618. Elizabeth I: The Shadow of the Tower (Part 3)

Summary

The Rest Is History – Episode 618: Elizabeth I: The Shadow of the Tower (Part 3)
Released: November 17, 2025
Hosts: Tom Holland & Dominic Sandbrook

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Episode Overview

In this captivating installment, Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook dig deep into the tumultuous years that saw Elizabeth I’s survival during the reign of her half-sister Mary Tudor (“Bloody Mary”). The episode traces the final years of Mary’s rule, the perils Elizabeth faced—including imprisonment in the Tower—and the dynastic, religious, and political intrigue of the mid-Tudor period. Through expert storytelling and sharp analysis, the hosts demystify Mary’s infamous reputation, explore the complex landscape of religious identity in post-Reformation England, and set the stage for Elizabeth’s rise to power.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Literary & Historical Legacy of Mary Tudor

• John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs — The hosts open with Foxe's influential text, which painted Mary as “Bloody Mary” and lauded Elizabeth as the Protestant savior.
  • “It was published in 1563... one of the foundational texts, you might argue, of English national identity.” (Dominic, 04:30)
• Foxe contrasts Mary’s “thirst for blood” with Elizabeth’s peaceful, learned, and godly persona, shaping their legacies.

2. Catholic versus Protestant: A Fluid Divide

• The language of division (“Protestant” vs. “Catholic”) was only starting to clarify after Edward VI’s death.
  • “Not really, it's still a little bit muddy... the sense of Europe being divided into kind of rival poles is starting to clarify.” (Tom, 07:40)
• Most English people didn’t self-identify on these religious lines; religious and cultural identities remained in flux.

3. Mary and Elizabeth: Sisters and Rivals

• Both were declared bastards and removed from the succession by Henry VIII and Edward VI.
  • “Both of them have been officially and legally declared bastards by act of Parliament.” (Tom, 11:10)
• Mary’s accession was hailed by the people, but Elizabeth was publicly popular— perhaps even more so.
  • “The cheering for her as the younger and more glamorous sister is louder.” (Tom, 16:08)
  • “Her reliance on the love of her subjects will be a running theme.” (Tom, 16:52)

4. Religious Policy Under Mary

• Mary envisioned her Catholic restoration as “housekeeping”—a return to order more than a counter-reformation.
  • “She feels that she's not kind of instituting a Counter Reformation, really. As I say, it's just a kind of process of housekeeping.” (Tom, 21:42)
• Burning of heretics was seen as a failure, not a goal; nonetheless, her reign became associated with violence due to Protestant propaganda.

5. Dynastic Uncertainties & Foreign Policy

• Mary’s marriage to Philip of Spain was seen by supporters as a masterstroke, ensuring protection against France, but sparked nationalist and anti-Catholic backlash.
  • “It is an amazing coup.” (Dominic, 26:01)
• Parliament and public harbored suspicions about England becoming subservient to Spain.

6. Wyatt’s Rebellion and Elizabeth’s Imprisonment

• 1554: Multiple conspiracies brewed, the most successful led by Sir Thomas Wyatt (the younger), aiming to replace Mary with Elizabeth.
  • “They've found themselves out in the cold. So since Mary took over, it's kind of your classic Tudor faction fight to some degree.” (Dominic, 32:00)
• Elizabeth was implicated (rightly or wrongly), interrogated, and imprisoned in the Tower—evoking the shadow of her mother, Anne Boleyn.
  • “Elizabeth is a very shrewd operator already. She's not the woman who is going to leave incriminating evidence around.” (Tom, 35:29)

7. Elizabeth’s Ordeal: The Tower & Woodstock

• Her emotional appeals to Mary and skillful delaying tactics are detailed.
  • “One of Elizabeth's favourite tactics when she's cornered... is just to delay, to prevaricate, to string people along.” (Tom, 46:43)
• Psychological warfare: Elizabeth is moved through the same gateways and quarters associated with her mother's downfall.
  • “The echoes of Anne Boelyn's fate... are so manifest that it can't be coincidental.” (Tom, 51:38)
• Eventually released to house arrest at dilapidated Woodstock—her isolation heightened, but not destroyed.

8. Bloody Mary—Myth and Reality

• Only about 280-300 Protestants executed under Mary—compared in context to more severe repressions by other Tudors.
  • “If you look at the Pilgrimage of Grace... Henry put 250 Catholics to death, and that's basically in a few weeks.” (Tom, 60:31)
• Many victims would have received the same fate under Protestant monarchs for extreme heresies.
  • “Several of them would have been burned under Edward VI or Henry viii.” (Tom, 61:09)
• Marian foreign policy had some successes, including revival of the navy under Philip's prompting.

9. The Endgame: Mary’s Death and Elizabeth’s Ascension

• Mary died, childless, in 1558—a series of phantom pregnancies compounding her personal tragedy.
  • “It’s kind of Mary's great tragedy... this burning desperation for a child and it just causes her, you know, she dies knowing she has failed.” (Tom, 68:49)
• William Cecil and Elizabeth prepared a “shadow government” for a Protestant restoration even as Mary lingered.
  • “From this point on, William Cecil effectively is at Elizabeth's right hand.” (Tom, 71:10)
• Upon Mary’s death, Elizabeth receives the crown with somber acknowledgment of her burden—and her readiness.
  • “The law of nature moveth me to sorrow for my sister. The burden that has fallen upon me maketh me amazed.” (Elizabeth, via Tom, 72:46)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• Foxe (via Tom, 05:31):

  • “Mary filled England with smoke from... the burning of God's saints, whereas Elizabeth, when she comes to the throne, is all about the advancement of learning and godliness.”

• Elizabeth’s letter from her imprisonment (Dominic, 43:32):

  • “I never practiced, counsel nor consented to anything that might be prejudicial to your person in any way or dangerous to the state by any means... I humbly beseech your majesty to let me answer her for yourself and not suffer me to trust to your counselors.”

• On the label “Bloody Mary” (Tom, 61:46):

  • “The image of Mary as bloody is a genius work of propaganda on the part of Fox and that's why his book is so seismically influential.”

• On Mary’s approach to heresy (Tom, 58:54):

  • “She and her agents do not go around sniffing out heretics. The people who are charged and interrogated, and if they refuse to repent, then burnt, are people who've been denounced by their neighbors. And Mary undoubtedly would much rather not have executed them.”

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Essential Timestamps

• 04:19–06:47 – Introduction of Foxe’s Book of Martyrs; framing Mary and Elizabeth in collective memory
• 09:54–12:57 – The bastardization of Mary and Elizabeth; succession crisis following Edward VI
• 16:08–16:52 – Elizabeth’s public popularity during Mary’s coronation
• 22:16–23:45 – Elizabeth’s cautious responses to religious pressure
• 26:04–29:15 – Mary’s proposed marriage to Philip of Spain and efforts to retain English autonomy
• 32:14–36:27 – The unfolding of Wyatt’s Rebellion; the threat to Elizabeth
• 43:32–44:55 – The emotional toll of Elizabeth’s imprisonment; her heart-wrenching appeal to Mary
• 50:09–51:14 – Consequences of lack of evidence against Elizabeth; her eventual release from the Tower
• 54:37–55:28 – The iconic “diamond ring” at Woodstock; psychological warfare against Elizabeth
• 58:06–61:46 – Revisionist view on Mary’s violence and suppression in context
• 68:12–69:59 – Mary’s desperate, failed efforts to produce a Catholic heir
• 71:09–72:46 – William Cecil’s role in Elizabeth’s preparations for power; Elizabeth receives the crown

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Tone and Language

The episode is marked by a witty, conversational style—both academic and accessible—intermixed with empathetic, sometimes sympathetic appraisals of oft-maligned historical figures. While challenging stereotypes (like “Bloody Mary”), Tom and Dominic use sharp humor and modern analogies (e.g., “Brexity vibe,” “Henry viii was right about one thing…”), making the narration inviting and relatable. Their handling of Elizabeth’s psychological trials and political acumen is admiring but grounded in the realities of ruthless Tudor court politics.

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Further Listening

The episode ends on a cliffhanger, teasing the next chapter: Elizabeth’s early years as queen, her religious settlement, and the looming challenge of Mary, Queen of Scots. Listeners interested in the darker corners of Tudor history or the making of the Elizabethan Golden Age will find much to anticipate.

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For comprehensive, vivid storytelling and shrewd historical argument, this episode is essential listening for fans of Tudor drama, religious history, and those seeking to move beyond the old caricatures of Mary and Elizabeth.

Transcript

[Dominic Sandbrook]

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[Tom Holland]

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Visit hivehome.com to find out more. Subject to survey and suitability Hive compatible with selected technology of Queen Mary, this truly may be affirmed and left in story for a perpetual memorial or epitaph for all kings and queens that shall succeed her. To be noted that before her never was readin's story of any king or queen of England under whom, in time of peace, by hanging, beheading, burning and prisoning so much Christian blood, so many Englishmen's lives were spilled within this realm as under the said Queen Mary for the space of four years was to be seen, and I beseech the Lord, never may be seen hereafter. So that was the Tudor number one bestseller, the thrillingly titled Acts and monuments of these latter and perilous days, Touching matters of the Church. And it was by an unusually forensic and judicious historian, John Fox, a man of Lincolnshire, hence the accent. And that book went down in English history as Fox's Book of Martyrs, one of the foundational texts, you might argue, of English national identity. It was published in 1563, five years after the death of the character. He's talking about Mary Tudor and Tom. In that passage, John Fox is describing the depredations, crimes and horrors of her reign, a reign so drenched in blood that to this day, and I remember this, when we did it at school when I was about 10, she is still known as Bloody Mary. And he's not just talking about Mary, is he? He's talking about the subject of our series, which is Elizabeth, because Elizabeth is the yin to Mary's yang.

[Tom Holland]

Well, or is she? Or do they actually have more in common, perhaps, than is conventionally assumed? We will be finding out in this episode. But specifically, that passage comes in an entire segment that is focused on Elizabeth and what Fox sees as the miracle that enables Elizabeth to survive the reign of Bloody Mary, her. Her half sister. And Fox thinks that obviously Elizabeth is absolutely brilliant, because Fox is writing, is a Protestant, Elizabeth is a Protestant. But just as he thinks Elizabeth is brilliant, he thinks Mary is an absolute shocker, the worst ruler ever on the English throne. So he casts Mary as this terrifying papist tyrant and Elizabeth as a Protestant deliverer. He says that Mary was inflamed with zeal not for God, but for idolatry, whereas Elizabeth is a restorer of the gospel. He describes how Mary filled England with smoke from. From the burning of God's saints, whereas Elizabeth, when she comes to the throne, is all about the advancement of learning and godliness.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

And he's not exaggerating the differences, is he? So just to remind people, we ended last time with the death of Edward vi, their brother. So he'd been an ultra Protestant, a kind of evangelical reformer. So we are in 1553 and now we are going to find out what happens. You know, Edward wanted his Protestant relative, Lady Jane Grey, to succeed him. But Mary is of course the obvious person, more beloved of the English people. But the thing about her that everybody knows, the thing that Fox knew, that we learn in schools, that everybody knew at the time, was that her defining characteristic was her loyalty to the faith of her mother, Catherine of Aragon. That is to say, she is a Catholic. People using the words Catholic and Protestant by this time.

[Tom Holland]

Not really, it's still a little bit muddy again, we'll be kind of looking at that. But I think, I think the sense of Europe being divided into kind of rival poles is starting to clarify. But Mary, remember, is of an older generation. Yeah, she's not entirely on top of that. But anyway, she, she sees herself as upholding the traditional faith of England. And when she's interrogated by her brother's counsel in 1550, she's absolutely upfront about this. She says, I would rather refuse the friendship of all the world than forsake any point of my faith. And to that end she had defied her father, Henry viii, and she defies her brother Edward vi. She attends Mass daily. She refuses to accept the very radical Protestant reforms that her brother is pushing forward. And remember, there is a huge age difference. Edward, by 1553, when he dies, he's still just a teenager and a very priggish teenager and very vehemently Protestant. And I think that he views his elder sister rather in the way that a student coming back from his first term at university might view, you know, a middle aged terf or someone like that.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

She's in her late 30s, she's 37 in 1553.

[Tom Holland]

Yes. And I think Edward just feels, you know, she's got these very antiquated, unacceptable, very cancellable views.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Her religious views are problematic, right?

[Tom Holland]

Yes. Elizabeth is different because Elizabeth, unlike Mary, had done well under her brother's rule. So she also, like Mary, has inherited a faith from her mother. Elizabeth's mother, of course, Anne Boleyn, was an evangelical and Elizabeth has been raised in that faith. But actually the huge influence on her obviously isn't Anne Boleyn, because Anne Boleyn died when Elizabeth was only three and a half. It's her stepmother, Catherine Parr, Henry VIII's last wife. And like Catherine, Elizabeth, I think, has an authentically evangelical sense of convictions, but she also quite likes a crucifix, you know, a choir, a cathedral close, all of that. The core is evangelical Protestant, if you want to call it like that. But she's perfectly happy with, you know, a bit of traditional cladding.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Yeah.

[Tom Holland]

And to that extent, she's much less kind of obviously Protestant than Edward, who is all about, you know, if there's anything that's more than 15 years old, RIP it down, whitewash it. But the one thing that Elizabeth does do to signal to her brother, her religious affiliations, and we'd mentioned this in the last episode, she very ostentatiously wears plain and sober clothes. I think that's quite a challenge for Elizabeth because she does love a beautiful.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Dress, nice dressing up. So, obvious question. Edward VI is dying. He knows he's dying. He regards it as his last, sort of his last duty on earth to ensure that England passes into the hands of somebody who will uphold what he sees as the unproblematic evangelical religion. Why does he not basically arrange the succession for his half sister, Elizabeth? Why does he turn to Lady Jane Grey instead?

[Tom Holland]

It's such a good question. I remember when we did our episodes on Lady Jane Grey, that we discussed this question then, and I think the answer is that we've been talking about how different Mary and Elizabeth are, but they also have very, very profound similarities. So both of them are the daughters of mothers who've been rejected by their father, Henry viii. Catherine of Aragon had been packed off, Anne Boleyn had had her head chopped off. Both of them had been born as princesses and lost that title under Henry viii and under Edward vi, they're called lady rather than princess.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Yeah.

[Tom Holland]

And this is because both of them have been officially and legally declared bastards by act of Parliament. So there is a sense that both of them have a kind of shared taint. And it's this that prompts Edward to decide that they should have to be removed from the succession, which Henry VIII had had kind of said that they should succeed him. Edward decides he's going to overturn that and appoint his heir, as you said, their cousin, Lady Jane Grey.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

I suppose the truth is you can't have Elizabeth and not have Mary. Right. If you can legitimize Elizabeth, then. Then, then why are you excluding Mary?

[Tom Holland]

Yeah, I think that's right. And so Edward dies on the 6th of July, 1553, and James, Jane's father in law, the Duke of Northumberland, one of the Dudley families, he declares Jane Queen. But as we heard in the last episode and in the two episodes that we did years ago on Lady Jane Grey, episodes 239 and 240, for those who are interested, it all goes wrong. Elizabeth hunkers down in, in Hatfield, her great house in Hertfordshire. But Mary is much more proactive. She's in East Anglia. She raises basically the kind of the English people against Lady Jane's regime. And Lady Jane ends up ruling so briefly that she will be commemorated inaccurately actually, as the Nine Day Queen. And so the Tudors are able to maintain their hold on the throne because, of course, that's what's at stake. You know, it's a struggle not just for Mary to obtain what she sees as her birthright, but also to keep the Tudor dynastic hold on the throne.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Yep.

[Tom Holland]

And because Elizabeth is next in line to Mary, Mary's triumph is also, in a sense, Elizabeth's. And so Elizabeth makes sure to share in it. And she actually enters London before Mary on the 29th of July. So she arrives from Hatfield and she's escorted by 2,000 horsemen. And they have spears, they have bows, they have guns, and they're dressed in the green and white livery of, of the Tudors. And this is obviously a very public declaration, a reminder to people not just that, you know, she is there, that she is a Tudor like her victorious sister, but also that she is, she's a heavyweight in her own right. If she can command 2000 Horsemen, then it promotes her to the people of London and the country more generally, as someone with backing, with wealth, with lands. She is a person of great substance in her own right.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

And to remind people she is going to turn. She's not yet turned 20, so she is 19 and a half years old. She's still effectively a teenager. A very daunting moment, but a good example of her political skill and the kind of the cool and the steel beneath the surface. Right, yeah.

[Tom Holland]

And of course, it's a reminder to Mary. And Elizabeth comes in from, from the northwest of London, rides through the city, heads out east. And Mary is approaching London from East Anglia and the two sisters meet at Wanstead, east of London. And this is the first time that they've met for three years. And Mary welcomes Elizabeth very warmly and we're told even to kissing all her ladies. So that's very nice. And on the 3rd of August, Mary makes her formal entry into London and Elizabeth is riding by her side. And I think Elizabeth would have who's a very shrewd observer would have noted two things in particular about Mary's triumphant entry into the capital. The first is the crowds cheer her ecstatically. They are as enthusiastic to see a queen as they ever were to see a king. And this is a key revelation because Mary is the first woman to be ruling in her own right since Stephen and Matilda. And Matilda had not, you know, her rule had not been uncontested. So really, Mary is the first queen regnant to rule in an uncontested way in English history and people salute and hail and cheer her as a monarch.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

The irony, Henry viii, it had all been for nothing, all that faffing around with wives. Yeah, he'd assumed, I suppose. Yeah. After the wars of the Roses, understandably, he had assumed, you know, there'd probably be more civil wars, you'll need to command armies, all of that kind of business. But he was wrong. Because actually, the affection for the dynasty is such. And that what people regard as the legitimate line that Mary never really has. Well, we'll come to what ructions there are later on, but she never really has that much difficulty in cementing her regime, does she?

[Tom Holland]

No, she doesn't. And I think it makes clear that there are opportunities for a queen to command the love and devotion of her subjects, just as there are for a king. But having said that, I think the other thing that Elizabeth notices as she's riding by her sister's side is that the cheering for her as the younger and more glamorous sister is louder. And I think that is something also that she bears in mind that if the people of London are saluting the ruling queen, she also is a very, very popular person. And her reliance on the love of her subjects will be a running theme throughout the next few years. And then when she becomes queen, throughout.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Her reign, how do we know that the cheers were louder for her? So that must come from witnesses at the time. But how do we know that they're not party pre.

[Tom Holland]

Because it's noted by people who are sympathetic to Mary and it's a cause of concern. Right. Because obviously, you know, it's not the kind of thing that would make Mary feel brilliant about Elizabeth, with whom she already has a very complicated relationship. Although, having said that, to begin with, for the first few weeks, their relationship seems okay. To reiterate the point that David Starkey made, which we quoted in the earlier episode, Mary was tender hearted to excess when issues of principle were not involved. So, of course, the issue of principle in that comment is the Sticking point. But I think even on this score, Mary is not the monstrous bigot of Fox's Book of Martyrs.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Well, I'm delighted to hear this because as you know from last week's episodes, I actually have a lot of time for Queen Mary. I think she's a very impressive person. And actually it's really important in this context to hammer home the point that basically it's not so simple as there being card carrying Catholics and card carrying Protestants. The whole kind of religious ecosystem is in flux. To see it just as two camps is wrong, isn't it? Because actually people are trying to find their place in the new order and it's not necessarily obvious to people what they are and how things will settle down.

[Tom Holland]

Yeah. And so it's perfectly possible for Mary throughout, you know, all the time, that Henry VIII has been terrible to her, she continues to proclaim her admiration for him and she does so now that she's Queen. Henry serves her as a role model. She allows her dead brother Edward VI to be buried using the Protestant funeral service. And in fact, both Henry and Edward as well. Henry's not exactly a Protestant, but I mean, he's a kind of weird kind of Catholic who's thrown off the Papal Supremacy. Edward is definitely a Protestant. Both of them uphold the notion that the King should be the head of the Church of England and use that to ram through their reforms of the Church of England. Mary as a Catholic thinks that the Papal Supremacy should be restored and does that very quickly. But even once she's done that, she still operates on the assumption basically that she's the head of the Church of England. I mean, what she decides basically goes, so she's inherited that assumption as well, I think from her father and her brother. But the reason that she doesn't really see any tension there is, as you said, that she doesn't really have a sense of there having been a reformation that needs to be countered. She doesn't really think that the scale of the upheaval that England has gone through is something that has imposed a kind of binary contrast on England. So to quote Lucy Wooding in her wonderful introduction to Tudor England, which I think is the best single volume on Tudor England that there is. She writes, Mary seems to have had the firm conviction that bar a few troublemakers, she was essentially ruling a Catholic country with the support of its people.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

But that's probably true, isn't it? I mean, insofar as most people, if you'd said to them, are you a Catholic or Protestant? They'd look at you like you were mad. Maybe younger people, as in people under the age of 20, will have been brought up in a more evangelical mindset. But older people, I mean, people are aware that changes have happened and many of them will probably say God. A lot of these changes are a bit bonkers, aren't they? I don't really understand them myself, but they don't, they don't think to themselves, well, we're living through the Reformation. I wonder if there'll be a Counter Reformation. I mean, that's not how people think.

[Tom Holland]

I think that's absolutely right. So to that extent, Mary is correct that there's a kind of bit of spring cleaning that needs to be done. There's kind of damage being done.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Yeah, Things have gone much too far.

[Tom Holland]

Things have gone too far, but you just tidy up and then things will basically be. Be as they were. Now, it has to be said, you know, we also have this idea, I think, that there's such a thing as Catholicism, which is monolithic, refusing to change. But that's not the case at all because the Catholic world, like the Protestant world in the 16th century, is in a constant state of flux. There are Catholic reformers, there are people in the upper echelons of the Catholic Church who absolutely feel that reform is necessary. And Mary herself belongs to that wing of the Catholic Church. So she never goes on pilgrimage as a queen. Before she came to the throne, she had helped to translate Erasmus, who's the great humanist scholar, who had been a kind of a coruscating critic of corruption in the Catholic Church. And she, she had no problem at all with using the Bible in English. She thought know that was fine as well. And just to reiterate, she belongs to this a generation that hasn't yet conceptualized, I think, the notion of there being Catholics and Protestants. And that's why she feels that she's not kind of instituting a Counter Reformation, really. As I say, it's just a kind of process of housekeeping, of tidying things up that have been a little bit smashed up. Now, as it turns out, that's not entirely the case because of course, what she, she is demanding of people who have accepted reformed religion, who are Protestants, as we might call them, she is obliging them to make a choice because actually, papal supremacy is something that has become a massive sticking point for people like that.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Yeah.

[Tom Holland]

And the most prominent person for whom this is an issue is of course, her sister Elizabeth. But I think it's a reflection not just on Elizabeth's character, but on the General tenor of evangelicals at this point, that Elizabeth is not prepared to be martyred. So Fox's book of Martyrs, as its name suggests. You know, there are lots of people who will be prepared to go to the stake, but relatively speaking, relative to the number of Protestants that there probably are in England at this time, there aren't actually that many because most people are happy to do as Elizabeth does and kind of just kind of keep their head down. So Elizabeth knowing, you know, she's got to prove herself to Mary. Early in September, she requests an audience with her sister. You know, she's a great actress. She falls down on her knees, tears streaming from her cheeks, lamenting that, that Mary seems ill disposed to her. And to quote, she knew of no other cause except religion. She might be excused in this because she had been brought up in the way she held and had never been taught the doctrine of the ancient religion. That's a good card to play because Mary knows that's absolutely, you know, she knows that's true.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

I'm the real victim in all this.

[Tom Holland]

Yeah. So Elizabeth says, well, you know, can you send me a priest? Give, give me books that I can read up and, you know, learn the error of my ways. And on the 8th of September, she duly attends mass with Mary at the Chapel Royal. Although again, a kind of classic Elizabeth maneuver, she does try to get out of it by pulling a sickie. But Mary sends a doctor and says, actually, fine, yeah.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

So after that quite promising start, things start to get tense again, don't they? And how much of this do you think is the. I mean, it's an interesting question actually. How much have they inherited the bad blood between Catherine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn? So how much does you know? Obviously Mary hated Anne Boleyn because Anne Boleyn was horrible to her. Does she blame Elizabeth at some subconscious level, do you think?

[Tom Holland]

Possibly. I mean, once the kind of complications of religious divides have been removed, as we've said, Mary has been incredibly kind to Elizabeth and viewed her as a sister. But the moment that religion complicates the picture, then things start to go tense again. And Mary in the first months of her reign is busy disassembling the Protestantism of her brother. And she knows that Elizabeth is unsympathetic to this. And so she starts to see Elizabeth again as a threat. And specifically she begins to go on to her advisors that Elizabeth resembles Anne Boleyn. And again, to quote, as her mother had caused great trouble in the kingdom, the queen feared that Elizabeth might, might do the same, but important to say Mary's anxieties about Elizabeth are not just on the religious dimension, because there is also a further one, which is that of foreign policy. And Mary is worried that Elizabeth might imitate Anne Boleyn in being a French partisan.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Well, that's a massive issue throughout all this period, isn't it? That's often forgotten in the sort of popular literature or the popular understanding of it. The cleavages in British politics are not just about religion, but they're also about, you know, there are two big powers in Europe and which one are you going to ally yourselves with? And Anne Boleyn, of course, had come from France, her father had been a diplomat in France, and Elizabeth is perceived as being a Francophile rather than a kind of Hispanophile.

[Tom Holland]

Yeah. And this is a problem because Mary is planning a really spectacular diplomatic coup, namely marriage to the son of the most powerful monarch in the world. And that monarch, of course, is Charles v. And on the 16th of November, Mary announces to Parliament that she is going to be marrying the son of. Of Charles V, Philip of Spain. And her admirers think this is an incredible coup. So one of them describes it as the most splendid royal match since the Norman Conquest. In a sense, that's not an exaggeration.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

I mean, it is an amazing coup.

[Tom Holland]

Protestants will see this as a terrible mistake, Mary handing England over to the Catholic superpower. This isn't how Mary sees it. And again, it's a reminder that she's operating in a world where the divisions between Catholic and Protestants, Protestant, are not yet set in concrete, because to Mary, Charles V, who, as emperor, rules the Low Countries, he is the heir of the Dukes of Burgundy and all that region in the Low Countries is crucial to the English economy. And it's also crucial as a counterpoint to France, and it's also crucial as an obvious launching pad for any invasion of England. So it has been English policy to side with whoever is ruling the Low Countries for, you know, for decades and decades and decades. And the fact that Charles V is as powerful as he is, it seems to Mary and her advisors, just makes the deal even better.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Yeah.

[Tom Holland]

I mean, basically, it's a traditional Anglo Burgundian match.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Yeah.

[Tom Holland]

And kind of issues of Protestant Catholic don't really come into the equation, I think, for Mary and her foreign policy advisors.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Well, do you remember in our. In our first episode, we described how the marriage of first Arthur Tudor and then Henry VIII to Catherine of Aragon was an amazing diplomatic coup for Henry vii. Right. Being allied to the Emerging superpower of Spain. This is more of the same, but with knobs on. And if you're a patriotic Englishman who thinks smiting the French is the supreme goal of life, what's not to like about this? This is great.

[Tom Holland]

Well, I think there is an issue, which is, of course, that Mary is not a princess. She is a queen. And so there are understandable anxieties, I think, for that reason, that her marrying Philip may result in England's subordination. I mean, you can see the ruling monarch is the partner of the world's most, you know, son of the world's most powerful man. There is an issue there. And so Mary goes to great lengths to ensure that England will not be subordinated to Philip's empire. So she prescribes that when he's in England, he has to have kind of Englishmen in his household, not just Spaniards. He's not allowed to have powers of legislation. He is not allowed to embroil England in kind of distant wars. So essentially, he has a largely ornamental role. And Philip is actually so offended by this that he almost walks out of the marriage. But he, you know, for Philip also, France is the great enemy for the Habsburgs, and so for him also, England is a real catch. And so the marriage does go ahead. There's kind of grumbling discontent in Parliament, and I think some of this is tinged by kind of Protestantism, but in the main, it's a more kind of Brexity vibe. It's a kind of, you know, a dislike of any suggestion of foreign influence.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Over England and surely turbocharged because she's a woman. So Henry VIII was right about one thing. He said, didn't he? The problem with having a daughter succeed me is that she will inevitably fall into the influence of her husband and the kingdom will pass to him. And that must be a huge part of this, that had it been an English king marrying a Spanish princess, the dynamic would be so different.

[Tom Holland]

Yeah, but. But, you know, Mary's queen, she's a Tudor, she's the daughter of Henry viii, and so she's not having any opposition in Parliament at all. So she. She swats all criticism aside in a very imperious manner. We shall marry as God shall direct our choice, to his honor and to our country's good. And again, a very Henry VIII development. She ponders disinheriting Elizabeth completely. And, of course, Henry VIII was always doing that. He was always disinheriting his various children. Mary now wants to disinherit her sister because she's. She. She sees her as too heretical, too popular with the mass of the people. She suspects her of being in league with the French. There are all kinds of good reasons, it seems to Mary, but her councillors say this would be a really, really bad idea. So, as one of them puts it, since Parliament had accepted the Lady Elizabeth as proper to succeed, it would be difficult to deprive her of the right, she claimed, without causing trouble. And what does he mean by trouble? Well, there are those, you know, 2,000 horsemen. There's the fact that Elizabeth is the second largest landowner in the country. Let sleeping dogs lie is basically the advice. So Mary does. But of course, she remains very suspicious of her, and all the more so because the marriage with Philip is unpopular for the reasons that we've been saying, and she's nervous about whether Elizabeth might be kind of causing trouble. So Elizabeth, by December, is aware that she is really not flavour of the month with Mary, and so she decides to withdraw from London, withdraw from the court, and she goes back to Hatfield and hunkers down there. And at the same time as she does this in closed rooms across the capital, across the south of England and into the Midlands, conspirators are starting to plot rebellion. And the object of these conspirators is to depose Mary and to replace her with Elizabeth. And the man who gives his name to this plot is a kind of young, dashing blade called Sir Thomas Wyatt, the son of the man who introduced the sonnet into England. He's a very experienced soldier, he's a Protestant and he loathes the Spanish because his father, as well as bringing the sonnet into England, had also been an ambassador to Spain. And so the young Thomas had been there and had seen the Inquisition doing its stuff and had fully bought into the idea of Spain as a kind of a nest of Catholic tyrants.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

And because he's a swashbuckling, charismatic character, Wyatt, everyone calls this Wyatt's Rebellion, but actually it's kind of Lady Jane Grey too, isn't it?

[Tom Holland]

Yeah.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

So, for example, Lady Jane Grey's father, the Duke of Suffolk, is involved with this, and there's lots of people who are. Basically, they've found themselves out in the cold. So since Mary took over, it's kind of your classic Tudor faction fight to some degree, isn't it?

[Tom Holland]

Yes. And as Nicola Tallis in her book on young Elizabeth points out, the conspirators were all well connected and they all had contacts within Elizabeth's household. And this will be a key issue in how this rebellion plays out. So the plan of these conspirators, Wyatt and his co conspirators, is to raise the country. On Palm Sunday 1554, Wyatt will raise Kent, the Duke of Suffolk will raise the Midlands. And the other uprisings are planned in the west country and tellingly in Hertfordshire, which is where Hatfield House, Elizabeth's base is. But news of, of this conspiracy leaks well, well before Palm Sunday. So Palm Sunday's the, the Sunday before easter. Already by January 1554, news of, of what's being plotted is starting to reach the ears of Mary's spies. And so all the uprisings are suppressed really before they can kick off, except for one, and that is Wyatt's uprising in Kent. So there he has raised about 3,000 men, most of them are Protestant. They march on London. It's very reminiscent of the Peasants Revolt. They are unable to cross London Bridge, but they go down to Kingston, swing back and try to enter London through, through the western gates. And as they're approaching, Mary is urged to flee. But instead she rides to the Guild hall and she rallies the city and she declares herself married to her people. And a contemporary witness describes the performance she puts on and is very impressed. More than marvel it was to see that day the invincible heart and constancy of the Queen herself, who being by nature a woman and therefore commonly more fearful than men be, showed herself in that case more stout than is credible.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

That's impressive. And that's very, that's very Tudor. And Tom, it's very Elizabeth I at Tilbury.

[Tom Holland]

You know, it's very Elizabeth I. And so again and again, when you read about how Mary kind of plays the role of a queen, you realize that she's providing a role model that Elizabeth I think undoubtedly kind of remembered. It's very Elizabeth at Tilbury.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

It's the second time she's done this in, in a year. Right. I mean she did it when, during the Lady Jane Grey business. This is Lady Jane Grey two, basically.

[Tom Holland]

Yeah.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

And once again the people are with her.

[Tom Holland]

They are, yeah. They rally in support of Mary. Wyatt's rebellion is crushed and Mary, who I think naturally is kind hearted, she is widely thought to be of a merciful disposition, but she feels she has no choice now but to, you know, firm smack of government. So Wyatt is executed, the Duke of Suffolk is executed. Because the Duke of Suffolk is Lady Jane Grey's father, that means that Lady Jane Grey has to be executed, Guildford has to be executed, a hundred of Wyatt's followers are hanged. And in London, the Imperial ambassador reports, one sees nothing but Gibbets and hanged men.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Mary's brilliant, isn't she? It's such a shame she lets herself down about the Pope because in every other respect her choices are great. She's nice, she's a merciful person, but she does what she has to do and I applaud her for it.

[Tom Holland]

Well, so she has smacked down the rebellion, but of course there is one massive question that is left hanging and that is what in this rebellion was the role of Elizabeth? And of course this is investigated immediately and Elizabeth is a very shrewd operator already. She's not the woman who is going to leave incriminating evidence around. If she had been involved in the plot, which I think she probably had been. And I think the most salient piece of evidence that she had at least been complicit in the plot is that the husband of her great favorite, Kat Ashley, John Ashley, in the wake of the rebellion, he flees abroad. And why is he doing that? Presumably he had been a kind of go between. I mean, it's, yeah, it seems the likeliest explanation for what's going on.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

And it might not be as, as straightforward as her saying, let's get rid of my sister and I'd like to be queen. It may be her just saying, well, listen, let's see what happens. And I'm, you know, I'm available if things, you know.

[Tom Holland]

Yeah, if the ball comes loose at the back of the scrub.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Yeah, exactly, exactly.

[Tom Holland]

So she gets interrogated and of course she protests her innocence and Mary doesn't believe her. So on the 26th of January, Mary summons Elizabeth to come to London. And Elizabeth classically says, oh, I feel a bit ill, I've got a bit of a headache, bit of a cold and refuses to come. So Mary then sends a posse of very well born agents, kind of lords and so on, on the 12th of February to go to Hatfield and bring her back to London. And Mary makes sure this time to send two doctors to make sure that, you know, she can't pull a sickie. And so the journey takes a very long time because Elizabeth continues to say, oh, I've got a headache, I can't go, whatever. But finally they arrive and Elizabeth gets out at Whitehall. A large crowd has gathered to see her. They cheer her. Elizabeth is taken into Whitehall, a private quarters. She's not allowed to see Mary. The weeks pass and all the time Elizabeth is thinking, oh my God, what's going on? Have they found any incriminating evidence? Are they faking evidence? I mean, who knows what she's thinking. But she is nervous about what might be about to hit her. And then on the 16th of March, she finds out. So she is visited by the lord chancellor and 19 other council members. So that's about half Mary's council.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

This is very Anne Boleyn. This is what happened to her.

[Tom Holland]

Right, Very Anne Boleyn. And almost everything about what Elizabeth is going to go through is reminiscent of Anne Boleyn, and I think deliberately so. Mary is playing mind games with her. So the councillors question her about her involvement with Wyatt's rebellion. Going over questions she has already been asked. And once again, she denies all involvement in it. And once again, the counsellors display open skepticism. Elizabeth demands to be brought into Mary's presence so that she can plead her case. This request is refused. Again, she insists on her innocence. She says, I am a woman. I am a true woman in thought, word and deed. And her interrogators cut her off and they answer her with words that Elizabeth must surely have been dreading from the moment that she was fetched from Hatfield and brought to London. The counselors tell her in words that were absolutely calculated to fill the daughter of Anne Boleyn with dread. There is no remedy for that. The Queen's Majesty is fully determined that you should go unto the Tower.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

What a cliffhanger. What on earth is going to happen to the young Elizabeth? Find out after the break.

[Tom Holland]

This episode is brought to you by the American Revolution on pbs.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

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The American Revolution premieres Sunday, November 16th on PBS and the PBS app. This episode is brought to you by the Swedish clothing brand Asket.

[Tom Holland]

Now, Dominic, in our episode on tailoring and the history of the suit One of the most salient things you get a real sense of while stood in a tailor's on Savile Row is that historically clothes were made with love and care so that they would last for a very long time indeed. And I think it's the shame in today's age of fast fashion that it is hard to come by clothes that stand the test of time.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

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[Dominic Sandbrook]

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[Dominic Sandbrook]

To this present hour, I protest before God who shall judge my truth, whatsoever malice shall devise, that I never practiced, counsel nor consented to anything that might be prejudicial to your person in any way or dangerous to the state by any means. And therefore, I humbly beseech your majesty to let me answer her for yourself and not suffer me to trust to your counselors. Yea. And that afore I go to the Tower, if it be possible. If not, before I be further condemned. So that's an extraordinary appeal, and it was written on the 17th of March by Elizabeth to her sister Mary. She is waiting for guards to move her from Whitehall up the River Thames to the Tower of London. She is obviously terrified that she is going to suffer the same fate as her mother, Anne Boleyn, who was imprisoned in the Tower and then beheaded. She is begging Mary to be able to plead her case directly to her, exactly as Anne Boleyn had begged that she'd be able to plead her case to Henry viii. And as we know, you know, things are looking incredibly bleak for her. She's been put under armed guard, she's been separated from her servants.

[Tom Holland]

Yeah.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

And then the next day, two members of the council arrive, don't they, to take her to the Tower, and it looks as though the game is up for her.

[Tom Holland]

Yeah, I think it's the most desperate moment of her life. So the two members of the council who arrive to take her to the Tower are absolute heavyweights. So one of them is a guy called William Paulett, who is the Marquess of Winchester. He's very grizzled, he's very grey, and he, as Elizabeth would have known full well, had been one of the judges at the trial of Anne Boleyn's supposed lovers. The other is a man called Henry Ratcliffe, and he is the Earl of Sussex. He is in his mid-40s and he is Elizabeth's great uncle. And so Elizabeth turns to him and begs him, please let me see my sister. Sussex says, no, you know, Her Majesty has absolutely refused that. And so then Elizabeth says, well, please, may I write the Queen a letter? And so Sussex, you know, he's a great uncle, he's more favorably disposed to her, perhaps, than the Marquess of Winchester. He says, all right, you can write a letter. And so Elizabeth sits down and she scribbles away protesting her innocence, warning Mary to stand guard against all those who would. Who would slander her. And astonishingly, she even cites the example of Thomas Seymour, her very handsy stepfather, who we talked about in the previous episode.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Yeah, Mr. Tickle.

[Tom Holland]

She writes to Mary, in late days, I heard my Lord of Somerset say that if his brother had been suffered to speak with him, he had never suffered. And it's Kind of an amazing thing to say, comparing herself to Thomas Seymour and Mary to Thomas Seymour's elder brother, the Duke of Somerset.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Yeah.

[Tom Holland]

Because in view of the gossip, I mean, that's a kind of mad illusion to make and maybe reflective of the degree of stress that she's under.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

You're treating me like Jeffrey Epstein.

[Tom Holland]

Yeah. I mean, not a sensible thing for her to say, but she's sufficiently on the ball that when she has, you know, she writes a whole page and then she covers halfway down a second page and then she scores a line underneath her name and does lines through it so that people won't be able to kind of fake things underneath what she said. And this takes so much time that all the while the tide has been rising, and by the time she's finished, the tide has risen so high that it will no longer be possible to pass under London Bridge. And so the journey to the Tower has to be postponed for a day. And this is a classic example of what will, throughout her life, be one of Elizabeth's favourite tactics when she's cornered, which is essentially, is just to delay, to prevaricate, to string people along. However, you know, day passes, and at 9 the next day, Palm Sunday, Winchester and Sussex reappear. And this is the day, of course, that Wyatt's rebellion had been scheduled for. There is nothing from Mary. She doesn't reply to Elizabeth's letter. And so Elizabeth is resigned to her fate. If there be no remedy, she says, then I must be contented. So she gets into the boat. She's rowed up the river towards the Tower. It's bucketing down with rain underneath London Bridge. The boat goes, and they pull up to the Tower and moor there. And according to John Fox, who describes all this in great and loving detail, she was rowed up to the Traitor's Gate. And she initially, she refused to get out of the boat. And then when she did so, she declared, here landeth as true a subject being prisoner has ever landed at these stairs. And this becomes a kind of famous, famous scene, famous lines. However, we know from a contemporary witness that this didn't happen, that actually she entered the Tower across the drawbridge. So she got out of the boat and entered through the main entrance. And I think this would have been no less chilling for Elizabeth, because that is the same gateway through which her mother, Anne Boleyn, had had entered the Tower. And when Elizabeth passed inside the Tower, she would have seen the scaffolding on which Lady Jane Grey, her cousin, had just been executed and that had been built on the very spot where her mother had been executed. And when she is led to her quarters, these are the royal quarters which her father had rebuilt for her mother's coronation and where Anne had stayed until the hour of her execution. So massive psychological pressure and I think completely deliberate. Partly, you know, you asked is, is Mary avenging herself on the ghost of Anne Boleyn? I think to a degree here she is, but I think she's also doing it because she needs Elizabeth to break. She needs Elizabeth to confess. Because if Elizabeth doesn't confess, then there isn't really any hard evidence against her. And this really matters because, you know, just to reiterate, Elizabeth is very popular. She is a very powerful figure in her own right. It would be very dangerous for Mary to prosecute her own sister without extremely solid evidence. And Elizabeth, I think, probably is probably confident that there isn't hard evidence against her. And so when she's brought before the council on Good Friday, it soon becomes very clear that they haven't really got anything on her.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

That said, if in Henry viii, Henry VIII would undoubtedly have executed her. I mean, he didn't need hard evidence. He made it up. But Mary is not quite as capricious. And I guess for a woman, you know, it's hard, maybe harder, to be quite so secure that you can just make stuff up as Henry VIII was.

[Tom Holland]

Yeah, I think her position is less stable than Henry's.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Exactly. So there is a danger, isn't there, Wyatt?

[Tom Holland]

He's still on the scene and he's.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Going to be executed on the 11th of April. And there must have been some doubt in her mind, some fear that basically he turns up on the scaffold and says, elizabeth made me do it. She was part of it. She knew about it all along. But he deliberately doesn't do that. Why doesn't he do it? Because it's not true or he's a kind person?

[Tom Holland]

Well, he explicitly says Elizabeth had not been privy of my rising or commotion before I began. I suppose there are two explanations for that. One, Elizabeth hadn't been privy to it. He's telling the truth. Secondly, he's looking forward to the prospect of a Protestant heir to Mary, and he wants to keep her in the game. So either explanation, I think, would be adequate.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

So eventually she, you know, the threat recedes.

[Tom Holland]

Right.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

She's there for another month. There's another month of dithering while Mary and the council prevaricate and they're discussing what to do with her. And then again, is this a little nod to the past so it's on the afternoon of the 19th of May, which is the anniversary of Anne Boleyn's execution, that Elizabeth is allowed out of the Tower. Do you think that was deliberately chosen or not?

[Tom Holland]

I'm sure it was.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Right.

[Tom Holland]

I think the echoes of Anne Boelyn's fate throughout this entire episode are so manifest that it can't be coincidental.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

But here the message is different. The message is your mother ended up on the chopping block, but you are being spared. And doesn't that prove how nice and merciful your sister is? Don't you think that's the message?

[Tom Holland]

No, I don't. So Elizabeth is being freed from the Tower, but she's still a prisoner. So she is. She's rowed down the river rather than being allowed to pass through the City of London where she might be cheered. And Mary, I think, is basically saying, you know, I've still got my eye on you.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Yeah.

[Tom Holland]

The fate of your mother is still kind of hovering over your neck. Don't doubt that. Elizabeth is not kept a prisoner in London. Mary obviously wants her kind of buried in the wilds of the countryside and so she is sent to your neck of the woods, to Oxfordshire and specifically Woodstock Palace. So very near what's today is Blenheim. Woodstock had been a very significant place for the royal family, so it's where the Black Prince had been born. It's where Henry VII had celebrated the betrothal of Catherine of Aragon to Prince Arthur. So again, perhaps another piece of kind of psychological warfare there that might be kind of over egging it. What is clearly designed to break Elizabeth is the fact that by this point, Woodstock has become very dilapidated. So it's very run down, it's damp, there's dry rot, I guess, kind of, you know, Formica everywhere, kind of terrible 1970s wallpaper, you know, not the kind of place that you'd want to stay if you are as highborn as Elizabeth is. And so she absolutely hates it. She's bored, she's isolated, she's forbidden, I quote, any message, letter or token to or from any manner of person, see.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Any manner of person. But that's not true. There is one manner of person that she is allowed contact with, Tom, and that's a Welshman. There's a lot of Welsh history on the show these days. Some would say too much. So explain how Wales features yet again.

[Tom Holland]

So Thomas Parry, described by David Starkey as a fat, self important Welsh Welshman. He is Elizabeth's agent, you know, her financial planner, the guy who you know, her accountant. And he is allowed contact with Elizabeth because Elizabeth has to pay for her own imprisonment. And so he has to find the money that enables Elizabeth to do this. And so he installs himself in the Bull. The local pub. Yeah. And there he's able to serve as Elizabeth's window on the world.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

God, so much Welsh history in this show.

[Tom Holland]

It has to be said the windows of Woodstock are really not fun things to be stuck behind. And according to Fox, again, this is a famous story that he tells. Elizabeth has a diamond ring, and she uses this to scratch lines of poetry on one of the panes of glass. Much suspected by me. Nothing proved can be quoth Elizabeth prisoner.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Do you think that really happened? Have people found the pane of the window pane?

[Tom Holland]

I think it probably happened. What I will say is it reads like lines that Elizabeth might have written because we have quite a lot of Elizabeth's poetry.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Okay. Now, meanwhile, outside the windows of Woodstock, Mary is proceeding with her counter revolution, even though she doesn't think of it as a counter revolution, she thinks of it as housekeeping. And this is what Fox describes in his book of martyrs as the great tyranny of Bloody Mary's reign. So the hanging, beheading, burning and prisoning. And this is the episode in English history that once upon a time, all boys and girls learned before the age of about 11 years old. The kind of darkest period in, you know, the story of England when Bloody Mary and her Catholic tyrants sought to burn out the true religion.

[Tom Holland]

Yeah.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

And, I mean, a lot of people do die, don't they? 300 or so Protestants are burned at the stake.

[Tom Holland]

Yeah. So the charge sheet against. Against Bloody Mary is. Is thanks to Fox, very lengthy. And some of these 300 martyrs are very famous men. So one of them is Thomas Cranmer, who'd been Archbishop of Canterbury and, of course, Anne Boleyn's chaplain before he became archbishop and had been Elizabeth's godfather. Another is the guy who'd been the Bishop of London under Edward vi, a man called Nicholas Ridley. And he had in the. The spell when Lady Jane Grey was queen, he had preached against both Mary and Elizabeth, calling them bastards and saying that Jane was the rightful queen. So Elizabeth might have enjoyed his martyrdom almost as much as Mary did.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Yeah. This is the Martyrs Memorial in Oxford. You can see it to this day. But they're also. These are the big wigs, but they're also very ordinary, unsung people who are executed, aren't there?

[Tom Holland]

So famously, there are lots of kind of tailors and so on, who were burned in Smithfield, just outside the City of London. And you can see a memorial to them there on the side of St. Bartholomew's Hospital. And there's one notorious episode which happened on Guernsey in the Channel Islands, when a pregnant woman is consigned to the flames. And to quote Wooding, amidst the flames, she gave birth to a baby boy who was rescued by a bystander. But the bailiff in attendance thrust him back into the fire to perish with his mother. And when you read that, you think, that must be propaganda. I can't believe that happened, but we know that it did because the bailiff was subsequently prosecuted for the murder of the child under Elizabeth. So that did happen. So that's Bloody Mary. But the propaganda also casts Mary as a political failure. And Exhibit A on this charge sheet is her marriage to Philip of Spain. And the argument is that by doing this, Mary has subordinated England to a domineering foreign papist and a Spaniard to boot, and that the consequence had been nothing but humiliation. England gets dragged into a war with France that was none of her business. This culminates in the humiliating loss in January 1588 of Calais, which had been the English foothold on the Continent since the time of Edward iii. And there's this again famous story that everyone used to know, that Mary on her deathbed said, when I am dead and opened, you shall find Calais lying in. In my heart. And you know, this is Mary as failure as well as bigot.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

But, Tom, this is not now us being revisionist. I mean, the scholarship, the historiography for the last, well, for decades, in our lifetime has been that this is. Much of this is Protestant propaganda, massively inflated, that Mary's executions are nothing unusual for a Tudor monarch, and that even her foreign policy is better than is advertised. So, well, let's dig into this a little bit. So let's start with the idea of Bloody Mary, the Catholic, the mad Catholic bigot who rampages across the land, burning decent, honest, Protestant churchmen. All of this. This is untrue, isn't it? To some extent. I mean, sure, people do die, but they always die in medieval and early modern monikers.

[Tom Holland]

We've been saying throughout that she has a reputation for mercy and that this is not unjustified. She and her agents do not go around sniffing out heretics. The people who are charged and interrogated, and if they refuse to repent, then burnt, are people who've been denounced by their neighbors. And Mary undoubtedly would much rather not have executed Them. She wanted their repentance. She didn't want them dead at the death of every martyr for Mary. And the apparatus of the Catholic Church is a failure. Now, I can entirely see that from our perspective in the 21st century, this doesn't really seem much of an extenuation. But the thing is, and we talked about this in. In the series we did on Mary, Queen of Scots, a monarch's job is to suppress heresy and rebellion. And in the 16th century, heresy and rebellion are equated. It's impossible to distinguish between the two. It's the monarch's job to suppress heresy.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Of course.

[Tom Holland]

It's absolutely crucial function. It's under 300. It's about 280 to 290 people who are executed for heresy under Mary. And when you put that in the context of what other Tudor monarchs did, it starts to seem less bad, because the 280, 290 people who die, that's. That's over a span of three years. But if you look at the Pilgrimage of Grace, which was a Catholic rebellion against Henry VIII In 1537, Henry put 250 Catholics to death, and that's basically in a few weeks.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Tom Holland]

You know, that's on a far vaster, more immediate scale than anything Mary does. And then in 1569, there's a. There's a rebellion against Elizabeth again by Catholics, and she put 600 Catholics to death, and we don't hear anything about that.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

And just to be clear, like, if you rebel, I mean, you know that these are the penalties. Right. I mean, as you said, it's absolutely the monarch's job.

[Tom Holland]

Yeah.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

If people rebel against you, you know, either they win or you win. And if you just slap them on the wrist and say, go home and don't do it again, you know, you will lose your crown within months and everybody will say you were useless and you let England down. I mean, this is part of the job description.

[Tom Holland]

It is. And there's a further complication in assuming that the people who are burned are kind of evidence of Mary's bigotry and bloodlust, because actually, several of them would have been burned under Edward VI or Henry viii because actually, their views are so heretical that even a Protestant monarch would have regarded them as beyond the pale. So they're, you know, they're people who deny the Trinity or reject the divinity of Christ. That is death. Whether you are saying it under a Protestant or a Catholic monarch, they had.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

It coming, let's be fair.

[Tom Holland]

I mean, Mary did it and she was right to do it would be the perspective of, of the 16th century. I mean, I entirely see that by the lights of a 21st century humanist, this isn't really an adequate extenuation. But I, I think by the standards of the 16th century it is. I think the, the image of Mary as bloody is a genius work of propaganda on the part of Fox and that's why his book is so seismically influential. What about the record of military failure? Even that I think isn't as total as it seemed. The accusation that England is dragged into this war against France, you know, willy nilly, without any stake in it, that's simply not true. France is England's traditional enemy. France is always looking to attack England. And in Mary's reign, England is directly threatened by a massive increase in the size and the capacity of the French navy. And people who listen to our series on Mary Queen of Scots may remember that in 1548 the French intervene in Scotland militarily against the English who are doing the rough wooing at the time. And that shortly afterwards the five year old Mary Queen of Scots is brought by a French flotilla from the Clyde down to Scotland. And that is the famous moment, Dominic, where Mary shows no sign of seasickness that you were very contemptuous of.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Did she not steer the ship herself? Is that not the claim that she personally helmed that ship?

[Tom Holland]

I think this isn't the salient fact about this. What matters is that the French fleet are able to sail up the side of England and intervene in Scotland and then sail down the other side and the English can't do anything about it. And the reason for that is that by Mary's reign the English fleet has become very run down. No English warship has been built since 1551. And the person who rectifies this is Philip of Spain. In 1555. He says to his wife, come on, you've got to get the ship bills hammering. We need to get the English navy back out to sea. And the war that results in the loss of Calais isn't all bad news. So to quote Benjamin Reading, who's written a great essay on this, it was fundamentally important for it acted as the stimulus for reviving the English navy. And of course, in the long run, England's future does not lie in maintaining a very, very expensive foothold in France, namely Calais. The future lies in ruling the Channel and the seas beyond. And this is one of the great ironies of Tudor history, because had Mary not married Philip of Spain, then the English fleet in 1588 would not have been in the condition to defeat the Spanish Armada sent by Philip of Spain.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

So what you're saying is Philip of Spain stands alongside Alfred the Great as the founding father of the Royal Navy?

[Tom Holland]

Yes, essentially. I mean, it's, it's, it's one of the delicious ironies of history. So I think you could say that. Far from tottering, far from being weak, far from being blood soaked, actually, by 1558, Mary's regime is looking pretty secure. So Calais's been lost, but England has a fleet that is capable of stopping the French from bringing the attack to English ports. The campaign to restore Catholicism is going well. There's a drop off in trials for heresy, which suggests that overt Protestantism is starting to be weeded out. Of course, there are still plenty of people in England who have Protestant sympathies, but it's the measure of how successful Mary's Counter Reformation is that these, by and large, are content to lie low. And we have a classic example of this, a brilliant young public servant again from Lincolnshire, like, like Fox.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

So, Lincolnshire, on today's, Today's podcast, a lot of Lincolnshire.

[Tom Holland]

And this is a guy by the name of William Cecil. So he's only 35 in 1558, but he's a man who's already risen very, very high. He's proved very proficient at climbing up the slippery pole of power. A committed Protestant had been since his mid-20s, he'd been a student of Roger Ascham, the great educationalist and Greek scholar at Cambridge, as Elizabeth had been, he'd been a very committed servant of Edward VI's regime. He'd been on the council as a councillor. He had backed the plot to put Lady Jane Grey on the throne. And he is a man who has no doubt that the papacy is the Antichrist. So people may be wondering, well, how has this man survived Mary coming to power? Like Elizabeth, he's a very subtle, self disciplined operator.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Well, Tom, he sounds like an absolutely splendid man, but the question is, why hadn't he ended up on the chopping block? Like, how has he managed to survive and indeed to flourish under Mary, when surely he should have been one of her targets?

[Tom Holland]

Partly because he's a very subtle, self disciplined man. A man who knows how to keep a secret and knows how to bury a secret. Like Elizabeth, he doesn't leave behind paper trails. At the same time, as we've been saying throughout this episode, Mary is not a vengeful woman. She is ready to forgive, she's ready to forget. And so long as men like Cecil, are not actively conspiring against her. She is perfectly happy to tolerate them, to coin a phrase. She doesn't want to make windows into men's souls. And this is a wise and, by the standards of the age, I think, moderate policy, and one that by 1588, seems to be working. And there is a feeling domestically, but also abroad, that England is being won back for the Catholic Church. So one Catholic puts it, England is beginning to recover its pure form. It all seems to be going well.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

So had history worked out differently, maybe England would have continued along that path towards what Theo describes as England's finest hour, its reintegration in the world of Catholic continental Europe. But of course, it doesn't. Now, one reason it doesn't is because all of this is dependent on one woman, right, on the person at the top. And Mary, you know, the Tudors have a bit of bad luck, don't they, with Edward VI and now with Mary again. So by the autumn of 1558, she is seriously ill with cancer, she's confined to her bed, she's got kind of constant fevers, she has delirium and stuff. And the issue, again, the perennial Tudor issue, she has no child, she has no Catholic heir.

[Tom Holland]

And this is not for want of trying.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Right, Exactly. So that's what Philip II of Spain. That's what Philip of Spain was for. Yeah, but it just hasn't. Hasn't worked out. And they are. They are living as man, and I mean, they do spend a lot of time apart, but they do live, as it were, as man and wife. Right?

[Tom Holland]

Well, immediately after the marriage, they do. And by April 1555, Mary had been so convinced that she was pregnant that she actually retires to a kind of, you know, a birthing chamber in Hampton Court palace, and she summons Elizabeth from Woodstock. So this is basically when Elizabeth's imprisonment there finishes, obviously, because she wants Elizabeth to witness, you know, her supplanting as the heir. But the pregnancy had turned out to be a phantom one, and Mary is left humiliated, and I think Philip is left feeling humiliated as well. And so he then leaves England. He does come back for a brief stay in the summer of 1557, but it's only for a few weeks, and then he goes off again, and they never see each other. And in the wake of that stay, there are further rumors of a pregnancy, but they're not widely believed. And one of Philip's counselors, a guy called the Count of Faria, is very blunt about this, and he wrote to Philip, it seems to me, The Queen is making herself believe that she's with child, although she does not own up to it. And I think that's very astute. And it's kind of Mary's great tragedy, as with Henry. So with Mary, you know, this burning desperation for a child and it just causes her, you know, she dies knowing that she has failed, because it means that as she is on her deathbed in October 1558, Elizabeth remains what she'd been since the death of Edward vi, their brother, five years before. She is the heir to the throne. And Mary can do nothing about that.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

So she hasn't seen Mary for months. She had visited London earlier, in the spring of 1558, and had stayed at Somerset House, hadn't she? And she had some people think she'd gone there basically to reassure herself that, you know, one of these phantom pregnancies wasn't gonna turn out to be a real pregnancy.

[Tom Holland]

Yeah.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

But Elizabeth had used that trip to London to make some important contacts.

[Tom Holland]

Yes, she did. So to quote Stephen Alford, who wrote a brilliant book on the person that Elizabeth is meeting at Somerset House, there were no great papers for this meeting, but we know this meeting happened because a servant in the household of the man who is coming to see Elizabeth kept a record of it, or to be precise, of a boat trip made by his master up and down the Thames to Somerset House for the meeting. And the person who was going in the boat going to meet Elizabeth to have this secret meeting was, to quote Allford, again, the cleverest young man in Tudor politics. And this man was Sir William Cecil.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

So that's the person we were just talking about.

[Tom Holland]

Yeah. And from this point on, William Cecil effectively is at Elizabeth's right hand. She's setting up a shadow government ready to step in when Mary dies. And on the 10th of November, Elizabeth entertains the Count of Faria, the counsellor of Philip ii, who's effectively his ambassador, his agent in England, at a house called Brocket hall near Hatfield, owned by one of Elizabeth's supporters. And there they have a private conversation. And the Count then reports details of this conversation back to Philip. And he says that Elizabeth wants to remain on good terms with Spain, but she's also absolutely insistent that she owes Philip nothing. And she emphasizes to Faria that it's not Philip who has kept her alive, but rather the love of her people, it was the people who put her in her present position, to quote Faria. And he leaves the interview plunged into gloom. I'm very much afraid he wrote, that she will not be well disposed in matters of religion, for I see her inclined to govern through men who are believed to be heretics. And a week later, on the morning of the 17th of November, Mary hears Mass. And then, very quietly, she goes to meet her Maker. She is dead. And the news is brought to Elizabeth at Hatfield. The tradition is that she was sitting under an oak tree when the news arrived, but this is a very late story, rather sadly, seems to be unlikely. But, you know, what the hell, let's say it happened.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

A Protestant oak.

[Tom Holland]

A Protestant oak. And with her, as the news is brought to her, is William Cecil. And the Queen summons Cecil and her most trusted advisors, the people that she has been preparing with for her reign. And she says to them, my lords, the law of nature moveth me to sorrow for my sister. The burden that has fallen upon me maketh me amazed. But Cecil, he's not unduly amazed. He's ready. And I think, as events will show, Elizabeth herself was ready too, because she is now, against all the odds, Queen of England.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Crikey, what a cliffhanger. Because in the next episode, which members of the rest is History Club can listen to right now, we will find out what happens when Elizabeth becomes queen. The dawning of the Elizabethan golden age, the issue of her marriage, the revolution that she and William Cecil are about to unleash in English religion, and the snake pit, the machinations of Tudor politics as Mary, Queen of Scots, enters the chat. So if you want to listen to that episode right now, you merely need to go to therestishistory.com to sign up. Join the club. And you will get a host of unbelievable benefits along with that. But, Tom, I can't wait to find out what happens next. Personally, I'm really looking forward to it because we're going to record it right now. And on that bombshell, thank you very much and goodbye, everybody. Bye bye.