Amy was the daughter and only child of Sir John Robsart, Sheriff of Norfolk and Suffolk, and Elizabeth Scott who lived in the 16th century Syderstone Hall in West Norfolk.
Born on June 7 1532, little is known about her early life but a great deal is known about her death at the tender age of 28, when her life ended after she fell down a flight of stairs. And she makes sure it is so: by continuing to visit Norfolk in her ghostly form.
A renowned beauty, Amy married Robert Dudley on June 4 1550 in the presence of King Edward VI but the couple enjoyed just three years of married bliss before Robert was imprisoned after his father John's conspiracy to put Lady Jane Grey on the throne failed. Released a year later, he fought with English forces in France and the couple struggled financially until the accession of Elizabeth I in 1558.
Robert and Elizabeth had been friends since childhood and, close in age, had shared the same tutor – when she was eight, she had told Dudley that she would never marry. The pair spent many hours together while Amy was kept far away from court in case she threatened the special relationship – gossip was rife that the pair were in love and as soon as she became queen, Elizabeth appointed Dudley as Master of Horse, a position which ensured he would have to spend even more time with her.
By 1559, Elizabeth had moved Dudley's bedchamber next to her private rooms – scandalous behaviour which spread like wildfire in the courts of England and abroad and the pair did little to quash the rumours by their open, flirtatious behaviour. People began to suspect that the Queen had found her future husband despite her advisors begging her to marry advantageously to a foreign suitor.
Meanwhile, poor Amy was living apart from her husband with friends until she moved to Cumnor Place in Abingdon, the home of her husband's treasurer. On September 8 1560, the Abingdon Fair was in town and Amy persuaded the other ladies of the household to visit without her and became agitated when some refused. She told them she planned to play backgammon, but when her friends returned, she was found dead at the bottom of a flight of eight steps with head injuries and a broken neck.
The subsequent rumours that an accident had been staged to make it look as if Amy had fallen to make way for marriage between Elizabeth and Dudley put paid to any hope that the Queen had of making her court favourite her husband.
Whether it was accident, suicide or murder is a subject which has perplexed historians for centuries and which became the subject of Sir Walter Scott's novel, Kenilworth. Some believe she had grown desperate at rumours of her husband's infidelity and had thrown herself down the stairs, others that she was suffering from cancer and that her bones were so brittle that when she fell, she snapped her spine.
Amy was buried in the chancel of the Church of St Mary the Virgin in Oxford, her husband was absent from her funeral – but he would see his wife one more time before he died. Almost immediately, there were reports of ghostly activity at her parent's home in Syderstone Hall and, before it was demolished in 1810, she would appear by the staircase where she met her death at Cumnor Place.
Alfred Barlett, writing in 1850, recalled that Amy's ghost was so vengeful that people avoided Cunmor Place entirely and it nearly 'destroyed the peace of the village' – the ghost had to be exorcised by nine clergymen from Oxford who drowned it in a pond in the adjoining close. The water in the pond never froze again.
Legend has it that Dudley, by then the Earl of Leicester and remarried, saw his first wife one final time following the defeat of the Armada, as he travelled to Buxton to try and take in the healing waters in the Derbyshire town in August 1588. As he travelled through Wychwood Forest, the shape of Amy Robsart loomed in front of him and, with a great laugh, told him he would be dead within a fortnight. He died at his house in Oxfordshire on September 4, 1588.
Following the demolition of Cunmor, Amy's ghost moved back to Syderstone Hall and when that was demolished, moved across to the nearby Rectory (another story for another day).
As an aside, Amy's ghost is said to haunt another Norfolk stately home, too, Rainthorpe Hall near Tasburgh, which was once the home to her half-sister and close to her birth place at Stanfield Hall.
Amy played at Rainsthorpe as a child, and on a door in the main hall is carved, in old French, 'The shade of the great Robsarts still cherishes Raynsthorpe'. The sound of happy, playful, childish footsteps can be heard at Rainsthorpe, it is said, the footsteps of a child who whose death would cause misery and suspicion and change the very course of history.
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