In her last sickness, with the sense of her end coming on fast,
Elizabeth the First had the ring she had worn since her coronation
filed away from the royal finger.
It was a tricky operation, for the skin had grown in over the gold,
but then it was supposed to be a tight fit.
This was, in a way, her wedding band put on when she had joined herself to England 45 years earlier.
Now, it seemed, the two were to be put asunder.
# Since first I saw your face
# I resolved to honour and renown ye... #
She was supposed to be immortal, of course.
The odd thing was that, despite the garish auburn fright wig,
the white face mask and the wrinkled bosom,
diplomats who saw her at court and who had no reason to be gallant,
swore they could still see the young woman no more than 20 years of age.
# What I that loved and you that liked Shall we begin to wrangle...? #
It doesn't do to be too starry-eyed about the Virgin Queen.
Elizabeth the First was only too obviously made of flesh and blood.
She was vain, spiteful, arrogant, she was frequently unjust
and she was often maddeningly indecisive.
But she was also brave, shockingly clever, an eyeful to look at
and, on occasions, she was genuinely wise.
In other words, she had all the qualities it took
to make the genius politician she undoubtedly was.
A few feet away from Elizabeth's tomb in Westminster Abbey lies the body of another woman -
Mary Queen of Scots, the woman who had haunted and fascinated Elizabeth for so much of her life.
No virgin, that's for sure. No politician either.
A complete disaster as a ruler, you would have to say,
but Mary managed something that eluded Elizabeth - she reproduced.
This is the story of two queens and more importantly, two women,
one a politician, the other a mother,
and it's the story of a painful birth, the union of England and Scotland - the birth of Britain.
A cherished tradition has it that when Elizabeth heard the news
that she was to become queen, on November the 17th 1558,
she was seated beneath an ancient oak tree. Her first words were from Psalm 118 -
"a domino factum est mirabilae in oculis nostris..."
"This is the Lord's doing and it is marvellous in our eyes."
She was right, it WAS marvellous, in fact it was little short of being a miracle
that she had made it to that day alive.
Tudor royal politics were a bloody affair, especially for Tudor women.
She had been only two when her mother, Anne Boleyn, had gone to the scaffold,
her sin - in Henry's mind - being her failure to produce a son.
It must have been a body possessed by others, by the devil,
an unclean piece of flesh, it had to be cut away.
So Elizabeth would never be free from suspicion.
Out of her dark Boleyn eyes, she watched herself being watched.
Inevitably, there were times when her guard was down. She was barely a teenager when trouble first struck.
She was living with her guardian, Katherine Parr, Henry VIII's widow,
when Parr's new husband, Thomas Seymour, started paying playful visits to her bedroom.
When Katherine Parr died,
a rumour started circulating that Seymour had his sights set on marrying Elizabeth.
To even THINK of such a thing was treason.
Even worse, some wagging tongues said that Elizabeth was pregnant with Seymour's child.
It took all of Elizabeth's already extraordinary composure and self-confidence
to persuade Lord Protector Somerset that she was innocent.
"My Lord, there goeth rumours abroad, which be greatly against my honour and honesty, which be these -
"that I am in the Tower and with child by my Lord Admiral. These are shameful slanders.
"I most heartily desire, your Lordship, that I may come to the court and show myself there as I am.
"Your assured friend to my little power, Elizabeth."
She was, remember, just 14, but there was already the fortitude and clarity and the courage.
It was just as well, for she'd need these qualities five years later
when facing the most traumatic and dangerous crisis of her entire life.
When her Catholic half-sister, Mary, came to the throne,
Elizabeth found herself in even deeper trouble.
In fact, she found herself in the Tower when a Protestant plot to get rid of Mary backfired.
Elizabeth managed to talk herself out of being charged with treason,
but she remained under close surveillance.
Danger only turned to deliverance five years later, when Queen Mary died childless.
So here she was, Elizabeth, under the oak,
about to be the Protestant Queen.
She had survived, just, but she must have been full of dark knowledge and experience
about how difficult it was all going to be.
Her mother had been killed for producing just a daughter and a stillborn,
and her sister Mary's womb had produced nothing but the tumour that had killed her.
So, however dazzling Elizabeth looked, however clever she was,
she has got to have known how rough the road was going to be for a ruler of the wrong sex.
The 25-year-old Elizabeth came into an inheritance of high hopes
and deep anxieties.
The celebrations at her coronation were carefully designed
to show off the young queen as the paragon of virtue.
This charade of piety, though, was hardly enough to compensate
for the misfortune of having another woman on the throne.
All the same, the sceptics must have been reassured by Elizabeth's precocious self-possession,
the air of controlled energy she exuded in public right from the start.
You might suppose that her first appearances at the council would have been an ordeal,
but what the councillors saw was not some girlish ingenue,
but someone who seemed full, it was said, of MANLY authority.
Elizabeth did all the things women in 16th century England weren't supposed to do.
She looked men in the eye and she spoke out of turn.
She had been schooled to it by her tutor, Roger Ascombe.
Ascombe was not just another low-rent don.
He was public orator at Cambridge University and it was his outlandish idea to teach the teenage girl
a discipline most people thought was quite unsuitable for a woman -
the art of rhetoric, the art of public speech.
This was Elizabeth's first and would always be her strongest political weapon.
But there was something Elizabeth brought to the management of sovereignty
that was entirely her own - something that none of the princely conduct manuals ever spelled out -
that state craft was also STAGE craft.
Her father and mother had both known this instinctively.
Elizabeth had the actress's gift in spadefuls.
She simply adored being adored.
Adoration, though, wasn't the same thing as allegiance.
For her most important adviser, in fact, her surrogate father, William Cecil,
charisma was no substitute for the one thing which would truly secure the future of a Protestant England -
an heir.
Cecil knew perfectly well that the majority of the country was still Catholic,
either actively or passively,
and he also knew how little it would take for the hard-earned gains of the Reformation to be undone.
So although the Queen told everyone it was none of their business,
Cecil constantly had to remind her
that the realm needed her to have a husband.
For that matter, her body required it too, since in the 16th century,
prolonged virginity was thought to bring on the potentially toxic condition known as green sickness -
the abnormal retention of female sperm.
Marital copulation, then, was what the doctor ordered for the good of the realm.
The problem, though, as Cecil was painfully aware, was that if he pushed Elizabeth too hard,
she might just end up plumping for the man everyone assumed she really loved.
That man, of course, was Cecil's rival on the council - Robert Dudley.
Dudley was everything Cecil was not - flashy, gallant,
a noisy extrovert and, not least, incredibly good-looking, especially on a horse.
To a queen who liked being surrounded by lookers and who could dismiss those she thought ugly,
this mattered a lot.
And they shared a past - the same tutors, the same childhood traumas.
Dudley's father had been executed for treason, which made them both orphans of the scaffold.
In the grim years of Mary's reign, he'd sold lands to help Elizabeth -
that sort of thing she never forgot.
But how much of a couple were they?
Did they, as all the gossips and all the diplomats and most movie-makers since have assumed, become lovers?
What was in the way was Dudley's wife, but she had been ailing for years.
When she died, Dudley would be free and sleeping with your intended was not that unusual in Tudor England.
But this would have been outrageous for a Queen who had paraded her virginity at her coronation
by leaving her hair down.
When pressed about the rumours, Elizabeth airily retorted that such things were impossible
when she was surrounded day and night by her ladies.
With the terrible example of the fate of her own mother before her,
it would have been foolhardy for her to sleep with Dudley.
The politician in her was, as always, ruling the lover.
In any case, something then happened which did terrible damage to their relationship -
Dudley's wife, Amy, was found at the bottom of a staircase, dead from a broken neck.
An accident seemed altogether too convenient to be credible.
This was, after all, the golden age of gossip
and gossip did not believe Amy had fallen, gossip believed she had been pushed.
Elizabeth immediately sent Dudley away until cleared of suspicion.
Officially, he was and although the Queen always insisted that Dudley had been completely vindicated,
it still cast a shadow over their relationship just at the moment when they had become free to marry.
Perhaps it was a case of "beware of wishing for your heart's true desire lest you end by getting it."
For the next few years, Elizabeth swung mercurially between endearment and exasperation,
drawing up documents to make Dudley an earl,
only to shred them in front of him -
and other times, especially when she felt nagged by the council,
she would torment them by pretending their marriage was just about to happen. It never did.
By 1563, Elizabeth seems to have given up on the possibility of ever marrying Robert Dudley,
because she was prepared to offer him to someone else,
someone whose own marriage prospects were of tremendous significance for the balance of power in Britain.
That someone was Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots.
Throughout the whole tortured history of their relationship,
Elizabeth was eaten up with curiosity about her cousin, Mary,
stuck in a neurotic beauty contest,
interrogating her ambassadors as if they were the mirrors on the wall,
as to who was the taller, the fairer, the wittier, the cleverer.
Elizabeth might have won the prize for brains, but from the few pictures we have of her,
Mary, with her heart-shaped face, heavy eyelids and creamy complexion,
evidently had the stuff to reduce men to warm puddles on the floor.
She was more than just competition, though. To Elizabeth, Mary, Queen of Scots was a menace.
The reason was obvious. Mary was a Catholic
and the Catholic church did not recognize Elizabeth's right to be Queen of England.
To them, Elizabeth was the product of Henry VIII's illegal marriage to Anne Boleyn.
In Mary's Catholic eyes, then, Elizabeth was simply illegitimate.
How could Elizabeth not take this personally?
What's more, Mary was not only a Stuart,
she was also a Tudor through her great-grandfather, Henry VII,
and so long as Elizabeth was childless, Mary was next in line to the English throne.
From the moment Mary Stuart arrived in Scotland at the age of 18,
from the French court where she had been brought up,
the relationship between the cousins was tainted with mutual suspicion.
At the first opportunity, Elizabeth behaved badly, almost irrationally,
denying Mary safe conduct through England to her new realm
and forcing her to sail the long way round to Scotland.
Though very much the injured party, Mary's response already betrayed the theatrical self-pity,
which so got up Elizabeth's nose.
"I trust the wind will be so favourable as I shall not need to come on the coast of England,
"and if I do, Monsieur L'Ambassadeur, the Queen, your mistress, shall have me in her hands to do her will of me
"and if she be so hard-hearted as to desire my end,
"she may then do her pleasure and make sacrifice of me."
Perhaps things might be better between the two of them
if Mary could accept Elizabeth's choice of a safe Protestant husband for her -
in the form of Robert Dudley.
One tiny problem with this plan, though.
Mary had no intention of being told what to do by Elizabeth,
and, anyway, everyone knew that after the death of his wife, Robert Dudley was spoiled goods.
Lord Henry Darnley, though, the handsome poster boy of the Scottish nobility,
seemed a much better prospect. One look at Darnley's shapely calves and Mary decided she must have him.
It helped that he, too, had Tudor blood flowing through his veins -
unfortunately a lot of whisky ran through them too.
Too late, Mary discovered that she had married a lazy, dissolute drunk,
incapable of doing even the minimal things required of a co-sovereign.
Stuck at Holyrood with the task of ruling Scotland without him,
Mary increasingly relied on her private secretary,
the Italian Catholic, David Rizzio.
Naturally, the Protestant nobles in Scotland
were convinced that Mary was plotting to turn Scotland back into a Catholic country once more.
So Darnley's increasing estrangement from his wife gave the Lords -
most offended by Rizzio's access to the Queen - the opening they were looking for.
In 1566, a group of them approached Darnley and proposed what amounted to a violent coup -
get rid of David Rizzio, who was her lover, they said, not just her secretary.
"Ah!" thought Darnley, "Now that'd explain why she's such a bitch.
"I'll show her who's in charge!"
On March the 7th, while she was dining,
Darnley and his fellow plotters burst into Mary's chamber,
tore the terrified Rizzio from Mary's skirts and stabbed him to death in front of her.
Between 50 and 60 wounds were discovered on his body, after it was thrown down the privy staircase.
At some point, the murderers turned to Mary, pointing a pistol at her heavily pregnant belly...
..and perhaps, at that moment, Mary knew how to turn terror into power,
for in the months that followed,
she milked the melodrama of the threatened womb for all it was worth.
Instead of being reduced to a weeping wreck, Mary was strangely calm.
She knew she could be strong because she was carrying her greatest weapon inside her womb.
Whatever happened to her useless, drunken, homicidal nitwit of a husband,
she knew that a baby would be born. Mother and child were going to survive.
On June the 19th, at Edinburgh Castle,
Mary gave birth to the boy who would become James VI of Scotland.
On hearing the news, Elizabeth's reaction was to cry -
"Alack, the Queen of Scots is lighter of a bonny son,
"and I am of the barren stock."
Mary was by now so consumed with contempt for Darnley, that she resolved to be rid of him.
Possibly all she meant by this was to be rid of him as a husband,
but some of her devotees,
in particular the Earl of Bothwell, who took her sighs to mean something altogether more decisive.
Bothwell, one of the great landowners of Scotland,
was rich, promiscuous and dangerous,
but he could also turn on the gallantry, and in her distress,
Mary now turned to him as protector,
and Bothwell was only too happy to solve Mary's Darnley problem.
On the evening of March 9th 1567,
while Mary was attending a masked ball,
Bothwell supervised the lighting of a fuse that, at 2am,
would detonate an immense quantity of gunpowder beneath the house where Darnley was asleep.
EXPLOSION
The house was blown sky-high.
Darnley was dead, but not bumped off according to plan. Minutes before the explosion,
he'd heard suspicious noises and had himself lowered out of his bedroom window on a chair.
Running through the garden in his nightshirt, Darnley ran straight into the plotters
who promptly throttled him to death.
Darnley's murder was a turning point in Mary's life.
From now on, death followed Mary Stuart like a lady-in-waiting.
She was already sick, vomiting black mucus.
She needed help and the unscrupulous Bothwell was at hand to give it.
His power over Mary now made him recklessly bold
and he announced to the Scottish Lords that for the proper government of the country,
it was necessary for Mary to have a husband. Very decently, he offered himself for the job.
Bothwell's idea of a marriage proposal was to abduct Mary and take her to his grim castle in Dunbar.
There, he planted his flag as prospective King of Scotland
by planting himself, violently it was said, inside her body.
Now he supposed the traumatised Mary would HAVE to marry him
and, to most of the country's horror,
Mary did just that, a few weeks later, at Holyrood.
It was at this point that Mary lost it -
lost control over her own body, lost the priceless political asset of her motherhood -
soiled by her relationship with Bothwell - lost Scotland, lost the whole damned shooting match.
The thing is, that it never needed to have happened. Had she been half the politician Elizabeth was,
she would have distanced herself from Bothwell,
and then she would have condemned Darnley's murderers,
professing herself to be shocked at the crime, truly shocked,
and presenting herself to the Scots as a doubly victimised mother.
Instead, the mother let herself be turned into a whore.
Mary now faced the rebel armies loyal to the murdered Darnley,
but on the verge of battle, Bothwell conveniently disappeared to gather reinforcements, or so he said,
leaving Mary to face the enemy on her own. It was the last she would ever see of him.
Dragged back to Edinburgh, a captive, filthy and dishevelled,
she appeared at a window, her dress torn from her shoulders,
her breasts exposed, and was greeted by a mob howling abuse.
Handbills, featuring her as a mermaid, began to appear -
a mermaid being another name for a prostitute.
Mermaids, of course, were not fit to sit on the throne of Scotland,
so Mary was forced to renounce it in favour of her baby son.
Her Protestant half-brother, the Earl of Moray,
took charge of baby James and made himself Regent of Scotland.
Mary was 25 years old -
her history seemed done,
but of course it was not.
She had one last weapon to deploy -
her air of tragically damaged beauty.
Incarcerated in the castle of Loch Leven, in the middle of a deep lake,
she unleashed her seductive charm on her jailer,
one of the usually hard-bitten Douglas clan, who melted in adoration.
After ten months of imprisonment,
in May 1568, Mary made a getaway across the loch.
But there was really only one way she could get her throne back -
an appeal to her cousin, Elizabeth.
So her next journey, across the border, was to be in the nature of a temporary refuge.
She must have supposed her stay would last perhaps a month, a year at the most.
Had she known the real answer - 19 years -
she would surely have avoided the passage across the Solway Firth.
But there she was, an exhausted, bedraggled figure, her hair cropped for disguise,
sitting hunched up in a small boat,
her eyes fixed on the disappearing shoreline of Scotland.
Mary's appearance on English soil threw Elizabeth into turmoil.
Was Mary her heir or wasn't she?
After all, Elizabeth wasn't getting any younger - 35 in 1568.
The royal laundresses were still sending Cecil monthly evidence
of her capacity to produce children but she was no nearer to getting married.
So would the fugitive Queen of Scots be treated like the next in line,
or at least as a fellow sovereign, a guest?
Well, not exactly. Mary's first request to Elizabeth
was for some clothes that befitted her status rather than the rags she had fled in.
What she got, after much complaining, was a packet of linen.
Just as well, perhaps, that she didn't know Elizabeth was already wearing Mary's favourite pearls
that had been stolen from Mary by her enemies and sent to the English Queen.
In fact, Elizabeth didn't know what to do with Mary.
Her royal instincts were outraged by the humiliation and indignities heaped on her royal cousin.
If Mary would agree to keep her hands off the English throne,
Elizabeth was sorely tempted to help her regain the Scottish crown.
Elizabeth, though, could also see the wisdom of the opposite view -
it was folly to restore a Catholic queen to the Scottish throne,
giving a back door entry to Britain for the French and the Spanish.
There was a safe Protestant regime in Scotland now, run by Mary's enemies - why rock the boat?
So, if Mary imagined she could rely on the sisterhood of queens, she was deluded.
The first thing that Elizabeth did was order an inquiry into the murder of Mary's husband, Lord Darnley,
which turned into a trial in all but name.
Now Mary could have no illusion that she was anything except a prisoner.
She was shuttled from house to house under the watchful eye of the Earl of Shrewsbury,
who got the unenviable job of being her jailer. Some of those houses were just a damp ruin.
Others, like Wingfield here, were much more tolerable places.
Now, Wingfield is in Derbyshire and that tells you something about the nervousness of her captors.
Mary Stuart had to be kept a long way away from any possibility of rescue,
far away from Scotland, from London, from the coast...
In fact, in the Midlands.
But wherever she was, Mary Stuart had become maximum-security problem number one -
not just a headache, but a magnet for conspiracy.
There were many political heavyweights
for whom Mary was a legitimate and attractive alternative to Elizabeth.
And they were not just a bunch of wild-eyed Catholic dreamers,
but men close to the heart of Elizabeth's government.
Their most ambitious plan was to annul the Bothwell marriage
and marry the Queen of Scots to the premier duke of the realm - Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk.
Although Norfolk may have been a Catholic at heart,
he was, like so many at this time, outwardly at least, a conforming Protestant.
So it was reasonable to see the marriage plot as a way of binding up the wounds of the Reformation.
But the Queen wasn't fooled, not for a moment.
When the plot was exposed, she sent Norfolk straight to the Tower.
The plot collapsed. There was, though, a different kind of fury waiting to happen
and this WAS burning with a Catholic flame.
Up here in the north, Catholicism had not only NOT been rooted out,
it actually fed on the burning resentment and fierce independence
of the great aristocratic families who ran things around here.
They had been here for centuries and were not about to be pushed around by a bunch of Tudor bureaucrats.
They weren't going to be told what was what in THEIR government and THEIR religion.
So, for them, Mary Stuart was not just a successor,
she was a replacement, as in immediate replacement.
So the Catholic north fought the Protestant south.
For a while it even looked as though the north might win.
The rebels swept through Lancashire, Yorkshire and Northumberland,
and it must have seemed that Catholic Britain had been reborn.
Now Elizabeth's government really knew what it was up against -
the latest act in the religious war
that had begun when Henry VIII had made himself Head of the Church.
But 12,000 troops were eventually mustered and the rebellion brutally crushed.
Perhaps the brutality worked
because the northern rising was the last great rebellion to disturb Tudor England,
and it's tempting now to feel the country's settling at last into its Elizabethan finery -
feeling fat, safe, comfortable - but it was always a jittery kind of grandeur.
# Farewell!
# Thou art too dear for my possessing... #
Elizabeth was 20 years into her reign and suitors had come and gone,
but there was always something the matter with them - too lowly, too Catholic, too stupid.
And besides, now her suitors had rivals -
millions of Elizabeth's subjects who had become jealously possessive
and thought that the Queen was theirs alone.
In the 1570s, they got her.
The cult, the religion of Elizabeth was spectacularly created.
# For how do I hold thee
# But by thy granting...? #
Her Accession Day became the greatest of national holidays,
more sacred than all the heathen events on the Papist calendar.
# The cause of this fair gift in me is wanting
# And so my patent back again... #
Her image began to appear everywhere in allegorical pictures -
Elizabeth as the sun who gave the rainbow its radiant hues.
Even those on the inside,
who could plainly see the elaborate scaffolding from which this image was projected,
who knew that the pale moon glow of the queen's face
was just pulverised eggshell, borax, alum and mill water,
even these knowing types were still total captives to the cult.
She had this effect on all kinds of people, especially men,
even when they got older and should have known better.
They built huge prodigy houses in her honour. It was, in a way, a desperate need to impress,
a sign of culture's raw immaturity, its hunger for glitzy gorgeousness.
Elizabethan razzle-dazzle, thigh-hugging hose,
oak-panelled libraries with yards of unread classics,
ballrooms as big as playing fields.
# Farewell!
# Thou art too dear for my possessing... #
Now you might suppose that devotees would be queuing up for a glimpse of the national Madonna,
but many knew that hosting the show came at a heavy price.
If you were a Burgess of the City of Warwick,
it's hard to know which lot would have made you more nervous.
The royal wanderers, after all, came with 200 carts of the Queen's baggage,
each one pulled by a team of six horses - that's a lot of stable room to find, that is a lot of hay!
And a week before the great event, men from the office of purveyors
would come here and buy up everything in sight for the visit at prices THEY decided were fair.
Then there were the lords and ladies, notoriously hard to please.
Supposing they rolled their eyes at the entertainment? Supposing they wrinkled their nose at the fair?
And then there was Queen Bess herself,
a bejewelled apparition with a chalk-white face like some goddess on Earth,
but like the immortals, she was evidently frightening as well as majestic.
You could revel in the Elizabethan glamour show,
just so long as you didn't think too hard about what was going on beyond the sceptred isle.
For out there in Europe, a total war between Catholic and Protestant powers was about to ignite.
The rivalry between Mary, Queen of Scots and Elizabeth was no longer a girlie soap opera.
It was right at the centre of that global struggle.
In Rome, the Pope declared that Elizabeth was to be considered a heretic.
"Whoever sends her out of the world," the Pope decreed,
"not only does not sin but gains merit in the eyes of God."
In response, England became a national security state.
Infiltrators and double agents were recruited by the government.
Gentlemen vigilantes were sworn to take out, in advance,
anyone so much as suspected of plotting against the Queen.
At the heart of the operation was Elizabeth's chief spymaster, Francis Walsingham.
"Intelligence is never too dear," was Walsingham's motto,
and his whole career was an applied demonstration that knowledge is power.
But if Walsingham was ferocious, he was not paranoid.
There were underground conspiracies organised in France, Rome and Spain,
and they were all working towards one end - the assassination of Elizabeth
and the enthronement of Mary Stuart.
Elizabeth might have been queasy about taking care of Mary, but Walsingham wasn't.
It was his job to get his hands dirty for England - that's what spymasters do,
but he knew he couldn't just do her in. Elizabeth had to be free of any suspicion of complicity in murder.
On the other hand, the Mary problem could not be allowed to drag on for another 15 years.
Walsingham realized he would have to force a solution.
So he engineered a trap... and it was a gem.
Mary may have been under house arrest, but she been allowed to lead the life of the country lady.
Then, in December 1585, Walsingham made a change.
Mary and her household were suddenly packed up and sent to close confinement
at Chartley Manor in Staffordshire,
where she was guarded by the unsmiling puritan, Amias Paulet.
As Walsingham had intended, Mary was furious,
desperate to find a way out of her prison.
So of course she was thrilled when she discovered an ingenious means
to smuggle coded letters to her supporters.
The letters were secretly put in a watertight packet, slipped through the bunghole of beer casks,
delivered to and from Chartley.
What Mary didn't know, of course, was that this was a trap.
Walsingham set the whole thing up.
The letters were intercepted.
When Mary's latest champion, the rich merchant, Anthony Babbington,
supplied Mary with details of a plot to murder Elizabeth and put Mary on the English throne,
Mary wrote back with encouragement.
The trap was sprung.
At Chartley, Mary felt the skies lighten.
After nearly 20 years of unjust imprisonment,
she could feel liberty so close she could practically taste it.
One morning, and very unusually,
Paulet allowed her to go out riding, have a day's hunting.
From a distance she could see a group of horsemen approach.
Mary must have thought, "This is it!
"News from Babbington, freedom at last!"
But it was, in fact, the warrant for her arrest.
Babbington and his fellow plotters had been tortured and had already confessed.
Mary was taken away while her rooms at Chartley were searched,
turning up hundreds of incriminating documents.
In London, Elizabeth wrote an ecstatic letter to Amias Paulet.
"Amias, my most faithful and careful servant,
"may God reward thee treble-fold for the most troublesome charge so well discharged."
There was just one more stop, one more castle in the career of the wandering Queen -
Fotheringay in Northamptonshire.
It's just a grassy mound now, which is just as well, since no ruin, no standing building for that matter,
could possibly take the weight of the drama that was to follow.
Anyone expecting Mary Stuart to crumble into tearful confession had seriously misjudged her.
Up against it, she had drawn something inside her long and mostly disastrous career,
which made her resolute and unnervingly lofty as if she was suddenly above this squalid charade.
From the moment of her arrest to the moment of her execution, she gave as good as she got.
As a sinner I am truly conscious of having often offended my creator.
I beg him to forgive me,
but as queen and sovereign, I am aware of no fault or offence
for which I have to render account to anyone here below.
Her second tactic was to lie her head off, denying all knowledge of the Babbington plot,
although she was on stronger ground
when she accused Walsingham of setting up the whole thing to get rid of her.
Elizabeth, of course, did not see it exactly in this way.
She wrote to Mary as if the Queen of the Scots was a houseguest who'd made off with the towels.
"You have planned to take my life and ruin my kingdom by the shedding of blood.
"I never proceeded so hastily against you.
"I have maintained and preserved your life with the care I use for myself."
On the 15th of October 1586, the formal trial began.
In a typical gesture, half plea, half threat,
Mary warned her prosecutors to look to their consciences.
Remember, she said, the theatre of the world is wider than the realm of England -
and it was to that audience, worldwide and across the ages, that she now took centre stage.
Mary hobbled into the room, by now painfully infirm,
dressed head to foot like a glamorous mother superior in swathes of velvet and a white headdress.
Deprived of any lawyer, she turned to the Privy Council facing her.
There is not one, I think, among you, let him be the cleverest man in the world,
who would be capable of resisting or defending himself if he were in MY place.
Of course, it wouldn't have mattered what she said -
the trial resumed in London without her and passed swiftly to her conviction.
All her adult life, Elizabeth had been spooked by her fascinating, infuriating cousin,
who seemed to personify all the cliches about women which Elizabeth herself had rejected.
Now she had a precious opportunity to get mother Mary off her back.
Parliament was impatient to be rid of her and the people were positively baying for Mary's blood.
Yet somehow, Elizabeth couldn't bring herself to do the deed,
not because she was sentimental, but because she was scared -
scared of being seen by the world to have her fingerprints on the axe.
This was what was robbing Elizabeth of her sleep -
the tormenting question whether by killing Mary she was getting rid of trouble or inviting it.
On February 1 1587, Elizabeth finally put her signature on Mary's death warrant.
# There were three ravens Sat on a tree
# Down-a-down Hey, down-a-down
# They were as black as they might be... #
All the chaos, squalor, reckless adventuring, rash conspiracies, pathetic delusions,
histrionic self-pity, all the escapes, all the rescues had all led her to this one supreme moment -
she would be a Catholic martyr.
So when Mary was told she was to be executed the next morning, by a weeping Scottish courtier,
she told him to be joyful instead, for the end of Mary Stuart's trouble, she said, was now done.
Carry this message for me and tell my friends that I died a true woman to my religion
and like a true Scottish woman and a true French woman.
When she undressed for the executioner,
the demure black gown fell away to reveal a crimson petticoat, the blood-red hue of the martyr.
Mary's eyes were bound with a white silk handkerchief embroidered with gold
and she lay with such utter stillness on the block that it actually unnerved the executioner.
# His hawks they fly so eagerly
# Down-a-down Hey, down-a-down... #
His first blow cut deep into the back of her head,
the second severed it but for a hanging thread of flesh.
Even now, Mary contrived to remain centre stage.
For 15 minutes after the last blow of the axe
the lips on her severed head, so witnesses reported, continued to move, as if in silent prayer.
# She lifted up his bloody head... #
And when the executioner, by now probably wanting to die himself, held up the head to the spectators,
he made the mistake of grasping it by the mass of auburn curls.
But that was a wig.
To general horror, Mary's skull, the hair cropped into grey stubble,
fell from his grip and rolled along the floor.
At that moment, a terrible howling came from the crimson blood-soaked petticoat.
Mary's lapdog had to be taken away from the wreckage of her mistress.
They tried and tried to scrub it clean of the clotted blood.
They did so but it wouldn't eat. It languished, it died.
It was just another martyr to Mary's pathetic, tragic life.
If that dog was the first mourner, it certainly wouldn't be the last.
Among the mourners, astoundingly, was Queen Elizabeth, in deep denial of what she had done.
"When she heard, her countenance changed, her words faltered
"and with excessive sorrow she was in a manner astonished, in so much as she gave herself over to grief,
"putting herself into mourning weeds and shedding an abundance of tears."
Some of Elizabeth's anguish may have been genuine remorse.
Some of it was downright fear -
and she was right to worry.
Even before Mary's execution, King Phillip of Spain had accelerated his plans for the enterprise of England,
and with Mary now dead, there would be no stopping him.
Suddenly, Elizabethan England looked very small, very vulnerable.
This was always Elizabeth's worst nightmare - a full-scale Catholic invasion.
And now Phillip was launching one.
The Spanish admirals, however, were deeply pessimistic about the chances of success.
English ships were vastly superior in speed and manoeuvrability.
The miracle was not that England was saved,
but that the Spanish came so close to pulling it off.
Only a few miles of the Channel and an unhelpful wind direction made the difference.
The weather, as usual, batted for England.
But it was a close thing. The English were right to be scared in the summer and autumn of 1588.
What do you do when you're weepy and terrified?
Well, you cry for Mummy.
And that, courtesy of Robert Dudley, dying of cancer now but still the impresario of Elizabeth's shows,
is how she appeared to the troops at the armed camp at Tilbury -
the mother at last, the virgin mother of England and the kind of mother you'd want on your side.
A mother in a breastplate of steel.
Everything Elizabeth had ever learned came together at Tilbury -
charisma in a costume, the shell-burst of oratory,
and, perhaps most important, what all mothers know instinctively -
that there's no substitute for BEING there.
And there, on August 8th and 9th, she certainly was,
arriving in a gilded coach escorted by 2,000 ecstatic troops.
What she produced for the expectant crowds was pure gold -
the first great speech by a queen recorded in history.
This is where the real event of 1588 happened, not out on the high seas but on the soapbox at Tilbury.
My loving people, I come among you, not for my recreation and disport,
but being resolved in the midst of the heat of the battle to live and die amongst you all,
to lay down for God and my kingdom and for my people,
my honour and blood even in the dust.
I know I have the body of a weak and feeble woman,
but I have the heart and stomach of a king and a king of England too,
and think foul scorn that Spain or any prince of Europe should dare invade the borders of my realm,
to which rather dishonour I myself will take up arms.
Oh, I know it's all spin and hype,
but it was hype for England and it did make a difference, just like Churchill's rhetoric in 1940.
Almost instinctively the Queen seemed to know what it was her people needed to hear.
"Look," she said, "I may be a goddess but I'm also flesh and blood - YOUR flesh and blood.
"Whatever you go through, I'll go through it with you."
That made the difference between terror and determination. That is what we have queens for.
You couldn't top that and Elizabeth couldn't.
The euphoria of 1588 was short-lived.
In the closing years of the Tudor century, famine across the country triggered food riots.
Cut-throats and beggars prowled the roads,
the Irish, referred to as "savages", were driven into a nine-year war
and for the queen herself,
the distance between the mythology of Elizabeth's ageless body and the shrivelled reality
became more glaring.
Thoughts inevitably began to turn to her succession.
Everybody knew who that would be -
James, son of Mary, Queen of Scots.
So in the end, did Mary, Queen of Scots, the mother, triumph from the grave over her rival Elizabeth?
Elizabeth had one comfort though.
James had been brought up a Protestant, forced to disown his own mother after her disgrace.
But still, he was Mary's child - the fruit of her womb, not Elizabeth's.
And when Elizabeth died in 1603, nearly half a century after that day under the oak,
as gently as an apple falling from a tree, as someone said,
and when her underthings were taken from her body,
it was seen that they still fitted the contours of the virgin -
wasp-waisted, slim-hipped, long-limbed.
It was a body, which, according to some, had not fulfilled the purpose God intended.
It was supposed to have joined itself to a husband - to have given him and the country posterity.
She had done none of this, but no-one in their right mind thought she had failed her people.
She had been different, that's all.
When the ring which had united Elizabeth to her country was finally removed from her finger,
it was carried 400 miles north, to Scotland.
Now it symbolised a new marriage, this time between two nations.
Elizabeth and Mary Stuart never met.
It took James the First to bring the two women together at last -
closer in death than they had ever been in life.
There had been an old, wonderful joke doing the rounds in the 1560s
that all of their problems would be solved
if only Mary and Elizabeth could marry each other.
And in one sense they had.
Or at least together - and at a terrible price and with so much pain - they had had a baby.
It was a little thing with a big name - Magna Britannia...Great Britain.
There's much more to discover and debate about the history of Britain on the BBC history website.
Subtitles by Gillian Frazer and Anne Morgan BBC Scotland 2000