Charles G. Harper

CUMNOR, AND THE TRAGEDY OF AMY ROBSART

One comes more readily to Cumnor by road, but more picturesquely by river, from Bablockhythe, whence a byway leads steeply up to that famous place. Cumnor is indeed of such fame that, although one must needs allow it to be a hill-top—certainly not a valley—village, yet to omit it from these pages would surely be unpardonable. At Bablockhythe remains the last of the old river ferries, capable of taking a wheeled conveyance across; and capable, too, of giving an unwary oarsman or punter a very nasty check with its rope, permanently stretched athwart the stream.

There is some very noble, still, quiet scenery at, and just above and below, Bablockhythe, where the water runs with a deep and silent stealthiness, and the bushy poplars and pendant weeping willows are reflected with such startling faithfulness that the reflection in the water beneath looks more solid—much more real—than the foliage above. It is an illusion of the weirdest kind.

In one or other of the quiet backwaters between this and Oxford there may be found, by those who care to seek, the curious aquatic plant known as the “water-soldier.” Botanists of course know it by another, and a horrific, name: to them it is “stratiotes aloides.” But to those few rustic folk who know at all of its existence—and it is not a common affair—it is the “water-soldier.” It does not, however, convey any military impression to the ordinary beholder, being just a plumed bunch of leaves which in summer-time is found floating on the surface; coming up from its autumn, winter, and spring home below, in the river-mud, and growing long suckers, resembling strawberry runners, each of them with a youthful “soldier”—or recruit, shall we say—at its end. These form leaves, and each one produces a white flower. When these flowers fade the “water-soldier” and its outposts of young sink again to the river-bed, and there rest until summer comes again, when the process is repeated.

But what of Cumnor? It looks boldly down upon the Thames Valley from a conspicuous wooded ridge. It is a village picturesque alike in itself and in its romantic history, traditions, and legends. Figure to yourself a place of scattered rustic cottages, not yet touched to commonplace by that shrinkage of distances caused by the rapidity and frequency of modern methods of travel which have brought expansions, rebuilding, and general modernisings in their train; with an ancient and stately church rustically overhung with trees quite in the old Birket Foster and first-half-of-the-nineteenth-century convention. That is Cumnor to-day.

In Domesday Book the place appears as “Comenore,” but we hear of it in Anglo-Saxon times as “Colmonora”; and it is supposed to have obtained the first part of its name from one St. Colman, or Cuman, a seventh-century Gaelic saint. The termination, “ora,” doubtless refers to the shores of the Thames; not, however, nearer than a mile and a half, and at a considerably lower level.

Cumnor had, apparently, an early church, replaced by the existing fine Transitional Norman and Early English cruciform building, not yet ravaged by the “restorer.” Cumnor Place, built about 1350, as a sanatorium for Abingdon monastery, after the fearful experiences of the “Black Death” pestilence, stood very closely adjoining the picturesque churchyard, on its south side, and, after several changes of owners, and at last sunk to the condition of a roofless ruin, was finally demolished in 1811, and its stones used in the rebuilding of the church at Wytham.

There is much of interest belonging to Cumnor church, from the battered old altar-tomb in the churchyard, with barely legible inscription, to Lieutenant William Godfrey, “who faithfully served King Charles ye I. from Edgehill Fight to ye end of ye unhappy wars,” down to the curious epitaph on the exterior east wall, upon “Christian, the wife of Henry Hutt”:

This paragon of virtue, worth, and contentment with her station in life died in 1740, aged 31.

A real startler awaits the stranger who enters unsuspectingly into Cumnor church. This is none other than a singularly vivid likeness of Queen Elizabeth, done in stone and standing on a pedestal in the north aisle. The pale effigy, standing there in the subdued light of the church, is calculated to stir the nerves of the most stolid. The statue, a singularly fine one, represents the Queen in the costume of the period, made familiar in many statues and paintings. She is standing, and holds the orb and sceptre, symbols of sovereignty. This work of art has a history of some curious interest. It was originally set up in the grounds of Cumnor Place by Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, in honour of his great patroness. Perhaps it is due to this origin that the statue represents the Queen so pleasingly. Zucchero, in his painting of her, and the many other sculptors who plied their chisels on this inspiring theme, never produced anything to vie with this in combined charm and dignity. Elsewhere you perceive “great Eliza”—in spite of courtly efforts to idealise her—rendered not a little uncouthly. Majesty, with more than a dash of vinegar, and plain evidences of the termagant, are characteristics of the most of Queen Elizabeth’s portraits in marble, stone, and paint; but here she is rendered in terms of grace.

Upon the decay of Cumnor Place the statue was removed to Dean Court, and thence to a height above the village of Ferry Hinksey, in 1779. From that solitude it was taken to Wytham Abbey, and eventually forgotten; being found, broken to pieces, in an out-house. It was finally removed, restored, and placed here, in Cumnor Church, in 1888, on a pedestal detailing these circumstances.

An unusual, and welcome, feature of this church is the series of engravings, reproductions of seventeenth-century correspondence, and notes upon the history of the village, for the information of the cultured visitor. Here you may read something of the grim associations of the vanished Cumnor Place, and learn, in a chronological table drawn up by the vicar, to what tune the centuries have jogged along in this rural parish. That chronology ends with this remarkable thought, this astonishing intellectual effort: “1893. The Future is not yet!”

It never is.

Brasses, now placed upon the walls, commemorate the virtues and the benefactions of various persons, including “Katherin, sometyme the wyffe of Henry Staverton, who dyed a good Christian the xxvth day of December in ye yere of our lorde God, 1557.” It is perhaps even more important to have lived a good Christian; but, apart from such counsel of perfection, the inscription is a significant change from those piteous pre-Reformation invocations for mercy, and appeals for prayers, that were the commonplaces of all monumental inscriptions only a few years earlier.

James Welsh, who died in 1612, and Margery, who departed three years later, each leaving £5 in charity, are celebrated in verse, beginning:

In the south transept, dedicated to St. Thomas of Canterbury, lie two Abbots of Abingdon, one of them probably William de Comenore, who died in 1333. Latest of all the monuments here is that of Sir William Wilson Hunter, an Indian official, who died in 1900, aged 59.

But the chief interest centres in the fine canopied tomb of grey marble, on the north side of the chancel, to Anthony Forster and his wife: Forster, that “Tony Fire-the-Faggot” of Sir Walter Scott’s unhistorical “historical” romance of Kenilworth, in which he is held up to execration as a villain of the most varied villanies; a time-server and hypocrite: “Here you, Tony Fire-the-Faggot, papist, puritan, hypocrite, miser, profligate, devil, compounded of all men’s sins, bow down and reverence him who has brought into thy house the very mammon thou worshippest.”

This horrid portraiture of the man is an overdrawn picture. No need to paint the devil blacker than he really is; and although the evidence available tends to attach the stigma of “murderer” to him, it does not by any means follow that he practised all the meannesses and petty vices with which he is charged.

On the other hand, those whitewashers of smirched reputations who have long been so actively and unprofitably employed in cleansing historical characters under a cloud, have overstepped the mark in loudly declaring their belief in his innocence of all charges brought against him.

The name of Anthony Forster, in fiction and in fact, is closely connected with the famous tragedy of Cumnor Place and Amy Robsart, which still, after three hundred and fifty years, exercises the minds of historians, and arouses controversies; and seems likely ever to do so.

We have already referred to the house as a grange belonging to the Abbots of Abingdon. It came into the private possession of Thomas Pentecost, alias Rowland, the last of them, by deed of gift from Henry the Eighth in 1538. The Abbot, in consideration of his having peaceably and willingly surrendered the Abbey and all its belongings to the King, was given Cumnor Place for his life; but as he died the following year, he derived little benefit from the compact. Seven years later, October 8th, 1546, the King conferred Cumnor Place, with the manor of Cumnor, and greater tithes, upon his physician, George Owen, in consideration of some lands at Oxford, including the site of Rewley Abbey; and a cash payment of £310 12s. 9d. William Owen, son of this George, married in 1558 one of the Fettiplace family, his father then settling upon him the Cumnor property. William Owen, however, elected to live elsewhere, and let Cumnor Place to Anthony Forster.

Who, then, was this Anthony Forster? He was the friend and factor of a very great man in those times: a man by no means great from force of character, but from sheer opportunism, good luck, and the favour of a comely person: none other, indeed, than Lord Robert Dudley, later to become, by the ennobling hands of Queen Elizabeth, Earl of Leicester. Around the reputation of Dudley there lurk too many sinister stories for us to lightly dismiss any charge brought against him or his agents. He was suspected of having put many persons away by the means of poison: a method very fashionable in that age of the Renaissance and widespread neo-pagan culture; and that he was an ambitious man to whose ambition no bounds of prudence or conscience were set is generally acknowledged by historians. He was by no means alone in this, but was typical of his age, an age great in refinements, culture, and wealth; great in arms, and no less notable in its tortuous policies, national and domestic; and in its lies and manifold duplicities.

The early prospects of Lord Robert Dudley, as third son of the Duke of Northumberland, were perhaps not particularly brilliant, and as a young man of eighteen or nineteen years he had in 1550 married Amy, daughter and heiress of Sir John Robsart, of Stanfield Hall, Norfolk. That was in the reign of Edward the Sixth, the young King himself being present at the wedding. There is no reason against the assumption that this was a love-match; but there is every reason to assume that in after-years, when his ambitions were kindled, it was bitterly regretted by Dudley, who, in the changes that had befallen with the successive deaths of Edward the Sixth and of Queen Mary, and with the accession of Queen Elizabeth, had become not only a courtier, but a royal favourite, looked upon with amorous glances by that great Queen herself, whose subtle character has defied the analysis of historians. Queen Elizabeth’s lovers, looked upon with favour, were not few, but Dudley was pre-eminent among them, and presumed, and was allowed to presume, more than any others. The Queen continually enriched him with grants of land and with the monopoly of the export of wool and other commodities, until he became extraordinarily wealthy, and able to maintain a magnificence remarkable even for that period. The loves of Dudley and his Queen afforded gossip for not only the Court, but for the nation at large, and a forthcoming marriage was looked upon as so sure a thing that the Spanish Ambassador found it possible to write home to his sovereign, referring to Dudley as “the King that is to be.” And all this while, we are to bear in mind, Dudley’s wife, Lady Robert Dudley (the “Amy Robsart” of the looming tragedy) was alive! What was that meek woman doing while such well-founded gossip was heard in every corner of the land? She was travelling and visiting in many different parts of the country, and doing so in considerable state.

Among the relics of her to be seen, framed on the walls of Cumnor Church, is the facsimile of a letter from her to her husband, dated 1557, displaying nothing but perfect confidence and trust, which she might do, well enough, and yet find her trust misplaced. Or, possibly, those letters were cast in a conventional form, and hid a breaking heart.

But, although Dudley and his wife had for some years lived apart, and although he was notoriously a false and faithless man, whose varied gallantries were the talk of the time, there was not yet, in 1557, any question of getting rid of her, and no great and dazzling ambition made him or his agents contemplate a crime. Queen Mary yet ruled and it was not until the following year that she died, and was succeeded by her sister, Elizabeth. No sooner, however, did Elizabeth become Queen than Dudley appeared as the most favoured courtier. That he was to become King-Consort none doubted, and it is singular to consider that, in all the records of that time, the fact of his being already married appeared to offer no bar to that contemplated union. Continuously, from the Queen’s accession, these circumstantial rumours spread, and it is beyond the bounds of credibility that Lady Dudley should not have been made perfectly well acquainted with them in the course of the two years in which they were current. Lady Dudley—why historians and others continue to write of her after her marriage by her maiden name of Amy Robsart is not clear—had been accustomed to visit a Mr. Hyde, a kinsman of Dudley’s, at Denchworth, near Abingdon; and it does not, therefore, appear extraordinary that when Anthony Forster, her husband’s steward, took Cumnor Place on lease, in 1559, she should elect to visit there: the more especially so if there were any truth in the rumour that she was ill at that time, for Cumnor, as we have already seen, was supposed to be a particularly healthy spot.

But it is by no means so sure that she was at all unwell. It is one of the most damning evidences of foul play in this famous case that rumours were current for some time before the murder, or the accident, whichever it was, to the effect that she was suffering from cancer and was sure to die shortly, and that this gossip was contradicted at the time. Among those who gave the lie to it was the Spanish Ambassador, writing to the Duchess of Parma. “They,” he said, “are thinking of destroying Lord Robert’s wife.” Who “they” were we can only conjecture. “They have given out that she is ill; but she is not ill at all; she is very well, and is taking care not to be poisoned.”

Is it at all reconcilable with the theory of accident that a person whose continued existence stood in the way of so ambitious a man as Dudley, and of whom it was so freely said that she was dying, when she was known to be well, and whose life was said to be in danger from violence or poison, should in fact meet her end so immediately and mysteriously? No modern coroner’s jury would return a verdict of accidental death under such suspicious circumstances.

What are the known facts? Lady Dudley was residing at Cumnor Place in September 1560, and the extraordinary cloud of suggestions, innuendoes, and suspicions current everywhere must have reached her ears. She must have been superhuman not to have been miserably affected by these doings of her husband, who, at the time when the tragedy happened, was with the Queen at Windsor; and she was, as we have seen suggested, probably in fear of being secretly poisoned. On Sunday, September 8th, the day of Abingdon Fair, her servants all went to Abingdon, by her express desire, according to one account. But, at any rate, they did all go, leaving in the house alone, it would seem, Lady Dudley, Mrs. Hyde, and Mrs. Odingsell, Mr. Hyde’s sister. The three ladies were that evening playing a game popular at that time, known as “tables,” when suddenly Lady Dudley arose and left the room, being almost immediately afterwards found dead at the foot of a staircase by the servants returning from the Fair; having apparently fallen and broken her neck.

Where was Forster at this time? The records are silent, and do not tell of any man about the place. The views of Dudley himself and his dependents were that the affair was purely an accident. Alternatively, it was suggested by some that it was suicide.

But Dudley’s conduct on receipt of vague news of tragedy at Cumnor was suspicious. It would be supposed that the first act of an innocent man would be to hurry off from Windsor to the scene of this happening, to learn at first hand what had befallen his wife; but Dudley was content to send Sir Thomas Blount, a confidential gentleman in his train, to ride over and make inquiries. On the way Blount met a messenger from Cumnor, proceeding to Windsor with the detailed news. Next day, at Cumnor, Blount, examining the lady’s maid, extracted from her the admission that Lady Dudley had been frequently heard to pray for delivery from desperation. He eagerly seized upon this as indicating suicide, but the maid immediately checked him with, “No, good Mr. Blount, do not so judge of my words. If you should so gather, I should be sorry I said so much.”

What “desperation” might mean is uncertain: it is a strange choice of a word; but it has been thought that the unhappy woman, knowing she was in danger of being murdered, thus prayed to be protected from the desperate resolves against her life.

Blount, writing to Dudley, acquainted him with the feelings of the neighbourhood about the affair, by which it is sufficiently evident that this happening was already regarded as a serious thing for Dudley. To this Dudley replied, directing that the strictest inquiry should be made; that an inquest should be held immediately, and “the discreetest and most substantial men should be chosen for the jury.” But surely, the question of an inquest and the choice of a jury were the affairs of others than himself, and an inquest would have been held in any case, whether he liked it or not; and so his directions to that end are mere unmeaning words. He further begged of Blount “as he loved him and desired his quietness, to use all devices and means for learning of the truth without respect to living persons”; and especially desired him not to dissemble, but to tell him, faithfully, “whether it happened by evil chance, or villainy.”

He was evidently seriously alarmed for himself; but we look in vain for any expression of sorrow at his wife’s lamentable end. All he was concerned with was “the talk which the wicked world will use”: talk for which his own conduct for long past had given the fullest occasion.

Blount had halted at Abingdon on his journey, and only reached Cumnor on September 11th. Already, as might have been supposed, the coroner had summoned his jury. They were, in Blount’s opinion, “as wise and able men, being but countrymen, as ever I saw.” They deliberated long and searchingly, and Blount wrote again, on the 13th, that they were very active; “whether equity is the cause, or malice [i.e. suspicion, let us note] against Forster, I know not.” He further said that they were very secret, but he could not hear that they had found any presumption of evil. He thought, however, they would be sorry (these wise and able men—for countrymen) if they failed. Obviously Blount had been trying to pump the jury as to their finding. Dudley himself, writing to Blount, said the foreman of the jury had communicated with him to the effect that although the inquiry was not yet concluded, for anything they could learn to the contrary, it was a very misfortune. So Dudley himself had been trafficking with the jury, a thing that would in modern times afford very strong presumption of guilt.

If we put faith in Dudley’s own protestations, we must, however, find him innocent. Yet is it possible to have this faith?

After hearing to that effect from the foreman he wrote to Blount, saying that after the jury had rendered their verdict, he could only wish there would be a second inquiry. He wished Arthur Robsart, the dead woman’s brother, and Appleyard, her half-brother, to be present. Never at any time, in all these scenes, was Dudley himself present. It is uncertain whether a second jury was summoned, or whether the sittings of the first were extended; but it is certain that an inquiry was still in progress on September 27th, and that this resulted at last in a verdict of accidental death.

But the affair cast an indelible stain upon Dudley’s reputation, and although the question of his marrying the Queen was not dropped, and was ardently debated from time to time, his wife, being dead, proved a more insuperable obstacle than she had been while living. The dark suspicions, if not of his actual complicity, at least of Forster’s having contrived the tragedy in his master’s supposed interest, would not be allayed. Everywhere mutterings were heard, and the Queen did not dare marry one under such a cloud.

Lady Dudley was buried in great state in the church of St. Mary, Oxford, and even there the grisly accusation of assassination came up, in Dr. Babington, the preacher, chaplain to Dudley himself, thrice making a slip of the tongue; desiring the prayers of the congregation for the lady “so pitifully murdered,” instead of “slain.” This incident serves sufficiently to show what was in men’s minds.

In 1566, seven years after the tragedy, Appleyard was brought before the Privy Council for having declared that he had not been satisfied with the jury’s verdict, but for Dudley’s sake had covered the murder of his sister. He was intimidated, and fully apologised, for Dudley had become all-powerful; and he was made to explain his words as “malice,” and to beg pardon for them; but an apology extracted by such means does not carry great weight. Years afterwards Cecil could find it possible to say that Dudley was “infamed by his wife’s death,” and so infamed he still remains, whether we find it by direct participation or by the deeds of his too-subservient agents.

We must here come to the conclusion that Dudley was not himself guilty; but that Forster certainly was. That conclusion can, indeed, hardly be avoided. The country side thought so, and it is not sufficient for apologists to point to his gentility and his culture, and to exclaim that such an one would be incapable of such a crime. Whenever did honourable descent or cultivated tastes prevent a man from bearing a villain’s part? The view that because Forster was a gentleman, and interested in the arts, he was incapable of crime is the conventional view of people who are not satisfied that a villain is a villain unless he wears a scowl and other distinguishing signs.

It has been remarked that Forster would not in after-years have been chosen Member of Parliament for Abingdon and would not have been given University and other honours if he had been what suspicion made him. But would he not? Dudley could have procured all these things, and more, for his faithful man, even as he was in a position to secure most things for himself.

The year following the tragedy of Cumnor Place, Forster purchased the freehold of it; Owen probably being unwilling any longer to hold a house with such dark associations. And here he lived the remainder of his life, dying in 1572. In those twelve years he almost wholly rebuilt Cumnor Place, which he left by will to Dudley, who had, in the meanwhile, become Earl of Leicester. If the Earl accepted this gift, he was to pay £1,200 to Forster’s heirs.

The Earl did accept, but sold the property soon after. It is not to be supposed that he would care to be any longer associated with the ill-omened place. By this sale Cumnor passed to the Norris family, ancestors of the Earls of Abingdon, who still own it.

The entry of Forster’s funeral at Cumnor is to the effect that “A. F., gentleman,” was buried on November 10th; and it has been thought curious that the word “gentleman” takes the place of some other word first written and then erased: whether the first was uncomplimentary, or merely the Latin word miles, as sometimes suggested, is now of course beyond the wit of man to discover.

Those who visit Cumnor with this pitiful story in their recollection, and are disappointed at finding Cumnor Place no longer in existence, will find in the Purbeck marble monument to Forster an interesting relic, bringing them into touch with these long-vanished personages; but they will find no support of the charges brought against him. Nor could such support be in any way expected; but in the long Latin eulogistic verses engraved in brass under the brass effigies of himself, his wife, and their three children, we find him credited with an astonishing variety of virtues and accomplishments. He was, it seems, distinguished for his skill in music, languages, and horticulture, and was charitable, benevolent, and full of religious faith. The brass portraiture, too (which, after all, is not necessarily a portrait), represents him as a man of singularly open countenance.

Apart from the personal association, the tomb is interesting as combining late Gothic and Renaissance decoration.

It has already been said that Cumnor Place is a mansion of the past, and that it was finally demolished by a former Earl of Abingdon in 1811. An amusing story is told, to the effect that when the popularity of Scott’s Kenilworth aroused a keen interest in Cumnor, the Earl undertook to drive some guests over to see the house, forgetting that he had, several years earlier, given orders for it to be demolished. The disappointment of himself and his friends on arriving at Cumnor was very keen.

Cumnor Place was never more than a modest country residence, and bore no resemblance to Scott’s description; nor had it the imposing towers described in Mickle’s ballad, which concludes with—

It stood to the south of the church, and was in its last years a ruinous malthouse, finally converted into labourers’ cottages. The stones of it were removed chiefly for the building of Wytham church; and there, at the entrance to the churchyard, an archway remains to this day, bearing the inscription by the pietistic Forster: “Verbum Domini Janva vitae.”

It only remains to once more remark that Scott’s novel, Kenilworth, enshrining many of these things, is full of the grossest perversions of known facts, and not for one moment to be relied upon, historically. Raleigh figures in it, and in its pages is knighted by Queen Elizabeth, in 1560; but he was only eight years of age at the time. Lady Dudley is represented as the Countess of Leicester; but she met her tragic end three years before Dudley was created Earl. She is also made to figure in the grand festivities at Kenilworth, although she had been dead fifteen years when these great doings took place. There was no “Black Bear” inn at Cumnor at that time; nor could there reasonably have been such a sign, for Dudley, whose device it was, did not then own property at Cumnor, and was not directly associated with the village. The Richard Varney, co-villain with Forster in the story, was derived by Scott from Ashmole’s gossipy Antiquities of Berkshire, and is not to be readily identified.