Simon Schama journeys through 5,000 years of life in the British Isles.
Queen Elizabeth I was one of the country's most intelligent monarchs, ruling a Protestant rogue state in a Catholic world. But it was her long, tangled relationship with her cousin Mary Queen of Scots that would test her the most.
Elizabeth never married. Mary married twice but it ruined her. A magnet for conspiracy and intrigue, Mary tormented Elizabeth until finally executed for treason. But it was Mary not Elizabeth who gave birth to an heir. Simon Schama asks if it was the politician Elizabeth, or the mother Mary, who won in the end.
Watch Complete Series:
https://dailymotion.com/playlist/x8t1po
Queen Elizabeth I was one of the country's most intelligent monarchs, ruling a Protestant rogue state in a Catholic world. But it was her long, tangled relationship with her cousin Mary Queen of Scots that would test her the most.
Elizabeth never married. Mary married twice but it ruined her. A magnet for conspiracy and intrigue, Mary tormented Elizabeth until finally executed for treason. But it was Mary not Elizabeth who gave birth to an heir. Simon Schama asks if it was the politician Elizabeth, or the mother Mary, who won in the end.
Watch Complete Series:
https://dailymotion.com/playlist/x8t1po
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TVTranscript
00:00In her last sickness, with the sense of her end coming on fast, Elizabeth I had the ring
00:13she had worn since her coronation filed away from the royal finger. It was a tricky operation,
00:20for the skin had grown in over the gold. But then it was supposed to be a tight fit. This
00:26was, in the manner of speaking her wedding band, put on when she had joined herself
00:31to England 45 years earlier. Now, it seemed, the two were to be put asunder.
00:48She was supposed to be immortal, of course. And the odd thing was that despite the garish
00:54auburn fright wig, the white face mask and the wrinkled bosom, foreign diplomats who
00:59saw her at court, and who had no reason to be gallant, swore they could still see the
01:04young woman, no more than 20 years of age. It doesn't do to be too starry-eyed about
01:18the Virgin Queen. Elizabeth I was only too obviously made of flesh and blood. She was
01:25vain, spiteful, arrogant. She was frequently unjust, and she was often maddeningly indecisive.
01:35But she was also brave, shockingly clever, and eyeful to look at, and on occasions she
01:42was genuinely wise. In other words, she had all the qualities it took to make the genius
01:49politician she undoubtedly was. Just a few feet away from Elizabeth's tomb in Westminster
02:00Abbey lies the body of another woman, Mary Queen of Scots, the woman who had haunted
02:06and fascinated Elizabeth for so much of her life. No virgin, that's for sure. No politician,
02:14either. A complete disaster as a ruler, you'd have to say. But Mary managed something that
02:20eluded Elizabeth. She reproduced. This is the story of two queens, and more importantly,
02:29two women. One a politician, the other a mother. And it's the story of a painful birth. The
02:35union of England and Scotland, the birth of Britain.
03:05A cherished tradition has it that when Elizabeth heard the news that she was to become queen
03:30on November the 17th, 1558, she was seated beneath an ancient oak tree. Her first words
03:37were from Psalm 118. This is the Lord's doing, and it is marvellous in our eyes.
03:50She was right, it was marvellous. In fact, it was little short of being a miracle that
03:55she had made it to that day alive. Tudor royal politics were a bloody affair, especially for
04:01Tudor women. She had been only two, after all, when her mother, Anne Boleyn, had gone to the
04:12scaffold. Her sin, in Henry's mind at least, being her failure to produce a son. It must have been a
04:19body possessed by others, by the devil, an unclean piece of flesh. It had to be cut away.
04:31So Elizabeth would never be free from suspicion. Out of her dark Boleyn eyes,
04:36she watched herself being watched. Inevitably, there were times when her guard was down.
04:42She was barely a teenager when trouble first struck.
04:48She was living with her guardian, Catherine Parr, Henry VIII's widow,
04:52when Parr's new husband, Thomas Seymour, started paying playful visits to her bedroom.
05:00When Catherine Parr died, a rumour started circulating that Seymour had his sight set
05:06on marrying Elizabeth. To even think of such a thing was treason. Even worse,
05:13some wagging tongue said that Elizabeth was pregnant with Seymour's child.
05:19It took all of Elizabeth's already extraordinary composure and self-confidence
05:24to persuade law protector Somerset that she was innocent.
05:28My lord, there goeth rumours abroad which be greatly against my honour and honesty,
05:33which be these, that I am in the tower and with child by my lord admiral. My lord, these are
05:39shameful slanders. I most heartily desire, your lordship, that I may come to the court and show
05:44myself there as I am. Your assured friend to my little power, Elizabeth.
05:50She was, remember, just 14. But there was already the fortitude, the clarity and the courage.
05:57And it was just as well, because she was going to need all those qualities five years later
06:02when facing the most traumatic and dangerous crisis of her entire life.
06:11When her Catholic half-sister Mary came to the throne,
06:15Elizabeth found herself in even deeper trouble. In fact, she found herself in the tower when a
06:21Protestant plot to get rid of Mary backfired. Elizabeth managed to talk herself out of being
06:28charged with treason, but she remained under close surveillance. Danger only turned to
06:34deliverance five years later when Queen Mary died childless.
06:39So here she was, Elizabeth, under the oak, about to be the Protestant queen. She had survived,
06:47just. But she must have been full of dark knowledge and experience about how difficult
06:53it was all going to be. Her mother had been killed for producing just a daughter and a stillborn.
07:00And her sister Mary's womb had been taken away from her by her father.
07:05And her sister Mary's womb had produced nothing but the tumour that had killed her.
07:13So, however dazzling Elizabeth looked, however clever she was,
07:16she has got to have known how rough the road was going to be for a ruler of the wrong sex.
07:23The 25-year-old Elizabeth came into an inheritance of high hopes and deep anxieties.
07:32The celebrations at her coronation were carefully designed to show off the young
07:37queen as the paragon of virtue. This charade of piety, though, was not to be underestimated.
07:45were carefully designed to show off the young queen as the paragon of virtue.
07:51This charade of piety, though, was hardly enough to compensate for the misfortune
07:56of having another woman on the throne. All the same, the sceptics must have been reassured
08:02by Elizabeth's precocious self-possession,
08:05the air of controlled energy she exuded in public right from the start.
08:10You might suppose that her first appearances at the council would have been an ordeal,
08:15but what the councillor saw was not some girlish ingenue,
08:19but someone who seemed full, it was said, of manly authority.
08:27Elizabeth did all the things women in 16th century England weren't supposed to do.
08:32She looked men in the eye and she spoke out of turn.
08:36She had been schooled to it by her tutor, Roger Ascombe.
08:42Ascombe was not just another low-rent don, he was public orator at Cambridge University,
08:48and it was his outlandish idea to teach the teenage girl a discipline most people thought
08:53was quite unsuitable for a woman, the art of rhetoric, the art of public speech.
08:59This was Elizabeth's first and would always remain her speciality.
09:03It was Elizabeth's first and would always remain her strongest political weapon.
09:11But there was something Elizabeth brought to the management of sovereignty
09:15that was entirely her own, something, for that matter,
09:18which none of the princely conduct manuals ever spelled out,
09:22that statecraft was also stagecraft.
09:27Her father and mother had both known this instinctively.
09:30Elizabeth had the actress's gift in spadefalls.
09:34She simply adored being adored.
09:44Adoration, though, wasn't the same thing as allegiance.
09:48For her most important advisor, in fact, her surrogate father, William Cecil,
09:53charisma was no substitute for the one thing
09:56which would truly secure the future of a Protestant England.
10:00An heir.
10:04Cecil knew perfectly well that the majority of the country was still Catholic,
10:09either actively or passively, and he also knew how little it would take
10:13for the hard-earned gains of the Reformation to be undone.
10:18So although the Queen kept telling everyone it was none of their business,
10:22Cecil constantly had to remind her that the realm needed her to have a husband.
10:27For that matter, her body required it, too,
10:30since in the 16th century, prolonged virginity was thought to bring on
10:34the potentially toxic condition known as greensickness,
10:38the abnormal retention of female sperm.
10:42Marital copulation, then, was what the doctor ordered for the good of the realm.
10:49The problem, though, as Cecil was painfully aware,
10:52was that if he pushed Elizabeth too hard,
10:55she might just end up plumping for the man everyone assumed she really loved.
11:00And that man, of course, was Cecil's rival on the council, Robert Dudley.
11:09Dudley was everything Cecil was not.
11:12Flashy, gallant, a noisy extrovert,
11:15and not least, incredibly good-looking, especially on a horse.
11:19To a Queen who liked being surrounded with lookers,
11:22and was quite capable of dismissing those she thought physically unpleasing,
11:26this mattered a lot.
11:28And they shared a past, the same tutors, the same childhood traumas.
11:33Dudley's father had been executed for treason,
11:36which made them both orphans of the scaffold.
11:39In the grim years of Mary's reign, he'd sold lands to help Elizabeth out.
11:44That sort of thing she never forgot.
11:47But how much of a couple were they?
11:50Did they, as all the gossips in Europe, and all diplomats,
11:53and most movie makers since have assumed, become lovers?
12:01What was in the way was Dudley's wife, but she had been ailing for years.
12:06When she died, Dudley would be free, and sleeping with her would be a dream.
12:12But this would have been outrageous for a Queen who had paraded her virginity
12:16at her coronation, by leaving her hair down.
12:21When pressed about the rumours, Elizabeth arily retorted
12:24that such things were impossible when she was surrounded day and night by her ladies.
12:29With a terrible example of the fate of her own mother constantly.
12:34Elizabeth's father, who was a very good man,
12:37With a terrible example of the fate of her own mother constantly before her,
12:42it would have been foolhardy to the point of insanity for her to sleep with Dudley.
12:46The politician in her was, as always, ruling the lover.
12:55In any case, something then happened which did terrible damage to their relationship.
13:01Dudley's wife, Amy, was found at the bottom of a staircase, dead from a broken neck.
13:09An accident seemed altogether too convenient to be credible.
13:13This was, after all, the golden age of gossip,
13:16and gossip did not believe Amy had fallen.
13:19Gossip believed she had been pushed.
13:24Elizabeth immediately sent Dudley away, until cleared of suspicion.
13:29Officially, he was.
13:31And although the Queen always insisted that Dudley had been completely vindicated,
13:35it still cast a shadow over their relationship,
13:38just at the moment when they had become free to marry.
13:42Perhaps it was a case of,
13:44beware of wishing for your heart's true desire, lest you end by getting it.
13:53For the next few years, Elizabeth swung mercurially
13:56between endearment and exasperation,
13:59drawing up documents to make Dudley an earl, only to shred them in front of him.
14:05At other times, especially when she felt nagged by the council,
14:08she would torment them by pretending their marriage was just about to happen.
14:13It never did.
14:17By 1563, Elizabeth seems to have given up on the possibility of ever marrying Robert Dudley,
14:24because she was prepared to offer him to someone else.
14:27Someone, for that matter, whose own marriage prospects
14:31were of tremendous significance for the balance of power in Britain.
14:35That someone was Mary Stuart, Queen of the Scards.
14:44Throughout the whole tortured history of their relationship,
14:47Elizabeth was eaten up with curiosity about her cousin Mary,
14:51trapped in a neurotic beauty contest,
14:54interrogating her ambassadors as if they were the mirrors on the wall
14:57as to who was the taller, the fairer, the wittier, the cleverer.
15:02Elizabeth might have won the prize for brains,
15:05but from the few pictures we have of her,
15:07Mary, with her heart-shaped face, heavy eyelids and creamy complexion,
15:11evidently had the stuff to reduce grown men to warm puddles on the floor.
15:17She was more than just competition, though.
15:19To Elizabeth, Mary, Queen of Scots, was a menace.
15:25The reason was obvious.
15:27Mary was a Catholic, and a Catholic church
15:30did not recognise Elizabeth's right to be Queen of England.
15:33To them, Elizabeth was the product of Henry VIII's illegal marriage to Anne Boleyn.
15:39In Mary's Catholic eyes, then, Elizabeth was simply illegitimate.
15:44How could Elizabeth not take this personally?
15:48What's more, Mary was not only a Stuart,
15:51she was also a Tudor through her great-grandfather, Henry VII.
15:55And so long as Elizabeth was childless,
15:58Mary was next in line to the English throne.
16:07From the moment Mary Stuart arrived in Scotland at the age of 18 from the French court,
16:12where she had been brought up,
16:14the relationship between the cousins was tainted with mutual suspicion.
16:19At the first opportunity, Elizabeth behaved badly, almost irrationally,
16:24denying Mary safe conduct through England to her new realm
16:27and forcing her to sail the long way round to Scotland.
16:31Though very much the injured party,
16:33Mary's response already betrayed the theatrical self-pity
16:38which so got up Elizabeth's nose.
16:42I trust the wind will be so favourable
16:44as I shall not need to come on the coast of England.
16:49And if I do, Monsieur l'Ambassadeur,
16:52the Queen, your mistress, shall have me in her hands to do her will of me.
16:57And if she be so hard-hearted as to desire my hand,
17:01she may then do her pleasure and make sacrifice of me.
17:08Perhaps things might be better between the two of them
17:11if Mary could accept Elizabeth's choice of a safe Protestant husband for her
17:16in the winning form of Robert Dudley.
17:19One tiny problem with this plan, though.
17:22Mary had no intention of being told what to do by Elizabeth.
17:26And anyway, everyone knew that after the death of his wife,
17:30Robert Dudley was spoiled goods.
17:36Lord Henry Darnley, though,
17:38the handsome poster boy of the Scottish nobility,
17:41seemed a much better prospect.
17:43One look at Darnley's shapely calves
17:46and Mary decided she must have him.
17:49It helped that he too had Tudor blood flowing through his veins.
17:54Unfortunately, a lot of whisky ran through them too.
17:58Too late, Mary discovered that she'd married a lazy,
18:01dissolute drunk incapable of doing even the minimal things
18:04required of a co-sovereign.
18:08Stuck at Holyrood with the task of ruling Scotland without him,
18:12Mary increasingly relied on her private secretary.
18:15The Italian Catholic, David Rizzio.
18:19Naturally, the Protestant nobles in Scotland were convinced
18:23that Mary was plotting to turn Scotland back into a Catholic country once more.
18:29So Darnley's increasing estrangement from his wife
18:33gave the Lords most offended by Rizzio's access to the Queen
18:37the opening they were looking for.
18:40In 1566, a group of them approached Darnley
18:44and proposed what amounted to a violent coup.
18:48Get rid of David Rizzio, who was her lover, they said,
18:51not just her secretary.
18:53Ah, thought Darnley, now that would explain why she's such a bitch.
18:58I'll show her who's in charge.
19:05On March the 7th, while she was dining,
19:07Darnley and his fellow plotters burst into Mary's chamber,
19:11tore the terrified Rizzio from Mary's skirts
19:14and stabbed him to death in front of her.
19:33Between 50 and 60 wounds were discovered on his body
19:36after it was thrown down the privy staircase.
19:39At some point, the murderers turned to Mary,
19:42pointing a pistol at her heavily pregnant belly.
19:49And perhaps at that moment, Mary knew how to turn terror into power,
19:54for in the months that followed,
19:56she milked the melodrama of the threatened womb for all it was worth.
20:02Instead of being reduced to a weeping wreck, Mary was strangely calm.
20:08She knew she could be strong
20:10because she was carrying her greatest weapon inside her womb.
20:15Whatever happened to her useless,
20:17drunken, homicidal nitwit of a husband,
20:19she knew that a baby would be born.
20:22Mother and child were going to survive.
20:29On June the 19th, at Edinburgh Castle,
20:32Mary gave birth to the boy who would become James VI of Scotland.
20:37On hearing the news, Elizabeth's reaction was to cry...
20:41Alack, the Queen of Scots is lighter of a bonny son,
20:47and I am of the barren stock.
21:07Mary was by now so consumed with contempt for Darnley
21:11that she resolved to be rid of him.
21:14Possibly all she meant by this was to be rid of him as a husband.
21:18But there were those amongst her devotees,
21:21in particular the Earl of Bothwell,
21:23who took her sighs to mean something altogether more decisive.
21:28Bothwell, one of the great landowners of Scotland,
21:31was rich, promiscuous and dangerous.
21:35But he could also turn on the gallantry,
21:37and in her distress, Mary now turned to him as protector.
21:42And Bothwell was only too happy to solve Mary's Darnley problem.
21:50On the evening of March the 9th, 1567,
21:53while Mary was attending a masked ball,
21:56Bothwell supervised the lighting of a fuse
21:59that at two o'clock in the morning
22:00would detonate an immense quantity of gunpowder
22:03beneath the house where Darnley was asleep.
22:07MUSIC
22:11The house was blown sky-high.
22:15Darnley was dead, but not bumped off according to plan.
22:18Minutes before the explosion, he'd heard suspicious noises
22:22and had himself lowered out of his bedroom window on a chair.
22:26Running through the garden in his nightshirt,
22:28Darnley ran straight into the plotters,
22:31who promptly throttled him to death.
22:33MUSIC
22:42Darnley's murder was a turning point in Mary's life.
22:46From now on, death followed Mary Stewart like a lady-in-waiting.
22:52She was already sick, vomiting black mucus.
22:56She needed help, and the unscrupulous Bothwell was at hand to give it.
23:01His power over Mary now made him recklessly bold,
23:04and he announced to the Scottish lords
23:06that for the proper government of the country,
23:08it was necessary for Mary to have a husband.
23:12Very decently, he offered himself for the job.
23:18Bothwell's idea of a marriage proposal was to abduct Mary
23:22and take her to his grim castle in Dunbar.
23:25There, he planted his flag as prospective King of Scotland
23:30by planting himself, violently it was said, inside her body.
23:36Now, he supposed, the traumatised Mary would have to marry him.
23:40And, to most of the country's horror,
23:43Mary did just that a few weeks later at Holyrood.
23:50It was at this point that Mary lost it,
23:53lost control over her own body,
23:56lost the priceless political asset of her motherhood,
23:59soiled by her relationship with Bothwell,
24:02lost Scotland, lost the whole damn shooting match.
24:05The thing is that it never needed to have happened.
24:08Had she been half the politician Elizabeth was,
24:12she would have distanced herself from Bothwell, not married him.
24:15And then she would have come down like a ton of bricks on Darnley's murderers,
24:19professing herself to be shocked at the crime, truly shocked,
24:24and presenting herself to the people of Scotland as a doubly victimised mother.
24:29Instead, the mother let herself be turned into a whore.
24:37Mary now faced the rebel armies loyal to the murdered Darnley.
24:41But on the verge of battle, Bothwell conveniently disappeared
24:45to gather reinforcements, or so he said,
24:48leaving Mary to face the enemy on her own.
24:51It was the last she would ever see of him.
24:53Dragged back to Edinburgh, a captive, filthy and dishevelled,
24:58she appeared at a window, her dress torn from her shoulders,
25:01her breasts exposed, and was greeted by a mob howling abuse.
25:08Handbills featuring her as a mermaid began to appear,
25:11a mermaid being another name for a prostitute.
25:15Mermaids, of course, were not fit to sit on the throne of Scotland,
25:19so Mary was forced to renounce it in favour of her baby son.
25:24Her Protestant half-brother, the Earl of Moray,
25:26now took charge of baby James and made himself Regent of Scotland.
25:33Mary was 25 years old.
25:36Her history seemed done, but, of course, it was not.
25:41She had one last weapon to deploy, her heir of tragically damaged beauty.
25:47Incarcerated in the castle of Loch Lavin, in the middle of a deep, cold lake,
25:52she unleashed her seductive charm on her jailer,
25:55one of the usually hard-bitten Douglas clans.
25:58He was a young man, but he was a man of his word.
26:01He was a man of his word.
26:02He was a man of his word.
26:04He was a man of his word.
26:05He was a man of his word.
26:07He was a man of his word.
26:08One of the usually hard-bitten Douglas clan, who melted in adoration.
26:18After ten months of imprisonment, in May 1568,
26:23Mary made a getaway across the Lark.
26:28But there was really only one way she could get her throne back,
26:32an appeal to her cousin, Elizabeth.
26:35So her next journey, across the border,
26:38was to be in the nature of a temporary refuge.
26:41She must have supposed her stay would last perhaps a month, a year at the most.
26:46Had she known the real answer, 19 years,
26:50she would surely have avoided the passage across the Solway Firth.
26:55But there she was, an exhausted, bedraggled figure,
26:59her hair cropped for disguise, sitting hunched up in a small boat,
27:04her eyes fixed on the disappearing shoreline of Scotland.
27:16Mary's appearance on English soil threw Elizabeth into turmoil.
27:22Was Mary her heir or wasn't she?
27:25After all, Elizabeth wasn't getting any younger, 35 in 1568.
27:31The royal laundresses were still sending Cecil monthly evidence
27:35of her capacity to produce children.
27:38But she was no nearer to getting married.
27:42So would the fugitive Queen of the Scots be treated like the next in line
27:46or at least as a fellow sovereign, a guest?
27:50Well, not exactly.
27:52Mary's first request to Elizabeth was for some clothes that befitted her status
27:57rather than the rags she had fled in.
28:00What she got, after much complaining, was a packet of linen.
28:09Just as well, perhaps, that she didn't know that Elizabeth
28:12was already wearing Mary's favourite pearls
28:15that had been stolen from Mary by her enemies
28:18and sent to the English Queen.
28:22In fact, Elizabeth didn't know what to do with Mary.
28:25All her royal instincts were outraged by the humiliations
28:29and indignities heaped on her royal cousin.
28:32If Mary would agree to keep her hands off the English throne,
28:36Elizabeth was sorely tempted to help her regain the Scottish crown.
28:43Elizabeth, though, could also see the wisdom of the opposite view,
28:47that it was folly to restore a Catholic queen to the Scottish throne,
28:51giving a backdoor entry to Britain for the French and the Spanish.
28:56There was a safe Protestant regime in Scotland now,
28:59run by Mary's enemies.
29:01Why rock the boat?
29:03So, if Mary imagined she could rely on the sisterhood of queens,
29:07she was deluded.
29:09The first thing that Elizabeth did was order an inquiry
29:13into the murder of Mary's husband, Lord Darnley,
29:16which turned into a trial in all but name.
29:19Now, Mary could have no illusion that she was anything except a prisoner.
29:24She was shuttled from house to house
29:27under the watchful eye of the Earl of Shrewsbury,
29:30who got the unenviable job of being her jailer.
29:33Some of those houses were not much more than a damp ruin.
29:37Others, like Wingfield here, were much more tolerable places.
29:41Now, Wingfield is in Derbyshire,
29:44and that tells you that there was a lot going on there.
29:46Now, Wingfield is in Derbyshire,
29:48and that tells you something about the nervousness of her captors.
29:52Mary Stewart had to be kept a long way away
29:55from any possibility of rescue.
29:58Far away from Scotland, far away from London,
30:00far away from the coast.
30:02In fact, in the Midlands.
30:05But wherever she was,
30:06Mary Stewart had become maximum security problem number one.
30:11Not just a headache, but a magnet for conspiracy.
30:17MUSIC CONTINUES
30:23There were many political heavyweights
30:26for whom Mary was a legitimate and attractive alternative to Elizabeth.
30:30And they were not just a bunch of wild-eyed Catholic dreamers,
30:34but men close to the heart of Elizabeth's government.
30:39Their most ambitious plan was to annul the Bothwell marriage
30:43and marry the Queen of Scots to the Premier Duke of the Realm,
30:47Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk.
30:50Although Norfolk may have been a Catholic at heart,
30:53he was, like so many at this time, outwardly at least,
30:57a conforming Protestant.
30:59So it was perfectly reasonable to see the marriage plot
31:03as a way of binding up the unhealed wounds of the Reformation.
31:07But the Queen wasn't fooled, not for a moment.
31:11When the plot was exposed, she sent Norfolk straight to the Tower.
31:22The plot collapsed.
31:24There was, though, a different kind of fury waiting to happen,
31:27and this was burning with a Catholic flame.
31:36Up here in the North, Catholicism had not only not been rooted out,
31:41it actually fed on the burning resentment and fierce independence
31:45of the great aristocratic families who ran things around here.
31:50They'd been here for centuries,
31:52and they were not about to be pushed around by a bunch of Tudor bureaucrats.
31:56They weren't going to be told what was what
31:59in their government and their religion.
32:02So for them, Mary Stuart was not just a successor.
32:06She was a replacement, as in immediate replacement.
32:11SINGING
32:15So the Catholic North fought the Protestant South.
32:19For a while, it even looked as though the North might win.
32:23As the rebels swept through Lancashire, Yorkshire and Northumberland,
32:27it must have seemed that Catholic Britain had been reborn.
32:32Now, Elizabeth's government really knew what it was up against,
32:36the latest act in the endlessly drawn-out religious war
32:40that had begun when Henry VIII had made himself supreme head of the Church.
32:46But 12,000 troops were eventually mustered,
32:49and the rebellion brutally crushed.
32:57Perhaps the brutality worked,
32:59because the Northern Rising was the last great rebellion to disturb Tudor England.
33:05And it's tempting now to feel the country settling at last
33:08into its Elizabethan finery, feeling fat, safe, comfortable.
33:14But it was always a jittery kind of grandeur.
33:27Elizabeth was 20 years into her reign, and suitors had come and gone,
33:32but there was always something the matter with them.
33:35Too lowly, too Catholic, too stupid.
33:38And besides, now her suitors had rivals, millions of Elizabeth's subjects,
33:44who had become jealously possessive and thought that the Queen was theirs alone.
33:53In the 1570s, they got her.
33:56The cult, the religion of Elizabeth, was spectacularly created.
34:09Her accession day became the greatest of national holidays,
34:13more sacred than all the heathen events on the papist calendar.
34:29Her image began to appear everywhere in allegorical pictures.
34:33Elizabeth as the sun who gave the rainbow its radiant hues.
34:39And even those on the inside, who could plainly see the elaborate scaffolding
34:44from which this image was projected,
34:46who knew that the pale moon glow at the Queen's face
34:50was just pulverised eggshell, borax, alum and mill water.
34:55Even these knowing types were still total captives to the cult.
35:00She had this effect on all kinds of people, especially men,
35:03even when they got older and should have known better.
35:08They built huge prodigy houses in her honour.
35:11It was in its way a desperate need to impress,
35:14a sign of the culture's raw immaturity, its hunger for glitzy gorgeousness,
35:20Elizabethan razzle-dazzle, thigh-hugging hoes,
35:23oak-panelled libraries with yards of unruly,
35:27oak-panelled libraries with yards of unread classics,
35:31ballrooms as big as playing fields.
35:42Now, you might suppose the devotees would be queuing up
35:45for a glimpse of the national Madonna,
35:48but many knew that hosting the show came at a heavy price.
35:54If you were a Burgess of the city of Warwick,
35:56it's hard to know which lot would have made you more nervous.
36:00The royal wanderers, after all, came with 200 carts of the Queen's baggage,
36:06each one pulled by a team of six horses.
36:09That's a lot of stable room to find, that is a lot of hay.
36:13And then, a week before the great event,
36:16men from the office of purveyors would come here
36:20and buy up everything in sight for the visit,
36:22at prices they decided were fair.
36:25Then there were the lords and ladies, though notoriously hard to please.
36:30Supposing they rolled their eyes at the entertainment,
36:33supposing they wrinkled their nose at the fair.
36:37And last of all, of course, there was Queen Bess herself,
36:41a bejewelled apparition with a chalk-white face,
36:44like some goddess on earth.
36:47But like the immortals, she was evidently frightening,
36:51as well as majestic.
36:55You could revel in the Elizabethan glamour show,
36:58just so long as you didn't think too hard
37:00about what was going on beyond the sceptred isle.
37:04For out there, in Europe,
37:06a total war between Catholic and Protestant powers was about to ignite.
37:12The rivalry between Mary, Queen of Scots, and Elizabeth
37:16was no longer a girly soap opera,
37:18it was right at the centre of that global struggle.
37:22In Rome, the Pope declared that Elizabeth was to be considered a heretic.
37:27Whoever sends her out of the world, the Pope decreed,
37:30not only does not sin, but gains merit in the eyes of God.
37:36In response, England became a national security state.
37:40Infiltrators and double agents were recruited by the government.
37:45Gentlemen vigilantes were sworn to take out in advance
37:49anyone so much as suspected of plotting against the Queen.
37:55At the heart of the operation
37:57was Elizabeth's chief spymaster, Francis Walsingham.
38:02Intelligence is never too dear, was Walsingham's motto,
38:07and his whole career was an applied demonstration
38:10that knowledge is power.
38:14But if Walsingham was forced to go to war,
38:17but if Walsingham was ferocious, he was not paranoid.
38:22There were underground conspiracies organised in France, in Rome and Spain,
38:27and they were all working towards one end,
38:30the assassination of Elizabeth and the enthronement of Mary Stuart.
38:38Elizabeth might have been queasy about taking care of Mary,
38:42but Walsingham wasn't.
38:44It was his job to get his hands dirty for England.
38:47That's what spymasters do.
38:49But he knew well enough he couldn't just do her in.
38:52Elizabeth had to be free of any suspicion of complicity in murder.
38:57On the other hand, the Mary problem could not be allowed
39:01to drag on for another 15 years.
39:04Walsingham realised he would have to force a solution.
39:08So he engineered a trap.
39:11And it was a gem.
39:13Mary may have been under house arrest,
39:16but she'd nevertheless been allowed to lead the life of the country lady.
39:20Then, in December 1585, Walsingham made a change.
39:27Mary and her household were suddenly packed up
39:30and sent to close confinement at Chartley Manor in Staffordshire,
39:34where she was guarded by the unsmiling Puritan, Amius Paulet.
39:39As Walsingham had intended, Mary was furious,
39:42desperate to find a way out of her prison.
39:46So, of course, she was thrilled when she discovered an ingenious means
39:50to smuggle coded letters to her supporters.
39:53The letters were secretly put in a watertight packet,
39:57slipped through the bunghole of beer casks,
40:00delivered to and from Chartley.
40:02What Mary didn't know, of course, was that this was a trap.
40:06Walsingham had set the whole thing up.
40:09The letters were intercepted.
40:13When Mary's latest champion, the rich merchant, Anthony Babington,
40:17supplied Mary with details of a plot to murder Elizabeth
40:21and put Mary on the English throne,
40:23Mary wrote back with encouragement.
40:26She said,
40:27The trap was sprung.
40:32At Chartley, Mary felt the skies lighten.
40:36After nearly 20 years of unjust imprisonment,
40:39she could feel liberty at hand, so close she could practically taste it.
40:44One morning, and very unusually,
40:46Paulet allowed Mary to go to bed,
40:49and the next morning, she went to bed.
40:51She was in bed with her husband,
40:53One morning, and very unusually,
40:56Paulet allowed her to go out riding to have a day's hunting.
41:00From a distance, she could see a group of horsemen approach.
41:04Mary must have imagined,
41:06This is it.
41:07News from Babington.
41:09Freedom at last.
41:13But it was, in fact, the warrant for her arrest.
41:17Babington and his fellow plotters had been tortured
41:21and had already confessed.
41:24Mary was taken away while her rooms at Chartley were searched,
41:28turning up hundreds of incriminating documents.
41:34In London, Elizabeth wrote an ecstatic letter to Aemius Paulet.
41:40Aemius, my most faithful and careful servant,
41:44God reward thee triple fold
41:47for the most troublesome charge so well discharged.
41:54SIREN WAILS
41:59There was just one more stop,
42:01one more castle in the career of the Wandering Queen.
42:05Fatheringay in Northamptonshire.
42:08It's just a grassy mound now,
42:10which is just as well, since no ruin,
42:13no standing building, for that matter,
42:15could possibly take the weight of the drama that was to follow.
42:19Anyone expecting Mary Stuart to crumple into tearful confession
42:24had seriously misjudged her.
42:28Up against it, she'd drawn something inside her long
42:31and mostly disastrous career,
42:33which made her resolute and unnervingly lofty,
42:37as if she was suddenly above all this squalid charade.
42:42From the moment of her arrest to the moment of her execution,
42:46As a sinner, I am truly conscious of having often offended my Creator.
42:52I beg Him to forgive me.
42:55But as Queen and Sovereign, I am aware of no fault or offence
42:59for which I have to render account to anyone here below.
43:07Her second tactic was to lie to her father,
43:10and to make him believe that he was lying to her.
43:13Her second tactic was to lie her head off,
43:16denying all knowledge of the Babington plot,
43:19although she was on stronger ground when she accused Walsingham
43:22of having set up the whole thing to get rid of her.
43:28Elizabeth, of course, did not see it exactly in this way.
43:32She wrote to Mary as if the Queen of the Scots
43:35had somehow been an ungrateful houseguest
43:37who'd made off with the towels.
43:43You have planned to take my life and ruin my kingdom
43:46by the shedding of blood.
43:48I never proceeded so hastily against you.
43:51On the contrary, I have maintained you and preserved your life
43:54with the same care which I use for myself.
44:05On the 15th of October, 1586, the formal trial began.
44:10In a typical gesture, half plea, half threat,
44:14Mary warned her prosecutors to look to their consciences.
44:18Remember, she said,
44:20the theatre of the world is wider than the realm of England.
44:24And it was to that audience, worldwide and across the ages,
44:28that she now took centre stage.
44:34Mary hobbled into the room, by now painfully infirm,
44:38dressed head to foot like a glamorous mother superior
44:42in swathes of black velvet and a white headdress.
44:45Deprived of any lawyer,
44:47she turned to the big guns of the privy council facing her.
44:53There is not one, I think, among you.
44:56Let him be the cleverest man in the world
44:58who would be capable of resisting
45:00or defending himself if he were in my place.
45:04Of course, it wouldn't have mattered what she said.
45:07The trial resumed in London without her
45:10and passed swiftly to her conviction.
45:16All her adult life, Elizabeth had been spooked
45:19by her fascinating, infuriating cousin,
45:22who seemed to personify all the cliches about women
45:26which Elizabeth herself had rejected.
45:28Now she had a precious opportunity to make her own choice
45:32and she had a precious opportunity
45:34to get Mother Mary off her back.
45:37Parliament was impatient to be rid of her
45:39and the people were positively baying for Mary's blood.
45:43Yet somehow, Elizabeth couldn't bring herself to do the deed.
45:47And it wasn't that she was sentimental about Mary,
45:50it was that she was scared,
45:52scared of being seen by the world
45:54to have her fingerprints on the axe.
45:57This was what was robbing Elizabeth of her sleep,
46:01the tormenting question whether by killing Mary
46:04she was getting rid of trouble or inviting it.
46:10On February 1st, 1587,
46:14Elizabeth finally put her signature on Mary's death warrant.
46:18MUSIC PLAYS
46:34All the chaos, squalor, reckless adventuring,
46:38rash conspiracies, pathetic delusions,
46:41histrionic bouts of self-pity,
46:43all the escapes, all the rescues,
46:45they had all led her to this one supreme moment.
46:49She would be a Catholic martyr.
46:52MUSIC CONTINUES
46:58So when Mary was told she was to be executed the next morning
47:03by a weeping Scottish courtier,
47:05she told him to be joyful instead.
47:08For the end of Mary Stuart's trouble, she said,
47:12Carry this message for me and tell my friends
47:15that I died a true woman to my religion
47:18and like a true Scottish woman and a true French woman.
47:22MUSIC CONTINUES
47:32When she undressed for the last time,
47:34she was taken to the hospital where she was admitted.
47:38MUSIC CONTINUES
47:40When she undressed for the executioner,
47:43the demure black gown fell away to reveal a crimson petticoat,
47:48the blood-red hue of the martyr.
47:52Mary's eyes were bound with a white silk handkerchief
47:55embroidered with gold,
47:58and she lay with such utter stillness on the block
48:01that it actually unnerved the executioner.
48:04MUSIC CONTINUES
48:07MUSIC CONTINUES
48:18His first blow cut deep into the back of her head.
48:22The second severed it, but for a hanging thread of flesh.
48:29Even now, Mary contrived to remain centre stage.
48:33For 15 minutes after the last blow of the axe,
48:36the lips on her severed head, so witnesses reported,
48:40continued to move, as if in silent prayer.
48:44MUSIC CONTINUES
48:52And when the executioner, by now probably wanting to die himself,
48:56held up the head to the spectators,
48:58he made the mistake of grasping it by the mass of auburn curls.
49:03But that was a wig.
49:06To general horror, Mary's skull, the hair cropped into short grey stubble,
49:10fell from his grip and rolled along the floor.
49:14MUSIC CONTINUES
49:24That moment, a terrible howling came from the crimson blood-soaked petticoat.
49:30Mary's lap dog had to be taken away from the wreckage of her mistress.
49:36They tried and tried to scrub it clean of the clotted blood.
49:40They did so, but it wouldn't eat.
49:43It languished, it died.
49:45It was just another martyr to Mary's pathetic, tragic life.
49:50Perhaps that little dog was the first mourner.
49:53It certainly was not going to be the last.
49:56Among the mourners, astoundingly, was Queen Elizabeth,
50:01in deep denial of what she had done.
50:06When she heard, her countenance changed, her words faltered.
50:10And with excessive sorrow, she was in a manner astonished,
50:14insomuch as she gave herself over to grief,
50:16putting herself into mourning weeds and shedding abundance of tears.
50:20MUSIC CONTINUES
50:32Some of Elizabeth's anguish may have been genuine remorse.
50:37Some of it was downright fear.
50:40And she was right to worry.
50:42Even before she was buried, Elizabeth was still in a state of fear.
50:47And she was right to worry.
50:49Even before Mary's execution, King Philip of Spain had accelerated
50:54his plans for the enterprise of England.
50:57And with Mary now dead, there would be no stopping him.
51:02Suddenly, Elizabethan England looked very small, very vulnerable.
51:12This was always Elizabeth's worst nightmare,
51:15a full-scale Catholic invasion.
51:18And now Philip was launching one.
51:22The Spanish admirals, however,
51:24were deeply pessimistic about the chances of success.
51:27They knew the English ships had a massive edge in speed and manoeuvrability.
51:33The miracle was not that England was saved,
51:36but that the Spanish came so close to pulling it off.
51:39Only a few miles of the channel
51:42and an unhelpful wind direction made the difference.
51:45The weather, as usual, batted for England.
51:55But it was a close thing.
51:57The English were right to be scared in the summer and autumn of 1588.
52:03What do you do when you're weepy and terrified?
52:06Well, you cry out for mummy.
52:08And that, courtesy of Robert Dudley, dying of cancer now,
52:12but still the great impresario of Elizabeth's shows,
52:15is exactly how she appeared to the troops at the arm camp at Tilbury.
52:20The mother at last.
52:21The virgin mother of England.
52:24And the kind of mother you'd want on your side.
52:27A mother dressed in a breastplate of steel.
52:33Everything Elizabeth had ever learned came together at Tilbury.
52:37Charisma in a costume, the shellburst of oratory.
52:41And perhaps most important, what all mothers know instinctively,
52:45that there's no substitute for being there.
52:49And there, on August the 8th and 9th, she certainly was.
52:54Arriving in a gilded coach, escorted by 2,000 ecstatic troops.
53:00And what she produced for the expectant crowds was pure gold.
53:04The first great speech by a queen recorded in history.
53:09This is where the real event of 1588 happened.
53:12Not out on the high seas, but on the soapbox at Tilbury.
53:19My loving people, I come among you not for my recreation and disport,
53:26but being resolved in the midst of the heat of the battle
53:31to live and die amongst you all.
53:34To lay down for God and my kingdom and for my people
53:40my honour and blood, even in the dust.
53:46I know I have the body of a weak and feeble woman,
53:50but I have the heart and stomach of a king.
53:54And a king of England, too.
53:57And think foul scorn that Spain or any prince of Europe
54:02should dare invade the borders of my realm,
54:06to which rather dishonour I myself will take up arms.
54:18Oh, I know it's all spin and hype, but it was hype for England.
54:22And it did make a difference.
54:24Just like Churchill's rhetoric made a difference in 1940.
54:28Almost instinctively, the Queen seemed to know
54:30what it was her people needed to hear.
54:33Look, she said, I may be a goddess, but I'm also flesh and blood.
54:37Your flesh and blood.
54:39Whatever you go through, I'll go through it with you.
54:42That made the difference between terror and determination.
54:47That is what we have queens for.
54:53You couldn't top that, and Elizabeth couldn't.
54:56The euphoria of 1588 was short-lived.
55:01In the closing years of the Tudor century,
55:04famine across the country triggered food riots.
55:07Cutthroats and beggars prowled the roads.
55:10The Irish, who were spoken of as savages,
55:13were driven into a nine-year war.
55:17And for the Queen herself, the distance between the mythology
55:21of Elizabeth's ageless body and the shrivelled reality
55:26became more glaring.
55:28Thoughts inevitably began to turn to her succession.
55:33Everybody knew who that would be.
55:35James, son of Mary, Queen of Scots.
55:43So, in the end, was it Mary, Queen of Scots,
55:45the mother who had triumphed from the grave over her rival Elizabeth?
55:52Elizabeth had one comfort, though.
55:54James had been brought up a Protestant,
55:57forced to disown his own mother after her disgrace.
56:04But still, he was Mary's child, the fruit of her womb, not Elizabeth's.
56:13And when Elizabeth died in 1603,
56:16nearly a half a century after that day under the oak,
56:20as gently as an apple falling from a tree, someone said,
56:25when her underthings were taken from her body,
56:28it was seen that they still fitted the contours of the virgin,
56:32wasp-waisted, slim-hipped, long-limbed.
56:37It was a body which, according to some,
56:39had not fulfilled the purpose for which God had fashioned it.
56:42It was supposed to have joined itself to a husband,
56:45to have grown his seed,
56:47to have given him and the country posterity.
56:52She had done none of this.
56:54But no-one in their right mind thought that she had failed her people.
56:58She had been different, that's all.
57:06When the ring which had united Elizabeth to her country
57:09was finally removed from her finger,
57:12it was carried 400 miles north to Scotland.
57:15Now it would symbolise a new marriage,
57:17this time between two nations.
57:22Elizabeth and Mary Stuart never met.
57:27It took James I to bring the two women together at last,
57:31closer in death than they had ever been in life.
57:35There had been an old, wonderful joke, doing the rounds in the 1560s,
57:40that all of their problems would be solved
57:44if only Mary and Elizabeth could marry each other.
57:47And in one sense, they had.
57:50They were at least together and at a terrible price,
57:52and with so much pain, they had had a baby.
57:56It was a little thing with a big name.
57:59Magna Britannia.
58:01Great Britain.
59:13MAGNA BRITANNIA