619. Elizabeth I: The Virgin Queen (Part 4)

29:03So it's kind of like Labour MPs on the left sneering at Starmer for giving messages in front of a Union Jack. It is exactly that. He's a fascist. Yes. And it has to be said that just as Labour prime ministers tend to store up trouble for themselves with their left-wing backbenchers, so Elizabeth is also storing up trouble for herself by keeping the vestments and keeping the altars. Because she has a problem with the fact that all the Catholic bishops have resigned en masse. How is she going to fill the vacancies? Her preference, obviously is for Protestants who, like her, had stayed in England and haven't gone off to Geneva and learned all kinds of mad ideas at the feet of John Calvin.

29:48And so to the degree that she can appoint such figures as bishops, she does so. And the key appointment is to the Archbishop of Canterbury, the preeminent bishop in the Church of England. And she gives that role to Matthew Parker, who was her mother's old chaplain. People may remember from our very first episode, it's to Matthew Parker that Anne Boleyn in her last interview with him says please look after my daughter which Matthew Parker had then done over the course of Elizabeth's childhood and youth and and so you can see why he would be an obvious candidate for her but the problem is is that there aren't really enough people of good caliber to fill all the vacancies and so Elizabeth ends up having to appoint eight of these kind of exiles as bishops and they are going to embroil her in endless rows about vestments and crucifixes.

30:38And Elizabeth hates this. She takes her God-appointed role as Supreme Governor very, very seriously. And she's not going to surrender her prerogatives to a bunch of lefty theologians from Geneva. No way. Equally, as you said, the radicals see the Elizabethan church as being sunk in papist mummery. And this is a story that will run and run through Elizabeth's reign into the time of James I and then, of course, Charles I, with ultimately explosive consequences. What about Catholics, though? There's a lot of Catholics, right? What do they think of this? And this is the other thing, which when people talk about Elizabeth's arguments with the more radical Protestants, they tend to ignore the fact that they are just little gnats to Elizabeth.

31:26to Elizabeth. They're kind of little buzzing insects. The huge threat to her is the vast mass of the English population who are Catholic. And they are Elizabeth's real nightmare because there are just so many of them. And added to that is the fact, of course, that most of the great powers on the continent of Europe are Catholic as well. And to them, a Protestant England is bound to seem a rogue state. And the risk remains that they will try and overthrow Elizabeth and replace her with a Catholic monarch. And how you head these threats off during the first year of Elizabeth's reign is the most pressing challenge that she faces.

32:05And it's the one over which she and Cecil, her first minister, are most bitterly divided. Because at its heart are two massively glaring questions which go to the very core of Elizabeth's status as a queen. And the first of these is, should Elizabeth get married? And the second, which is tied in with the first question, should she appoint a successor? And they're questions on which Elizabeth and Cecil have very different points of view. And Cecil finds to his fury that Elizabeth is almost impossible to pin down on them. But can he pin her down? What a cliffhanger. We will find out after the break.

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33:31In the end, this shall be for me sufficient, that a marble stone shall declare that a queen, having reigned such a time, lived and died a virgin. So that was Elizabeth I, and she was answering a House of Commons petition in early 1559. And the MPs had taken a break from arguing about religious fancy dress to press an issue on which all of them could agree, which is basically they said, come on, you need to get married because you need to have an heir. Ideally, we'd love a couple of sons and then the dynasty can endure. And this is an issue, Tom, that runs right through Elizabeth I's reign. It's one of the things that we know about her.

34:15Most people, even though they don't know much about Elizabeth I, know that she was the Virgin Queen, married to her kingdom. And actually, if Parliament had had its way, this would never have been the case because again and again, 1563, 66, 1576, they petition her and say, will you please get married? Will you please have a husband and then have children? And obviously the urgency is because, well, it's multiple things. to some degree, I suppose it's about sexism, isn't it? I think probably not much. I mean, there's a shade perhaps of that, that they think that power is properly the dimension of men and that therefore Elizabeth would be better off with a man by her side.

34:53I don't actually think that's a really salient fact. They think the dynasty and civil war is the single biggest thing. That thing that is basically, you don't understand the Tudors if you don't get that all through the decades of the Tudor dynasty people are thinking this is a dynasty of Parvenus and they're going to fall any moment and then it'll be Wars of the Roses round two, basically. Sure. But for, say, Cecil, an ardent Protestant, there's now an added dimension as well, which is that if the Protestant Reformation is dependent on the life of Elizabeth, just as the Catholic Reformation had been dependent on the life of Mary, then it's absolutely crucial that the succession is sorted out.

35:36And the best way to do that is for Elizabeth to have a son. And then the succession is clear. And as Cecil is all too painfully aware, the obvious successor is the most nightmarish successor imaginable, if you are a stalwart English Protestant, because that successor potentially is Mary Queen of Scots. She's not just Catholic, but also from July 1559, she's become the Queen of France. So the Dauphin, her husband, has succeeded his father. I mean, it's a double nightmare. She has so many negatives. She's Catholic. She's Scottish. She's kind of French. And she's also useless. But apart from that, she's brilliant.

36:18So no wonder that Cecil is saying to Elizabeth, come on, it's your patriotic duty. Get married. Give us a son. So again and again, he's kind of writing this to all his mates, moaning about Elizabeth's refusal to do this. God send our mistress a husband and buy him a son that we may hope our posterity shall have a masculine succession. And Elizabeth, when she gets messages like this, so actually that petition that she gets from the House of Commons, she's not saying that she's going to stay a virgin queen, but she's saying this might be one option. She does leave the door open. She never says never, but in a way she is because it turns out that all these, well, I'm going to think about it.

36:56Effectively, she's just kind of kicking the whole issue down the road. She does not want to commit. So people may wonder, well, why does she not want to commit? And I think there are all kinds of potential answers to that question, some of which perhaps are rooted in her upbringing, which we've been tracking. You can see that perhaps there's a kind of an association of marriage with death, the execution of her mother. It must surely have kind of weighed on her. And she did once confide that she hated the idea of marriage every day more for reasons which she could not divulge to a twin soul if she had one, much less to a living creature, which does suggest that perhaps there are kind of buried psychological reasons.

37:41But we can't be sure about that because, as we've said, Elizabeth is a very close person. Her emotions are kept very, very private. So I think you're kind of going into the dimension of psychological speculation there. But there is another much more obvious reason why she refuses to be pinned down. And that is that as she recognizes much more clearly than Cecil, her unmarried state constitutes an absolutely brilliant diplomatic weapon because she is a queen of England. And therefore her hand in marriage is an amazing prize for any Christian prince. And so Elizabeth likes to keep the prospect dangling in front of would-be suitors.

38:24And this works brilliantly in two ways, because firstly, every time there's an inquiry from a continental suitor about, you know, could I marry you? That inquiry serves to validate her legitimacy. But what it also does, it enables Elizabeth to bring in her favorite strategy, which is essentially to string people along, to say, oh, I might give you this, and then never giving it to them. And actually, she does it brilliantly because she is a kind of consummate politician. An example of this, of how she pursues this strategy of dangling the prospect of marriage in front of people, is demonstrated by her relationship with Philip of Spain, her erstwhile brother-in-law, so the husband of her dead sister, Mary.

39:09And to Philip, his marriage to Mary had mattered because England mattered. England's a second-rate power, but is a very, very useful counterpoint to France. And so the moment Mary is dead, Philip basically turns to Elizabeth and say, well, you know, let's, what about it? Let's do it. You know, it would be a kind of Catherine of Aragon in reverse. Elizabeth very politely turns him down and Philip then starts proposing a kind of number of other matches for her. All of them calculated to seal the friendship between the Habsburgs and England. And she's saying, yeah, well, maybe, perhaps, kind of prevaricating, playing coy, never committing.

39:50And the result of all this, Elizabeth dangling the prospect of marriage, dangling the prospect of an English alliance with Spain against France, is that Philip effectively, for years, plays the role of Elizabeth's defender in Catholic Europe. He refuses to sanction a crusade against her. He leans on the Pope not to excommunicate her. And this, I think, may seem very counterintuitive to people who know Philip as the man who sends the Spanish Armada to overthrow Elizabeth. But actually, in the early years of Elizabeth's reign, he is her great defender. He's absolutely not her inveterate enemy. And that is a reflection of Elizabeth's diplomatic skill, essentially, in kind of playing him like a fiddle.

40:36So you've got the staying single as a kind of diplomatic maneuver and she's brilliant at doing that partly because it's in her nature. She's brilliant at prevarication as a political ploy, at keeping her true intentions secret, playing her cards close to her chest very cleverly and so on. And I think also psychologically she hates commitment. Well, I mean, this goes to surely what is the single most important reason why she doesn't marry. The moment that she marries, she loses an enormous amount of her power and her agency. So as soon as a foreign spouse arrives with his own courtiers, with his own cronies, he becomes the focus of the court.

41:24You know, he becomes king, possibly. lots of people look to him to make decisions and so on and surely i mean it's amazing that actually cecil never quite gets this right maybe because he's a man and he doesn't it doesn't occur to him you know that she will lose so much as soon as she makes that decision i think every they all assume that a queen has to marry that she has to marry that it's her duty i think it basically doesn't kind of cross their minds that she might not there are any very few people who kind of penetrate to what seems to us an obvious state of affairs. And perhaps it's telling that one of them was not English, but a Scottish ambassador to her court.

42:04So James Melville, he was called, and he immediately sees what Elizabeth's up to and wrote to her, your majesty thinks if you were married, you would be but queen of England. And now you are both king and queen. I know your spirit cannot endure a commander. And he's absolutely right, I think. So she's playing two roles right now. She's both the queen and the king, and she'll lose the role of the king. Of course, the tragedy for Elizabeth, though, is that by preserving her own power and agency, she is effectively signing her dynasty's death warrant. Because the moment, you know, by not marrying and having an heir, she's basically saying, well, I will preserve my own agency, but the cost is the Tudor's end with me.

42:46yeah and that then leaves open the question of who would succeed her you know if the tudor dynasty goes extinct then who is going to be the next king or or indeed queen because of course the major threat as it's always been is mary queen of scots and you know she's legitimate she's catholic she's queen of france all these things we've been listing you know these these make her an incredible menace in the early years of elizabeth's reign and it's cecil's job as elizabeth's chief minister if Elizabeth won't marry, then to take alternative steps to guard against what Cecil sees as the ultimate threat of Mary, Queen of Scots succeeding her.

43:24And the key Cecil recognizes very clearly is to disrupt the alliance between France and Scotland, of which Mary's marriage to the King of France is the kind of the great symbol, the old alliance, as it's called. And so he says, well, what if I can replace the alliance between Scotland and France with an alliance between Scotland and England? And this might seem a huge challenge because Scotland and England have been ancestral enemies for generations and generations, but he doesn't see it as impossible. He does what he always does when he's faced with a huge challenge, which is to kind of essentially draw up a memo and kind of lay out all the arguments in bullet point form.

44:05And so he writes, it must necessarily be provided that Scotland be not so subject to the appointments of France as it is presently, which being an ancient enemy to England, seeketh always to make Scotland an instrument to exercise thereby their malice upon England and to make a footstool thereof to look over England as they may. So Scotland is a French dagger pointed and he recognizes, keen Protestant that he is and very shrewd analyst of international affairs, that what needs to be done is to support the Protestant cause in Scotland. And his vision is of a united Protestant Britain. And he writes that thereby this famous isle, i.e.

44:49Britain, may be conjoined in one uniformity of language, manners, and conditions. He's a British visionary. However, what that would require would be effectively a policy of foreign intervention, liberal intervention overseas. Protestant intervention. Yeah, and Elizabeth doesn't like that because she knows, A, wars are expensive, and also a war is a kind of policy commitment, and her entire reign is basically an exercise in shrinking from policy commitments, right, and just kicking the can down the road. So Cecil the whole time is basically pushing and kind of trying to cajole her into some form of intervention in Scottish politics.

45:31And basically what she finally agrees, what's this, 1560? They can do it financially. They will send money to the Protestants' camp in Scotland. Yes, so finally she surrenders. I mean, at one point Cecil had been threatening to resign and she does kind of give in. And so money and arms start heading northwards to help the Protestants overthrow not just the Catholics, but the French Catholics who are in hold of France, one of whom is Mary, Queen of Scots' mother, Mary of Guise, who dies in the course of this campaign. And the result by the first week of July in 1560 is one of the supreme triumphs of Cecil's entire career.

46:10And this is a treaty that is signed by himself in person. He's written up to the Scottish capital, but also by Scottish and French representatives. And because it's signed in Edinburgh, it's called the Treaty of Edinburgh. And basically it gives Cecil everything he had dreamed of getting. So the French agree to withdraw from Scotland. They are gone. But even more crucially, the French recognise Elizabeth as Queen. And so that then essentially kind of kneecaps any prospect of Mary Queen of Scots having French support for her claim to the English throne against Elizabeth. and then a month after the Treaty of Edinburgh there's another amazing triumph for Cecil because the Scottish Parliament meets and effectively disestablishes the Catholic Church repudiates the papal supremacy enshrines Protestantism as a state religion in Scotland and this dream that Cecil has had of a Protestant island of England and Scotland united in a kind of the commonality of true religion seems almost to have been achieved and these are two absolutely decisive victories and they they they serve to keep mary kind of in her box because with the french recognition of her claim to the english throne gone what is she getting out of the french alliance and the seal is set on her effective impotence as a player in french politics um at the end of 1560 when her husband dies of an exploding ear people who listen to our episode on Mary Queen of Scots may remember that pus starts shooting out of his ear and his nostrils and it's all very horrible.

47:48So she is now no longer queen in France. The game is up there. And so in August 1561, she returns to Scotland. And there she finds that her kingdom is firmly in the grip of a Protestant establishment. This is Cecil's other great victory. He's helped to establish godly religion in the heart of Mary Queen of Scots' kingdom. And Mary Queen of Scots, when she arrives in Edinburgh, does not do a Mary Tudor. She does not attempt to roll this back. She does not attempt to reinstitute Catholicism. And so Scotland remains Protestant despite having a Catholic queen. And this enables it to constitute a crucial building block in Cecil's strategy for keeping Elizabeth and Protestantism in England secure.

48:37So this unitary Protestant identity that Scotland and England now share enables a diplomatic alliance between these two old rivals, England and Scotland. Antichrist basically is being kept at bay. And at the same time, Cecil's mistress is more secure on her throne. So it's brilliant. Win, win, win. That's great. Because that's everything we want, because it basically paves the way for the creation of the Kingdom of Great Britain eventually, more than a century later. But also, we love keeping the Antichrist at bay. So that's great news. However, the Antichrist, you can never completely discount him, can you?

49:20I mean, you can never get rid of him completely. He's always lurking there. and I guess the fear is, you know, could the Antichrist return or who knows what might happen if Elizabeth dies because this issue of the air. So in 1562, Elizabeth gets smallpox, doesn't she? And people think Elizabeth is for the chop. She might die. And so if you are Cecil and the rest of the political elite, what's your answer to this? Because you obviously don't want Mary, Queen of Scots, but who do you want? Who is left? I mean, this is a massive, massive problem for them. It is. It's a huge problem. And so a few months after that scare with the smallpox in March 1563, he draws up a bill that is astonishingly bold.

50:09I mean, one might almost say bold to a revolutionary degree. So it pointedly excludes Mary Stewart from the line of succession. the line of succession is drawn up and it's a protestant one and most startling of all it it legislates for the council so elizabeth's privy council in the event of the queen's death to be entrusted with emergency powers and stephen alford in his biography of cecil spells what these powers would be cecil proposed that if elizabeth died without a successor the queen's divine authority to govern would be transferred not to an heir, but to her privy council. And England would become for a time an aristocratic republic.

50:52And as Orford points out, this is to anticipate by 150 years, the glorious revolution, which sees the Catholic James II kind of chucked off the throne and a Protestant king replacing him. And it's a kind of gobsmacking maneuver in the context of mid-16th century England. But as Orford also points out, this is not an expression of kind of crypto-Republicanism. There is, I think, a slight trend in historians studying the reign of Elizabeth to kind of describe it as a Republican monarchy. I don't think that that is the case at all. Elizabeth always remains queen. She's very conscious of her prerogatives.

51:33And I think that her court and Cecil and everybody is very conscious of it as well. so so Orford has a brilliant comparison with actually what Cecil is doing here he says that it's you know basically Cecil's duty to prepare for the worst like modern government's planning for nuclear apocalypse it is incredible that he could bring himself to imagine a scenario so horrific so he is thinking okay if the absolute worst happens what then do we do so he's thinking the unthinkable but actually Elizabeth doesn't allow it to pass she says there's no way that my power will pass to you guys now part of this is not just his fear for the succession is it it's his fear that Elizabeth is actually going to do something very drastic and very inappropriate and rash and reckless.

52:16That's the irony of it. Because he's infuriated not just by her customary prevarications, but also by the prospect that she might actually do what everyone's been pressing her to do and get married. And get married, right. So this is the thing with Elizabeth, isn't it this is the uh the tension that um that's one it's one of the fun elements of her whole story that although she's incredibly cool and pragmatic and shrewd and all of this she is still a creature of flesh and blood and she has a succession of kind of infatuations or crushes on people that everybody else regards as as absolutely inappropriate and definitely not the right person for her to be considering as her husband.

53:01So in 1562, when she was ill, she had named a protector if she were to die. And this is somebody that we've mentioned, or certainly from a family that we've mentioned, which is Robert Dudley. So tell us about Robert Dudley. So Robert Dudley, we've mentioned him briefly in the previous episodes, but not in such a way that he's probably seared on people's minds. So just to recap, he's the son of the Earl of Northumberland who had been busy promoting Lady Jane Grey as queen and had ended up executed by Mary Tudor. He was a childhood friend of Elizabeth. When Elizabeth gets sent to the tower in the wake of Wyatt's rebellion by Mary, Robert Dudley is there as well for the same reason he's suspected of complicity in Wyatt's rebellion.

53:45Both of them get freed, of course. They remain very close in the dying days of Mary's reign. And Robert Dudley is a very, very good-looking, glamorous, swaggering man. And contemporaries note that Robert Dudley strongly resembled Thomas Seymour, who was her very handsy stepfather, Mr. Tickle, the man who had basically introduced the young Elizabeth to the dimension of adult sexuality. And perhaps that had kind of imprinted a certain type on Elizabeth's imaginings, but definitely Thomas Seymour, Robert Dudley, they're all kind of men of a certain kind. Roysterers. They're Roysterers, but they're kind of charismatic and physically attractive.

54:32And when Elizabeth becomes queen, she appoints Robert Dudley as her master of horse. And that is a role that gives him a kind of exceptional degree of closeness and intimacy, because as master of horse, he helps her up into her stirrups, which means that he can touch her. He is also given rooms next to her privy chamber, very much a kind of a female dimension. But Dudley is there very close. And she's seen on several occasions to be kind of surprisingly intimate with him. So there's one occasion she's seen running her fingers over his neck. on another she mops his brow with a handkerchief after he's finished a tennis match and i think the mutual attraction between them is very evident and so maybe elizabeth is thinking well you know why shouldn't i i marry him well there are two obvious reasons why she shouldn't marry him so a blindingly obvious one is the moment that she marries him everybody will hate him and um this will cause her enormous problems that there'll be there'll be too many it's a it's that classic thing that politicians face when you promote one person, you disappoint all the rivals.

55:42And as soon as she does this, surely the chances of rebellion or faction fighting at court will be massively magnified. Exactly. Because if the problem with marrying a foreign prince is that it risks locking England into a kind of permanent alliance, the problem with marrying someone from the English aristocracy is, as you say, that it will kind of foster internal dissension. And that is a massive threat. She would remember how everyone hated the Boleyns, everyone hated the Woodvilles. That's what would happen now. Yes. There's also a further problem specific to Robert Dudley, which is that by the early 1560s, he is darkly suspected by his enemies of having murdered his wife.

56:24And that also is obviously not a good look. So this was a woman called Amy Robsart, who he'd married in 1550. But by 1560, so just over a year after Elizabeth had become queen, Dudley is never with Amy. He's spending his whole time with Elizabeth. And then on the 8th of September 1560, Amy was found dead at the foot of a staircase in their Oxfordshire home in Cumner. And she died of head injuries and a broken back. An inquest was held. Robert Dudley demanded that a full inquiry be made because he was anxious that he might be accused of the murder. And sure enough, the verdict was that Amy had fallen down the stairs, that her death had been accidental.

57:10And it's certainly the case that Dudley couldn't have pushed her because inevitably he was with Elizabeth at the time. He was not in Cummins, he was in Windsor. But it's perfect for his enemies. You know, it gives them the ideal way to blacken his name. And so they're endlessly kind of promoting rumours that he had commissioned the murder. They're fanning the accusation that he's the murderer of his wife. And so this is a massive blot. But I suspect that even if he hadn't had this accusation of murder hanging over him, Elizabeth still wouldn't have married him. And the reason for that, I mean, there are many reasons why Elizabeth wasn't going to marry anyway, but specifically, too many people that she depends on are saying, don't do it.

57:51So one of these is Cat Ashley, the woman probably that she trusted and loved more than anyone else in existence. and on one occasion cat flings herself at the feet of elizabeth um and declares that she would rather have strangled elizabeth in her cradle than allow her to marry such a man as dudley and the other person who makes it very clear that he disapproves is cecil um and he's you know he says bluntly to elizabeth if you marry him then i'm going to resign but i think ultimately it's elizabeth herself who pulls back from the brink because she knows the costs she can evaluate them and even to marry someone that she is as obviously devoted to as Dudley, it's still a commitment of exactly the kind that she has always shrunk from.

58:35And so in 1564, rather than marry Dudley, she pushes an astonishing proposal. And this is a proposal that we didn't mention in our series on Mary Queen of Scots because I was saving it for this series. She proposes that Dudley should go north to Scotland and there become the husband of Mary, Queen of Scots. And to make it a more tempting match for Mary, she gives Dudley this magnificent title, the Earl of Leicester. Well, that really is a splendid title because, you know, we love Leicester on this show, don't we? So what on earth is Elizabeth thinking? I mean, that seems mad. I guess although that said, if she sent a very, very loyal English Protestant to Scotland, I guess that works kind of diplomatically.

59:19Yeah. And also if they then have children, then, you know, the heir to the throne might then become a, you know, son of Leicester. And again, perhaps there are kind of deep psychological waters. I mean, and perhaps actually it's an expression of Elizabeth's own frustration and yearning as a virgin queen. I mean, as maybe she's wanting Mary kind of vicariously to play the role that she herself would have loved to have had, you know, the wife of Lester. I mean, it is a very odd proposal, a very odd episode. And perhaps it's not surprising that Mary, Queen of Scots, turns it down and goes on, of course, to opt for two spectacularly unsuitable husbands in succession.

1:00:06and if you want to find out just how unsuitable they were and you haven't listened to our series on Mary Queen of Scots do because honestly the story is mad so first of all she marries Darnley the biggest cock in British history who ends up his house ends up getting blown up and he's found very mysterious in a side garden with a chair next to all very odd and then Bothwell who basically abducts her rapes her and then and then marries her so which is a kind of example of what Elizabeth was sparing herself when she turned down Leicester. And it's the marker of how in every way Elizabeth is a much astuter player, a more self-disciplined player than Mary ever was.

1:00:46And the result of all this, so I mean, first of all, it's a massive object lesson of what happens if you make the choice and the choice goes wrong. But the result of it is that in 1568, Mary basically is kicked out. She's in England. She's come south. and suddenly in England you have a Catholic claimant, a Catholic heroine, a focus for everybody who disapproves of Elizabeth, disapproves of her Protestantism, disapproves of her regime and suddenly Mary Queen of Scots has turned up and she's right there. You could get rid of Elizabeth, put her on the throne and for Elizabeth, this is a massive deal.

1:01:25Yeah, and I think when Mary arrives she doesn't realise it But she constitutes an absolutely mortal threat to Elizabeth and to her Protestant regime in a way that she hadn't really done while she was ruling as queen in Scotland. And so the huge question is, what is Elizabeth going to do? Is she going to tolerate this? What about Cecil? You know, Cecil has devoted his entire life to overthrowing Mary. And now she's a prisoner in England. Will Mary become a focus for conspiracy? If she does, what resources of espionage and skullduggery is Cecil going to have to depend on to foil Mary's plots? And what will this deadly game of cat and mouse mean for the Catholics of England, for the Pope, for the greatest Catholic king of the age, Philip II of Spain, as he is now?

1:02:20Where might this flux of conspiracy and plotting and spying, where might it lead to? And Dominic, we will find out in a new series next year, the Tudor Cold War. We'll be looking at the conspiracies that Mary Queen of Scots launches against Elizabeth. the espionage deployed by Cecil and his spy chief, Sir Francis Walsingham, to counter Catholic plotting, the engagement of the Spanish in the Low Countries, and the process of events that culminates with the execution of Mary Queen of Scots in Fotheringay Castle. and then in due course we will be coming to the spectacular story of the Spanish Armada.

1:03:13But all that, Dominic, lies in the future. So much to look forward to on The Rest is History. Now, you may be wondering, what could be more exciting than the Tudor Cold War and the Spanish Armada? The answer is basically practically nothing, especially if it's going to be told, Tom, with as much dazzling skill as you brought to this series. However, the good news is, for the members of The Rest is History Club and others, that Christmas is coming early, or rather the new year is coming early, because Tom especially is a very generous and kind-hearted person. We decided to give you your presents early this year.

1:03:45So next week we'll be returning with what's usually a festive treat. It's the story of the Nazis, and we will be looking particularly at Hitler's invasion of Western Europe and what that meant. So we'll be in late 1939 and early 1940, the spring and summer of 1940, one of the most dramatic stories in modern history. Of course, if you want to get all of that series right away on Monday, you merely need to join the Rest is History Club at therestishistory.com. Right. So, Tom, thank you very much. That was a genuine tour de force. And on that bombshell, goodbye, everybody. Goodbye.

1:04:37Hello, I'm Gordon Carrera, national security journalist. And I'm David McCloskey, former CIA analyst turned novelist. Together, we're the hosts of another gold hanger show, The Rest is Classified, where we bring you the best stories from the world of secrets and spies. And this time, we are delving into the dark and twisted story of the man who dared to challenge Vladimir Putin. Yevgeny Pregosian and the ruthless war machine he built, the Wagner Group. From Putin's chef to mercenary warlord, Pregosian's journey is one of the most extraordinary rises and falls of the 21st century. He went from serving canapes to George Bush and Tony Blair to masterminding a covert campaign to disrupt the US presidential election in 2016 and unleashing mercenary troops that reshaped conflicts across Africa and the Middle East.

1:05:34But when he flies too close to the sun and begins to challenge Putin's power, it's not just ambition, it is a death wish. And for our Declassified Club members, we go even further. We sat down with Mark Gagliotti, who's one of the leading experts on Russian organized crime and also a man banned from entering Russia, to explore the hidden forces that shape Putin's cold, paranoid psyche and the forces that threatened to take him down. If this sounds good, listen to The Rest is Classified wherever you get your podcasts.