589. Mary, Queen of Scots: Downfall (Part 6)

31:14The second, very, I mean, 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 lock. And then finally, he threatens to cut her throat. And bear in mind that Mary has seen Lindsay in action, getting rid of Rizzio. And so at this point, she, in floods of tears, agrees that she will sign the documents.

32:01But she promises as she does so, 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.

32:29We're read and almost broken With the frequent uproars and rebellions raised against us Since we returned to Scotland So, Mary Queen of Scots, she hasn't lost her French accent 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 done as death.

33:12You 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 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.

33:48But 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.

34:40And 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 want to have anything to do with it. And I think that in her depth of her misery, following her miscarriage, following 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.

35:29And 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 depressed by being catcalled 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 um the brooding laird of lock leave and castle um 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 um for the rest of her life and with pretty geordie on her side mary is able to make two attempts um at escape the first of these doesn't work out it's faintly ludicrous it requires her dressing up as a washerwoman so like i miss toad like toad of toad hall trying to escape prison um so unlike toad uh mary queen of scots doesn't uh succeed in escaping because um her hands are very white and soft um and these are noticed um and so she gets apprehended taken back to Lock Leaven.

36:38But 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, you're just 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 take out the crown, presumably, like all Scotland lies at her feet.

37:16Or 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 Habana. And she goes to Hamilton, which is a town to the south of Glasgow, where there was very recently a by-election.

37:57And there she sets up her court directly opposite Glasgow, which is where Moray is and Lennox and all her bitterest enemies. And actually various congregant lords do leave Moray. They do go over to Mary. And so you think, oh, come on, this is it. This is your chance. And sure enough, two weeks after her escape from Loch Leven, 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.

38:39And first she goes to Dumfries and then she cuts across country, traveling 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 had 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.

39:24But now she's pretty much lost all that completely, hasn't she? She's having to drink sour milk. 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 demoralized. 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 and ask her to restore me to my throne. She does. So on the 15th of May, she arrives at the abandoned Abbey of Dundranen, which is a mile away from the coast of the Solway Firth, the expanse of water that separates Galloway from Cumberland in England.

40:11And 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 rowed across the Solway Firth to England and she will never again step foot on Scottish soil. And she will never again know 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 she is going to be in England and she never imagined that when she crossed the border.

41:02She thought she'd be back within weeks, months. Well, 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 at getting sucked into a civil war in Scotland because Elizabeth hates foreign entanglements.

41:52Yeah. 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.

42:33So 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 Cecil, he'd always hated Mary, as you've said many times in this series.

43:11And 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.

43:52And 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 Moray 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 can be found, then that cuts the Gordian knot for Elizabeth. Because she then is absolved of responsibility for helping Mary. And Murray, sure enough, manages to find some evidence.

44:35And 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 had an adulterous passion for Bothwell. Right. And the case for the prosecution is helped by two key factors.

45:16And the first of these is the fact that Bothwell himself is no longer on the scene to object to what is being reported. So we last left him galloping away from Carberry 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 who expresses it I think with undisguised relish he fell foul of the kinsman of a former mistress very improbable was imprisoned by Frederick the king of Denmark and Norway and died in 1578 in the fortress of Dragsholm 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.

46:06He thinks that Bothwell was actually quite looked after. But since we're going for the kind of Shakespearean, Jacobean tragedy tone here, let's stick with the fact that he dies mad, chained to a pillar. I mean, another kind of Jacobean 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're forwarded by Moray to William Cecil. And Moray says, they prove, they prove in our opinion, that she consented to the murder of the king, her lawful husband.

46:46Do they, Tom? Well, this is obviously unbelievably convenient for Moray and for Cecil because they don't really have a case unless they have hard evidence that proves that Mary was implicated in Darnley'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.

47:25So 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 to bothwell um fair to say that one person who does think the casket letters is jenny werbold so she's always keen to think the worst of of mary but i i think i've been 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.

48:14So 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, or 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 weights 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.

48:55She 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. Right.

49:32And 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 house arrest and with Tudor queens and princesses hasn't there under Henry VIII 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.

50:10Yeah, and she's got servants. She's got a sizable number appropriate to her rank. She's got Mary Seaton 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. 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 archery. She enjoyed riding. She can't really ride. And so as a result, she'd always been very fit.

50:47Now 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 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.

51:34So Moray stands at the head of a list 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 her. So a slight blot on his copybook 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.

52:28He's had a great time. I mean, that's all worked out very nicely. Yeah, it's all worked out well for him. With Moray's death, Scotland collapses into civil war between adherents of James and adherents 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.

53:06And 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 Marian 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. So that's Maitland gone, a very Jacobean tragedy ending for him.

53:54Morton 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 I think his ultimate downfall doesn't really come as a surprise. So on the 31st of December, 1580, he's confronted in council 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.

54:40This precipitates Morton's fall. He's put on trial. He's found guilty and 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 guillotine. and it stood in the public square in Edinburgh for a long time, right the way up until 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.

55:19Well, talking of people going to Scotland and seeing Mary Queen of Scots-themed sites, you're planning to do that yourself, aren't you, in a special bonus episode for Arrested 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 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.

56:07Basically what she does is she doubles down on her Catholicism, doesn't she? She sort of reinvents herself 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 realised that Elizabeth has intervened in Scotland against her party, she thinks, I'm going for this.

56:54I'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 recognised as such right from the very beginning of her captivity in England. So as early as 1572, her erstwhile brother-in-law, the French king, Charles XI, 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.

57:39But 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 say goodbye, 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, who you've mentioned a lot, say, look, this is a woman who, you know, maybe she was dealt a bad hand and there were lots of terrible people around her. But she played her cards incredibly poorly.

58:15She made poor decisions. She was irresponsible. She was lazy. She was just politically inept. And do you know what? I mean, I know Jamie Wormald 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 perfect heroine for a drama.

59:18I 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 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.

1:00:10But 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. 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 counter argument to that would be that actually, I mean, England in the same period has two actually pretty proficient females. I mean, I know everybody disses bloody Mary, Mary I, but, you know, she does rule competently. And of course, Elizabeth I is very competent. So it's not impossible to be a competent woman faced by challenges and to surmount them.

1:00:44And also, of course, in France, there is Mary Queen of Scots mother-in-law, Catherine de 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 countenances 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.

1:01:21And 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 forgiving. 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.

1:01:58but we'll try to do it more quickly, I think. Because you're full of Mary Queen of Scots themed enthusiasm, aren'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 Carré. So we will be looking at that and 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 Rest is History Club after hearing that.

1:02:33That is madness. Just to remind you, it's therestishistory.com. It's what Mary, Queen of Scots, would have wanted. On that bombshell, Tom, thank you so much. That was an absolute tour de force. I don't think you've ever heard that before. Thank you very much. Splendid stuff. Bye-bye, everybody. Bye-bye.

1:02:56Thank you.