480 years ago, on the 8th of December 1542, a baby girl called Mary was born to Marie

de Guise and James V of Scotland. Six days after Mary was born, her father died and the

mulling little babe became Queen of Scotland. Even before she had reached her 20s, the life

of this Queen of Scots would be extraordinarily tumultuous. Let me give you it in a nutshell.

She was promised a marriage to Prince Edward of England, but wedded instead to the French

D'Orfave, Horsois, so became Queen of France too. She was orphaned a year before she was

widowed. She returned to Scotland to marry a charismatic drunkard, Henry Lord Donnelly,

who probably had an affair with her private secretary, David Ritzio, whom he then had killed.

She was a young mother to a son when Donnelly died in suspicious circumstances. She was abused

by and married to a third man, James Hepburn, Earl of Bothwell. In prison, but escaping

in Scotland, she fled to England only to be imprisoned again there. She would not escape

this time. After 18 years of house arrest on the orders of Elizabeth I, she was beheaded

at Fatheringhay Castle. The interiority of even famous 16th century women can be hard

to access. Today's guest, however, has found a route into understanding the experiences

and emotions of the Scottish Queen through exploring her through the fabrics and textiles

of her life, her material world. My guest writes, Mary's luciveness owes much to the

bias of her contemporary biographers and historians, exclusively men who documented and assessed

the events of her reign and captivity through a masculine prism, one largely filtered through

an oppositional Protestant perspective. But there is another way to see her. My guest today

is Claire Hunter, a community textile artist and textile curator for over 20 years. She's

the author of the Sunday Times Besseller Threads of Life, which won the Saltair First Book

Award and was already a four book of the week. Her latest book is embroidering her truth,

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