Mary Queen of Scots was an active, willing conspirator in the Throckmorton Plot, personally corresponding in cipher to further the Catholic invasion and the replacement of Elizabeth, a question historians have debated for centuries.

51:20>> Yeah. Nightmare. >> Yeah. Exactly. He hates Elizabeth. He hates St. Francis Drake. He hates England. He's just a terrible person. And then the the other person is the French ambassador and he is called Michelle de Castelloo and he is much more um calculating and smoother and more subtle, isn't he, than the Spanish guy? >> Yes. And he's been there a long time. So he'd been sent in 1572 and charged

51:43specifically with smoothing Anglo French relations after the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre. So he's been chosen for his emoleiancy among other qualities and he's done a very good job. Um and so by 1583 he's he's got you know over a decade's worth of experience in handling relations with Elizabeth and her government. And Elizabeth is not an easy woman to handle. I mean you know she plays the game very well. But the whole

52:06while I'm sad to say uh cast no has been in close contact with Mary Queen of Scots who is writing to him using a cipher >> right >> and amazingly a cache of her letters were found as recently as 2024 in the Ribatech national de France and they show conclusively the Mary Queen of Scots you know is not a passive bystander in this you know she's not

52:32just a cipher being used by geese for his own interests She was actually an active conspirator in this plot. >> Yeah. So this has been debated by historians for decades, for centuries. >> Yeah. >> Was Mary effectively framed? You know, was she being used by more machavevelian people? Was she naive? Or was, you know, did she join in the plots? Was she an act exactly an active agent in the

52:58conspiracy? And and basically the this recent evidence suggests there's no question whatsoever. Yes, it does. >> She knew exactly what she was doing. She'd rolled up her sleeve. She got stuck in. >> Yeah. And so result of this the the residency of the French ambassador Ssbury Court, which is a house of Granberry Grand House on Fleet Street. This makes it a kind of key focus of the

53:18conspiracy that is being hatched by geese. You know, he he he essentially it's the nerve center for operations within England itself. >> Right. However, Walsingham, the great spy chief of Elizabeth, all along has had moles in the French embassy in Ssbury Court and one of them goes by the code name of Henry >> Great code name. >> And the identity of this uh mole is very controversial. So in 1991, the the great