Hosted by journalist and broadcaster Jackie Bird, each episode of our Love Scotland podcasts tells some of the thrilling stories behind the Trust’s people and places, showcasing how everything we do is for the love of Scotland.
The afterlife of Mary, Queen of Scots
Transcript
Five speakers: male voiceover [MV]; Jackie Bird [JB]; Steven Reid [SR]; second male voiceover [MV2]; Rosemary Goring [RG]
[MV]
Love Scotland, brought to you from the National Trust for Scotland; presented by Jackie Bird.
[JB]
Hello and welcome. There’s something about Mary. In 1587, the tumultuous life of Mary, Queen of Scots ended after three blows of the executioner’s axe. And yet, hundreds of years later, she remains a headliner in global historiography. Why?
We’ve discussed Mary’s life in Scotland in a previous podcast. The National Trust for Scotland looks after the magnificent Falkland Palace, which was described as Mary’s happy place – and boy did she need one.
Born in 1542, shipped off to France as a child, brought back from France as a teenager already a widow, she became a Catholic queen of a Protestant country. At this stage, through no fault of her own, she was a divisive figure, a hate figure for some. However, things didn’t improve after her disastrous marriage to Henry, Lord Darnley. She bore him a child, James, but she was later implicated in Darnley’s murder. Then another ill-conceived marriage with the brutish Earl of Bothwell, who was also implicated in Darnley’s demise. It’s easy to forget that Mary was only queen for 6 years before she was deposed, eventually held captive in England for 19 years, and then executed at the age of 44.
There’s no shortage of drama in that short life, but does that explain our enduring fascination with her? Well, that’s been the subject of a major study and now a book called The Afterlife of Mary, Queen of Scots. I’m happy to say I’m joined by the editor of that book, Professor Steven Reid, Head of History at the University of Glasgow, who’s back by popular demand after his earlier star turn on the early life of Mary’s son James. Welcome back, Steven.
[SR]
Hello Jackie, how are you doing? Nice to see you.
[JB]
I’m good, thank you. Now, this book is the result of something called the Mary Project. Can you talk us through that and its aims?
[SR]
Sure. Well, the project started in 2016 over a coffee with my friend Anne Dulau-Beveridge. Anne was interested in doing a small exhibition at the University of Glasgow. She’s one of the curators within the Hunterian, which is our museum and art gallery, and she had this painting – The Abdication of Mary, Queen of Scots by Gavin Hamilton. It’s from the late 18th century, and it’s the first what we call romantic painting of Mary. It’s the first that removes itself completely from any attempt to be truly historical and truly representative of historical fact, and it presents Mary in a romantic way.
And it got us thinking. What else do we have in the university collections that tells us about Mary’s afterlife and about the way that she’s been represented in objects and texts? We started a small project, initially in 2016 – just a couple of workshops with some academics at the university and with some colleagues. And we found that the university had an incredible world-leading collection of Marian items, particularly coins from her own lifetime, but also engravings, prints and text.
Then from there, we started to see themes and ideas around Mary’s afterlife and saw that there were definite patterns about the way she was remembered down the centuries and the different ways that her story was told. We thought, well, why don’t we expand this out and see where else we could look? And so, between 2019 and 2021, we received funding from the Royal Society of Edinburgh to extend our search into archives and heritage collections across Scotland, and eventually into the Royal Collection Trust and into the British Library as well.
We asked curators and heritage professionals and academics to come together to look through the lists of items that we found in each collection, to tell us what they were about. From there, we put together this map of over 2,000 objects relating to Mary. You could actually quadruple that if you included all the printed texts about her as well.
But we focused very much on the physical heritage of Mary – the objects, the images, the paintings. The project itself, and the book that we finally completed, also looks at film and music as well. Looking at her in these non-traditional ways, trying to get away from the textual afterlife largely.
[JB]
Let’s begin with a quote.
‘In the end is my beginning.’
Mary’s idea of a legacy, her own legacy – what does that tell us?
[SR]
‘In my end is my beginning’ is a motto that Mary used in her later life. She used it on her embroidery, and it reflects the fact that she was very self-aware in the closing decades of her life that the narrative that would be told about her was in many ways outwith her control. She felt that Elizabeth and the English government were trying to politically remove her.
I think that Mary herself felt that she was being put to death as a Catholic martyr. That was the image that she wanted to have as her posterity: that she was a rightful queen who had been deposed in 1567 by a group of nobles. She was a fit, physically well, mentally sound monarch who was absolutely sure of her rights as a sovereign queen. The story that she wanted to tell in her afterlife was that she had been unjustly treated and that she was dying in England at the hands of another queen as a Catholic, and that she was being effectively martyred.
And so, the images that she commissioned in her own lifetime, and even in her own letters towards the end of her life, you see her creating this idea of herself as a Catholic martyr – someone who’s been unjustly removed from power.
[JB]
Was it prescient of her to create her own legacy?
[SR]
I think so. I think to have the self-awareness to look ahead and think that my own political agency, if you like, has been taken away from me. She tries and tries again to come back to power, both through public negotiations with Elizabeth and with her son in her later life, but also through secret negotiations that include plots – and she’s constantly denied. I think in some ways she just had to look to her legacy and think, I’m not going to return to power; I have to try and secure an image of myself.
What’s been interesting about the project and what it’s uncovered in contemporary objects – objects very near to Mary – is that she had a far stronger hand in commissioning portraits of herself than we had previously realised. One of our contributors identifies a series of portraits in the 1570s that are very iconic of Mary, that we think Mary had a strong hand in. She was connected in terms of putting out her own letters and writings to her own information network, which portrays her in this way. And she’s aware in her own embroideries and her own physical objects that she thinks of herself as a martyr.
So, in part that created the beginning of a legend around her, and whether it was prescient or not is really difficult. The image of herself has endured; the idea of her as a Catholic martyr has endured through the ages as well.
[JB]
From your research, you stress that even early source material is completely partisan, no grey areas. People either loved or loathed her, or more specifically, what she stood for. How do you therefore negotiate such propaganda?
[SR]
I think that’s a really important point when we think about Mary. Everything that came from her later reign and everything that was used to justify her abdication in 1567, it was entirely partisan. You had the King’s party on one side who were putting forward the infant James VI as the figurehead king; and you had the Queen’s party on the other, who wanted to defend Mary and restore her to the throne.
The King’s party won the battle, the Marian Civil War, which lasted for six years, in large part because they were so good at using propaganda. George Buchanan was the leading Humanist who wrote much of the legend around Mary that portrays her in a hugely negative light. The King’s party were militarily weaker and had less geographic control of Scotland, but were able to create all this propaganda around Mary to portray her as an adulteress, as a murderess, someone who didn’t care for her son, didn’t have the nation’s best interests in heart – and were able to put out into the world.
As a result, even the sources from her own lifetime, most famously the casket letters, the ones that supposedly prove that she was romantically connected with Bothwell and was involved in the murder of Darnley – all these sources are questionable and put out there.
As we go through history, one of the themes that emerges is that you always get people on either side of those debates either defending Mary or harshly criticising her. They always retreat into these binary frames using the sources that exist. What’s been interesting is looking at how that story develops over the centuries between both those who would attack her and those who would defend her.
[JB]
You say, though, that there’s been a gender divide as well. Develop that for me.
[SR]
What’s been interesting, and one of the things that emerged out of the story of Mary over the centuries we looked at, is that it isn’t gender-neutral, in the sense that we find that women often want to identify with her or they can empathise with her. That ranges from poets up to salon readers and others who are interested in her. A range of writers who’ve written books about her, like Sophia Lee for example, who made a career out of writing books that included a three-part trilogy on Mary.
So, women on one hand can identify with her, but men tend to want to either condemn her or to really apologise and defend her, all the while taking away her agency, I think. It can become quite patriarchal. It can be quite heavily gendered. The most interesting example, I think, is Walter Scott, who actually had a carving of Mary’s death mask on his ceiling in Abbotsford … but also had what was believed to be a portrait of her severed head taken just after her death in his dining room at Abbotsford. So literally, in some sense, owning relics of Mary and owning parts of her identity, if you like.
[JB]
Gosh, it takes all sorts.
[SR]
It does!
[JB]
Was this gender divide truer of Mary than of other great historical figures?
[SR]
I guess with Mary, we haven’t really done this sort of searching in the way that we have for someone like Mary. But I think what’s interesting is that Mary generates a far stronger, personal …
[JB]
An emotional response?
[SR]
I would say absolutely there’s a far stronger emotional connection to Mary, an immediacy to her story that is far stronger than say someone like Robert the Bruce or William Wallace or any of the Stuart kings.
It’s notable that Mary’s son, although being the first king of the British Isles, of a united British Kingdom and all the achievements that he has in his life, is really bypassed in history because there is something about Mary … and as you said, her personal act of reign as a ruler in Scotland is only 6 years. But the amount of interest that that story has generated and the fact we keep coming back to it so much, there is something there. That was one of the questions at the heart of the project. Why is there this recurring interest in Mary, despite the fact that her contribution to the direction in the history of Scotland, in terms of shifting it or changing it, was very minimal.
[JB]
Something else I find particularly fascinating about your project was that the prevailing narrative of Mary changed over the centuries. In your introduction you say that this tells us about evolving attitudes towards gender, monarchy, power and religion in Scotland, and to Scotland’s own perception of its history. Before we look at that and how she’s been viewed down the centuries, presumably in the years immediately after her death she was still a pretty controversial political figure.
[SR]
That’s absolutely true. The most powerful instance is that all her personal relics, or at least as many as the English government could get their hands on, being burnt immediately, because they were worried about the potential popular response that could be got from her objects. Also, royal objects, particularly if they have royal blood on them, can have power.
The useful comparison is the execution of Charles I. Mary’s execution was carried out privately in a courtyard at Fotheringhay, and Charles’s was done in the open. As soon as he died, they immediately ran up with napkins to dab up his blood because this was royal blood that had power. How much more powerful would Mary’s be as a martyred queen? So, there’s that immediate security risk shows you just how worried they were about this.
And again, throughout that early period, Mary is still, in the half century or so after her death, a very live political problem for the Stuart monarchs to think about. How do they rehabilitate her, take her back into a narrative, when it’s Mary’s son who’s on the throne in England? There are very real political ramifications.
And also she herself being executed. What to do with the body? When it’s initially buried, it’s not looked after as well as it could be. James himself has to think, well, how do I recommission this and what do I do? He moves her body, obviously to Westminster, and gives it a proper burial and a proper tomb because he wants to reclaim her and make her the mother of the Stuart dynasty. A very live political figure there.
[JB]
So, the years move on, and that angry politicisation ebbs a bit. We come along to the Georgians, for example. How was she viewed then?
[SR]
The Georgians had an interesting relationship with Mary. The Georgians were quite emotional. They were quite effective in their response to tragedy, and they liked to show that they could be deeply emotionally affected by the things that they saw and stories that were tragic. Mary’s story, being tragic, was something that really resonated with them.
But they also saw Mary in the sense of being an idealised feminine figure. Many in the Georgian period would see her as a devoted wife, as someone who bore her hardship with grace and dignity. These kind of feminine qualities were very highly valued. You can see that coming through in, again in a very gendered way, associating these ideas of femininity with a queen who had been deposed and executed.
[JB]
The Georgians saw her sympathetically. Could that have been anything to do with the fact that that was post-Jacobite troubles and trying to calm the waters?
[SR]
Well, again, Mary herself, up to the end of the 17th century, is still very much associated with the Stuart monarchy. You saw through the 17th century that on one hand, the defenders of the Stuarts see Mary as someone who has been unjustly executed. But then on the side of the Republicans, this is another example of a Stuart tyrant, someone who’s really difficult.
By the time you get into the 18th century, Mary is briefly associated with the Jacobites. You get a number of portraits circulating among Jacobite supporters. What’s interesting there is that the effective sympathy comes through because the portraits change. We’ve got about 15 or so of these small head portraits of Mary in the 17th and 18th century. As Mary becomes more of a political enemy, the facial features harden; they become quite difficult. And then, as you get into the 18th century, they become more feminine and softer, picking up this idea of Mary as a feminine effective icon, an icon of sympathy. They change as well, and you begin to see that look, Mary’s face being reshaped to fit the aesthetic of the 18th century.
I suppose in some ways that culminates with The Abdication of Mary, the portrait that we have at the Hunterian by Gavin Hamilton, where the figure is deeply Georgian. The outfit is more like a dress that you’d find in the contemporary period. The picture itself is really influenced by Gavin Hamilton’s time in Rome as an artist. It’s all very neoclassical, but it looks nothing like the historical Mary. This transformation has happened because of the change in gender attitudes and the change in views of what it means to be a woman and what’s important in terms of the emotional value of Mary’s story.
[JB]
And then, by the time the Victorians come along, the view of her life and legacy changes again.
[SR]
Yes. We get a number of authors writing about Mary, and the view of her again becomes more powerful, I suppose. You see writers like the lesbian aunt/niece – let me see if I can get this right – the lesbian aunt/niece couple who are known compositely as Michael Field. They write a series of texts about Mary showing her as being quite sexually independent, as being powerful in her own female agency. And so, you see this harder edge coming into Mary’s story.
But at the same time, you also get a really curious development in the Victorian period of costumed balls and Mary – and Mary’s association with particularly the funds for raising the Waverley monument, and Princess Alexandra dressing as Mary. Mary’s costume and her iconography became all the rage. You could buy her costume, the patterns and the materials to make it in Debenhams. It was really a big part of that culture. People repeatedly dressing as Mary, so much so that it became a running joke.
You also found young Victorian ladies dressing as Mary for photo shoots. This is the early age of photography – the late 19th, early 20th century – and you find them at Highland retreats and in various other places, dressing as Mary and her four handmaids. So on one hand, in literature you’re finding a more sexually independent, progressive Mary beginning to emerge from the story, one who’s more in control of her own life and is more involved consciously in the murder of Darnley perhaps, and in the Darnley–Bothwell relationship. But you also have this very costumed, elaborate, more flowery version of Mary appearing in the costumes and the styling that goes with it.
[JB]
This moved on with bells on, I suppose, with the advent of moving pictures and the fact that she became a global media icon, especially in early films.
[SR]
Yeah, that was one of the most exciting finds, I think, of the project – the sheer range of black and white films. I think we found seven new black and white films relating to Mary that hadn’t been looked at previously – from the advent of the first Scottish historical film in 1895, which is a 19-second clip produced by a New York production company that stages Mary’s execution. It’s the first …
[JB]
I’ve had a look at it, and anyone listening can actually look at it on YouTube. It’s done very well.
[SR]
It is. You can see it on the NLS Moving Image archive and it’s an actor, Robert Thomae, dressed as Mary.But also, not only is it the first Scottish historical film, but it’s also the first to use a jump-cut special effect where the person moves forward and then the frame is paused and then they’re replaced with a mannequin with a detachable head, so it all comes together seamlessly.
Mary really tapped into that film market. Obviously the more famous ones that are known are Mary of Scotland with Katharine Hepburn, which she herself tried to use to relaunch her career in the 1930s. But there are lots of French and American and British attempts to create black and white films of Mary’s story, and that has continued right through the 20th century in TV series, in new films as well, and in lavish productions that we still see today.
[JB]
Wasn’t the Katharine Hepburn film – correct me if I’m wrong here – raised in Parliament because it was so historically inaccurate?
[SR]
That’s new; I didn’t know that actually! I hadn’t picked that one up, but it wouldn’t surprise me.
[JB]
Yes, I think I read that! Mel Gibson would never have been allowed to …
[SR]
What’s interesting is that there were a number of attempts in the early 20th century by the British film companies and by the British Film Board to create a British history on film as a form of cultural hegemony, as a way of putting British identity out there. But of course, one of the things that we find in the book is that it was the US film industry that really won that war and was able to seize hold of the cultural narrative and create a cultural dominance across the world using cinema.
You see that story being played out in the Mary films where the US interests are much stronger in the films. So again, you see how all these things connect together.
[JB]
Often the Mary films are a tale of two women rather than Mary as a queen. It’s always Mary and Elizabeth; Mary the martyr, Elizabeth the brutal; Mary the fluffy, Elizabeth the brave. The movies and the stage plays seem to major on the foibles of being feminine.
[SR]
I think that’s exactly right. And that is one of the strongest themes that’s emerged throughout is that binary presentation of Mary and Elizabeth across 4 and a half centuries, where Mary is portrayed usually as feminine and Elizabeth is portrayed as masculine. Mary is portrayed as emotional and regal, whereas Elizabeth is portrayed as logical and quite cold and calculating. You do get some manipulation in that, but broadly speaking that continues right into the modern day. You do see some plays in the 20th century like Robert Bolt’s Vivat! Vivat Regina!, where the two queens are portrayed on the stage throughout in parallel, on either side of the stage, and the whole thing is done as a dialogue.
You do see, in a recent staging of Mary, Queen of Scots Got Her Head Chopped Off, actresses flipping a coin to play Elizabeth one night and Mary the next. So, you do see some changing in that, but it is a strong dynamic that goes through – that Mary and Elizabeth are always portrayed in a binary.
[JB]
Is part of our fascination with her the fact that she was a woman? We can’t hide from that. And that in terms of a woman on the throne, she ‘had to marry’ – damned if she did, damned if she didn’t. Whereas – I’m answering my own question here – because that falls flat when you look at Elizabeth, who managed to plough her own furrow.
[SR]
It’s difficult because in the 16th century it’s such a patriarchal society, so the choices that you have are really difficult. Elizabeth is unique because she chooses not to marry, and she creates an identity around herself of being married to her country. That allows her the space to be a very effective queen, deeply successful. But she doesn’t fulfil what, by the standards of the 16th century, would be her prime aim – to perpetuate a strong and stable dynasty going forward.
Mary does achieve that, through her son and through her second marriage to Henry Stuart Darnley. But that marriage causes such political unrest that it removes her from power and destroys her own personal legacy. Although again, in 1603, her son claims the throne and was able to say that it was my mother who’s created this dynasty, to rehabilitate her. So, that’s part of it. The cards are stacked against Mary and although she rules in her own name for 6 years, it’s done in a culture where every decision is being heavily scrutinised. It’s a deeply male-controlled world and as soon as she has a male child, people are looking to remove her from power.
There’s that real difficulty, but there’s also the fact that her story is so inherently dramatic. It is frequently portrayed as a three-act play where you have the French child whose upbringing is at the court of Henry II, then a first marriage to Francis II – he dies young, very tragically. Then you’ve got the interlude in Scotland with the drama with Darnley and Bothwell and the murder of Rizzio. And then act three is the captivity in England, when she’s under the control of Elizabeth and her government.
The retelling of the story is that it’s so easily packageable. That was something we did find on the project, that it lends itself very well to drama and to TV and to opera, because it has that structure.
[JB]
But our story’s a two-part, so let’s take a break just there. Part of the Mary Project is to collate and assess the many physical objects relating to her life. And that came up with some fascinating and new perspectives. We’ve touched on them earlier. We’ll find out some more. We’ll be back in a moment.
[MV2]
Impressive. For a moment, I thought she was talking about me. I meant Falkland Palace, she said with a smile. Of course you did. The art, the architecture – Scotland’s history can really turn your head. So we signed up to take care of it. Keep it looking dapper.
[MV]
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[JB]
Welcome back. Professor Steven Reid, let’s talk about this gathering of Mary memorabilia. What were you looking for?
[SR]
I think we weren’t looking for anything in particular. We were being very much led by what we would find in the archives and in the collection. We asked all the heritage experts and the curators that worked with us in the project to look into their own archives and into their own material stores, do a search for anything that they thought materialated to Mary. It could be prints, could be engravings, could be coins – and tell us what they found.
In the first stage of the project, they all came back with Word documents and Excel spreadsheets with big lists of material. And then they started to present on it, and we started to look through and think, gosh, what are these things? Some of them were very unusual. Some were standard, like you would think – prints and engravings. Others were odd physical objects that appeared – everything from garden ornaments to rubber ducks to pieces of clothing to locks of hair. They had a really wide range of objects. And the more time we spent on the project, the weirder and wackier some of these objects have become. That has really helped us reshape the narrative around Mary, particularly in the 21st century, because she’s also a commercial as well as a historiographical icon.
[JB]
And in bringing them together after 400-odd years, I understand that there were still discoveries to be made.
[SR]
Yes, I think that what we had found was that … I mean, a good example is again The Abdication of Gavin Hamilton, the painting that we put at the centrepiece of our exhibition, which was at Glasgow in early 2023. We had it cleaned and conserved and we found that the trademark cap that Mary has – whenever you think of an image of Mary – there was a much more prominent cap in that picture. And it showed us that Mary’s iconography through all these objects is something that’s very consistent.
If I ask your listeners to imagine Mary in their head, and indeed if you do this as well, you probably would think perhaps of someone in a black dress. You would think of someone with striking red hair. You would think of someone that’s quite tall, and you’d probably also think of maybe a white cap on her head, a crucifix and a rosary possibly, and maybe a ruff or some other religious items. Does that sound about right, Jackie?
[JB]
Yes, yes, you got it.
[SR]
That iconography was something that, when we put all these objects together, we could trace right through. It began in both the paintings that Mary herself was involved in commissioning in the 1570s and 80s. But one of the big findings that we had was that this image was disseminated widely across the globe, and particularly in Catholic Europe, in a series of cheap woodcuts of Mary.
Woodcuts are when you take a wood block and you engrave on it an image that you want, and you can put it through a printing press very quickly and create cheap reproductions. You can also do it in metal and intaglio. The good thing about that is that you can tweak it and make it different for different audiences. So, if you wanted to emphasise Mary’s royal lineage, for example, you could add a range of crowns in the corner showing her rights and titles to the realms of Britain and France and Ireland. If you want to emphasise her Catholic identity, you could add angels or you could add religious paraphernalia. You could add little poems and texts about her life, and you could change the material depending on the audience.
But what we found in those engravings was that the image that we have of Mary in our mind – with the cap, with the ruff, with the religious iconography – became really fixed in these images. It became recycled and reused throughout all the later images and paintings and popular icons that we still see of Mary today. That chain became very quickly established as a result of her being seen as a Catholic martyr. That was one thing we found.
We also found with the objects that people had a very strong physical, emotional, affective response to, like the Georgians did. It’s one that defies reason, for want of a better phrase. People often say these objects are attributed to Mary, Queen of Scots, or believed to belong to Mary, Queen of Scots. And in many cases, when we looked at the objects, we found the provenance didn’t hold water. There are so many crucifixes around different collections that supposedly belonged to Mary or were used at the end of her life; they can’t be real. In many cases we’ve proven now that wasn’t the case.
But what’s interesting is not the fact that this isn’t a real crucifix of Mary’s, but the fact that people have invested this power in it and said, ‘this is connected to Mary’. And then the stories they have later told about them as well.
[JB]
It’s like Mary, Queen of Scots slept here. She would never have slept in her own bed, ever, if half of those assertions were true!
[SR]
The best example of that is the red bed at Holyrood. Holyrood was again one of the chapters in the book that we focus on. Deborah Clarke, the former curator at Holyrood, wrote a brilliant story about this for us, showing that in the late 18th and early 19th century, Holyrood began to open to the public and tours started. They were led by the housekeeper, and the housekeeper embellished this story around a bed that had belonged to the Duchess of Hamilton, saying that this was Mary’s bed.
Over time, the providence of the bed became lost so that it became Queen Mary’s red bed. This was discovered again in the 20th century. Actually, this isn’t Mary’s bed; it’s the Duchess of Hamilton’s bed. But the story still sticks, and it took a long time for them to divest from that narrative because the power associated with the bed is very real.
The other example, of course, are death masks. There are a number of death masks of Mary, some in wax; some in plaster; some in wood. And when we laid them all down side by side, there’s three or four different facial patterns, all completely different. But they all claim to be Mary’s. Again, one of those is the one that’s in Walter Scott’s library. There’s the face that’s used on the tomb at Westminster. But again, people believe they’re Mary and want to believe that they’re Mary. They want that connection even when it’s not quite real.
[JB]
I can really see the power of the collection now, because another aspect of it was the fact that you managed to bring together a lot of her embroideries whenever she was in captivity – and didn’t you manage to form a pattern of a protest, her own protest?
[SR]
So this is something that’s not been formed specifically by the project, but it’s certainly well known in the collections of her embroideries that are partly owned by the Royal Collection but are largely part of the V&A. When you look at these embroideries, and this has been established by Michael Bath and Clare Hunter and other scholars, that these were a conscious form of Mary’s protest, that the embroideries themselves are fitted with motifs and ideas.
The most famous one, I suppose, or the cheekiest one, would be a cat, which is a red-haired cat holding a brown mouse … and you can guess who it’s meant to be. It’s Elizabeth. You can see as well in some of the other symbols that they’re all about suffering and endurance through pain, and thinking about looking ahead to a better time.
Similarly, in a lot of the paintings of Mary you get coded biblical motifs. One of the ones that Mary uses quite a lot is Susanna and the elders, where Susanna is wrongfully accused of adultery by a range of elders in her village and then eventually they are condemned and put to death for the wrongful accusation against her. That story had very real parallels for Mary, and you see it being worked into often very small details into the paintings of Mary that still exist. So, that power is there within that iconography too.
[JB]
And no shortage of hagiography from Burns, and indeed from Sir Walter Scott when he wasn’t gazing on a death mask.
[SR]
Yes. So again, poets particularly frequently engaged with Mary. Again, Burns created this image of Mary, a very Georgian effective Mary, one who is maternal. And again, in Burns’s example, there’s a contrast between the un-maternal, unfeeling Elizabeth, who is cold like steel and is hard willed; and Mary herself, who’s deeply concerned for her son and is interested in the spring around her and knowing that she won’t see another one. So again, creating this quite bucolic image of Mary, I suppose.
[JB]
I had a chat with one of the National Trust for Scotland curators before you came along, Steven, and I asked that – apart from the places that she visited that I mentioned in my introduction – did we have anything in the various collections linked to Mary? I was expecting a couple of things. We have … so many! There is the poem about Mary, Robert Burns’s own hand in his birthplace museum. Drum Castle has a medal struck to mark her execution. There’s a 19th-century wooden pipe with her face carved upon it in Weaver’s Cottage. It’s through all the classes; it’s not just the landed gentry. There are various 20th-century items of crockery depicting her. There’s an endless list, which consolidates the fact that her story has long been part of Scottish culture.
[SR]
I think that’s right, and the pipe and the medal are both good examples, as is the crockery. You find that there were a whole range of Victorian medals struck, and indeed rings based on rings that Mary and Darnley would have worn as well; commemorative rings being produced in that way. You find that there are physical objects scattered throughout many Scottish collections: again shoes, locks of hair, other physical objects that are reputed to be Mary’s but perhaps are not … and again, people invest this power in them.
But from the 19th century on, that commercial aspect has really begun to emerge around Mary – people buying objects that commemorate Mary and are associated with her, and it proliferates into tea towels, into bookmarks. You have a range of Etsy stores, for example, devoted to Mary, Queen of Scots now. That commercial element and the tourism heritage element of Mary has really developed over the past two centuries, and again it’s another strand of why she’s so popular. But would there be such a burgeoning commercial interest if there wasn’t that story that’s so compelling?
There’s definitely something there that it builds on. You don’t get that level of object fascination with other monarchs or other figures in Scottish history, I don’t think.
[JB]
But one of the contributors in the book argues that, and I quote: ‘Mary’s place in the communal memory of Scotland is shaped by emotion and supposition rather than the critical evaluation of the queen’s life and reign.’ Has our fascination with Mary the woman diminished her historical legacy?
[SR]
I think her historical legacy has been gone over and gone over and gone over with biographies. There was a very exciting discovery last year where a series of letters were found in a Paris archive by a group of cryptological code-breakers. They found about 50 letters that told us about Mary’s captivity, letters she’d sent in cipher between 1570 and 1585. That’s rare. We don’t normally get new discoveries like that around Mary. Over the past century, there’s been very little in the way of new material discovery that’s come out. But I think with this project, what we were trying to do is get away from that and find a brand new way of looking at Mary.
I think it has shown a way that she’s perhaps more powerful and more enduring. Her life was very difficult and, as a queen, the odds were always stacked against her. But as a queen, even allowing for that, she didn’t have a brilliant reign. I think when you look at the legacy she’s had, it’s far more interesting because it does get us to reflect on what are our attitudes to women in the 17th, 18th, 19th century. How do we engage with the story of a woman who’s experienced violence in her life in such a difficult and horrible way? What does that say about us and our values today? So, in that sense, the legacy story I find far more interesting because it resonates so much today.
[JB]
We’ve learned about Mary’s story down the years, Steven, and how she’s been repurposed to reflect the society telling it. What do we think of her now, and what does it tell us about our society?
[SR]
I think what’s been most exciting to see in contemporary portrayals of Mary has been that they’re far more inclusive now, and they’re being used to reclaim a range of different narratives. One of the most interesting things that we posed within the project were recent drag portrayals of Mary, most famously in RuPaul’s Drag Race, both by Rosé, who portrayed Mary, Queen of Scots in a series of comedic sketches, but also by Cheddar Gorgeous, who portrayed Elizabeth I. There was a kind of meta dialogue going on between them, between the various Drag Race shows, and that was really fascinating to see. Also, there’s some fantastic pictures of RuPaul dressed as Elizabeth – again, people claiming Mary’s narrative for their own in a range of different settings to the ones that she maybe would be completely unfamiliar with, which has been really exciting to see.
Mary is definitely a brand now, I think, and is a real draw for heritage organisations and has a real commercial power, which we haven’t ever quantified – I would be very interested to do that. That kind of work has been done with Robert Burns. Mary is used in a range of tours. The strangest one I think we found was a series of medals for a virtual marathon series by London Secret Runs, where for every marathon you do, you can claim a new medal showing an episode from Mary and Elizabeth’s lives and they go on to a huge metal disc that you can put up on your wall.
You get everything from playing cards to my personal favourite, the mascot of the project, which was a rubber duck that features Mary. You know it’s Mary because of the cap and the ruff that’s on the duck itself. So, she’s very much a commercial presence. She’s very much a part of popular history, particularly children’s history. My son particularly likes the Horrible History’s versions of Mary that you get. And again, that in itself is interesting too.
She’s also been of direct relevance and importance to contemporary debates about gender equality, about power, particularly in Hollywood. We saw that when the 2018 film came out, and it came out just at the time that the Me Too movement was really beginning to explode. The story itself, which features two women caught in a patriarchal society making difficult choices, really spoke to that debate. Indeed, it was a very powerful part of our early project as well.
One of the things that’s come out in both the project workshops and in all the online teaching that we do around the project – and indeed in my classes on Mary – is how her story reflects the difficult choices that women often have to make when placed in positions of power, and again when confronted with a patriarchal society. So that in itself has been a really interesting thing to see. And it shows again just how relevant Mary’s story is, even though it’s 4 and a half centuries in the past.
[JB]
That’s our own societal zeitgeist, stamped firmly on Mary’s memory.
[SR]
I think so. And it’s absolutely still evolving.
[JB]
So at the end of the day, on this voyage of discovery, did you answer the question, why is her story so enduring?
[SR]
I think we’ve got a sense of the ways that it’s endured, but you mentioned the quote earlier on from one of our contributors and how there is a non-rational response to these objects and to Mary’s story. And that’s exactly it. I still don’t feel we fully know why. We’ve quantified just how popular she is and just how global she is, but there is an element, a non-rational response, whether it’s to real objects or to real places. I’ve heard some people on our course describe their time in Edinburgh, for example, as having trod in the place where Mary’s footsteps were. This idea that it’s an irrational, emotional response that goes beyond explanation. At the moment, that’s enough for me, I think, just to think, ‘yep, we’ll never fully explain it’. It goes into emotion and something deeply held by people, and that’s a mystery we’ll probably never solve, to be honest.
[JB]
Well, she was human. And so are we. Professor Steven Reid, thank you so much for joining us.
[SR]
Thank you, Jackie.
[JB]
We’ve just filled a podcast about her and we have barely scraped the surface – proof that Mary’s afterlife is still thriving. The book, The Afterlife of Mary, Queen of Scots, edited by Steven, is published in April 2024 by Edinburgh University Press.
Falkland Palace, Mary’s happy place, is cared for by the National Trust for Scotland, as well as other locations we’ve mentioned with links to Mary, including Alloa Tower and Kellie Castle. Check our website for opening times. Thank you for listening to Love Scotland. Until next time, goodbye.
And you can listen back to another podcast on Mary. In season 4, I learnt about the queen’s time in Scotland with author Rosemary Goring.
[RG]
I think she was very much a fish out of water by the time she arrived in Scotland. I think she was always made to feel that her position was extremely precarious.
[MV]
Love Scotland is brought to you by Think and Demus Productions on behalf of the National Trust for Scotland; presented by Jackie Bird.
For show notes and more information, go to nts.org.uk and don’t forget to like, subscribe, review and share.
Arguably the most famous monarch in Scottish history, Mary, Queen of Scots remains a figure of global intrigue more than 400 years after her death. One question, then: why?
Jackie’s on a mission to find out why Mary’s story and legacy have been pored over in such detail for centuries. Joining Jackie in the studio is Professor Steven Reid of the University of Glasgow, who is also the author of The Afterlife of Mary, Queen of Scots. Together, they unpick the posthumous interest in Mary, the many different perceptions of her legacy, and how Mary’s death has been used throughout history to further different groups’ objectives.
This podcast was recorded in April 2024.
Mary, Queen of Scots: The life and legacy of one of history’s most famous queens
Transcript
Three voices: male voiceover [MV]; Jackie Bird [JB]; Rosemary Goring [RG]
[MV]
Love Scotland – from the National Trust for Scotland. Presented by Jackie Bird.
[JB]
Hello and welcome to Love Scotland. Today, we’re focusing on a tragic heroine whose life has been a fascination for more than 400 years. The story of Mary, Queen of Scots isn’t confined to the history pages either. Like a 16th-century Marilyn Monroe, her life and loves have been picked over down the years as we’ve analysed her bad judgements politically and the bad men romantically. Despite the passing years, she remains box office as confirmed by the plethora of books, TV dramas and movies about her life. And now a new book – Homecoming: The Scottish years of Mary, Queen of Scots. And I’m happy to say its author, Rosemary Goring, is our podcast guest today. Thank you for coming along, Rosemary.
[RG]
Hi. Great to be speaking to you.
[JB]
Well, we’re going to start with the difficult questions! Why does Mary continue to garner so much interest?
[RG]
Well, it is a really interesting question because in some ways I can’t answer that except to say that you’re right – people keep coming back to her. They keep wanting to pick away at her story and see if they can find a new dimension to her. I think it’s because she was so complicated a figure; we’ve never quite fathomed her. She’s both tragic but on the other hand she was incredibly successful. She was extraordinarily talented and yet she failed so dismally. And there’s never been a way of reconciling the different parts of her character that completely explain what happened to her and why. So, I think that’s why we keep returning to her.
[JB]
And before we talk about the real Mary, have you got a view after all your research on all those movie and TV depictions of her?
[RG]
Ah well, this is where I have to confess I can’t watch those, because I just scream at the screen. Every time Mary meets Elizabeth, I’m out of the room! To be honest, I can talk about the books but the movies, they have just gone over my head … deliberately.
[JB]
Absolutely! Because that meeting did not happen.
[RG]
It did not, and it was the one thing that Mary was desperately keen that would happen. And I think Elizabeth, as she grew a little wiser, realised that it must not happen. You can totally understand why somebody doing a film or a novel would make that happen – it’s great dramatic material. Even when I was writing this book, I was partly wishing I was writing fiction because there you’d have a chance to change what happened and even maybe change the ending. You can do that with dramas but unfortunately not with straight history.
[JB]
Absolutely. So, what was the interest for you personally? Was it the complexity of the character?
[RG]
In part it was the complexity. It was also I wanted to find out for myself, or come to my own conclusions about, whether Mary was responsible for her own downfall, or if Scotland and Scottish society and politics played a large part, or even the entire part, and can be blamed for what happened to her. I’ve been trying to take that thread through the book and at the same time I wanted to place her very specifically in her Scottish context because a lot of her story took place outside of Scotland, but I believe that it was Scotland that made her the woman that she was. And I thought that all the locations where she actually made history tell you a little bit about the world that she lived in and how she responded to it.
[JB]
We’ll find out your conclusion, I hope, about whether or not she was entirely the architect of her own downfall, but let’s begin for people who are not quite so au fait with the history. As you’ve said, you decided to tell the story through the Scottish places that she lived, she visited or in many cases fled to. And reading your book, finding out that there were so many occasions she had to seek some sort of sanctuary, was that really a metaphor for her life?
[RG]
Ah well, latterly it certainly was. The first few years of her life were very happy, even if she was under danger from Henry VIII who was desperate to marry her off to his young son. Even from the start, you’re right, she was seeking sanctuary in a sense that her mother whisked her away from Linlithgow where she was born, up to Stirling Castle which was a great fortress, and then even further locations beyond that. She had to be packed off to France when she was still 5 because everywhere in Scotland was still too dangerous; the threat was too great. And then later in her life obviously, when she was escaping her enemies, she took refuge OR they took her captive.
So yes, it is a sort of metaphor for her life, but actually I feel it doesn’t tell the whole story because at various points in her life she was majestic and she was in control and she was a terrific figurehead for Scotland in her early years as a queen. So, I like to think of the places where she took sanctuary … I more think of the ones when she was an adult as places where she would go for spiritual resuscitation or to gather her thoughts, rather than she was timorous and scared.
[JB]
Let’s get some anchor dates. She was born, as you say, into Linlithgow Palace 1542. The bulk of Linlithgow is very much a ruin these days, but you describe throughout the book in great detail what these places were like in their heyday – the grandeur of the 16th century and the lives of those living there. How important was this in terms of trying to convey the context of the life into which Mary was born?
[RG]
Very important. I think it’s really difficult today to imagine what a castle like Linlithgow would have felt like and appeared to be like to ordinary people. People in those days, when I say ordinary, they had so little compared with us today. So, the splendour of a castle or a palace was partly, in a way, to reinforce royal authority, whether for the people in the country itself or for people who were visiting – visiting dignitaries who needed to be shown that Scotland wasn’t a dreadful, poor, hole-in-the-corner kind of country, but somewhere that you had the finest crafts and arts, which was a really Renaissance country.
Which of course Mary’s father James V, and her grandfather James IV, had worked so hard to do. They were fascinated by the arts and by culture, and they made sure that the buildings that they had much to do with were renovated to look as splendid and as completely modern as was possible to be. I felt it was really important to set the context of where her story unfolds. I love socio-economic history. I think it tells you so much about a period. It tells you almost as much in some ways as political history because it is in these tiny details of whether it’s tapestry hangings or the way people ate or the way that they lived and the hours that they worked – that tells you so much about what was going on in society.
[JB]
Yes. And so, from Linlithgow, as a baby, before she was a year, she moved to Stirling, to be crowned.
[RG]
That’s correct, yes. That was a really amazing castle. Again, it had been partially built by her grandfather and her father. It was still actually being built when she and her mother, Mary of Guise, hurried up there. They managed to make an escape – or her mother managed to make an escape – which was very wily. It has been described often, Stirling, as the brooch between the Highlands and the Lowlands – the brooch in the centre of Scotland. The view that you can actually see from the castle, I always feel it’s a way of looking at Mary’s kingdom, what she had inherited. I always think that it’s such a shame that she didn’t live to a great old age to look back on the country that she had reigned from the ramparts of Stirling.
[JB]
Because she had to leave there at 5 years old, or leave Scotland.
[RG]
She did, yes. And before she could leave, they decided that she would sail to France, to the safety of Mary of Guise’s family and the French Court. They decided that to do that, she would sail from the west coast. She was taken to Dumbarton Castle, which is this incredibly daunting castle on this basalt lump of stone – very, very grim. But the young Mary, who had all her friends around her, seemed very happy here, and very happy to sail off to France. When she had sailed off, her mother took refuge in Falkland Palace because she was so upset at losing her daughter.
[JB]
When she went to France, who were her key predators, if you like, at that time?
[RG]
You mean back in what you could call Britain?
[JB]
Yes.
[RG]
Henry VIII was very much her key predator because he wanted to marry her off to his youngest son. And wanted her at that point, before she was married, from the age of 10 for her to be placed at the English Court where she could be coaxed and taught to be the kind of queen that they wanted her to be, as the wife of his son. And of course the Scottish parliament would have nothing to do with this. They realised what this foretold so this is why she had to be got out of the country, because Henry VIII wasn’t subtle. My goodness, he had a lot of brute force behind him, and if he wanted something, in the end he could probably get it.
[JB]
What struck me is that children like Mary, although born into great privilege, were just pawns on a European chessboard, to be moved and married at will.
[RG]
Totally that. Anybody who feels envious about royalty, probably pertains today to some diluted extent as well, these were not enviable lives. They might have been luxurious, sumptuous but my goodness the danger that lurked around the corners. That’s what you can see in some of the buildings that Mary lived in and passed through in Scotland, is just the implicit threat in how military they all are – the battlements and the dungeons they all have. This was a life of grave danger at almost every turn. You never knew where your next assassin was lurking.
[JB]
Hmmm. We won’t spend too much time discussing her time in France. She arrived there when she was 5. Were they happy years?
[RG]
I think they were happy, actually. She only saw her mother once during the whole time she was in France, and that was for a very long visit, for almost a year, when Mary of Guise went there. And other than that, she and her mother corresponded regularly and they were very close, despite the actual geographical distance. So that when Mary of Guise did die, before Mary came back to Scotland, that was for her a terrible bereavement. But, that’s jumping forward a bit.
She was very happy at the French Court because she was something of its darling. The king thought she was beautiful. He did think that the Scots were a slightly rough lot [chuckles] and one of the Court thought they didn’t wash as thoroughly as they ought to! I’m not sure that would have been true of Mary because I get the feeling that she was enormously fastidious, and also she had lots of maid servants and courtiers around her to make sure that she was immaculately turned out. And she was given her own court when she was old enough to actually be acknowledged properly, formally.
[JB]
And she became queen, but for a very short time.
[RG]
Exactly that. She married the dauphin, became queen and it’s hard to imagine the sycophancy that they would have been treated with as a couple, but also the loneliness of that position. Because actually the dauphin as king never had any real power; he was a very sickly young man. It was Mary’s uncles – the Guise brothers – who really held the strings of power. And so, a very tricky time for her. I think after her marriage, and once the dauphin was so unwell and died, these were not happy years. These were quite menacing years for Mary. She realised her position was precarious.
[JB]
Did she have to return to Scotland? Did she have any say?
[RG]
She did have a say. I think she could have decided, and she at one point considered, not returning to Scotland. She certainly didn’t leap to return as soon as she was, if you like, freed of being the queen of France. As soon as she was the dowager queen, she could have got on a boat and come back. She didn’t do that; she searched for other marital options because she wanted to be married and there was power in marriage, particularly given what alliances she could have made throughout Europe. For me, that’s a black mark in the book against Mary – in that she did not seem to be committed to coming back to Scotland and picking up the reins. She was happy with Scotland to be ruled by people just sitting in the country and making sure things carried on.
There was a delegation – somebody came to visit her, her step-brother the future Earl of Moray came to France to tell her that she would be very welcome in Scotland. And one of the reasons – it sounds as though an obvious thing, of course you’re queen, you would be welcome – but in the time that she had been in France, there had been the Reformation. A Catholic queen was suddenly not sure if she would be wanted in a Protestant country. He came over to reassure her and say yes, do come back to Scotland. Maybe that helped sway her mind, but my feeling is that she had become so accustomed to the comfort of the French Court, that she was very Frenchified even though she had had her Scottish Court around her the whole time she was there. She spoke in Scots. Apparently, her English wasn’t so good but her French was excellent. I think that Scotland did not, without her mother being there, feel like home for her.
[JB]
But at the end of the day, she made the decision to return. She returned an 18-year-old widow. That phrase itself elicits sympathy.
[RG]
It does, doesn’t it? It’s hard to imagine: you’d been married, you’d been widowed and you’re suddenly in charge of a country which is pretty fearsome. It’s in the hands of (I would say) rabid Protestant sect who obviously had to be a bit rabid to effect a Reformation. They had to take the law into their own hands. Whatever you think about that – whether it was a right thing to do or the wrong thing – they were a very fearsome bunch.
[JB]
What was she like as a young adult arriving in Scotland? That’s a tricky question, I know, because in your book you say even historians can’t agree on her character.
[RG]
One thing we do know is that she was extremely good looking. People all said, even the people who loathed her or everything she stood for, how beautiful she was. She was extremely tall – she was almost 6ft. She was beautifully dressed because she loved clothes. She would wear high heels to accentuate how high she was. She had auburn hair, fair skin – she was lovely. I think actually that made such an impression on people, that carried her a good way into the good will of the people as this Catholic queen returned. She was very fun-loving; she absolutely adored partying. She loved music – she had as much music around her at Holyrood Palace as she could possibly manage. She loved playing cards and dice – she’d sit up all through the night gambling. She loved outdoor pursuits – hunting and hawking. She was a really athletic, fun-loving girl basically.
[JB]
Well, she sounds great, and this is very upbeat. And I think this is a good time to take a break because, spoiler alert, the next tranche of Mary’s Scotland years didn’t go too well.
Rosemary, we’ll take a short break and we’ll be back in a moment.
[MV]
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[JB]
Welcome back to the Love Scotland podcast where I’m discussing the life and locations of Mary, Queen of Scots with Rosemary Goring, whose new book plots Mary’s tragic timeline alongside the castles and palaces in which she sought refuge.
Rosemary, Mary seems to have been constantly enveloped in a web of religious and warring powers, and caught between ambitious and ruthless men. So, this question: did she ever stand a chance?
[RG]
Well, I think probably not, actually. I think the dice was loaded against her from the start. I think if you look at European politics of the time, these were huge tectonic forces crushing in on Scotland and on what she was hoping to achieve. In a way, the world she was working in was far too difficult for her ever to succeed. I think she could have managed to have avoided her end – the terrible end that she came to – but I don’t know that she could ever have been a fully effective monarch.
[JB]
Was that because of something lacking in her character? Her intelligence? Her experience?
[RG]
I definitely think she lacked experience, but then so have many other kings and queens. She had flaws in her character, but again so have many other kings and queens. I think the actual period that she was born into, in the midst of religious conflicts, with a country that had had a recent revolution, really made it very difficult. Even the most astute king or queen would have found it hard. I think it was exceptionally hard for somebody who was on her own but was looking for a partner, looking for the stability of that in an extremely male world.
[JB]
Yes, because I have to say – it’s not exactly a feminist stance – but I was thinking, as I read your book, what that woman needs is a good man by her side! And that is precisely what she didn’t get. After being married to practically a child, she made two dreadful marriages in Scotland. What do those matches tell us about her?
[RG]
That is really interesting because I think when she married Lord Darnley against all the advice she was getting, against the advice of the 4 Marys who were her great friends all through her life. Despite what they were saying, she went ahead and married him. Some have said it was pure lust – and it’s entirely possible that there was an element of that. I think she was desperate though for somebody who she could lean on and trust. Why she thought Darnley was that figure, I do not know. But she did that, and probably within weeks she realised what a mistake she had made. He was just turning out to be incredibly vile. He wasn’t just ambitious, he was vicious.
[JB]
In the book you’ve described him – and I’m sure there are many more adjectives – as ‘venal, vain, immoral, unfaithful, a lout’ … and she couldn’t see it. She just couldn’t see it.
[RG]
She couldn’t. And then suddenly she saw it all, and I think that must have been a terrible moment for her because by then she was pregnant, and what could she do? She had this desperately unpleasant man who actually posed a threat to her own life, as she soon began to realise, with the murder of Rizzio, during which she was almost murdered … or always believed that she was an intended victim as well. So that was an absolutely calamitous marriage, and you can feel for her. She said that at one point, if he wasn’t dealt with – whatever she meant by that – she would take her own life. She couldn’t live if they were still together.
[JB]
And of course, Darnley met his end in a plot that involved her second husband, the Earl of Bothwell, who you describe as ‘just a thug’.
[RG]
[laughs] An educated thug, yes! He really was. It was very noticeable apparently, after Mary married him, that her own language grew much coarser. That she had been infected by the way he spoke and behaved and thought. Marrying him was an act of absolute desperation, and I think it shows just how far she had fallen from her own ambitions, actually, and from her own sense of integrity. When Bothwell became the prime suspect for Darnley’s murder, which was almost from the very start, there was a kind of white-washed trial in which he was completely exonerated, and people began to get very uneasy at the sight of their queen consorting with this man.
When he first proposed to her, she actually refused him, but then it became clear that really she needed somebody as thuggish as him to help her see off her enemies. It was an absolutely calamitous decision. On the day of her wedding, she was found … wedding’s too nice a word for them getting married really, it wasn’t a joyful occasion … she was found bitterly crying. She was already regretting it. I suspect she never wanted to marry him, but because he had possibly raped her, certainly because she may have thought she was pregnant, she had to go along with it.
[JB]
Do we know for sure that Mary played a part in the murder of Darnley, her first husband, that she was somehow an accomplice with Bothwell?
[RG]
No, we absolutely don’t know that she was an accomplice. That’s one of the things that is impossible to say for sure. It seems really hard to think she knew nothing of what was planned, given the kind of men that were around her and given the signals that she’d been giving off, but essentially she was a gentle person. She wasn’t vindictive; she wasn’t bloodthirsty like many people in positions of power. And I think it is possible that she deluded herself into thinking that this could be dealt with diplomatically, or in some way having him banished, without actually having him murdered. I personally don’t think that she ever explicitly said that she wanted him killed or ever played a part in that.
[JB]
But if you marry a thug, I suppose that’s what you get. [laughs]
Let’s talk about some of Mary’s favourite places, because obviously this is the premise of the book, and you describe them so wonderfully. Let’s talk about Falkland Palace, which is a National Trust for Scotland property. What was its role in her life?
[RG]
Falkland Palace really was one of her favourite places. It had been one of her mother and father’s favourite places as well. This was a little hunting lodge in the heart of Fife in Falkland Forest. This is where they would retreat to enjoy themselves, not necessarily in sorrow as when Mary of Guise went there after Mary had gone to France, and not as when her father had gone there after the Battle of Solway Firth when he thought that he was about to die, which indeed he did. This was a place where they could have fun and they could sort of let their hair down and go hunting, which they just loved to do. For them, it was a holiday place; it was a place of happy memories. And it was sumptuous and beautiful – it’s a jewel box of a location.
[JB]
It also had one of the earliest tennis courts, and lots of stories abound about Mary playing real tennis, but I was interested to learn in your book there’s no firm evidence that Mary actually played there.
[RG]
Not that I can find. I was reading a book by a couple of tennis experts, and they said it would have been very unseemly for a queen to have played tennis. Well, Mary did lots of unseemly things in a very charming fashion. It’s entirely possible to picture her playing tennis, but if she ever did play tennis there, she can’t have been completely smitten by it because she allowed the court to go into complete disrepair during her time. So, that doesn’t seem to me something that somebody who loved playing tennis would have allowed to happen.
[JB]
And there are also many claims that Mary adored a good game of golf, but it’s like the stories about Sean Connery – if everyone supposedly had their milk delivered by Sean Connery, he would have had a pretty major milk round! No real proof that she played golf around Scotland either?
[RG]
Well, there’s one reference to her playing golf, and this is in a list of indictments of her, of what a flibbertigibbet she was and what terrible things she did in the wake of her husband’s murder. Goiffe, as they called it, was one of them, but it’s a single reference and it’s done to discredit her. Maybe she once picked up a golf club? I don’t know, but she certainly wasn’t out on the Royal & Ancient every other weekend!
[JB]
And every club that now says Mary, Queen of Scots played here … perhaps, perhaps not so much! You described overall writing about Mary as like ‘wading through quicksand’. What makes it so difficult?
[RG]
Firstly, there’s the volume of material, both from her own time and in all the centuries since. And secondly, it’s trying to find a voice that is completely trustworthy. It’s only in our own times that historians are more judicious, and they balance up this fact against that fact and all the probabilities. In the early centuries, people just wrote tracts which were either entirely against here – she was a complete sinner – or she was an absolute saint. And it’s only now that the scales of justice are being allowed to be weighed slightly more judiciously. That for me made it very difficult. And also finding out what I felt as I went through writing it was also hard, because you could not fail to have sympathy for somebody like Mary. She’s a magnificent character and there’s so many good things about her, and yet always knowing the end of her story, retrospectively, makes it all the more tragic as you see the desperate decisions that she made and the holes that she dug for herself.
[JB]
You can see down the years just why dramatists have been drawn to her. What did you glean from visiting so many of her haunts?
[RG]
What a very varied place Scotland is. The different parts of Scotland that she was meant to keep under control, just how different they are geographically, the people in these different areas all had different temperaments and customs. Also, just how very hard a life somebody in her position or in aristocracy in general, had, given the look of buildings where they lived. They weren’t comfortable. They would have put hangings up on the walls, but these were not wonderful places to live. They didn’t live in luxury as we would understand it.
[JB]
And there was menace everywhere, and I suppose the entire country, with (as you say) she was a Catholic queen in a newly Protestant country. It must have been deeply intimidating.
[RG]
I think so. And I think people made sure that she felt that, because really the clique around her – her closest friends obviously were not judgemental – but the men who wanted her gone wanted to make sure that she was kept in a state of alarm. They did not want her to be practising her own faith, even though she had been promised that she could do this so long as she was relatively discreet. Although I don’t think in her early years she was anything more than conventionally devout, it still mattered a great deal to her to be able to take Mass and to read the Bible as she wanted to do. I think she was very much a fish out of water by the time she arrived in Scotland and I think she was always made to feel that her position was extremely precarious.
[JB]
You said that looking at the palaces and castles where she lived, or where she took refuge, was a chance to ‘catch a glimpse of her’. Was there any moment in your search or in your research where you thought ‘I saw her; I get her’?
[RG]
I think there was one. I must admit I do write historical fiction and so I am quite fanciful. But the place where I really felt that I could almost have seen Mary was at Port Mary Cove, which is just beyond Dundrennan Abbey, where she spent the last night of her time in Scotland and where the boat came to take her off to England. From Port Mary Cove you can look out across towards Cumbria and Workington, where she was going to land, and you just have this terrible sense of what might have been if she had listened to all her advisors who were begging her not to get into the boat, not to sail off but to stay in Scotland, or even sail to France. And at that location, I just feel there’s an atmosphere. You can really feel it as you walk on that beach.
[JB]
So, she was aged just 24, with fewer than 6 years of rule. Why didn’t she flee to France for a happier ending?
[RG]
I know! Why didn’t she? That’s the huge question. Because she could have gathered support there, or at the very worse she could have stayed there. She had her own income, and she could have had a perfectly acceptable life and would have saved her own life rather than dying desperately. That’s one of the many questions that hang over her – why, why, why?
[JB]
She made her way to England. It didn’t work out well. She was held for 19 years before her execution. She’d lived, I think, roughly less than a quarter of her life here, yet her reign is indelibly stamped.
[RG]
Yes, it really is. I think she’s made a big impression on Scotland in various ways, increasingly in good ways I think. Initially, when she escaped and then when she was executed, I think she was seen as a justification for saying women cannot be rulers. This was the big argument in the 16th century anyway – could women rule effectively? All through Mary’s young upbringing, she was asked to write school essays on this subject. I think for her detractors, the way she behaved and what happened to her was just a vindication of their own view that women weren’t fit to rule.
But I think in the centuries since then, people have had a much more nuanced view of her. I do notice now that a lot of young women are very drawn to her story because I think they feel they can identify with somebody who was in the very top position in an extraordinarily male environment, an aggressively male environment – very few people she could actually trust and rely on. I think modern women are starting to see in her something if not as a role model, then as somebody whose example is very interesting, and they have a great sympathy for the challenges that she faced.
[JB]
What do you think Elizabeth I had that Mary didn’t, that enabled Elizabeth I to reign for so long and so successfully?
[RG]
She had very good advisors, who actually sometimes told her what she was doing effectively. She listened to them. She also had I think I would call a cooler temperament – she wasn’t as impetuous. She would take time to think about things and sometimes do nothing at all rather than make a decision, in the hope that something would resolve itself, which was actually a very canny way of behaving in lots of situations. She didn’t have the charisma that Mary had, but I think at the same time that’s a plus in the way that she was a much calmer ruler.
[JB]
So, Mary died aged 44. The final irony though was that the person who did get the English crown, and the Scottish one, was Mary’s son James. So, in a way, she lived on.
[RG]
Absolutely. In a way, the story went in the direction she had always hoped for, and in a very simple way, a very un-bloody way. Whereas if Mary had pressed her case for the English throne, there would have been terrible bloodshed. But it just fell naturally to James VI. As you say, she got what she’d always hoped for.
[JB]
Rosemary Goring, thank you very much. Thank you for sharing your thoughts on Mary with us.
[RG]
Thank you.
[JB]
And Rosemary’s book Homecoming: The Scottish years of Mary, Queen of Scots is out now. And if you want to walk in Mary’s footsteps in Falkland Palace, or in Alloa Tower where she also stayed, just head to the National Trust for Scotland website for all the details of opening times and for even more information on Mary’s life and times.
If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe for free and join me next time. Until then, goodbye.
[MV]
Love Scotland is brought to you by Think and Demus Productions, on behalf of the National Trust for Scotland. Presented by Jackie Bird. For show notes and more information, go to nts.org.uk and don’t forget to like, subscribe, review and share.
She’s one of Scotland’s most famous monarchs and continues to be the focus of huge interest today. Mary, Queen of Scots is a figure synonymous with Scottish history, but why has her story resonated for so long?
In this episode, Jackie sits down with writer Rosemary Goring to discuss Mary’s life and legacy. Why did the queen love her time in Falkland Palace so much? Why did she have to spend her childhood in France? And what role did she have to play in the brutal murder of her first husband?
Rosemary Goring is the author of the 2022 book Homecoming: The Scottish Years of Mary, Queen of Scots.
This podcast was recorded in October 2022.
James VI: wise man or fool?
Transcript
Five speakers: male voiceover [MV]; Jackie Bird [JB]; Steven Veerapen [SV]; second male voiceover [MV2]; Steven Reid [SR]
[MV]
This is Love Scotland, with Jackie Bird.
[JB]
You join me in a place where kings and queens have knelt in worship, where the body of James V, the father of Mary, Queen of Scots, lay for a month before his burial, and where royal matters of life and of state were contemplated – and I’m sure a bit of divine guidance was sought.
This is the Chapel Royal in Falkland Palace. This is 500 years of Scottish history. Falkland in Fife was a fun palace for the Stuart dynasty, a holiday-home-come-hunting-lodge where they attempted to escape the trials of rule, but also a place of refuge in troubled times.
And a royal who experienced several seismic moments in his life here was King James VI of Scotland, who in 1603, after the Union of the Crowns, became James I of England. Now, we’ve covered James’s early life in a previous podcast, but a man with such a notable place in history deserves a sequel. So, I’m joined in this quite stunning chapel, with its striking painted ceiling and ornate tapestries, by Steven Veerapen, who is the author of a book about James called The Wisest Fool. Steven, welcome to the podcast.
[SV]
Thank you, Jackie, for having me. Looking forward to it.
[JB]
And what a place in which to record.
[SV]
I know, yes. Steeped in history and steeped in James’s somewhat tumultuous life as well.
[JB]
Tumultuous indeed. Now, if only these beautiful walls could talk! The title of your book, The Wisest Fool – that’s not you being judgmental about James; that’s a quote. Tell me the origins of that.
[SV]
The origin of the ‘wisest fool’ title is actually from Sir Anthony Weldon, or at least from a book ascribed to him. The Court and Character of King James, it was called. It wasn’t an entirely flattering book, but it was the one that gave him, I suppose, the most famous reputation – or I suppose you could say the most infamous reputation.
When we think of King James, we tend to think, unfortunately, of a slobbering, cowardly, somewhat odd man. And this all gets traced back to that single text; that text really cemented his historical reputation. One of the things I wanted to do with the book really was to see how much of that was true, how much of it was invented, how much of it was just political slander, really.
[JB]
So you think he’s had a bit of a bad rap?
[SV]
I do. I think it’s one of those things that happens to some leaders, some monarchs as well. Bloody Mary, for example, in England – whether that title is fair, whether it’s deserved or not, the name has stuck. With James, it was the ‘wisest fool’. Elizabeth got off quite lucky: the Virgin Queen sounds fairly nice!
[JB]
He’s been somewhat overshadowed, hasn’t he, by his mother in terms of iconic status, Mary, Queen of Scots, and also I suppose when he took the English throne by his son Charles I. He’s sort of sandwiched between them.
[SV]
Yeah, I think that’s a really good way of putting it. There’s this iconic reign before him and Elizabeth, this iconic reign before him and his mother; and then after, the still somewhat iconic, if tragic, reign of Charles I. James was almost a victim of his own success. He was good at what he did! He was good at his job. That maybe makes for less good copy, I suppose.
[JB]
We’re going to delve right into it, but we’re not going to start at the very beginning because, as I said, we’ve had a previous podcast. So, to get us where I’d like to start, let me just fill in the background. You’re the expert – if I get anything wrong here, jump in, promise?
[SV]
Yeah, I will.
[JB]
Right. He was born in 1566. His father was murdered, probably by the man who then married his mother. He last saw Mary when he was less than a year old. He was proclaimed king a few months later, after his mother was forced to abdicate. In his childhood, he was a pawn. Nobles were vying for control of him and the country. His main tutor beat him. He saw his murdered grandfather die in front of him. He was 16 when he was abducted and held captive for nearly a year. As a teenager, he also fell in love with a glamorous male cousin who may or may not have groomed him.
Steven, those are just the headlines. Now, some experts believe that what happens in your formative years decides the sort of man you’re going to be. So, James was always going to be a pretty complex character.
[SV]
Yes, when you lay out like that, you realise how dramatic it is. You think, where’s the mini-series just covering those events? So yes, his childhood was unorthodox, I think even by 16th-century royal standards. One of the unusual things, and I know we’ve spoken before about his childhood, wasn’t that he was separated from his parents – that was fairly standard for royals in that time – but he was actually taught to hate and detest and fear his parents. He was being really taught to dislike the concept of monarchy, to think it wasn’t important. And what seems to have happened, I think, is that he took refuge in the completely opposite view of these things.
He decided, no, monarchy’s not unimportant; it’s the most important thing in the country and the world, and God has chosen me. He found refuge in all these attacks on his family by becoming obsessed with the idea of family, by becoming really desirous of creating a family for himself.
[JB]
I was going to ask, of all of those events that I listed, what do you think defined him? And really, they all defined him.
[SV]
Yes, it’s difficult to say. I suppose the big one would be Esme Stewart, because in Esme Stewart, his cousin whom he made Duke of Lennox – the man who groomed him, who was the same age as his mother, actually – we find not just the seeds of his famous later sexuality, but also that obsession with family, because Lennox was his cousin. And I don’t think it’s coincidence that the first person he fell in love with was a family member. And he carried that through his life, right until his last lover, Buckingham. He was still using the language of family. He would call Buckingham ‘his wife and son’. He would call himself ‘your dad and husband’.
[JB]
Let’s look at the bigger picture: the court that was supposed to serve him. If you’re after people with principles, your book makes really depressing reading because probity among the Scottish elite was in short supply.
[SV]
Yes, I remember when I was writing the book, with each new chapter, I thought, my God, another betrayal, another drama, another bit of misery! How did this guy get through it? But he did. One of the things I have to say for James, and Anna actually, is they were consummate survivors. I mean, they really knew how to survive. Mary went under; James and Anna did not.
[JB]
Anna was his wife-to-be, but before he met her, the nobles were all either vying for power independently or so many of them were in the pay of Elizabeth I, who is the shadow overlooking the Scottish court. Is that a fair representation?
[SV]
Yes. At every juncture in James’s young life, you find Elizabeth interfering, meddling, causing mischief. And it almost felt, I suppose, that she was the villain of the piece. I think in her defence, she was looking out for England; that was her job. So, if she could take advantage of warring Scottish nobles, if she could pay them off, if she could cause trouble, if it worked in England’s favour, good on her I suppose – that’s what she was being paid to do.
[JB]
I began by feeling sorry for young James when you hear about that awful back story. But as it unfolded and the extent to which he used his mother who was in captivity, which is where we take up our story, I lost that sympathy. Is that unfair?
[SV]
It might be slightly unfair. James is quite often criticised for not doing enough to help his mother, perhaps even being secretly relieved when she was executed, because it took away a potential rival for the throne. She was still claiming the throne.
James had no relationship with his mother, which I think was unusual. She became a source of fascination, I think, from a distance. But he did what he could to save her. Right up until the end, he did not believe Elizabeth would do it. It’s easy to look back and think, oh, of course Elizabeth executed Mary. She was always going to execute Mary. At the time, that was a big deal, executing a monarch and a monarch executing another monarch, trying another monarch. This was big stuff. It was cited later in the 17th century – those who were trying to get rid of Charles I could look back and say there’s precedent; we’ve done it before. At the time, it was a huge deal. Elizabeth didn’t want to do it. James, I think, did not think she would really do it. He actually wrote south with alternative possibilities – you could confine her more strictly … One, my favourite, was marry me! James offered to marry Elizabeth in the closing months of his mother’s life.
[JB]
And there was quite an age difference there!
[SV]
There was quite an age difference: 30 years. Yes, he was going to take one for the team!
[JB]
So, in the final years of Mary’s life, he was writing letters to her saying yes, yes, everything will be fine. I’m doing this and we may do this; we may get you into Scotland; we may do this. He was playing her along.
[SV]
Yes, that does with hindsight look cruel. I think if there had been a means by which Mary could have been returned to Scotland, but not to power, James might well have taken it. Certain ideas were floated over the years, but it was never a realistic prospect. International politics played a role as well; religion played a role. It was never really going to happen. But yes, it does look cruel. Looks like it was exciting Mary’s hopes of freedom. Ultimately, she’d been imprisoned for nearly 20 years for something she didn’t do. She definitely didn’t do … in terms of murdering Darnley. That was why she was ostensibly kept in prison for all these years in England.
When she first fled to England for help from Elizabeth, Elizabeth gave her this sham inquiry, the show trial into whether or not she had played a role in Darnley’s murder. Elizabeth eventually decided we’ve found no evidence for it, but no evidence against it. So, we’re going to just keep you in prison for the rest of your life!
[JB]
But what about Elizabeth’s claim that she intended to play a part in an assassination of Elizabeth herself?
[SV]
I think that was certainly true. Ultimately, Mary was convicted and found guilty, obviously, of plotting to kill Elizabeth. It was a hands-off approach. Mary’s principal goal was freedom; she wanted to be freed from her English captivity. If certain Catholic hotheads were willing to kill Elizabeth in pursuit of that, she was willing to turn a blind eye to it.
[JB]
Well, let’s get back to James then, because I’m not letting you off the hook here. He was obsessed with gaining the English crown, surely?
[SV]
Yes, this is one thing that really frustrates me about James, and to some extent his mother as well. They played Elizabeth’s game. Elizabeth held out the idea that she held in her hands the rights to the English throne; it was entirely up to her whether she said yea or nay to any candidate.
As it turns out, as we know from history, when she died in 1603, she didn’t say a word. It didn’t matter. They’d wasted all these years trying to convince her, trying to wheedle her, trying to goad her into making some pronouncement. It didn’t matter. It was the politicians that ended up doing the job.
[JB]
Part of James’s plan to reach the English crown was to show that he was a family man, unlike Elizabeth. So, he needed a wife, and he needed a wife who would be deferential. How did that turn out?
[SV]
In fact, I was going to say not particularly well – that’s a lie. It worked out massively well, if we look at it from the standards of the period. Once Mary, Queen of Scots was gone, once she had been executed, James suddenly was a much more attractive prospect. He was now a sole king. He was in charge of his realm. There was no mother in captivity claiming his crown. He was really in charge.
What we find then is almost immediately he starts seriously looking for a wife. Given his early experiences with Lennox, when it was clear that he was groomed by a man, was in love with this older man, it’s quite often written that this was just political necessity. There was no such thing as having a homosexual lifestyle. A king had to marry, whether he loved his wife or not.
James, I think, was almost certainly bisexual. How do we know this? Well, there’s several pieces of evidence. One of them is he cleared out his bed chamber of these handsome young men that had followed in Lennox’s footsteps. He really seemed keen on finding this wife. When he found Anna, or when he decided on Anna, he was desperate to be married as quickly as possible. He was a young man; he wanted to perpetuate the dynasty, all of this sort of thing. He was so desperate that he sailed out to Denmark and Norway to retrieve her himself, which was quite a bold move at the time – a monarch to go visiting in another country. He did that. He brought her back.
But James had somewhat misogynistic views on women. He expected women to be submissive. He expected them to be deferential. James had a really strong streak of the teacher in him. He wanted a young woman that he could mould, that he could take charge of, which I should say wasn’t unexpected in the 16th century. A 16th-century autocrat was obviously going to want a submissive wife.
James, after he had married Anna, I think very swiftly found out that this ornamental bride had a mind of her own, and that was troubling to him, but it certainly didn’t drive them apart. Interestingly, during their time in Scotland, I’ve been able to find no evidence that he was cheating on her, apart from potentially one time with another woman actually. No young men are really in the picture. He seems to have been faithful, and they were having a lot of children!
[JB]
They got married in 1589. Anna was 16 and James was 23.
[SV]
She was 15 when they got married by proxy, so she was extremely young, and I think that was part of the attraction. At the time, that was obviously acceptable. He wanted a young, fertile bride.
[JB]
How did his and Anna’s relationship evolve? You’ve intimated that it was a loving one. They had seven children, after all.
[SV]
Oh yes, James was no ‘heir and a spare’ man. I think that gives the lie to the idea that he was only interested in men. He was certainly interested in women as well. What he seemed to discover is that Anna really was politically active. One of the first things she did actually was try and reform his court. James’s court had been fairly laddish, a place of mucky riding boots and all of this sort of stuff, running off to the chase. Anna very swiftly tried to institute a Danish formality to it. Some of the courtiers complained about this, saying ‘there’s great alterations since we got this queen’!
[JB]
So, he didn’t actually get his biddable queen, but she was almost more of a partner with him, wasn’t she?
[SV]
I think she was; I think much more than history has given her credit for. There are some really scathing things written about Anne of Denmark right up until the mid-20th century. One of my favourite, or the most infamous, comments about her was ‘Alas, the king has married a stupid wife’, which was written I think in the 1950s.
[JB]
After the trials and tribulations of his early ‘reign’ when he was a boy king, how did he rule Scotland? Was he a good king? Did he manage to rule it with all the warring nobles?
[SV]
I think, again, James was a real survivor. James’s biggest struggle in Scotland wasn’t so much against the nobility as against the Scottish Kirk.
[JB]
It was a tinderbox as far as religion was concerned, because the Reformation wasn’t all that long ago.
[SV]
It wasn’t all that long ago. And also, the infrastructure of the Scottish Kirk – what should it look like? How should you worship? All of this stuff hadn’t really been settled right at the Reformation, so you still get a lot of people arguing reform hasn’t gone far enough – we need to do this; we need to do that. And James was there trying to carve out his own position. He wanted to be head of the Church. He wanted to be head of the Kirk. A lot of the hotter Kirk ministers: ‘absolutely not; you’re just a member of the Kirk like anyone else’. So, there was a running battle throughout his reign as he was trying to gain mastery of the Kirk. It really makes me almost more appreciative of Mary, Queen of Scots hanging on as long as she did as a Catholic, when James faced so many struggles as a Protestant.
[JB]
Well, something tells me that James is going to get a new job, or at least an additional job. A vacancy is about to arrive in London, so let’s take a quick break and we’ll be back in a moment.
[MV2]
Impressive. For a moment I thought she was talking about me. I meant Falkland Palace, she said with a smile. Of course she did. The art, the architecture. Scotland’s history can really turn your head. So, we signed up to take care of it. Keep it looking dapper.
[MV]
Since 1931, the National Trust for Scotland, a charity supported by you, has been looking after Scotland’s treasured places so we can all share in them.
Support us at nts.org.uk
[JB]
Welcome back to the Love Scotland podcast, coming to you from the Renaissance splendour of the Chapel Royal at Falkland Palace. Steven Veerapen, before the break we talked about how James had acquitted himself rather well at the Scottish Court, but things were about to change. In March 1603, Good Queen Bess, Elizabeth I finally died, but without actually naming James, as you said at the beginning, as her heir. So, how did he manage to claim the throne?
[SV]
Well, James had been extremely sneaky in the 1590s.
[JB]
That’s another black mark!
[SV]
Sneaky in a way that I suppose worked though; it worked effectively. I’m making a case for him; I’m really standing up for James.
During the 1590s, James was obsessed with getting recognition of his succession rights. That does look again horribly ambitious and really, again, sneaky, but that was normal in the period. If any monarch had any succession rights to any territory, however big or small, it was dishonourable if they didn’t pursue it – it was dishonourable to their family name, all of this stuff. James was really doing no more than was expected.
Elizabeth, on the other hand, almost seemed to increasingly enjoy not giving him what he wanted! It was one of my favourite things to write, actually, was that relationship between James and Elizabeth. They were both Protestant. They both had to be locked in this weird dance where she had something to give that she wasn’t going to give. He had to play nice, try and get it, but you could almost hear the simmering fury that he wasn’t getting it! So, what he did was go behind her back.
First of all, he tried writing to the Earl of Essex, who wrote back. But that was backing what turned out a dead horse actually, when Essex had his head chopped off for rebellion. He then made a wiser choice in Robert Cecil, who was Elizabeth’s final chief minister. Cecil was a really effective and consummate politician. What he did was start writing to James. Essentially, they were saying to each other, she’s not going to live forever. She’s not going to name you as her heir. It’s not going to matter. We’ll deal with this politically; we’ll deal with this quietly. And they did.
So, when Elizabeth died in 1603, there was no civil war. There was no great outcry. James was just very quietly, very smoothly proclaimed king. He was happy. Delighted!
[JB]
Of course he was! He hot footed it south as soon as he possibly could.
[SV]
Couldn’t leave Scotland fast enough!
[JB]
He promised to come back, what, every three years?
[SV]
Every three years, so he claimed. He stood up in the High Street in Edinburgh, said don’t worry guys, I’ll be back every three years, it will be fine. He came back once, as it turned out.
[JB]
How is he viewed at the English Court?
[SV]
James at the English Court in those opening years was viewed with huge acclamation. There are fantastic reports of him travelling through England, meeting cheers, meeting crowds, meeting all this enthusiasm. People really were excited. Why? Because if you think about it, they lived with a lot of uncertainty underneath Elizabeth. She was an elderly woman. She had no heir. No one really knew what was going to happen. James’s path to the throne was being worked out very secretly. So, people didn’t know for sure if he would become king. They don’t know who would.
But when he was proclaimed king, this was great. He was a married man. He was a family man. He had heirs as well. So, the succession in the future looked, for the first time in most people’s memories, really stable.
[JB]
And what about the Court itself when he got down there? Naively perhaps, I had no idea of the extent of anti-Scottish feeling.
[SV]
Yeah. And that rose partly I think in reaction to James’s actions. But I think one thing that we have to keep in mind that often isn’t, is James was still King of Scots at the same time. He was wearing two crowns. He was King of Scots and he was King of England. That meant he had to juggle two traditions or two jobs. One of the roles of the King of Scots, for example, was they were supposed to grant certain levels of access to their Scottish subjects; in England, the monarch could be slightly more distanced – they could create a barrier around themselves, retreat into their privy chambers and so on.
So, James was doing that. He was doing the English thing, retreating into his privy chambers, but he was still giving these Scots access because he was still King of Scots. From an English perspective, I don’t think they particularly cared, these English courtiers, that he has two jobs to do. They just wanted a King of England. And what they saw was a King of England who was allowing privileged access to these Scottish incomers.
[JB]
He brought down a sort of Scottish mafia with him.
[SV]
Yes, he did and surrounded himself, ringed himself with these Scots. I think partly because he trusted them, he’d known them, but more so because that was still his job. He still had to keep these guys sweet.
[JB]
Did he have a grand plan to do something within his role as king in England to make big changes, or was it just a destination? Was that all he wanted, to get onto that throne?
[SV]
Oh, that’s a really good question because yes, part of James’s problem was he had too many grand plans. He was a really idealistic man. He had a lot of big ideas, big picture ideas, big ticket items on the monarchical agenda. And that was the problem, I think. He also had to try and sell the idea that he was the continuity candidate. He was Elizabeth’s heir. He’d become successor to Elizabeth, and he wanted to say we’re going to do this big, noble, laudatory thing. We’re going to end this war, we’re going to unite these crowns, we’re going to unite our religious faiths. But there’s going to be no change. Everything will be done very smoothly and calmly.
Now, these things didn’t quite sit nicely together. His big goals were that union of the crowns – he wanted to take that further. He wanted full integration of Scotland and England. He wanted to really put an end to all the religious wars, which I think is a really laudable goal. He’d looked at his own life, I suppose, all the conflict. He could look at his mother’s reign and see all the conflict – and what he wanted to do was put an end to conflict. He’d had enough of conflict. He wanted to create peace in terms of ending Elizabeth’s old Anglo-Spanish War. He wanted to create peace between these warring Protestant faiths, and then after that, I think he really hoped that we can make peace with the Catholic Church. Everything will be rosy. Now, no one man could do these things, but James had a very high opinion of himself and thought he could.
[JB]
That’s really interesting because, using a bit of cod psychology, it comes back to what I said earlier about what happens in your childhood defines you.
[SV]
Absolutely. It comes again back to family. What kind of rhetoric was he using? What kind of language was he using? ‘I’m the father; this whole isle is my wife.’ He was using the language of family. ‘Parliament are my children’, all of this. He clung to that, not just in his domestic life really, but in his political public life as well; he was clinging to this idea of family.
[JB]
And as you say, that is in contradiction to the values of the times, because he was supposed to be a king. I’m on the throne. Let’s start a war with you. I quite fancy taking over your lands. No, he baulked.
[SV]
Yes, this is something you see a lot through history that’s always a bit annoying – when there’s a war on, people are saying, this is terrible, isn’t it? This is terrible – we’re sending people over to die. Let’s put an end to this. James did. And yes, there was a window of popularity in the back of that. But within years, people were starting to look back and say, oh, remember when Elizabeth was queen and England was great and Protestant and militant. Why can’t we go back to sending people off to die? So yeah, it’s sad, but I think that’s still human nature, I suppose.
[JB]
Well, he had that lovely window when he was acclaimed, and he made his family front and centre, as you say. The succession’s all sorted out because I’ve got lots of sons. But things started to go awry, and I suppose partly because of his spending. It seems like a small thing, but it wasn’t.
[SV]
It wasn’t. No, it’s one of those things. And I know various attempts have been made to defend it and say, well, he was the king. He had to project an image of majesty and all of this. Yes, but not to that extent, James! Throwing money away at favourites, throwing money away at everyone, really just enjoying yourself. Which makes for great drama because without international wars and things going on, it’s a soap opera. His life in England was a real soap opera, so it’s great fun. But yeah, the spending was out of control. He was having these elaborate masques. He was really having this extremely lavish life; that’s the subtitle of the book, The lavish life of King James.
But I think the other reason for the turning point, the reason his popularity started to fade, was that when he’d been trying to game the system, when he’d been trying to win the English crown, win support for it, he’d made quite a lot of promises to people, that when he became king, he didn’t keep.
The big one is obviously to Catholics. In the 1590s, the Kirk had been constantly berating him, saying you’re too soft on Catholics. Well, he was, I say as someone that was raised Catholic. He was politically being very forgiving towards Catholics.
[JB]
He wasn’t burning many of them … or any of them?
[SV]
Yeah, absolutely. Why was he doing that? Because he didn’t want any Catholic resistance to his English claim. So, what he did was promise Catholics the Earth. There will be more tolerance. When I’m king of England, things will be easier, your lives will be easier. And that didn’t happen because again, when he actually gained the English crown, it was very much: I’m the continuity candidate. Things haven’t changed from Elizabeth’s day. Tried to keep that going. The Catholics, I suppose, fairly felt very hard done having been made all these promises, and it’s just more of the same now we’ve got a new king.
[JB]
And we have the Gunpowder Plot.
[SV]
Absolutely. I think that was the big – I was going to say the big explosive without even meaning it! – the big explosive event that really showed the Catholic discontent. James, to his credit, didn’t take bloody reprisals against the Catholics. He could see as well as anyone that this was a small extremist band of terrorist Catholics. So, what happened as a result of that? Nothing bloody against the Catholics, but also nothing that really made their lives any easier.
[JB]
There’s a quote from your book, and it comes back to that anti-Scottish feeling, because I did not know this, that there was a quote from one of the accomplices, I believe, who took part in the Gunpowder Plot. James had been on the throne now for about two years in England and ‘he wanted to blow the Scottish beggars back to their native mountain’.
[SV]
Yes, I had to get that quote in! It’s such an amusing one. And that was Guy Fawkes, I believe …
[JB]
That came from Guy Fawkes himself?
[SV]
Yes, quite bold and open in it. It just reveals, I think, that that was as much xenophobic as it was religious, the Gunpowder Plot. There was a sense that these are Scottish interlopers. We have a foreign king that no one asked for. Let’s get rid of them.
[JB]
That’s the last time I attend a firework display then if that’s the case. So, he’s got problems, he’s spending too much. He has not really paid his dues to the Catholics as they thought. He also falls in love, really in love, with a man, and he does this a few times while he’s on the throne in England. But he was very public about it. And when he had his favourites, they were favourites and they leapt above the other nobles, and this did not go down well.
[SV]
I think it’s no coincidence that Anna’s last pregnancy was 1606, and it was the next year that Robert Carr makes his appearance. The king falls in love; Anna no longer gets pregnant. She was still relatively young. I think this is really the first time that James had an emotional break with his wife. Now, what’s interesting though, is they certainly didn’t lead separate lives or anything. That concept didn't exist in the period. She was still queen, she still had a job to do, and they still had a very, I suppose, affectionate relationship.
[JB]
But it reduced her political influence.
[SV]
Yes, and I think that’s what annoyed Anna. She tried various things to try and retain political influence. She combined with her son Prince Henry. Both of them hated Robert Carr, and I think with good reason. Robert Carr was supposedly very attractive physically but intellectually somewhat lacking. James liked a pretty face, but he fell in love with this man, with the idea that he could again teach him, almost take him on like a disciple. In that very early relationship, there are reports of him trying to teach this guy Latin. Very little interest, I would imagine, in learning Latin from the king. But that was James’s way of showing affection, of showing love is I want someone that can learn from me, that I can teach. And Robert Carr, I think, was happy to take the positions, the titles, but he wasn’t equipped to do the job that came with being a royal favourite, which if you were a man meant political influence. It meant political office.
[JB]
We know that the other courtiers were not best pleased about this. What about the public? Did it feed down to the streets? Did they know this was the way the king was behaving?
[SV]
Yes, and it did to some extent, less so because of the sexuality, which is interesting. The attacks don’t seem to so much be about the king is in love with a man. It seems to be the king’s in love with a Scottish man. We don’t like him.
[JB]
Really! This whole xenophobic thing is gaining ground all the time. Then in 1612, there is a colossal family tragedy. The beloved heir, his son Prince Henry, dies unexpectedly at the age of 18. Henry sounded like a completely good egg but obsessed with exercise.
[SV]
Yes. 1612 was a climactic year because Cecil died. Robert Cecil, who’d been the architect of the succession, was a really stabilising political influence and he again was feeding political information to Henry. He presumably didn’t see himself dying, but he died in 1612 without really being able to groom Henry politically as much as he might have liked.
And then Henry fell ill in the summer, and we think it was typhoid. Seems very likely, but medical practices at the time were not the best. Henry’s approach to falling ill was to push his body even further – to exercise, to swim, to ride, to run. The doctors prescribed, bizarrely, slicing a live chicken up the spine and applying it to his shaved head, which, unsurprisingly, didn’t do much good. And he died in pain.
[JB]
Things were changing, weren’t they? Because Parliament was becoming more powerful, at least it wanted to be more powerful. James was an exponent, as we’ve heard, of the divine right of kings, so this was never going to end happily. What were his later years like?
[SV]
Though there were clashes with Parliament, yes, I’m going to defend James again a little bit. James is often criticised for this. And people can try and see the seeds of the later civil war, shadows of civil war in James’s reign. It was James’s belief in the absolute divine right of kings. And yes, he did believe in that. And of course it was silly, but the Tudors had believed in that as well. Elizabeth had clashed with Parliament; Elizabeth had locked MPs up in the Tower if they’d got a bit bolshy. So, it goes back further than James. James’s beliefs weren’t all that unusual for the time. Henry VIII believed he was divinely appointed by God as well. They all did at the time.
James’s mistake was being quite vocal about it. He wrote it down. He wrote a book about his belief in the divine right of kings. So, it’s almost become more associated with him, but it wasn’t an unusual belief. Parliament actually, in James’s reign, said to him in one of the early sessions, we’d planned to set our rights and liberties before Elizabeth, but they’d only refused to do it because of her age and sex. That was the only thing, apparently, that held them back from making their demands. They made them of James.
[JB]
And as the years went on, he was constantly criticised for not getting involved in foreign wars, which was seen as rather unkingly.
[SV]
Yes, this initially came to a head in his later years, James’s daughter Elizabeth had married the Elector Palatine Frederick. And that was great. James wanted this; James had set up this marriage. It took place – it was slightly delayed because of Prince Henry’s death – but it took place in 1613. And James’s idea, again, was about balance. It was about his role on the world stage. He wanted a Protestant match for his daughter and a Catholic match for his remaining son, Prince Charles. And the idea was I’ll be the counterweight or they’ll counterweight each other.
Unfortunately, the Elector Palatine, Elizabeth’s husband, accepted the Crown of Bohemia, which was Catholic Hapsburg property. It was hereditary possession of the Hapsburgs. But the politicians there were very Protestant, and they invited Frederick and Elizabeth to take the crown and they did. And this wound up the Hapsburgs, the Catholics. And this – what James I think hoped would be a bit of a family squabble – became the 30 Years War.
[JB]
Oops.
[SV]
As happens in slightly higher up noble families, a war breaks out! James was adamant that England and Scotland wouldn’t get involved in this. He really wanted a diplomatic out. He thought, OK, my somewhat foolish son-in-law and daughter have got themselves in a bit of hot water. I’ll find a way out of this.
One of the ways out of it was by really pressing that Catholic match for his son. If his son married a Catholic Hapsburg, it would keep it in the family. This again would just be a family squabble, but it didn’t quite work out.
The 30 Years War, as we know from history, was one of the bloodiest wars in Europe. It was horrific. James was under huge pressure to get involved. This really excited particularly Protestant MPs, because what they could see is a chance to make England great again. We can go and play our part in this war. We can go and defend Elizabeth and Frederick, really wave England’s banners as a militant, Protestant state. And this horrified James. He was really upset, emotionally upset. He cried. There are reports of him crying that he was being dragged into war after a successful decade of peace. His peace.
[JB]
And things got worse for James because Anna, his beloved wife – and they were still on very good terms despite his favourites – she died in 1619 at the age of 44. Now, James was in his early 50s then. He was not a well man. He liked to drink, did our James.
[SV]
He did, and I’m not judging him for that. Good on him! He was enjoying himself. He liked to drink, he liked to eat. He gained weight, his teeth began falling out. I think it was actually a really nice and quite endearing relationship between James and Anna. There are reports of them – and I mean, they weren’t old people at all – but by the standards of the day, their healths both were declining. She possibly had some early tuberculosis, she’d all kinds of health problems, but they would retreat off to spas and things together.
There was certainly again no sense that they lived apart, which has very often been written. It’s often written that when they came to England, they led separate lives, but they didn’t. They were still very much in each other’s pockets, very affectionate towards one another. When she died, it was a blow. It was a massive blow. He determined that three times the amount that was spent on Elizabeth I’s funeral should be spent on Anna’s. He had no money to do that, we should point out, so it took months before he could raise the funds. But yes, when she died, it was a family member going, and family always meant a great deal to James.
What seems to have happened is that his last favourite Somerset had been jettisoned some years before. Into his shoes had come George Villiers, who became the Duke of Buckingham. He really took on the role of, and it sounds odd to say, James’s wife. How do we know this? Because James called him his wife! He would write letters to him calling him ‘my sweet child and wife’.
[JB]
And his last years were decidedly odd because when his son Charles, latest to be Charles I, went off to Spain to try to claim his Spanish bride – and that didn’t go well – he went with George, who he was very, very close to.
[SV]
Yes, at first Charles disliked Buckingham and was suspicious of him. But Buckingham was much smarter than Robert Carr had been. Robert Carr had really enjoyed being the king’s lover because it gave him lots of perks, but he’d made no effort to ingratiate himself with James’s family. Buckingham knew better. Whether he just instinctively knew it, he seems to have been quite an ambitious but not an unpleasant person. He ingratiated himself first with Queen Anna, who liked him. Yes, he was having an affair with her husband, but he was very deferential towards her. He treated her well; she liked him. He won over Charles eventually, and Charles seems to have looked at him as kind of an older brother figure. Whether he knew what might have been going on between his father and Buckingham, he probably just didn’t want to think about it. Who wants to think about their parents’ sex lives? No one!
[JB]
Who does indeed. James died in 1625, aged 58. Obviously not old by our standards. But even that was surrounded by intrigue. Did he die naturally or was he murdered?
[SV]
James died a natural death. He’d been failing for years in health. He’d been going downhill for quite a while. What there is no doubt about is that Buckingham and his mother were very close to the king in his final years. Again, James was always desperate for that sense of family, which I keep repeating. They were there in the royal bedchamber at James’s end and they did give him dodgy medicine, but they weren’t trying to kill him; they were trying to save him. If they could have saved James’s life, Buckingham’s credit would never have been higher! He would have been a saviour.
James was having all kinds of medical treatments from all kinds of doctors. And we know from reports of early modern healthcare that these things were horrific. They were giving people things that were almost guaranteed to kill them rather than cure them. James, I think, died not as a result of any deliberate murder, but of failing health and bad medicine that was probably entirely well-intentioned.
[JB]
And as you said, he had only managed to come back to Scotland once and it included a visit here to Falkland. Almost certainly he came into this room and spent time worshipping in this Chapel Royal. His life, even as a young boy, as a teenager, had been fixed on gaining the English throne and achieving some sort of union. He didn’t really achieve total union. Was that a big regret?
[SV]
I think it was in the early years because James, when he first went to England, thought that it would be a relatively smooth process. He thought this is just a bit of business, I’m in charge, I’m the king. If I say that I want it, it will happen and it will be a minor bit of business. I think he was really surprised at the resistance in Scotland and England to political union, and it never came about. He never achieved it. I think he did think it would come eventually.
What I would point out is when there was political union in 1707 between Scotland and England, it still wasn’t as comprehensive as James had wanted. When James came back here, to this room in 1617, he was really pressing the case for religious union between Scotland and England. He, based on his experiences, did not have a high opinion of the Scottish Kirk. He wanted it to incline more towards English religious practices. In England, the monarch was the head of the church, still is. In Scotland, that’s not the case.
He wanted Scotland to follow England’s example. So, when he came back here in 1617, he was really covertly trying to push a religious agenda. And in 1707, that never happened either. Scotland has always retained its separate church.
[JB]
Looking at the big picture then, as you seem to be the lead witness for the defence, James, the wisest fool – wise, foolish? After spending so much time researching, what are your feelings about it?
[SV]
Well, it’s interesting because that title from again Anthony Weldon, ‘the wisest fool’. The fool thing runs that he was wise in small matters, unimportant things, but a fool in big matters. I would say the opposite is true. I think in big matters like peace, religion, James was actually quite forward-thinking. He was wise, tolerant as well. I think in small matters he could be a bit of a fool. In things that were maybe relatively unimportant, he could be quite foolish. In domestic and love matters, he could certainly be foolish!
[JB]
Fascinating. Stephen Veerapen, thank you for taking us through the life of King James. This has been a whistlestop tour. There is much, much more in your fabulous book: The Wisest Fool, published by Birlinn. So, thank you.
[SV]
Thank you very much Jackie, really enjoyed it.
[JB]
And Falkland Palace is cared for by the National Trust for Scotland so that you can enjoy its history and its marvellous grounds. Details of opening times are on the Trust’s website. I heartily recommend a visit, so thank you for listening. Until next time, goodbye.
And if you’d like to hear more about King James, look out for our earlier Love Scotland episode, James VI: The Childhood Years with the historian Stephen Reid.
[SR]
When his grandfather, Matthew Stewart, the Earl of Lennox, is assassinated, he’s killed just outside Stirling Castle. And the body is brought in just as he’s dying for James to see. He’s not much older than 5 at this point, so seeing that must have been really quite shocking for him.
[MV]
Love Scotland is brought to you by Think and Demus Productions on behalf of the National Trust for Scotland; presented by Jackie Bird. For show notes and more information, go to nts.org.uk and don’t forget to like, subscribe, review and share.
Recorded in Falkland Palace’s chapel royal, Jackie and her guest Steven Veerapen discuss the adult life and legacy of James VI of Scotland and I of England. During his reign, the king faced a host of challenges: from religious tensions to anti-Scottish sentiment in his London court, not to mention Guy Fawkes’ gunpowder plot.
Veerapen’s book, The Wisest Fool, challenges the varied perceptions of James as an ineffective or short-sighted monarch. What really fuelled the first king to reign over Scotland, England and Ireland? How did his adult relationships – with men and women – influence his decision-making? And which is more accurate: was the king a wise man, or a fool?
This podcast was released in July 2024.
