Imprisoning the Catholic Queen of Conspiracy

Dominic Sandbrook (0:10)

Hello, everybody, welcome to The Rest Is History. Now, as you know, we are in the middle of our mighty series about Elizabeth I, Mary Queen of Scots, Philip II of Spain, Philip Sidney, and as Tom calls it, the Tudor Cold War. So what we would have called in a previous incarnation of The Rest Is History, the road to the road to the Spanish Armada.

Tom Holland (0:35)

The storm clouds of war are definitely gathering.

Dominic Sandbrook (0:39)

The Brink of Apocalypse would be the name of the episode or something. Tom, you suggested doing a bonus episode about Mary Queen of Scots and her time in England because it really is extraordinary how long it is. She's in England in captivity for about 18 and a half years, between 1568 and 1587

She's only 25 years old when she lands at Workington, Cumbria. So May 1568 Now, remind us for people who maybe haven't listened to the original Mary Queen of Scots series, what brought her to England in the first place?

Tom Holland (1:13)

Basically, the complete mess that she had made of ruling what was becoming an increasingly Protestant country as a Catholic queen. And we talked about this in the series that we did on her, that she really bulls things up. One of her problems, her religion, it's a massive thing. She's Catholic. She has a disastrous taste in husbands, two disastrous marriages. And there's a widespread suspicion in Scotland, probably unfounded, that she had murdered one of them, Lord Darnley, the cock chick. This had led the great Protestant lords in Scotland to rebel against her, to make her prisoner. She'd been imprisoned on this castle on an island in the Loch of Loch Leven. She'd managed to escape that. She'd tried to raise Scotland against her Protestant foes. She'd been defeated. And at that point, she thought, I have no recourse but to go to England and ask Elizabeth, who is her cousin, if she could have English backing to get her back on the throne. And so she goes to Dundreen in Abbey on the coast of Galloway, gets a boat and is rowed across the Solway Firth to Cumbria in North West England. It's such an indicator of her lack of political astuteness and judgment.

She assumes that the Protestant Elizabeth will be delighted to restore her to the throne. So Jenny Wormald, who we quoted throughout our series on Mary Queen of Scots, really doesn't rate Mary at all. Says she doesn't appear to have had any awareness of the enormity of the problem which her arrival in England would create. And just to spell out why Mary's arrival in England is a massive problem for Elizabeth. If Elizabeth backs Mary and tries to put her back on the Scottish throne, England will be dragged into a Scottish Civil War. And Elizabeth hates spending money on war and particularly on Scottish Civil Wars. She absolutely doesn't want anything to do with it. Elizabeth is not sure that Mary wasn't guilty of Darnley's murder. So that is also a problem. But worst of all, Mary is Elizabeth's obvious heir. We've been talking about this throughout the Cold War series.

Were Elizabeth to die, the Catholic Mary would be the obvious successor. And there are, of course, all kinds of people who want to expedite the death of Elizabeth basically by assassinating her. And so this has been a kind of running theme throughout the series that we've been doing on the Cold War. And so what this means when Mary turns up in England in 1568, is essentially she has to be kept as a prisoner. But there is a problem. You can't just take her and bang her up in the Tower of London or in some dungeon somewhere, lock her up and throw away the key. Because Mary's treatment by Elizabeth and her government is constantly shadowed by two contradictory requirements. The first is obviously, if she's going to be kept as a prisoner, she has to be kept secure. Her jailers have to stop her escaping or being rescued. She's too big a threat to the Elizabethan government to be out there on the loose. And this is why, for most of her time in England, she is kept in the Midlands. So at a distance from Scotland and at a distance from the southern coast, because Mary has very close links with the Guise in Catholic France.

Both Protestant Scotland and Catholic France have an interest in seeing her freed. And so this is why Mary has to be kept in the middle, away from either of them. And also in the middle of the Midlands, because C is the obvious way to destroy her.