The Rest Is History - 589. Mary, Queen of Scots: Downfall (Part 6)

Episode Date: August 6, 2025

Following the murder of her husband, Lord Darnley, how did Mary Queen of Scots - thought to have conspired for his death - navigate the most precarious situation of her young life so far? Would she marry again, and if so whom? Why was she forced to flee her enemies dressed as a man, and would she escape the threat of imprisonment? Could she look to her fellow cousin, Elizabeth I, for aid, or face the Virgin Queen’s condemnation? And, would she come out from these tumultuous events a queen and unscathed, or dethroned, and traumatised for life? Join Tom and Dominic as they reach the dramatic climax of their journey through the reign of Mary Queen of Scots, as steps into the hands of Elizabeth I and her spymasters. Would this most brave and belligerent, but now beleaguered of women, survive the most perilous period of her life? The Rest Is History Club: Become a member for exclusive bonus content, early access to full series and live show tickets, ad-free listening, our exclusive newsletter, discount book prices on titles mentioned on the pod, and our members’ chatroom on Discord. Just head to therestishistory.com to sign up, or start a free trial today on Apple Podcasts: apple.co/therestishistory. For more Goalhanger Podcasts, head to www.goalhanger.com _______ Twitter: @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Producer: Theo Young-Smith Assistant Producer: Tabby Syrett + Aaliyah Akude Executive Producers: Jack Davenport + Tony Pastor Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest is History. For weekly bonus episodes, add free listening, early access to series and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to the restishistory.com and join the club. That is, the rest is history.com. which brought Mary down. The fact was that an embarrassment had been removed, a problem resolved. There was no doubt whatsoever that Mary could have continued her reign,

free of the albatross, because that was precisely what people wanted. What she had to do, as Elizabeth and Catherine de Medici, both of whom stood by her in February 1567, begged her to do, was to preserve an appearance of innocence. allow the scandal to burn itself out, enable stability to return. Rulers did recover from great scandals in the 16th century, the Bartholomew's Day massacre, the execution of Mary Queen of Scots herself,

were headline news in Europe and infinitely more dangerous to their perpetrators than the murder of Darnley. The problem, therefore, was not the murder. It was the infinitely unwise behaviour of Darnley's widow. So that was the historian Jenny Wormald in her biography of Mary Queen of Scots, which has the splendid title, A Study in Failure. She hates Mary, Queen of Scots. So in our last episode, Tom, we described the events leading up to the murder of Mary's second husband, Lord Darnley, who you don't rate as a man.

I don't rate him either. We described the murder and we described the suspects and the aftermath. And we went through in true crime podcasting style, going through all the different conspirators and explaining, sort of exploring the moments that led up to the murder itself. And we identified the conspirators, a large cross-section of the Scottish nobility.

Talk us through them. So some of them have got vendettas against Darnley, they hate Darnley. Some of them there are more coldly political reasons to do with their sense of what's right for Scotland and for Mary. Well, I think, Patrick, reasons, you might say.

Right. They wanted to, yeah, they want to do what's right for Scotland. So there are three ringleaders. One of these is William Maitland, who is Mary's Secretary of State. He had essentially first floated the idea for the murder. He'd coordinated the conspiracy. He had liaised with William Cecil, who is Elizabeth's first chief minister and a man who had always wanted Mary's overthrow.

Then there is the Earl of Morton, pudgy-fingered, and sinister, slow speaking, loves of vendetta, Mary's former Chancellor, just back from England after having been double-crossed by Darnley, very sinister, very vengeful, as we said. And then there is the Earl of Bothwell, who is the Lord who had consistently shown the most loyalty to Mary. He is swaggering, he is violent, he is murderously ambitious, and he is the man who had provided the gunpowder that blew up Darnley's house and people may be wondering

what did we decide about Mary if they haven't listened to our previous episode well we concluded that Mary was ignorant of the conspiracy genuinely appalled by Darnley's murder and therefore not guilty but with Darnley gone actually you could argue that things

looking quite good for Mary so as Jenny Wormold points out it's not just a crime it's an opportunity You know, Darnley was this terrible millstone. He's now gone. And actually, Jenny Wellmore, makes a really good point. Lots of kings and indeed lots of queens in the 16th century sanction acts of shocking violence. So Elizabeth I is a really good example. Or Mary's mother-in-law, Catherine de Medici. And then they use them. They benefit from them politically. There's a bit of scandal. There's a bit of a stigma and stuff, but they ride it out. Why is it different for Mary? And in the last episode, Elizabeth the first wrote to that letter and said, you know, you need to sort this out. And you need to sort it out by identifying the culprit and punishing him. Is that basically the mistake from which Mary never recovers, that she doesn't take Elizabeth's advice?

Yeah, basically. I mean, Elizabeth is right. Elizabeth is a very shrewd operator. She reads the Scottish situation much better than Mary herself does, perhaps because she has distance. but also I think because Mary is a very impulsive woman who is given to acting on her emotional response to a situation rather than trying to stand back and looking at it more coolly. And the reason that Mary refuses to accept Elizabeth's advice

that she should come down hard on Bothwell, who everyone by this point is agreeing is behind the murder, I think it's for two reasons. Firstly, Mary doesn't think Bothwell is guilty. Mary has a very clear sense of who she thinks is to blame, and this is her half-brother, the Earl of Morey, who had long been on manoeuvres against her. She doesn't want to go after Bothwell

because she's genuinely convinced of his innocence. But even as she blames Moray, she also believes, and in this she is correct, that a whole swath of the Scottish nobility had also been parties to the conspiracy. And this, I think, has thrown her into a massive funk because she also believes, and in this she is wrong, that she, as well as Darnley, had been targeted by the explosion. And I think it doesn't help her in kind of misreading the situation as badly as she does, that she's physically ill. She seems to have lost her ability to kind of ride out crises.

We've seen an example of that before. She behaves very impressively, say, in the aftermath of the Ritsio murder. But on this case, she doesn't. And so the second reason why she refuses to go after Bothwell is that Bothwell is the man that she is looking to serve as her champion. She needs someone she feels who she can rely on. And this isn't just for herself, but also for her infant son, James. Far from a reigning Bothwell, she turns to him and says, look after me, I need you.

Be my chivalrous knight. You know, Bothwell is a great man for chivalry, even while he's kind of beating people up behind the back of the pub. He is also very keen on kind of posing a salonsalot. And Mary plays the part of Guinevere, quite damagingly, because the accusation that she's literally been adulterous with him is already swirling around Edinburgh. I mean, why is that a massive problem? Why didn't she, I mean, she could. you could say he's a very violent man, he's a man who will do what needs to be done, maybe, as it were, jumping into bed with him politically, is a smart move,

allying yourself with somebody who's going to be feared. Well, we will see what the effects of Mary allying herself with Bothwell will be because the fact that she has turned to Bothwell for her security, this isn't something that she can really keep private. And so in the 40 days that follow Darnley's murder when she is meant to be in mourning for him, she is repeatedly seen in the company of Bothwell. And this does not go down well. It's noted as well that she has made a gift of Darnley's clothes and horses to Bothwell. Again, this can be misconstrued very, very easily.

And then there comes a key development that lots of the Scottish nobility who by this point are worrying, that Mary's partiality to Bothwell may well provide him with the opportunity to establish himself as a kind of military strong man and therefore threaten them all. As part of Bothwell's attempt to provide security for Mary, he installs one of his own henchmen as the captain of Edinburgh Castle. And so this seems, from the point of view of Bothwell's rivals, to be a very sinister development. They don't trust him and therefore they are starting not to trust Mary precisely because she does trust him. There is also a knock-on effect for Mary on her public reputation with the mass of people in Edinburgh and beyond. So that Easter, a couple of months after the

murder of Darnley, Mary rides out from Edinburgh Castle, now under the control of Bothwell's henchmen. And there are a group of women in the market at their stalls and they shout to out to her, God save your grace, if you be innocent of the king's death. And this is the first time that Mary publicly hears the accusation that she might be responsible for the murder. And of course it devastates her. And then news comes from Dunfernland that a pornographic placard has been posted there showing a mermaid and a hair and the mermaid is associated with prostitution and the mermaid is shown bare breasted and she is labelled MR, so that's Maria Regina, Queen Mary, and the hare is the heraldic

symbol of Bothwell's family. So the implication there is very clear that the queen who was once so loved by the people, so popular with them, is starting to lose her whole. on her subject. And is that because people had affection, even though Darnie was in private, a terrible man? Is that because people had affection for Darnie, do you think? No, I don't think so. I think it's because the notion that their queen might be an adulteress and a murderess is not going down well. Okay.

They don't like Bothwell. They don't like the queen's association with him. They don't like the fact that Bothwell has very probably killed Mary's previous husband. It just looks very, very bad to them. So on Bothwell, do you think Bothwell at this point, I mean, Bothwell must be thinking, you know, there's a vacancy there and I'm the man to fill it. Yeah, he's clearly very ambitious. He clearly sees Mary's evident affection for him as a massive feather in his cap.

But I think also his ambition to take Darnley's place is because he, I mean, better than anyone, is aware that he has an enormous number of enemies and that the higher he rises, the more predatory those enemies are going to become. So John Guy puts it really well. He started thinking in the crudest possible terms that to guarantee his position in the giddy game of noble factionalism,

he must physically possess the queen. And of course, this is precisely what people think has been going on. Right. That Mary and Bothwell have been conducting an adulterous fair. I mean, Mary hasn't been, I don't think, but I think Bothwell is now aspiring to win the queen and get her into his bed and marry her and thereby essentially become king. And there's a crucial meeting, isn't there? 19th of April, he gets the other conspirators to a pub, Ainslie's Tavern in Edinburgh. And so is that the meeting where he basically lays out his plan

and says, you know, I want to marry her? He says, look, guys, if I be able to. become king, then I'll be in a position to look after you all. So why don't you sign up for it? And while you're doing it, perhaps you could also confirm that I'm completely innocent of Darnley's murder. And so not all the conspirators sign it. So Maitland doesn't sign it, but Morton does. And so Bothwell thinks, well, this is brilliant. If I got Morton on side, then, I mean, he's the really dangerous player. I can probably go ahead with this plan. And that is then confirmed for him by the fact that Moray, who is his oldest and most formidable rival, is so alarmed by what's going on that he has fled to France, has abandoned Scotland.

And the news of this makes Bothwell dance for joy. And I can't help but being reminded when reading the story of Macbeth, the man who aspires to the throne, the rival nobleman who flee abroad, the echoes seem very eerie, and perhaps they're deliberate. I mean, Macbeth is written when James I 6th of Scotland becomes. James I, the first of England. So perhaps there's a kind of faint hint of a shadow play there. I don't know.

Certainly, Bothwell's wheeze in getting Morton to sign this bond doesn't work out because only two days after they've had their meeting in the pub, the inevitable happens. Morton goes back on his word. And this is, I mean, it's not a straw in the wind. It's a tree trunk in a howling gale. Because wherever Morton leads, others tend to follow. And the other thing, of course, that Bothwell knows about Morton is that those who oppose him

tend to end up dead. So this is very, very alarming news. And I think it concentrates his mind because he now has a choice. He can either step back, give up his ambitions, and perhaps thereby make himself more vulnerable to those people who've already decided he needs to be removed, or he can go for broke. He can physically seize control of Mary, which, in a effect is to stage a coup. And what about Mary in all this? Because obviously there's this sort of sense of gathering tension, you know, things are moving towards a crisis, towards a resolution.

Is she aware of this, do you think? Do you think she feels the walls closing in on her? Yes, I think so. And I think the measure of that is that on the 21st of April, she raised to sterling where she placed her son for safekeeping the previous autumn. And I think Mary has always realized that to control her son is to control the future. Yeah. So the fact that she now wants to go and get him and physically have him is a measure probably of how insecure she's feeling and how nervous. So she goes to Sterling and she tells the captain of the castle what she wants to do. And to her horror and consternation, the captain refuses her permission to remove James. And the reason for this, Guy explains it, a moderate politician with his finger on the pulse of the lords, he knew they would rebel if Bothwell got his hands on the air to the throne. That's the jeopardy for Mary,

that it's now assumed even by her own placement that if she has possession of James, Bothwell will get possession of James. So he allows Mary in to see James, but only with female attendance. Mary spends two days with James, she kisses him goodbye, rides off, and that is the last time that she ever sees him. I mean, that's, yeah, it's very sad, isn't it? So then she goes to her birthplace. Linlithgow. And from there, the next day, she heads off to Holyrood, but she never, ever gets there. So what happens? So she's riding over a bridge that crosses a river outside Edinburgh when suddenly there comes the pounding of horse hooves. And she looks round and there is

Bothwell at the head of some 800 horsemen. And he rides up to her and he seizes her horse's bridle. And he then abducts her to Dunbar, which is his great stronghold. And the news of this causes a consternation across Scotland. And three days later, in Stirling, where the young Prince James is, a consortium of nobles led by Morton, Assemble and another covenant, Dominic. They love it in Scotland. The Scots love a covenant. And this time they call themselves the Confederate Lords.

and they pledged themselves to freeing the queen from her captivity. Meanwhile, the day before, Bothwell has appeared from out of the castle at Dunbar. He's ridden to Edinburgh, and there he has gone to his wife and strong-armed her into agreeing to a divorce, which is duly granted on the 3rd of May. And then three days after that, on the 6th of May, so 12 days after her abduction, Mary re-emerges from Dunbar and she's riding at the side of Bothwell along the road to Edinburgh and they enter the city and crowds meet them but they are sullen. They don't cheer. They don't shout out God save your majesty to Mary. And the mood of the capital remains sullen. One week later on the 12th of May,

Mary formally pardons Bothwell for his abduction of her and then she creates him the Duke of Orkney as she had previously elevated Darnley to a dukedom. This is a signal that she wants to marry a commoner. You know, she can only marry a duke. And the wedding to the new duke happens on the 15th of May in Holyrood. And Mary enters the palace's great hall for the wedding ceremony, dressed in a flowing black gown, the colour of mourning for Darnley.

And again, I mean, we mentioned Macbeth. This is very Hamlet, the sense. of the funeral baked meats, coldly furnishing forth the wedding table. And, you know, as in Hamlet where Gertrude's overregey marriage to Claudius is, you know, it doesn't go down well with Hamlet. Mary's marriage to Bothwell does not go down well with the people of Edinburgh. And the very evening of the wedding, a new placard is nailed to the gates of Holyrood. And it reads, as the common people say,

only harlots Mary in May So here's a question for you When they were in Dunbar In that great castle What had happened there Between Bothwell and Mary Because her biographers

Have spilled a lot of ink On debating this, haven't they? So alongside the murder of Darnley This is the great debating point In the life of Mary Queen of Scots Because that accusation That she's a harlot that she's prostituted herself to Bothwell

is incredibly damaging and it massively informs initial interpretations of her abduction. So contemporary writes, she was minded to cause Bothwell to ravish her to the end that she made the sooner end his marriage which she promised before she caused the murder of her husband. So in other words,

the whole thing is a setup that Mary was fully expecting Bothwell to come and seize her. This is definitely not true. Really? Just as Mary had not been ignorant of Darnley's murder, she had very clearly been startled, outraged, horrified by her abduction. So again, to quote John Guy, she was most definitely abducted against her will. But this in turn leads to a further question, which I think it is unanswerable for obvious reasons, but we'll, you know, say what I think. So the question is, was she? she then raped? Did Bothwell rape her in Dunbar? And it seems to me that the evidence for this is pretty solid. So we have someone who went with her, who rode with her to Dunbar, who accompanied

her, is a guy called James Melville, who's a diplomat, who'd always been one of her most trusted aids. And he wrote, the queen could not but marry him, i.e. Bothwell, seeing he had ravished her and laid with her against her will. Oh, well, that is pretty. But did he say he was there? he was in Dunbar, why would he make it up? Why would he make it up, exactly? And Mary's own comment, I mean, it's kind of painful, pathetic. She wrote, albeit we found his doings rude, yet were his words and answers gentle. So John Guy, for instance, interprets that as meaning that Bothwell had pressed his suit roughly,

and it had taken Mary two days to be persuaded, and that was why Bothwell had then ridden off to Edinburgh to divorce his wife. and that there had been no physical rape. It had just been a kind of rough wooing, if you like. Yeah. I mean, that doesn't seem, the confluence of what Melville writes and what Mary herself writes seems to me to point to a much more sinister explanation. And I think that what Mary is saying when she says, you know, that his doings were rude, his words and answers gentle,

it's almost as though she knows that she now has to marry him. and she's trying to convince herself that Bothwell is still the model of chivalry that she'd always thought him to be even though she now knows that he isn't that he's revealed to her his true colours and I don't think she convinces herself about that at all

because when she is seen coming out of Dunbar and in the days and weeks that follow her arrival in Edinburgh and still more her wedding she seems to observe us to be kind of miserable, broken, defeated and courtiers say of Bothwell that he is jealous and suspicious and thinks to be obeyed. And of course, the miserable thing for Mary is that that's exactly like Darnley had been. But what you get with Bothwell, even more than with Darnley, and these stories were also told of Darnley, is that Bothwell in private is

physically abusive. So another Shakespeare play, it's like Rich the third marrying Anne Neville. Yeah. I mean, I think this is one of the reasons why the tragedy of Mary Queen of Scots resonate so profoundly is that it is reminiscent of Shakespearean tragedy. It does have that kind of quality to it. Yeah, because you're describing, in your notes you point out that the court, they try to put on the appearance of jollity and gaiety as though it's business as usual. But there's a sort of sense that a lot of people who should be there are not there. Yeah. And there's a, you know, it does feel like the court in Macbeth or in Hamlet or something.

Well, so it's not to say the ghost of Darnley appears. So, but yeah, it is like the court of Macbeth when all the Thanes are fleeing. Yeah. And in Mary's case, the cruelest blow comes when Maitland, who's had a massive row with Bothwell, he storms off. And of course, Maitland is married to one of the four Mary. posh mary who's the one who'd always been closest to mary queen of scots and so she goes as well and so mary's devastated by this left in floods of tears and maitland and posh mary go off they leave hollyrood they join the confederate lords who by now number 30 and it's clear that there is going to be a fight to the death and it's a fight that mary is already on the verge of losing so by early june morton and the confederate lords are already closing in on Edinburgh. And Mary has to run away. And she does this in such high speed that she can't get any of her clothes together, none of her shoes, none of her gold-embroidered garters. So

absolute scenes. And all she can take are the barest essential. So a silver basin, a silver kettle, a small cabinet containing her papers and lots of hair pins. And there's very much an emphasis there on her toilet. So the dressing of her hair. So she does take her papers, but otherwise everything is needed to make sure that her auburn tresses are looking their best. And then there's an absolute killer blow, because the moment she's left Edinburgh, Edinburgh Castle, which has been under the rule of one of Bothwell's followers, he immediately switches aside and goes over to the Confederate Lords. So this is a sign that clearly, you know, he's decided who's winning and who's losing.

So the Confederate Lords have now taken Edinburgh and they advance on a castle called Borthwick, which is where Mary has taken refuge. and they put it under siege and on the night of the 11th of June Mary dresses up as a man she slips out through the besieging lines and she rides her way

to join with Bothwell and there's a kind of unhappy memory there of those times in France when she and the four Marys had dressed up as boys and disguised themselves all those kind of larks and now she's disguising herself

to escape people who want, you know, who want to topple her, so miserable. But she is able to rejoin Bothwell, isn't she? So Bothwell's been raising troops in the borders. And they actually do get a decent army. So by the middle of June, they're hoping to recapture Edinburgh. And they can set her.

And at this point, she's not looking like a man at all. You describe her in your notes as looking very new romantic. Yeah, so I said, you know, she hasn't taken her best clothes. So she's wearing kind of red petticoat and a velvet hat. and kind of various items of clothing. And she looks, I mean, she looks kind of quite glamorous, but not like a, not like a fashionable French queen, certainly. And so she and Bothwell, at the head of their army, they're marching on Edinburgh, and they reach just south of Musselbrough.

And their head of them is Carbury Hill. And here they run into the army of the Confederate Lords. and the Confederate lords have a massive banner, which couldn't be more hypocritical, bearing in mind that Morton is one of the lords who is carrying it. This banner is decorated with the poor murdered body of Darnley. And next to Darnley, there is a young child has been embroidered who is shown praying on his knees. the slogan on this banner judge and revenge my cause

oh lord and just to reiterate I mean this is Morton's banner yeah bonkers so things are looking pretty bleak for Mary at this point you point out that William Cecil had in London

Elizabeth I first minister had talked about Scottish politics being a kind of quagmire or bog or something and there's a sense at this point that she's been pulled down beneath her depths because there is no battle actually at Carbury Hill there's just this sort of Mexican standoff in punishing punishing heat

and actually it's clear that the momentum lies with the Confederate Lords and not with Mary and Bothwell because her troops begin to desert and they were just to sort of slink away into the heather or whatever it is. I mean it's interesting because there's there is a kind of a chivalric dimension to it

because there are kind of various attempts to fix up single combat between Bothwell who wants to fight with Morty But Morton's kind of pretty elderly, hasn't fought in a battle for ages, so he doesn't want to do that. And there's various attempts to find a kind of rival champion. But Mary, in the end, steps in and says, no, we're not going to do this. And so rather than a kind of great Arthurian combat, it's the opposite. Her troops just melt away.

There is no battle. And in the end, Mary is forced to negotiate with the Confederate Lords. And her terms are, Bothwell should be allowed to ride away. and she will come under the protection of the Confederate Lords. And the reason that she does this, I think partly because she is, she knows by now that she's pregnant by him. So she would want the father of her child, you know, still to be active and on the scene. And also she knows that while Bothwell is at liberty,

there is always the hope that he might be able to raise an army and come to her rescue and save her from whatever fate the Confederate Lords have. in plan for her. So they do embrace. Bothwell then gets onto his horse, turns it round, gallops away, and husband and wife will never see each other again. So Mary, what happens to her? Well, she is taken from Carbury Hill to Edinburgh and it's quite like the return of Louis the 16th and Marianne Twennett after they'd attempted their escape. So she's guarded by soldiers who show her no respect at all. Mary is absolutely stunned to be treated like this.

I mean, I think she had no idea how unpopular she's become with her enemies. She's taken to Edinburgh. She's not allowed to go to Holyrood. She's put in a kind of a private house. And from that window, she leans out and she sees Maitland passing and she calls out to him. And Maitland very pointedly does not look up. And then from Edinburgh, she is taken across the Firth of Fourth to Fife. and once in Fife she is taken northwards

up to the castle of Loch Levin which is a very inaccessible stronghold on an island in the middle of a lock and people may remember right back in the beginning of episode one she got taken to a monastery to escape the rough wooing and now here she is she's back on an island

in a lock but this time she's a prisoner oh dear so her guardians they're not big fans of hers are they Sir William Douglas he's a member of the kind of Morton clan and the half-brother of her old arch-enemy

the Earl of Moray. So that's not good news. Yeah, so William Douglas, who's the laird of Loughley and his mother had been one of James V's mistresses and this mother is still alive and she had always detested Mary and clearly felt that her boy should be king.

Right. So she's a very malevolent presence, not keen on Mary at all. And also there's a very sinister figure called Lord Lindsay, who's a Confederate at Lord who, very close to Morton, never a good sign, and had been one of Rizio's killers. So he's not a fun person for Mary to have around either. She does have Mary Seton, so Fashion Mary, the hairdresser.

She's gone and so this is good news because obviously Mary has got her hot water and her pins and things, so at least she can look good. And also she's allowed a few servants. But effectively, she is a prisoner and she's utterly, utterly miserable. And then two further body blows come. First, she has a miscarriage and she loses what turned out to be twins. So two babies are lost. And then shortly after that, on the 24th of July, the very sinister Lord Lindsay arrives on the island. He's got a whole delegation of Confederate lords with him. And Lindsay presents Mary with three documents. The first of these is a declaration of abdication in favor of her son, James. The second, very painful for Mary is the appointment of Moray as regent for James. And the third is that while Moray is coming back from France to take up his post, Morton should serve as regent. Obviously, Mary is not going to sign these.

She says, no, there's no way I'm going to do this. Lindsay then starts to menace her with the prospect of more restrictive prisons, then of being drowned in the the lock, and then finally he threatens to cut her throat. And bear in mind that Mary has seen Lindsay in action getting rid of Rizio. And so at this point, she, in floods of tears, agrees that she will sign the documents. But she promises as she does so, when God shall set me at liberty again, I shall not abide these, for it is done against my will. But, you know, these are empty words, really, because she has now signed her abdication. And she is no longer Queen of Scots.

What a bombshell. We'll find out what happens to Mary after the break. We read and almost broken, with the frequent uproars and rebellions raised against us since we return to Scotland. So Mary Queen of Scott, she hasn't lost her French accent, which is, that's some consolation, I suppose.

Anyway, that's a briefing note. She dictated that to her secretary, and it was taken by her ambassador to Elizabeth I. And it is describing her circumstances, her mood, after the collapse of her regime and the end of her queenship following her marriage to the Earl of Bothwell. Of course, the great irony is Elizabeth, the person to whom she addresses that note, effectively.

Elizabeth had said, look, you should identify Bothwell as the culprit and Donna's death. You should execute him, punish him, make an example of him. rid yourself of this. Not only does she not do that, she actually marries him. Now the bonkers thing is that Mary still thinks at this point that Elizabeth will support her. And remember they've never met. And at different moments, she's A, wanted to be Elizabeth's heir, but she's also set herself up as a rival to Elizabeth. But she thinks Elizabeth will be the, you know, the white knight who will somehow save her. And is that realistic? Tom, I don't think it is

realistic. Well, actually, it is quite realistic because obviously Elizabeth disapproves of Mary marrying unsuitable men. But the thing she really disapproves of is rebellion against an anointed monarch. And she, when the news of Mary's deposition is brought to her, she is absolutely appalled. And all the more so, because of the definite whiff of what Elizabeth sees as unsound heretical theology that surrounds it. So listeners may remember John Knox, the great shepherd of the Scottish Reformation, that he had met Mary and he had lectured her, telling Mary that unworthy monarchs can legitimately be toppled and imprisoned, that this is the will of God.

And this is a perspective that quite a lot of the kind of the hotter Protestants in England also share. And there is therefore no way that Elizabeth is likely to back Mary's deposition because she sees it exactly as Mary sees it as being an expression of kind of incipient republicanism, this Protestant idea that the godly have a right to depose an unworthy monarch. Neither Elizabeth nor Mary won't have anything to do with it. And I think that in her depth of her misery, following her miscarriage, following her. her forced abdication, this is the straw that Mary clings to. And it helps her to get back some of her spirits. It helps to redeem her from the misery that she's been plunged into. It helps her to recover from her kind of her sickness, her sense of exhaustion, her despair.

And another thing that helps her to recover, I think, from being depressed, is she finds that she hasn't lost her power to charm and to fascinate. I think she's been very very, depressed by being cat-called in Edinburgh, but now she has male admirers in the castle, it turns out. So one of these is the dashing younger brother of Sir William Douglas, who is the brooding laird of Lockleven Castle. And this is a guy who's known as Pretty Geordie. Of course he is. George Douglas. And he falls madly in love with Mary Queen of Scots.

And in fact, he will stick with her for the rest of her life. And with pretty Geordie on her side, Mary is able to make two attempts to escape. The first of these doesn't work out. It's faintly ludicrous. It requires her dressing up as a washerwoman. So like... Like, Toad. Like Toad of Toad Hall trying to escape prison.

So unlike Toad, Mary Queen of Scots doesn't succeed in escaping because her hands are very white and soft. And these are noticed. And so she gets apprehended. taken back to Lockleaven. But then a second attempt is much more successful because by this point she has wowed not only Pretty Geordie, but also Little Willie Douglas.

Who's an even younger Douglas boy on the scene. And you think, oh God, it's so amazing. And so what he does, Little Willie Douglas goes around and he sabotages all the boats but one, which he then gives to Mary. And so she is able to be rowed across the lock and no one is able to pursue her. And so she gets away.

And so now she's free. Hooray. Amazing. So she's free. She's going to tell about the crown, presumably, like all Scotland lies at her feet, or does it? It doesn't, does it?

No, it doesn't. I mean, it really should have done. Mary has all the advantages. She might be unpopular with certain segments of society in Edinburgh, but across the sweep of Scotland, she is seen as the rightful queen. And we've been talking about this throughout the series, how loyalty to the Scottish throne

to the Stuart family is very, very strong and Mary is in pole position to capitalise on this. And so sure enough, when she reappears, her Auburn locks flowing in the wind, thousands of men flock to her banner. And she goes to Hamilton, which is a town to the south of Glasgow, where there was very recently a by-election.

And there she sets up her court directly opposite Glasgow, which is where Morey is and Lennox and all her bitterest enemies. And actually, various congregant lords do leave Murray. They do go over to Mary. And so you'd think, oh, come on, this is it. This is your chance.

And sure enough, two weeks after her escape from Loch Leaven, Mary does meet with her enemies in battle at a place called Langside, a village outside Glasgow. She has a much larger army. She should have won. She doesn't. The battle lasts three quarters of an hour. That's enough for Mary's forces to be.

routed and so she turns tail and she flees in desperation southwards and first she goes to Dumfries and then she cuts across country travelling by night into the wilds of Galloway and it's the measure of how distraught she is how terrified of being captured that at this point she actually shaves off her hair her beloved Auburn hair to avoid being recognised and she recalled later just how awful an experience this escape into the wilds have been. I have had to sleep upon the ground and drink sour milk and eat oatmeal without bread and have been three nights like the owls.

And now, you know, you talked in the very first episode about her sense of fun and that being one of her defining characteristics. But now she's pretty much lost all that completely, hasn't she? She's having to drink sour milk. Well, there's that, but also she's lost her child. She's probably been raped, lost her crown. She's been chased all over Scotland. She's crushed.

Yeah, completely demoralised. Lost her self-confidence. And so it's at that point that even though her followers are saying, come on, stay in Scotland, don't give up, don't give up. She says, no, I will go to England. I will throw myself on the mercy of Elizabeth I first and ask her to restore me to my throne. She does.

So on the 15th of May, she arrives at the abandoned abbey of Dunnard. Drainon, which is a mile away from the coast of the Solway Firth, the expanse of water that separates Galaway from Cumberland in England. And the next day she goes to, down to the beach, there's a fishing vessel has been sourced for her. She gets in it and she's rode across the Solway Firth to England and she will never again step foot on Scottish soil and she will never again no freedom because we've been talking about this escalating sequence of disastrous decisions that she makes. And her decision to go to England is the last and culminating disastrous decision because it is one that will lead directly to her date with the chopping

block in Fotheringay 19 years later. So for the next 19 years years, she is going to be in England. And she never imagined that when she crossed the border. She thought she'd be back within weeks, months. She assumes, I think, that because Elizabeth is opposed to the deposition of anointed monarchs, therefore Elizabeth will back her. And I think also Mary has no comprehension of just how difficult a situation her arrival in England is for Elizabeth. she just hasn't computed it because for Elizabeth, the arrival of Mary in England is a nightmare because it obliges her to choose between giving support to an anointed queen, which is, you know, every fibre in her being is saying this is what she should do.

And her utter horror are getting sucked into a civil war in Scotland because Elizabeth hates foreign entanglements. So two of her great principles are now in direct opposition with one another. And what adds to, I think, to her general mood of paralysis and indecision is the fact that Murray, who by now has come back from France and installed himself as the Regent of Scotland, he's actually doing a really good job. I mean, he's a much, much steadier hand on the tiller of the Scottish ship of state than Mary had ever provided. And of course, also, he's Protestant. So, you know, from Elizabeth's point of view, he's Protestant, he's calm, he's politically skillful, he's. not kind of running around Scotland, marrying unsuitable people and doing disastrous things. So I think very reluctantly, Elizabeth finds herself thinking, well, actually, maybe he's doing

a better job than the Anointed Queen would. But then again, you know, Mary is the Anointed Queen. So it's an absolute nightmare. And if there's one thing that Elizabeth is very good at weaponising, it's her complete sense of indecision. You know, when she's faced with things that she doesn't want to decide about. She just prevaricates. And often that turns out to be the best policy. And so that's what she does. Basically, she sits on her hands. And this is why she refuses to see Mary. And her chief minister, William Sessorheda, always hated Mary, as you've said many times in this series. And now, Mary, the Catholic, is out of Scotland, which he always wanted. And what is even better? She has delivered herself up as a gift to him because she's come to

England. And again, Mary has no comprehension of the realities of the situation at the English court. So three days after she's arrived in England, she writes to Cecil and to quote her, I write to you above all others in my just quarrel at this time of trouble in the hope of obtaining the assistance of your good counsel. And as John Guy puts it, when Cecil read this letter, all he could do was laugh. I mean, the very idea that he would help Mary. Right. And so far from helping her, what he does is place her under effective detention in Bolton Castle, which is kind of, it's in the north of England, but it's a fair distance from the Scottish border. So Mary can't make a dash for the frontier. And then he writes to Murray and he asks for evidence against the captive queen. And what he wants evidence of is the fact that Mary was guilty of murdering Darnley. Because if that could, be found, then that cuts the Gordian not for Elizabeth, because she then is absolved of responsibility for helping Mary. And Murray, sure enough, manages to find some evidence.

And he sends Cecil a dossier, which is designed very explicitly to demonstrate that Mary had indeed been complicit in Darnley's murder and that therefore Elizabeth could legitimately wash her hands of her. And the allegations are that Mary had been sleeping. with Bothwell, pursuing an adulterous affair with him, before Darnley's murder, that Mary had conspired with Bothwell to murder Darnley, and that her abduction by Bothwell had actually been staged, that it had been completely faked, that there had been no rape, that Mary had an adulterous passion for Bothwell. Right.

And the case for the prosecution is helped by two key factors. And the first of these is the fact that Bothwell himself is no longer on the scene to to what is being reported. So we last left him galloping away from Carbury Hill, leaving Mary forever. He doesn't hang around. He flees Scotland for Orkney, of which he's now the Earl. Then he goes to Shetland. And then he crosses the North Sea and ends up in Norway.

There things go very badly for him. So to quote Wormald, who expresses it, I think, with undisguised relish. He fell foul of the kinsman of a former mistress, very improbable, was in imprisoned by Frederick, the king of Denmark and Norway, and died in 1578 in the fortress of Draggsholm, which I think is about 70 miles from Copenhagen, chained to a pillar and quite mad. Oh, right. John Guy has a different opinion on this.

He thinks that Bothwell was actually quite looked after. But since we're going for the kind of Shakespearean, Jacobian tragedy tone here, let's stick with the fact that he dies mad, chained to a pillar. I mean, another kind of Jacobian tragedy element would. be if somebody were to find some secret letters hidden in a casket. Yes. And sure enough, eight letters and sonnets supposedly written by Mary to Lord Darnley are found in a casket in Holyrood and they are forwarded by Morae to William Sessel.

And Morae says, they prove, in our opinion, that she consented to the murder of the king, her lawful husband. Do they, Tom? Well, this is obviously unbelievably convenient for Morae and for Cecil. Because they don't really have a case unless they have hard evidence that proves that Mary was implicated in Darnie's murder. So, again, to quote John Guy, who's brilliant on this. The sole evidence that Mary was a party to the murder plot comes from them, so the casket letters. There is no other proof.

Her guilt or innocence depends on whether the letters are true or false. And I think that the consensus today is that they probably were faked. I mean, there were so many people on the scene with both motive and opportunity. So if not Moray, then Morton or Maitland. I mean, any of those could have done it. And if they're not faked from scratch, then probably they are repurposed letters. So letters that Mary may genuinely have written that have been kind of edited to make it seem like they're referring to Bothwell. Fair to say that one person who does think the casket letters is Jenny Wurbalt.

So she's always keen to think the worse of Mary. But I think, I mean, reading John Guy's kind of comprehensive takedown of the casket letters, I think it's pretty clear they were faked. And one of the things that I think substantiates that is the fact that Elizabeth herself seems to have been sceptical. So also a number of the judges who in October 1568 were appointed to rule on Mary's guilt. So there's this kind of convention. Elizabeth wants to know, well, what's the state of play with them? And one of these judges writes to Cecil and says, this cause is the doubtfulest

and the most dangerous that ever I dealt in. Cecil is not happy to be informed of this. So he immediately abolishes the tribunal that's been set up, sets up a new one, and he waits it with judges that he can rely on, including himself. It's not framed as a trial of Mary, but effectively that's what it is. Elizabeth doesn't like this spectacle. She doesn't like the spectacle of commoners sitting in judgment on a monarch. And so at Christmas she adjourns it. It's never reconstituted. The verdict therefore effectively, ironically as a Scottish one, it's the verdict of not proven. And this of course is exactly the kind of verdict that Elizabeth loves. There's no decisive conclusion being made either one way or the other. And it leaves Mary suspended

in a kind of legal no man's land. Is she guilty? Is she isn't? There is no conclusive verdict given. But it means that the taint is there, but Elizabeth doesn't have to act on it. And for Mary, it results in a kind of a living death. You know, she's not convicted,

but Elizabeth isn't going to set her free. And so she, as a result of this, spends the rest of her life effectively under house arrest. But she's not badly treated I mean she's not chained to a pillar She doesn't go mad But she's sort of I mean there's been quite a lot of

Of house arrest With Tudor queens and princesses Hasn't there under Henry the 8th And then of course what happened to Elizabeth And this is sort of more of the same So she's just kind of She's got an apartment in various houses And she's just

You know Yeah and she's got She's got a sizable number Appropriate to her rank She's got Mary Seton Doing her hair Mary Seaton does go back to Scotland in 1577. So that must have been a devastating moment for Mary Queen of Scots, you know, to lose that

last link with her childhood. There's basically there's no dancing. There's no fun. Mary loves her sport. So there are all these unfounded stories that she played golf. The evidence on that actually seems to be quite weak. But definitely, I mean, she enjoyed, she enjoyed archery. She enjoyed riding.

She can't really ride. And so as a result, she, you know, she'd always been very fit. now she starts to get overweight, her shoulders start to stoop, she starts to kind of lose her youthful looks. And of course she's separated from her son, who she knows is being raised in Scotland as a Protestant. And she has to presume that he's being raised to hate her, which is exactly what is indeed happening.

Do you think she, I mean, she must still have dreamed of returning to Scotland and there are moments of hope, aren't there? So in 1570, Moray, her great arch rival, he was actually assassinated, wasn't he, by one of her supporters? Yes, and not only assassinated, but shot by a firearm. And he is the first head of government ever to be shot with a firearm. So Moray stands at the head of a list, you know, that will include Abraham Lincoln, who will be doing an episode on.

Very soon. Yes, so Moray gets shot on the 23rd of January, 1570. John Knox preaches at his funeral. By this point, Knox has slightly disgraced himself. So a theme of this series has been middle-aged men having inappropriate relationships with much younger girls. And Knox had married a distant member of the Stuart family who was aged 17 when he, aged 54, married us. So a slight blot on his copy book there. Asquithian level behaviour.

Anyway, he's still very much on the scene. He preaches at Murray's funeral and then he dies two years later, happy in the knowledge that the Reformation is secure and that the Catholic Jezebel has been exiled from Scotland. Well, he's had a great time. I mean, that's all worked out right now. It's all worked out well for him. With Murray's death, Scotland collapses into civil war

between adherence of James and adherence of Mary. Maitland, who has been a shadowy figure. He's kind of siding with Mary. then turning against her. Now he does side with Mary again. So declares for the Marian cause. Lennox and Morton lead the King's Party. Lennox briefly rules as regent before he too is shot, not assassinated this time, but in a skirmish. And by this point, Elizabeth has intervened on the side of her godson James. So against the Marians. And with this English backing, the Marians are comprehensively defeated. There is now no constituency in Scotland able to fight. for Mary's restoration. And among the Merian captives who were handed over by the English to Morton

is his old mucker, Maitland. And Morton, of course, shows no mercy at all. He's absolutely set on having Maitland publicly executed. Maitland is thrown into a cell in Edinburgh. The story is that he plays the Roman,

i.e. he commits suicide rather than suffer the disgrace of public execution. His body is left in the cell where it is largely devoured by rats. Exactly. So that's Maitland gone, a very jacobian tragedy ending for him. Morton himself now rules as regent, does so throughout the 1570s, makes a very good fist of it.

I mean, he's sinister, but he's very able. Yeah. He does a very good job. But of course he has so many enemies that his, I think his ultimate downfall doesn't really come as a surprise. So on the 31st December 1580, he's confronted in counsel by the brother-in-law of John Knox. So this is the guy who's, you know, he's a kind of steward. And he publicly accuses Morton of complicity in Darnley's murder. So the mystery of Darnley's murder is still kind of floating there, capable of doing damage to big players in Scottish politics.

This precipitates Morton's fool. He's put on trial. He's found guilty. he's executed on the 2nd of June 1581. And Dominic, he is executed in a brilliant way. He's basically guillotined. So long before the invention of the guillotine, the Scots had this contraption, which they called the maiden, a kind of proto-gillotine. And it stood in the public square in Edinburgh for a long time, right the way up into the 18th century, I think. And people who are interested can go to the National Museum of Scotland and see it to this day.

So if you want to get up close to the fate of Morton, you can go and do that. Well, talking of people going to Scotland and seeing Mary Queen of Scott's themed sites, you're planning to do that yourself, aren't you? In a special bonus episode for our rest is history club members. I've been so enthused by this story that I'm going to go on a tour. We're going to talk about it once I've done it. Yeah, that's the end of Morton. The truth, though, for Mary is that there is really no chance now.

So in 1580, there is no chance now that she will ever get. get back to her throne in Scotland. She no longer has a party that supports her. Elizabeth clearly is not going to help her. And what happens in the story of the next few years, which we will be doing in a second season on Mary Queen of Scots, but we'll also be looking at Elizabeth I and her spy masters and all the conspiracies and stuff.

Basically what she does is she doubles down on her Catholicism, doesn't she? She sort of reinvents herself as the, as the hope of English Catholics, and I suppose Scottish Catholics as well. Yeah, and important to emphasise that Mary has not shown herself to be a true daughter of the Catholic Church. We talked in a previous episode about how odd it is that the Catholic Mary had presided over a Protestant Reformation. And even when she's in captivity in England, she starts kind of flirting with Anglicanism because she thinks that this might. play well with Elizabeth. But once she's realized that there is, you know, Elizabeth has intervened in Scotland against her party, she thinks, I'm going for this. I'm going to play the

role of the Catholic heir to England. And I'm going to try and win the Catholics of England over to my cause. And this is obviously a very, very dangerous policy to adopt. And it is recognized as such right from the very beginning of her captivity in England. So as early as 1772, her erstwhile brother-in-law, the French king, Charles X 11th, had predicted what Mary's fate might be. The poor fool he had written will never cease from plotting until she loses her head. In faith they will put her to death. I see it is her own fault and folly. Well, do you know what? He wasn't wrong. But yes, we'll come back to that story. We'll tell you what happened next to Mary and all the plots and stuff

in a future series. And of course, rest is history. Club members will be able to hear the episodes of that series early. But Tom, before we just, before we say goodbye, let's, we've got Mary out of Scotland. So let's look back at her time in Scotland and her time as the Queen of Scots. Now, some historians, let's say Jenny Wormold, he had mentioned a lot, say, look, this is a woman who, you know, maybe she was dealt a bad ham. and there were lots of terrible people around her but she played her cards incredibly poorly she made poor decisions she was irresponsible

she was lazy she was just politically inept and do you know what I mean I know Jamie Wilmold really dislikes her but can you really disagree with a lot of that I mean she does play she makes terrible choices again and again no so there are two layers here one of the layers is

the issue of whether Mary was conspiring against Darnley to murder him, whether she had been having an adulterous affair with Bothwell, the level of the murders, the marriages, the rapes, the conspiracies, the assassinations, which has always provided the kind of the colour and the glamour and the tragedy of Mary Queen of Scots and explains why she is such an extraordinary figure,

why people have been so fascinated by her, why so many dramatists and librettists and film directors have seen in her the kind of the perfect heroine for a drama. I think that Jenny Wormald is unfair on the Mary Queen of Scots of that layer. However, the layer that Jenny Wormald, as a historian looking at the kind of deep structures of the Scottish state in the 15th and 16th centuries, I think she writes with a sense of horror

at just how disastrous Mary Queen of Scots was. She has studied Mary Queen of Scots predecessors who are very able, very competent, very hard ruling, if you like. And Mary exhibits none of those qualities and her ability to make the wrong decision again and again and again is just extraordinary. And that is not to downplay the tragedy of her fate.

the horrors that have visited on her. But I think it is to say that as Queen of Scots, she is a failure. And that's patent because she only lasts six years. Yeah. What else could she be defined as? A quick question, though, some listeners may say,

of course, it's much harder for her being a woman. My counterarguments to that would be that actually, I mean, England in the same period, has two actually pretty proficient female. I mean, I know everybody disses bloody Mary, Mary the first. But, you know, she does rule competently. And of course, Elizabeth I first is very competent. So it's not impossible to be a competent woman faced by challenges and to surmount them.

And also, of course, in France, there is Mary Queen of Scott's mother-in-law, Catherine D' Medici, who isn't a regnant queen. But she is a very, very formidable player and who is prepared to take very robust action when her interests need defending, namely slaughtering enormous numbers of Protestants on the streets of Paris. Mary Queen of Scots never countenance as that. And, of course, people may be listening to this and thinking, well, you're saying she's a failure because she didn't sanction repression, violent, bloody repression. I mean, in a sense, that is what we're saying because that was what was expected of Queens in the 16th century. And those are the standards by which we are judging Mary. I think Mary was a nicer person than Elizabeth or Catherine de Medici. I think she was kind-hearted. She did not tend to pursue her enemies. She was, for giving. But I think that was precisely the problem. So as a human being, I think she is a very attractive person. But as a queen, I think she's a failure. Okay. Well, maybe on that note, Tom, we should look ahead. We will be returning with the rest of Mary Queen of Scots' story in a few months' time, I think. I mean, we often say that. And actually, it turns out to be like six

years later. But we'll try to do it more quickly, I think. Because you're full of Mary Queen of Scott's themed enthusiasm, won't you? I certainly am, and not only Mary Queen of Scots themed enthusiasm. I'm also very enthusiastic about Cecil's spy network, Sir Francis Walsingham, counter espionage, all of that. It's very John Le Carre, so we will be

looking at that, and at Mary's ultimate fate. And do you know what it all sets the scene for? That's something we've been building up to doing on the rest of history. The Spanish Armada. Yes, it does. Yes, it does. So that will be hopefully setting sail next year. I don't understand why people wouldn't join the Restis History Club after hearing that.

That is madness. Just to remind you, it's the rest is history.com. It's what Mary, Queen of Scots, would have wanted. And that bombshell, Tom, thank you so much.

That was an absolute toward the force. I think you've ever heard that before. Thank you very much. Splendid stuff. Bye by, everybody. Bye-bye.