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A Novel of Historical and Detective Fiction MISFORTUNE: A NOVEL OF HISTORICAL AND DETECTIVE FICTION by Samme Chittum a Dissertation Submitted to the University at Albany, State University of New York in Partial Fulfillment of Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy College of Arts and Sciences Department of English 2015 MISFORTUNE: A NOVEL OF HISTORICAL AND DETECTIVE FICTION by Samme Chittum COPYRIGHT 2015 Abstract Misfortune is a work of historiographic metafiction that takes as its subject what many regard as an unsolved crime: the suspicious death on Sunday September 8, 1560 of Amy Robsart, the wife of Robert Dudley, the favorite of Elizabeth I. The plot revisits the black-legend of Robert Dudley, the wife killer, by casting him as the victim and his wife as a co-conspirator in a scheme to assassinate her husband. Misfortune connects the events and personalities surrounding the death of Amy Robsart to Leicester’s Commonwealth, a work of political propaganda published in 1584 that accused Dudley of murdering his wife. This novel is concerned with and comments upon authors as historical actors, stolen stories and fiction masquerading as nonfiction. Because it is a novel of detection, the story of the crime is gradually reconstructed via investigations conducted by two amateur detectives working in two different centuries. The dominant narrative is that of the investigation that unfolds in September of 1560 at Cumnor Place during the week after the murder. The subordinate investigation is set in Sir Water Scott’s country estate of Abbotsford as he writes Kenilworth in September of 1820. Sir Thomas Blount is the sixteenth-century detective and the primary narrator; Lady Louisa Stuart is eighteenth century detective whose journals entries both add to and contradict Blount’s findings. Blount is modeled upon the hard-boiled detective who has a personal stake in the investigation. Lady Louisa is a classic armchair detective whose strength is her detachment. My dissertation draws upon a diverse and extensive body of historical evidence, both factual and circumstantial, the sources of which are cited in my afterword, “The Thing That Thou Saw Only in Thought: Crafting a Creative Dissertation.” iii Table of Contents Abstract ........................................................................................................................................... iii Chapter One: Elizabeth Tudor......................................................................................................... 1 Chapter Two: Henry Fitzalan, the 19th Earl of Arundel .................................................................. 7 Chapter Three: What the Cruel World Shall Bruit ........................................................................ 16 Chapter Four: Abbotsford ............................................................................................................. 34 Chapter Five: Knights Be Not Born ............................................................................................... 36 Chapter Six: Cumnor Hall .............................................................................................................. 40 Chapter Seven: The Heart Doth Choose ....................................................................................... 56 Chapter Eight: Two Dints to Her Head .......................................................................................... 65 Chapter Nine: Sir Richard Verney ................................................................................................. 71 Chapter Ten: A Falsehood Once Received .................................................................................... 79 Chapter Eleven: My Husband’s Whore ......................................................................................... 81 Chapter Twelve: His Enemies ........................................................................................................ 91 Chapter Thirteen: White Witches ................................................................................................. 96 Chapter Fourteen: True Tales ..................................................................................................... 109 Chapter Fifteen: Secrets ............................................................................................................. 115 Chapter Sixteen: In Print ............................................................................................................. 136 Chapter Seventeen: The Crypt .................................................................................................... 178 Chapter Eighteen: A Letter ......................................................................................................... 187 Chapter Nineteen: His Lechery ................................................................................................... 199 Chapter Twenty: Full of Dishonor ............................................................................................... 213 Chapter Twenty-one: Two Villains .............................................................................................. 235 Chapter Twenty-two: Windsor Castle ......................................................................................... 251 Chapter Twenty-three: A Piece of Gossip ................................................................................... 263 Chapter Twenty-four: The Hood Upon Her Head ....................................................................... 266 Chapter Twenty-five: The Virgin Queen ..................................................................................... 270 Afterword .................................................................................................................................... 274 Bibliography ................................................................................................................................ 304 iv Chapter One: Elizabeth Tudor Whitehall Palace in the winter of 1588; three months after the death of Robert Dudley “Here lies the noble lecher, who used art to provoke. Here lies the constant husband, whose love was firm as smoke. Here lies the politician and nut worm of the state. Here lies the Earl of Leicester That God and man did hate.” An excerpt from an epitaph by an anonymous author written after Robert Dudley’s death at age 56 on September 4, 1588, four years after the publication of Leicester’s Commonwealth, a scurrilous account of the circumstances surrounding the death of his wife. Francis Walsingham makes his reverences, nostrils flaring as he dips his head and inhales a bright, ticklish whiff of mint. And what else? The sweetish sharp scent of roses in spirit water and something confectionary as well, mayhap almonds ground fine. All mask something sour—her person, smelling like Sunday’s clotted cream gone off by Monday and comprised, top to bottom, of pinched toes and nails gone yellow, brittle knees, ribs like clapboards, withered breasts and a scalp all but bald beneath a red wig curled in the Roman style. The Queen is distracted. She sighs and touches her wig, as if yearning to scratch an itch or tap her brain. He clears his throat and waits but a moment before she narrows her bird-like eyes and surveys him with a gaze both scrutinizing and fond. “You wear each day of your life upon your countenance, Sir Francis. A pipe with your posset is what you need. Dries up the rheum!” 1 “Your Majesty is my only looking glass,” he says. “It is upon you I rely for an honest reckoning. Your good health makes a mockery of all physic. As for me, treacles are of no avail, but I shall try Raleigh’s herb, if you judge it to be restorative.” He is rewarded with a sly smile, her vermillion lips closed to hide teeth gone grey- brown. Her skin crinkles, fissuring the sediment-like layer of white lacquer on her cheeks. He is almost out of humor after being kept waiting while her women painted her face, taking pains to conceal every flaw as they dabbed her high forehead with a paste compounded of alum, tin ash and a dash of moth wings, for all he knows. How unbeautiful she is, he thinks, but enduring, and that is all that matters—that and her command of the old gods who still meddle in the affairs of men. Four months have gone by since Neptune opened his sea-foamy maw and swallowed four hundred Spanish galleons, as if intent on declaring his violent love for her, his queen among mortals. “I have of late been thinking,” she says, “of the incalculable harm done by lies enshrined in print.” She tilts her chin toward the table. There they are, laid side by side, a pamphlet containing an epitaph defaming Dudley and something much worse—a copy of the banned book they have both tried so hard to suppress, to no avail. “To let him have the last word, it rankles, sir. I cannot abide it.” The Queen need not name the author of whom she speaks. He knows him all too well. Sir Charles Arundell, dead not quite a year. Her troublesome second cousin, leader of the English Catholics in France and author of the book that has blighted Dudley’s legacy: Leicester’s Commonwealth. A discourse on the abominable life, plots, treasons, murders, falsehoods, poisonings, lusts, incitements and evil stratagems employed by Lord Leicester. 2 Out of habit, he makes his face as private as a wardrobe. “Your grace, this scurrilous tract was and is no more than idle gossip, a bundle of railings bound in leather.” Yet it is also dangerous, a seditious treatise printed in Paris, or possibly Antwerp in October of 1584.
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