Elizabeth I's Secret Agents (2017) s01e01 Episode Script

1
Britain at the time
of Queen Elizabeth I
was divided, unstable and violent.
Despite this,
Elizabeth stayed in power
for over 40 years.
The secret of her incredible reign
is hidden in this portrait.
Detailed in the folds of her dress,
these eyes and ears
represent a spy network.
The world's first secret service,
run by a father-and-son team.
Both exceptionally intelligent
and given the job of protecting
Queen and country.
This series tells their story
over five decades
and reveals
how the secret state was born.
Elizabethan England as it really was,
with a network of spies
battling a terrorist threat.
And both sides will stop at nothing.
You have to wonder
what personal cost comes with that.
That there must be some kind of damage
to somebody's soul
to commit that kind of crime.
Leading historians
have researched these events
from different individual perspectives.
Elizabeth was ineffably different.
She was exceptional, she was holy,
she was magical.
They'll take us inside the mind
of each of the key players,
dissecting their motives and actions
while the course of British history
hangs in the balance.
The double-crossings, the conspiracies
which he holds in his head,
it's an endless labyrinth,
and it is terrifying.
We'll see how history is really made
in the corridors of power
from just behind the throne.
In this first episode,
one of the most famous executions
in British history -
Mary Queen of Scots.
In the second half of the 16th century,
England finds itself alone.
A Protestant nation
surrounded by a Catholic Europe.
Then, in 1570,
12 years into Elizabeth's reign,
the Pope raises the stakes by claiming
that Elizabeth is a heretic.
This effectively gives 40,000 Catholics
who were illegally practising in England,
permission to kill her.
Elizabeth lived constantly
in fear of her life
and to the despair of her ministers,
she was very determined not to show it.
Right until her old age,
she made a point
of going among her people.
She felt that it was a gift
she'd inherited from her father,
Henry VIII, that she had
I suppose what we might call now
the common touch,
and she made a point of showing herself
to the people,
even when it was quite risky to do so.
She didn't want to appear to be
cowed or afraid.
Over the course of her reign,
there were
14 assassination attempts on her life.
But Elizabeth has one person
who is ultimately reassuring.
The man whose job it is
to keep her alive.
Her spy master.
This is William Cecil.
He is brilliant
confident, cunning
ruthless and loyal.
He's second only to Elizabeth.
Whenever she needs anything doing,
however dirty it may be,
he is the main figure.
He runs everything.
He was always at Elizabeth's side.
He was her guide, her oracle,
in many ways her political mentor.
And I also think that perhaps -
this is an opinion -
he was maybe her only real friend.
It's really Cecil
who acts as a buttress
between Elizabeth and the threat of
Catholic terrorist conspiracy.
He's got eyes and ears
everywhere in Europe.
He controls an enormous network
of what's rather gloriously called
spyery.
It's such a wonderful word, isn't it?
Spyery.
You want to whisper it.
Cecil's genius was to create
the world's first spy network.
He has intelligence into Europe
through the merchants
that trade with foreign powers.
He has people working for him
inside England's diplomatic service.
And has even penetrated
England's secretive Catholic community,
paying servants
inside their households.
By the 1570s,
Cecil has informants and spies
in every part of society.
People are watching out for everything
and all the information is coming back
right to the centre of power,
which is
completely controlled by Cecil.
In early 1571,
Cecil's network provides something
that grabs his attention.
According to the Pope's banker,
huge funds have been raised
for a new plot to overthrow Elizabeth.
Details of this plot
have been brought into the country
by a Catholic courier,
who'll be landing at Dover.
For days, Cecil's men watch the port.
And when the courier arrives,
he's arrested.
He'll be taken to the Tower of London.
The intercepted message
is rushed to Cecil.
Cecil immediately sees
that these letters are in code.
Although Cecil can't break the code,
he sees that the letter is addressed
simply
to someone with the codename 40.
If he can find out who 40 is,
he can find the traitor
who's plotting to kill the Queen.
He heads to the Tower of London
to talk to the captured courier -
a man called Charles Bailly.
[SCREAMS ECHO]
Charles Bailly is a Roman Catholic.
He's a relatively young man,
with a degree of innocence
to the real world.
I don't get the feeling
that he's somebody
who has seen all the dangers
and troubles of this world.
Who is 40?
Who is 40?
Who is number 40?
Cecil realises
that if he can crack that,
he'll know
who stands behind the conspiracy.
William Cecil's face looks like
a very ruthless face.
Not least because
he has the authority and the power
over life and death.
When you see this man,
you will be looking at the last face
that you will ever see.
Despite Cecil's threats,
Bailly won't talk.
Bailly then befriends
another Catholic prisoner,
in the cell next door.
He thinks that he's meeting people
who can help him.
He thinks he's meeting other people
that are being held on trial,
that are Catholics like him.
And he begins to divulge information
in a confessional way.
The other prisoner
even offers to pass messages
to the Catholic underground
on the outside.
But the prisoner in the cell next door
isn't actually a prisoner.
He's working for Cecil.
It's classical of Cecil's techniques
to introduce such a stool pigeon
into Bailly's cell, who is a double,
but of course can sometimes become
even a treble agent,
into the heart of the conspiracy.
And this works very effectively
in Bailly's case.
Cecil discovers
Bailly was carrying letters
from the government of Spain.
Spain, of course, is the big Catholic
political and military power
that at any point could invade England.
So to have the spectre of a conspiracy,
with Spain supporting an attempt
to overthrow Elizabeth,
is everything that Cecil has feared
but is now confronting him,
and it is terrifying.
At some point,
Bailly realised he had been tricked.
He carved a message on his cell wall
that can still be read
over 400 years later.
"Wise men ought circumspectly
to see what they do.
"Examine before they speak,
to prove before they take in hand,
"to beware whose company they use.
"And above all things,
"to consider whom they trust."
He's talking about the various agents
that have come in and out,
who he has been duped by.
Just three weeks after his arrest,
Bailly writes to Cecil
revealing what he knows.
That 40 is a lord of the realm.
Now, this is absolutely explosive.
Cecil is probably not as shocked
as he might be.
He's always suspected
that these English aristocrats
may at any point
revert to Catholicism,
as much for political
as religious reasons.
For Cecil, knowing it was a lord
he was dealing with, adds a new level.
Cecil himself was born a commoner.
He studied at Cambridge University,
learned five languages
and worked his way up.
What he has, he earned.
Now he has to take on
a lord of the realm.
But which one?
For three months, there's no progress.
Then his network makes a breakthrough.
In August 1571,
one of his agents in Shrewsbury
arrests two men
carrying £600 in gold.
A fortune large enough to start a war.
They're also carrying a coded letter.
Brought to London for interrogation,
they admit they're servants
of a lord of the realm.
The lord's home is searched
and the key to the code
is found in his Bible.
The traitor is the Duke of Norfolk.
40 turns out to be the Duke of Norfolk.
One of the most powerful nobles
in the country,
he is related in blood to Elizabeth.
She calls him her cousin.
Norfolk is a widower,
a keen tennis player
and the richest man in England.
Related to Elizabeth
through a shared grandmother,
Norfolk is very much
part of the royal family.
So this is absolutely extraordinary,
that somebody so close to Elizabeth
has been plotting to support
a Spanish invasion of the country
and to take over the realm.
Now it is Cecil's job
to tell Queen Elizabeth I
that her cousin is trying to kill her.
To reveal to Elizabeth
that Norfolk is complicit in a plot
to have her overthrown
and probably killed,
is politically explosive.
So the information,
the intelligence he has,
has to be handled with incredible care.
You need to have your case
absolutely watertight
and you need to do it
at just the right moment,
to ensure that Elizabeth will follow
what he wants to do,
which ultimately, of course,
is to get the Duke of Norfolk.
The Queen doesn't react as Cecil hoped.
She suddenly gets cold feet
and she stalls.
She says, you know,
"He's a kinsman of mine.
"I can't quite accept
that he has to be executed."
Cecil is a civil servant,
he's a man of the middle class.
He does not know, and can never know,
what it means to be royal.
Elizabeth's belief
in her own specialness,
her own extraordinariness,
was what had sustained her
throughout the very difficult years.
She had this extraordinary belief
in herself and in her own right.
It's incredibly frustrating,
I think, for Cecil,
because he's trying to say,
"Look, I've got chapter and verse here,
"proving that
they've been trying to kill you.
"You have to sign
their death warrants."
And she backs away.
Cecil can't allow someone
who has plotted to kill the Queen
to get away with it,
but ultimately
it's the Queen's decision.
It seems that Cecil is stuck.
A few weeks later,
a London printing press
publishes a pamphlet.
A scandal sheet
that is distributed on the streets.
It accuses Norfolk
of plotting a rebellion
and assisting England's enemies.
The public turn against the rebel royal
and demand his head.
The scandal sheet is anonymous,
but it came from
a printing press run by Cecil.
Cecil is pioneering something new
because he is using spin,
political manipulation of news,
to influence public opinion.
He is an absolute master at doing that
and I think this is a new way
of doing politics within the state.
For eight months,
Norfolk begs for forgiveness.
But in June 1572,
the Queen signs his death warrant.
He is beheaded.
There is a real pathos to watching
how those people are caught
in the spider's web.
Cecil really does capture those people,
play with them.
They are absolutely his creatures.
And they will be destroyed.
Cecil seems to have won.
But something is still niggling away
inside the mind of the spy master.
Was Norfolk working alone?
Alongside the coded letters
the courier was carrying,
he also had this pamphlet
promoting Mary Queen of Scots.
So he can't quite
make these things add up,
and he's working relentlessly
on the story,
interrogating people again and again,
introducing the story of Norfolk.
It's a classic spy master's manoeuvre.
How can he make these things work?
He's got to keep things going.
He can't quite lock it all down
until he knows the full story.
He interrogates
Catholics connected to Norfolk.
And in the end, he works out
what Norfolk was planning.
Norfolk will marry Mary Queen of Scots,
he'll invite a Spanish invasion
into the country.
He will then depose Elizabeth
and he will rule the country
with Mary Queen of Scots.
So it confirms all his worst fears.
Mary Stuart was the Queen of Scotland.
She is ill-educated, impulsive,
romantic, proud
and short-sighted.
She has taken risks all of her life.
She has had affairs
with all the wrong men.
She no longer has access to her son.
Her lover is in a Danish prison.
Her second husband was blown up,
possibly with her own connivance.
When Cecil sees Mary,
he sees everything that's wrong
about European Catholicism.
He sees a vain, pretty
but ostentatious woman.
You can see that
from the fashionability of the clothes
that she's wearing, the hat,
the slightly coquettish look
that she gives you.
This is everything
that Cecil despises and hates.
Mary Queen of Scots is Catholic.
Kicked out of Scotland
by her Protestant subjects,
she's now living
in the North of England.
This is a problem
because Mary and Elizabeth
are first cousins.
Elizabeth is the daughter
of Henry VIII.
Mary descends from Henry's sister.
Cecil is deeply, deeply worried
because he knows that she has
a strong claim to the English throne
through her family connections
with Henry VIII.
She's the only person
who can make that claim
against Elizabeth.
He knows
there are going to be the conspiracies.
He's got to try
and do something about it.
There's no way in which
this problem has gone away.
This problem has only just started.
England in the 1570s is changing fast.
Merchant ships
are bringing huge numbers
of Protestant refugees into London.
And Sir Walter Raleigh
sets sail for America,
hoping to set up a trading post.
Cecil, meanwhile,
is made Lord Burghley.
And he builds himself
a luxurious stately home -
Burghley House in Lincolnshire.
Meanwhile, Queen Elizabeth I
is beginning to carve out
a kind of legendary status.
She commissions portraits of herself.
It's here that we see one of the first
manifestations of Elizabeth
as the Virgin Queen,
which will continue as her brand
to the end of her reign.
No longer, really, a human being,
but an icon, a statue.
She's as much an idea
as she is a person.
What's really interesting about
Elizabethan portraiture of the Queen
is that it was designed
to be looked at by people
who on the whole
couldn't even read or write.
Elizabeth took advantage
of the opportunity for publicity
which printing offered
and she had hundreds
of images of herself
diffused about the realm,
so that people could recognise
their Queen,
they could know what she looked like,
and that they had a sense of her
as a powerful and present figure
in their lives.
It's a technique which has been used
by many subsequent rulers,
the idea that you have
the image of the ruler in your home,
and Elizabeth was really
the first person to pick up on this.
But behind the powerful images,
the truth was
that she was living in constant danger.
The plots against Elizabeth
keep coming.
A disaffected Catholic aristocrat
offers himself as the inside man
to a foreign invasion.
A Catholic extremist tries
to enter the court armed with a gun.
Even an MP has a go.
With the blessing of a Catholic priest,
he plans to shoot the Queen
in her palace garden.
All the assassination attempts
are at the very least inspired by Mary.
The would-be killers want to put
their Catholic queen on the throne.
For Cecil,
she's like a sort of running sore
at the heart of the country
that he's trying to defend.
He knows, really, I think,
from this point onwards,
that he has to get rid of Mary.
For Cecil,
it's an almost impossible task.
Persuading Elizabeth
to execute the Duke of Norfolk
had been tricky.
To get her to kill her first cousin,
and a queen,
that will require some real cleverness.
But by the 1580s,
his dark empire has grown.
Alongside the traditional departments
of governmental control,
Cecil's secret state now employs
some very interesting characters.
A forger who can open and close a seal
so that nobody notices.
To break codes,
Cambridge University's top mathematician
is brought in.
Running these expert spies
is someone Cecil has picked carefully.
Francis Walsingham,
he's a driven man.
If you look at those eyes
There is no mercy there,
there is no compassion there.
He is made by what he saw
on Sunday 24th August, 1572,
when he was
the English ambassador to France.
And what was happening
was the St Bartholomew's Day massacre,
when 3,000 French Protestants
were killed.
He was surrounded by the Paris mob.
He had his wife
and four-year-old daughter in there.
He saw Protestants being dragged
out of that house and hanged.
That left a traumatic experience,
which he lived with
for the rest of his life.
Walsingham is an absolute dead cert
for Cecil.
He knows he can trust him implicitly.
There's no formal moment
where William Cecil turns to Walsingham
and says,
"This is now what you are about,
"you have to go and hunt down Mary,"
but I think there's no question
that they worked together so closely,
Walsingham knows
that that's the number-one priority.
They know
that it is not enough for Mary
to be the figurehead of a conspiracy.
They must catch her red-handed
in a plot to kill the Queen.
The first thing they do is to move her
to the remote Chartley Manor
in Staffordshire - a place with
high battlements and a moat around it.
William Cecil is trying
to absolutely isolate her,
cut her off from the outside world.
She is completely surveyed.
Her guardians, her jailers, really,
are making sure that they can see
everything that goes in and everything
that comes out of the household.
Mary's allowed to receive gifts,
checked carefully.
More than anything,
Mary's life becomes very, very boring.
She loses her
right to ride in the grounds,
which really upsets her.
She takes great pleasure in fresh air,
in horsemanship
and she complains bitterly
about wasting away
without access to fresh air.
Cecil is deliberately applying
a kind of psychological pressure.
She gets very lonely.
She gets very frustrated.
Stifled by these new rules,
Mary makes contact
with some of her followers
and they also have espionage skills.
Of course Mary has a spy network.
Wouldn't you, if you were locked up
in the middle of England,
not knowing
what was going to happen to you?
This is Mary's code book
for communicating
with the Catholic underground.
It's a substitution code
where every letter
and some important words
are replaced by a symbol.
This is E.
This is B.
This is the sign for intelligence.
And thisis the Queen of England.
But how to pass the coded messages
back and forth?
There's only one way
in and out of Chartley Manor
and everything
that passes through it is searched.
Every few days,
a brewer brings in supplies of beer.
And this is how, in June 1586,
Mary hears about Anthony Babington.
Anthony Babington
is a well-born Catholic
and well-connected young man.
This is a man
who does not really need for a job.
So, you know, you could see him
as a sort of young
Catholic Elizabethan playboy.
And he sees himself
as something of a man of action.
Via her agents,
Babington relays a message to Mary,
describing his loyalty to her.
She replies direct to him,
calling him a friend.
What attracts her to Babington
is that he tells her
there's a whole army of young men
who virtually pray to her.
She's not forgotten, she's not alone.
And he tells her
that she has these followers
and she laps it up.
Babington also has the potential
to be useful to Mary.
As a gentleman,
he has friends at the Royal Court.
They can get close enough to Elizabeth
to kill her.
For Babington, morally,
in the eyes of God,
in the eyes of the church,
it was fine for him
to be part of a plot
to remove her
and to have her assassinated.
On the 7th July,
Babington sends a coded letter to Mary
outlining his plan.
He, along with 100 followers,
are going to try and free Mary
from house arrest
at Chartley Castle in Staffordshire.
But Babington is in way over his head.
Buried deep in Cecil's network
is an operative
going by the codename Honest Man.
He's none other than the brewer
who delivers Mary's beer.
The brewer was on to a wonderful thing.
He's taking the bribes from Walsingham,
he takes bribes
from Mary Queen of Scots,
he even raises the price of his beer.
In fact, even the Catholic courier,
who had put Babington
in touch with Mary,
is a double agent
working for Walsingham and Cecil.
It is labyrinthine.
I mean, it's mirrors within mirrors,
rooms within rooms.
And it's Cecil
who's at the heart of it,
who knows every room
and whose inside of it
and whose onside and who's not.
And so they intercept
Babington's letter.
The letter is given to Cecil's
Cambridge University code-breaker
and the clock is ticking.
If the letter is delayed
getting to Mary,
she'll know
her correspondence is compromised.
How can he possibly make sense
of the icons and squiggles
without knowing what they stand for?
He does something rather clever.
He has calculated that,
in written English,
13% of letters are E.
2% are X.
He looks at the frequency of symbols
and painstakingly unpicks the code.
Babington tells Mary he has six nobles
who are ready to assassinate Elizabeth.
They have now caught Babington
in an act of treason.
But he isn't the ultimate target
of their operation.
They want Mary's written consent
to the assassination attempt.
And if Cecil can capture that
and can definitively prove
that that's happening,
Mary is finished.
Babington's letter reaches Mary
late on the 8th July.
But will Mary set in motion
a plot to kill her cousin Elizabeth
and put herself on the throne?
Days pass
but Mary does not reply.
I find that silence on Mary's part
really very striking
because she's a very impulsive woman
and yet, in this case, she waits.
Mary knows
that if she sends this letter off,
the plot is going to be activated.
She is sending a gang of armed men
to ambush the Queen of England
with violence.
That's a huge thing for anyone to do.
It takes quite a long time
for Mary to reply.
Meanwhile, Babington is in London.
He's there with his co-conspirators.
One can only sort of imagine how tense,
how nervous he must've felt.
Now Walsingham and Cecil,
it's like two hunters in the jungle,
watching a baited trap
and your quarry comes up
and sniffs all round it.
It hasn't taken a bite yet.
They must've been beside themselves
with frustration and concern
that their sting operation,
which is what it is, has been rumbled.
After ten days,
Mary replies to Babington.
She tells him
to set the six gentleman to work.
She's having a miserable time
in the least-comfortable house arrest
she's ever had.
She's almost given up hope
by the time
she consents to the Babington plot.
That's why she's so desperate,
that's why she's prepared
to go through it.
But it is the act of a woman who's
The Babington plot
is Mary's one last role of the dice.
The letter is given
to Walsingham's agent
and he puts a gallows
on the front cover,
so Walsingham will know immediately
that the trap has been sprung
and that letter is
Mary Queen of Scots' death warrant.
It's actually the fulfilment of dreams
of both Cecil and Walsingham.
The absolute smoking gun.
Cecil sees that
and agrees that this is now
the best opportunity he has
to really have Mary executed.
But before Cecil orders Mary's arrest,
there's the small matter
of dealing with the young Catholic
who provided the bait.
Babington has dinner one evening
with one of Walsingham's informers
and it's partway through this dinner
that he realises
that this man has, in fact,
received orders
for Babington's own arrest.
So Babington gets up
from the dinner table,
goes to pay the bill
and scarpers.
Babington is brought back to London,
where he's hanged,
cut down whilst still alive
and disembowelled.
October 1586,
Mary Queen of Scots
is put on trial for treason.
Cecil conducts the prosecution himself.
She's found guilty.
Now he needs Elizabeth's approval.
The death warrant
of a member of the royal family
requires the Queen's signature.
Cecil knows that this is
one of the most crucial moments.
But he's been here before with Norfolk
and he knows,
so he can assume,
that she will prevaricate.
News of Mary's trial sends shock waves
through Catholic Europe.
The King of France even
writes to Elizabeth,
pleading for Mary's life to be spared.
For Cecil, this is still
a very, very volatile moment.
He's got to come out
completely the winner of this.
In January 1587,
Cecil visits Elizabeth at Greenwich.
He's impatient for Mary's sentence
to be carried out.
Cecil tells Elizabeth, "She has to die,
"you have to sign the death warrant".
He desperately, desperately
wants this to be signed off on.
Elizabeth's initial reaction
to Mary's conspiracy -
she's absolutely furious.
I think she refers to Mary,
at one point, as "this viper".
Undoubtedly,
Elizabeth wanted Mary dead.
That's beyond question at this point.
Nonetheless, what she was nervous about
would be that she would be a queen
who was also a regicide.
If Elizabeth strikes at Mary,
she ultimately strikes at herself.
So she's not quite ready
to take this last political step.
And therefore, she doesn't wish Mary
to be used too harshly.
Cecil and Elizabeth argue
about Mary's death warrant for 6 weeks.
And he pushes and pushes
because, again, Elizabeth stalls,
she prevaricates
and he's absolutely appalled by it.
Because he sees it
as the great weakness.
I don't think that Elizabeth's
prevarication was a weakness at all.
First of all, that behaviour which,
in a male ruler might have been
described as prudent or cunning,
in Elizabeth
it's dismissed as kind of, you know,
feminine prevarication.
"She couldn't make up her mind."
She was perfectly capable
of making up her mind,
she just chose not to make it up
until it suited her to do so.
Elizabeth was a spectacularly
good player of a long political game
and the fact that she survived
as long as she did and died in her bed
is testament to how useful it was
not to make hasty decisions.
Cecil does not relent.
And on the 1st of February,
Elizabeth finally signs
Mary's death warrant.
But it still needs the seal of England
to give the warrant legal status.
Elizabeth asks for the warrant
to be returned to her.
She never gets it back.
It's one of the murkiest moments,
I think,
in all of Elizabethan politics.
How does it get to Cecil?
We'll never really know.
Elizabeth doesn't know what's going on.
Or does she,
and she doesn't want to know
and she wants it
just to be taken care of?
I think there's a lot of that
that's really happening.
Elizabeth couldn't be seen
to authorise the deed
and so she constructs
this elaborate facade,
which does everything
to encourage her ministers
to get the deed done,
but without actually explicitly
telling them to do so.
Quite clearly, what Elizabeth is doing
is allowing her ministers
to take the decision from her,
to do the undoable
without her having to take
personal responsibility.
So now it's up to Cecil.
Does he want to take the decision
to execute a queen?
At 9am on the 8th of February,
Mary mounts the scaffold
in a ceremony
carefully choreographed by Cecil.
OK, this is the Great Hall
of Fotheringhay Castle.
In one corner burns an enormous fire.
It's a cold, cold day.
Here's all the gentry lined up
round this very low wooden scaffold.
But when Mary takes off her cloak,
she reveals a dress
of brilliant scarlet,
the Catholic colour of martyrdom.
Mary has this one last chance
to tell the story for herself,
to make herself
the heroine of the chronicle
of the life of Mary Queen of Scots.
And she's very, very well aware
that she is doing that,
even in his face,
as she faces the scaffold.
When it comes to the moment of truth
the executioner comes up
and raises the axe
and basically misses
the crucial part of the neck.
He has to shorten his grip and chop
until, eventually, he can
lift up the head and cry out, you know,
"Here's the head of a traitor."
He didn't know that Mary Queen of Scots
was wearing a wig.
So, for Mary to be exposed
in that moment,
when the executioner holds up her head
and then the wig becomes detached
from her skull,
that is the ultimate humiliation.
And the head falls out of his hands,
bounces on the straw-covered scaffold.
The lips are still moving.
And she has a dog, a pet dog,
a West Highland Terrier,
who's hiding
amongst the skirts of her dress
and it comes out and starts barking.
The two commissioners, basically,
have a nervous breakdown.
They can't cope with what has happened.
They can't cope with how Mary
has taken control of her own death.
So, as theatre,
it really has little parallel
in the whole of British history.
February the 9th,
Elizabeth is still waiting for
Mary's death warrant to be returned.
Cecil visits the Queen
with the news that her cousin
has already been beheaded.
She goes completely crazy,
she is furious with him.
Her rage, so profound,
that he actually says afterwards
that he fears for her health.
It must be like being engulfed
by this tsunami of rage.
I mean, she's almost
biting the carpet with rage.
I mean, the Tudors always were
redheaded,
pretty full of colour
and Elizabeth was probably
one of the worst of them.
In my reading of the situation,
she fell victim
to a bit of method acting.
She'd talked herself into
the role of the unfortunate monarch
who was being pushed
by the necessity of good government
to take this terrible step.
And then she kind of starts believing
her own shtick.
She starts thinking,
"Actually, I am angry,
I am upset, I am outraged."
And it was easier
for Elizabeth to believe
that Cecil had somehow cheated her,
that he'd acted without her authority,
even though that's what
she'd wanted him to do all along.
Elizabeth has played
a very, very shrewd game herself.
She's played Cecil
as much as Cecil has played her
and, in the end,
they've got what they both understand
really has to happen.
Mary is dead,
that Elizabeth can feel
her hands are not quite as bloody
as they really are.
The Queen then
banishes Cecil from her court.
He is completely cut off from power.
He writes to her,
begging to be taken back.
He sorrowfully prays
Her Majesty will suspend
her heavy censure against him.
The surviving correspondence
around this time is very sketchy,
but there is an interesting fragment,
which tells us that Cecil believes
that he would rather
be sent to the Tower
and probably executed,
than just be banished
and watch politics going on from afar.
This is how much he is
such a political animal.
Looking at the picture, you can see
how devastated he would have been.
Almost every single element
of this portrait
shows the trappings of power
and political influence.
So he holds the staff of state,
he's also got the
Order of the Garter around his neck.
The robes symbolise his role
as principal Secretary of State.
Everything tells you that this is,
effectively,
the most powerful man in the land
after the Queen.
It's 30 years of work,
of hard graft in the offices of state,
working with correspondents,
networks of spies.
It's all gone.
And I think you can see,
just in this one picture,
of how awful that would have been.
But Cecil has one last trick
up his sleeve.
His banishment creates an opening,
which there is only one man
perfectly trained to fill.
His son, Robert.
For years, behind the scenes,
he's been grooming young Robert,
teaching him all the intricacies
of running the dark state.
There is young Robert
sitting at the family occasions,
at the kitchen table, if you like,
learning from his father
about statecraft.
And he is a prodigy,
he's brilliant at maths,
he's great at cosmography,
he learns all the languages that,
of course, you need for statecraft.
And it has to be the fruition
of everything that he's really wanted.
It's about legacy,
it's about dynastic succession.
And so it is the fulfilment
of everything
that he could possibly wish for.
The house,
the position at court,
and the spy network
are all handed down to Robert.
Robert Cecil is one
of half a dozen statesmen
who changed the course
of English history.
Robert Cecil, it turns out,
is even more clever
and even more intense
than his father.
He is cunning
feeble
rich, lonely.
The Cecils meet their archenemy.
Priests are not social workers.
They are at the sharp end
of a religious war.
An attack on Spain
It's a raid.
It's the old way of doing things.
and the death of Queen Elizabeth I.
"I spent all my life," Elizabeth says,
"in little rooms."
In many ways, she lived alone.