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.