So recently somebody in the YouTube comments asked me to do a deep dive on whether Elizabeth

the first gave the order for Mary Queen of Scots' execution. And honestly, thank you,

whoever you are, because this is one of those stories where the closer you look, the stranger it

gets. Here's the version everybody knows. Mary Queen of Scots was Elizabeth's prisoner for 19 years. Elizabeth

kept refusing to sign the death warrant. Then one day she signed it. Then she said she didn't mean it.

Then her secretary William Davison got thrown in the tower for sending it without her permission.

And Mary lost her head anyway. That's the surface version. The real version involves a forged post script, a beer barrel,

a secretary who kept his salary while sitting in the tower, a council that may or may not have

acted behind the queen's back, and a woman who had 19 years to find another solution and

somehow never quite managed it. So let's get into it. Hey friend, welcome back to the Renaissance English

History Podcast. I am your host, Heather, and I've been podcasting on Tudor England since 2009,

gosh darn it, which makes me the original Tudor history podcaster. I am, as always, just thrilled,

just delighted that you are here with me today to talk about Mary Queen of

Scots and Elizabeth I first. If you're new here, very, very warm, welcome to you. This is the kind

of thing we do. So hit subscribe if you like, so you don't miss any of the fun deep dives like this

that we do. So to understand why the execution was such an impossible question for Elizabeth,

you first have to understand what Mary actually was representing, and it's a lot more complicated than the usual

Catholic rival framing. Mary Stewart was, depending on your theological and political starting point,

either the rightful queen of England or a dangerous pretender. In the eyes of anybody who

considered Henry VIII's marriage to Anne Boleyn invalid, which included the Pope and most of Catholic

Europe, Elizabeth was illegitimate. Mary, as the granddaughter of Henry the 8th sister Margaret,

had a perfectly legitimate claim to the English throne.

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