father’s fate who, after his master was gone, suffered death for doing his master’s commandments“.2

Sir Edward Guildford had a daughter, Jane, and a son, Richard. With these children John probably shared classes; growing up, he became like a son to his guardian, and at 20 he married the 16-year-old Jane Guildford, an arrangement between his mother and Sir Edward.3 It proved to be a happy and fruitful union, and a 1535 poem spoke of “the love and devotion with which you and your noble wife adorn the ties of marriage”.4 From the early 1530s the couple moved in reform-friendly circles. Their children were tutored by foreign refugees like Michelangelo Florio and Nicholas Bourbon, the latter urging the Dudleys “to continue to follow the banners of Christ”.5 With the years, the whole family became keenly interested in the new sciences, and their resident instructors included the rhetorician Thomas Wilson and the magus John Dee. Roger Ascham was indignant that his pupil Robert Dudley preferred Euclid to Cicero; John Dudley collected astrolabes and his wife clocks.

From 1537 Jane Dudley and her children may have lived mostly at Dudley Castle, Staffordshire, which John Dudley had acquired from a cousin, the Baron Dudley, also known as “Lord Quondam”. Despite having inherited huge debts, the baron was unable to give up spending. In 1532 John Dudley, perhaps smelling a good deal, scratched up over £7,000 which he lent his cousin on the security of the baronial estate. Lord Quondam never paid off his many creditors; instead he tried to evade foreclosure by sending pathetic pleas to King Henry and to Thomas Cromwell. This method did not work endlessly, and in 1537 John Dudley came into possession of the Castle;6 he soon started to build a beautiful residential wing in the style of the Renaissance.

John Dudley, 1540s, with wand of office. The Garter ribbon around his neck is discernible.

Little is known of the personal lives of John Dudley’s younger brothers, Andrew and Jerome. Like John, Andrew distinguished himself in the navy and the Scottish wars and acquired positions of trust at the court of Edward VI. He was evidently loyal and close to his eldest brother. Jerome had originally been destined for the Church by his father; yet he was either mentally or physically incapacitated and needed special care, the Dudleys paying for “his board and his apparel”.7 The brothers had three half-sisters from their mother’s marriage to Arthur Plantagenet. One of them, Elizabeth, lived with John Dudley and his family before her marriage to one of his cronies, Francis Jobson (another man involved in the Dudley boys’ education8). On the whole, John Dudley had a friendly relationship with his stepfather (who had cheated him of part of his inheritance); in 1536 he made a private visit to Calais, where Arthur Plantagenet acted as Lord Deputy. However, Dudley became very outspoken when he felt his half-sister’s interests to be in jeopardy, informing her father in 1538: “for my part I have and will do as becomes a brother to do to his sister”.9

John Dudley, created Viscount Lisle after his stepfather’s death in 1542, was a good friend of William Parr, who in 1543 found himself brother-in-law to Henry VIII. Jane Dudley, Viscountess Lisle was one of the new queen’s best friends and attended her marriage ceremony.10 Among the Protestant connections of Catherine Parr was the outspoken housewife Anne Askew, who clashed with the authorities due to her unorthodox views. Jane Dudley contacted her in prison, and at some point before she was tortured and burnt at the stake, John Dudley and William Parr tried to persuade her to conform to the Catholic doctrines of the Henrician church. Unimpressed, she told the two “it was great shame for them to counsel contrary to their knowledge”.11

The Dudleys’ family life was absolutely scandal-free, and John was by all accounts a model husband.12 In 1548 he rather stayed with his suffering wife than return to court after a long absence, since she “had had her fit again more extreme that she had any time yet.”13 There is evidence that John Dudley may have been somewhat under his wife’s thumb. When leading a diplomatic peace mission to France in 1546, he used his colleague William Paget as an intermediary:

As I lack leisure to write to my wife, I shall desire you to make her my recommendations; and where she wrote for some goldsmith’s work from Paris, I pray God I may have enough to bring home myself. I assure you this journey hath been extremely chargeable, after such sort as I think I shall be fain to hide myself in a corner for seven years after. I have borrowed here in Paris almost £500 and all little enough.14

Likewise, when in 1552 the then Duke of Northumberland could not return to schedule from an inspection tour in the North of England, he warned his young son-in-law Henry Sidney: “I pray you keep this from my wife.”15

There is even funnier evidence about high society English husbands and their wives. When after the Privy Council’s revolt against the Duke of Somerset in 1549 it was reported that “the Protector was still in the Tower, and everyday it was said that either on that or the next day, he would be let out to have his head cut off”, his wife, “a very prudent woman, … went one morning to the Earl of Warwick’s house” to plead with him for her husband’s life. Dudley, Earl of Warwick since 1547, had great difficulties convincing her to rise up from her kneeling position and take a seat, and finally promised that he “would do his best”; she then passed into the Countess of Warwick’s chamber, “where they talked for a long time, and the Duchess begged the Countess to speak that night to her husband in favour of the Duke, and at the same time she took out a very rich jewel of diamonds, and gave it to the Countess, and begged her to take it to remind her of her promise. The Countess refused it at first, but afterwards accepted it.” The next morning, when the Earl of Warwick “went to the Council he repeated the request of the Duchess, and the lords, who thought more of the Earl than of anybody else, told him he could order as he thought best. Great is the power of gifts; for from the very night that the Countess spoke to her husband in favour of the Duke he lost all rancour against him.”16 The wives continued to meet and helped arrange a marriage between their children, Anne Seymour and John Dudley the Younger, the family heir.

John Dudley did not attend his son’s grand marriage festivities, out of ill-health or out of fear to be poisoned, as his enemies said. Modern historians believe that this match was meant as an honest move to keep friendship with the Duke of Somerset, who was, however, apparently not interested. Somerset very soon began to intrigue against Dudley’s policies and his person, so that by late 1551 the latter decided to get rid of the disgruntled ex-Protector once and for all. This seems not to have destroyed the marriage of their children, though. Anne Seymour visited her husband when he was imprisoned in the Tower after the Dudley family’s downfall. Before his own execution John Dudley was at pains to ask Somerset’s sons to forgive him his “fraudulent scheme” against their father; according to a French eyewitness, he said that nothing else “had pressed so injuriously upon his conscience”.17 He probably had not been very happy to have such a rift in his family.

Henry Dudley, the eldest of the eight sons and five daughters of Jane and John Dudley, had been his father’s favourite before his death at 19 during the siege of Boulogne in 1544.18 The younger John Dudley, the next surviving son, received the following letter from his parents around 1552. He was then about 22 years old and, although married for two years, without a substantial income of his own.19 It does not appear from the letter whether he was travelling in France, as has been assumed, or living in England. What is clear is that he was in financial difficulties and had not dared to ask his parents for help:

I had thought you had had more discretion than to hurt yourself through fantasies or care, specially for such things as may be remedied and holpen. Well enough you must understand that I know you cannot live under great charges. And therefore you should not hide from me your debts whatsoever it be for I would be loath but you should keep your credit with all men. And therefore send me word in any wise of the whole sum of your debts, for I and your mother will see them forthwith paid and whatsoever you do spend in the honest service of our master and for his honour, so you do not let wild and wanton men consume it, as I have been served in my days, you must think all is spent as it should be, and all that I have must be yours, and that you spend before, you may with God’s grace help it hereafter by good and faithful service wherein I trust you will never be found slack, and then you may be sure you cannot lack serving such a master as you have toward whom the living God preserve, and restore you to perfect health and so with my blessing I commit you to his tuition.

Your loving Father. Northumberland.

Your loving mother that wishes you health daily Jane Northumberland20

This short letter shows us a remarkably generous father – perhaps less in money matters than in his confession that he at least had lost his money in the company of “wild and wanton men”.

On 2 June 1552 the Duke of Northumberland lost one of his daughters after a few hours of illness. The next day he explained to William Cecil, his closest confidant in office, that he would stay at home on this day and why:

I have thought good to signify unto you what moveth me to suspect infection in the disease whereof my daughter died. First, the night before she died, she was as merry as any child could be, and sickened about three in the morning, and was in a sweat, and within a while after she had a desire to the stool; and the indiscreet woman that attended upon her let her rise, and after that, she fell to swooning, and then, with such things as they ministered to her, brought her again to remembrance, and so she seemed for a time to be meetly well revived, and so continued till it was noon, and still in a great sweating; and about twelve of the clock she began to alter again, and so in continual pangs and fits till six of the clock, at what time she left this life. And this morning she was looked upon, and between the shoulders it was very black, and also upon the one side of her cheek; which thing, with the suddenty, and also [that] she could brook nothing that was ministered to her from the beginning, moveth me to think that either it must be the sweat or worse, for she had the measles a month or five weeks before, and very well recovered, but a certain hoarseness and a cough remained with her still. This [is] as much as I am able to express, and even thus it was: wherefore I think it not my duty to presume to make my repair to his Majesty’s presence till further be seen what may ensue of it.21

This text has been noted for its first-hand description of what was probably the sweating sickness. Hester Chapman, a 20th century author of popular Tudor and Stuart biographies, wrote disapprovingly of it:

Northumberland’s chief concern was to explain that, in the event of her having had some infectious disease, he would be unable to appear at Court till he was out of quarantine; he therefore described the child’s symptoms and the state of her corpse (‘between the shoulders it was very black’) without a sign of feeling, and this to one of his most intimate associates – for he had no friends. While allowing for the detachment then felt by the majority of parents about their children, we may yet perceive in this letter the icy heartlessness which was one of the writer’s most formidable weapons.22

Chapman was probably inspired to comment on this letter at all by Patrick Fraser Tytler, its first editor, who wrote in 1839: “It is strange, that not a word of sorrow escapes the lips of the father who saw his little daughter hurried in a few hours from the midst of the joyousness of childhood into the grasp of this fell disease; and yet it would be hard to blame him, for the deepest is often the stillest grief.”23 One could be forgiven for believing that between 1839 and 1962 the psychological and historiographical standards seem rather to have sunk than risen: As opposed to Tytler’s, Chapman’s interpretation reeks with prejudice about the “wicked Duke”. It is a prime example of how a harmless letter can be converted into an indictment of its writer’s character (“we may yet perceive in this letter the icy heartlessness”). – “This is as much as I am able to express” is conveniently ignored, as is the anger about the “indiscreet woman that attended upon her” and who “let her rise”, which in the father’s view caused the girl to deteriorate.

As we are informed from another of John Dudley’s letters, only days before his daughter’s death one of his young daughters-in-law had died, possibly of the same disease. Anne Whorwood, who had provided the Duke with the only grandchild he was to see in his life, had been the first wife of Ambrose, the Dudleys’ second eldest son still alive at that time; it had been an advantageous match, to an heiress – as was to be expected for a son of the most powerful man in the country. Nevertheless John Dudley had two children who obviously married for love during the years of his ascendancy.

Robert Dudley, his parents’ third surviving son, had met Amy Robsart in the summer of 1549 during the dramatic events of Kett’s Rebellion. John Dudley and his sons Ambrose and Robert had come with an army to rescue the inhabitants of Norwich who were tasting a portion of peasant terror rule, Sir John Robsart being a Norfolk gentleman-farmer with no rebel sympathies whatsoever. In May 1550 the two fathers agreed on a marriage settlement for Amy and Robert, and on 4 June 1550, the day after the wedding of Robert’s eldest brother John, they were married in the presence of King Edward and his sister Elizabeth. There is every reason to assume this was a love match (and all biographers of both John and Robert Dudley of the last forty years have done so): Not only did William Cecil, another wedding guest, remember it as a “carnal marriage”, but there was absolutely no reason for John Dudley, Earl of Warwick and Edward’s chief minister, to marry off his not yet 18-year-old son to a country girl. Yes, Amy Robsart was her father’s heiress, though only after both her parents’ death, and Sir John Robsart was wealthy but not spectacularly so. It is presumed the Earl of Warwick was happy to acquire a relative in a county in which he had little personal influence, yes, and he was willing to pay handsomely for his son Robert’s “dowry”, the young couple living chiefly on his contributions. What had happened? John Dudley had married his heir to a duke’s daughter, his second son first to a wealthy co-heiress and then to a baroness in her own right with large landed possessions; he would try to marry his fourth son to girls of the blood royal, and would match his youngest son with a very rich, orphaned child-bride. Evidence suggests that John Dudley thought highly of his son Robert’s talents – he may have been pleased with his performance during the Norfolk campaign and allowed his son to marry the girl he loved.24

Mary Sidney in the early 1550s. John Dudley's eldest daughter may have married for love

Mary Sidney in the early 1550s. John Dudley’s eldest daughter may have married for love

Robert Dudley’s eldest sister, Mary, may even have skipped asking for permission before marrying her sweetheart. Aged perhaps 20, she married Henry Sidney, one of Edward VI’s young gentlemen of the Privy Chamber, on 29 March 1551 at Esher, Surrey. The ceremony was, however, repeated publicly at her parents house Ely Place, London, on 17 May.25 Why this was felt necessary is unknown, and it is certainly interesting why the eldest daughter of so powerful a man – a potential marriage prize herself – should have married a not very wealthy gentleman-courtier’s son? Although Henry Sidney had known Prince Edward as a child (his father being in the prince’s service), his influential court career only started with Dudley’s ascendancy, and especially after his marriage to the powerful earl’s daughter. He soon became one of the six Chief Gentlemen of the Privy Chamber, a most important group of men who surrounded Edward around-the-clock. Sidney, who became the young king’s most intimate friend, was knighted by Edward on the same day his father-in-law was created Duke of Northumberland. It is often implied that John Dudley married his daughter to Sidney in order to gain more influence on Edward. Yet this is clearly turning chronology and evidence on its ear for the sake of prejudice. As has been said: “It is not impossible that like that of her brother Robert, Mary’s marriage was a romantic one”.26

In early January 1553 John Dudley’s stomach ulcer caused one of his characteristic fits of brooding. As usual in these moments of melancholy he turned to William Cecil, writing:

What comfort think you may I have, that seeth myself in this case after my long travail and troublesome life, and towards the end of my days? And yet, so long as health would give me leave, I did as seldom fail mine attendance as any others did; yea, and with such health as, when others went to their sups and pastimes after their travail, I went to bed with a careful heart and a weary body; and yet abroad no man scarcely had any good opinion of me. And now, by extreme sickness and otherwise constrained to seek some health and quietness, I am not without a new evil imagination of men. What should I wish any longer this life, that seeth such frailty in it? Surely, but for a few children which God hath sent me, which also helpeth to pluck me on my knees, I have no great cause to desire to tarry much longer here. And thus, to satisfy you and others whom I take for my friends, I have entered into the bottom of my care, which I cannot do without sorrow: but if God would be so merciful to mankind as to take from them their wicked imaginations, and leave them with a simple judgment, men should here live angels’ lives; which may not be, for the fall of Adam our forefather procured this continual plague, that the one should be affliction to the other while we be in this circle, out of which God grant us all his grace to depart in his mercy.27

The Duke had some difficulty to find a bride for his second youngest son, Guildford. Northumberland would have liked to match him with Margaret Clifford, the young heiress of the Earl of Cumberland, a conservative regional magnate of the North of England. Dudley was at pains to uphold a united front of the country’s aristocracy as a precaution against new popular uprisings and hostile intrigues by foreign powers;28 it was this rather than Margaret’s somewhat remote place in the royal succession which made the choice attractive to the Duke. In the summer of 1552 he enlisted King Edward’s enthusiastic support, but Cumberland declined nevertheless.29 Guildford’s next turn came with his engagement in the spring of 1553 to Lady Jane Grey, Margaret Clifford’s first cousin. Lady Jane Grey’s place in the succession as outlined by Henry VIII was behind Edward VI’s half-sisters, Mary and Elizabeth, yet unlike romantic novels suggest there was never any serious consideration of Jane becoming Edward VI’s wife (his intended bride being first Mary Queen of Scots and after that Elisabeth de Valois). A marital alliance with the King’s chief minister must have been attractive to Jane’s parents – and the Dudleys were not “below” the Greys. They had plenty of noble blood; for example, through his mother John Dudley descended from the 15th century earls Richard Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick and John Talbot, 1st Earl of Shrewsbury.30 It is worth noting that John Dudley and Henry Grey, Jane’s father, were themselves second cousins once removed through their common descent from Edward Grey, 6th Baron Ferrers of Groby (John Dudley was that baron’s great-grandson, Henry Grey his great-great-grandson). More importantly, they were also good friends and Henry Grey owed both his place on the Privy Council and his dukedom to John Dudley.31 Thus, a match between their children was not unlikely or inappropriate.

Perhaps for cost-effectiveness, Guildford Dudley’s wedding in May 1553 was combined with that of his youngest sister Katherine to Henry Hastings, the Earl of Huntingdon’s heir who had a sprinkling of Plantagenet blood in him. First and foremost, though, the Earl of Huntingdon was another ally of John Dudley in the government. In fact, Katherine was only between eight and ten years old and this match was not yet binding.32 Lady Jane Grey’s sister Katherine also married: the eldest son of the Earl of Pembroke, and it was this Earl who was subsequently suspected to have been the keenest pusher for all these matches.33 Edward was by now gravely ill, although that his condition was hopeless probably became only fully apparent in June.34 To save his legacy, he now made his cousin once removed Lady Jane Grey successor to the Crown and tried to give the document a legal basis; from his somewhat intimidating speech to the lawyers it appeared that he was fond of Jane and Guildford Dudley.35 Whether their marriage had been part of a plot to snatch the Crown from its rightful heirs or an example of “routine actions of dynastic politics”36 is a matter of historiographical taste.

After Edward’s death on 6 July 1553 the Privy Council decided to implement the regime of Queen Jane – to honour their late master’s wishes and to preclude “papistry’s re-entrance”, as John Dudley put it.37 A few days later a letter from Mary Tudor arrived saying she was now Queen of England. It arrived as the Council had lunch, and both the Duchesses, Jane’s mother and Guildford’s mother, burst into tears.38 It was agreed to send the Duke of Suffolk to fight Mary, who was gathering strength in Norfolk; Jane however, ‟with weeping tears“, insisted on keeping her father with her:”whereupon the council persuaded with the duke of Northumberland to take that voyage upon him, saying that no man was so fit therefore … Well (quoth the duke then) since ye think it good, I and mine will go, not doubting of your fidelity to the queen’s majesty, which I leave in your custody.” The assembled lords returned to Jane’s presence-chamber where she “humbly thanked the duke for reserving her father at home, and beseeched him to use his diligence, whereto he answered that he would do what in him lay.” Preparing for departure the next day, Northumberland reminded his colleagues of their oaths to Jane as queen who by ‟our enticement is rather of force placed therein than by her own seeking and request.” He went on to warn them:

if ye mean deceit … God will revenge the same. I can say no more; but in these troublesome time wish you to use constant hearts … I have not spoken to you in this sort upon any distrust I have of your truths, … but I have put you in remembrance thereof, what chance of variance soever might grow amongst you in mine absence; and this I pray you, wish me no worse God speed in this journey then ye would have to yourselves. – My lord (saith one of them) if ye mistrust any of us in this matter, your grace is far deceived; for which of us can wipe his hands clean thereof? And if we should shrink from you as one that were culpable, which of us can excuse himself as guiltless? Therefore herein your doubt is too far cast. – I pray God it be so (quoth the duke); let us go to dinner.39

When the Duke of Northumberland and three of his sons returned as prisoners from their venture they were pelted with stones, the guards having a difficult time to protect them from the hostile populace. The Habsburg ambassadors reported: “Though on his way to the Tower the Duke preserved tint bonne myne [a quite good countenance], when he reached his prison they say his only care was to have nobles to judge him, as is the custom in England, and that his remorse and evil conscience were astonishing. His younger son wept when he was near the Tower … So now the Duke, his wife and five sons, … and the Lady Jane are all prisoners together”.40 The next news was: ‟The Duchess of Northumberland has been let out of prison sooner than was expected, and set out to meet the Queen to move her to compassion towards her children; but when she had arrived at a spot five miles from this place, the Queen ordered her to return to London, and refused to give her audience. We passed her on our way hither.”41 The Queen had already received Lady Jane’s mother, who lost no time to blacken the Dudleys as best she could: she told her “that her husband had been the victim of an attempt to poison him, and that the Duke of Northumberland had done it. She then prayed for her husband’s release from the Tower, where he had been imprisoned two days previously.”42 It was a matter of a few more days and the Duke of Suffolk was out of the Tower again.

In view of the axe, Jane Dudley was even more desperate to save her husband than her children. The frantic directness and grammar of her letter reveal the terror she was going through. She implored Lord and Lady Paget (old family friends despite political differences) to enlist the help of two of Mary’s most trusted ladies:

Now good madam, for the love you bear to God forget me not: and make my Lady Marquess of Exeter … to remember me, to Mistress Clarencius to continue as she hath begun for me: and good madam desire my lord as he may do: in speaking for my husband’s life: in way of charity I crave him to do it madam. I have held up my head for my great heaviness of heart that all the world knows cannot be little: till now that indeed I do begin to grow into weak sickness, and also such a rising the night from my stomach uptoward that in my judgment my breath is like clean to go away, as my women well can full say it as they know it to be true by their own pain they take me. Good madam, of goodness remember me. So God to keep you[r] ladyship long life … your ladyship’s poorest friend Jane Northumberland as long as please the queen & good madam desire my lord to be good lord unto my poor five sons: nature can no otherwise do but sue for them although I do not so much care for them as for their father who was to me & to my mind the most best gentleman that ever living woman was matched withal: as neither those about him nor about me cannot say the contrary & say truly: how good he was to me that Our Lord & the queen’s majesty show their mercy to them.43

As he had wished, the Duke of Northumberland was judged by his peers, most of whom had backed Jane as well. John Dudley begged Queen Mary to be merciful to his children, “considering they went by my commandment who am their father, and not of their own free wills.”44 Very much in accordance with the government’s wishes, on the scaffold he urged the English people to renounce the Protestant schism and return to the Universal Church of Christ’s Body.45 Not long afterwards, the Imperial ambassadors understood that neither his sons nor Lady Jane would be executed. All were condemned nonetheless, and all pleaded guilty as was usual at Tudor state trials. Wyatt’s rebellion, in which the Duke of Suffolk entangled himself, sealed the fate of his daughter and her husband. Suffolk may have hoped to free the young people, yet the rebellion was not otherwise concerned with them; victims of the “Tudor Constitution”, they can hardly have been aware under what pretext exactly they lost their heads.

After Guildford’s execution in February 1554 the Duchess of Northumberland continued to work for her other sons’ release and pardon, though she did not live long enough to see the latter. In her will of January 1555 Jane Dudley left bequests to Lord and Lady Paget, as well as to the many Spanish grandees who had interceded for her children; in June 1554 she had even obtained a permission for her sons to hear mass in the Tower. Her will is completely silent on religion, which indicates she had remained a Protestant in her heart. She still remembered “my lord, my dear husband”, though, and bequeathed to her daughter Mary Sidney “her clock … she did so much set by, that was the lord her father’s, praying her to keep it as a jewel.”46

Notes
1 Adams 2002 p. 133
2 Tytler 1839 p. 150
3 Loades 2004
4 Ives 2009 p. 307
5 Loades 2004
6 Loades 1996 pp. 27 – 28
7 Collins 1746 p. 34
8 Adams 2004a
9 Ives 2009 p. 106; Loades 1996 pp. 33, 38
10 Porter 2010 pp. 143, 163
11 Loades 2004
12 Loades 2004
13 Beer 1973 p. 68
14 Beer 1973 p. 36
15 Beer 1973 p. 135
16 Spanish Chronicle pp. 190 – 192
17 Hoak 1980 pp. 48, 203
18 Loades 2004
19 Loades 1996 pp. 224 – 225
20 HMC Pepys pp. 1 – 2
21 Tytler 1839 pp. 115 – 116
22 Chapman 1962 p. 65
23 Tytler 1939 p. 114
24 Loades 1996 pp. 225, 239
25 Adams 2004b
26 Adams 2004b
27 Tytler 1839 pp. 155 – 156
28 Loades 2004; Loades 1996 pp. 168 – 169
29 Jordan 1970 p. 513
30 Wilson 1981 p. 3; Adams 2002 pp. 312 – 313
31 Ives 2009 p. 111; Loades 2004; Loades 1996 pp. 179 – 180
32 Adams 1995 p. 44
33 CSP Span 16 August 1553; CSP Span 4 September 1553
34 Loades 2006 p. 96
35 Loach 2002 p. 164
36 Loades 1996 p. 239; Ives 2009 p. 153; Jordan 1970 pp. 513 – 514
37 Loach 2002 p. 176; Alford 2002 pp. 172, 173 – 174
38 CSP Span 11 July 1553
39 Chronicle of Queen Jane p. 5 – 7
40 CSP Span 27 July 1553
41 CSP Span 29 July 1553
42 CSP Span 2 August 1553
43 Gunn 1999 pp. 1270 – 1271
44 Tytler 1839 pp. 225 – 226
45 Jordan and Gleason 1975 pp. 45 – 46
46 Collins 1746 pp. 34 – 35

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Porter, Linda (2010): Katherine the Queen: The Remarkable Life of Katherine Parr. Macmillan.

Sherman, W. H. (1995): John Dee: The Politics of Reading and Writing in the English Renaissance. University of Massachusetts Press.

Skidmore, Chris (2010): Death and the Virgin: Elizabeth, Dudley and the Mysterious Fate of Amy Robsart. Weidenfeld & Nicolson.

Tytler, P. F. (1839): England under the Reigns of Edward VI. and Mary. Vol. II. Richard Bentley.

Wilson, Derek (1981): Sweet Robin: A Biography of Robert Dudley Earl of Leicester 1533–1588. Hamish Hamilton.
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First published on 23 March 2011 at thehistoryfiles.com

About Christine Hartweg

Hi, I'm the author of "Amy Robsart: A Life and Its End" and "John Dudley: The Life of Lady Jane Grey's Father-in-Law". I blog at www.allthingsrobertdudley.wordpress.com
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