Elizabeth could not execute Mary Queen of Scots because Mary was an anointed monarch, and Elizabeth could not establish the precedent that anointed rulers could be executed without undermining her own legitimacy.

18:30kind of house arrest. And Cecil is hoping that Elizabeth can be persuaded to license her execution. But there is a problem because although Elizabeth has no fondness for Mary and although she entirely recognizes the danger that Mary as a Catholic represents to the future of Protestant England, the salient thing from Elizabeth's point of view, even more important than Mary's Catholicism, is the fact that she is an anointed

18:59monarch. And you cannot from Elizabeth's point of view simply chop off the head of an anointed monarch because Elizabeth herself is an anointed monarch and she does not want to be the queen who established the president that said it was okay to execute an anointed ruler. This is the problem. This is the dilemma that is confronting Elizabeth and Ceil. What are they going to do with Mary,

19:25Queen of Scots? and how are they possibly going to bolster this uh Protestant regime? We will find out after the break. This episode is brought to you by National Geographic. Tom, we're familiar, aren't we, with what happened in Pompei when Vuvius exploded. We absolutely are. So, AD79, Vuvius blows its top. Uh debris rains down on Pompei. It ends with a pyrolastic flow which essentially inmbs the city intombs