domestic tragedy named A Yorkshire Tragedy alluded to her fall from a pair of stairs as an easy way to get rid of one's wife: "A politician did it." In the 19th century her story became very popular due to the best-selling novel, Kenilworth, by Walter Scott. The novel's arch-villain is again called Varney. The notion that Amy Robsart was murdered gained new strength with the discovery of the Spanish diplomatic correspondence (and with it of poison rumours) by the Victorian historian James Anthony Froude. Generally convinced of Leicester's wretchedness, he concluded in 1863: "she was murdered by persons who hoped to profit by his elevation to the throne; and Dudley himself … used private means … to prevent the search from being pressed inconveniently far." There followed the Norfolk antiquarian Walter Rye with The Murder of Amy Robsart in 1885: here she was first poisoned and then, that method failing, killed by violent means. Rye's main sources were Cecil's talk with de Quadra around the time of Amy Dudley's death and, again, Leicester's Commonwealth. Much more scholarly and influential was an 1870 work by George Adlard, Amy Robsart and the Earl of Leycester, which printed relevant letters and covertly suggested suicide as an explanation. By 1910, A.F. Pollard was convinced that the fact that Amy Robsart's death caused suspicion was "as natural as it was incredible … But a meaner intelligence than Elizabeth's or even Dudley's would have perceived that murder would make the[ir] marriage impossible." Modern theories The coroner's report came to light in The National Archives in 2008 and is compatible with an accidental fall as well as suicide or other violence. In the absence of the forensic findings of 1560, it was often assumed that a simple accident could not be the explanation—on the basis of near-contemporary tales that Amy Dudley was found at the bottom of a short flight of stairs with a broken neck, her headdress still standing undisturbed "upon her head", a detail that first appeared as a satirical remark in Leicester's Commonwealth and has ever since been repeated for a fact. To account for such oddities and evidence that she was ill, it was suggested in 1956 by Ian Aird, a professor of medicine, that Amy Dudley might have suffered from breast cancer, which through metastatic cancerous deposits in the spine, could have caused her neck to break under only limited strain,