Mary's executioners were publicly humiliated when they discovered she had worn a wig and hidden her dog beneath her skirts on the scaffold.

62:46steps forward, picks up the severed head to exhibit it before the assembled crowd and proclaim the death of a traitor, this is what executioners are always obliged to do. 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

63:15realize 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. And this dog once detected, and it lies

63:47there amid the gore of the dog's mistress, and it howls piteously. And again, to quote Mattingly, Mary Stuart had always known how to embarrass her enemies, and not just to embarrass them, but to do them the maximum harm. >> Well, this is the question, isn't it? Because now we've come to this climactic moment, the moment that the whole series has been building towards. Elizabeth had one of the reasons she

64:12didn't want to execute Mary Queen of Scots was she she knew that it would set off a firestorm of protest in Catholic Europe, and it would make England even more of a rogue state as viewed from Madrid, for example. And this execution is going to have extraordinarily um tumultuous and fearful consequences, isn't it, for England in this struggle with the Spanish? >> It absolutely is. Because 1588, which is