584. Mary, Queen of Scots: Birth of a Legend (Part 1)

0:11She held the crucifix high, visible all down the long hall, as she flung defiance at her judges, and her voice rose with a kind of triumph above the voice of the Dean of Peterborough, always higher and clearer than his rising tones, arching over the vehement English prayers, the mysterious dominating invocations of the ancient faith. The Queen's voice held on for a minute after the clergyman had finished. Her words were in English now. She was praying for the people of England and for the soul of her royal cousin Elizabeth. She was forgiving all her enemies. Then, for a moment, her ladies were busy about her.

0:51The black velvet gown fell below her knees, revealing underbodys and petticoat of crimson silk, and she stepped forward suddenly, shockingly, in the colour of martyrdom, blood red from top to toe against the sombre background. Quietly she knelt and bowed herself low over the little chopping block, in manus tuas domine, and they heard twice the dull chunk of the axe. There was one more ceremony to accomplish. The executioner must exhibit the head and speak the customary words. The masked black figure stooped and rose, crying in a loud voice, Long live the Queen! But all he held in his hand that had belonged to the rival Queen of Hearts was a kerchief and pinned to it an elaborate auburn wig.

1:44Rolled nearer the edge of the platform, shrunken and withered and grey, with a sparse silver stubble on the small, shiny skull, was the head of the martyr. Mary Stewart had always known how to embarrass her enemies. So that was the American historian Garrett Mattingly in 1950, and he was writing about the execution of Mary Stewart. it. Mary, Queen of Scots at Fotheringay Castle on the 8th of February, 1587. Tom Holland, it is one of the most dramatic, one of the most celebrated moments in British history. Iconic because Mary is a bit of an icon, isn't she? She's a fashion icon. She is. She's famously beautiful and stylish and well-dressed and all of these kinds of things.

2:32And also loads of history about men. Yeah. But now we're absolutely hitting the jackpot. So I would say Mary, Queen of Scots is probably the most celebrated Scot who's ever lived. And she's celebrated because she is a byword for glamour and romance and tragedy, which seems to be what people like in Scottish history. So I guess Bonnie Prince Charlie would perhaps be her only rival, who's also glamorous, romantic, and tragic. The story of Mary Queen of Scots is extraordinary. So she becomes the Queen of Scots when she's only one week old. She then goes to France, and as a teenager, she briefly rules as Queen of France.

3:13And then when she's 19, she comes back to Scotland, a country that she barely remembers. And she has this incredibly convulsive and ultimately calamitous reign, which is marked by plots and rebellions and two disastrous marriages and two very notorious murders. And as a result, mystery and controversy completely shadows her. So there are all kinds of questions that people are always debating. Was she an adulteress? Was she a murderess? Was she a victim of rape? And she's a very polarizing figure and she always has been. So to her admirers, of whom there are lots, she's the archetype of a heroine brought low by duplicitous and brutal men.

4:05So she was a figure of romance and now a kind of feminist heroine. But there are lots of people who think she's a complete waste of space, useless, a traitor, conniving, an inept at conniving. So that's even worse than conniving, right? Yeah. I mean, she ends up deposed. That's pretty much the marker of being a failure as a ruler. And back in the 16th century, the justification for this was precisely that she was a Jezebel, that she was a kind of monstrous archetype of everything that made women rulers a terrible idea. And today there are absolutely historians who will say that she's one of the most calamitous rulers in Scottish history.

4:42And the doyen of these historians who condemn her as a disastrous queen, who is herself Scottish, Jenny Wormald, wrote a brilliant, groundbreaking book on Mary, Queen of Scots. And she condemned her as a monarch of little wit and no judgment, a woman who absolutely brought about her own downfall. And so, Dominic, we will be sifting the evidence for this today and over the next five episodes of the series. And lots to discuss. But important to emphasise, you were worried that this was maybe an overly Scottish theme. I wouldn't say worried. I would say excited. You would be relieved to know that this isn't just a Scottish story.

5:19There's quite a lot of England in it as well. And I guess that that's evident from the account of the execution that you read, which we opened this episode with. Because Fotheringay, of course, where she ends up being beheaded, is in England. I mean, it's in Middle England. It's in Northamptonshire. But what that passage also alluded to is the sense in which, in death as throughout her adult life, Mary Queen of Scots is shadowed by a rival queen. And this queen is her own cousin. In fact, it's the woman who had agreed to her death And that, of course, is Elizabeth Tudor Elizabeth I Yes, so Mary was the Queen of Scots, Tom Elizabeth was the Queen of England Mary was a Catholic Elizabeth was a Protestant And Mary, of course, was married three times But Elizabeth was the Virgin Queen Married to her people and to her country And here's the thing We always think of them as the sort of supreme arch rivals But they never actually met They never even were in the same building at the same time.

6:22No. And I think that people ever since have felt that this was a slightly wasted opportunity. And in so many fictional treatments of Mary Queen of Scots, she's always meeting up with Elizabeth I. So Schiller in Germany wrote a famous play about it. Donizetti wrote an opera, again, where Mary and Elizabeth meet up. And I suppose the most recent example is the 2018 film starring Saoirse Ronan as Mary Queen of Scots. And actually, I have next to me, and I will hold it up for the benefit of those on YouTube, it's this titanic definitive biography of Mary by John Guy, which came out about 20 years ago.

6:58And it's been retitled for the purposes of the film. And on the cover, you get Saoirse Ronan as Mary, Queen of Scots, but you also get Margot Robbie as Elizabeth I. And the subtitle is Two Queens, One Future. So that sense that to write about Mary immediately means that you have to write about Elizabeth is really, really powerful and part of the story that we'll be telling. But it's not just an English or Scottish story. It's also a European story, right? Because as you've pointed out, the book that we read from at the beginning, the Garrett Mattingly book, is actually a book about the defeat of the Spanish Armada.

7:29So Spain and France are involved in this story too. Yeah, so actually that account that you read, it's the first chapter in Mattingly's account of the Spanish Armada. He frames it as the key event that results in Philip II of Spain launching his doomed attempt to conquer England the following year in 1588. And that reflects the fact that throughout her life, Mary was a figure of absolutely European significance, and not just for Spain, but even more for France. So although she was the Queen of Scots, actually, I think the kingdom that she loved best, the place probably where she felt most at home, was France.

8:04So actually very like Theo, her father was Scottish, but her mother was French. and she goes to France when she's very young. She gets educated there. She grows up there, where she first marries and becomes a queen. I think there's a sense in which all through her subsequent life, she's a little bit homesick for it. Perhaps the great irony of her reign and the key to understanding her ultimate tragedy is that the preference of this most famous of all Scots wasn't actually for Scotland at all. Her heart was probably French. Enough preamble, let's get right into the story. So she is born in Linlithgow, west of Edinburgh, one of the great palaces of Scotland, on the 8th of December, 1542.

8:57So set the scene for us a little bit, Tom. It's perishingly cold, even by the standards of Scotland in winter. So the Tweed, which is the fast flowing river on which I have my Scottish estate and which marked the frontier between Scotland and England had completely frozen over, which anyone who knows the Tweed, I mean, it's an extraordinary thing. But despite these perishing conditions, it hasn't stopped the Scots and the English from fighting one another, which for generations after generation, they're always at it. And this is why Mary's father, who is James V, he's 30 years old, he's the king of Scotland, And that's why he's not present at Linn-Lithgow for her birth.

9:37And the reason for this is that two weeks earlier, he'd been fighting the English on the western border of Scotland. And he had suffered a humiliating defeat, Solway Moss in Cumberland in England. He'd managed to escape the battlefield. He'd ridden back. He'd stopped by at Linn-Lithgow where his wife had been entering her confinement. But he hadn't stayed there basically, I think, because he was kind of too depressed and miserable at his defeat. He felt he had lots to organise. So he went to Edinburgh. In Edinburgh, he felt, oh, I'm just too depressed. And so he went on to a hunting lodge at Falkland.

10:10And basically, he seems to have gone there to commune with his sense of failure, I think. And he basically goes to bed. He's very depressed. He's also pox ridden. He's a great one for the ladies and is absolutely ridden with syphilis. And while he's in bed, he has brought the news that his wife has given birth and it's a daughter. And this plunges him even deeper into misery. Yeah, gutting. Well, over the course of his life, as we will see, he's fathered a lot of bastard sons, but he has no legitimate male heir. And he'd really been hoping for that. So having a daughter is a huge disappointment to him.

10:44Meanwhile, back in Lithgow, the newborn daughter and her mother are doing very well. And this is because a Scottish palace in the mid 16th century is actually an incredibly civilized place to be. Yeah, it's great. It's hung with magnificent tapestries to provide insulation. It's got the cutting edge glazed windows, tremendous glaziers on hand. It's very, very sophisticated. And in the opinion of Mary's mother, the palace at Linlithgow is equal of any chateau to be found in France. She would know. Absolutely, Dominic, because she herself is French. So she's Mary of Guise. She's from a noble family in France, right?

11:27and she's famously beautiful and smart, cunning, all of these kinds of things. And, I mean, no son. I mean, we're in the same century as Henry VIII and all his carry-on, so no son is always a bad thing. But on the other hand, at least James has an heir of a kind. And you say she's of a noble family. I mean, the Guise are the most influential and domineering noble family in France. And as we will see, they have essentially their eyes on the throne. so she's a very formidable person in her own right and her marriage to james v the king of scotland it bears witness to what for generations and generations has been the foundation stone of scotland's foreign policy which is known by the scots as the old alliance a uld so the scot spelling and it is underpinned i'm afraid to say by a visceral hostility to england which makes complete sense i mean strategically england is the adversary for both countries the english had fought the French, the Hundred Years' War, memories of which are still around, obviously, in the 16th century.

12:29The Scots, so their memories are of their Wars of Independence, which were 300 years earlier. Robert the Bruce, all of that kind of thing. Yeah. And actually, both of these had been English defeats, hadn't they? They had. Yeah. The English defeat in the Scottish Wars of Independence had been much more humiliating for the English than their defeat in the Hundred Years' War, basically because Scotland is to England what England is to France, namely less rich, less powerful, fewer reserves of manpower. And this is as true in the time of Mary, Queen of Scots, as it had been back in the time of Robert Bruce.

13:06So the population of England is about three and a half million. And Scotland's is well under one million. The only sizable town in Scotland at this time is Edinburgh. Even then, I mean, it's only just under 10 ,000. So London, by way of comparison, is over 60 ,000. and its entire machinery of government is much less centralized than you get in England or France. And so therefore it's harder to raise and sustain armies in the field. And the corollary of that is that generally, provided the English aren't distracted by wars in France, they can pretty much be relied upon to defeat the Scots in battle.

13:47As they have done in recent years, right? So the 16th century has been pretty good for England in this regard. You mentioned Solway Moss, but they also famously won the Battle of Flodden, 1513. A lot of business with pikemen running down into bogs and things. And Mary's grandfather was killed at Flodden, wasn't he, James IV? And a lot of the English people said that he'd been killed by his own side, which is Paul from the Scots. Well, I think not just English people, Scots thought that too. Right. It's unclear, but these rumours certainly play into a kind of opinion that is very common in England and indeed France.

14:21that Scottish affairs are exceptionally brutal and murderous and that the nobility in Scotland are kind of very, very thuggish and dangerous. Do you think that's true? Well, we'll see. Mary certainly grows up to think it's true. In due course, she would say of the Scots that they are, as is known, a people as factious amongst themselves and as factious towards their ruler as any other nation in Europe. And I guess that she could look back at her forebears, those who had sat on the throne before her, and found plenty of evidence to support this. So Mary is a steward. The name Stuart derives from the position held by one of her ancestors, who'd been the high steward of Scotland.

15:10And he had then married the daughter of Robert Bruce, a woman called Marjorie, which I think is an improbable name for a Scottish queen, and thereby founded the Stuart dynasty. And it's true that very few of the Stuart kings kind of die in their beds. So there are lots who die in battle against the English, but there's another who gets assassinated while being pursued down a sewer. Another gets killed in battle fighting his own son. And actually, the son who kills his own father is the guy who goes on to become James IV, the one who dies at Flodden. So I think there is a general sense that to be a Scottish monarch is a dangerous thing.

15:52And this, I think, is why James is particularly depressed at the news that he's been given a daughter rather than a son, because he's worried that to have a woman on the throne will, by its very nature, be threatening, not just for Scotland, but more specifically for his own line, his own regime. He has this brilliant line, doesn't he? The devil go with it. It will end as it began. It came from a woman and it will end in a woman. What's all that about? yeah it's kind of paraphrased it came with alas and it will pass with alas so in other words the stewart's inherited the throne via marjorie the daughter of right robert bruce and with mary stewart it will finish and so he's very depressed he gets worse and worse and then he dies and we're told by someone who records the details that he died amid a marvelous vomit so oh yeah horrid and so this is one week after mary has been born and so she's now the queen of scotland and she is one week old.

16:50And obviously, if the stereotypes, which very strongly held by foreigners, but also it would seem by James V himself, if the stereotypes of Scottish savagery and backwardness are true, then you would think that the Stuarts are doomed. You know, a one week old baby girl on the throne, it doesn't look promising. And even more threatening is the fact that there are a couple of noblemen on the scene who themselves have a possible claim to the throne and who even more threateningly for scotland absolutely test each other okay everybody basically is called james so one of these is james hamilton and he is the earl of aaron and he is the grandson of the daughter of james ii so that's going quite a few generations back but he is now the heir apparent so if mary dies he gets the throne right he's very scheming but he's also very slippery and very very inconstant and mary of guise mary queen of scotts mother despises him and she says of him that he was a simple and the most inconstant man in the world for whatever he determineth today he changes tomorrow so you can't pin him down okay and the other bloke so he is called matthew Matthew Stuart and he's the Earl of Lennox and like the Earl of Aaron he's a grandson of James II's daughter but he stands behind Aaron in the ranking because his claim derives from a female rather than a male line so the inherent sexism of the Scottish laws of inheritance right yeah and he is in exile in France at this time when Mary is born but he's obviously itching to return and he's described by one admirer as having been a strong man of personage well proportioned in all his members so that's nice in all his members.

18:38That's nice. Potentially a very impressive figure. Right. So in a sane world, one of these men would have got the baby, taken her to some equivalent of the Tower of London, Scottish equivalent, some shack in Scotland, and smothered or otherwise dealt with her, Princess and the Tower style, bang, job done. Let's get on and have a nice stable government for a happier Scotland. But no, foolish from the Scots. They could have done it and they would have been right to do it, I guess would be definitely your take on it. But actually, this doesn't happen at all. And this is because actually Scotland is much more politically stable, I think, than the negative perspective abroad allowed.

19:18And the measure of this is that since 1437, so that's more than a century before Mary's birth, four kings in succession had come to the Scottish throne as children. And all of them had survived their minority and all of them had grown up to become very powerful and intimidating rulers. and the reason for this is that actually the Scottish monarchy has a number of advantages that aren't immediately apparent I think to you know sneerers in London or Paris and one of these advantages is that actually the aristocracy are not as feral as say the English aristocracy had shown themselves to be in the 15th century when England had collapsed into the Wars of the Roses.

20:06And as you mentioned, the princess and the tower end up being murdered. There's no equivalent of that in Scotland. And Jenny Wormald, who we mentioned, the great historian of late medieval and 16th century Scotland, who's very down on Mary, Queen of Scots. She's brilliant on this kind of quality of essential stability that Scotland has. And she writes, the evidence is that the magnates infinitely preferred strong royal rule to lack of it. So they're not looking to overthrow kings. Essentially, they want a king to grow up and provide authoritative rule because that's better for Scotland. Yeah. And they're doing that partly because they're frightened of the English or they're not frightened of the English.

20:47I think they are constantly aware of the English threat on their southern border. They're well aware that in pitch battle, the English are probably going to win. but they're also aware that as long as there is a strong stable state in Scotland, the English will never be able to conquer Scotland. The Highlands in particular are effectively impregnable. It's not just the English who failed to conquer Scotland, the Romans had failed earlier. Scotland is a very, very difficult country to subdue. And so as a result, the English are kind of like a tide. They're constantly flowing in, but they're almost bound to flow back out again.

21:24And this is why ever since Edward I tried to conquer Scotland and Edward II had then been defeated at Bannockburn, it's just a relentless sequence of wars and squabbles that are never resolved. The Scots can't stop the English attacking, but the English can't subdue the Scots. And so you just have this kind of three centuries long stalemate. One of the reasons that the Scots are able to see the English off is that actually in kind of geopolitical terms, they're quite well set. So if you think of France, France has the English to deal with, but they've also got the Spanish. They've got problems on the Italian frontier.

22:02Been fighting in Italy, yeah. Yeah, they've got Italy. They've got the low countries. They've got problems potentially along the Rhine. So they have enemies on almost every corner. The English are sandwiched between France and Scotland. So whenever the English go attack France, as Shakespeare puts it, the weasel Scot darts out down into Northern England. The Scots only have the one natural enemy, and that's England. And this is one of the reasons why it doesn't actually need the centralized bureaucracy that had developed in England and France, say, over the course of the Hundred Years' War. They don't need excessive amounts of money or men, because the only sphere where they're going to be fighting is that very narrow border that constitutes the line between england and france and so such taxes as they raise the stewarts can blow it on fancy ships or guns and they love a fancy ship they love a massive cannon but they can still have enough to then spend it on building glorious palaces like at linlithgow this is why you have the you know the wonderful glazing and the uh the tapestries and stuff it's because the Scottish monarchy has money to spare.

23:12Basically, James V is a great builder of the Scottish equivalent of Chateau. He can enjoy French-style interior decoration, but massively on the cheap. And because of this, the Scots themselves do not feel that they're peripheral barbarians. And the Scots monarchs certainly don't think that. They don't see themselves as being remote or isolated or backwards. They see themselves absolutely as being the peers of the King of England or the King of France. And so that's why I think, although it's not optimal to have a one-week-old baby girl on the throne, it doesn't doom Mary and it doesn't mean that Scotland is doomed to fall to pieces.

23:57Well, let's find out because, you know, Tom, that's very optimistic. Are we looking for a golden age of Scottish history? Is Mary, Queen of Scots' life, going to be all sweetness and light? find out after the break welcome back to the rest is history now if you're not a member of the rest is history club i know what you've been doing you've been listening to the adverts more fool you you should join the club and you won't have to listen to them but while you've been listening to the adverts extraordinary scenes nine months have passed and mary has just been crowned in Stirling Castle. A slightly bad omen here, Tom, because she was crowned on the anniversary of the Battle of Flodden.

24:39Yeah, so the 9th of September, 1543, 29 years after the Battle of Flodden. So big disaster in Scottish history. Why on earth have they chosen that date? Well, it will be seen by Mary's enemies as a bad omen, but I think you could just as easily see it as a mark of Scottish insouciance. They've already got over Flodden. Forget it. Yeah, who cares? As you said, she's crowned in Stirling Castle, which has always been viewed as the key to Scotland. Bannockburn is kind of fought in its shadow. It guards the lowest crossing point on the River Forth, and it's pretty much impregnable. So that is one of the reasons why Mary is there.

25:14The crown has to be held over the baby queen's head, because obviously it would crush her if it was laid on top of her. And Mary cries and bawls and sobs the whole way through the ceremony, which again, bad omen. People might see as an omen. But very clearly, if she's being crowned she hasn't been murdered no coronation is going ahead the country hasn't collapsed into civil war and great news the earls of aaron and lennox so the two men who we mentioned in the first half who both have claims to be her successor they've been there so the first one massive snake yeah always changing his mind the other bloke good members well-proportioned members Yeah, exactly.

25:56So Aaron has carried the crown in the coronation procession. Lennox has carried the scepter. If you throw in the sword of state as well, these constitute the honours of Scotland, as they're called, and you can see them to this day in Edinburgh Castle. Attentive listeners may remember that Lennox had been in exile in France. So obviously, if he's there in Stirling, he's negotiated his return. So it's good for him. But it's Aaron probably at this point who is ahead because he has won the backing of Scotland's parliament to serve both as regent and to be nominated as Mary's official heir. So, yeah, watch out for him.

26:36If he had a Richard III vibe, we know what would happen. Yeah. But we will see. In one sense, there's a kind of surprising degree of political stability. These two earls are kind of, you know, they're eyeballing each other, but they're not trying to kill Mary. They're not in open opposition to one another. But the state of Scotland is unsettled even so. And this is due not so much to the rivalry between Aaron and Lennox, but to a much more formidable and enduring rivalry, which is that between France and England. so both of those kingdoms they've obviously heard the news there's this infant girl and they're both thinking oh you know there's opportunity here now you would think wouldn't you that the french would be the people who would do a deal with scotland because of the old alliance and all that kind of thing and the english are kind of the you know they're the old enemy and all of that stuff and it's a little bit more complicated isn't it so the english are actually at war with scotland at this point technically is that right yeah you know i mean mary's father died of a broken heart after being defeated by them.

27:40Right. And of course, also, Mary is under the wing of her mother, Mary of Guise, who's very much a French woman. So why is this even an issue? Why the English, even in play, is a possible ally? It doesn't make sense. Because over the decade before Mary is born, something very kind of novel, unexpected. and I think for relations between Scotland, England and France, very destabilizing has begun to emerge, which is a pro-English faction in Scotland. Absolute scenes. I mean, unheard of. So people may wonder, how on earth is it that a pro-English faction has grown up in Scotland? And the answer to that is that the storm clouds of the Reformation have been massing, not not just over Europe, but over Scotland.

28:34Because just as has been happening in England at the same time, the country is being shaken by the emergence of a novel and very fast-growing heresy in Germany. So we did five episodes on this, The Life of Martin Luther, kind of the father of the Reformation. And his writings had been detected in Scotland as early as 1524. So that's only a few years after he nailed up his theses in Wittenberg. And then three years later, so in 1527, there is a report from a concerned Catholic that Luther's writings are circulating widely in Edinburgh and St. Andrews. And then the following year in 1528, you get the first martyrdom of a Protestant.

29:18And this is a former Catholic priest called Patrick Hamilton. And he's burnt at the stake in St. Andrews, which is one of Scotland's three universities at this point and the oldest and most prestigious. So this is all going on. But surely there's a huge thing. It's not just coming from Germany or from Flanders or other places the tracts are coming from. But the fact that England has been embroiled in the Reformation because of Henry VIII's marital issues presumably has a massive knock-on effect on Scotland because now all sorts of tracts and ideas can arrive across the very porous Anglo-Scottish border.

29:51Yeah. And of course, they're written in a form of English. So Scots, which is pretty different from the kind of English that is being written by Protestant reformers in London or Cambridge or whatever. But I mean, it's much easier for Scots to read than say German. And so these pamphlets have an outsized effect on Scottish opinion, as you said. And of course, as you also said, there is the outsized figure of Henry VIII. And by this point, I mean, he really is outsized. He's very much a person of bulk. Yeah, he's got that massive ulcer. Yes, all those injections up his arse and stuff. I mean, it's all happening.