Elizabeth I & Mary, Queen of Scots

Not Just the Tudors

History Hit

History

4.8 • 3K Ratings

🗓️ 13 January 2022

⏱️ 43 minutes

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Summary

Elizabeth I and Mary, Queen of Scots were cousins who never met - but their fates were intertwined. As their nations were engulfed in religious turmoil and civil wars raged on the continent, these two powerful women struggled for control of the British Isles.

In this edition of Not Just the Tudors, Professor Suzannah Lipscomb goes to the British Library in London to meet curator Andrea Clarke and visit a stunning exhibition on the rival Queens, which uses original documents and extraordinary objects to show how paranoia turned sisterly affection to suspicion.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	The parallel lives of the rival queens, Elizabeth I and Mary Queen of Scots,
0:10.1	rightly continued to fascinate. Their lives were mirror versions of each other. The Catholic
0:16.3	Mary and the Protestant Elizabeth, the unmarried Elizabeth and the much married Mary, the successful
0:22.8	sovereign and the deposed dinast. And whilst the two queens had competing claims for the
0:28.4	English throne, they maintained an intimate correspondence, even through the period of time in which
0:34.1	one imprisoned the other, up until the point at which one ultimately signed the other's death warrant.
0:41.5	A fabulous exhibition at the British Library in London explores their extraordinary
0:46.5	relationship through the words they themselves wrote and wrote to each other, as well as through
0:52.1	objects and paintings. I had the special privilege of being shown around it after hours by its curator,
1:00.4	Dr Andrea Clark.
1:09.6	Andrea, it's lovely to see you again. Thank you so much for showing me around. I'm very, very
1:14.5	excited. Do you want to say a word about how the exhibition came about and who was involved
1:19.0	in the kind of vision for it? Yes, so I submitted a proposal back in 2016 to do an exhibition on
1:27.2	Elizabeth and Mary when I realised that nobody has ever done an exhibition looking at the two queens
1:33.1	together, putting them centre stage and giving them equal billing, so to speak. So it just seemed
1:39.4	like the next natural tutor exhibition to do here at British Library. It's one that really showcases
1:45.8	our collections. What we try to do is tell their story, the story of two powerful women bound together
1:51.4	by their Chertuda ancestry and their experiences fellow suffering queens, but divided by their opposing
1:58.9	Protestant Catholic faiths and ultimately their rivalry for the English and Irish thrones.
2:04.4	And we try to tell their story in their own words. So we have the largest collection of Mary
2:09.4	and Elizabeth's autograph letters here at the British Library and so they lie at the very heart of
2:14.0	the exhibition and that's really important because even though they've been bought together on
	...

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