All language subtitles for A.History.of.Britain.07of15.The.Body.of.the.Queen.DivX5-AC3.www.MVGroup.org

In her last sickness, with the sense
of her end coming on fast,

Elizabeth I had the ring
she had worn since her coronation

filed away from the royal finger.

It was a tricky operation,
for the skin had grown in over the gold,

but then it was supposed
to be a tight fit.

This was, in a manner of speaking,
her wedding band,

put on when she had joined herself
to England, 45 years earlier.

Now it seemed
the two were to be put asunder.

She was supposed
to be immortal, of course.

And the odd thing was,
despite the garish auburn fright wig,

the white face mask
and the wrinkled bosom,

foreign diplomats who saw her
at court and had no reason to be gallant,

swore they could still see the young
woman, no more than 20 years of age.

It doesn't do to be too starry-eyed
about the Virgin Queen.

Elizabeth I was only too
obviously made of flesh and blood.

She was vain, spiteful, arrogant,
she was frequently unjust,

and she was often
maddeningly indecisive.

But she was also brave,
shockingly clever,

an eyeful to look at and on occasions
she was genuinely wise.

In other words,
she had all the qualities it took

to make the genius politician
she undoubtedly was.

Just a few feet away from Elizabeth's
tomb in Westminster Abbey

lies the body of another woman,
Mary, Queen of Scots,

who had haunted and fascinated
Elizabeth for so much of her life.

No virgin, that's for sure.
No politician either.

A complete disaster as a ruler,
you would have to say,

but Mary managed something
that eluded Elizabeth.

She reproduced.

This is the story of two queens
and, more importantly,

two women - one a politician,
the other a mother.

It's the story of a painful birth,
the union of England and Scotland,

the birth of Britain.

A cherished tradition has it
that when Elizabeth heard the news

that she was to become queen,
on November 17th, 1558,

she was seated beneath
an ancient oak tree.

Her first words
were from Psalm 118,

"a domino factum est mirabile
in oculis nostris" -

"this is the Lord's doing
and it is marvellous in our eyes."

She was right, it was marvellous.

In fact, it was little short of a miracle
that she had made it to that day alive.

Tudor royal politics were a bloody affair,
especially for Tudor women.

She had been only two, after all,
when her mother, Anne Boleyn,

had gone to the scaffold,
her sin, in Henry's mind at least,

being her failure to produce a son.

It must have been a body
possessed by others, by the devil.

An unclean piece of flesh,
it had to be cut away.

So Elizabeth would never be free
from suspicion.

Out of her dark Boleyn eyes,
she watched herself being watched.

Inevitably, there were times
when her guard was down.

She was barely a teenager
when trouble first struck.

She was living with her guardian,
Katherine Parr,

Henry VIII's widow,
when Parr's new husband,

Thomas Seymour, started paying
playful visits to her bedroom.

When Katherine Parr died,
a rumour started circulating

that Seymour had his sights set
on marrying Elizabeth.

To even think of such a thing
was treason.

Even worse, some wagging tongues said
that Elizabeth was pregnant with his child.

It took all of Elizabeth's already extraordinary
composure and self-confidence

to persuade Lord Protector Somerset
that she was innocent.

My Lord,
there goeth rumours abroad

which be greatly against
my honour, which be these:

That I am in the Tower
and with child by my Lord Admiral.

My Lord,
these are shameful slanders.

I most heartily desire
your Lordship

that I may come to the court
and show myself there as I am.

Your assured friend
to my little power, Elizabeth.

She was, remember, just 14,

but there was already the fortitude,
the clarity and the courage.

Just as well, because she would need
these qualities five years later,

when facing the most traumatic
and dangerous crisis of her entire life.

When her Catholic half-sister,
Mary, came to the throne,

Elizabeth found herself
in even deeper trouble.

She found herself in the Tower

when a Protestant plot
to get rid of Mary backfired.

Elizabeth managed to talk herself
out of being charged with treason,

but she remained
under close surveillance.

Danger only turned to deliverance
five years later

when Queen Mary died childless.

So here she was,
Elizabeth, under the oak,

about to be the Protestant queen.

She had survived, just, but she must
have been full of dark knowledge

and experience about how difficult
it was all going to be.

Her mother had been killed for producing
just a daughter and a stillborn,

and her sister Mary's womb produced
only the tumour that killed her.

However dazzling Elizabeth looked,
however clever she was,

she must have known
how rough the road was going to be

for a ruler of the wrong sex.

The 25-year old Elizabeth
came into an inheritance

of high hopes and deep anxieties.

The celebrations at her coronation
were carefully designed

to show off the young queen
as the paragon of virtue.

This charade of piety, though,
was hardly enough to compensate

for the misfortune of having
another woman on the throne.

All the same, the sceptics
must have been reassured

by Elizabeth's precocious self-possession,
the air of controlled energy

she exuded in public,
right from the start.

You might suppose that
her first appearances at the council

would have been an ordeal,
but what the councillors saw

was not some girlish ingenue,
but someone who seemed full,

it was said, of manly authority.

Elizabeth did all the things
women in 16th-century England

weren't supposed to do - she looked
men in the eye and spoke out of turn.

She had been schooled to it
by her tutor, Roger Ascombe.

Ascombe was not
just another low-rent don.

He was public orator at Cambridge University,
and it was his outlandish idea

to teach the teenage girl
a discipline most people thought

unsuitable for a woman: The art
of rhetoric, the art of public speech.

This was Elizabeth's first and would
remain her strongest political weapon.

But Elizabeth brought something
to the management of sovereignty

that was entirely her own;
something, for that matter,

which none of the princely
conduct manuals spelled out,

that statecraft was also stagecraft.

Her father and mother
had both known this instinctively.

Elizabeth had
the actress's gift in spadefuls.

She simply adored being adored.

Adoration, though, wasn't
the same thing as allegiance.

For her most important advisor,
her surrogate father, William Cecil,

charisma was no substitute
for the one thing

which would secure the future
of a Protestant England - an heir.

Cecil knew that the majority
of the country was still Catholic

either actively or passively.
He also knew how little it would take

for the hard-earned gains
of the Reformation to be undone.

Though the queen kept telling everyone
it was none of their business,

Cecil constantly reminded her that
the realm needed her to have a husband.

Her body required it too,
since in the 16th century

prolonged virginity was thought to bring
on the potentially toxic condition

known as green sickness,
the abnormal retention of female sperm.

Marital copulation, then,

was what the doctor ordered
for the good of the realm.

The problem, though,
as Cecil was painfully aware,

was that if he pushed Elizabeth
too hard, she might just end up

plumping for the man
everyone assumed she really loved.

That man was Cecil's rival
on the council, Robert Dudley.

Dudley was everything Cecil was not -
flashy, gallant, a noisy extrovert,

and not least, incredibly good-looking,
especially on a horse.

To a queen who liked
being surrounded with lookers

and was capable of dismissing those
she thought physically unpleasing,

this mattered a lot.

They shared a past, the same tutors,
the same childhood traumas.

His father had been executed for treason,
so both were orphans of the scaffold.

In the grim years of Mary's reign,
he'd sold lands

to help Elizabeth out.
That sort of thing she never forgot.

But how much of a couple were they?

Did they, as the gossips
in Europe and the diplomats

and movie-makers since
have assumed, become lovers?

In the way was Dudley's wife,
but she had been ailing for years.

When she died,
Dudley would be free,

and sleeping with your intended
was not unusual in Tudor England.

But this would have been outrageous
for a queen who paraded her virginity

at her coronation
by leaving her hair down.

When pressed about the rumours,
she airily retorted

that it was impossible when surrounded
day and night by her ladies.

With the example of the fate
of her own mother before her,

it would have been foolhardy
to the point of insanity

for her to sleep with Dudley.

The politician in her was,
as always, ruling the lover.

Something then happened which did
terrible damage to their relationship.

Dudley's wife, Amy, was found
at the bottom of a staircase

dead from a broken neck.

An accident seemed altogether
too convenient to be credible.

This was, after all,
the golden age of gossip

and gossip did not believe Amy
had fallen but had been pushed.

Elizabeth immediately sent Dudley
away until cleared of suspicion.

Officially he was, and though
the queen always insisted

that Dudley had been vindicated,
it still cast a shadow

over their relationship, just when
they had become free to marry.

Perhaps it was a case of, "Beware
of wishing for your heart's true desire

"lest you end by getting it".

For the next few years,
Elizabeth swung mercurially

between endearment and exasperation,
drawing up documents

to make Dudley an Earl,
only to shred them in front of him.

And other times, especially when
she felt nagged by the council,

she would torment them
by pretending their marriage

was just about to happen.
It never did.

By 1563, Elizabeth had given up
on the possibility of ever marrying Dudley.

She was prepared to offer him
to someone else -

someone whose own marriage prospects
were of tremendous significance

for the balance of power in Britain -
Mary Stuart, Queen of the Scots.

Throughout the whole tortured
history of their relationship,

Elizabeth was eaten up
with curiosity about her cousin, Mary.

Trapped
in a neurotic beauty contest,

interrogating her ambassadors
as if they were mirrors on the wall

as to who was the taller,
fairer, wittier, the cleverer.

Elizabeth may have won for brains,
but from the few pictures we have of her,

Mary, with her heart-shaped face,
heavy eyelids and creamy complexion,

had the stuff to reduce grown men
to warm puddles on the floor.

She was more than just competition.

To Elizabeth,
Mary, Queen of Scots, was a menace.

The reason was obvious.
Mary was a Catholic

and a Catholic Church did not
recognise Elizabeth's right

to be Queen of England.

To them, she was a product of Henry VIII's
illegal marriage to Anne Boleyn.

In Mary's Catholic eyes, then,
Elizabeth was simply illegitimate.

How could Elizabeth
not take this personally?

Mary was not only a Stuart,
she was also a Tudor

through her great grandfather,
Henry VII.

So long as Elizabeth was childless,

Mary was next in line
to the English throne.

From the moment Mary arrived
in Scotland at the age of 18

from the French court
where she had been brought up,

the relationship between the cousins
was tainted with mutual suspicion.

At the first opportunity, Elizabeth
behaved badly, almost irrationally,

denying Mary safe conduct
through England to her new realm

and forcing her to sail
the long way round to Scotland.

Though the injured party,

Mary's response already betrayed
the theatrical self-pity

which so got up Elizabeth's nose.

I trust the wind will be
so favourable,

as I shall not need to come
on the coast of England.

And if I do, Monsieur L'Ambassadeur,

the queen, your mistress,
shall have me in her hands

to do her will of me, and if she be
so hard-hearted as to desire my end,

she may then do her pleasure
and make sacrifice of me.

Perhaps things might be better
between the two of them

if Mary accepted Elizabeth's choice
of a safe Protestant husband for her,

in the winning form
of Robert Dudley.

One tiny problem with this plan,
though.

Mary had no intention of being
told what to do by Elizabeth.

Anyway, everyone knew
that after the death of his wife,

Robert Dudley was spoiled goods.

Lord Henry Darnley, the handsome
poster boy of Scottish nobility,

seemed a much better prospect.

One look at Darnley's shapely calves
and Mary decided she must have him.

It helped that he too had Tudor
blood flowing through his veins.

Unfortunately, a lot of whisky
ran through them too.

Too late, Mary discovered
she had married a lazy, dissolute drunk,

incapable of doing even the minimal
things required of a co-sovereign.

Stuck at Holyrood with the task
of ruling Scotland without him,

Mary increasingly relied
on her private secretary,

the Italian Catholic, David Riccio.

Naturally, the Protestant
nobles in Scotland

were convinced that Mary was plotting
to turn Scotland back into a Catholic country.

So Darnley's increasing estrangement
from his wife

gave the lords most offended
by Riccio's access to the queen

the opening they were looking for.

In 1566, a group of them
approached Darnley

and proposed what amounted
to a violent coup.

Get rid of Riccio, who was her lover,
they said, not just her secretary.

"Ah," thought Darnley, "That would
explain why she's such a bitch.

"I'll show her who's in charge."

On March 7th, while she was dining,
Darnley and his fellow plotters

burst into Mary's chamber, tore
the terrified Riccio from Mary's skirts

and stabbed him to death
in front of her.

Between 50 and 60 wounds
were discovered on his body

after it was thrown down
the privy staircase.

At some point the murderers
turned to Mary,

pointing a pistol
at her heavily pregnant belly.

Perhaps at that moment, Mary
knew how to turn terror into power,

for in the months to follow,
she milked the melodrama

of the threatened womb
for all it was worth.

Instead of being reduced to a weeping
wreck, Mary was strangely calm.

She knew she could be strong
because she was carrying

her greatest weapon
inside her womb.

Whatever happened to her useless,
drunken, homicidal,

nitwit of a husband,
she knew a baby would be born.

Mother and child
were going to survive.

On June 19th, at Edinburgh Castle,
Mary gave birth to the boy

who would become
James VI of Scotland.

On hearing the news,
Elizabeth's reaction was to cry,

Alack, the Queen of Scots
is lighter of a bonny son

and I am but of barren stock.

Mary was by now so consumed
with contempt for Darnley

that she resolved to be rid of him.

Possibly all she meant
was to be rid of him as a husband

but there were some devotees,
in particular the Earl of Bothwell,

who took her sighs to mean
something altogether more decisive.

Bothwell, one of the great
landowners of Scotland,

was rich,
promiscuous and dangerous.

He could also turn on the gallantry,

and in her distress
Mary turned to him as protector,

and Bothwell was only too happy
to solve Mary's Darnley problem.

On the evening of March 9th, 1567,
while Mary was attending a ball,

Bothwell supervised
the lighting of a fuse

that at two in the morning would detonate
an immense quantity of gunpowder

beneath the house
where Darnley was asleep.

The house was blown sky high.
Darnley was dead,

but not bumped off
according to plan.

Minutes before the explosion,
he'd heard suspicious noises,

and had himself lowered out
of his bedroom window on a chair.

Running through the garden in his
night-shirt, he ran into the plotters,

who promptly throttled him to death.

Darnley's murder
was a turning point in Mary's life.

From now on, death followed Mary
like a lady-in-waiting.

She was already sick,
vomiting black mucus.

She needed help, and the unscrupulous
Bothwell was at hand.

His power over Mary made him reckless.

He announced to the Scottish lords that
for the proper government of the country

it was necessary for Mary
to have a husband.

Very decently,
he offered himself for the job.

Bothwell's idea of a marriage
proposal was to abduct Mary

and take her
to his grim castle in Dunbar.

There he planted his flag
as prospective King of Scotland

by planting himself - violently,
it was said - inside her body.

Now he supposed the traumatised
Mary would have to marry him,

and, to most of the country's horror,

Mary did just that,
a few weeks later, at Holyrood.

It was at this point that Mary lost it -
lost control over her own body,

lost the priceless political asset
of her motherhood,

soiled by her relationship
with Bothwell.

Lost Scotland, lost the whole
damned shooting match.

The thing is,
it need never have happened.

Had she been half the politician
Elizabeth was,

she would have distanced herself
from Bothwell, not married him.

Then she'd have come down like a ton
of bricks on Darnley's murderers,

professing herself to be shocked
at the crime, truly shocked,

then presenting herself
to the people of Scotland

as a doubly victimised mother.

Instead, the mother
let herself be turned into a whore.

Mary now faced the rebel armies
loyal to the murdered Darnley.

But on the verge of battle,
Bothwell conveniently

disappeared to gather
reinforcements, or so he said,

leaving Mary
to face the enemy on her own.

It was the last
she would ever see of him.

Dragged back to Edinburgh,
a captive, filthy and dishevelled,

she appeared at a window,
her dress torn from her shoulders,

her breasts exposed,
and was greeted by a mob howling abuse.

Handbills featuring her
as a mermaid began to appear,

a mermaid
being another name for a prostitute.

Mermaids were not fit
to sit on the throne of Scotland,

so Mary was forced to renounce it
in favour of her baby son.

Her Protestant half-brother,
the Earl of Moray,

took charge of baby James
and made himself Regent of Scotland.

Mary was 25 years old.

Her history seemed done,
but of course it was not.

She had one last weapon -
her air of tragically damaged beauty.

Incarcerated in Loch Leven Castle,
in the middle of a deep, cold lake,

she unleashed
her seductive charm on her jailer,

one of the usually hard-bitten
Douglas clan, who melted in adoration.

After ten months of imprisonment,
in May 1568,

Mary made a getaway across the loch.

There was only one way
to get her throne back -

an appeal to her cousin Elizabeth.

Her next journey, across the border,
was to be in the nature of a temporary refuge.

She must have supposed her stay
would last a month, a year at the most.

Had she known the real answer,
19 years,

she would surely have avoided
the passage across the Solway Firth.

There she was,
an exhausted, bedraggled figure,

her hair cropped for disguise,
sitting hunched in a small boat,

her eyes fixed on the disappearing
shoreline of Scotland.

Mary's appearance on English soil
threw Elizabeth into turmoil.

Was Mary her heir or wasn't she?

After all, Elizabeth wasn't
getting any younger, 35 in 1568.

The royal laundresses were still
sending Cecil monthly evidence

of her capacity to produce children,

but she was no nearer
to getting married.

Would the fugitive Queen of Scots
be treated like the next in line

or at least
as a fellow sovereign, a guest?

Not exactly. Mary's first request
to Elizabeth was for some clothes

that befitted her status rather
than the rags she had fled in.

What she got, after much complaining,
was a packet of linen.

Just as well perhaps that she didn't know

that Elizabeth was already wearing
Mary's favourite pearls,

stolen from Mary by her enemies
and sent to the English queen.

In fact, Elizabeth didn't know
what to do with Mary.

All her royal instincts were outraged
by the humiliations and indignities

heaped on her royal cousin.

If Mary would agree to keep
her hands off the English throne,

Elizabeth was tempted to help
her regain the Scottish crown.

Elizabeth could also see
the wisdom of the opposite view,

that it was folly to restore
a Catholic queen to the Scottish throne,

giving a back door entry to Britain
for the French and Spanish.

There was a safe Protestant regime
in Scotland now, run by Mary's enemies.

Why rock the boat?

So if Mary imagined she could rely on
the sisterhood of queens, she was deluded.

The first thing Elizabeth did
was order an inquiry

into the murder
of Mary's husband, Lord Darnley,

which turned into a trial
in all but name.

Now Mary could have no illusions
that she was anything except a prisoner.

She was shuttled
from house to house

under the watchful eye
of the Earl of Shrewsbury,

who got the unenviable job
of being her jailer.

Some of the houses were not
much more than a damp ruin,

others, like Wingfield here,
were more tolerable.

Wingfield is in Derbyshire,
and that tells you something

about the nervousness
of her captors.

Mary had to be kept a long way
from any possibility of rescue,

far away from Scotland, far away
from London, far away from the coast.

In fact, in the Midlands.

But wherever she was, she had become
maximum security problem number one,

not just a headache
but a magnet for conspiracy.

There were many
political heavyweights

for whom Mary was a legitimate,
attractive alternative to Elizabeth.

They were not just a bunch
of wild-eyed Catholic dreamers,

but men close to the heart
of Elizabeth's government.

Their most ambitious plan
was to annul the Bothwell marriage

and marry the Queen of Scots
to the premier duke of the realm,

Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk.

Although Norfolk may have been a Catholic
at heart, he was, like so many of this time,

outwardly at least,
a conforming Protestant.

It was reasonable
to see the marriage plot

as a way of binding up
the unhealed wounds of the Reformation,

but the queen wasn't fooled for a moment.

When the plot was exposed,
she sent Norfolk to the Tower.

The plot collapsed.

There was, though, a different kind
of fury waiting to happen,

and this WAS burning
with a Catholic flame.

In the north, Catholicism
had not only not been rooted out,

it fed on the burning resentment
and fierce independence

of the great aristocratic families
who ran things here.

They'd been here for centuries,
and weren't about to be pushed around

by a bunch of Tudor bureaucrats.

They weren't to be told what was what
in their government and religion.

So, for them, Mary Stuart
was not just a successor,

she was a replacement,
as in immediate replacement.

So the Catholic north
fought the Protestant south.

For a while it looked
as though the North might win.

As rebels swept through Lancashire,
Yorkshire and Northumberland,

it must have seemed
that Catholic Britain had been reborn.

Now Elizabeth's government
really knew what it was up against,

the latest act in the endlessly
drawn out religious war that began

when Henry VIII made himself
Supreme Head of the Church.

12,000 troops were mustered
and the rebellion brutally crushed.

Perhaps the brutality worked,
because the northern rising

was the last great rebellion
to disturb Tudor England.

It's tempting to feel
the country settling at last

into its Elizabethan finery,
feeling fat, safe, comfortable.

But it was always
a jittery kind of grandeur.

Elizabeth was 20 years into her reign
and suitors had come and gone.

There was always something
the matter with them - too lowly,

too Catholic, too stupid.

And besides,
now her suitors had rivals -

millions of her subjects,
who had become jealously possessive

and thought that the queen
was theirs alone.

In the 1570s, they got her.

The cult, the religion of Elizabeth,
was spectacularly created.

Her accession day became
the greatest of national holidays,

more sacred than all the heathen
events on the papist calendar.

Her image began to appear
everywhere in allegorical pictures,

Elizabeth as the sun who gave
the rainbow its radiant hues.

Even those on the inside,
who could plainly see

the elaborate scaffolding
from which this image was projected,

who knew that the pale moon glow
of the queen's face

was just pulverised eggshell,
borax, alum and mill water,

even these knowing types
were total captives to the cult.

She had this effect on all kinds
of people, especially men,

even when they got older
and should have known better.

They built huge
prodigy houses in her honour.

It was in its way
a desperate need to impress,

a sign of the culture's
raw immaturity,

its hunger for glitzy gorgeousness,

Elizabethan razzle-dazzle,
thigh-hugging hose,

oak-panelled libraries
with yards of unread classics,

ballrooms as big as playing fields.

You'd think devotees would be queuing
for a glimpse of the national Madonna,

but many knew that hosting
the show came at a heavy price.

If you were a burgess
of the City of Warwick,

it's hard to know which lot
would have made you more nervous.

The royal wanderers, after all, came
with 200 carts of the queen's baggage,

each pulled by a team of six horses.

That's a lot of stable room to find,
that is a lot of hay.

Then, a week before the event,

men from the office of purveyors
would come and buy up

everything in sight for the visit,
at prices they decided were fair.

Then the lords and ladies,
so notoriously hard to please.

Supposing they rolled their eyes
at the entertainment,

supposing they wrinkled
their nose at the fair?

Last of all,
there was Queen Bess herself,

a bejewelled apparition
with a chalk-white face

like some goddess on earth.

But, like the immortals, she was evidently
frightening as well as majestic.

You could revel
in the Elizabethan glamour show

as long as you didn't think
too hard about what was going on

beyond the sceptr'd isle.

For out there, in Europe,

a total war between Catholic
and Protestant powers was about to ignite.

The rivalry between
Mary, Queen of Scots, and Elizabeth

was no longer a girlie soap opera,

it was right at the centre
of that global struggle.

In Rome, the Pope declared Elizabeth
was to be considered a heretic.

"Whoever sends her out of the world,"
the Pope decreed,

"not only does not sin,
but gains merit in the eyes of God."

In response, England became
a national security state.

Infiltrators and double agents
were recruited by the government.

Gentlemen vigilantes were sworn
to take out, in advance,

anyone so much as suspected
of plotting against the queen.

At the heart of the operation
was Elizabeth's chief spymaster,

Francis Walsingham.

"Intelligence is never too dear,"
was Walsingham's motto.

His whole career was an applied
demonstration that knowledge is power.

But if Walsingham was ferocious,
he was not paranoid.

There were underground conspiracies,
organised in France, Rome and Spain,

all working to one end -
the assassination of Elizabeth

and the enthronement
of Mary Stuart.

Elizabeth might have been queasy
about taking care of Mary,

but Walsingham wasn't.

It was his job to get his hands dirty
for England, that's what spymasters do.

But he knew well enough
he couldn't just do her in.

Elizabeth had to be free of suspicion
of complicity in murder.

On the other hand, the Mary problem
could not be allowed

to drag on for another 15 years.

Walsingham realised
he would have to force a solution.

So he engineered a trap...
and it was a gem.

Mary may have been under house arrest,

but she was allowed to lead
the life of the country lady.

Then, in December 1585,
Walsingham made a change.

Mary and her household
were suddenly packed up

and sent to close confinement
at Chartley Manor, Staffordshire,

where she was guarded by
the unsmiling puritan, Amyas Paulet.

As Walsingham had intended,
Mary was furious,

desperate
to find a way out of her prison.

So she was thrilled when she discovered
an ingenuous means

to smuggle coded letters
to her supporters.

The letters were secretly
put in a watertight packet,

slipped in the bunghole of beer casks,
delivered to and from Chartley.

What Mary didn't know
was that this was a trap.

Walsingham
had set the whole thing up.

The letters were intercepted.

When Mary's latest champion,
the rich merchant Anthony Babbington,

supplied Mary with details
of a plot to murder Elizabeth

and put Mary on the English throne,
Mary wrote back with encouragement.

The trap was sprung.

At Chartley,
Mary felt the skies lighten.

After nearly 20 years
of unjust imprisonment,

she could feel liberty at hand,
so close she could practically taste it.

One morning, unusually, Paulet allowed her
to go riding, hunting.

From a distance, she could see
a group of horsemen approach.

Mary must have imagined,

"This is it -news from Babington.
Freedom at last."

But it was in fact
the warrant for her arrest.

Babington and his fellow plotters
had been tortured and had confessed.

Mary was taken away while her rooms
at Chartley were searched,

turning up hundreds
of incriminating documents.

In London, Elizabeth wrote
an ecstatic letter to Amyas Paulet.

Amyas, my most faithful
and careful servant,

God reward thee treble-fold
for the most troublesome charge

so well discharged.

There was just one more stop,
one more castle

in the career
of the wandering queen:

Fotheringhay in Northamptonshire.

It's just a grassy mound now,
which is just as well,

since no ruin, no standing
building for that matter,

could take the weight of the drama
that was to follow.

Anyone expecting Mary Stuart
to crumble into tearful confession

had seriously misjudged her.

Up against it,

she drew on something
inside her long and mostly disastrous career

which made her resolute
and unnervingly lofty,

as if she was above this squalid charade.

From the moment of her arrest
to the moment of her execution,

she gave as good as she got.

As a sinner, I am truly conscious
of having often offended my creator.

I beg him to forgive me.

But as queen and sovereign,

I am aware of no offence
for which I have to render account

to anyone here below.

Her second tactic
was to lie her head off,

denying all knowledge
of the Babington plot,

though she was on stronger ground
when she accused Walsingham

of having set up the whole thing
to get rid of her.

Elizabeth did not see it
exactly in this way.

She wrote to Mary
as if the Queen of the Scots

had been an ungrateful house guest
who'd made off with the towels.

You have planned to take my life
and ruin my Kingdom by shedding blood.

I never proceeded
so hastily against you.

On the contrary, I have maintained you
and preserved your life

with the same care
which I use for myself.

On the 15th of October, 1586,
the formal trial began.

In a typical gesture,
half plea, half threat,

Mary warned her prosecutors
to look to their consciences.

"Remember," she said,
"the theatre of the world

"is wider than the realm of England."

It was to that audience,
world-wide and across the ages,

that she now took centre stage.

Mary hobbled into the room,
by now painfully infirm,

dressed head to foot
like a glamorous Mother Superior,

in swathes of black velvet
and a white headdress.

Deprived of any lawyer,
she turned to the big guns

of the Privy Council facing her.

There is not one,
I think, among you,

let him be the cleverest man
in the world,

who would be capable
of defending himself

if he were in my place.

Of course, it wouldn't
have mattered what she said.

The trial resumed in London
without her

and passed swiftly
to her conviction.

All her adult life,
Elizabeth had been spooked

by her fascinating, infuriating cousin,

who seemed to personify
all the cliches about women

which Elizabeth had rejected.

Now she had a precious opportunity
to get Mother Mary off her back.

Parliament
was impatient to be rid of her,

the people were positively baying
for Mary's blood.

Yet, somehow, Elizabeth couldn't
bring herself to do the deed.

It wasn't that she was sentimental
about Mary, it was that she was scared -

scared to be seen by the world
to have her fingerprints on the axe.

This is what was robbing
Elizabeth of her sleep,

the tormenting question,
whether by killing Mary

she was getting rid
of trouble or inviting it.

On February 1st, 1587,
Elizabeth finally put her signature

on Mary's death warrant.

All the chaos, squalor, reckless
adventuring, rash conspiracies,

pathetic delusions, histrionic bouts
of self-pity, all the escapes and rescues,

they had all led her
to this one supreme moment.

She would be a Catholic martyr.

When Mary was told she was
to be executed the next morning,

by a weeping Scottish courtier,
she told him to be joyful instead,

"For the end of Mary Stuart's trouble,"
she said, "is now done."

Carry this message from me
and tell my friends that I died

a true woman to my religion

and like a true Scottish woman
and a true French woman.

When she undressed
for the executioner,

the demure black gown fell away
to reveal a crimson petticoat,

the blood-red hue of the martyr.

Mary's eyes were bound
with a white silk handkerchief,

embroidered with gold,

and she lay with such utter stillness
on the block

that it actually unnerved the executioner.

His first blow cut deep
into the back of her head,

the second severed it
but for a hanging thread of flesh.

Even now, Mary contrived
to remain centre stage.

For 15 minutes
after the last blow of the axe,

the lips on her severed head,
so witnesses reported,

continued to move
as if in silent prayer.

When the executioner,
by now probably wanting to die himself,

held up the head to the spectators,

he made the mistake of grasping it
by the mass of auburn curls...

but that was a wig.

To general horror, Mary's skull, the hair
cropped into short grey stubble,

fell from his grip
and rolled along the floor.

At that moment a terrible howling

came from the crimson,
blood-soaked petticoat.

Mary's lap dog had to be taken away
from the wreckage of her mistress.

They tried and tried to scrub it clean
of the clotted blood.

They did so, but it wouldn't eat,
it languished, it died.

It was just another martyr
to Mary's pathetic, tragic life.

Perhaps that little dog
was the first mourner,

it certainly was not
going to be the last.

Among the mourners,
astoundingly, was Queen Elizabeth,

in deep denial
of what she had done.

(MAN) When she heard, her countenance
changed, her words faltered

and with excessive sorrow
she was in a manner astonished,

in so much as she gave herself
over to grief,

putting herself into mourning weeds
and shedding abundance of tears.

Some of Elizabeth's anguish
may have been genuine remorse,

some of it was downright fear -
and she was right to worry.

Even before Mary's execution,
King Phillip of Spain

had accelerated his plans
for the "enterprise" of England,

and with Mary now dead,
there would be no stopping him.

Suddenly, Elizabethan England
looked very small, very vulnerable.

This was Elizabeth's worst nightmare,
a full-scale Catholic invasion,

and now Phillip was launching one.

The Spanish admirals, however,
were deeply pessimistic of success.

They knew English ships had a massive
edge in speed and manoeuvrability.

The miracle was not
that England was saved

but that the Spanish
came so close to pulling it off.

Only a few miles of the Channel

and an unhelpful wind direction
made the difference.

The weather, as usual,
batted for England.

But it was a close thing.

The English were right to be scared
in the summer and autumn of 1588.

What do you do when weepy
and terrified? You cry for Mummy.

That, courtesy of Robert Dudley -
dying of cancer now,

but still the great impresario
of Elizabeth's shows -

is how she appeared to the troops
at the armed camp at Tilbury -

the mother at last,
the virgin mother of England

and the kind of mother
you'd want on your side,

a mother dressed
in a breastplate of steel.

Everything Elizabeth had ever learned
came together at Tilbury.

Charisma in a costume,
the shell burst of oratory,

and, perhaps most importantly,
what all mothers know instinctively,

that there's no substitute
for being there.

And there, on August
the 8th and 9th, she certainly was,

arriving in a gilded coach,
escorted by 2,000 ecstatic troops.

And what she produced for
the expectant crowds was pure gold,

the first great speech
by a queen, recorded in history.

This is where
the real event of 1588 happened,

not out on the high seas,
but on the soapbox at Tilbury.

My loving people, I come among you,
not for my recreation and disport,

but being resolved in the midst
of the heat of the battle,

to live and die amongst you all,
to lay down for God and my Kingdom

and for my people, my honour
and blood even in the dust.

I know I have the body
of a weak and feeble woman,

but I have the heart and stomach
of a king and a King of England too,

and think foul scorn that Spain
or any prince of Europe,

should dare invade
the borders of my realm

to which rather dishonour
I myself will take up arms.

It's spin and hype, but hype for England
and it did make a difference.

Just like Churchill's rhetoric
made a difference in 1940.

Instinctively, the queen knew
what it was her people needed to hear.

"Look," she said, "I may be a goddess
but I'm also flesh and blood,

"your flesh and blood. Whatever you go
through, I'll go through it with you."

That made the difference
between terror and determination,

that is what we have queens for.

You couldn't top that
and Elizabeth couldn't.

The euphoria of 1588
was short-lived.

In the closing years
of the Tudor century,

famine across the country
triggered food riots.

Cut-throats and beggars
prowled the roads.

The Irish, spoken of as savages,
were driven into a nine-year war.

For the queen, the distance between
the mythology of her ageless body

and the shrivelled reality,
became more glaring.

Thoughts inevitably
began to turn to her succession.

Everybody knew that would be James,
son of Mary, Queen of Scots.

In the end, was it Mary,
Queen of Scots, the mother,

who had triumphed from the grave
over her rival, Elizabeth?

Elizabeth had one comfort -
James had been brought up a Protestant,

forced to disown his own mother
after her disgrace.

But still, he was Mary's child,
the fruit of her womb, not Elizabeth's.

When Elizabeth died in 1603,

nearly half a century
after that day under the oak,

as gently as an apple falling
from a tree, someone said,

and when her underthings
were taken from her body,

it was seen that they still fitted
the contours of the virgin -

wasp-waisted,
slim-hipped, long-limbed.

It was a body which, according to some,
had not fulfilled the purpose

for which God had fashioned it,
to have joined itself to a husband,

to have grown his seed, to have
given him and the country posterity.

She had done none of this.

But no one thought
that she had failed her people.

She had been different, that's all.

When the ring which united
Elizabeth to her country

was removed from her finger, it was
carried 400 miles north to Scotland.

Now it would symbolise a new
marriage, one between two nations.

Elizabeth and Mary Stuart
never met.

It took James I to bring
the two women together at last,

closer in death
than they'd ever been in life.

There was an old, wonderful joke
doing the rounds in the 1560s,

that all their problems
would be solved

if only Mary and Elizabeth
could marry each other.

In one sense they had.

For at least, together, at a terrible price
and with so much pain,

they had had a baby.

It was a little thing with a big name,
Magna Britannia - Great Britain.