The Beheading of the Cousin Queen

The rivalry between Mary, Queen of Scots, and Queen Elizabeth I is stuff of legends: neighboring queens, cousins, opposites, and deadly opponents. [Support Noble Blood on Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/noblebloodtales. Noble Blood merch is available here: https://store.dftba.com/collections/noble-blood]

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Noble Blood, a production of I Heart Radio
and Grimm and Mild from Aaron Minky. Listener discretion is advised.
One quick note before we begin, and I'm sure you
are absolutely tired of hearing me say it, but I
wrote a book. It's a novel called Anatomy, a love story,
and if you love spooky stories about people in history,

(00:24):
I really think you're gonna love it. It takes place
in nineteen century Edinburgh and it's everything I love, like
the reason I made Noble Blood in novel form. So
if you haven't pre ordered, please please do me a
favor and check it out wherever you buy books, your
local indie bookstore. It would mean so much. And now
the episode for the woman we know today as Queen

(00:54):
Elizabeth the first. Growing up, Elizabeth's royal status was far
from secure. Her mother Anne Boleyn, had climbed from Lady
in waiting to Queen, only to fall out of favor
and lose her head in one of the quickest and
most dramatic downfalls in royal history. Little Elizabeth was only

(01:16):
three at the time, and it's not quite certain how
aware she was when it came to the matter of
her mother's death, or the matter of her own subsequent
loss of status. Perhaps apocryphale, she is said to have
asked one of her father's courtiers, why was I lady
Princess yesterday and Lady Elizabeth today? The former princess became

(01:40):
after the death of her mother, Like her older sister, Mary, delegitimized,
and so Elizabeth grew up all too aware that her
status was precarious. Growing up, Elizabeth's households were small and meager.
Her governess often needed to beg the king that he
would provide the uns for his daughter to have proper clothing.

(02:03):
Elizabeth was still a child approaching ten when her father,
King Henry the Eighth, beheaded his fifth wife, Catherine Howard.
Elizabeth had liked Catherine Howard. She had treated her with kindness,
but the beautiful teenage queen had flirted or maybe done
more with men who weren't the king, and so Catherine

(02:24):
Howard was imprisoned in the tower, forced weeping to lower
her head on a black block and wait for the
hiss of an axe man's blade. Some say that it
was at that moment, when Catherine Howard was beheaded, that
Elizabeth decided that she herself would never marry, She would

(02:46):
never subject herself to the mercy of a man. Her
own fate was already decided by her father's capricious winds.
Why invite that sense of unhappy submission into her life again?
Volunteer early. By the end of Henry the Eighth's life,
he softened towards his two illegitimate daughters, Mary the Elder

(03:08):
and Elizabeth. Though he didn't formally re legitimize them, he
did re enter them into the line of succession after
Henry's death, The youngest sickly Edward, would be king, son
of Henry and his third wife, Jane Seymour. If Edward
didn't have any children, next in line would be Mary.

(03:29):
If Mary didn't have any children, only then would Elizabeth
become queen. The profound uncertainty and insecurity of her status
growing up, combined with the sheer unlikeliness that she would
ever become queen, gave Elizabeth a pragmatic and independent streak.

(03:52):
She didn't trust anyone unless she had to, and even
then she never left her back unguarded. Her loyalty is
were hard one. Elizabeth knew that her right to rule
wasn't inevitable, and she was willing to fight to protect it. Meanwhile,
just one country away, Elizabeth's first cousin, once removed, was

(04:16):
born to an entirely different sort of childhood. This cousin
was Mary Stewart, Queen of Scots, whose father died only
six days after her birth, and so Mary, Queen of
Scotts was officially Queen of Scotland from infancy. A quick
side note here, Mary is an incredibly common name in

(04:40):
the Tutor era, but for this story, the Mary that
we'll be talking about from now on is not Mary Tutor,
Elizabeth's older sister, but this new, much younger Mary, Queen
of Scotts. Mary Queen of Scots, nine years younger than Elizabeth,
was praised throughout her childhood for her good looks and

(05:00):
her charm. While her mother ruled Scotland for her, Mary
was raised in France alongside the dauphin, the prince who
would one day be her husband, Frances. Because Mary was
a queen in her own right, the French court honored
and deferred to her. She outranked even the King of

(05:21):
France's own daughters. People at court called her la plu parfait,
or the most perfect. At sixteen years old, her husband
became King of France, making Mary the queen of two countries.
Royalty was her birthright, and as she was taught, England
was her birthright as well. Mary Stewart was the granddaughter

(05:46):
of Henry the Eighth's older sister Margaret, and as a Catholic, many,
including the French and Mary herself, believed that she was
the rightful heir to the throne of England over Henry
the Eighth's illegitimate Protestant daughter Elizabeth. While in France, Mary
used the English lion in her own personal coat of arms,

(06:09):
and before her wedding with Frances, she signed an agreement
bequeathing Scotland and her claim to the English throne to
the French crown. If she Mary died before Frances and
they didn't have children, these two cousins, Mary and Elizabeth
would never meet. They would spend their early lives writing

(06:31):
letters to one another, calling each other sweet names, and
building upon the diplomatic bonds of family. In theory they
should be allies. They were, as Mary would write, two
queens quote in one aisle of one language, the nearest
kinswoman that each other had, but family only goes so

(06:54):
far when your cousin begins to present a threat from
cordial letter. The relationship between Elizabeth Tudor and Mary Stewart
stretched and devolved into rivalry, and then into something more
pernicious and more deadly. We as a society have a

(07:17):
habit of pitting women against one another. Hilary Duff and
Lindsay Lohan, Jennifer and Angelina, Brittany and Christina. It's a
side effect of misogyny to frame any disagreement between women
as a catfight, to preemptively assume that there's only room
for one woman at the top. And so all women

(07:39):
are inherently each other's competition, and so it's no wonder
that the comparison between Mary, Queen of Scott's and Elizabeth
the First has fascinated writers and historians for generations. They
were two tall, red headed queens, one romantic, beautiful, married

(08:00):
three times, the other a virgin who presented herself as
masculine to retain power. But this is a rivalry that
goes far beyond mere tabloid father In the end, one
of these two cousins would sign the other's death warrant.
Family is important, but not as important as power. I'm

(08:23):
Danish schwartz and this is noble blood. Mary Stewart and
her husband Frances were King and Queen of France, but
only briefly. Francis had always been sickly, and less than
two years after he ascended to the throne he died

(08:47):
of possibly one of the more embarrassing ways that a
king could go out of an ear infection, in December
of fifteen sixty and so a few months later, the
teenage dowager Queen returned to her homeland Scotland, a place
she hadn't lived since she was five years old. The

(09:08):
nineteen year old Mary now returned with a new name.
She had left Scotland as Mary Stewart s t e
w A RT, but at some point in France she
changed it to Stuart s t U a r T
to make it easier for the French to pronounce. At
this point in her life, she was reportedly six ft

(09:30):
tall and strikingly beautiful, with long red hair. She was
well educated, spoke multiple languages, and incredibly poised. Unfortunately, she
was also probably unaware of just how complicated the political
and religious situation had become in Scotland. During her long absence.

(09:51):
Mary was Catholic, but the Protestant movement in Scotland was
gaining considerable traction. Mary's half brother, the Earl of Moray,
who had been ruling in Mary's absence since her mother's death,
was a Protestant, as was the influential preacher John Knox,
who had waste no time issuing fiery sermons denouncing Mary

(10:13):
and her sinful ways. As Queen, Mary decided that religious
tolerance would be the best course of action, and so
she built a cabinet of advisers with predominantly Protestant voices.
Her focus even then was on England, trying to ensure
that she was made Elizabeth the First's heir, if not

(10:34):
just given the throne outright by the people. Back when
she was still Queen of France, Mary had refused to
ratify the Treaty of Edinburgh in fifteen sixty, after English
and Scottish Protestant forces had bested the Catholic French in Scotland.
In that treaty, the French agreed to formally stop recognizing

(10:55):
Mary as the rightful Queen of England, but Mary, refusing
to ratify, wouldn't ever stop recognizing herself, at least in theory.
Even so, the relationship between the cousins remained cordial. Mary
and Elizabeth wrote letters to one another, with Mary always
waiting patiently to be formally named as Elizabeth's heir. The

(11:19):
two talked about possibly getting together and meeting in person,
but like distant mutual friends, their plans never came to fruition.
Elizabeth was always guarded on edge wisely, it would seem
when it came to Mary, she understood that it didn't
benefit her at all to name her successor while she

(11:39):
was still alive. She once told an adviser, princes cannot
like their own children. Think you that I could love
my own winding sheet. In case you don't know, a
winding sheet is what you wrap a corpse in. Some
people like to frame Elizabeth as vain and jealous of

(11:59):
Mary's youth and her beauty, but that seems a little
unnecessary to me, a little tabloid, just politically to Elizabeth,
Mary was a constant and lingering threat. That political threat
of Mary as a distant, smiling enemy just biding her
time until she could capture the English throne perhaps explained

(12:22):
why Elizabeth was so outraged when Mary, Queen of Scotts,
took the matter of her second marriage into her own
hands without consulting her own advisers, let alone consulting Elizabeth.
Without even waiting for the Pope to give dispensation, Mary
made up her own mind to marry a man named
Lord Darnley. The excuse given later was that Mary was

(12:46):
just smitten, that she fell so head over heels in
love with Darnley that she couldn't wait for anyone to
give permission. At least that was the excuse given to
Elizabeth the first Because puppy love or not, it was
an incredibly strategic marriage in terms of asserting Mary's claim
to the English throne. Considerate the matrimonial equivalent of moving

(13:10):
a chess piece into a check position. Mary and Darnley
were both grandchildren of Henry the eighth older sister Margaret Tudor,
though Darnley was the product of Margaret's second marriage. If
Mary's goal was selecting a husband that highlighted her blood
in the English dynasty, Darnley was the perfect fit. Unfortunately,

(13:34):
that was the only thing about Darnley that was perfect.
In fact, Mary realized pretty quickly that she had saddled
herself with a truly awful husband. He was a drunk
and lazy man who was jealous and selfish. While Mary
was pregnant with their son, Darnley joined in the conspiracy

(13:55):
to kill Mary's secretary, a man named David Rizzio, out
of Ellessie about the rumors that he Rizzio, not Darnley,
was the child's real father. Darnley and his men stabbed
Rizzio while Mary watched on screaming. Even with that trauma,
their child was miraculously still born healthy, a son who

(14:19):
Mary named James. Mary made Elizabeth the first the cousin
she had still never met her son's godmother. The child's father.
Darnley wouldn't be in the picture long. Mary's first husband
died with an ear infection whimper. Darnley would die with
a boom, well, a boom and then a strangulation. Early

(14:44):
in the morning of February fifteen sixty seven, the house
in Edinburgh where Darnley had been staying kirk of Field,
was destroyed and an explosion. Darnley was found partially clothed
nearby a Apparently he was unharmed by the actual explosion,
but he was dead all the same, someone had been

(15:07):
waiting for him to flee the building and had been
there to wring his neck. Pretty much immediately, everyone knew
that the murder was the doing of Mary's close adviser,
the Earl of Bothwell. Bothwell was sent to trial and
he was found innocent, but no one really took any
stock in that. It's pretty easy to be found innocent

(15:30):
when the queen herself is more than grateful that her
terrible husband was dispatched. The murder itself was shocking, but
then even more shocking. Only three months after the murder
of her husband, Mary married Bothwell. Still, the case is
only suspect. Mary didn't even bother to complete the mandatory

(15:53):
mourning period for her deceased husband, terrible as he was.
Some say that the pair had con fired together to
kill Darnley from the beginning, that they had been lovers
the whole time. Other historians maintained that Bothwell kidnapped and
then raped Mary in order to entrap her in a marriage.
It's impossible to know with any real clarity, but we

(16:16):
do know that the optics were awful, and that Elizabeth
the First was watching her cousin in horror. After Mary's
marriage to Bothwell, Elizabeth the First wrote to her, Madam,
to be plain with you, our grief has not been
small that in this your marriage, so slender consideration has

(16:37):
been had, that as we perceive, manifestly, no good friend
you have in the whole world can like thereof. And
if we should otherwise write or say, we should abuse you.
For how could a worse choice be made for your
honor than in such haste to marry such a subject, who,

(16:58):
besides other and tore is, lacks public fame, has charged
with the murder of your late husband. It was, in short,
an international scandal. Some even say that the scandal of
a queen quickly marrying the man who likely murdered her
husband inspired the plot of Hamlet. But Queen Elizabeth the

(17:21):
First and Shakespeare weren't the only ones outraged. The combined
one to punch of Darnley's unsolved murder and Mary marrying
the primary suspect led to the Protestant factions in Scotland
overthrowing Mary, imprisoning her, and forcing her to abdicate in
favor of her one year old son, James, who then

(17:43):
became King James the sixth of Scotland. Mary was imprisoned
at luck Levin Castle, although after a few months in
fifteen sixty eight, she managed to escape and she managed
to rally supporters for one final battle a bat All
to reclaim the kingdom that was her birthright. Mary was defeated,

(18:05):
and so without a country, she fled to England in
the hopes that her quote sister, Queen Elizabeth would be
her salvation. Mary hoped that Queen Elizabeth might even help
her continue to rally support so that she could reclaim
the Scottish throne. But no, Instead of sending troops to
Scotland or even sending Mary to pro Catholic France, Queen

(18:29):
Elizabeth the First welcomed Mary to England and then placed
her under de facto house arrest. It was a moral
and legal gray area Mary, even if she did promise
to be fully loyal to Elizabeth, and even if Elizabeth
believed her, was still a symbolic leader for plenty of

(18:50):
Catholics who wanted to kill or overthrow Elizabeth. That became
especially true after Pope Pious the Fifth issued a papal
bull on February seventy allowing any English Catholic the authority
to overthrow the Protestant Queen. Mary, for her part, refused
to recognize the authority of the English court to try

(19:13):
or imprison her, and so the Gray Area. Mary was
Elizabeth's biggest threat, and the longer that Mary was alive,
the more Catholic rebels would unite in their fight around her.
Queen Elizabeth's advisers all wanted her to execute Mary and
make an end to it all. One member of the

(19:33):
House of Commons called her the monstrous and huge dragon
and mass of the earth, but Elizabeth hesitated. Executions were
a messy business. They made martyrs. When Elizabeth had to
sign the execution warrant for the Duke of Norfolk, she
had signed and then recanted, and then signed again, and

(19:54):
then recanted a total of three times before the order
finally went through. And Mary it was an even more
complicated case. First, there was her son, the King of Scotland.
Over the nineteen years that his mother would be imprisoned,
James would go from an infant to a grown man,
And even though he didn't know his mother at all,

(20:16):
and even though he was raised Protestant, Mary was still
his mother, and Elizabeth feared at least in theory the
retaliation of his Scottish forces should she execute Mary. But
that issue was easy enough to get around because Elizabeth
had no children of her own. As a virgin queen,

(20:37):
James the sixth of Scotland was the front runner to
get the throne of England when Elizabeth died. Elizabeth could
dangle and threaten that throne to make sure James wanted
to stay on her good side. But there was a larger,
more philosophical reason that Elizabeth was hesitant just to do
away with Mary. Though plenty of people believed that Mary

(20:58):
had been legally and justly deposed, Elizabeth didn't. In her mind,
Mary was still an anointed sovereign. You can't just execute
an anointed sovereign. Even though it would eventually become more commonplace,
at this time it was a huge deal. A wife

(21:19):
is one thing. A queen in her own right is
something entirely different. Queens are anointed by God and so hated,
as Mary was among most of England. Large As her
threat continued to loom, Elizabeth couldn't bring herself to pull
the metaphorical trigger, until, of course, she no longer had

(21:41):
a choice. Though Mary wasn't supposed to be communicating with
the outside world, she was slipped letters that were smuggled
in the watertight casing inside the stopper of a beer barrel,
unbeknownst to Mary and her supporters, though Elizabeth and her
spy masters were privy to the scheme, and so even

(22:04):
though the Catholic loyalist Anthony Babington wrote his letter to Mary,
Queen of Scott's encode, Elizabeth's ciphers decoded it, and so
they read the details of what would come to be
known as the Babington plot to overthrow Elizabeth in a
letter that asked Mary for her advice on how to

(22:24):
ensure quote the dispatch of the usurping competitor. Elizabeth spies
also got their hands on Mary's reply when she signed
what would become her own death sentence, a letter in
which you wrote, quote, let the great plot commence. Of course,
one can't really blame Mary. She had been imprisoned for

(22:47):
coming up on two decades for no crime with no trial,
close to half of her young life. Someone loyal writing
to her to try to help her escape and reclaim
power must have seemed like a no brainer. Thomas Phillips,
the cipher decoded and copied Mary's letter, adding a short

(23:09):
ps to Mary's reply, asking hey, quick question, just curious,
Would you mind telling me the names of everyone else
involved in this plot? No reason. But before that letter
was even answered, the arrests started. Babbington and his co
conspirators were arrested and imprisoned and sentenced to death, to

(23:30):
be hanged, disemboweled, drawn and quartered. Apparently, the first two
executions were so gruesome that Queen Elizabeth made a quick
change for the rest of them, saying that from then
on the men were to be hanged until quote quite
dead before the rest of the mutilation. It took a

(23:54):
few more months for Mary to be tried and found
guilty of collision. Even with the smoking gun of her
letter to Babington, Mary continued to proclaim her innocence. Elizabeth's
advisers knew how prickly Elizabeth would be when it came
to actively ordering the execution. Her closest minister, Cecil, summoned

(24:17):
Parliament so that the pressure wouldn't be Elizabeth's alone. It
was quote to make the burden better born and the
world abroad better satisfied Elizabeth. Secretary Davison slipped the death
warrant to Elizabeth in the middle of a large pile
of other things for her to sign, and as soon
as she signed it, knowing that the Queen could change

(24:39):
her mind at any moment, Davison rushed the warrant to
the rest of the council and got the execution moving.
Mary Queen of Scotts, was executed on February seven, at
forty four years old, after nineteen years of imprison mint,

(25:00):
in which she was moved from one remote English castle
to another. Mary walked slowly and confidently to the stage
that had been draped in black fabric for the occasion
of her death. She walked with her back straight and
her head high, letting the light catch her profile as
she stood and paused before climbing the stairs. Even though

(25:24):
her famous looks had faded, there was still something striking
about her, her height, her red hair, her steely eyes.
Mary accepted the hand of her longtime jailer, who had
been with her for so many years, as she was
climbing the stairs. I thank you, sir, she said, this
is the last trouble I shall ever give you. Over

(25:47):
one hundred people had come to the Great Hall of
Fathering a castle. To watch Mary's execution. From the crowd,
a man rose and shouted to Mary, I am the
Dean of Peterborough. Ra it is not too late to
embrace the true faith. Yea, the Reformed religion with have Mary,
moments from death, interrupted him with a raised hand. Good,

(26:10):
mister dean, troubled, not yourself anymore about this matter. I
was born in this religion, have lived in this religion,
and am resolved to die in this religion. When the
executioner stepped forward, he knelt and asked for Mary's forgiveness.
I forgive you and all the world with all my heart,

(26:32):
for I hope this death will make an end to
all my troubles. She said personally, I can't imagine that
I would be facing the man who would be removing
my head with the same grace. The executioner then gestured
for Mary to remove her large black cloak. He offered
to help, but Mary shook her head. She gestured for

(26:54):
her ladies in waiting to come a sister. They unbuttoned
her black outer gown, and, to the gasps of the crowd,
revealed that beneath Mary was wearing a dress in bright crimson,
the color of Catholic martyrdom. Mary kissed her crucifix and
prayer book and handed her lady in waiting a handkerchief

(27:17):
so that she could tie it as a blindfold. The
lady's hands were shaking so much that Mary tied the
blindfold herself gracefully. Mary went to her knees and laid
her head on the smooth block. This is where the
grace of the execution ends. From here it becomes a

(27:38):
grim comedy. The executioner swung his blade down and missed.
He grazed only the hairs on the side of Mary's neck.
Mary was heard to have muttered, sweet Jesus. The executioner
tried again. He made contact this time, but didn't get
quite through her neck. He was worse to saw through

(28:01):
the sinew with the axe until the head disconnected. God
Save Queen Elizabeth, The frazzled executioner shouted, grabbing the severed
head by its hair so that he could hold it
up to the crowd. He didn't realize that Mary had
been wearing a red wig. With the executioner only holding

(28:21):
the wig, Mary's head fell, and the head of a
gray haired woman lolled on the stage, lips still moving.
The crowd gasped, but the chaos didn't even end there.
From the folds of Mary's skirts came a yelp in

(28:42):
her dress. Mary had smuggled in her dog getting to
the execution. Getting distraught, began howling and circling the corpse.
The angry Protestant man in the audience, the one who
had heckled Mary earlier, ran up to the stage and
grabbed the dog by the nape of its neck. Remember
John Knox had prophesied that dogs would drink her blood.

(29:05):
He shouted, he shoved the dog's face into Mary's blood,
drink ekur. Instead, the dog bit the man's hand. When
the dust settled, there were to be no relics left
of Mary, Queen of Scots, nothing for curious onlookers to
keep as mementos or sell, no items for Catholics to

(29:28):
help turn her into a martyr. Mary's clothes, her prayer books,
her everything were burned in the courtyard. Bonfires throughout England
were lit in celebration of the Catholic Jezebel's death, but
Elizabeth was inconsolable. The queen claimed that she had signed
the death warrant, but had never actually meant for it

(29:51):
to be enacted. It was only supposed to be kept
in reserve for future threats. Elizabeth blamed her secretary Davison,
but most people didn't quite believe her outrage. The historian
William Camden wrote that Elizabeth conceived or pretended great grief
and anger against Davison, but in Camden's second edition he

(30:15):
thought better of his accusation of pretending and removed that word. Still,
she was queen, and so Elizabeth put Davison on trial
and were of London, finding him ten thousand marks. Although
his sentence would ultimately be remitted. However, Elizabeth felt about

(30:35):
how it happened, the deed was done. Mary, Queen of
Scotts was dead. Sixteen years later, Elizabeth herself would die,
and it would be Mary's son, James, who had finally
become king of both Scotland and England. King James the
sixth of Scotland and the first of England, the man

(30:56):
who united the two kingdoms. Though Elizabeth and Mary never met,
today the two women are buried mere feet apart together
in Westminster Abbey. That's the tragic story of Mary, Queen

(31:17):
of Scott's and her relationship with her cousin Elizabeth. But
keep listening after a brief sponsor break, to hear a
little bit more about one of Mary's more unusual modern legacies.
It feels a little bit stereotypical of me to be

(31:40):
relating golf to the story of the Queen of Scots,
But by all accounts, Mary loved to play golf, or
as she learned it as a child in France hell
Mel In Scotland, Mary had a vacation house Sat Andrew's,
often considered to be the oldest golf course in the world.
When Mary, or where any royal golfer hit the links,

(32:02):
their bags were carried by military cadets. It's believed that
Mary gave those cadets a nickname, one that carries on
to this day. When Mary played golf, her bags were
carried by a man that she called a caddy. Noble

(32:27):
Blood is a production of I Heart Radio and Grimm
and Mild from Aaron Minky. The show was written and
hosted by Dani Schwartz. Executive producers include Aaron Manky, Alex Williams,
and Matt Frederick. The show is produced by rema Ill
Kali and Trevor Young. Noble Blood is on social media
at Noble Blood Tales, and you can learn more about

(32:48):
the show over at Noble blood tails dot com. For
more podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit the i Heart
Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your
favorite shows. M