Elizabeth I's Secret Agents (2017) s01e02 Episode Script

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.
The Elizabethan state was
mirrors within mirrors.
The double crossings, the conspiracies.
It's an endless labyrinth.
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.
By meeting Robert Cecil,
you have the feeling
that you would have somehow
compromised yourself.
You would have exposed yourself
to his sharp eye.
And, it's because of that
that he is a terrifying figure.
We'll see how history is really made
in the corridors of power,
from just behind the throne.
In this episode,
a Catholic threat
a rival at court
and the death of Queen Elizabeth I.
1594, England is alone.
A Protestant country
surrounded by Catholic Europe.
The Spanish Armada
has just been defeated.
But there is still the fear
they might try again.
Merchant ships are bringing spices,
tobacco and immigrants
into the ports,
as well as Protestant refugees
and the occasional Catholic terrorist.
Most people live in tremendous poverty,
but those who are close to the Queen
have extraordinary wealth.
Here at Burghley House
lived the Cecils, her spy masters.
The father, William Cecil,
saved Elizabeth
from seven assassination attempts.
But, when he took the decision
to execute Mary, Queen of Scots,
Elizabeth was furious
and banished him from court.
It's 30 years of work,
hard graft in the offices of state,
working with correspondents,
networks of spies.
So, to have this taken away from him,
it's devastating.
He would rather be sent to
the Tower and probably executed,
than just be banished
and watch politics going on from afar.
The hope is, though,
that son Robert can take over
the father's spy network
and regain
the family's position at court.
Robert Cecil is trained
to do the dirty work of government.
He is clever
cunning, feeble
rich, lonely.
He dreams of following his father
into becoming the Queen's
principle secretary -
the equivalent of her Prime Minister.
But she is currently a little
less than impressed with Robert Cecil.
I think she was initially
quite mistrustful of him.
She was quite dismissive.
I think she thought
he was a bit of a prig.
And he certainly didn't have any
of the swaggering glamour, which
Elizabeth usually preferred
in her court favourites.
Born with a curved spine,
Cecil was less than five feet tall.
Poor little pygmy, she calls him.
Although people think that
pygmy was a horrible nickname,
she gave everyone nicknames,
and I think it was rather affectionate.
When the Queen called him pygmy,
Cecil was deeply hurt.
And later, to his father,
he writes quite candidly,
"If anyone else calls me pygmy,
I would admit how much it hurts."
"But in the case of the Queen,
I don't dare to."
The pressures on Elizabeth's courtiers
were intense.
She had executed 15 of them
since she had come to the throne.
But Robert Cecil
did have something up his sleeve.
He inherited his father's spy network.
Cecil has spies
watching every suspect Catholic family
in the country.
He has informants in the prisons,
he has turned priests,
he has corrupted servants
who are reporting back
directly to Cecil.
He knows his best chance
of impressing the Queen
is to capture Catholics
plotting against her.
Every plot foiled can be used
as a pawn in a bigger game at court.
In 1594, he hears of a Catholic priest
described as very dangerous.
Cecil sends some men to arrest him.
The man they are after
is Father John Gerard,
a priest who snuck into the country
just after the Spanish Armada
and has been trying to
win over hearts and minds
in Norfolk and Suffolk.
Priests are not social workers,
they are at the sharp end
of a religious war
and they are prepared
to die for the cause.
If one of these agents
of foreign powers
get close enough to the Queen,
then her life is in danger.
Cecil then takes the news
of Gerard's capture to the Queen.
She should be pleased,
but the Queen's mind is elsewhere.
There's a new star at court.
The Earl of Essex was everything
Cecil wasn't.
He was handsome,
an expert swordsman and a war hero.
Essex was an athlete.
You can see it in the paintings.
I mean look, those legs,
with armour tied round them
like modern skinny jeans.
He is so obviously playing up
what he considers to be his strength.
For Cecil, the Catholic terrorists
are the official enemy.
But Essex is the real enemy.
Everybody at the Elizabethan court
knows that the court is a theatre,
it's the stage
on which people compete for power.
So, Robert Cecil
when he sees the Earl of Essex appear,
he knows that he's no longer
in full control of the plotlines.
Essex could flirt with the Queen,
there's talk of him playing cards
late at night with the Queen,
suggesting a sexual closeness
with the Queen,
that clearly was ridiculous
and was out of the question.
Elizabeth
was extremely susceptible to..
I wouldn't say it was flattery exactly,
there was a particular way to
address or approach her.
Essex was extremely adept
at playing this game of courtly love,
so when Essex casts himself at her feet
and describes her as his goddess
and Elizabeth responds in kind,
they're playing a game.
Now, she may have felt
attracted to Essex,
he was a very handsome young man.
Cecil's rivalry with Essex
is also deeply personal.
They grew up under the same roof.
When Essex's parents died,
he was taken in by the Cecils.
He and Robert were brought up
almost like brothers.
When Essex makes
this great entry into court life
it's not just that Robert Cecil is
wondering how he's going to
stay on top of the situation
in the court,
it's also a return of all kinds
of insecurities and worries
that go back
to his earliest childhood.
There's a story of them riding along
together in a carriage one day
and engaging in a furious row
in which all courtliness and veneer
is stripped away.
So, I would think
that Robert Cecil
felt he had reason to worry.
Crucially, Essex has bought himself
his own private spy network.
Essex runs agents through a handler
he's stolen from Cecil's network
with an offer of more money.
Cecil's code breaker, and a double agent
in the Catholic underground
also defect from Cecil's network
to his rival's.
Gradually, they thin out
into two rival teams
of intelligence operatives.
And the material they are generating
is the grist to the mill
of the competition
between Cecil and Essex.
And the spy game has changed.
No longer simply a necessary system
to keep the Queen safe,
now it's about playing politics
and gaining power.
The first person caught
in the centre of it
is a man called Roderigo Lopez.
He's from a wealthy
Portuguese merchant family,
and he's also the Queen's doctor.
Lopez is also working for Cecil.
Cecil is using Lopez
as a kind of private back channel
for communication with Spain.
So, Essex gets involved
in something called the Lopez plot,
which I've studied for weeks
and can't get to the bottom of.
What is known is that at this point,
Essex makes a wild accusation.
He claims Lopez has
taken 50,000 crowns,
and in return, he has promised
to poison the Queen.
Elizabeth initially
seemed to be horrified
at the accusations against Lopez.
This is a man
she trusted very intimately,
who knew her, arguably, physically
in a way that no other man ever had.
And she was really appalled
by the accusations.
However, she did appear
to allow herself to be convinced.
Lopez is thrown in the tower
and Cecil has a decision to make
about whether to stand by him.
Lopez may be too expensive to defend.
There is nothing at this point
to suggest that Robert Cecil
believes that Lopez is guilty
of conspiracy to kill the Queen.
But Cecil
gets behind the investigation,
and Lopez, who is an old man
is shown the rack.
And that's the phrase that's used,
he was shown the rack.
There is only one rack in England.
It's the one in the Tower.
It's a legendary, fearsome,
and awful punishment.
Lopez is a doctor,
he knows exactly
what is going to happen if he's racked.
And, so, Lopez signs the confession.
And Lopez says, "Yes, I did it.
"I offered to kill the Queen."
Essex has forced Cecil
to get a false confession
out of his own agent.
Lopez is then hanged, cut down
while still alive and disembowelled.
When Lopez has been executed,
Robert Cecil has come to a kind
of maturity,
in that
he has faced the full implications
of the intelligence game.
In that it is not just a matter
of gathering paper and messages
and moving information around.
He's been prepared to sentence to death
a man that he knows to be innocent.
It is the behaviour
of somebody who aspires
to be a supreme professional
to outdo his father, in that respect,
and who, to do this,
is prepared to do almost anything.
And you have to wonder
what the personal cost is
of somebody who has done this,
who has knowingly sent
to the most horrific death,
to be publicly mutilated
and chopped up while still alive,
knowingly done this
to a long-time servant of his family
and of the Queen.
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.
Whatever the Lopez plot did
or did not involve, the outcome
did seem to boost
the reputation of Essex.
He could feel
that he had saved the Queen.
And now here,
in this dramatic sinister area,
involving Spain, Catholics,
he has apparently proved
that he can be the master of that.
The Queen needs protection, um,
and he can give it
just as well as Robert Cecil can.
It falls to Cecil to make
the next move in their rivalry
for the Queen's favour.
Cecil believes that the priest
he captured earlier is the real threat.
Now he wants to find out
what Father John Gerard knows.
He was held up like that.
And was made to hang
from these manacles
for hours and hours on end.
And he kept passing out, so they would
put a little step underneath him,
and every time he came to,
they would drop it again.
And this went on for two days.
And on the second day,
he had to wear a looser robe
because his hands were so swollen
and he said the pain was worse
in his chest, and his belly,
and his arms, and his fingers
and he felt blood was pouring
out of his fingers' ends,
he felt blood was
pouring out of his pores.
John Gerard is in fact a key player
in the Catholic underground.
When Cecil's men had come close
to arresting him before,
he had hidden in priest holes -
secret chambers cut
into the floors and walls of houses.
Now Cecil wants him to reveal
which families had been hiding him,
but Gerard is resisting.
You knew that Cecil would go to hell
and he, Gerard and God's children
would go to heaven.
So, he has this sort of tunnel vision,
this single-minded purpose,
and that gave him strength,
that undoubtedly gave him strength.
Gerard resists all his tortures.
Refusing to give up a single name.
Gerard did rightly to that
he had what he called
an interior temptation.
He thought that he would give up,
give in.
But then he said that he realised
the worst they could do to him
was kill him,
and then he would be with his brothers,
he would be a martyr.
So, he said that gave him strength,
the idea of suffering.
And I think with Gerard,
whether this is retrospective
or in the moment, I don't know,
but there's almost a sense that
him hanging there with the manacles
is his Passion.
It's the Passion of Christ
for John Gerard.
While Cecil gets nowhere,
Essex, meanwhile, has
a truly bold way to impress the Queen.
An informant Essex has
at the Spanish court
tells him
they are planning an invasion.
He tells Elizabeth
that he will lead a pre-emptive strike,
attacking the port of Cadiz.
It's a raid. It's an attempt
to inflict a bloody nose.
It's an attack
on a rich Spanish port
where he could hope for crude booty,
which he could present
to the Queen as tokens of his triumph
and as gifts to her.
It's the old way of doing things.
So, Essex heads for Cadiz,
with 8,000 men on 120 ships
on a raid that took three months.
With Essex away,
Cecil has the Queen to himself
and he takes the opportunity of
inviting her to his house and gardens -
Theobalds in North London.
He has something to show her.
Before Essex left, he had sent a note.
In it, Essex revealed his plan
was not just to raid Cadiz,
but also to establish
a garrison there -
something Elizabeth had
expressly ordered him not to do.
Essex countermanded her orders,
which she could never bear.
Elizabeth was prepared to indulge him
up to a point,
but the more impetuous he grew
the more impatient with him she became.
That lovely word she used about him,
a 'temerarious youth.'
She just thought he was too big
for his very elegant golden boots,
and after a while she got tired of it.
Cecil is able to convince her
to look to the future
beyond the Cadiz raid.
Elizabeth will know that
in leaving the care of the state
to the Earl of Essex,
she's committing it
to, in effect, endless war,
and a war
that can never really be won
against the might of Spain.
So, while Essex is away in Cadiz,
Cecil gets what he's always wanted.
Like his father before him, he becomes
the Queen's Principal Secretary.
The secretary is the forerunner
of what will become the Prime Minister.
The secretary has to be
close to the monarch at all times.
So, to be the secretary
is to control
the politics of the court
and to control
the body of the monarch.
Essex's raid in Cadiz was a success,
but he returns to find Cecil in power.
When Essex came back from Spain,
Robert Cecil has got the job
that really matters.
Essex can go on
flirting with the Queen,
he can dance with the Queen,
he can whisper sweet nothings
in her ear,
but it's clear now
that when it comes to business,
she's not going to listen to Essex.
It's Robert Cecil
who is the coming man.
After 1596, we see quite
how much Elizabeth relies on Cecil
and, in fact, has always taken Cecil
far more seriously
than she ever took Essex.
Their relationship begins to look
much more intimate,
at times rather stormy,
but much more, um, much more
kind of reliable and trustworthy,
I think, in Elizabeth's view.
Cecil seems to have won
the battle with Essex,
but it isn't over yet.
Cecil has got his position
at exactly the wrong time.
In the late 1590s,
there are bad harvests,
the Black Death breaks out again
and there is rioting
reported across the country.
And Queen Elizabeth,
who has ruled England
for almost 40 years,
is looking tired.
I really love this picture because
I think it really shows Elizabeth
as an actual human being,
rather than an idea,
although she was so angry with it that
it was never allowed to be exhibited.
And here we see her
for what she was, which is
an exhausted old woman.
She has bags under her eyes.
We see she's sort of flopping forward.
The ring of office has fallen
from her hand and its resting
very exhaustedly on her prayer book.
She looks like someone
who's given all her life and her energy
to the cares of the realm, and
it's the opposite of
the triumphant portraits
of the Virgin Queen
that we see from mid-reign.
And yet, to me,
it's Elizabeth at her most human
because we finally see her
as a human being,
and we have a sense of
the extraordinary weight of the burden
that she carried alone
for so very long.
The succession,
the passing of the Crown
from a dead person to a living person
is the moment at which
the early modern state
hangs in the balance.
So, now the spy masters
turned their dark attentions
on to who will be
the next King or Queen of England.
Particularly interesting, as Elizabeth
refuses to name a successor.
As Elizabeth has no children,
the focus turns to
her closest relations - her cousins.
But most of them are Catholics,
too old, or have no successor.
But there is one, who,
despite his flaws,
people are beginning to turn to.
There are other candidates,
but none of them
is as serious a candidate as James.
He's Protestant,
he's of the Royal blood
he's a man
and he has children.
He has two sons.
James, though,
has a reputation for being devious.
He's hopelessly extravagant
and it's thought
that he may sleep
with both men and women.
His whole life has been complicated.
James VI comes to the throne
as an infant
on the back of political violence.
His father is strangled
after an explosion
that failed to kill him,
in which his mother
and her lover are implicated.
But James would love
to be King of England.
James sees himself as, by right,
the only true lineal claimant.
But he's not absolutely certain
that that's not going to be upset.
Elizabeth certainly didn't want
James to feel
that the Crown was assuredly his,
because as soon as
he began to feel that,
he could gather allegiance around him,
he could begin to plot, effectively.
So, she very much wanted
to make him feel insecure.
The English Crown hangs in the balance.
It's a messy situation
that Cecil wants to keep on top of.
Since becoming secretary,
he has been using government funds
to massively expand his spy network.
Including paying an informant
at the Scottish court.
This informant tells Cecil
someone using the codename Plato
is offering to help James
become Elizabeth's heir.
And he soon works out who it is.
Essex is coming to see
that he NEEDS James.
If he's losing the battle
for control over Elizabeth,
she's not going to last long anyway.
He also discovers
that the Earl of Essex
is denouncing Cecil to James
at every opportunity.
And that Essex is positioning himself
as the King's future right-hand man
by the throne of England.
They were playing for
the highest of stakes,
and Robert Cecil
had every reason to fear
what Essex's triumph,
if it happened, could mean for him.
If Cecil loses, he dies.
Cecil is now in a nightmare position.
He'd love to expose Essex's
secret communications with James,
but if he tells Elizabeth about it,
she might rule out James' succession -
the only real option
for the future of Protestant England.
Cecil would like to
talk directly to James,
but that's tricky too,
because of a little personal history.
Because Cecil's father
executed James's mother.
His father had masterminded
the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots
and Robert Cecil was now concerned
that James might hold that against him.
But, bizarrely, in reality,
James was not that bothered.
James does not bear a grudge
for his mother's execution.
In many ways, I suppose
his mother's execution
does him a favour.
It removes an embarrassment,
in that James is Protestant.
That can't be said of his mother.
Cecil, though, can't be certain
that James feels that way.
Cecil knows that he cannot be the one
to initiate contact
with the King of Scotland.
And, so, for a while,
everything is stuck,
with nobody trusting anybody enough
to move forward.
The Earl of Essex now
visits the Queen at her vast palace
at Greenwich, and he does something
he will live to regret.
He's there to suggest someone he knows
for an important position
in government.
But the Queen is no longer
interested in his opinion
and laughs at him.
He lost his temper.
He is so angry,
that for a moment it looks like
Essex might draw his sword.
Then he turns his back on her
and walks away.
Ultimately insulting gesture.
Off he storms into outer darkness.
He was no more use to her,
and really not much more of an ornament.
So, I think she was quite happy
to wash her hands of him.
Over the next two years,
she strips Essex of all his titles.
He's banned from court.
Elizabeth must have felt
she was quite safe
in just dispatching him
away from court, banning him.
And that nothing more would happen.
But, in fact
Essex
doesn't consider himself finished.
So, Essex is sort of saying,
yes, I realise I'm finished with Elizabeth,
but that doesn't matter.
There's the coming man.
The great worry, of course, for Cecil
is that the further Essex
is cast from the orbit of Elizabeth,
the closer he comes
to the orbit of James of Scotland.
And, of course, with each passing day,
the Queen gets older.
And, so, the great denouement
of all of this approaches,
like the ticking of a clock.
At the turn of the century,
England starts
what will later become an empire.
The East India Company is formed
and merchants set sail
for the subcontinent
to deal in tea, silk, and opium.
In London, at the New Globe Theatre,
Shakespeare's Hamlet is performed
for the first time.
And a man known
as Norton the bookseller
is making one
of his regular visits to Scotland.
This time, though, he's carrying
secret messages to King James
from the Earl of Essex.
Essex asks James to help him.
"Relieve my poor country
that groans under her burden."
Essex is inviting James
to join him in a coup d'etat.
To signal his approval,
he asks James to send a reply
hidden in the pages of the books.
He must sanction
the overthrow of Elizabeth I,
and accept the Crown for himself.
James signals his approval.
This is
On one level, it's surprising.
It's surprising in how dangerous
this could have been,
this does seem pretty desperate.
Once again, Cecil's network
is able to tell him everything
that's going on.
But he can't expose this conspiracy
either.
This is explosive information of the kind
that would absolutely destroy
James's candidacy
for the throne of England.
So, he takes the risky decision
to let Essex try his rebellion.
By the 7th of February 1601,
Essex has assembled a force
of over 300 armed men at Essex House,
his palace on the river in London.
They'll start the rebellion
the following day.
The extraordinary idea is devised,
well, it seems extraordinary to us,
but it also seemed very simple to them.
The Queen, she's fallen
into the hands of this sinister figure,
Robert Cecil,
who is cutting Essex and his friends off
from the influence that matters.
What will they do?
Go down to Whitehall,
seize control of the area,
lock up Cecil, presumably,
execute him in due course
and take physical control of what was
the centre of the Elizabethan state -
Queen Elizabeth herself.
But Essex doesn't know
that Cecil has had an informant
inside his house
throughout the planning of it.
Robert Cecil knows pretty much
every stage of the preparation.
And yet, he allows Essex
to play out the whole thing.
The following day,
Essex leads his 300 armed followers
onto the streets of London.
This is the playing out
of treason in public.
And not only is it
conclusive evidence against Essex,
but Cecil knows
where Essex will go next.
Wherever Essex and his men go,
they find Cecil has larger forces
waiting for them.
The conspirators went back
to Essex House,
they barricaded themselves inside.
Cecil now has
the whole place surrounded
and Essex has nowhere left to go.
Effectively, the conspirators came out
with their hands up.
Essex was an idiot.
He was an idiot! I mean,
he went flouncing around the place
as though he was some, you know,
kind of medieval champion.
He didn't seem to realise
he lived in a modern world
which was governed by authority,
peace, prudence and civil servants.
For a young man,
he was tragically behind the times.
For a few hours,
Elizabeth contemplates forgiving Essex,
but ultimately decides
to sign his death warrant.
He is beheaded.
He was 33.
There's a sadness at the heart
of the Essex story, a poignancy.
Yes, he was a headstrong young man,
but what he was in love with
the syndrome he was trying to
recreate and preserve
the courtly lover,
the courtly servant to the Queen.
The brave military hero.
Writing his poems to Elizabeth,
believing she would save him
to the end.
It was a whole way of life
that was doomed.
But also contained human values
that it was sad to see go.
Cecil is victorious.
How did Cecil feel about it
is another question.
Cecil and Essex,
in relation to Elizabeth I,
had been like two feuding brothers,
feuding for their mother's affection.
Cecil and Essex in childhood
had been like two feuding brothers
struggling for the affection
or approval of William Cecil.
So we have to assume
that some kind of guilty feelings
almost fratricidal
emotions
it's impossible not to feel
some kind of pity
for Robert Cecil,
who, the more he succeeds,
the more isolated he becomes.
And the longer he stays in the game,
the lonelier he becomes.
That he is edging up and up and up
and yet becoming more and more
single and alone and isolated.
Whatever the psychological cost,
Cecil seems to be winning.
But there is only one thing
that slips his attention.
In the Tower of London,
the Catholic priest, John Gerard,
makes a slightly strange request.
He asks for some lemons,
which his jailers
can't see a problem with.
Gerard communicated with his friends
on the outside with lemon juice.
When it dries, it would be invisible.
But then if you dip that paper in water,
the writing comes out.
And so he begins
a secret communication with Catholics
in London, asking to be rescued.
Cecil is unaware of this.
He's still thinking about how he can work
with King James of Scotland.
In Scotland,
news of Essex's failed rebellion
reaches James.
And with Essex dead,
James needs someone else
to help him become King of England.
In May 1601,
two men ask to meet Cecil.
They said that James wants Cecil
to work for him
inside Elizabeth's court.
Cecil has to assess
firstly whether he can believe this.
This is just after the Essex rebellion.
He knows that James and Essex
were in contact.
So, Cecil's immediate worry has to be
that this is a set-up.
So it takes two weeks
before Cecil gives a reply.
And in that time, we can assume
that he's doing everything he can
to try and see around
the corners here and work out
whether this is a genuine,
sincere offer
and this is going to be the road that
leads quite directly to the succession,
or whether this is a dark
and convoluted path,
which will end up
in Cecil being implicated
in a treasonous correspondence.
Robert Cecil wasn't right to think
that this was a trap.
Indeed,
his ambassadors write this to him.
They make plain to him
that there is a great difference
between vigilancy and credulity.
You know, they didn't have coffee,
but you need to wake up and smell it.
Cecil decides to go for it.
He opens the correspondence.
Cecil penetrated
Essex's conspiracy with James.
He goes to elaborate lengths to ensure
this won't happen to him.
Cecil refers to himself and James
in code.
They are 10 and 30.
The letters are not written
in Cecil's own hand,
but by a trusted proxy.
They're then given to a courier,
known as the pigeon,
a hand-picked agent
who uses a diplomatic bag
that can't be searched,
to take them to the king.
"Your best approach," he tells James,
"is to prefer quietness
over needless expostulation."
He advises James to take a step back,
not to press Elizabeth.
And it's into that space
that Cecil will then place himself
as the intermediary,
as the only intermediary
who can bring about
the succession that
both he and James want.
This makes perfect sense to James
in those circumstances.
He can then
correspond with Elizabeth less often
and in a less fraught sort of way,
and in a less needly sort of way.
So, in that sense,
the correspondence with Cecil
does help to reduce tensions between
the two monarchs that
had been developing through the 1590s.
By late 1602, Cecil has James
in the palm of his hand.
But the real pawn of this manipulation
is not the Scottish King,
but the ageing English Queen.
"I've spent all my life,"
Elizabeth says, "in little rooms."
And I thought that was the best
description of her I'd ever read.
Because actually, in many ways,
she lived a very confined
and constricted life.
And much of her life, although
its public aspect was so splendid,
so formal, so magnificent,
was spent in confined spaces,
guarded and never on her own.
This world of spiery,
of conspiracies and
small candlelit rooms,
where danger was always
lurking outside the door
and you were never quite sure
what was going to happen
when someone entered.
And I do wonder if,
at the end of her life,
Elizabeth didn't feel that affinity
rather regretfully.
Cecil is, in some ways,
responsible for this.
Prisoners live in little rooms.
And Cecil,
in guaranteeing her survival,
has boxed her in, in a small space
and it does suit him, of course,
to have her manageable and contained.
Inside the Tower of London,
under the noses of his jailers,
Father John Gerard has been busy
running his Catholic network,
sending instructions
to Catholic nobles.
Now, though, it's time to leave.
Gerard bribes the warder a little bit,
to allow him to just cross
the courtyard of where his cell is,
over to the Cradle Tower.
Gerard now throws a cord
down to his friends,
to create a primitive zip wire.
But he has to climb down the rope
with hands swollen by torture.
He starts, he grabs the rope,
and very soon he swings round,
and has to do the rest of it
hanging upside down,
and halfway across, he stops.
He's exhausted
and he just dangles there lifelessly.
But he said
he got the faith from his prayers,
the prayers of his friends
and from God.
And somehow he got over that rope,
he got right to the end of the wharf,
then one of his followers
grabbed his legs,
hoiked him over,
and got him, basically almost
had to carry him into the boat,
and then they rowed for their lives.
A monarch dies in public,
and so Elizabeth's court
has gathered around her bedside.
Her life has contracted down
from the palaces to a few rooms,
to her bedroom,
and now the bed in which she will die.
In her last 24 hours of life
she cannot move or speak.
And it is only then that Cecil
leans over
and asks,
will it be the King of the Scots?
And she puts a hand to her face
when James's name is mentioned.
People do that when they have bad news.
It's Robert Cecil
who interprets this gesture,
that she wanted
the King of the Scots to succeed her.
The audience in this room,
the councillors
squashed into this small space,
they all knew Cecil was
the most powerful man in government.
So they have to play their part
in this script,
regardless of
what their private thoughts might be.
They have to acknowledge James
because Cecil has arranged
this as only having one outcome.
Elizabeth never recovers
the power of speech
and dies
in the early hours of the morning.
On the 24th of March 1603,
Cecil proclaims James
as the new King of England.
For Cecil, this must have been a moment
of dizzying responsibility
and gratifying power.
He now holds the reins.
He has managed the death of Elizabeth
and he's going to now manage
the arrival of James of Scotland.
When Robert Cecil
comes out of the palace
the morning
after Elizabeth has died
he has exchanged
one sea of troubles for another.
James is
not the same as Elizabeth.
And Cecil cannot expect
this to be the same sort of gig.
So we enter, in the spring of 1603,
into an uncertain world.
And what's more,
John Gerard is on the loose.
Gerard is hungrier than ever,
and he's also got this sort of aura
about him now. He has escaped.
He has escaped
from the Tower of London.
There's almost a sort of
sense of untouchability to him.
He will soon meet
a man called Guido Fawkes,
as they devise their master plan -
the Gunpowder Plot.
And it's Cecil's job to stop it.
36 barrels of gunpowder
under the Houses of Parliament.
They are going to have the impact
of a small-scale nuclear bomb.
It's going to be a hell of a bang.
The clock is ticking.
It's midnight
in the Palace of Whitehall by now,
Parliament will open
in a matter of hours.
It's Cecil's ultimate test.
And the name which comes
up is that of Cecil's old enemy,
John Gerard.