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Mary, Queen of Scots: The Royal Rivals (Part 2)

In marked contrast to her childhood treatment in Scotland, where she was considered at first a sickly child, unlikely to live, and later a pawn in a dynastic game, even at five years old, Mary was hailed as a figure of romance in France.

A brave little queen who had been forced to flee the barbaric Scots, the cruel English, for the safe arms of all-embracing France.

The stage was already set in French minds for the appearance of a childish heroine. To their satisfaction, Mary Stewart, with her charm, her prettiness, and the natural docility of youth, was ideal material to be molded into the playing of this golden role.

So that was Lady Antonia Fraser in her celebrated biography of Mary, Queen of Scots.

And she, Tom, is describing the impact that the infant—well, not really infant because she’s five years old—that the young Scottish queen makes on the French court after she arrives in France in the summer of 1548.

In our first episode, you set the scene, didn’t you, by talking about the sort of turbulent politics of Mary’s childhood, the death of her father and so on when she was only a week old. Then all this complicated political game with Henry VIII and with the French court.

So just remind us what went on there.

Yeah, so the Rough Wooing. Henry VIII wanted Mary, Queen of Scots, to marry his son, the future Edward VI. He thought he’d got the deal. Then it got ripped up. He got absolutely irate and sent the English to burn and slaughter and loot, which they then did for eight years.

The impact of this ultimately is that Mary, Queen of Scots’ French mother, Mary of Guise, who is part of France’s leading noble dynasty, she’s able to foil the English and secure a French match for her daughter.

And when I say a French match, I mean, it’s the most brilliant French match imaginable. Because when Mary Stewart, after a perilous and storm-wracked voyage from Scotland—and you were very sniffy about her failure to succumb to seasickness, but I think it’s historical proof.

I wouldn’t say sniffy, I’d say bracingly sceptical.

Go on, continue.

Young Mary, Queen of Scots, steps onto French soil, and she does so as a future Queen of France, because her betrothed is the Dauphin himself. And this is the eldest son of Henri II, or Henry II, François—or we’ll call him Francis, because we’re being very Anglophone in our treatment of French names.

I read in your notes, Tom, you’ve written—I think this is massive punching down from you—you’ve written,

“He wasn’t the hunk he might have been.”

And then the next line, one year younger than Mary, so he’s four.

Yeah.

So I think that’s a bit harsh.

And you mock him as being short.

I mean, all four-year-olds are short, I think it’s fair to say.

Well, he’s abnormally short, but Mary is abnormally tall. So there’s a disproportion in height.

He’s got a stutter, and you laugh at him about that.

What do you mean I laugh at him? I’m not laughing at him, I’m just setting the historical record straight.

And you also mock him, very cruel remarks in the notes about his two left feet.

Yeah.

He can’t dance. Mary loves dancing. He can’t dance, Mary’s already a brilliant dancer.

Brilliant dancer.

She’s five, and she’s a brilliant dancer, and she can steer the ship single-handedly through a storm. Unbelievable.

She’s very, very precocious.

But actually, Francis is great. He’s weedy, but he’s plucky.

Come on, he’s four.

Actually, the two of them get on tremendously well.

Yeah.

Because he’s not just plucky, but actually very smart. And Mary already has a kind of instinctive sense of what is expected of her, how to play to the gallery.

And so she and Francis, everyone agrees, they make an adorable couple. A charming couple. Charming couple.

It’s five and four. No, Tom, don’t defend it. You love it. Listen, I’ll leave a second.

The king of France, he’s like you, he’s drunk the iron brew, and he’s massively, like, he thinks Mary, Queen of Scots, is brilliant, doesn’t he? The most perfect child I’ve ever seen, he says. This is a historical testimony, Dominic, which you’re sneering at, and which I’m just laying it out as it is. It is what it is.

And actually, he’s so impressed by Mary that he gives orders that she should have precedence over his own daughters in royal processions. And this isn’t just because she’s the betrothed to the Dauphin, but because she’s already a queen in her own right. And clearly, you know, she’s poised, charming and regal, all in one. She’s the complete package.

And also, he says that she should get nicer clothes than his own daughters. She’d turn up in Scottish fashions. Well, we’ll come to the issue of Scottish fashions in due course. I mean, I get the sense that you already hate her because of this.

No, no, no, I’m objective. And you might think that, you know, the king of France’s daughters would hate her, but not a bit of it. Because the French princesses find her so charming, such fun, that they all end up the most tremendous pals.

Oh, lovely.

And in fact, I mean, particularly in Lady Antonia’s biography, but more generally, the accounts of Mary, Queen of Scots and her chums, you know, the French princesses and so on. And it’s like reading about the kind of the poshest, funnest boarding school yarn. It’s a kind of Renaissance Mallory Towers.

Right.

And it’s great fun, but there’s also quite a lot of schooling.

So Mary, like Elizabeth Tudor, her cousin over in England, is given a very, very good education. I think it’s fair to say that unlike Elizabeth, she’s not an intellectual.

Okay.

But that’s precisely what makes her so charming and fun, because nobody likes an intellectual, do they?

No, no, no one wants a blue stocking.

No.

So she’s given an education that would conventionally be regarded as more appropriate to princes than princesses. But that’s because she’s a queen in her own right, and so therefore she has to be prepared for her role.

And as John Guy in his brilliant, I think, definitive biography of Mary, Queen of Scots puts it, what she gets is the equivalent for a prospective ruler of a degree in business administration.

So she works hard, but she’s not a nerd. Her real talent, much more, I think, than for kind of construing Livy or whatever, although she does that, is for having fun. So girls just want to have fun, and Mary, Queen of Scots is the epitome of this.

And it’s such an amazing background for her, because this, of course, is the golden age of the chateau in France. Anyone who’s been to the Loire and seen the kind of the beautiful chateau there, this is what you’re getting.

And Mary and Francis and the royal princesses and all their friends are kind of endlessly processing from Fontainebleau outside Paris to Blois and to Chambord on the Loire. She visits them all.

And Antonia Fraser can’t get enough of it. So she exclaims,

“beautiful gardens, beautiful galleries, so many other beauties. Oh, how charming.”

But her biography is brilliant on this. I mean, it brilliantly evokes what she describes as the kind of the dreamlike quality of Mary’s upbringing in France. She’s got ponies, of course. She’s got lap dogs. She’s got falcons. She has amazing clothes.

I mean, the king of France himself has said she has to have the best clothes possible. So she has gloves of dog skin and deer skin. She has velvet shoes of every conceivable color, you know, amazing gowns and dresses and trains. And she has so many jewels that she needs three brass chests just to hold them.

So, as I say, the most tremendous fun.

But, of course, you know, in boarding school stories, you’re away from home. And so the issue of homesickness is always there.

And so people may be wondering, well, Mary’s a young girl who’s gone to a foreign country. Is she ever homesick?

And I think the answer to that is that to begin with, yes, she misses her mother very badly.

And, in fact, Mary of Guise will only once be able to make it out of Scotland and come and see her in France. And the reason for that is that she is literally holding the fort back in Scotland. You know, she’s got Stirling Castle and she’s surrounded by people who would quite like to see the back of her.

And the person who particularly liked to see the back of her is the Earl of Arran, who is next in line to the Scottish throne. And there’s this guy who is kind of endlessly shifting and running away from defeats and things like that. So Mary of Guise thinks he’s a bit of a loser. And she strikes in the spring of 1544.

And the reason that she does then is that by this point, her daughter, Mary, Queen of Scots, is 12 years old. And this is the kind of age when it’s felt that she is able to kind of start picking up the reins of power.

So Mary of Guise has prepared her tactic well. She’s got people on the side and she persuades Arran to resign the regency in exchange for kind of various bungs and benefits and bribes.

Mary of Guise, this foreign woman, takes his place as the regent of Scotland. And, of course, this is yet another consolidation of French control over Scottish affairs. And even as this is going on back in France, the Queen of Scots is becoming ever more of a French princess.

Now, you say that, Tom, but am I not right in saying that she does dress sometimes in Scottish national dress to amuse the locals? So that’s nice, isn’t it?

Yes. And this is defined in France as being basically animal skins, which is not Scottish national dress, but this is what they think. So it’s a kind of mockery.

Right. And she’s complicit in it or they are dressing her up against her will or how does it work?

A bit of both, I suspect. And I think it reflects the way in which Mary’s links to Scotland are starting to fade as she becomes, you know, enters her teenage years.

So she had travelled to France with a substantial Scottish train. These are all the people who were seasick while she was being poised and regal and not being seasick on the journey.

So most of her Scottish train has kind of been sent away. So the Scottish attendants who have come with her when Mary’s French grandmother, her Guise grandmother, Antoinette de Guise, comes across them. She’s appalled and she says, “we can’t have them.” And her exact phrase is “they are not as clean as they might be.”

So essentially she’s offended by Scottish standards of hygiene.

Mary has a governess who herself is an illegitimate daughter of James the Fourth and she’s called Lady Fleming. She’s stunningly gorgeous. So John Guy describes her as beautiful and voluptuous. And she was known by the French as la belle écossaise, so the beautiful Scotswoman.

She has a fling with Henry the Second, the French king. And this in itself wouldn’t have been particularly a problem except that she ends up pregnant and thereby precipitates a scandal. And so she gets dismissed and sent back to Scotland in disgrace.

However, it is not a completely Scot-free zone because Lady Fleming’s daughter does remain with Mary in France.

And she is one of four Scottish girls, all of Mary’s age, all of noble birth, all called Mary, who constitute, I guess, I mean, we’ve now moved on from boarding school stories. These are now Mary’s squad. This is like kind of gaggle of teenagers in Beverly Hills or whatever.

So you’ve got:

• Mary Fleming: daughter of Lady Fleming, Mary Stewart’s cousin, the highest ranking of all the four Marys. So you might call her Posh Mary.
• Mary Livingstone: loves hunting, loves dancing, loves archery. So you might call her Sporty Mary.
• Mary Beaton: the most beautiful. So you might call her Pretty Mary.
• Mary Seaton: knows all about clothes, brilliant at hairdressing, can tease any head of hair into an absolute miracle. So you might call her Fashion Mary.

And the five of them are completely inseparable. They get up to all kinds of scrapes and japes. They’re actually a bit like Peter the Great and Marie Antoinette, that they love playing at being common people.

Okay. So to quote John Guy,

“Mary adored making Cotignac, a type of French marmalade, putting on an apron and boiling quinces and sugar with powder of violets in a saucepan for hours before laying out the slices of crystallized fruits.”

And she gets the four Marys to help her. They have a special kitchen that is kind of created in their apartments. They put on aprons and pretend to be kind of servants or bourgeois women organizing, you know, the housework and the house routines and things like that. It’s all such fun.

Right. All very charming. And it does enable Mary, Queen of Scots, to keep up with her native language because she and the four Marys are all chattering away in Scots, even though all of them by this point speak absolutely fluent French. Probably it’s their, you know, it’s their language of choice.

But by the time she’s in her mid-teens, she can probably barely remember any of it. She left when she was five, so she can probably remember nothing of Scotland or virtually nothing.

Yeah.

And presumably that’s what the French want. They want her to become, you know, she’s the wife of the Dauphin. She’s going to become the Queen of France. They effectively want her to be French, no?

Well, and specifically the Guise family. So her relations on her mother’s side, because she is absolutely a key part of the Guise plans, not just for France, but for Europe more generally.

So while Mary’s been having this lovely time with her ponies and making marmalade and so on, her two uncles, we mentioned them before, Francis, who’s now the Duke of Guise, and Charles, who’s the Cardinal of Lorraine, they’ve been busy consolidating their grip on France.

So the Duke, his nickname is Scarface, a battle injury. He’s very charming, but he’s also very hard-nosed, the man of action, veteran of the Italian wars, as we mentioned in the previous episode, and a man who in January 1558 shames himself by capturing Calais from the English.

Robbing them of their rightful possession on the French mainland.

So that’s very sad.

And the Cardinal, who is, as we mentioned, the kind of brilliant and fertile schemer, the leading political figure in the French court. The pair of them remind me of the Duke and the Cardinal in the Duchess of Malfi, the Jacobean drama.

There’s a kind of quality, I think, about them that conveys everything that Protestants tend to find sinister about Catholic powers and courts at this time.

They have a kind of Borgia vibe to them.

And why they want Mary is not just to, you know, if Mary and Francis have children, then their grandchildren will be kings of France, presumably. But their ambitions are higher than that.

They want to forge a kind of Franco-British empire that will be under their thumb. And so step by step, they’ve been putting the building blocks in place.

• They have Mary, Queen of Scots, in their grasp.
• Her mother, their sister, Mary of Guise, is ruling Scotland as regent.
• On the 24th of April, 1558, their niece, Mary, Queen of Scots, marries the Dauphin.

Mary writes to her mother back in Scotland on the morning of her marriage. She says,

“All I can tell you is that I count myself one of the happiest women in the world.”

And of course, she’s an absolute wow at the wedding. Very shockingly, very innovatively, she wears a completely novel colour at her wedding. And that is white.

In France, unheard of to wear a white dress. And she does this because she knows that it will suit her complexion and her auburn hair.

Great festivities, gold and silver coins tossed out into the crowds. The wedding banquet features six giant mechanical ships that kind of glide around the banqueting hall. And it’s all great fun and absolutely brilliant.

And everyone has a wonderful time.

Now, what does this wedding mean for Scotland and its continued independence? So objectively, publicly, nothing, it would seem.

So nine days before she gets married, Mary signs and seals a promise to uphold, and I quote, “Scotland’s freedoms, liberties and privileges.”

But behind the scenes, things are slightly different.

So 11 days before she’d signed that pledge that Scottish independence will be maintained, Mary had been given another document that had been drawn up by her Guise uncles, which is top secret. Nobody talks about it.

It’s been drawn up in very florid legal jargon, basically to dazzle Mary, who’s still only 15 years old.

But when she puts her seal to it, she is effectively agreeing to a completely bombshell promise that if people in Scotland knew about it, it would cause outrage.

Because what Mary says is that:

• If she dies without an heir, then her husband, Francis (who presumably was going to become the king of France), and
• All his successors, so all the future kings of France,

will rule as well as the kings of Scotland.

So Scotland will become part of the French kind of fiefdoms.

They also write that Mary has had this wonderful education, all her business studies and stuff, her ponies, her dog skin gloves and everything.

And therefore, the Scots owe France a million pieces of gold for it.

What? So a very expensive boarding school education. That’s a very expensive boarding school.

And effectively, it’s a blueprint for turning Scotland into a province of France.

Oh, the French. God, who would have thought that they would behave like such snakes?

And here’s the thing.

They’re not just— that’s not even the limit of their ambitions.

Because they’re also, and this is the really shocking thing, they have their eyes on a much greater prize, some would say, which is our own beloved country of England.

Unbelievable.

And again, it’s Mary who is the key to this plan because, and we haven’t touched on this yet, but it’s a very, very important part of Mary’s story.

We’ve talked about how she’s a steward of the royal line of Scotland, but she also has the blood of the Tudors, the English dynasty, in her veins.

This is because her grandfather, James IV, the guy who had died at the Battle of Flodden, had married the sister of Henry VIII, Margaret Tudor. And by 1558, so when Mary is marrying the Dauphin, this has come to take on a potentially enormous dynastic significance.

So we left England under the rule of Edward VI, the young Protestant heir of Henry VIII, but he had died in 1553. And he’d been succeeded by his elder sister, Mary Tudor, who is a Catholic.

But she, in the months following Mary Stewart’s wedding to the Dauphin, has fallen ill and potentially fatally ill. And so the question that is being asked in France, as in England, is,

“if Mary Tudor dies, who is going to succeed her?”

Now, of course, she has a younger sister, Elizabeth, but the claim of Elizabeth to the English throne is viewed in France, and particularly by the Guise, with contempt.

So as the Cardinal of Lorraine, the subtle, one might almost say sinister, power player at the French court, points out,

“Elizabeth is the daughter of a witch, namely Anne Boleyn, who had been put to death by Henry VIII, and her daughter, Elizabeth, had been declared a bastard by Act of Parliament in 1536.”

So she seems to be ruled out of the succession, in the opinion of the Guise.

And worse than that, of course, she’s a Protestant, and no cardinal is going to think that a Protestant should succeed to the throne of England.

And so the Cardinal of Lorraine argues that the throne should not pass to Elizabeth, but instead to the next in line, who, of course, just happens to be his own niece, Mary Stuart.

So shocking developments. OK, so that is potentially, I mean, that would be momentous. I mean, that would give the Guise family control over not one kingdom, but three kingdoms.

And so when Mary, Bloody Mary, Mary Tudor dies on the 17th of November, 1558, they’re straight in there, aren’t they? They say,

“Our niece, Mary, Queen of Scots, the Queen-in-waiting of France, is now the new Queen of England.”

And they really mean this. I mean, this isn’t just a performative gesture, that this is a serious part of their ambitions, of their kind of geopolitical ambition, right?

I think they do mean it seriously, but of course, there is a slightly performative element, because they want to treat Mary as though she is the Queen of England.

And so the English coat of arms starts featuring alongside those of France and Scotland, you know, in the doorways and the crockery and the plates and things that the Dauphin is using in his palace.

And when ushers clear a way for Mary Stuart, you know, going through the chateau or whatever, they are crying out,

“Make way for the Queen of England,”

which is obviously very heady stuff for Mary. I mean, brilliant. She’s Queen of Scots. She’s now the Queen of England. Soon she’s going to be the Queen of France.

And that moment arrived very soon, because on the 10th of July, 1559, the French King, Henry II, dies of a sports injury. He’s been in a tournament and the lance goes through a gap in his helmet into his eye and he dies very soon afterwards.

And two months later, on the 15th of September, 1559, Mary’s husband is crowned the King of France. And again, Mary is a massive fashion success. She wears white. She looks dazzling. All the other members of the royal family are in black. So they look very dowdy compared to her.

And, you know, the Queen of Scots, who the French claim is the Queen of England, is now also the Queen of France.

Wow. To quote John Guy,

“Wherever the French court came to rest and whichever towns it visited, the heraldic arms of Francis and Mary were blazoned with those of England on the gates.”

So she has done very well for herself. Queen of Scots, Queen of France, Queen of England. And she’s what, about 16 or something. And she’s very glamorous and all this.

The only slight flaw I can see in this design is that she’s not actually the Queen of England. No.

So this is a big problem for her because now the person who is the Queen of England is her cousin, Elizabeth, Elizabeth Tudor.

And this is the person who, in all the films and the books and the operas and whatnot, is her arch enemy. And you can see why that would be the case, right?

Because if you’re Elizabeth I and you’ve spent your life being declared a bastard and being locked up in various houses and all of this, the arrival of this new contender over the channel in France, who’s also very glamorous and whatnot.

If you’re Elizabeth, you presumably absolutely hate the very mention of Mary Queen of Scots’ name.

Well, I think that what you do initially is to ensure that powers across Europe do not recognise this potential rival to your throne.

And this is exactly what Elizabeth and her diplomats do. So they ensure that, for instance, Mary Tudor’s husband, who was the King of Spain, Philip II, that he recognises Elizabeth as Queen.

And even though Philip is Catholic and Elizabeth is Protestant, Philip II does recognise her.

And the reason for that is that he’s desperate to keep England on board in his ongoing struggle with France. Yeah, of course.

So power politics trumps kind of religious affiliations. This in turn means that the Pope has to recognise Elizabeth because the Pope is under Philip II’s thumb. And so he has to do what Philip says.

And it’s also implicitly agreed, even by the French themselves, because on the 2nd of April, 1559, they sign a treaty with England, the Treaty of Cateau-Cambresi, which effectively is the treaty. I mean, it’s kind of complicated, but in its practical effect is that the English acknowledge that they have lost Calais.

And the quo for the quid is that the French implicitly accept that Elizabeth is Queen of England.

And obviously, this is terrible news for Mary, because not only has her claim to the English throne been sign-lined, but actually, the guys who have signed this treaty with the English are her own uncles, the Guise, the people who’ve been saying, “you’re the Queen of England.”

Right. Because it was the Duke of Guise who had captured Calais, and so he wants to confirm his military achievement.

And it’s doubly bad for Mary, because all the kind of claims to the English throne, as you said, it’s alienated Elizabeth, but it’s particularly alienated two key operators at the English court.

One of these is a guy called Sir Nicholas Throckmorton, who is Elizabeth’s ambassador to France, who is a very, very committed, hot Protestant, and therefore very opposed to the idea of England having another Catholic queen.

He has been very busy making copies of Mary’s offensive, heraldic arms. So all these ones with England’s English coat of arms being courted with the French and Scottish coat of arms. And he’s sending them back to London.

There they are being read by Elizabeth’s most trusted servant, her chief minister, who is a man called William Cecil, who, like Throckmorton, is a very, very committed Protestant. He’s passionately loyal to Elizabeth, but he’s even more passionately loyal, I would say, to the Protestant cause.

He’s also a man who’s long been interested in Scottish affairs, because he had fought with Edward Seymour, the Duke of Somerset, at the Battle of Pinky, the kind of disastrous defeat that, in a way, had precipitated Mary going to France.

So these two Protestants, with the ear of Elizabeth, they loathe Mary, and they see her as a potentially mortal threat, not just to Elizabeth, but to the Protestant cause in England.

They are completely committed to stopping the Catholic Mary ever succeeding to the English throne. They’re so committed to that, that actually it’s Cecil’s real ambition is not just to stop Mary becoming Queen of England, but to topple her from her Scottish throne.

Mary, I think, is oblivious to this, but she has made herself an enemy who, as events will prove, is as subtle and dangerous an enemy as any queen could have.

And while this has been going on, of course, there have been tumultuous events in Scotland, back in her homeland. Events that threaten not just the future of Catholicism in Scotland, but Mary’s own survival as queen.

Tom, let’s find out about those after the break.
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To promote a woman to bear rule, superiority, dominion, or empire above any realm, nation, or city is repugnant to nature.

Now that was an archive recording of a Scot, an author of one of the most famous pamphlets ever written by a Scot. I mean, history is littered with famous pamphlets, but this is probably the most famous. And it’s the first blast of the trumpet against the monstrous regiment of women.

And disappointingly, monstrous regiment there actually means the kind of unnatural rule of women. I’d always thought of it as being, you know, a military squad of women with bayonets marching towards cannon or something.

Now, it’s an author you describe in your notes, Tom, as top feminist and funster, John Knox. So he’s the great sort of godfather of the Scottish Reformation. He absolutely hates Mary, Queen of Scots, doesn’t he?

• Yeah, he does. He does.

But here’s the thing. His target in 1558, when he wrote that pamphlet, she wasn’t really his target there. His target was somebody else: Mary Tudor in England and Mary of Guise in Scotland, right?

• Yeah, principally Mary Tudor.
  He basically doesn’t like Marys.
• Yeah, it’s not just women, it’s Marys. He’s not in favour of them at all.

And he sees definitely Mary Tudor, but also by extension Mary of Guise, as kind of exercising a Catholic tyranny over the whole of Great Britain. And so that pamphlet is a kind of pain, cry of despair and frustration that Catholic rule under these women seems impregnable and that the Reformation threatens to be stillborn in the island.

And yet, Dominic, you as a bluff Protestant will be thrilled to learn that only two years later, everything had been stood on its head.

So by 1560, the authority of the Catholic Church in Scotland has been toppled and actually, as it turns out, decisively defeated. Protestant reformers like Knox himself, perhaps preeminently Knox himself, have emerged triumphant.

And the measure of what Scotland has gone through in those two years is that Alec Ryrie, the great historian of British Protestantism, in his book, The Origins of the Scottish Reformation, he can describe those two years as not just one of the most extraordinary national transformations in European history, but he goes on to say that it’s arguably the first modern revolution.

He disagrees with you, because you claim the first modern revolution took place hundreds of years earlier, and yet he’s a famous professor, Tom. How could you explain that?

I think what he probably means there is the first revolution of modern Europe, which is a slightly different way of phrasing it.

• Is that what it is?
• I think that is what it is.

So people may be wondering, what on earth has happened? What is this great revolution? And I guess that as good a way as any of answering that question is to look at the career up until this point of John Knox, who was probably the most famous of all Mary Stuart’s adversaries.

And so he, like so many of the early Protestants, I mean, there’s such a feature of, you know, the series we did on Martin Luther. He had originally himself been a Catholic priest, and probably he was converted to Protestantism by Patrick Hamilton, who we mentioned in the previous episode was Scotland’s first Protestant martyr. He’d been burnt at St. Andrews in 1546, and the man who presided over that execution, who’d brought Hamilton to trial and then convicted him and then set him up on a stake in St. Andrews, strapped with bags of gunpowder.

This was Scotland’s leading churchman, a guy called David Beaton, who was the Archbishop of St. Andrews, but was also Scotland’s last cardinal, as it will prove.

And three months later, Beaton gets killed by five assassins who were out to revenge themselves on Beaton for the death of Patrick Hamilton. And they murder him in his own stronghold, the castle of St. Andrews, which is right on the coast, pretty impregnable.

And they hang his body from the castle walls. It’s been stripped naked. Then they pull it down. One of the Protestants who’ve kind of gathered around to exult over his humiliation then urinates in the mouth of the corpse.

They then salt his body and they throw it into the most notorious dungeon in the whole of Scotland, which is inside the castle of St. Andrews. And it’s a very deep bottle-shaped hole. So once you’ve been put in it, you can only be got out with a kind of rope.

And it’s dug below the level of the sea right next to the, you know, whether you can kind of hear the distant booming of the waves through the rock. And this is, you know, a pointed humiliation of the preeminent Catholic churchmen in Scotland.

And yet also a fairly standard night out in St. Andrews, I would say. Yeah, well, students at St. Andrews can take us up on that. So Knox is obviously thrilled by this. He’s one of the Protestants who goes to the castle of St. Andrews, which is now kind of a stronghold of Protestantism. He serves the garrison there as its chaplain.

They’re able very easily to hold out against the Scottish authorities up until the point when Henry II sends a massive task force to Scotland to try and throw the English out. This task force has enough men that they can go and capture the castle of St. Andrews. All the garrison are taken prisoner and they are sent to the galleys, and Knox is among them.

So he gets chained up on the bench. He has to pull the oars and so on. He does this for a year and a half. Finally, he is set free as a result of a personal intervention from the English Protestant king, Edward VI, who admires John Knox.

So Knox is set free but can’t go back to Scotland, so he goes to England. He’s given a parish in Newcastle, which he chooses because it’s pretty close to Scotland. Protestant refugees can kind of amass there. It becomes a kind of center of resistance to Mary of Guise and her Catholic regime in Scotland.

Knox thinks Edward VI is brilliant. He thinks England is brilliant. He sees it as, you know, the new Jerusalem. Brilliant. It’s absolutely wonderful. Hooray.

And then, of course, Edward VI dies and is succeeded by Mary Tudor, who is Catholic, who will go on to be called by Protestants Bloody Mary because of her burning of Protestants. Knox thinks,

“Ah, this isn’t a good place for me.”

So he scrams and ends up in Switzerland, in Geneva, which has become a kind of godly city of reformed religion under the aegis of John Calvin, with Luther, one of the two great figures of the Protestant Reformation. If Knox had thought that England was brilliant, he thinks that Geneva is even better. He described it famously as:

“the most perfect school of Christ that ever was in the earth since the days of the apostles.”

Great key.

But he does go back to Scotland from time to time, doesn’t he?

A couple of times he goes back, yeah. Because there’s now a sort of coterie of Scottish lords who are prepared to protect him. Is that because they are Protestants themselves now? Yes.

Basically, the Reformation has swept through Scotland, including the aristocratic hierarchy. In fact, the most significant of these is Mary Stuart’s own half-brother, one of the many illegitimate sons that her father, James V, had fathered. He is also named James, so James Stuart, Lord James Stuart.

He’s often cast as a kind of Machiavelli. He’s certainly a very subtle man, capable of incredible duplicity, but also very sober-minded and, I think, very devoutly Protestant. All his political manoeuvring is, I think, in the cause of very strongly held Protestant convictions.

Jenny Wormald, the great Scottish historian who’s very down on Mary Stuart, loves her half-brother. She thinks that Lord James Stuart is brilliant, describing him as a

• true Stuart,
• tough,
• able,
• masterful,
• self-interested.

By implication, she’s suggesting that Mary Stuart is none of those things. He’s great pals with Cecil, the man who would become Elizabeth I’s great spymaster. This is a really important axis in Mary’s story.

This man, who in due course will become the Earl of Moray—the name by which he’s better known—is a key player in the story of Mary, Queen of Scots. He is able to provide patronage to Protestants in Scotland.

But it’s also because Mary of Guise, the regent, even though she’s Catholic, is not a natural fanatic like Mary Tudor. Her priority, I think, is to keep Scotland secure for her daughter, Mary, Queen of Scots, her dynasty, the Guises, and her country, France. If that means cutting a bit of slack to Protestants, then she’s happy to do that. Her commitment to preserving Scotland for the true Catholic faith is kind of fourth on the list, I would say.

But then, presumably, what changes everything is the death of Mary Tudor in 1558, and the fact that Elizabeth becomes the Queen of England. Mary Tudor was not an old woman, so she could have lived for 10 or 20 years more.

With her death and the accession of Elizabeth, the whole kaleidoscope takes another turn.

Why does it take such a turn? Is it basically because England now, between Scotland and France, is ideologically different, and therefore there’s a new impetus towards Protestantism in Scotland? Why does Elizabeth’s succession make such a difference to the story?

Having a Protestant on the English throne is obviously a massive destabilizing factor, certainly for Mary of Guise. And the reason that it’s a disaster is that it goes with the grain of trends within Scotland. Her rule, although it’s been very competent, and although she’s a very effective political operator, she is French, and this has become increasingly unpopular with large swathes of Scottish public opinion, and particularly with the Scottish nobility.

And so, by the time that Elizabeth becomes Queen in England, there are nobles in Scotland who are starting to think that France is playing the role in the national demonology that the English traditionally have played. So, there is one resentful lord who describes the alliance with France, the old alliance, as

“an iron hook that hath caught and killed afore now the most part of our ancestors,”

which is a kind of massive rewriting of history.

Part of the reason for this isn’t just dislike for the kind of heavy-handed character of the French garrisons that are providing Mary of Guise with her muscle in Scotland. It’s also that she is trying to provide Scotland with the kind of centralised rule that she, as a French aristocrat, takes for granted. She thinks this is what is required for a successful modern state.

And, again, Scottish nobles feel resentful of this. They feel kind of cut off from her patronage. They feel that the traditional roads by which they can source power are being closed off to her. And then, on top of that, there’s the continued presence of their own queen, Mary Stuart, Mary of Guise’s daughter, in France, which is, I think, experienced by many Scots not as redounding to Scotland’s glory, but as a national humiliation.

We talked about this when we did Marie Antoinette, the way in which often foreign queens in France are kind of hostages. You know, they’re held there in a gilded cage to ensure good behaviour from the country that the queen has come from.

So a group of these guys have already formed. I mean, I’ll tell you what they love in Scotland:

• They love a covenant.
• They can’t get enough of a covenant.
• Covenants like tea cakes, iron brew—they love all that.

They’ve pledged themselves to the Reformation.

And with the arrival of Elizabeth, these sort of people, what do they call themselves? The Lords of the Congregation. Yeah. They now think, brilliant, they’ve got a Protestant monarch in England, and we can actually use this now. The time has come to kick the French out of Scotland and actually to completely turn the alliance system on its head and to have an ideologically based Protestant alliance with the old enemy, with the English.

Yes.

And Dominic, you might say the kindling has been laid, but the spark needs to be provided. And the spark is provided by the return to Scotland on the 2nd of May, 1559 of John Knox.

And I think it’s fair to say that just as Mary of Guise is kind of unsettled by the accession of Elizabeth in England, so also, ironically, it’s John Knox, because John Knox is actually very, very pro-English.

• He had wanted to go to England rather than to Scotland because he thought that the English were naturally much holier.
• Always very grateful to Edward VI.
• Always kind of held a candle for England.

But it’s unfortunately his blast of the trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women, which he had targeted against Mary Tudor, comes out just as Mary dies and is succeeded by the Protestant Elizabeth.

And Elizabeth is massively offended by it. To be fair, you can see why. I mean, of course you can. And so she bans Knox from England.

And so, for de Muir, Knox ends up going to Scotland. So Knox actually, ironically, is a bit like Mary. His loyalties primarily are to a foreign country. Knox would rather be in England. Mary would rather be in France, but they both end up in Scotland.

And Knox’s arrival in Scotland, as I said, has this kind of incendiary impact.

• In Perth, he gives a brilliantly inflammatory sermon that sets mobs roaming the city, attacking the city’s monasteries.
• Gives another sermon in St. Andrews, and the congregation rush out and start disassembling the local cathedral.

And all across Scotland, he inspires these kind of waves of godly vandalism.

• Abbeys are stripped bare.
• People go into the orchards of friaries and chop them down and take all the apples.

And my favorite detail is that lots of godly reformers go into the gardens kept by the monks and literally pull up all the flowers by hand.

“These flowers are offensive unto the eyes of the Lord.”

And I guess the key indicator that Knox and the lords of the congregation have the wind in their sails comes when the Earl of Arran, who, you know, we’ve been fingering throughout the story as Scotland’s supreme trimmer, a guy who’s constantly responding to the blowing of the wind, he changes sides.

So initially, he’d been a supporter of Mary of Guise. Then by September 1559, he thinks, “Oh, it’s all up with her. I’m going to switch sides.” And he brings over a whole nother swathe of the Scottish nobles. So that by October, most of the lords in certainly in the Scottish lowlands—it’s different in the highlands, which, of course, is that much more remote—most of the lords in the Scottish lowlands are openly ranged against Mary of Guise, the French regent.

And in fact, there are only two leading noblemen in the lowlands who stay loyal to her. One of these is Lord Seaton, who is the brother of Mary Seaton, Fashion Mary, the one who’s very into her fashion. The other is a guy called James Hepburn, who is the son of Patrick Hepburn, who we mentioned in the previous episode, the Earl of Bothwell, who was the hereditary Lord Admiral and Sheriff of Edinburgh, whom Mary of Guise had been flirting with.

James Hepburn has succeeded to those titles and to the Hermitage, the grim castle in the debatable lands. He’s a very effective defender of Mary of Guise. His most spectacular stunt is to pull off an enormous gold heist, because Cecil, Elizabeth’s minister in England, who’s obviously delighted at there being a Protestant revolution in Scotland, sent a massive train of gold.

James Hepburn, we’ll call him Bothwell from now on, ambushes it and makes off with all the gold. The news of this is brought to Mary Stuart in France, Mary, Queen of Scots. She’s terribly touched by this display of loyalty on the part of Bothwell. From that point on, I think it’s fair to say the Earl of Bothwell is a man who will have a place in her heart. She has a certain tendresse for Bothwell because she’s so grateful to him.

She’s completely powerless in all this. I mean, I know she’s the Queen of France, but she presumably can’t do anything to help her mother, Mary of Guise. She sits there impotently in France watching events in Britain, where it just gets worse and worse from her point of view.

So in February 1560, her half-brother, Lord James Stuart, negotiates a treaty in Berwick, the town on the border of England and Scotland, on behalf of the Lord of the Congregation. This is an overtly Protestant alliance.

• The English send a fleet that blockades Mary of Guise in Leith.
• Elizabeth commits England to protecting Scotland’s ancient rights and liberty.

This is not cast as a kind of English invasion and English takeover. But the consequence of this is that the old alliance, the alliance between France and Scotland that had been the foundation stone of Scottish foreign policy for 300 years, is now effectively defunct.

Whether of a broken heart or not, Mary of Guise gives up the ghost on the 11th of June. She dies, only 44. With her death, everything is kind of thrown up in the air because Scotland now effectively has no ruler, certainly no Catholic ruler.

Then, one month later, a further calamity for Mary Stuart, who’s now lost her mother. A new treaty is signed in Edinburgh between England, the lords of the congregation, and in a completely stunning volte-face, her two uncles, the Duke of Guise and the Cardinal of Lorraine, the very people who have been pushing her to take up the rule of England throughout this.

The terms are completely humiliating for Mary Stuart:

- France now officially recognizes Elizabeth as Queen of England.
- Mary is obliged to drop her claim to the throne of England.
- All French troops are to evacuate Scotland.
- Any failure by King Francis and Mary, his Queen, to ratify the treaty licenses Elizabeth in England to intervene in Scotland to uphold its terms.

So France has signed, sealed, and delivered their recognition of Elizabeth. All French troops that Henry II sent, which Mary of Guise had been using as her garrison and cutting edge, have to withdraw.

This is a complete triumph for the English crown and the Protestant insurgency in Scotland.

I guess Mary, Queen of Scots, at this point has basically only one consolation:

• She’s lost control of Scotland insofar as she ever had it, which she didn’t.
• She’s not going to be Queen of England.
• But at least she’s Queen of France.
• She’s got this husband—who you said he’s got two left feet, he’s too short, and he’s got a stutter, which you don’t rate.
• He’s plucky and smart.
• He’s a nice guy.
• And thank goodness nothing has happened to him, and hopefully it won’t.

Right, Tom? Right.

So then Mary of Guise has died in June. Then in mid-November, Francis goes out hunting and he comes back and says,

“Oh, I’m feeling a bit dizzy and I’ve got a kind of strange buzzing in my ears. I hope it’s nothing serious.”

By the end of the month, he is suffering a series of violent fits. By early December, weird matter is starting to ooze out of his ears. Then it starts coming out as kind of dribble from his mouth. And obviously, this isn’t a good sign. And on the 5th of December, he dies. Crikey.

I mean, you never rated him, to be fair.
I did. I said he was plucky and I said he was smart. That’s all you need. But also, the other thing you need is not to die of matter coming out of your ears. But he’s gone.

And for Mary, who it said wept for a month on the news of her mother’s death, in a way, this is an even more devastating blow because she’s still only 17, but she’s now been orphaned, she’s been widowed, and now she’s no longer the Queen of France.

And so her whole future, which had previously seemed so glittering, I mean, now, you know, what’s she going to do?

Her uncles, these arch manipulators and Machiavelles, wanted to stay in France because what they want to do is basically to marry her off to Francis’s younger brother, Charles, who is now the new king. But Mary is smart enough already to know there is no prospect of this.

And the chief problem she faces is her mother-in-law, who Dominic is a link to one of the previous series we did, which is the Medici.

So Mary’s mother-in-law, the wife of Henry II, is Catherine de’ Medici. So she’s from the Dukes of Florence. And Catherine de’ Medici had always disliked Mary as a kind of tool of the guise. You know, Catherine de’ Medici is a very, very smart operator. I mean, a ruthless operator. And she does not trust Mary.

She wants her cleared from the chessboard. And she makes this very clear to Mary.

So just one day after Francis’s death, she sends a message to Mary saying,

“Hey, give me back all the jewels. You know, they’re not yours anymore. They belong to the Queen of France. You’re no longer Queen of France.”

Right, she’s not messing around. Yeah, she’s not.

And so Mary knows there’s no way that Catherine de’ Medici is going to allow her to marry another of her sons.

The other reason why Mary isn’t happy to go along with the schemes of her uncles is that, you know, she views them as having completely stabbed her in the back because they’ve signed this Treaty of Edinburgh.

You know, they’ve deprived her of her right to the throne of England. And she feels that they had betrayed both her and her mother.

And so because of that, the obvious solution is that she goes back to Scotland because there at least she is Queen of Scots.

Do you know what? She should have stayed in France. She should have knuckled down, just kind of had a little palace of her own, had a quiet life, a lot of dancing, and she’d have lived to a ripe old age.

This is a great mistake that she makes.

Do you know who wouldn’t agree with you? It’s Jenny Wormald, the great Scottish historian who also, I think, was herself Catholic.

She feels that Mary should have gone back immediately to Scotland because the sooner she gets back, the better the chance there is of reversing the recent successes of Protestantism in Scotland.

And the reason for this is that although many of the leading nobility are now Protestant, the vast mass of people in Scotland are still Catholic.

So very like England under Henry VIII.
Yeah, of course.

And her status as Queen is still unchallenged. As Jenny Wormald puts it,

“There is no doubt about the strength and prestige of the House of Stuart and the profound unwillingness of the Scots to challenge it.”

So it’s what we were talking about in the first episode.

Mary, by virtue of being a Stuart, can demand a kind of loyalty that is instinctive to the vast number of Scots of her subjects.

And so that being so, Wormald argues, I think entirely convincingly, that Mary could have played the part of a Mary Tudor in Scotland.

You know, she could have gone back. She could have sought to reverse the Reformation.

And Wormald is very, very down on Mary because of this.

I think having myself had two girls who at one point were 17, I think it’s quite a big ask to expect a 17-year-old girl who hasn’t been to the country that she’s being asked to go back to since she was five years old, to go back and kind of reverse these seismic developments.

I think it’s quite tough to be down on Mary for having done the challenge.

And I am more sympathetic to Mary for essentially prevaricating.

So rather than hurrying back to Scotland, she goes into mourning for Francis. So that lasts 40 days.

She then goes on a kind of massive tour around France saying goodbye to all her, you know, her relatives and her pals and so on.

And she is also, throughout this, engaging in kind of massive slanging matches with Nicholas Throgmorton, the English ambassador, who is trying to pressure her to sign the Treaty of Edinburgh, which she refuses point blank to do.

However, she is preparing to go back to Scotland.

And the key figure in her plans is her half-brother, Lord James Stuart.

And the reason for that is that I think Mary instinctively, when in trouble, looks to her… Family, even though her mother had not let her down, her uncles have done.

So there is a problem with Lord James Stuart, which is, of course, that he’s a Protestant and not just a Protestant, but he’s basically been the kind of the leader of the lords of the congregation.

You know, but as I say, he is family. And Mary is obviously hoping that blood is thicker than water.

And sure enough, between them, they arrive at a kind of an agreement compact that, when it’s announced, appalls both her Guise uncles and John Knox.

The reason for that, the reason that the compact appalls the Guise is that Mary promises to recognise the Reformed Church, the Protestant Church that, you know, John Knox is kind of now the leading light of, as being Scotland’s official church.

In return, she will be allowed to celebrate the Catholic Mass in her own chapel at Holyrood, which is the Royal Palace in Edinburgh.

And I think there’s no real question as to who gets the better of that deal. I mean, clearly, you know, Mary is selling Catholic Scotland down the river, really.

Right. But at least she’ll be able to go back as Queen, right? So, you know, it’s a big win for her. And as a Catholic Queen.

So she leaves Calais on the 14th of August, 1561, and with her go her four beloved Marys, and they stand on the deck saying adieu, adieu, bidding tearful farewells to France, mourning the fact that they worry they will never see France again, which is entirely accurate. Mary will never see France again.

They’re a bit worried because Mary still hasn’t signed the Treaty of Edinburgh with Elizabeth. And so they’re worried that the English may be looking out for her to try and take her hostage.

And in fact, as they are going up the Northumbrian coast, one of her transport ships, which is carrying her horses, gets picked up by an English patrol ship on suspicion of piracy and taken into Newcastle.

So these horses are impounded and it will take three months for them finally to be sent north to Edinburgh.

Mary herself, she gets to Scotland, to Leith in record time. It only takes her five days. No seasickness, of course, because she’s so poised.

They arrive off Leith and the harbour is thickly veiled by mist so that Mary, in a kind of it’s pregnant with symbolism, can’t actually make out the contours of her kingdom through this sea mist.

And John Knox, you know, I mean, he’s a man ready to see it as an omen. And he wrote:

“The very face of heaven at the time of her arrival did manifestly speak what comfort was brought unto this country with her, to wit sorrow, dolor, darkness and impiety.”

But Dominic, was he right? Well, we love a bit of darkness and impiety on the rest is history.

And I’m happy to say that next time there’ll be loads of both as we explore the melodramatic story of Mary, Queen of Scots on her return to Scotland.

Now, if you cannot wait to hear that story, which is one of the most remarkable we’ve ever done, the great news is that you can hear it and the remaining three episodes of this series by joining our very own group of evangelical reformers, the Lords of the Congregation, the Rest is History Club at:

therestishistory.com

So what are you waiting for? And on that bombshell, goodbye. Bye-bye.