Did Mary Queen of Scots Really Have To Die?

Tom Holland: And that's the significance of that otherwise kind of enigmatic phrase, 'Then shall it be time to set the six gentlemen to work.' In other words, get the assassination squad out there. Let them kill Elizabeth.

Tom Holland: And that's the significance of that otherwise kind of enigmatic phrase, 'Then shall it be time to set the six gentlemen to work.' In other words, get the assassination squad out there. Let them kill Elizabeth.

Tom Holland: Elizabeth's opposition to having Mary executed goes beyond mere foreign policy concerns. She sees it as a threat to her own authority because Mary, like Elizabeth, is an anointed queen. And Elizabeth doesn't want to license anything that might impair the sense her subjects have of the divinity that hedges a king, as Shakespeare would put it. And obviously, if you're anxious to maintain the sense of dignity that surrounds an anointed monarch, then chopping off her head is not the way to maintain it.

Tom Holland: He has been opening all the correspondence between Babington and Mary. He's been decrypting what Babington may have written or what Mary may have written, reading it through, and then he is another of his many talents is that he's able to reseal letters that he's opened and make it look as though they have never been opened. And so because of this he can then forward these letters that he's read to the intended recipients and they have no idea that the contents have already been read by Walsingham's spy agency.

Tom Holland: Mary does not have a lawyer with her. She doesn't have a kind of barrister who is speaking on her behalf, and instead she is completely surrounded by enemies and by two in particular because just across from where she is sitting, so right in her eye line, next to the Lord Chancellor is Lord Burghley. And at a further remove on the bench reserved for knights... is a man that she had only met for the first time that very morning, and this is Sir Francis Walsingham... When Mary realizes that all her correspondence had been penetrated by Walsingham, I mean, she is stunned. At that point, surely she knows the game is up.

Tom Holland: The black velvet gown fell below her knees, revealing underbodies and petticoat of crimson silk. And she stepped forward suddenly, shockingly, in the color of martyrdom, blood red from top to toe against the somber background. And all the assembled Protestants there go into complete meltdown and they're so appalled by this stunt, this sartorial kind of coup de théâtre, that none of the official reports on Mary's death mention it.

Tom Holland: He lifts up the head and he finds himself holding nothing but hair. And Mary's actual head, shrunken and withered and gray, has rolled to the edge of the scaffold and it takes the spectators in the hall a few seconds to realize and work out what has happened. Mary had been wearing a wig. And that's embarrassing enough, but then there is one final embarrassment because once Mary's sobbing ladies have been removed to their quarters, and the executioners bend down beside Mary's corpse to disrobe it, again complete mortification. Because concealed in Mary's skirts all along has been her favorite dog, a Skye terrier.