Hi, Bon. Welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. I'm actually on a boat in the middle of the

wetlands sea in the Antarctic at the moment. It is not the easiest place I've ever been

to create new podcasts. However, that's not a problem because we've got our sibling podcasts.

So this is an episode of not just the tutors with Professor Susana Lipskin, if you'd

get into. Enjoy.

The parallel lives of the rival queens, Elizabeth I and Mary Queen of Scots, rightly

continue to fascinate. Their lives were mirror versions of each other. The Catholic Mary

and the Protestant Elizabeth, the unmarried Elizabeth and the much married Mary, the successful

sovereign and the deposed dinost. And whilst the two queens had competing claims for the

English throne, they maintained an intimate correspondence, even through the period

of time in which one imprisoned the other, up until the point at which one ultimately

signed the other's death warrant. A fabulous exhibition at the British Library in London

explores their extraordinary relationship through the words they themselves wrote and

wrote to each other, as well as through objects and paintings. I had the special privilege

of being shown around it after hours by its curator, Dr Andrea Clark.

Andrea is lovely to see you again. Thank you so much for showing me around. I'm very,

very excited. Do you want to say a word about how the exhibition came about and who was

involved and the kind of vision for it?

Yes, so I submitted a proposal back in 2016 to do an exhibition on Elizabeth and Mary.

When I realised that nobody has ever done the exhibition, looking at the two queens

together, putting them centre stage and giving them equal billing, so to speak. So it just

seemed like the next natural tutor exhibition to do here at the British Library. It's one

...