Rival Queens: Mary Stuart and Elizabeth I

Although they were cousins, Elizabeth I and Mary Stuart had little in the way of familial affection. Join Katie and Sarah as they take a closer look at the infamous rivalry between Mary Stuart and Elizabeth I in this episode.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff you Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Katie Lambert and I'm Sarah Dowdy. And we recently
did a podcast on Queen Elizabeth the First and it
got us thinking about her most important relationships while she

(00:24):
was queen, and today we're going to focus on her
relationship with her cousin and fellow Queen Mary Stewart, possibly
her greatest rival. And since we already talked about Elizabeth's
early life, let's talk a little bit about Mary Stewart's.
Unlike Elizabeth, she was born a queen. She was the
child of King James the fifth of Scotland and his

(00:46):
French wife, Mary of Gus, But her father died six
days after her birth, and this causes a little trouble
for baby Mary. It does her grandmother is the sister
of Henry the eighth, so he immediately makes an attempt
to control her, but the regency instead goes to her mother.
Henry keeps at it and pursues what's called the rough

(01:06):
wooing between his young son and Mary, hoping to make
an alliance there. Um Mary's mother instead sends her off
to France to be raised in the court of Henry
the second in Catherine de Medici, And this was the nicest,
most luxurious court in Europe at the time, so Mary
was in good hands and she had a lot of
French relatives there. And again, unlike Elizabeth, she had a

(01:30):
fairly happy childhood. It wasn't so stable childhood, right, And
Mary grows up to be a beautiful young lady. She's
about five eleven, very tall, remarkably tall for the Renaissance. Yes,
she's got red gold hair and ambered eyes. Yeah. Mary
is really the perfect Renaissance princess. When she finally marries

(01:50):
Henry and Catherine's eldest son, Frances in fifteen fifty eight,
and they like each other. They've been raised pretty much
as siblings, but it's the marriage probably isn't consummated. He's
a few years younger than her, and he's very sickly,
and she thinks of him fondly, but more in a
brotherly sort of way than in a husbandly sort of way.
Also in fifteen fifty eight, where the parallels start, Elizabeth

(02:14):
the first as sends to the throne, so Mary, through
the tutor line, is next in line, but Henry had
in order of succession that had muddled things up a bit.
Catholics actually would consider Mary the Queen of England already
because Elizabeth. They don't recognize Elizabeth's parents marriage that of

(02:37):
Henry the Eighth to Anne Berleyn So to them, Elizabeth
is a courtesan's bastard right. And in fifteen fifty nine
Frances becomes king and Mary is his queen consort, and
she begins putting on airs as far as this whole
Queen of England things go, because she's safe, comfortable and

(02:58):
powerful in France. She has very powerful in laws, and
she can do what she wants with impunity. She certainly
doesn't try to disabuse anybody of the idea that she's
the rightful Queen of England. Um. She and Frances actually
start quartering their arms with that of England, so they're
proclaiming themselves rulers of France, Scotland and England, which is

(03:21):
not something that's going to make Elizabeth very happy, you know.
And in a sense of course, Mary, by Henry's order
of succession had been disinherited or her line had been
so this does make sense. But the trouble between the
two queens begins around fifteen sixty when Mary refuses to
sign the Treaty of Edinburgh, and the basic back story
on that there's been a long alliance between France and

(03:45):
Scotland and it's getting less and less popular with the
increasingly Protestant Scottish lords who are ready to see themselves
free to France, and England backs them, and uh, they
put together the Treaty of Edinburgh, and obviously, Mary, as
Queen Consort of France as well as Queen of Scotland,

(04:08):
can't uh can't advocate breaking up this relationship. She embodies
this relationship, and she'd also have to then officially recognize
Elizabeth as the Queen of England instead of herself. It's
tantamount to renouncing her own claim to the English throne.
But further muddling matters at the time, her husband Francis
dies of an ear infection, so she's eighteen, she's dowager

(04:32):
queen in France, and it is time for Mary to
return home to Scotland, where again she hasn't been since
she was a baby. So things start to get more
personal around now. She asks Elizabeth for safe conduct crossing
the channels should she be forced to land on English soil.
Elizabeth gives her a pretty snappy answer, which she actually

(04:53):
sails before she can even receive it. But there would
be no safe conduct and no welcome for the Queen
of Scott's and her cousin's realm until she had fulfilled
her obligations by ratifying the treaty, as she was an
honor bound to do, and Mary was pretty much just
sorry she'd asked. He was offended by this response, and
the international community also wasn't thrilled with Elizabeth's behavior. They

(05:15):
thought she's hassling her young, beautiful, newly widowed cousin and
it's something queen right. So Elizabeth comes back from that
and tries to play nice and tells Mary that in
fact they do have a sisterly friendship and after all,
she didn't send her navy after her. It was very benevolent.
The essential fact here is that Mary as a teen

(05:37):
queen consort over in France is one thing to Elizabeth,
but Mary, Queen of Scott's back on the marriage market
is another issue. Entirely right, because with Mary coming back
to Scotland, Elizabeth now has a dynastic threat. There's also
the possibility of religious conflict because Mary had told the
Pope she intended to restore the Catholic faith to Scotland

(06:00):
and its Protestant and Elizabeth is a staunch Protestant as well.
And she was also extremely pretty, extremely powerful and a
rival to all of Elizabeth's potential suit Elizabeth isn't the
most eligible queen in Europe anymore, and that really bugs her.
But on the other hand, she sees Mary as a
potential compatriot. She is her cousin after all, and she's

(06:24):
a fellow female monarch, which is a a very unique
situation to be in. So Mary returns to Scotland in
fifteen sixty one, and her life as a potential queen
consort in this fancy French court has made it very
difficult for her to know how to run things. She
simply hasn't been raised that way and she doesn't have

(06:45):
the tools she needs to be as powerful as she
needs to be. She hasn't been raised and educated as
a prince. She's been educated as a as a queen consort,
and that's a very different, different job. And most troublesome
of all are these Scottish nobles. The Scottish nobles are

(07:06):
really difficult to deal with. They're more interested in um
fluffing up their own feathers, kind of in having private feuds.
They're always feuding with each other then supporting the crown.
And we have to consider to um, there's been a
regency while the queen has been in a minority for
eighteen years, so they haven't had a strong ruler for

(07:29):
a generation. But Mary does okay, at least at first
um with her illegitimate half brother James, Earl of Moray,
she comes to a sort of policy of religious tolerance,
so at least in that respect there's no more fighting
or things are at somewhat of a piece as far
as religion. She can practice her Catholic religion but not

(07:51):
pull up a Mary Tutor for instance, and have everyone
burned at the stake. And some people are happy to
have her there because again they've had that regions se
for so long. They haven't had a monarch around in
a long time. And she is beautiful and charming and
pleasant to be around, so you know, maybe she'll be
good for Scotland after all. And when she gets back
to Scotland, she immediately starts working on Elizabeth to be

(08:15):
named Elizabeth's Air, of which, as we said earlier, um
by birth she she would be, but she's sort of
downgraded her ambitions at this point. She's not trying to
be named. She's calling herself Queen of England now quartering
her arms. She just wants to be Elizabeth's air. And
Mary likes and dislikes Elizabeth as well. These aren't just

(08:37):
complicated feelings on Elizabeth's part, because on one hand, Elizabeth
has been helping the Protestants cause trouble for Mary in Scotland,
but friendly relationships would only help. They both realize it
would benefit them to be friendly, right, But Elizabeth can't
name Mary her air. And this is what's at least

(08:59):
someone at the cry box of their relationship, because that's
one of the reasons Elizabeth never wanted to get married
at all. She didn't want to name an air in
her lifetime because it would be a threat to her.
And there's a really good quote about that. Yeah, she says,
thank you that I could love my winding sheet when
his example show princess cannot even love their children that
are to succeed them, And she goes on to say

(09:20):
that she's been a witness to this, uh, this desire
to overthrow the current prince with whoever, whoever the heir
is uh, something she's seen in her sister's lifetime. When
Mary Tudor was queen, people were saying it's time for Elizabeth.
Elizabeth should be queen instead. So she knows what it's like,

(09:40):
and so her fear and reluctance and that context makes
sense with her being friends with Mary, but they aren't
quite cordial, at least for a time, and Mary is
even a bit courtly. On seeing her cousin Elizabeth's portrait,
she said she wished that one of them was a
man so that their kingdoms could be united by marital alliance,
which we thought was really interesting because of course that

(10:04):
is how you played the game. Then you married off
eligible people to create these political alliances. But when you
have these two two single queens, you can't do the stalemate.
What's going to happen. One of them is going to win,
and we'll see which one a little bit later. So
they both really want to meet each other, though, and
they come pretty close to it in fifteen sixty two,

(10:25):
but a religious war between the Catholics and Huguenots and
France upsets the meeting and they're really devastated by it.
Mary apparently cried all day and it was only consoled
when somebody told her that Elizabeth was just as upset.
So there's a real personal element to this relationship too.
They're curious about each other. But the thorn and their relationship,

(10:49):
of course, is the fact that they both are two
single queens. But Elizabeth has of course set herself up
as the Virgin Queen, a reputation she's worked very hard
to maintain haying, whereas Mary, on the other hand, temperamentally
isn't suited to be single. She doesn't want to be,
and she also has to think about the interests of Scotland.
It is in her interest to get married, but of

(11:10):
course any choice she makes, much like Elizabeth, is pretty
much impossible. Yeah, Elizabeth thinks that she'll be okay with
Mary's choice as long as it's somebody agreeable to the English,
namely not a Catholic prince from Spain, Austria or France,
which would be a very powerful alliance that Elizabeth does

(11:31):
not want to happen. So instead she offers up a
man named Robert Dudley and we'll talk about him more
in another podcast and relationship to Elizabeth. But he was
Elizabeth's great love, so this is a weird match, right,
And it was also an insulting one to Mary because
Dudley was of low birth and he's tainted because he's

(11:53):
implicated in the very mysterious death of his wife. So
Mary is genuinely insulted by this idea of a match.
He's kind of Elizabeth's reject. Elizabeth can't marry him herself
at this point, and Dudley is not interested in this
match either, so he doesn't want to move to Scotland
and leave Elizabeth. No, so she's game playing a little bit.

(12:13):
And Mary herself is trying to arrange something with Don Carlos,
who is Philip the Second's Air and it's good this
doesn't work out because Don Carlos is not a great guy. Yeah,
so Mary declines an invitation to meet with Elizabeth, which
of course greatly offends Elizabeth and um. Eventually Mary's advisers, Uh, right,

(12:34):
to Elizabeth's advisor, my guys will call your guys and
tell her that Mary won't even consider marrying Dudley. Unless
Elizabeth would settle the succession on her and after that
Elizabeth's quiet, the game is over. Mary has has called
her on it, basically, But at this point another possible
suitor enters the game, and his name is Lord Darnley.

(12:56):
So Lord Darnley made a little shot at Mary when
she was first widowed. His mother sent him to France
to press his suit with with Mary. She wasn't interested
at the time, UM. But Elizabeth was very disturbed by
this because Lord Darnley is also a tutor claimant. He's
a cousin of Mary's. Um. Elizabeth doesn't want any consolidation

(13:21):
of the tutor claims, so when Darnley returns from France,
she has him and his mother arrested. But by this time,
if patch things up, Elizabeth is okay with him again.
She lets Darnley go to Scotland on family business, whatever
that might be. UM. And it's kind of suspicious here
because she knows what Darnley's intention is regarding Mary. Not honorable,

(13:45):
let's put it that way, or at least honorable Mary Mary.
But he's not an honorable guy. There's several accounts of
him being basically someone who's really nice on the outside,
and once you get to know him, you realize justice
how bad is So it's kind of suspicious that Elizabeth
is sending him. She might know how this all plays

(14:08):
out right and be planning this is something that could
possibly ruined marry So three nights before Darnley arrives, spectral
warriors are seen fighting in the streets of Edinburgh at midnight,
and I think, good. You can all agree that's a
bad omen. And soon enough Mary welcomes him, and soon
enough falls in love with him. They're both young, they're

(14:29):
both very attractive, and as Katie said earlier, being single
does not suit Mary. And they announced their engagement and
then I love this. So Elizabeth has let Darnley go
to Scotland, knowing what might happen, but she completely plays
dumb and is shocked by the engagement and arrest Darnley's mother,

(14:52):
and Mary, quite quite understandably is saying, hey, I thought
you wanted me to marry an English guy, and I am.
So they get married in July of fifteen sixty five,
and it is quickly revealed to Mary that she has
made a very bad choice. Darnley is simply not a
good guy and it's not just her who decides to

(15:13):
hate him, it's all of these Scottish lords. Those contentious
lords do not like Darnley, and things get really bad
by March fifteen sixty six, so less than a year
after the marriage. Uh in the Retzo murder, Darnley and
other lord's plot to murder Mary's favorite in front of her.

(15:35):
She's heavily pregnant by this point, and they're hoping that
she'll be so shocked by seeing this man killed in
front of her, you know, at her feet essentially, that
she'll be dehabilitated and Darnley will act as maybe a
regent or maybe a king. It's just completely delusional thinking,

(15:56):
because no one would have ever let that happen. Again,
they hated. So Mary is confined for a few days,
and she is much brighter than her somewhat dimwitted husband,
and she convinces him that the conspirators are going to
go after him next. There's no way he's going to
be a regent or a co ruler or something now,
So she gets all of his conspirator's names out of him,

(16:18):
and they end up escaping through servant quarters and ride
twenty five miles to safety once again while she's heavily pregnant. Um.
The relations between Elizabeth and Mary actually improve after this
after obviously Elizabeth was disappointed with Mary's choice of husband
and things have gotten a little frosty there. But Elizabeth

(16:39):
is so horrified that something like this would happen in
front of a fellow sovereign queen, an anointed queen um,
that she warms up to Mary again right and when
Mary gives birth to her son, James in June fIF
sixty six, she names Elizabeth as the godmother, and in
a fun little story, Elizabeth ends a gold font for

(17:01):
the baby, but not realizing that the baptism took place
a few months after the birth font she sent was
much too small. She's really embarrassed for fat little baby
game Um. But the birth doesn't help Mary and Darnley reconcile,
and she's starting to think, Okay, I have a male air.
How can I get rid of this husband? She was

(17:24):
really upset about the prospect of spending her days with him,
but annulment is out of the question because that would
mean that James is illegitimate and she can't do that.
She needs an air, so her options are pretty much
divorce or arresting him for treason, but the question is
answered for her in fifteen sixty seven. So on the

(17:44):
night of February nine, Mary is supposed to spend the
night with Darnley, but she realizes that the last minute
that she has a mask to attend and goes out. Meanwhile,
Darnley's room is blown up seriously and he runs out
into the night naked and is strangled to death. That's

(18:06):
quite a story, and we're going to talk about it
more later because it's too good to pass up now.
That'll be a different podcast. But after his death, Mary
doesn't conduct herself in the wisest manner. In fact, she
marries the chief suspect, James Hepburn, who is the fourth
oral of bothwell, just three months after the death, and

(18:26):
also after he abduct and ravished her according to accounts,
and that's always been unclear. Was it a willing abduction
or did this guy just steal her for real? And
he's married at the time, so he's granted a divorce
to marry her. So again, things aren't looking so great
as far as Mary's choices are going. But she may

(18:47):
just have been very simple sad at that point, she's
in ill health. She needs a strong man to help
her manage Scotland. She's already married once badly, and she's
you know, got her heir and has to figure out
how she's going to live the rest of her life.
But Elizabeth is disgusted by Mary's actions and um she

(19:07):
even compares them to her own relation with her true
love Dudley and his wife's mysterious death, and how she's
conducted herself so properly after this, uh, contrasted with Mary
running away with this guy. Elizabeth even wants little Prince
James sent to England so she can rear him under
her protection rather than him being with Mary and this

(19:29):
strange new man. But Mary and Bothwell part ways on
June fifteen sixty seven. Uh. He's forced into exile and
imprisonment by those lords who you know, having just gotten
rid of Darnley, they're not willing to to put up
with Bothwell. Um. But Mary herself is imprisoned on a
tiny island in the middle of a lock and deposed

(19:52):
in favor of her one year old son, James, and
Elizabeth is completely outraged. She was outraged by Mary's actions
to begin with. But now she's even more outraged by
what the Scottish lords have done by deposing Mary, because
Elizabeth has very strong viewpoints about again appropriate behavior one
and about the monarchy and how an anointed queen a

(20:13):
sovereign and this was simply inappropriate. And a lot of
historians have suggested that if Elizabeth hadn't protested so much
against their actions, and the Scottish lords would have executed
Mary without much to do at all. Um And and
that really is the crux of their relationship. This, this
is why Elizabeth hesitates over the Mary question for so long,

(20:35):
because actively trying to depose or sentenced to death a
fellow monarch sets a really dangerous precedent and it's not
something Elizabeth wants to get into. But in contrast all
these helpful things she's doing at the same time, in
March of fifteen sixty eight, Elizabeth is eyeing Mary's jewels,
which of course have been put up for auction, and

(20:55):
she outbids Catherine de Medici for her pearls, and you'll
see them in several portrait. Mary is briefly liberated the
following year, and uh tries to seek refuge in England
with her cousin Elizabeth. She's probably thinking Elizabeth has been
pretty nice and helpful lately, but this is a really

(21:16):
bad move because Elizabeth uses as an excuse issues surrounding
Darnley's murder and holds Mary in a series of prisons
for the next eighteen years. And the English tribunal delivers
the only verdict they can against Mary because there's nothing
that can be proved. But Elizabeth can't let her go either,

(21:38):
because Mary at this point has gotten interested again in
claiming the English throne because she doesn't want the Scottish
one back, and I mean, really would you. It's pretty understandable,
and the tempo of her life has changed at this point.
She's gone from being this romantic, adventurous figure in this
whirlwind life is fleeing on horseback exactly to spending twenty

(21:59):
years in prison, practicing her religion and working on her embroidery. Yeah,
she's her embroidery is kind of an interesting side note.
There actually been books written solely about Mary's embroidery. She
was really good at it, but she would use symbolism.
I really liked rendering of a ginger cat playing with

(22:20):
a mouse, which was a reference to the red hair
to Elizabeth toying with poor little mouse Mary. But most
of her time in prison is really sad, and her
health suffers, her beauty diminishes, and she resolves to get
out first by pleading with Elizabeth. But also she is scheming.
From the very beginning. Elizabeth's chief advisor actually warns her

(22:42):
the Queen of Scott's is and always shall be a
dangerous person to your estate, and that is very much true.
Mary has started plogging against Elizabeth almost as soon as
she was in England um and unfortunately she's the numb
or one hope for English Catholics. So basically, any rebellion

(23:04):
you have that's trying to unsee Elizabeth is going to
look to Mary as the woman to put on the
throne in her stead. And one of the plots in
fifteen seventy was a big deal, the Rodolphie plot, which
was your average run of the mill Catholic plot to
assassinate Elizabeth and replace her with Mary. But after this

(23:24):
particular event, Elizabeth never again considers restoring Mary, and she
recognizes James the sixth as King of Scotland. But Mary's
security gets tighter around four She's been living as a
queen imprisoned, but it goes into major lockdown mode by

(23:45):
this point, and there are also new laws against plotting
treason in England by this point, and Elizabeth is afraid
that she might have to kill Mary under them and
goes to the now grown James and asks if you
and your mother would be willing to co role, and
he's unwilling to do this. He's seeing a future for
himself as um not only king of Scotland, but King

(24:07):
of England, and uh. Elizabeth tries to hide this betrayal
from Mary, which was kind, but the end finally happens
in a plot that was sent through beer barrels. Mary
is under this heavy security, but these beer barrels are
like the one one chink in the armor. But even then,
even after yet another plot comes up where it's clear

(24:28):
to Elizabeth that Mary is still conspiring against her, she
wavers for months about doing anything about it. She even
declares I am not free but a captive. She knows
that their lives are entwined together forever, and finally, though,
Mary is executed in February eight and she goes to

(24:49):
her death in a very dignified manner and when the
fact of her death is broken to Elizabeth, she's almost hysterical.
She dresses in morn, she cries, she rages against those
who drove her to do this, so much so that
her advisors get out of town because worried for their right.
And she's also afraid, truly deeply afraid, that God will

(25:12):
punish her for what she's done. And she's part of
this is certainly personal. This was a hard personal decision
for Elizabeth to make, but she's also worried that her
international reputation will be shot, that she's put Catholic martyr
to death, not just a treasonous queen um. And some

(25:34):
of this rage and these crying fits are to show
the world that she's upset by this. So while the
relationship between the Thistle and the Rose came to a
bloody end, the interesting thing is that despite this long
history they have with one another, they've never met no
and Mary never stopped pleading for personal contacts. She was

(25:57):
a very charming woman, and she was sure that she
could charm her cousin too. And Elizabeth was interested at
first in this, but became more and more distant, and
she's she's afraid of the charm. She's afraid that Mary
will enchant her, or worse, upstage her, be prettier and
more impressive than the great Queen Elizabeth. She said at

(26:20):
one point, there's something sublime in the words and bearing
of the Queen of Scott's that constrains even her enemies
to speak well of her. And again, since they never met,
they had the opportunity to make the other one larger
than life in their minds less excuse me, more than human.
And it's funny too to consider their reputations. Elizabeth always

(26:43):
played up the masculinity of her strength, even though she
was a very emotional woman, and Mary has always been
seen as the emotional one, even though honestly she's more ruthless.
She would have seen Elizabeth murdered because she was so
dust for it. Well, Elizabeth takes forever to sentence her

(27:03):
to death. So between this battle of the rival queens,
they both end up winning and losing. In the end,
Elizabeth makes James her Air, and every British monarch since
then has been a descendant of Mary. But James, of
course was a Protestant Air, which was the cause dear
to Elizabeth's heart and the best conclusion to this story

(27:26):
is that when James becomes king, he brings his mother's
remains to Westminster Abbey and builds a magnificent marble tomb
for the lady Chapel, with a Scottish lion at her feet,
and the tomb lies just across the aisle from you
guessed at that of Elizabeth together forever. So we will

(27:47):
end with the words of Elizabeth, who wrote a sonnet
about Mary and said, the daughter of Debate, that eke
discord doth so shall reap no gain where former rule
has taught still peace to grow. So, Katie, is that
about someone up? I think that does it for today.
But if you'd like to learn more about the Queens
of old, check out our article how Royalty Works, and

(28:08):
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