Mary Queen of Scots

Mary Stuart, a woman widely known as Mary Queen of Scots, led a remarkable life marked by tragedy, abdication, imprisonment and execution.   Sophie traces the arc of her tumultuous life and links her to a universally loved and admired 20th century woman, who was constrained by institutional rather than physical captivity and whose time was also cut far too short, and in tragic fashion.

This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

Music by Gregor Quendel from Pixabay 

https://www.buzzsprout.com/2599997/episodes/18768959

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Mary Queen of Scots and The Crown That Killed Her, a podcast by Sophie Manners. Hello and welcome back. I'm Sophie Manners, Professor of European History at Queen's College, Cambridge, author of biographies of people who were dealt impossible hands and played them with varying degrees of skill, wearer of a scarf that a Scottish colleague described this morning as aggressively English, to which I responded that this was probably fair and also entirely intentional, given that today's subject and the English crown had a relationship of such sustained mutual destructiveness that I thought a small sartorial acknowledgement of my national position was the least I could offer by way of transparency. We are staying in the British Isles. We are going north, and we are going to discuss a woman whose story has been told so many times, in so many registers, with so much partisan investment, from so many directions, that I approach it with the specific combination of professional confidence and personal caution that I reserve for subjects where the mythology has had five centuries to harden, and the actual history requires sustained effort to locate beneath it. Mary Queen of Scots, I want to say something at the outset that I think is necessary and that the subject demands. This is in the history of these islands one of the most emotionally charged biographical subjects available. She is a saint to the Catholic tradition, a martyr to the Scottish nationalist tradition, a cautionary tale to the English Protestant tradition, a romantic heroine to approximately every novelist who encountered her between 1600 and the present day, and a figure of genuinely complex political and personal failure to the historians who have spent their careers trying to see her clearly. She has been played on stage and screen by actresses of extraordinary range and quality, from Schiller's verse drama to Donizetti's opera, to no fewer than a dozen significant film and television productions, and the cumulative effect of all this creative attention is that most people carry an image of Mary Stewart that is approximately as historically accurate as a Hollywood cowboy is historically accurate about the American West. She was not primarily a romantic heroine. She was not primarily a victim, though she was substantially victimized. She was not primarily a martyr, though she was executed. She was a queen, specifically, a queen regnant of Scotland from her first week of life, a queen consort of France for eighteen months, and a queen with a serious claim to the English throne who spent nineteen years as a prisoner in England before being beheaded at Fotheringhay at forty-four. She was a woman of considerable personal gifts, impulsive political judgment, extraordinary bad luck, and the specific kind of tragic quality that attaches to people whose situation is structurally impossible from the beginning, and who make it worse by being at key moments precisely themselves rather than what their situation required. I find her as a historian genuinely fascinating and genuinely maddening in roughly equal proportion. I suspect that was true of most people who knew her personally, and it may be one of the more consistent threads in her biography. Let us begin at the very beginning, which in Mary's case is both the conventional starting point and an unusually dramatic one. She was born on december eighth, fifteen forty two, at Linlithgow Palace, in Westlothian, the daughter of James V of Scotland and his French queen, Marie de Guise. She was the only legitimate child of James V to survive him. She was also, and this detail is the key to everything, born into a Scotland already in crisis, already the object of competing great power interests, already the ground on which England and France played out their perpetual contest for influence in the Northern Kingdom. Her father died six days after her birth. James V, hearing of his daughter's birth, and apparently reflecting on the Stuart dynasty's origins through a woman, through Marjorie Bruce, daughter of Robert the Bruce, who had married Walter Stuart, is said to have remarked It can we alas, and it'll gangwin alas. Whether he actually said this, whether it was the dying words of a man who believed his dynasty was ending with the birth of a girl is disputed by historians. What is not disputed is that it captures something true about the specific political danger of being born female into a medieval dynasty, and something prophetic about what Mary's life would actually contain. She was crowned Queen of Scots when she was nine months old, nine months. The ceremony was conducted at Stirling Castle with a crown placed on an infant's head, which has the quality of an extraordinary solemn absurdity, the full weight of dynastic obligation laid on a child who cannot yet walk by a country that needs a monarch and is prepared to accept one of that age because the alternative is worse. The next few years of her childhood were shaped by one of the more grimly named episodes in British diplomatic history the Rough Wooing. Henry VIII of England, having failed to secure a marriage treaty that would have united Mary to his son Edward and brought Scotland into the English orbit, responded to Scottish resistance with a series of devastating military raids into southern Scotland that burned towns, destroyed harvests, killed civilians, and left a level of destruction that the Scots remembered for generations. It was, even by the standards of sixteenth century diplomacy, an unusually frank expression of the principle that if you cannot persuade your neighbour's child to marry your child, you may encourage them by burning their country down. The Scots' response was to send Mary to France. She arrived at the French court in August 1548, aged five, accompanied by her four young companions, the four Maries, ladies in waiting, who would remain her companions for years, and who are themselves the subject of enough legend to fill several footnotes. She was received by Henry II, of France and his queen, Catherine de Medicy, at a court of extraordinary sophistication and extraordinary danger, and she thrived there. This is perhaps the most important biographical fact about Mary that the romantic tradition consistently underweights. She was very good at France, she was educated by some of the finest tutors in Europe. She learned French, Latin, Greek, Italian, Spanish, and Scots. She was accomplished in poetry. She wrote verse in French that serious scholars have regarded as genuinely capable, in music, in dance, in the deportment and the intellectual culture of the French Renaissance court. She grew up tall, striking and charming, and the charm was not merely physical but intellectual. Contemporary accounts of her consistently note the quality of her conversation, her warmth, her capacity to engage people personally in a way that made them feel specifically attended to. She was, in short, a woman of real gifts, and France allowed those gifts to develop in the most favourable conditions available. She married Francis, the Dauphin of France, in April fifteen fifty eight. She was fifteen. He was fourteen. The marriage was a great occasion of Franco Scottish alliance, conducted with the ceremonial splendour of the Valois Court at its height, and Mary wore white, an unusual choice for a wedding dress in a period when white was associated with mourning, a choice that was either a statement of personal aesthetic confidence or an inadvertent piece of biographical foreshadowing, depending on how generous you choose to be about the symbolism. When Henry II of France died in july fifteen fifty nine, Francis became King Francis II of France, and Mary became Queen of France. She was also, in her own estimation, and in the estimation of every Catholic in Europe, the rightful Queen of England. Elizabeth I, the Protestant daughter of Anne Boleyn, was regarded by Catholics as illegitimate, the product of a marriage that the Pope had never recognised. Mary was the legitimate heir. She used the English royal arms alongside the French and Scottish arms without any apparent sense that this might be considered provocative. It was, of course, considered extremely provocative. Elizabeth noticed. Elizabeth did not forget. Francis II died in december fifteen sixty, after a reign of seventeen months. He was sixteen years old, and he died of an ear infection that went to the brain, one of those deaths by trivial infection that remind you, with uncomfortable directness, of what the world was like before antibiotics. Mary was eighteen, widowed, no longer Queen of France, and required to determine what came next. Um she returned to Scotland in August fifteen sixty one. She had been gone for thirteen years. She returned to a country she barely knew, speaking a court French that was more natural to her than Scots, Catholic in a country that had undergone a Protestant Reformation during her absence under the influence of John Knox, a man of such comprehensive and eloquent disapproval of female rule, and of Mary specifically, that his works constitute an entire secondary literature of political misogyny dressed in theological language, and entering a political landscape of quite extraordinary complexity that she would need to navigate with exceptional skill. She managed it initially rather better than either her admirers or her detractors tend to acknowledge. For the first five years of her personal rule in Scotland, from 1561 to 1566, she governed with a pragmatism and a political intelligence that surprised many who had expected a Catholic queen to immediately attempt to reverse the Reformation. She did not. She kept her own Catholic Mass in her private chapel while making no attempt to impose Catholicism on her Protestant subjects. She worked with her Protestant half brother, James Stuart, Earl of Moray, illegitimate son of James V, capable politician, reformed Protestant, as her chief adviser. She conducted her government with a competence that earned her during this period the genuine loyalty of a significant portion of the Scottish political establishment. And then she met Lord Darnley. Henry Stewart, Lord Darnley, was nineteen years old when Mary married him in july fifteen six five. He was, by the available evidence, tall, handsome, and almost comprehensively lacking in any other qualification for the role of royal consort. He was vain, petulant, prone to drink, jealous, easily manipulated by flattery, and possessed of none of the political intelligence that Mary's situation required from the man she married. He was also, and this is the specific political calculation that overrode all other considerations, which is why Mary chose him, and why the choice was, in its own terms, not entirely irrational, Catholic and a great grandson of Henry VII of England, which gave their potential children a claim to the English throne that strengthened Mary's own position as Elizabeth's successor. The political calculation was sound. The marriage was a disaster. Darnley, feeling excluded from genuine power, Mary had not given him the crown matrimonial that would have made him king in his own right rather than merely king consort, attached himself to a faction of Protestant lords and participated in the murder of David Rizio, Mary's Italian secretary, who was dragged from Mary's presence chamber and stabbed fifty six times in March fifteen sixty six. Mary was pregnant, she was present when Rizio was seized. She was held briefly at dagger point by one of the conspirators while her husband watched. She managed with a clarity of political mind that is one of the most impressive things in her biography to separate Darnley from his fellow conspirators within days, using a combination of personal appeal and political persuasion, and to escape with him from Holyrood to Dunbar. She was six months pregnant, um she had just watched her husband participate in the murder of her closest advisor in her own rooms. Her son James was born in june fifteen sixty six. He was baptized Catholic, as befitting the heir to the Scottish throne, and the potential heir to the English one. Elizabeth was his godmother, which is one of those facts of sixteenth century diplomatic protocol that requires the reader to pause and appreciate the specific quality of complexity that Elizabeth's relationship with Mary managed to achieve. Darnley was found dead in Edinburgh in february fifteen sixty seven. The house at Kirkle Field, where he had been staying, was destroyed in an explosion in the night, and his body and that of his servant were found in the garden, apparently strangled. Whether he died in the explosion or was killed before it, and the explosion stage two cover the method, is one of the most discussed forensic mysteries in Scottish history, and it has not been definitively resolved. What is not in serious historical doubt is that the explosion was organised by someone, and that the most likely beneficiary of Darnley's death was the Earl of Bothwell, James Hepburn, Earl of Bothwell, a powerful Protestant border lord who was the most significant military force available to Mary. Three months later Mary married Bothwell. I want to pause here because this is the decision that, more than any other single act, determined the course of her life, and it requires the historian to hold several things simultaneously, that the romantic tradition tends to collapse into a single narrative. The Romantic tradition says Mary was abducted by Bothwell, possibly raped and married under Duress, and her apparent choice of him was not a choice at all. There is evidence for this. Bothwell did intercept her party near Edinburgh in April 1567 and take her to Dunbar Castle, and what happened there is not fully known. He was trying by an Edinburgh jury of his peers who acquitted him of Darnley's murder in a trial from which the prosecution was essentially absent, in circumstances that suggest less a legal proceeding than a political arrangement. The historical tradition, somewhat less romantically, observes that whatever the nature of her captivity at Dunbar, Mary subsequently married Bothwell in a Protestant ceremony in May fifteen sixty seven, three months after Darnley's death, while Bothwell was widely regarded across Scotland and Europe as the likely murderer of her previous husband, and that this marriage, whatever its origin, was a political catastrophe of the first magnitude. The Scottish nobles did not accept it. Both Protestant and Catholic lords rose against her. At Carberry Hill in june 1567, her army melted away without a battle. Bothwell was allowed to flee. He eventually died, mad in a Danish prison, and Mary surrendered to the Confederate lords. She was imprisoned in Lochlevan Castle in the middle of a Loch, and in july fifteen sixty seven, under extreme duress, she signed an instrument of abdication in favour of her one year old son, who was crowned James VI of Scotland. She miscarried twins, Bothwells, while imprisoned at Lochlevin. She escaped from Lochlevin in may fifteen sixty eight, helped by a young man named Willie Douglas, who stole the castle keys and rode her across the Loch in a scene of genuine adventure, and rapidly gathered an army. She was defeated at the Battle of Langside, near Glasgow on may thirteenth, fifteen sixty eight. She was twenty five years old. She had been Queen of Scotland for twenty six years, of which she had governed personally for seven, and she had lost the throne, the army, the husband, and the country. She crossed the Solway Firth into England on may sixteenth, fifteen sixty eight, in a fishing boat. She believed that her cousin Elizabeth would receive her, support her, help her regain her throne. Elizabeth was a queen, as she was. Elizabeth understood, as she did, what it meant to be a female ruler in a world designed to resist female rule. Elizabeth would help. Elizabeth did not help. Elizabeth's position was, it must be acknowledged, genuinely difficult. Mary was the focus of Catholic hopes in England. Mary had a claim to the English throne. Mary's arrival in England had already provoked excited correspondence among English Catholic nobles, for whom her presence constituted a standing invitation to rebellion. Helping Mary regain her Scottish throne would mean sending an English army to fight a Scottish Protestant government that was currently pro English, in support of a Catholic queen who had already used the English royal arms without permission. The political logic against helping Mary was, by the standards of sixteenth century real politic, essentially unanswerable. Elizabeth imprisoned her instead. Nineteen years I want the number to land properly nineteen years from fifteen sixty eight to fifteen eighty seven from the age of twenty five to the age of forty four. Moved from castle to castle, Bolton, Tutbury, Wingfield, Chartley, and finally Fothering Hay, under varying degrees of confinement, with varying degrees of comfort, always watched, always the focus of the Catholic plots that Elizabeth's ministers feared, and that Elizabeth herself dreaded. She was not in a dungeon. She had her own household, her own attendance, her embroidery. The extraordinary embroidery that she produced over those nineteen years, much of it surviving in collections, including at Hardwick Hall, is one of the most extraordinary things about the captivity years, a sustained creative achievement that is simultaneously a pastime, and a political statement, and a form of endurance. She was in genteel imprisonment, managed by a series of noble custodians, the Earl and Countess of Shrewsbury, Bess of Hardwick, among others, who found her to a person both fascinating and exhausting. She plotted, of course she plotted, what else was she to do? She was a queen, anointed, legitimate, held without trial for nineteen years by a cousin who would neither release her nor condemn her formally because either action carried political risks that Elizabeth preferred to defer indefinitely. Mary's natural response to captivity was to attempt to end it, and the methods available to a imprisoned queen in the sixteenth century were primarily diplomatic and conspiratorial. She used both. The plots accumulated, the Rodolphy plot, the Throckmorton plot, and Elizabeth's ministers, led by William Cecil and Francis Walsingham, watched them accumulate, sometimes encouraged them to develop to the point where they could be prosecuted, and waited for the one that would be sufficient justification for the action that Cecil and Walsingham had concluded was eventually necessary. The Babbington plot of fifteen eighty six was that plot. Anthony Babbington, a young Catholic gentleman, coordinated a conspiracy to assassinate Elizabeth and place Mary on the English throne. Mary corresponded with him. Walsingham intercepted the letters. He had a spy in Mary's household and a method of opening and resealing her correspondence that she did not detect. And in letters that have been debated by historians ever since, Mary appears to have approved the plan, including the element involving Elizabeth's assassination. Whether those letters were genuine or interpolated with additional text by Walsingham's agents, or so selectively accepted in the trial as to misrepresent their actual content is one of the most contested questions in Mary's historiography. The trial in october fifteen eighty six was not, by any standard we would now recognise, a fair proceeding. She was denied legal counsel, denied the right to see the evidence against her, denied the right to confront witnesses. The outcome was predetermined by the political necessity that Cecil and Walsingham had been building toward for nineteen years. She was found guilty. Elizabeth spent months refusing to sign the death warrant, not from sympathy, most historians conclude, but from the genuine political terror of executing an anointed queen, of establishing the precedent that monarchs could be legally killed by other monarchs, and of the likely international response from France and Spain. Her ministers eventually presented the signed warrant to the execution commissioners without her explicit final authorisation, in what was either a bold act of political necessity or a straightforward act of insubordination, and Elizabeth was furious when she learned of it, furious in the specific way of a politician who wanted the outcome and wished not to own the method. On the morning of february eighth, fifteen eighty seven, at Fothering Hay Castle, in Northamptonshire, Mary Queen of Scots was beheaded. She wore a gown of black velvet. When the gown was removed for the execution, she was wearing a petticoat and bodice of crimson, the Catholic colour of martyrdom. She had planned her appearance with the careful theatrical precision that had characterized her at her best moments throughout her life. She was making a statement. The statement was I die for my faith and for my right to the English crown, and the clothes on my body will carry that statement forward after my head has been separated from it. The execution was, by the accounts of the witnesses, botched. The executioner required three strokes of the axe. When he lifted her head it fell. Her hair was a wig, and the head rolled free, revealing hair that captivity had turned grey. Her little dog, who had been hidden under her skirts, refused to leave the body. The witnesses were by all accounts shaken in ways that go beyond professional discomfort. There was something about the specific reality of executing a queen, this queen, in this way, that exceeded what the ceremony of state execution was designed to contain. She was forty four years old. She had been Queen of Scotland for the entirety of her life. She had been a prisoner in England for nineteen years. She was the first anointed European monarch to be legally executed. Her son, James VI of Scotland, whom she had not seen since he was ten months old, would succeed Elizabeth as James I of England in sixteen oh three. He moved her body from Peterborough Cathedral to Westminster Abbey in sixteen twelve, where she lies today, her tomb directly opposite that of Elizabeth, the two cousins facing each other across the Henry VII chapel for eternity, which is the kind of architectural irony that history occasionally produces and that no novelist would have the audacity to invent. Now, what do I make of her? She was not the saint that Catholic tradition required. She was not the scheming adulteress that Protestant tradition constructed. She was a woman of real intelligence and real gifts, who made a series of decisions, Darnley, Bothwell, the flight to England, that were each in their moment understandable, and each in their consequence catastrophic. She was dealt a hand that was genuinely nearly impossible, Catholic queen of a Protestant country, legitimate claimant to a throne occupied by a Protestant cousin who could neither release her nor execute her without political cost, symbol of a religious cause that she had not chosen and could not escape, and she played it with a mixture of occasional brilliance and recurrent catastrophic judgment that I find the more I study it. Not contemptible but recognizably painfully human. She was also, and I think this matters, a woman for whom the personal and the political were almost impossible to separate in ways that her situation made uniquely dangerous. Her feelings about Darnley, the initial attraction that overrode political calculation, the subsequent contempt that made her susceptible to Bothwell, the blind spot about Bothwell's qualities that the romantic tradition reads as passion, and the historian reads as political misjudgment. These were not weak character so much as the specific vulnerability of a woman who had spent her most formative years in a court that valued personal charm above political prudence, and who had never, from the age of fifteen to twenty five, been in a situation where personal charm was insufficient. The execution is, whatever one thinks of the political justice of it, a genuine historical atrocity. She was the sovereign queen of another nation, tried by the court of the nation that had imprisoned her, on charges that she was not permitted to contest with adequate representation for a plot that may have been partly fabricated. That her execution was politically expedient for England does not make it legal or just or anything other than the elimination of an inconvenient rival by a government that had run out of patience for the inconvenience. Elizabeth knew this. The fury with which she responded to the news that the warrant had been executed, the rage, the tears, the imprisonment of the minister she blamed was not performance or not entirely performance. It was the response of a woman who had understood and who made sure her ministers understood that what had been done could not be undone and would not be forgotten. She was right. It has not been forgotten, it never will be. Now the tease picture a woman born into a position of enormous formal authority at the very beginning of her life, a position so significant and so contested that her existence from her first days constitutes a political problem for the more powerful states around her, someone whose childhood and adolescence were shaped entirely by the geopolitical interests of great powers, who saw her primarily as an instrument, a marriage piece, a dynastic tool, a means of extending or limiting the influence of France, England, Spain, the papacy, rather than as a person. Picture someone who was educated brilliantly, and who possessed genuine intellectual and personal gifts, and who moved through the most sophisticated courts of her era with a charm and a cultural fluency, that her contemporaries consistently noted, someone who was in the best conditions her life provided, genuinely impressive and genuinely effective, and who showed, in the early years of her personal rule, a political intelligence that her detractors tend to overlook. Picture someone whose personal life was entangled with her political position in ways that her situation made very nearly inescapable, for whom the choice of a partner was simultaneously a private matter and a state matter, and for whom the two were impossible to navigate simultaneously without one dimension undermining the other. Someone who made choices in her personal life that were individually comprehensible and collectively catastrophic, and who paid for those choices with a severity that exceeded what justice required. Picture someone who spent a significant portion of her adult life in a form of captivity, not incarcerated in a cell, but contained, monitored, restricted, her movements controlled, and her communication surveilled by a political system that could neither accommodate her nor eliminate her without cost, someone who, during that captivity, maintained a creative and intellectual life of considerable intensity, and who found in the work of her hands, in making things, a form of expression and endurance that sustained her through years of enforced restriction. Picture someone who was tried by a process, whose fairness was questionable, whose outcome was determined before the evidence was fully examined, and whose condemnation reflected political necessity more than legal justice. Someone who met their end with a composure and a theatricality, a deliberate control of the final scene that was both personally genuine and politically calculated, and that has shaped how subsequent centuries have understood their life and their meaning. Picture someone whose legacy has been continuously claimed and reclaimed by causes that she would have recognised only partially, someone who has been made into a symbol by traditions that find different things in her story, and who has in the process been both celebrated and distorted into something more legible and less complicated than she actually was. Who is this person? It is Diana, Princess of Wales. I hear from here the entire range of reactions that this comparison is capable of producing, and I want to address the most obvious objection immediately. Diana was not a queen, was not beheaded, was not imprisoned, and died in a car crash rather than on an executioner's block. I know the biographies are not identical, they were never going to be identical. What I am claiming is structural rhyme, not biographical equivalence, and the rhyme, when you examine it, is one of the most precise in this series. Diana Francis Spencer was born on july first, nineteen sixty one, at Park House on the Sandringham estate in Norfolk, the daughter of Viscount Althorpe, later the eighth Earl Spencer, and Francis Roche. She was born, in the most literal possible sense, into the orbit of the British monarchy. Her family had been connected to the royal household for generations, she had grown up on the Sandringham estate, she had known the royal family from childhood, and she was selected. There is no other word that captures the process accurately, as a suitable wife for the Prince of Wales, on the basis that she was young, aristocratic, English, apparently uncomplicated, and a virgin in an era when the British establishment still considered this a relevant qualification for the position. She was nineteen when she became engaged, she was twenty when she married Charles Prince of Wales in july nineteen eighty one, in a ceremony watched by an estimated seven hundred fifty million people worldwide. She was, from the moment of the engagement, no longer primarily a person, but primarily a role the future Queen of England, the wife of the heir apparent, the face of the monarchy for the next generation, and the machinery of that role descended on her with a completeness and a speed that she had not fully anticipated, in the specific way that roles of that magnitude are never fully anticipatable until you are inside them and the doors have closed, the marriage was unhappy. This is now so thoroughly documented from so many sources that contesting it would be a waste of both our time. Charles and Diana were incompatible in temperament, in interest, in emotional need, and in their fundamental conception of what the marriage and the role required, and the unhappiness was present early and became progressively worse through the nineteen eighties. Diana suffered from bulimia, from depression, from the specific psychological consequences of isolation within an institution that did not know how to respond to her distress, and whose general approach to individual unhappiness was to apply the institutional equivalent of the stiff upper lip and wait for the problem to resolve itself. She did not resolve herself. She expanded instead into a public role of extraordinary range and emotional immediacy, into a quality of connection with people outside the palace that the institution found simultaneously useful and threatening, into a presence that the monarchy depended on for its popular legitimacy, even as it found her personal conduct, her emotional expressiveness, her willingness to speak to journalists and to the public, with a directness that Royal Protocol was not designed to accommodate, increasingly uncontrollable. The parallel with Mary's relationship to the Scottish nobility and to the Scottish Reformation is structural. Both women were essential to the institution that contained them, and both were found by that institution too personally themselves to manage. Mary's Catholic faith, her French formation, her personal intensity were not compatible with what the Scottish Protestant establishment required its queen to be. Diana's emotional transparency, her public warmth, her need for personal acknowledgement were not compatible with what the Windsor Institution required its princess to be. Both women were the wrong person in the right role, in a way that the institution could neither fully accommodate nor entirely suppress. The divorce was finalised in August 1996. Diana retained the title Princess of Wales, but lost the title Her Royal Highness, a specific, deliberate institutional diminishment that she felt acutely, and that the palace intended she would feel acutely because it was designed to clarify her position relative to the institution from which she was being separated. She was from 1996 to her death in August 1997, a figure of enormous public popularity and genuine political significance. Her land mine campaign contributed directly to the Ottawa Treaty banning anti personnel mines, and the political establishment on both sides of the Atlantic, found her interventions in foreign policy matters somewhat alarming, who existed in a state of careful, ambiguous, unresolved separation from the monarchy, whose identity she had helped to shape for sixteen years. She died on august thirty first, nineteen ninety seven, in the Pont de l'Alma Tunnel in Paris, in a car crash while being pursued by paparazzi photographers. She was thirty-six years old. The public response was one of the most extraordinary collective grief events of the late twentieth century, flowers outside Buckingham Palace, cues to sign condolence books, a quality of national mourning that the monarchy found, once again, difficult to manage and difficult to ignore. The institutional response, the delay in flying the royal standard at half mast, the Queen's apparent hesitation to return from Balmoral. the eventual public address, has been analysed as the behaviour of an institution, confronting the limits of its own emotional vocabulary. And I think that analysis is correct. Now the parallels with Mary first, the instrument made person. Mary was brought to France as a marriage piece, grown into a queen, and then required to return to Scotland when the dynastic purposes she had been assembled to serve were ended. Diana was selected as a royal bride, trained into a princess, and then required to manage the consequences when the marriage at the centre of the role failed. Both women began their adult lives as instruments of institutional purposes and became in the process of living those lives people whom the institutions could not adequately contain. Second, the incompatible gifts Mary's charm and cultural fluency were genuine and valuable and were also in the specific context of Protestant Scotland frequently counterproductive. They generated suspicion, resentment, the accusation of French Catholic foreign influence. Diana's warmth and emotional accessibility were genuine and valuable and were also in the specific context of the Windsor Institution frequently counterproductive. They generated institutional anxiety about control, about the distinction between the monarchy and the person, about what happens when the vessel becomes more compelling than the crown. Third, the marital catastrophe Mary's marriages to Darnley and Bothwell are the pivots on which her political career broke. Diana's marriage to Charles is the centre of her story and its failure, documented not only in biographies but in her own words, in the Morton book, in the panorama interview shaped everything that followed both women made choices in their personal lives that their institutions found unacceptable, and both paid for those choices with a structural disenfranchisement that the institutions were careful to make look like personal failure. Fourth the surveillance and the captivity Mary was surveilled and imprisoned. Diana was surveilled and contained not imprisoned in the literal sense but comprehensively monitored, her mail reportedly opened, her conversations taped, her movements managed by an institution whose relationship to her privacy was, in the late years of her marriage and after the separation, considerably more invasive than the public at the time understood. The panorama interview of nineteen ninety five in which she spoke directly to the public over the heads of the institution is the Diana equivalent of Mary's smuggled correspondence. The captive queen communicating directly with the world outside the walls fifth, the trial by institution. Mary was tried by an English court and denied adequate representation. Diana was not tried by a court but she was subjected to a sustained institutional campaign to manage her reputation, to limit her access to the structures of royal life, and to define her position relative to the monarchy in terms that served the institution's interests rather than her own. The withdrawal of the HRH title is the most specific instance but the broader pattern, the managed diminishment of a woman who had become too powerful and too independent for the institution to comfortably accommodate is structurally cognate to what happened at Fotheringhay sixth the death as symbol Mary wore crimson to her execution and arranged her appearance with precise awareness of the image she was creating for posterity. Diana's death generated an image the crash, the flowers, the candlelight vigil, the funeral that was consumed and processed by the world with an intensity that made it within days, something more than a death. Both women in their endings, became symbols that exceeded their biographies, and both became symbols whose meaning continued to be contested by the traditions that claim them. Where do the parallels strain? Mary was a queen regnant, who governed a country, commanded armies, and exercised sovereign power however briefly and however imperfectly Diana was a princess by marriage, who had no formal governmental authority, the formal power is categorically different and historically significant. Mary's captivity lasted nineteen years and ended in execution. Diana's constraint lasted sixteen years of marriage and ended in death in a car crash. The deliberate political institutional nature of Mary's captivity is not replicated in Diana's situation, however genuinely confined Diana's experience within the Windsor institution was, and Diana's death was accidental. Whatever the conspiracy theories that accumulated around it, the historical consensus is that she died in a car crash while being chased by photographers and that the pursuit was the consequence of a media culture that she had simultaneously suffered from and at various points used. Mary's death was the deliberate political act of a state these are not the same thing. The verdict Mary and I say this with specific acknowledgement that Diana's story is more recent, more personally affecting for many of my listeners and in terms of the public grief it generated more immediately resonant. But Mary is the more historically complete figure and the more structurally illuminating one. Her story contains the full arc, Queen from birth, brilliant years in France, personal rule in Scotland, political catastrophe, nineteen years of captivity, execution and the final vindication of her son's succession to the English crown that gave her death a dynastic meaning she had always intended it to have The Arc is complete. The tragedy is complete the irony that the son for whom she had been trying to secure the English succession succeeded to it sixteen years after her death, without any action required from her, is the kind of historical irony that makes the subject inexhaustible. Diana's story is incomplete in the sense that all lives cut short are incomplete. We do not know what she would have done with another thirty years, what the land mine campaign would have become, what her relationship with the monarchy would have looked like after the Queen's death, what role she would have played in the reign of her son. The open arc is its own kind of tragedy, but it is not the same kind as Mary's, and for the historian's purposes the closed arc is the more fully available subject I grew up in Kingston upon Thames, where the cultural relationship to the monarchy is one of comfortable, slightly amused, fundamentally loyal affection the kind of relationship to the crown that produces people who cue in good natured resentment to watch state processions, and then feel genuinely moved when the carriage passes. My relationship to Mary Queen of Scots is therefore mediated by that English cultural inheritance and I want to acknowledge it. England imprisoned her England killed her English historians have historically been readier to discuss her political failures than her political gifts and readier to describe her death as the consequence of her own decisions than as the political execution of an anointed queen by a government that found her inconvenient. She was all of those things she was a woman of genuine gifts and genuine failures. She was a queen who made serious mistakes she was also a sovereign monarch executed by a cousin who had no legal or moral right to kill her after nineteen years of imprisonment that was itself an act of ongoing political injustice dressed in the language of protective custody she deserves the full account this has been my attempt at it Mary Stuart, born december eighth, fifteen forty two at Linlithgow Palace, died february eighth, fifteen eighty seven, at Fotheringhay Castle Queen of Scotland, from six days old, Queen Consort of France for eighteen months, prisoner of England for nineteen years, she wore crimson to her execution. She arranged her appearance with precision. She knew exactly what she was doing she always knew exactly what she was doing. The tragedy is that it was often not enough. I'm Sophie Manners thank you for being here Antonia Fraser's Mary Queen of Scots, published in nineteen sixty nine and still in print remains the most comprehensive and most sympathetic serious biography, though John Guy's My Heart is my own, published in 2004 gives a sharper account of the political context. Both are worth your time and if you are ever in Northamptonshire the village of Fotheringhay still exists. The castle does not it was demolished after the execution but the mound remains in a field by the river Nene, and it is one of those places where the ground itself seems to carry the weight of what happened there. Go in winter go in the early morning stand on the mound by the river you will understand something that I cannot fully convey in a podcast. Good night