The Black Legend of the House of Dudley
Three generations of the cursed House of Dudley stained the executioner’s block in 16th-century England. Were its members murderous villains working to overthrow the Tudor crown, or shrewd political agents struggling to survive?
As Elizabeth I reached her 50th year, and religious and political tensions in England their bloody peak, a short manuscript circulated the court. Telling of the murderous misdeeds and scandalous ambitions of the queen’s favourite, Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, it became known as Leicester’s Commonwealth. It was not just he, however, who was the target of the anonymous author’s vitriol, but his entire family. Robert, the polemic railed, was ‘so born, so bred up, so nuzzled in treason from his infancy, descended of a tribe of traitors, and fleshed in conspiracy’. He was the son of a treacherous house and it had been foretold that ‘the house of Sir John Dudley’, Leicester’s father, was ‘to be the ruin in time of his Majesty [Henry VIII’s] royal house and blood’.
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