- 6 hours ago
Category
📚
LearningTranscript
00:06In her last sickness, with the sense of her end coming on fast,
00:11Elizabeth I had the ring she had worn since her coronation filed away from the royal finger.
00:18It was a tricky operation, for the skin had grown in over the gold.
00:23But then it was supposed to be a tight fit.
00:25This was, in a manner of speaking, her wedding band, put on when she had joined herself to England 45
00:32years earlier.
00:35Now, it seemed, the two were to be put asunder.
00:47She was supposed to be immortal, of course.
00:50And the odd thing was that despite the garish auburn fright wig, the white-faced mask and the wrinkled bosom,
00:58foreign diplomats who saw her at court and who had no reason to be gallant swore they could still see
01:04the young woman, no more than 20 years of age.
01:15It doesn't do to be too starry-eyed about the Virgin Queen.
01:20Elizabeth I was only too obviously made of flesh and blood.
01:24She was vain, 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 was genuinely wise.
01:44In other words, she had all the qualities it took to make the genius politician she undoubtedly was.
01:56Just a few feet away from Elizabeth's tomb in Westminster Abbey lies the body of another woman,
02:02Mary Queen of Scots, the woman who had haunted and fascinated Elizabeth for so much of her life.
02:10No virgin, that's for sure.
02:13No politician, either.
02:15A complete disaster as a ruler, you'd have to say.
02:18But Mary managed something that eluded Elizabeth.
02:22She reproduced.
02:24This is the story of two queens, and more importantly, two women.
02:29One a politician, the other a mother.
02:32And it's the story of a painful birth.
02:35The union of England and Scotland, the birth of Britain.
03:06The Amen to the Children, or the Anonych
03:24A cherished tradition has it that when Elizabeth heard the news
03:28that she was to become queen on November 17, 1558,
03:33she was seated beneath an ancient oak tree.
03:35Her first words were from Psalm 118,
03:39Ad domino factum est mirabile in oculis nostris.
03:43This is the Lord's doing, and it is marvellous in our eyes.
03:49She was right, it was marvellous.
03:52In fact, it was little short of being a miracle
03:54that she had made it to that day alive.
03:58Tudor royal politics were a bloody affair, especially for Tudor women.
04:07She had been only two, after all,
04:09when her mother Anne Boleyn had gone to the scaffold,
04:12her sin, in Henry's mind at least, being her failure to produce a son.
04:18It must have been a body possessed by others,
04:21by the devil, an unclean piece of flesh.
04:24It had to be cut away.
04:30So Elizabeth would never be free from suspicion.
04:34Out of her dark Boleyn eyes, she watched herself being watched.
04:39Inevitably, there were times when her guard was down.
04:42She was barely a teenager when trouble first struck.
04:47She was living with her guardian, Catherine Parr, Henry VIII's widow,
04:52when Parr's new husband, Thomas Seymour,
04:55started paying playful visits to her bedroom.
05:00When Catherine Parr died, a rumour started circulating
05:04that Seymour had his sight set on marrying Elizabeth.
05:07To even think of such a thing was treason.
05:11Even worse, some wagging tongues said
05:14that Elizabeth was pregnant with Seymour's child.
05:18It took all of Elizabeth's already extraordinary composure
05:23and self-confidence
05:24to persuade Lord Protector Somerset that she was innocent.
05:30My lord, there goeth rumours abroad,
05:33which be greatly against my honour and honesty,
05:35which be these,
05:36that I am in the tower and with child by my lord admiral.
05:40My lord, these are shameful slanders.
05:43I most heartily desire your lordship
05:44that I may come to the court
05:45and show myself there as I am.
05:48Your assured friend to my little power, Elizabeth.
05:55She was, remember, just 14.
05:58But there was already the fortitude,
06:01the clarity and the courage.
06:03And it was just as well
06:04because she was going to need all those qualities
06:06five years later
06:07when facing the most traumatic
06:10and dangerous crisis of her entire life.
06:15When her Catholic half-sister Mary came to the throne,
06:19Elizabeth found herself in even deeper trouble.
06:22In fact, she found herself in the tower
06:25when a Protestant plot to get rid of Mary backfired.
06:29Elizabeth managed to talk herself out of being charged with treason,
06:34but she remained under close surveillance.
06:37Danger only turned to deliverance five years later
06:41when Queen Mary died childless.
06:46So here she was, Elizabeth, under the oak,
06:49about to be the Protestant queen.
06:52She had survived, just.
06:55But she must have been full of dark knowledge
06:57and experience about how difficult it was all going to be.
07:01Her mother had been killed for producing just a daughter
07:05and a stillborn.
07:07And her sister Mary's womb had produced nothing but the tumour
07:10that had killed her.
07:12So, however dazzling Elizabeth looked,
07:15however clever she was,
07:16she has got to have known
07:18how rough the robe was going to be
07:20for a ruler of the wrong sex.
07:32The 25-year-old Elizabeth came into an inheritance of high hopes
07:37and deep anxieties.
07:42The celebrations at her coronation were carefully designed
07:46to show off the young queen as the paragon of virtue.
07:50This charade of piety, though,
07:53was hardly enough to compensate for the misfortune
07:55of having another woman on the throne.
07:59All 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
08:08right from the start.
08:11You might suppose that her first appearances at the council
08:15would have been an ordeal,
08:17but what the councillor saw was not some girlish ingenue,
08:20but someone who seemed full, it was said, of manly authority.
08:28Elizabeth did all the things women in 16th-century England
08:32weren't supposed to do.
08:34She looked men in the eye, and she spoke out of turn.
08:39She had been schooled to it by her tutor, Roger Ascombe.
08:45Ascombe was not just another low-rent don.
08:48He was public orator at Cambridge University,
08:51and it was his outlandish idea to teach the teenage girl
08:55a discipline most people thought was quite unsuitable for a woman,
08:59the art of rhetoric, the art of public speech.
09:02This was Elizabeth's first and would always remain
09:06her strongest political weapon.
09:11But there was something Elizabeth brought to the management of sovereignty
09:14that was entirely her own,
09:17something, for that matter,
09:18which none of the princely conduct manuals ever spelled out,
09:22that statecraft was also stagecraft.
09:26Her father and mother had both known this instinctively.
09:30Elizabeth had the actress's gift in spadefuls.
09:34She simply adored being adored.
09:44Adoration, though, wasn't the same thing as allegiance.
09:48For her most important adviser,
09:50in 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.
09:59An heir.
10:04Cecil knew perfectly well
10:06that the majority of the country was still Catholic,
10:09either actively or passively,
10:10and he also knew how little it would take
10:13for the hard-earned gains of the Reformation to be undone.
10:17So although the Queen kept telling everyone
10:20it was none of their business,
10:22Cecil constantly had to remind her
10:24that the realm needed her to have a husband.
10:28For that matter, her body required it too,
10:31since in the 16th century,
10:33prolonged virginity was thought to bring on
10:36the potentially toxic condition known as green sickness,
10:40the abnormal retention of female sperm.
10:44Marital copulation, then,
10:46was what the doctor ordered for the good of the realm.
10:50The problem, though, as Cecil was painfully aware,
10:54was that if he pushed Elizabeth too hard,
10:57she might just end up plumping for the man
10:59everyone assumed she really loved.
11:02And that man, of course, was Cecil's rival on the council,
11:06Robert Dudley.
11:11Dudley was everything Cecil was not.
11:14Flashy, gallant, a noisy extrovert,
11:17and not least incredibly good-looking,
11:19especially on a horse.
11:21To a Queen who liked being surrounded with lookers
11:24and was quite capable of dismissing those
11:26she thought physically unpleasing,
11:28this mattered a lot.
11:30And they shared a past.
11:32The same tutors, the same childhood traumas.
11:36Dudley's father had been executed for treason,
11:39which made them both orphans of the scaffold.
11:42In the grim years of Mary's reign,
11:44he'd sold lands to help Elizabeth out.
11:46That sort of thing she never forgot.
11:53But how much of a couple were they?
11:56Did they, as all the gossips in Europe
11:58and all diplomats and most movie makers since have assumed,
12:02become lovers?
12:07What was in the way was Dudley's wife,
12:10but she had been ailing for years.
12:13When she died, Dudley would be free,
12:15and sleeping with your intended
12:17was not that unusual in Tudor England.
12:20But this would have been outrageous
12:22for a Queen who had paraded her virginity at her coronation
12:25by leaving her hair down.
12:29When pressed about the rumours,
12:31Elizabeth airily retorted that such things were impossible
12:34when she was surrounded day and night by her ladies.
12:37With a terrible example of the fate of her own mother
12:40constantly before her,
12:42it would have been foolhardy to the point of insanity
12:44for her to sleep with Dudley.
12:46The politician in her was, as always, ruling the lover.
12:55In any case, something then happened
12:57which did terrible damage to their relationship.
13:01Dudley's wife, Amy, was found at the bottom of a staircase,
13:05dead from a broken neck.
13:08An 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
13:26until cleared of suspicion.
13:29Officially, he was.
13:30And although the Queen always insisted
13:32that 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,
13:43beware of wishing for your heart's true desire,
13:46lest you end by getting it.
13:52For the next few years,
13:54Elizabeth swung mercurially
13:56between endearment and exasperation,
13:59drawing up documents to make Dudley an earl,
14:02only to shred them in front of him.
14:04At other times,
14:06especially when she felt nagged by the council,
14:09she would torment them
14:09by pretending their marriage was just about to happen.
14:12It never did.
14:17By 1563,
14:18Elizabeth seems to have given up on the possibility
14:21of ever marrying Robert Dudley,
14:23because she was prepared to offer him to someone else.
14:27Someone, for that matter,
14:29whose own marriage prospects were of tremendous significance
14:32for the balance of power in Britain.
14:34That someone was Mary's steward,
14:37Queen of the Scots.
14:43Throughout 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,
15:04but 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.
15:20To Elizabeth, Mary, Queen of Scots, was a menace.
15:24The reason was obvious.
15:27Mary was a Catholic,
15:28and a Catholic church did 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
16:11from the French court where 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,
16:25denying Mary safe conduct through England to her new realm
16:28and forcing her to sail the long way round to Scotland.
16:32Though very much the injured party,
16:35Mary's response already betrayed the theatrical self-pity
16:38which so got up Elizabeth's nose.
16:43I trust the wind will be so favourable
16:45as 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
16:55to do her will of me.
16:57And if she be so hard-hearted as to desire my end,
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
17:13of a safe Protestant husband for her
17:15in 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
17:45and Mary decided she must have him.
17:49It helped that he, too, had Tudor blood flowing through his veins.
17:54Unfortunately, a lot of whiskey ran through them, too.
17:57Too late, Mary discovered
17:59that she'd married a lazy, dissolute drunk,
18:02incapable of doing even the minimal things
18:04required of a co-sovereign.
18:08Stuck at Holyrood
18:09with 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
18:22were convinced that Mary was plotting
18:24to turn Scotland back into a Catholic country once more.
18:29So Darnley's increasing estrangement from his wife
18:32gave 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.
18:47Get rid of David Rizzio, who was her lover, they said,
18:51not just her secretary.
18:53Ah, thought Darnley,
18:55now that would explain why she's such a bitch.
18:58I'll show her who's in charge.
19:04On March the 7th, while she was dining, Darnley and his fellow plotters
19:09burst into Mary's chamber, tore the terrified Rizzio from Mary's skirts,
19:14and stabbed him to death in front of her.
19:32Between 50 and 60 wounds were discovered on his body
19:36after it was thrown down the privy staircase.
19:38At some point, the murderers turned to Mary, pointing a pistol
19:43at 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, she milked the melodrama
19:57of the threatened womb for all it was worth.
20:02Instead of being reduced to a weeping wreck,
20:05Mary was strangely calm.
20:08She knew she could be strong because she was carrying
20:11her greatest weapon inside her womb.
20:15Whatever happened to her useless, drunken, homicidal nitwit
20:18of her husband, she knew that a baby would be born.
20:22Mother and child were going to survive.
20:29On June 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 sun,
20:46and I am of a 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.
21:17But there were those amongst her devotees,
21:20in particular the Earl of Bothwell,
21:22who took her size to mean something altogether more decisive.
21:28Bothwell, one of the great landowners of Scotland,
21:31was rich, promiscuous and dangerous.
21:34But he could also turn on the gallantry,
21:36and in her distress, Mary now turned to him as protector.
21:42And Bothwell was only too happy to solve Mary's Darnley problem.
21:49On the evening of March 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.
22:11The 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
22:21and 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.
22:42Darnley'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.
22:55She needed help, and the unscrupulous Bothwell was at hand to give it.
23:00His 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
23:29by planting himself, violently it was said, inside her body.
23:35Now 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.
23:49It was at this point that Mary lost it.
23:53Lost control over her own body.
23:55Lost the priceless political asset of her motherhood,
23:58soiled 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,
24:11she would have distanced herself from Bothwell,
24:14not married him.
24:15And then she would have come down like a ton of bricks
24:18on Darnley's murderers, professing herself to be shocked at the crime.
24:22Truly shocked.
24:24And presenting herself to the people of Scotland
24:26Scotland 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.
24:50It was the last she would ever see of him.
24:55Dragged back to Edinburgh, a captive, filthy and dishevelled,
24:59she appeared at a window, her dress torn from her shoulders,
25:03her breasts exposed, and was greeted by a mob howling abuse.
25:10Handbills featuring her as a mermaid began to appear,
25:13a mermaid being another name for a prostitute.
25:17Mermaids, of course, were not fit to sit on the throne of Scotland.
25:21So Mary was forced to renounce it in favour of her baby son.
25:26Her Protestant half-brother, the Earl of Murray,
25:28now took charge of baby James and made himself regent of Scotland.
25:35Mary was 25 years old.
25:38Her history seemed done, but of course it was not.
25:54She had one last weapon to deploy, her heir of tragically damaged beauty.
26:00Incarcerated in the castle of Loch Leven, in the middle of a deep, cold lake,
26:05she unleashed her seductive charm on her jailer,
26:08one of the usually hard-bitten Douglas clan, who melted in adoration.
26:18After ten months of imprisonment, in May of 1568,
26:23Mary made a getaway across the lark.
26:28But there was really only one way she could get her throne back,
26:31an appeal to her cousin, Elizabeth.
26:34So her next journey, across the border,
26:38was to be in the nature of a temporary refuge.
26:40She must have supposed her stay would last perhaps a month,
26:44a 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.
26:54But there she was, an exhausted, bedraggled figure,
26:59her hair cropped for disguise,
27:02sitting 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.
27:21Was Mary her heir or wasn't she?
27:24After all, Elizabeth wasn't getting any younger, 35, in 1568.
27:31The royal laundresses were still sending
27:33subtle monthly evidence of her capacity to produce children.
27:37But she was no nearer to getting married.
27:41So would the fugitive Queen of the Scots be treated like the next in line,
27:46or released as a fellow sovereign, a guest?
27:50Well, not exactly.
27:52Mary's first request to Elizabeth
27:53was for some clothes that befitted her status
27:56rather than the rags she had fled in.
28:00What she got, after much complaining, was a packet of linen.
28:08Just as well, perhaps, that she didn't know
28:11that Elizabeth was already wearing Mary's favourite pearls
28:15that had been stolen from Mary by her enemies
28:17and sent to the English Queen.
28:21In fact, Elizabeth didn't know what to do with Mary.
28:24All her royal instincts were outraged by the humiliations
28:28and 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.
28:57There was a safe Protestant regime in Scotland now, run by Mary's enemies.
29:02Why rock the boat?
29:03So if Mary imagined she could rely on the sisterhood of queens,
29:08she was deluded.
29:10The 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.
29:23Now, Mary could have no illusion
29:26that she was anything except a prisoner.
29:29She was shuttled from house to house
29:31under the watchful eye of the Earl of Shrewsbury,
29:34who got the unenviable job of being her jailer.
29:37Some of those houses were not much more than a damp ruin.
29:41Others, like Wingfield here, were much more tolerable places.
29:45Now, 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,
29:57far away from Scotland, far away from London,
30:00far away from the coast.
30:02In fact, in the Midlands.
30:04But wherever she was,
30:06Mary Stewart had become maximum security problem number one.
30:10Not just a headache, but a magnet for conspiracy.
30:23There were many political heavyweights,
30:25for 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
30:42and 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
31:02as 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.
31:21The plot collapsed.
31:23There was, though, a different kind of fury waiting to happen,
31:27and this was burning with a Catholic flame.
31:35Up here in the north, Catholicism had not only not been rooted out,
31:40it actually fed on the burning resentment and fierce independence
31:44of the great aristocratic families who ran things around here.
31:50They'd been here for centuries,
31:51and they were not about to be pushed around
31:53by a bunch of Tudor bureaucrats.
31:56They weren't going to be told what was what
31:58in their government and their religion.
32:01So, for them, Mary Stewart was not just a successor.
32:05She was a replacement, as in immediate replacement.
32:14So the Catholic north fought the Protestant south.
32:18For a while, it even looked as though the north might win.
32:22As the rebels swept through Lancashire, Yorkshire and Northumberland,
32:26it 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
32:42had made himself supreme head of the church.
32:45But 12,000 troops were eventually mustered,
32:49and the rebellion brutally crushed.
32:56Perhaps the brutality worked,
32:59because the Northern Rising was the last great rebellion
33:02to disturb Tudor England.
33:04And it's tempting now to feel the country settling at last
33:08into its Elizabethan finery,
33:11feeling fat, safe, comfortable.
33:14But it was always a jittery kind of grandeur.
33:18Where were thou art too dear for my possessing?
33:27Elizabeth was 20 years into her reign,
33:30and suitors had come and gone.
33:32But there was always something the matter with them.
33:35Too lowly, too Catholic, too stupid.
33:37And besides, now her suitors had rivals,
33:42millions of Elizabeth subjects,
33:44who had become jealously possessive
33:46and thought that the Queen was theirs alone.
33:52In the 1570s, they got her.
33:56The cult, the religion of Elizabeth,
33:58was spectacularly created.
34:02For how do I hold thee
34:06but by thy granting?
34:10Her accession day became the greatest of national holidays,
34:14more sacred than all the heathen events
34:16on the papist calendar.
34:18The cause of this fair gift
34:22In me is wanting
34:25And so my patent man
34:30Her image began to appear everywhere in allegorical pictures.
34:34Elizabeth as the sun who gave the rainbow its radiant hues.
34:40And even those on the inside,
34:42who could plainly see the elaborate scaffolding
34:45from which this image was projected,
34:47who knew that the pale moonglow of the Queen's face
34:51was just pulverized eggshell, borax, alum, and millwater,
34:56even these knowing types
34:58were still total captives to the cult.
35:02She had this effect on all kinds of people,
35:05especially men,
35:06even when they got older and should have known better.
35:10They built huge prodigy houses in her honour.
35:13It was in its way a desperate need to impress,
35:17a sign of the culture's raw immaturity,
35:20its hunger for glitzy gorgeousness,
35:23Elizabethan razzle-dazzle,
35:25thigh-hugging hoes,
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,
35:47but 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,
36:02came 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,
36:11that is a lot of hay.
36:13And then a week before the great event,
36:16men from the office of purveyors would come here
36:19and buy up everything in sight for the visit
36:22at prices they decided were fair.
36:25Then there were the lords and ladies,
36:27though 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,
36:40a bejeweled apparition with a chalk-white face,
36:44like some goddess on earth.
36:46But like the immortals,
36:48she was evidently frightening as well as majestic.
36:57You could revel in the Elizabethan glamour show,
37:00just so long as you didn't think too hard
37:02about what was going on beyond the sceptered isle.
37:06For out there in Europe,
37:08a total war between Catholic and Protestant powers
37:11was about to ignite.
37:14The rivalry between Mary Queen of Scots and Elizabeth
37:17was no longer a girly soap opera.
37:20It was right at the centre of that global struggle.
37:24In Rome, the Pope declared that Elizabeth
37:27was to be considered a heretic.
37:30Whoever sends her out of the world, the Pope decreed,
37:33not only does not sin, but gains merit in the eyes of God.
37:39In response, England became a national security state.
37:43Infiltrators and double agents were recruited by the government.
37:48Gentlemen vigilantes were sworn to take out in advance
37:52anyone so much as suspected of plotting against the Queen.
37:58At the heart of the operation was Elizabeth's chief spymaster,
38:03Francis Walsingham.
38:05Intelligence is never too dear, was Walsingham's motto.
38:10And his whole career was an applied demonstration
38:13that knowledge is power.
38:17But if Walsingham was ferocious, he was not paranoid.
38:22There were underground conspiracies organised in France,
38:26in Rome and Spain,
38:27and they were all working towards one end,
38:30the assassination of Elizabeth
38:32and the enthronement of Mary Stuart.
38:38Elizabeth might have been queasy about taking care of Mary,
38:42but Walsingham wasn't.
38:43It was his job to get his hands dirty for England.
38:46That'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.
39:10And it was a gem.
39:16Mary may have been under house arrest,
39:18but she'd nevertheless been allowed to lead the life of the country lady.
39:23Then, in December 1585, Walsingham made a change.
39:29Mary and her household were suddenly packed up and sent to close confinement
39:35at Chartley Manor in Staffordshire,
39:37where she was guarded by the unsmiling Puritan, Amius Paulet.
39:43As Walsingham had intended, Mary was furious, desperate to find a way out of her prison.
39:51So, of course, she was thrilled when she discovered an ingenious means to smuggle coded letters to her supporters.
39:58The letters were secretly put in a watertight packet, slipped through the bunghole of beer casks, delivered to and from
40:07Chartley.
40:09What Mary didn't know, of course, was that this was a trap.
40:13Walsingham had set the whole thing up.
40:16The letters were intercepted.
40:20When Mary's latest champion, the rich merchant Anthony Babington, supplied Mary with details of a plot to murder Elizabeth
40:27and put Mary on the English throne, Mary wrote back with encouragement.
40:35The trap was sprung.
40:41At Chartley, Mary felt the skies lighten.
40:45After nearly 20 years of unjust imprisonment, she could feel liberty at hand so close she could practically taste it.
40:53One morning, and very unusually, Paulet allowed her to go out riding to have a day's hunting.
40:59From a distance, she could see a group of horsemen approach.
41:03Mary must have imagined, this is it, news from Babington, freedom at last.
41:12But it was, in fact, the warrant for her arrest.
41:17Babington and his fellow plotters had been tortured and had already confessed.
41:23Mary was taken away while her rooms at Chartley were searched, turning up hundreds of incriminating documents.
41:34In London, Elizabeth wrote an ecstatic letter to Amius Paulet.
41:40Amius, my most faithful and careful servant.
41:44God reward thee, Treblefold, for the most troublesome charge so well discharged.
41:58There was just one more stop, one more castle in the career of the Wandering Queen.
42:05Fatheringay in Northamptonshire.
42:08It's just a grassy mound now, which is just as well, since no ruin, no standing building for that matter,
42:15could possibly take the weight of the drama that was to follow.
42:22Anyone expecting Mary Stewart to crumple into tearful confession had seriously misjudged her.
42:30Up against it, she drew on something inside her long and mostly disastrous career,
42:36which made her resolute and unnervingly lofty, as if she was suddenly above all this squalid charade.
42:45From the moment of her arrest to the moment of her execution, she gave as good as she got.
42:53As a sinner, I am truly conscious of having often offended my Creator.
42:59I beg Him to forgive me.
43:02But as Queen and Sovereign, I am aware of no fault or offence for which I have to render account
43:09to anyone here below.
43:14Her second tactic was to lie her head off, denying all knowledge of the Babington plot,
43:19although she was on stronger ground when she accused Walsingham of having set up the whole thing to get rid
43:25of her.
43:29Elizabeth, of course, did not see it exactly in this way.
43:33She wrote to Mary as if the Queen of the Scots had somehow been an ungrateful houseguest who'd made off
43:39with the towels.
43:42You have planned to take my life and ruin my kingdom by the shedding of blood.
43:47I never proceeded so hastily against you.
43:50On the contrary, I have maintained you and preserved your life with the same care which I use for myself.
44:04On the 15th of October, 1586, the formal trial began.
44:10In a typical gesture, half plea, half threat, Mary warned her prosecutors to look to their consciences.
44:18Remember, she said, the theatre of the world is wider than the realm of England.
44:24And it was to that audience, worldwide and across the ages, that she now took centre stage.
44:34Mary hobbled into the room, by now painfully and firm, dressed head to foot like a glamorous mother superior in
44:42swathes of black velvet and a white headdress.
44:45Deprived of any lawyer, she turned to the big guns of the Privy Council facing her.
44:52There is not one, I think, among you. Let him be the cleverest man in the world who would be
44:58capable of resisting or defending himself if he were in my place.
45:06Of course, it wouldn't have mattered what she said.
45:10The trial resumed in London without her and passed swiftly to her conviction.
45:18All her adult life, Elizabeth had been spooked by her fascinating, infuriating cousin,
45:25who seemed to personify all the clichés about women, which Elizabeth herself had rejected.
45:31Now she had a precious opportunity to get Mother Mary off her back.
45:36Parliament was impatient to be rid of her and 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, it was that she was scared.
45:51Scared of being seen by the world to have her fingerprints on the axe.
45:59This was what was robbing Elizabeth of her sleep.
46:03The tormenting question whether by killing Mary she was getting rid of trouble or inviting it.
46:12On February 1st, 1587, Elizabeth finally put her signature on Mary's death warrant.
46:35All the chaos, squalor, reckless adventuring, rash conspiracies, pathetic delusions,
46:44histrionic bouts of self-pity, all the escapes, all the rescues,
46:48they had all led her to this one supreme moment.
46:52She would be a Catholic martyr.
47:02So when Mary was told she was to be executed the next morning by a weeping Scottish courtier,
47:09she told him to be joyful instead.
47:12For the end of Mary Stuart's trouble, she said, is now done.
47:19Carry this message for me and tell my friends that I died a true woman to my religion
47:25and like a true Scottish woman and a true French woman.
47:40When she undressed for the executioner, the 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 embroidered with gold,
47:58and she lay with such utter stillness on the block that it actually unnerved the executioner.
48:17His first blow cut deep into the back of her head.
48:22The second severed it but for a hanging thread of flesh.
48:28Even now, Mary contrived to remain centre stage.
48:33For 15 minutes after the last blow of the axe, the lips on her severed head,
48:38so witnesses reported, continued to move, as if in silent prayer.
48:51And 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.
49:23That 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.
49:42It languished. It died.
49:45It was just another martyr to Mary's pathetic, tragic life.
49:50Perhaps that little dog was the first mourner.
49:52It certainly was not going to be the last.
50:00Among the mourners, astoundingly, was Queen Elizabeth,
50:04in deep denial of what she had done.
50:09When she heard, her countenance changed, her words faltered.
50:14And with excessive sorrow, she was in a manner astonished,
50:17in so much as she gave herself over to grief,
50:20putting herself into mourning weeds and shedding abundance of tears.
50:39Some of Elizabeth's anguish may have been genuine remorse.
50:44Some of it was downright fear.
50:47And she was right to worry.
50:49Even before Mary's execution,
50:52King Philip of Spain had accelerated his plans for the enterprise of England.
50:56And with Mary now dead, there would be no stopping him.
51:01Suddenly, Elizabethan England looked very small, very vulnerable.
51:11This was always Elizabeth's worst nightmare.
51:15A full-scale Catholic invasion, and now Philip was launching one.
51:21The Spanish admirals, however, were 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,
51:35but that the Spanish came so close to pulling it off.
51:39Only a few miles of the channel and 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 shows,
52:15is exactly how she appeared to the troops at the armed camp at Tilbury.
52:19The 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.
52:32Everything Elizabeth had ever learned came together at Tilbury.
52:37Charisma in a costume, the shell burst 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,
52:53arriving in a gilded coach, escorted by 2,000 ecstatic troops.
52:59And what she produced for the expectant crowds was pure gold.
53:04The first great speech by a queen recorded in history.
53:08This 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,
53:25but being resolved in the midst of the heat of the battle
53:30to 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.
53:56And 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.
54:17Oh, I know it's all spin and hype, but it was hype for England.
54:22And it did make a difference, just like Churchill's rhetoric
54:25made 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.
54:38Whatever you go through, I'll go through it with you.
54:42And that made the difference between terror and determination.
54:47That is what we have queens for.
54:52You 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,
55:03famine 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.
55:16And for the queen herself,
55:19the distance between the mythology of Elizabeth's ageless body
55:23and the shrivelled reality became more glaring.
55:28Thoughts inevitably began to turn to her succession.
55:32Everybody knew who that would be.
55:35It was Mary, James, son of Mary, Queen of Scots.
55:43So, in the end, was it Mary, Queen of Scots, the mother,
55:46who 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.
56:03But still, he was Mary's child,
56:07the fruit of her womb, not Elizabeth's.
56:12And 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.
56:24And when 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.
56:51She had done none of this.
56:53But no-one in their right mind thought that she had failed her people.
56:58She had been different, that's all.
57:05When the ring, which had united Elizabeth to her country,
57:09was finally removed from her finger,
57:11it was carried 400 miles north to Scotland.
57:16Now it would symbolise a new marriage,
57:18this time between two nations.
57:23Elizabeth and Mary Stuart never met.
57:27It took James I to bring the two women together at last,
57:32closer in death than they had ever been in life.
57:36There had been an old, wonderful joke,
57:39doing the rounds in the 1560s,
57:41that all of their problems would be solved
57:43if only Mary and Elizabeth could marry each other.
57:47And in one sense, they had.
57:50Or at least together and at a terrible price,
57:52and with so much pain, they had had a baby.
57:55It was a little thing with a big name.
57:59Magna Britannia.
58:01Great Britain.
58:15She buried him before the prime.
58:23She was dead, her man sorry.
58:24But there is, she was dead, her cell,
58:29and even soon the time.
58:34God send every gentleman such hopes, such howls,
58:43I'm such a lovely love.