696. Elizabeth I vs The Catholics: Killing the Queen of Scots (Part 6)

26:50Dominic Sandbrook:this yellow-haired man he's stephen alford in his great book the watchers says he's secret and secretive a man who had travailed to the uttermost in the cipher do we know anything more about him or is he just a sort of shadowy presence?

27:04Tom Holland:Well, Stephen Orford says that Phillips is the most kind of secretive, the most mysterious of all the spies in Walsingham's employ and also the ablest. So in addition to being the greatest code breaker, the greatest cipher breaker in Walsingham's employ, he is also the best handler of double agents. And this is why Walsingham has sent Phillips to Staffordshire to supervise this entire very complex operation because Gilbert Gifford, So that's the young seminarian who'd been recruited by Mary's agents in Paris to serve as a courier. He, too, has been recruited by Walsingham. Walsingham has turned him.

27:42Tom Holland:And Gifford's approach to Mary had been a setup supervised by Phillips. And it's Phillips as well who had recruited the brewer. So basically, you know, he's holding all the strings. And he has been opening all the correspondence between Babington and Mary. He's been decrypting what Babington may have written or what Mary may have written, reading it through. And then he is another of his many talents is that he's able to reseal letters that he's opened and make it look as though they have never been opened. And so because of this, he can then forward these letters that he's read to the intended recipients.

28:18Tom Holland:And they have no idea that the contents have already been read by Walsingham spy agency.

28:24Dominic Sandbrook:These people are brilliant, Tom, and she has walked right into it. I admire them for this.

28:28Tom Holland:I mean, she has, but she has no choices, I think, as she sees it. She's aware that there's a risk. She's very smart. I mean, she knows what she's up against, but I think she's desperate. As you say, she has walked into it because Phillips had read Babington's letter to Mary with its mention of the six noble gentlemen ready to kill Elizabeth. And so he has been waiting on tenterhooks to find out how Mary's going to reply, because he knows that if she replies favorably, if she says, oh, yeah, let's get the six gentlemen operating, then that's it. They've got her. And so he, you know, he gets this letter that's been sent back by Mary, supposedly to Babington.

29:03Tom Holland:But in fact, it's been brought to Phillips. He opens the letter. I'm probably not with trembling hands because he seems to be a very cool customer, but definitely, I mean, his heart must have been pounding. And he reads it through and he is not disappointed by what he finds. He deciphers Mary's letter. There is the reference to the six gentlemen. He writes it up, makes a copy in English, which he then sends to Walsingham. And on the copy of the letter that he sends to Walsingham, he inscribes it with a drawing of a gallows. But he might as well have drawn a chopping block and an axe. And he describes it as the bloody letter.

29:44Tom Holland:because this Phillips feels is the letter that is going to doom Mary, Queen of Scots, who, of course, has no idea what has happened. And all the while, Mary is hoping that the letter has got through and that perhaps a plot has been set in motion to set her free from her prison.

30:03Dominic Sandbrook:So three and a half weeks later, it's the 11th of August. Mary, of course, knows nothing of this. And her jailer, the whimsical and austere, Mr. Paulette, who's usually very unfriendly to her says to her would you like to go on a deer hunt doesn't he and she doesn't think oh this is a bit suspicious she thinks oh deer hunt brilliant especially as her legs the issue of the gross matter seems to have cleared up yeah the oozing has ceased

30:29Tom Holland:to a degree so she gets on on on a horse for what is going to prove the last horse ride that she will ever take and she she gallops out with paulet into the into the woods that surround the manor and they haven't gone far when they see a troop of horsemen approaching and mary's heart of course i mean it leaps you know she's thinking are these the men who've been sent by babington to set me free has his plot come to fruition perhaps elizabeth is dead perhaps they're coming to take me to london and set me on the throne of england and sure enough the captain of horse rides up to her and he addresses her not very politely and he tells mary that a plot against the life of Elizabeth has been uncovered.

31:08Tom Holland:And he then informs Mary that she is under arrest. And by this point, unbeknownst to Mary, a number of the conspirators in Babington's plot have already been apprehended. And Babington himself was arrested three days later on the 14th of August, and he was subjected to repeated interrogation. And it became very clear to his interrogators that he had been completely hoodwinked by Phillips. And that he'd even swallowed a kind of outrageous forgery that Wilsingham and Phillips had concocted between them, which was designed to extract an even more direct confession out of him. And in the event, Babington and the other conspirators in the plot did confess to plotting Mary's release, to sponsoring a foreign invasion and to working for the restoration of Catholicism.

31:56Tom Holland:I mean, they couldn't really not. They'd been, you know, bang to rights. They did, however, interestingly deny plotting to murder Elizabeth. And I think the reason for this was that they knew that that is what would do Mary if they if they said, yes, Mary was in on the plot to assassinate Elizabeth and that would that would do Mary. And they didn't want to do that. Obviously, they are put horribly to death. So Babington himself was publicly executed on the 20th of September. His fellow conspirators were executed the following day. And the site of this was in Hoban. It's where Tottenham Court Road tube station is.

32:29Tom Holland:So it's that kind of great traffic intersection now. And their deaths are very, very horrible. Elizabeth had insisted that they be as salutary as they possibly could. And once their kind of maimed and bleeding corpses lay spread eagled on the scaffold, they had then been chopped up into quarters and distributed to the various gates of the city of London to serve as warnings to the fate of traitors. Meanwhile, what of Mary? well she has been ordered to prepare for her departure from chartley manor and she leaves on the 21st of september even as the second batch of plotters who had conspired to free her were meeting their terrible ends in hoban and she was accompanied by an absolutely enormous wagon train loaded down with clothes with furnishings with assorted luxuries because even in these dire Straits.

33:23Tom Holland:Mary remains what she has always been, a complete diva. And it takes her days to travel the 80 miles from Chartley Manor to the place that Elizabeth had personally chosen as her new place of imprisonment. But finally, on the 25th of September, so they've been on the road for four days, Mary's journey comes to an end. And she has arrived in Fotheringay Castle.

33:48Dominic Sandbrook:We all know what's coming next. Well, at least a lot of us do. And even if you don't, it's going to be good. All right. So join us after the break for the end of the story of Mary, Queen of Scots.

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35:55Dominic Sandbrook:Welcome back to The Rest is History. Mary, Queen of Scots, has just arrived. at Fotheringay Castle. Now, this is the one thing that Fotheringay Castle is really known for. And it's the sort of detail that everybody always remembers. Oh, yeah, she, you know, the last chapter of her life is at Fotheringay. But actually, I've got no sense of, like, what Fotheringay looks like. I don't really have that much of a sense of where it is. It's Northamptonshire, isn't it? So it's in the sort of slightly nondescript middle of England.

36:21Tom Holland:Yeah. Why don't we know what it looks like? Because it doesn't exist anymore. Yeah, the castle has pretty much vanished. I mean, Fotheringay is a great place to visit because it has a wonderful church that was a kind of a monument to the Yorkist regime. So if you're interested in the Wars of the Roses and Richard III, it's great. But there are very few memorials to the place where Mary, you know, it's her final place of imprisonment. But so just to describe what was there when she arrives in September 1587. As you said, Dominic, it's Northamptonshire, which is the middle of England. So as far away from Scotland and the sea as possible.

36:52Tom Holland:They've got to make sure that she's not rescued. The ground around the castle is kind of very boggy and treacherous. So that helps as well. The castle itself is on a kind of raised hill. Like Chartley Manor, it has a double moat. Unlike Chartley Manor, it has very thick walls, a very imposing gateway, a colossal kind of Norman keep. So it is effectively, as a prison, impregnable. And there is no real prospect of Mary escaping it. But that's not the only reason that Elizabeth has fixed on Fotheringay as Mary's place of imprisonment. Because Fotheringay, as well as fortifications, also has a great sprawling complex of staterooms.

37:30Tom Holland:And these include a great hall, so capable of containing large numbers of people. And on the first floor of these state rooms, there is what was called a presence chamber, which is a room where the monarch, if she arrives, the throne can be placed there and she can keep state and all the people around can come and pay their respects to her. And it's in this presence chamber on the 14th of October, 1586, that the trial of Mary, Queen of Scots, opens. And Elizabeth herself is not there. But it feels like she is because her empty throne presides over the whole trial. It's positioned beneath a great cloth of state emblazoned with her royal arms.

38:15Tom Holland:And so it dominates the proceedings. Mary's judges they are sitting around a table that's placed in the center of the room and then around that table there are three benches and one of them is facing the kind of the empty throne at the opposite end of the room and the other two are set at right angles to it so kind of framing the space in which the table had been set essentially it does the throne and then there are kind of benches at right angles to the throne and a bench at the far end of the room. And on these three benches are sat the commissioners who've been appointed by Elizabeth to the trial.

38:52Tom Holland:So these are the privy councillors and assorted kind of supplementary peers, so barons and viscounts and earls, the leading figures in the state. Walsingham is there, obviously. So, too, is Sir Christopher Hatton, Elizabeth's great favourite, the sponsor of Drake on his circumnavigation of the globe. But there's no question who is the guy in ultimate charge of the proceedings. And this is William Cecil, Lord Burley, because this is the moment he has been waiting for. This is the moment that he has been working towards for many decades, long before even Mary, Queen of Scots, had sought refuge in England.

39:33Tom Holland:His great aim has been to bring Mary, Queen of Scots down right from the very beginning.

39:39Dominic Sandbrook:To bring her to justice, you might say. But of course, does she have a place at this trial at all? Because she's a queen. she's not a subject and she's not a subject of Elizabeth the first you know she's she's not even English so is this is it actually legal I guess that's the question well that's the point she

39:58Tom Holland:makes and she I should betray the dignity and majesty of kings and it would be tantamount to a confession that I am bound to submit to the laws of England well she's got a Scottish accent now well she she had a very pretty Scottish accent um is the is the report so she she's pretty objury I'm not you know it's a bit like her grandson Charles the first when he gets put on trial at the end of the English Civil War you know he refuses to recognize the court and this is basically Mary's strategy and this is infuriating for Burley and so he leads a succession of delegations to try and persuade her otherwise but she just seems completely obdurate and she tells Burley very memorable terms look to your consciences and remember that the theater of the whole world is wider than the kingdom of england but the guy who ultimately is able to persuade her is the the very fluent and plausible sir christopher hatton and he says to her if you be innocent you wrong your reputation in avoiding a trial and the subtext there i think is very clear he's saying that the trial is going to go ahead whether you are there or not and if you are not there then your absence will be interpreted as an admission of guilt what have you got to fear if you're innocent yeah and so mary feels the force of this and she spends a very restless night wondering what she should do and finally on the day that is scheduled for the start of the trial she says yes okay i will attend and so she arrives in the courtroom shortly after nine o 'clock in the morning she's wearing a long black dress of made of velvet a white cap and a long white veil that covers her hair and as she enters everyone stands and takes off their hats.

41:40Tom Holland:So it's a mark of respect to her as a queen. And she acknowledges these marks with a kind of slight incline of her head. But having said that, she is completely indignant that her chair is below Elizabeth's throne because it implies that she is subject to Elizabeth. So she has a kind of a bit of a strop about that. She does have three ladies in waiting attending her. These are the only women, obviously, in the courtroom. And these ladies in waiting are the only people who are sympathetic to mary mary does not have a lawyer with her she doesn't have a kind of barrister who is speaking on her behalf and instead she is completely surrounded by enemies and by two in particular because just across from where she is sitting so right in her eye line next to the lord chancellor is lord burley and at a further remove on the bench reserve for knights So this is the bench that is facing the throne of the empty throne of Elizabeth is a man that she had only met for the first time that very morning.

42:37Tom Holland:And this is Sir Francis Walsingham.

42:40Dominic Sandbrook:So she's looking at the two men who basically done more than anybody else to bring her to this point. And do you think she thinks that at that point, you know, that she's been told, if you're innocent, you've got nothing to fear. But do you think she thinks at this point when she sees them looking at her, when she sees that her chair is lower than Elizabeth's throne, all that stuff? do you think she thinks okay this is a done deal like this is a show trial i'm never going to get off or is she thinking i can still turn this around it's hard to know i imagine that that

43:09Tom Holland:probably in her heart she knows that she would not have been brought to trial had the determination of her enemies not been to see her executed but against that she doesn't know what evidence is going to be presented against her and the whole way through she has been insistent that um you You know, she's put nothing to paper in her own handwriting. She's been very careful about that. And, you know, she must assume that people haven't seen the letters that she wrote to Babington. She doesn't know about this. No one's told her. So she probably has a kind of scintilla of hope. But I think the moment that the proceedings start, she must have felt this kind of sickening, cold hand of dread clamping at her heart because Thomas Phillips, you know, the fairhead young man that she'd seen from her coach, he has prepared the evidence against her very diligently and very, very remorselessly.

44:04Tom Holland:And it is all laid out there for the commissioners to study. So Babington's correspondence with Mary, Mary's correspondence with Babington and her various friends and allies abroad and most faithfully of all that letter which phillips had termed the bloody letter and illustrated with the gallows i mean that is the letter that is going to destroy her and when mary realizes that all her correspondence had been penetrated by walsingham i mean she is stunned at that point surely she knows the game is up and she she sobs you know she she is good at at weeping on demand. And other times when she's not weeping, she goes very spiritedly on the attack and she plays all her favourite cards.

44:53Tom Holland:She says, you know, I'm not answerable for what people like Babington wrote to me. I had no influence on him whatsoever. She says that the letters attributed to her were not in her own handwriting. And she declares, can I be responsible for the criminal projects of a few desperate men which they planned without my knowledge or participation and she also makes sure to respond directly to the two men that she now appreciates are her her two greatest foes so on the opening day of the trial she accuses walsingham i mean correctly of having tampered with her letters that's exactly what walsingham and phillips had done and his response is a magnificent display of ambivalence he says i call god and all the world to witness that as a private person i have done nothing unworthy of an honest man and as secretary of state nothing unbefitting my duty and as stephen orford puts it this is a masterpiece of subtle wordplay that said everything and nothing at the same time i mean wilsingham is such a terrifying man to have as your enemy i think what about burley he's also a great man and she confronts him directly doesn't she people may remember who listened to our first our first series of mary queen of scots that when she arrived in england she wrote to burley and said i hope that you will be my you know you will speak to me to the queen on my behalf and it's evident from that letter that she had no idea how much burley hated her and how hard he'd been working to destroy her and it it's as though now at her trial that she suddenly realized what what burley has been up to all these long years and she kind of says to him you are indeed my enemy as though this is a blinding realization and burley's reply yes i am the enemy of the enemies

46:43Dominic Sandbrook:of queen elizabeth so she's clearly you know she by day two she really must know that she's you know she's staring at oblivion and actually she has a sort of meltdown doesn't she at the end of

46:56Tom Holland:day two she just decides there's no reason for her to stay i mean there's nothing she can say or do that is going to change the verdict that is looming and so she she rises to her feet she declares that she forgives the commissioners um for what is clearly a charade a show trial and then amazingly she crosses the room to where walsingham is sitting and she has private words in his ear and nobody hears what she says to him but it is apparent to people watching that walsingham is very angered by what mary is telling him and then once she's finished talking to walsingham she turns and addresses the entire commission again and she insists one last time on her innocence i place my cause in the hands of god no speculation about what she said

47:44Dominic Sandbrook:to walsingham how can we know but why would it langer him i mean he's won he's he's always about

47:50Tom Holland:to win i imagine she she accused him of cheating of of fraudulent behavior cast aspersions on his

47:56Dominic Sandbrook:honor i would guess okay so she's placed her cause in the hands of god and what does god say what does

48:01Tom Holland:god decide well god doesn't really it isn't really very helpful because um the verdict of guilty is duly brought in actually not in fotheringay but in the star chamber in westminster and it's delivered 10 days after the end of mary's trial and the reason for the delay is the inevitable one that elizabeth doesn't know what to do and delay and prevarication is always elizabeth's answer to insoluble puzzles because she's still in agonies at the thought of mary who is an anointed queen suffering execution and if she suffers execution then definitely this will bring war down on England, it will definitely mean that Philip's armada is sent against her kingdom.

48:45Tom Holland:But also, there is the fact that Mary has been convicted under this act that had been brought in the year before, the Act for the Queen's Safety. So if Mary is now executed, then Elizabeth's worry is that it will seem that Parliament has licensed it, and that therefore Parliament has the right to commit regicide. And this is something that Elizabeth doesn't want. And in the long run, Mary's grandson, Charles I, is also going to be executed by Parliament. So her anxieties are not completely overwrought. But Dominic, you asked earlier, Elizabeth doesn't want Mary publicly executed, but does she want her kind of eliminated privately?

49:31Tom Holland:And yes, that is absolutely what Elizabeth wants. And she does want Mary kind of removed in the way that unwanted royals throughout medieval history have traditionally been eliminated so maybe you know she could be drowned in a butt of marmsy or suffocated with a pillow or you know a hot poker stuffed up her bum i mean whatever all these kind of various methods that have been used to remove unwanted members of the royal family but she needs someone to do it and she is kind of expectant that someone will step up to the plate and answer her her needs because listeners may remember back in 1584 large numbers of her loyal subjects so the privy council members of parliament particularly loyal members of the general public had all signed something called a bond of association and this bond had been deliberately targeted at mary and people who signed it had committed themselves should mary ever be found guilty of plotting against elizabeth to kill her and essentially it had formally committed them to a kind of lynch law and this bond of association had been bundled into the parliamentary act so elizabeth can say to people well this is now the law of the land why aren't people acting on it and so this is why she is prevaricating even once the guilty verdict against mary has been brought in she's essentially hoping that one of the signatories to that bond of association will do what they have pledged to do and quietly and silently kill mary without

51:05Dominic Sandbrook:elizabeth having to sign her death warrant what i don't understand is why though she i mean a why it's taken so long i mean why have we even got to this point and b you know the sort of oh i hope that somebody because of the bond of association will privately kill mary you know all this why didn't she two years ago say to um lord burley can we not just get rid of police now like you know you can you you must know poisonous crack on and do it richard iii style or getting rid of edward the second or getting rid of the duke of clarence or whoever it's so easy to do it's a great question

51:38Tom Holland:and it's something that mary queen of scots herself often pondered so back in the days when she was able to communicate with the french and spanish ambassadors she she wrote to them and said i think this is what's going to happen i think i'm going to be poisoned i'm going to be smothered by a pillow or whatever. This is what I suspect. But it doesn't, I think. We've been casting the Privy Council and the Protestant establishment in quite a dark light in this series. They're practicing dirty tricks and operating under the radar. But they do, I think, have quite a principled sense that the operations of the law should proceed.

52:14Tom Holland:They are, by definition, very devout christians and they don't want to just commit a murder below the radar they think that justice should be seen to be done um and it's important for the reputation not just of the privy council not just of english justice but of their religion that they are seen to be doing the right thing and i think that that ultimately is is the reason why and so this is why even as elizabeth is digging her heels in still and saying i'm not going to sign the death warrant burley and walsingham are busy scheming to try and force her hand and so first they get parliament to petition her for mary's execution and elizabeth treats this with kind of icy contempt and in the wake of this burley then thinks well i'm going to have to um i'm going to have to unleash the dirty tricks here and so he reveals to elizabeth the existence of yet another plot to assassinate her and in fact this plot is an old one it had never gone anywhere it had been foiled the year before but burley had been kind of keeping it in reserve for just such an eventuality and even as he presents elizabeth with the news of this supposed plot against her he also fabricates a rumor that spanish troops have landed in wales and he goes to her and say that it's terrible news you know they're marching on cardiff or whatever you should double your bodyguard because you are in mortal danger and this does sufficiently alarm Elizabeth that at last on the 1st of February 1587 she takes the fateful step and she does sign the warrant for Mary's execution but even now Elizabeth remains Elizabeth she's signed she's signed this death warrant but she doesn't want it used she is still hoping that someone will get in there and kind of remove mary and it won't be in elizabeth's name and to this end she has um walsingham who is sick in bed at this time walsingham is often prostrated by illness she has walsingham write a letter to uh to paulet who is still serving as mary's jailer he's moved with her to fatheringay walsingham doesn't really doesn't want to do this but he has no choice because elizabeth has directly ordered him so walsingham writes to Paulette that Elizabeth is very disappointed that he is yet to live up to the vow that he had made when he signed the bond of association.

54:35Tom Holland:And why is it Elizabeth demands to know that he has not yet, and I quote, found out some way to shorten the life of that queen? In other words, Mary, do it. And Paulette, to do him credit, and I think this kind of shed lights on the question you were asking, why don't they just bump her off? Paulette is appalled and he replies to the queen, god forbid that i should make so foul a shipwreck of my conscience or leave so great a blot to my poor posterity to shed blood without law or warrant yeah elizabeth is contemptuous she dismisses paulet as dainty and she does not mean it's a compliment i mean elizabeth is it's a very a very hard woman but you know paulet is a hard man but he you know his his conscience his faith doesn't permit him to just go around bumping people off without the due course of law And I think that that's the explanation for why Puritans and Protestants, they think it has to be done.

55:29Tom Holland:You know, it has it has to be done with God's approval, basically.

55:31Dominic Sandbrook:But Burley now has the death warrant and he this is the weapon he needs. And even though Elizabeth has said, don't use it, he just thinks, come on, let's crack on. And so he has a little sort of cabal, doesn't he? He gets some of the privy councillors to his house and they agree. Yep, we're going to do this. And they send the warrant to Fotheringay.

55:51Tom Holland:Yeah, so only the Privy Councillors whom Burley is confident will back him in this because they all know that they are going behind Elizabeth's back and there is the risk of considerable trouble for them once the news reaches Elizabeth. But they all think the stakes are so high, we've got to take this step. And so the warrant is given to the clerk of the Privy Council, who is Walsingham's brother-in-law, Robert Beale, the guy who had been his secretary in the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre in Paris. And Beale goes galloping northwards at top speed for Northamptonshire. And he's accompanied by two of the greatest peers in the realm.

56:26Tom Holland:And this is the Earl of Kent and the Earl of Shrewsbury. And the Earl of Shrewsbury is the Earl Marshal. So he's going to be the guy officially in charge of the execution. And Shrewsbury hates it because he had been Mary's jailer for 15 years and he got on very well with Mary. He liked Mary. And in fact, he got on so well with her that Shrewsbury's wife, the very formidable Bess of Hardwick, had suspected him of having an affair with Mary. And so the fact that he now has to supervise the execution of the Queen of Scots is a miserable thing for him. But he knows his duty. And so he's heading off to Fotheringay as well.

57:02Tom Holland:And also travelling from London to Fotheringay is one last key participant. and this is a man who goes by the name or perhaps the pseudonym of bull and walsingham who had sourced this guy bull alerts beale to his arrival and walsingham writes to beale his instrument is put in a trunk and he passeth as a serving man and the instrument is an axe and bull is the

57:30Dominic Sandbrook:executioner so by the evening of the 7th of february everything is in place isn't it and uh this guy beal robert beal the clerk of the privy council he leads a delegation which has shrewsbury it has the earl of kent and it has the jailer pour it and he leads the delegation to mary's quarters for this um spectacular last confrontation yeah and this time they do not remove their hats

57:56Tom Holland:and for the last time personally pulls down mary's cloth of state and beal then reads out the warrant to mary and informs her that um the following morning she will meet her death on the chopping block and mary greets the news uh with great courage there are no tears she maintains her composure and she swears on the bible that she is innocent and she then requests um the company of a catholic priest for her last night uh so that she can give her confession and be administered the last sacrament but this request is refused and the earl of kent does not hesitate to explain why he says to mary your life would be the death of our religion your death will be its life and this i think is a foolish thing for him to have said because it it confirms mary in her determination to die a martyr so people who listen to the series we did last year on mary will remember although she's a catholic she wasn't a particularly militant catholic but now she is preparing to step onto the great stage of her own death and she decides that when she steps onto that stage she is going to be playing the role of a catholic persecuted to death by heretics for her faith and so she sits up late into the night writing to her brother-in-law henry the third of france and this is the last letter that she will ever write and she composes it very very deliberately very cleverly with the aim of doing as much damage to elizabeth and england on the international stage as she possibly can.

59:44Tom Holland:So she writes to Henry, the Catholic faith and the assertion of my God given right to the English crown are the two issues on which I am condemned. And yet I am not allowed to say that it is for the Catholic religion that I die, but for fear of interference with theirs. So that's one depth charge that she is laying, which will survive her death. and she all night she has been plotting other gestures of defiance and these other gestures of defiance will be unveiled the following morning the 8th of february the day of her death she keeps her executioners waiting of course she does she's a diva she's the star of the show you know she was never going to turn up on time and it's only at nine so an hour after she was meant to have appeared in the great hall that she turns up and all night carpenters had been preparing the scene of execution building the scaffold draping the uh the walls of the hall in black draping the scaffold in the black by the time mary arrives the hall is lined by halberdiers a crowd of people have been allowed into to watch the proceedings and of course up on the scaffolder the executioner bull is waiting with his assistant and both men they wear black masks they have long black gowns and they have white aprons over those gowns and bull of course is holding his giant axe mary has dressed uh with great care and consideration for her final hour as at her trial she appears in the great hall dressed in a flowing gown of black velvet she has a white veil and she has a frill of very delicate white lace at her throat she's helped onto the scaffold by paulet her austere and formidable jailer and as he helps her up mary says to him this will be the last trouble i shall give you and the most agreeable service you have ever done me she walks across the stage and she takes a seat where she is flanked by the earls of kent and shrewsbury and beale stepping forward once again reads out the warrant of execution and then it's the turn of the preacher who has been chosen personally by elizabeth for the occasion this is a man called robert fletcher who is the dean of peterborough and in fact is the father of john fletcher the dramatist occasional collaborator with shakespeare and goodness i mean this is such a shakespeare and seeing the kind of the sense of tragedy about it is so strong so fletcher is giving his sermon but mary is having none of it and first of all she intimidates fletcher into abandoning the sermon and then as he begins to read his prayers his anglican prayers in english mary and the six women who are in attendance on her they start answering these english prayers with prayers of their own and these prayers are in the latin of their own catholic faith and the voices of these seven women's drowned the sound of fletcher and it's completely mortifying for him and again he is intimidated into silence but mary carries on you know i said she's a diva she slips to her knees and she pulls out a silver cross from her skirts and she raises it and then she begins to pray in English so that everyone present will understand what she's saying.

1:03:21Tom Holland:And her prayers are for her enemies, for Elizabeth, and for England. And it's incredible theatre.

1:03:30Dominic Sandbrook:Very embarrassing for her executioners, of course, but there's worse to come, isn't there? And this is about what she's wearing.

1:03:36Tom Holland:Yeah. So we said she dressed with great care. The time has come for her execution. And so her attendants prepare her for the chopping block by removing first her veil and then her black outer garments and i will read from mattingly's account um we actually began our series um on mary queen of scots with exactly this reading but it always bears re-quoting so to quote mattingly the black velvet gown fell below her knees revealing under bodice and petticoat of crimson silk and she stepped forward suddenly shockingly in the color of martyrdom blood red from top to toe against the somber background and all the assembled protestants there go into complete meltdown and they're so appalled by this stunt this sartorial kind of coup de théâtre that none of the official reports on mary's death mention it and it was left to mary's attendance the six catholic women who were there with her on the scaffold to publicize what mary had done so she's there in her her scarlet under robes and she kisses her lady's farewell and then she kneels down on the cushion that has been laid before the chopping block and she allows her eyes to be covered by one of her attendants with a white corpus christi cloth and the fateful moment is now at hand mary lowers her throat onto the chopping block but she continues to pray in latin bull step forwards he raises his axe and he brings it swinging down and it crashes not onto mary's neck but onto the back of her head and she cries out in agony lord jesus receive my soul and then comes a second blow and this time it is directly onto the neck but even now the the blow isn't a clean one and bull has to use the blade of the act rather like a cleaver to hack and saw the head clean off and even now even in death mary still has two surprises in wait for her killers So when Bull steps forward, picks up the severed head to exhibit it before the assembled crowd and proclaim the death of a traitor, this is what executioners are always obliged to do.

1:05:57Tom Holland:he lifts up the head and he finds himself holding nothing but hair and mary's actual head shrunken and withered and gray has rolled to the edge of the scaffold and it takes the spectators in the hall a few seconds to realize and work out what has happened mary had been wearing a wig and that's embarrassing enough yeah but then there is one final embarrassment because once mary's sobbing ladies have been removed to their quarters and the executioners bend down beside Mary's corpse to disrobe it. Again, complete mortification because concealed in Mary's skirts all along has been her favourite dog, a Sky Terrier.

1:06:43Tom Holland:And this dog once detected and it lies there amid the gore of the dog's mistress and it howls piteously. And again, to quote Mattingly, mary stewart had always known how to embarrass her enemies and not just to embarrass them but to do them the maximum harm well this is the question isn't it because now we've come to this

1:07:05Dominic Sandbrook:climactic moment the moment that the whole series has been building towards elizabeth had one of the reasons she didn't want to execute mary queen of scots was she knew that it would set off a firestorm of protest in catholic europe and it would make england even more of a rogue state as viewed from Madrid, for example. And this execution is going to have extraordinarily tumultuous and fearful consequences, isn't it, for England in this struggle with the Spanish?

1:07:36Tom Holland:It absolutely is, because 1588, which is the year that follows Mary's execution, is going to be the year that Philip of Spain attempts to invade England to overthrow Elizabeth, the heretic queen, once and for all, to restore this Protestant rogue state, as you put it, to papal supremacy, to Catholicism, because 1588 is going to be the year of the Spanish Armada.

1:08:10Dominic Sandbrook:So much to look forward to. But we will be coming to the Spanish Armada much later because we will be changing the record a little bit next week, only a little bit because we'll still be there's still be some catholic versus protestant and the protest versus catholic action because we will be coming much further forward in time we'll be coming to belfast in the 1960s for the beginning of the troubles in northern ireland and of course rest is history club members will be able to get all that serious straight away on monday uh if you want to join the rest is history club the only way to get the full range of quite extraordinary benefits is to sign up at the rest is history.com and of course there will be for those people who subscribe to the free newsletter there'll be all kinds of interesting things in the newsletter i'll tell you one thing i would love the newsletter to resolve how did the dog stay quiet for so long and undetected you know when she's kneeling down someone's hacking at her head and the dog is still not moving not barking not whimpering not making any indication of its presence that is one of the great questions of history tom i imagine that she had a little

1:09:16Tom Holland:supply of biscuits um in one of the pockets of her petticoats that's my thesis well if if the

1:09:22Dominic Sandbrook:newsletter could address that i personally would be very very happy right on that bombshell we'll be back back next week uh with northern ireland and uh tom thank you so much for that absolutely titanic series a veritable tour de force goodbye bye-bye You