Sir Robert Dudley, RIP--and His Second Wife

Sixty-one years and two days after his father, Queen Elizabeth's favorite Robert Dudley, 1st Earl of Leicester died (September 4, 1588), Sir Robert Dudley, his illegitimate son died on September 6, 1649 outside Florence, Italy. His mother, Douglas or Douglass Howard Sheffield Stafford, had supported him with written testimony in a Star Chamber trial early in King James I's reign that she and Robert Dudley had been married before he married Lettice Knollys in 1578, thus claiming that Sir Robert Dudley was Leicester's legitimate heir. The Star Chamber ruled against him and he and Elizabeth Southwell left England for Italy in 1605.

Part of the reason his father's marital issues had been so confusing is that as Elizabeth I's favorite Leicester had feared her anger if he did marry again after Amy Robsart died in 1560, found dead on September 8. He told Douglas that he could not marry her because of this fear, yet he acknowledged their son and Sir Robert was with Leicester at Tilbury preparing for the Spanish Armada to land in 1588 before he died.

Sir Robert's mistress, Elizabeth Southwell disguised herself as a page and they converted to Catholicism, received a dispensation from the Pope and were married; Robert and Elizabeth had thirteen children. Elizabeth died in 1631 after the birth of their last child so Robert survived her for 18 years. They were both interred in San Pancrazio in Florence.

Elizabeth Southwell, a former lady-in-waiting to Elizabeth I, is perhaps more interesting, although Sir Robert was an explorer and writer. Her version of Queen Elizabeth's death has been part of the story of that queen through the centuries, source of the famous line that "must" is not a word to use to princes and other details of her death:

Written or dictated in April 1607 by Elizabeth Southwell (1584–1631), a maid of honor who attended the Queen during her final illness, this detailed account weaves political, medical, magical, and theological observations into a haunting narrative that culminates with the explosion of Elizabeth’s corpse during her wake. Southwell’s manuscript is preserved in the Jesuit Archives in London among the papers of the English Jesuit Robert Persons, who used “the greatest part of the sayd narration, though not all” in a lengthy refutation of the Oath of Allegiance.1 A manuscript copy of Persons’s redaction of Southwell’s manuscript, labeled “strange and incredible particulars,” is transcribed in John Nichols’s Progresses and Public Processions of Queen Elizabeth, the source from which Southwell was most often cited by twentieth-century historians.

Almost all of Chapter Three (quoted above), "Some Strange Eruption to Our State: Elizabeth Southwell’s Manuscript Account of the Death of Queen Elizabeth" from Catherine Loomis' book The Death of Elizabeth I: Remembering and Reconstructing the Virgin Queen from Palgrave Macmillan may be found in the book preview on Amazon.com (search for Elizabeth Southwell).

Loomis seems to accept most of Elizabeth Southwell's eyewitness account--and she was a cousin of Saint Robert Southwell--but analyses how Father Robert Persons, SJ used it against the memory of Elizabeth I in various ways. She refers to Sir Robert Dudley and Elizabeth Southwell as "recusants" but I think they had acknowledged Elizabeth I's supremacy while in England and probably James I's before they left for Italy and became Catholic.

James I refused to recognize Dudley as Leicester's heir and gave his titles to other courtiers in England; Charles I awarded Dudley's English/Anglican wife the title of Duchess of Dudley in 1644 and recognized Dudley's legitimacy but did not restore his lands or titles. Dudley served Duke Ferdinand of Tuscany as a naval advisor.

Sadly, the church in which Robert and Elizabeth were buried is no longer a church--it's a museum. There a funeral chapel, still consecrated for Catholic worship, inside the museum, but Robert and Elizabeth's tombs are not included in the Rucellai family sepulchre.