Mary, Queen of Scots, with Jade Scott

Imprisoned for nearly 20 years by her cousin Queen Elizabeth I, Mary, Queen of Scots, fought her battles through words, sending and receiving coded letters hidden in books, garments, and even beer barrels.

Historian Jade Scott, of the University of Glasgow, Scotland, has uncovered the human and political depths behind Mary’s captivity through 57 recently decrypted letters, coded missives that reveal her as a strategist, an adept diplomat, and a woman navigating the perilous politics of Elizabethan England.

In her new book, Captive Queen: The Decrypted History of Mary, Queen of Scots, Scott draws on these newly decoded letters to illuminate Mary’s time in captivity, her alliances and betrayals, and the intricate game of espionage that ultimately led to her execution.

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From the Shakespeare Unlimited podcast. Published November 4, 2025. © Folger Shakespeare Library. All rights reserved. This episode was produced by Matt Frassica. Garland Scott is the executive producer. It was edited by Gail Kern Paster. We had help with web production from Paola García Acuña. Leonor Fernandez edits our transcripts. We had technical help from Hamish Brown in Stirling, Scotland, and Voice Trax West in Studio City, California. Final mixing services are provided by Clean Cuts at Three Seas, Inc.

Jade Scott, PhD, is a historian specializing in Mary, Queen of Scots and is an expert on her letters. She is a lecturer in historical linguistics at the University of Glasgow and an associate fellow of the Royal Historical Society, researching early modern Scottish women and their correspondence.

Fascinated by Mary since she was a child, Scott was contacted by the DECRYPT Project to consult on the translations of Mary’s newly-decoded letters, which led to the writing of Captive Queen.

Scott lives in Glasgow.

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FARAH KARIM-COOPER: From the Folger Shakespeare Library, this is Shakespeare Unlimited. I’m Farah Karim-Cooper, the Folger director.

[Music fades]

KARIM-COOPER: The story of Mary, Queen of Scots, is one of the darker chapters in the reign of Elizabeth I.

Elizabeth imprisoned her cousin Mary for nearly 20 years. In 1587, Mary was executed for plotting to assassinate Elizabeth.

During her imprisonment, Mary tried to free herself through marriage and through intrigue. Multiple plots circulated around Mary, some of which she encouraged. She did all this by writing letters. And, naturally, Elizabeth’s spies were reading Mary’s correspondence.

So, Mary devised elaborate codes to shield the contents of her letters. Historian Jade Scott, affiliated with the University of Glasgow, has written a new biography of Mary, drawing on recently decoded letters to shed light on her life during her imprisonment.

The book is called Captive Queen: The Decrypted History of Mary, Queen of Scots.

Here’s Jade Scott, in conversation with Barbara Bogaev.

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BARBARA BOGAEV: Jade Scott, it’s such a pleasure to talk with you.

JADE SCOTT: Thank you so much for having me. I am really pleased to be here.

BOGAEV: Let’s get to these letters. That’s the new hotness. What are they? When, and where, and how were they discovered?

SCOTT: So, yeah, these really exciting letters were discovered by a team of scholars led by George Lasry. And they weren’t necessarily looking for them. They were looking at different coded and encrypted documents from the past and they found this amazing discovery that this series of 50 odd letters were actually letters written by Mary, Queen of Scots.

Having such a large number of letters come into the limelight was just incredibly thrilling because we know about, you know, thousands of letters to and from Mary, Queen of Scots that have survived all over the world. But normally when a letter to Mary or from Mary comes on to the open market, I suppose you could call it, they’ll come up in maybe single letters or small groups of letters and they’ll come up for auction. So, the fact that there were so many that were then attributed to Mary was just incredibly exciting for historians of the period—but especially those of us who work on letters.

BOGAEV: Right. Having a cache like this must just be Christmas in July. I can’t even imagine. But, what? Did these letters fall out of a book or were they found under an urn in an attic? Where’d they come from?

SCOTT: They’re preserved in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris and they were preserved with a bunch of other encoded documents. So, documents that have been disguised with their contents, kind of obscured, intentionally so.

Because coded letters were not signed by the person who was sending them, no one really realized that they were letters pertaining to Mary, Queen of Scots. So, it wasn’t until the team led by Lasry and his colleagues managed to decrypt the code using computer technologies. They developed this program that was able to decode this cache of letters.

BOGAEV: I can hear the excitement in your voice and I’m thinking, “Okay, this is why they weren’t deciphered because they didn’t know who they belonged to, who they were written by.” Of course, they were unsigned because if she had signed her coded letters, that would be—besides being stupid—that would be a straight journey to the executioner’s block. Okay, that answers a lot of questions. I guess the last one before we delve back into the history of her and her life, is what do these letters look like? So, we can imagine them as we’re talking about her.

SCOTT: There are hundreds of letters that Mary wrote or had produced for her by her secretaries that were put into code. The code would change all the time because Mary knew that her letters were being watched. She knew that they were being intercepted and read.

So, the code can be anything really, but generally, what her codes tended to be were kind of graphical symbols. So, anything as simple as, you know, a circle—and then if she drew a line, a diagonal line, perhaps through the circle, then that would change the meaning, but only slightly. So, you could go from a circle that meant “England,” and then a circle with a diagonal cross through it that meant “Queen of England.”

They are a kind of mix of alphabetical symbols and graphical symbols. Sometimes symbols from other alphabets, Greek alphabets, for example, getting dropped in there. Then there are ones that are really quite familiar to us as modern users of emojis and emoticons and things. So, sometimes you have little heart shapes and things like that. So, some are really familiar, and some are a bit more opaque but intentionally so because they’re constantly being updated and changed.

BOGAEV: Well, and on the other end then, how did you get the key to the code?

SCOTT: Well, yes, you had to be someone who she trusted with the cipher key, as it were. And actually, when her apartments are searched towards the ends of her life before she’s taken to trial, they find quite a lot of different cipher keys.

Different people would’ve had access to different keys at different times. So, she wouldn’t use the same code with every single correspondent. If you were given access to the key, then it’s a mark of her favor. It’s a mark of her trust in you because she’s putting a lot of reliance on you to use the key and not share the key.

Actually, there are letters with supporters who are writing to her over the many years that she’s held captive in England where supporters write and say, “This particular bearer has been stopped. They’ve been arrested. We can’t use that code anymore.” Because inevitably if he’s been arrested, his papers will have been taken and searched and that code is now suspect.

So, we do have references to the keys popping up quite a lot. She talks about in some of her plain text letters. She makes it really kind of obvious to those who are intercepting them and reading them that she knows they’re doing that because she’ll pepper them with references to things like, “my alphabets,” and the alphabets refer usually to the codes and the keys that go with them.

BOGAEV: It’s wild, the spycraft, right? Because on Elizabeth I’s side, her advisor, William Cecil, is allowing a lot of these letters to go through because it gives him insight into what the plotters were up to. So, it was a real game of cat and mouse over almost 20 years. It’s amazing. I think though, we need a primer on Mary, Queen of Scots now.

SCOTT: Sure. Yeah.

BOGAEV: Before we go on, so we know what the status quo was before this new discovery, take us back. Why was Mary, Queen of Scots a captive of Queen Elizabeth I starting in 1568 in the first place?

SCOTT: So, she ends up a captive really, through her own devices.

Prior to 1568, Mary had been quite a successful Queen of Scotland. She’d done quite a good job of mediating the different factions between nobles and other families. She’d done a really good job for a short period of navigating the kind of religious animosities in Scotland at that period.

But then she makes a momentous decision to marry a young man, Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley. That does not go well because Darnley is murdered, and she’s implicated in that murder. There’s kind of suspicions that she knew about it, or she’d encouraged it. Some actually suggested that she had a direct hand in it.

We’ll never really know to what extent Mary was involved in her husband’s death. But after that, she does then remarry. The person she gets married to is someone who most definitely was involved in her husband Darnley’s death. She marries Bothwell.

BOGAEV: Bothwell. Okay, we have to slow down here because this is the real bloodbath part of the interview, and I can’t resist it. So, this second husband, Darnley—first of all, he sounds like a big jerk.

SCOTT: Yes. [laughs]

BOGAEV: You can tell us more about that. And then the third husband, Bothwell, murders him and also raped Mary. Do we know that?

SCOTT: Yes.

BOGAEV: I mean, this is a lot.

SCOTT: Yes. So, her second husband, Darnley, it’s not a successful marriage. He’s quite an impetuous person. He’s determined to be recognized as king in his own right, which Mary is not willing to give up. And even though they have a son, who becomes James the VI of Scotland and James I of England, their marriage never really recovers. It’s not a happy marriage.

He alienates many of the nobles in Scotland who decide to come together and get rid of him. They have a meeting with Mary at which they ask her whether she’ll consider divorcing Darnley, and she says no, she won’t divorce him—not just for religious reasons, but because she doesn’t want to threaten her son’s inheritance. She doesn’t want his legitimacy to have any kind of question mark over that. And almost certainly the nobles then say, “Well, we can deal with this more permanently.” And in my opinion, I think she says, “Do what needs to be done, but don’t tell me the details so that I have deniability.”

BOGAEV: Right.

SCOTT: And we’re still debating this, you know, what level her involvement was in her second husband’s death, all these years later. So, she does a good job.

BOGAEV: But you’re on the side of plausible deniability.

SCOTT: I am, yes. I think she knew it was going to happen. I think she just didn’t know the specifics of it, intentionally so.

Then as you say, she remarries, she marries Bothwell, the Earl of Bothwell, who almost certainly forced her. She was coerced into this marriage. He physically abducted her and physically assaulted her. She was in an incredibly vulnerable state at that point and I think she feels that the only way out of this traumatic circumstance is to ally herself with this strong man. He does present himself as this kind of strong man who will defend her, even though he’s the one who’s doing all these kind of horrible things to her, and she goes along. She’s kind of swept up in this traumatic, vulnerable situation, and she’s coerced and she marries Bothwell.

BOGAEV: Oh man, the helplessness of even a very powerful and strategic queen.

SCOTT: Absolutely, absolutely. It very much hammers home to us the kind of gendered experience of these powerful women—you know, people like Mary, Queen of Scots, and Elizabeth I, and other iconic women that come to mind who exercise power and agency in remarkable ways but are nonetheless framed and constrained by the gendered expectations of their time.

BOGAEV: And Darnley’s murder was pretty grizzly.

SCOTT: Yes. So, they blew up the house that he’s staying in. He comes to Edinburgh, and he’s not been very well. He’s in Edinburgh, and they blow it up. They blow up the property that he’s staying in. But the explosion seems to be a cover-up of an earlier attempt to kill him, probably by strangling, if not suffocating him. Because after the explosion, they find a chair and a rope in the garden next to his body and it seems that he’s been lured out of the upper floor to try and escape and then someone has been in the garden waiting for him and has taken his life via strangulation or suffocation. There weren’t any other marks on his body to suggest that he’d been in, you know, an explosion.

BOGAEV: Yikes. Okay, so, Darnley’s murder sends her off to England.

SCOTT: Yes, I think that the Darnley murder is the kind of domino moment. That’s the point where things really go downhill. Bothwell was very unpopular. She becomes unpopular herself because she marries him. And although Bothwell and Mary try to defend themselves, they are challenged to battle by nobles who wish to remove Bothwell and secure the queen. Mary is then taken captive and she’s held captive in Scotland for almost a year.

Then, in May 1568, she escapes that Scottish prison and that’s when she makes the momentous decision to travel into England. Her nobles who are with her, her supporters who stay with her at that moment, they say to her, “Don’t do this. This is a mistake. Going to England will be a mistake. They’ll keep you a prisoner. It’s happened to other Scot royals in the past. Do not do this.”

She’s really torn between do I stay in Scotland and try and muster the support and keep the support going? Should I go to France? Or should I go to England?

I think she chooses England because the other two options are potentially worse. If she goes to France, she will not really be welcomed there. Catherine de Medici, her former mother-in-law, is not keen on having her back. If she stays in Scotland, yes, she has supporters there, but she’s essentially a fugitive. She would have to go into hiding until she felt secure enough to come out.

I think she thinks “No, of the three options, if I go to England I will at least be hosted.” I don’t necessarily think she believes that she’ll be held a prisoner for the next 20 years.

BOGAEV: And she counts on—she’s a cousin of Elizabeth I—and she counts on that.

SCOTT: Yes.

BOGAEV: Why does Elizabeth take her in? Was it the idea that you’ve got to keep your friends close, but your enemies closer? Because she does have a claim to the English throne.

SCOTT: Yes. So, Mary does have a claim to the English throne through her grandparents. Her grandmother, Margaret Tudor, was of course Henry the VIII’s sister, and so, she has a really close blood tie to the crown in England.

Arguably—and certainly people at the time did argue this—her claim to the throne of England was more legitimate than Elizabeth’s because of course, Elizabeth had been declared illegitimate after her mother Anne Boleyn was executed. There were many people in England who did not believe Elizabeth had a legitimate right to rule. So, Mary was a potential threat. She always embodied that threat for Elizabeth’s advisors.

And so, when Mary comes to England in 1568, initially everyone’s kind of flummoxed. They kind of don’t quite know how to deal with it. She’s hosted as a guest for a short period of time. Then she’s quickly moved to more secure premises while people debate what the best course of action is. William Cecil actually writes this incredible note to himself. Amongst his incredible papers, he writes this note saying, “What to do with Mary? If we send her back to Scotland, there’s a real chance she’ll be killed.” Which you might think, “Well, yeah, okay, let them deal with their own problems.” But he was very conscious that if he sent her back to Scotland and she was killed, Scotland would probably descend into a chaotic civil war, which is not what the English want on their borders.

BOGAEV:  Also, you don’t want a queen to be murdered, necessarily.

SCOTT: Absolutely.

BOGAEV: It doesn’t look good.

SCOTT: It doesn’t, no, and it doesn’t look good for Elizabeth if she’s implicated in the death of another queen. And of course, this is the problem she faces 20 years down the line.

The other option is they could send her to France, but they fear that if they send her to France, then she’ll muster support there and she might be able to come back to Scotland with a French force. Again, England does not want French forces on their border. So, that’s risky as well.

And then the third option Cecil acknowledges is we keep her in England but she will always be a figurehead for people who are discontented with Elizabeth’s rule. That is exactly the problem they face.

BOGAEV: Exactly, you have these rebellious nobles who want to help her so they’ll be aligned with maybe a legitimate heir to the throne, right? Hence all of these plots. How many plots was Mary, Queen of Scots involved in or how many plots circled her?

SCOTT: Well, there are so many because some of them are kind of dismissed as being so unrealistic that they’re not really counted as official plots. But the big ones are things like the Northern Rebellion. Then there’s the Ridolfi plot, which is the one that’s tied to her marriage proposal to the Duke of Norfolk.

BOGAEV: Right, because she’s constantly trying to get a husband to get her out of England.

SCOTT: Yes, this is one of her, kind of, key strategies. I think that’s actually a strategy that Mary is kind of not given credit for because we’re so seduced by the plots. I fully understand the plots are the sexy part of the story. But Mary was certainly, in the early period of her captivity, much more keen to pursue a diplomatic course of action.

Marriage was essentially a diplomatic course of action. It was a way of negotiating with England, negotiating with the Scot nobles, who some wanted her dead, some didn’t. Finding a suitable husband would then have perhaps at least allowed her to be given her liberty, and then in the long term, perhaps be returned to Scotland. So, marriage was a negotiation that Mary was really keen on. It was a strategy that she was really keen on, and that tends to get overlooked. We either think of just the plots, or we think of Mary when it comes to, you know, husbands. We think, “Well, she had such terrible taste in men. She’s a romantic. She just wants to fall into the arms of, you know, a white knight.” But I think that’s a bit unfair on her. I think it takes away the, kind of, political strategy behind marriage for elite women in the period.

BOGAEV: Well, now that we’re talking about the plots, we’ve come around back to encrypted letters. What was the spycraft, I guess? How did she get these letters out?

SCOTT: Yes. Some of the more unbelievable ways that we think have just been developed for drama were actually real techniques. So, some of them, of course, you know, the spycraft can be incredibly complicated and intricate, like the codes and people who are trying to make replicas of seals and things like that, incredibly technical and skilled.

But there’s more mundane examples of the spycraft. Things like hiding letters. So, letters were hidden under rocks, letters were hidden in the garden, either behind, you know, certain plants or even sometimes buried in the garden and someone would come along and get them later.

Other letters were hidden in clothing, especially Mary’s female attendants. If letters were folded up into really small packets, they could be slipped up the sleeve of a dress and hidden that way. Others would be sewn into doublets or cloaks, put in the lining of things. They’re also hidden in books.

BOGAEV: Stuck in a shoe?

SCOTT: Yes, they’re stuck in a shoe, as well, yep, that’s a really good example. That’s one where the heels of shoes were removed and little packets of letters were put in and then the heel glued back on.

They really go to extreme lengths, especially as the surveillance increases over the decades. As she becomes more, I would say, recklessly involved in plots, then she starts to really kind of ramp up the methods that she’s using. One of the ones that they use towards the end of her life, with the final plot, the Babington plot, is that they hide letters in beer barrels.

BOGAEV: Right, and William Cecil, Elizabeth’s advisor, was all over this and had spies everywhere.

SCOTT: Yes, him and Sir Francis Walsingham were monitoring this from the beginning. They have surveillance on her all the time.

BOGAEV: Okay, we’ve gotten to the casket letters. What were they and what were their significance?

SCOTT: So, the casket letters are actually letters that were produced early in Mary’s incarceration in England 1568. There’s a series of commissions in which they try to establish Mary’s guilt or innocence in the murder of her second husband, Lord Darnley.

These letters are produced by her half-brother, the Earl of Moray, who has become Regent in her absence. He has an agenda, of course, to keep Mary in England and not bring her back to be queen.

The letters have become infamous, I suppose, as these letters of romance and passion, and suggest this affair between Mary and what has been proposed to be Bothwell, and they then make it seem that, you know, “Well, of course she must have murdered her husband because, look, she was having this passionate affair with Bothwell before he died. And it’s all actually this, you know, romantic story.”

But most would accept that the casket letters were forged letters. With Mary, forged letters are incredibly important because—and I’m sure we’ll come back to this, Barbara—the ones that are used at her trial, she argues they’re forged. But the casket letters are an amalgamation of excerpts from genuine letters that are then edited, so, people have kind of meshed different letters together. So, where she might have written to Bothwell a very bland every-day, “Can you please come and attend me?” type letter, they’ve switched them in with little excerpts from letters to him from genuine women who he was having romantic affairs with.

BOGAEV: Wow. So, it’s like the Elizabethan equivalent of AI fakes.

SCOTT: Yes, absolutely. Yep. See, it’s been a problem for longer than we thought.

BOGAEV: Well, she did survive these failed plots, but it really took a toll. What was her daily life like? It seemed like she suffered from just terrible maladies, I don’t know, it was the age or maybe all the stress?

SCOTT: Yes, definitely. She suffered with a lot of health problems, physical and then kind of mental and emotional health problems that undoubtedly arose in part from her incarceration, but in part from her physical deterioration as well.

When she’s younger, she almost dies in Jedburgh in 1566 with what has been kind of retrospectively diagnosed as a burst ulcer. Other people have suggested she might have had porphyria because she has these recurrent bouts of similar illnesses.

She almost certainly had malaria. She develops these kinds of recurring fevers when she’s in prison in England—

BOGAEV: —in a castle, by the way, but a really awful, dingy castle that she hated for most of her captivity.

SCOTT: Absolutely, yes. When she’s in Tutbury—which is the castle, as you say, that she detested, she absolutely loathed—it wasn’t particularly well constructed. It had been left to kind of wreck and ruin for a while. There were drafts. There were holes in the roof. There were really terrible smelling privies. It was not particularly hygienic. It was not the best place to be held. It was horrific for her. She hated it.

But one of the results of that is that’s when she’d starts to develop these recurring fevers, which most likely was something like malaria, because the land around these various prisons was quite swampy. It wasn’t well drained. They didn’t have a lot of great sewage systems. So, she develops these recurring fevers that make her incredibly unwell at various points on top of the kind of physical and mental distress that she’s under all the time. You can then start to see why she deteriorates over the years.

BOGAEV: Yes. I really appreciate in your book how you bring some really mundane details that bring her to life and her circumstances. For instance, that she had an ongoing feud with the noble woman’s wives that were her jailers. They weren’t getting enough money to support her in a queenly fashion from Elizabeth, so, they really hated how expensive this was, what a burden this was to house her.

SCOTT: Yes, absolutely. It was an expense. This is the thing as well that’s quite a paradox with Mary: she is being held a prisoner, but she refuses to diminish her formal royal estate. She argues that she shouldn’t have to pay for her own imprisonment. If they want to keep her in these places, then that’s up to them, but they’ll be paying for it.

As you say, her jailers are constantly trying to get the funds from Elizabeth and they’re very rarely forthcoming. So, they’re paying for her care out of their own pocket. She likes to be kept in as much comfort as she can. But also, I think she takes comfort from the fact that she’s in these horrific palaces that she doesn’t want to be in, she’s desperate to get away from, but one of the things she can have control over is how she furnishes her rooms, how she dresses herself, how she feeds herself. Those are the things that she has, kind of, daily agency over. Those become incredibly important to her. So, I think the everyday life of her captivity is actually really important to try and recover.

BOGAEV: Yeah, she’s trying to preserve her identity, her self-esteem, as a queen, as a god anointed queen. Okay, but the Throckmorton Plot and the Babington Plot, they’re what sealed Mary, Queen of Scots’ fate. And this is where the newly discovered letters fit in.

SCOTT: So, the Throckmorton Plot is a plot that’s kind of brewing from 1583 onwards, you know, very early, and it slowly builds up. But the Throckmorton Plot is essentially much like all the plots surrounding Mary. It’s a plot to free her, get her out of her prison, restore her to her Scottish throne, and essentially have her as a kind of Catholic figurehead.

All of these coded letters, both these new ones that have been discovered and many, many more that may have reached their destination or were destroyed, they passed through the French embassy. The French embassy becomes the site where Mary is able to get her secret correspondence out and get letters secretly sent to her. It works really, really well. It’s very successful for quite a long time.

However, Francis Walsingham, Elizabeth’s spymaster, he manages to secure a mole in the French ambassador’s office. Mary suspects that there is a mole because she’s waiting on other letters that don’t appear. People who have been really quick to write to her suddenly go quiet, and she gets very suspicious. She says to the French ambassador, “I think you need to look at your people. I think something’s going on here.” He dismisses these concerns and says, “Nope, nope, I trust my men implicitly. All my secretaries are trustworthy men.”

But there is a secret mole. One of his men, one of his secretaries or his clerks, have been turned. They are taking the secret letters as they arrive and they’re handing them over to English agents who are then able to read them or copy them and this is how the plot eventually is exposed and most of the young gentlemen who are involved are executed. Mary has to very quickly do some quick thinking and say, “Nope, I didn’t know anything about it. I admit that I was writing to people, but I didn’t know that they were plotting.”

BOGAEV: And these newly decrypted letters show that she was fully aware of the plot and also that there was a mole.

SCOTT: Yes. So, people have suspected for a really long time. John Bossy suspected since the 1980s that there was this mole in the French embassy. The other kind of evidence from the period suggested that Mary did know, but that she was doing her usual plausible deniability strategy. Then, these new letters that George Lasry and his team managed to decode, they cement for us, they make it concrete, that for all Mary’s public denials, she actually did know. She did know who Francis Throckmorton was. She knew he was more than just a gentleman supporter. She knew that he was involved in plots. She knew that there were schemes and attempts going on. She knew fine well that there was this secret channel through the French embassy.

So, the newly decoded letters have been really important in that regard because they allow us to say with certainty that Mary was saying one thing publicly, but another thing privately. That is really important because when we come to the final plot, the Babington Plot, which happens a few years later, 1585 into 1586, she does or she tries to do the same thing. She tries to say, “Nope, I didn’t know anything about it. You know, I have written to these people, but in a kind of naive fashion where I wasn’t aware of what they were doing. No one had my authority.”

But because she had been shown to be doing that and playing a kind of deceptive hand with the Throckmorton Plot, they find it even easier to entrap her the second time around and go, “Oh, well she did it the first time. Let’s see if she’ll walk into the trap again.” Sadly, that’s what happens.

BOGAEV: Yeah, they entrapped her. And that was the final straw for Elizabeth who had really been struggling. She didn’t want to put her cousin to death. She didn’t want to establish this precedent of executing a queen or someone who had a legitimate claim to the English throne. All of that weighed, seemed to weigh really hard on her, as you present it. What do we know about the days leading up to Mary, Queen of Scots’ death and how she handled herself when the time came? Did the letters shed any light on that?

SCOTT: So, there are letters that are not part of the newly decoded cache but there are letters that she writes in the days leading up to her execution that are incredibly moving and revealing. I think the reason that they are so emotive is because there’s something very human about them. She’s aware that she’s going to be put to death but she’s had a really long time actually to ruminate on this.

Obviously, she’s been held prisoner for all these years. But also when the verdict of guilty is issued against her at her trial in 1586, it’s not specifically said when she’s going to be executed. So, she has quite a few weeks leading into months, this kind of limbo period of, is it going to happen? Is it not going to happen? And as you say, this is when Elizabeth is going back and forth in her own mind as to, “Should I do it? Should I not? Can I do it? Can I not do it?”

So, Mary is really quite stoic about it. She’s quite willing to face her own death, and I think in large part this is because she has done everything that she can, given the circumstances, to control how she thinks she’ll be memorialized.

So, she has been determined—when she finally recognizes that she’s not going to get out of these captive locations or circumstances—she then turns really determinedly to, “How am I going to be remembered?” And for her, it’s all about being seen to be someone who has been persecuted unjustly, someone who has been executed for her faith. She really tries to portray herself as a Catholic martyr, and that, I think, offers her some degree of comfort as she goes into these final days because she feels like she’s in control of that.

BOGAEV: Well, what do these new letters tell you that you didn’t know about Mary? What window do they give us? What’s the significance of them? And I suppose, maybe the pop culture impression of Mary is just not important, but it seems as if she’s gone down in history as this fiery, beautiful redhead who was impetuous and grasping and treacherous. She seems really smart and strategic.

SCOTT: A hundred percent. And I’m really pleased that you say that because that’s something that I think is really important to remember with Mary. I think it’s really easy to dismiss her in many ways, to dismiss her, and, you know, make assumptions about her. I would argue that we don’t need the new letters to tell us how amazingly sophisticated and strategic she was. But they just, kind of, give us an opportunity to really remind people of that.

If you look at her correspondence as a whole, this is a woman who is incredibly intelligent but also someone who’s incredibly socially intelligent, who knows how to work a room, who knows how to engage with people. And at times she is manipulative of that but she does that, you know, selfishly, I suppose, for her own benefit. We kind of see that in a negative, gendered, stereotypical way, you know, of the manipulative woman, and I actually think it’s really important that we step back and say, “Well, these are the tools that she has available to her. Does she do it well?” I think she’s incredibly capable and incredibly skilled at certain aspects, and I think it’s only fair that we try and recover that.

BOGAEV: It’s so fun to talk with you. Thank you so much for bringing Mary, Queen of Scots to life, and I’m excited about these letters. Thank you

SCOTT: Thank you so much. I’m so glad you with a chance to chat. I always like to give my two pence on Mary and why she deserves a little bit more of a fair hearing.

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KARIM-COOPER: That was Jade Scott, interviewed by Barbara Bogaev.

Captive Queen: The Decrypted History of Mary, Queen of Scots is out now from Pegasus Books.

This episode was produced by Matt Frassica. Garland Scott is the executive producer. It was edited by Gail Kern Paster. We had technical help from Hamish Brown in Stirling, Scotland, and Voice Trax West in Studio City, California. Our web producer is Paola García Acuña. Leonor Fernandez edits our transcripts. Final mixing services provided by Clean Cuts at Three Seas, Inc.

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Until next time, thanks for listening!