I watched it and enjoyed it for the most part… you could kind of see HBO shooting around the lack of extras for large group scenes. Like when E is addressing the troops, there’s probaly only 30 or so extras there so it looked a little light.
One thing I do need explained because I missed it (if it was even clear in the movie)… The death sentence for Mary Queen of Scots… The Earl of Lester says “If we don’t all sign it, we’ll all be hanged.”
Could anyone explain?
Nitpick: the Earl of Leicester
I haven’t seen the film, but speaking from a historical standpoint, he might have been saying that they needed to show a united front to Elizabeth.
Elizabeth was extremely reluctant to execute Mary, for fear of what the implications could be for her own throne and for future generations. The person of a king or queen was supposed to be sacrosanct, for they were believed to be God’s chosen. It was a very dangerous precedent to set.
Elizabeth knew this, and resisted executing Mary, even though she had plenty of reason to do so. I understand Elizabeth’s dillema-- how could it be treason to plot Elizabeth’s demise when Mary wasn’t her subject and was a sovereign queen in her own right? But Scotland didn’t want her back, and Elizabeth couldn’t set her at liberty to raise armies. She couldn’t let Mary live, lest she be the focus for plotters, yet to kill her was to diminish her own queenship.
Her tantrums after Mary was executed were just another example of her political talents. She wanted to retain a relationship with James, Mary’s son and heir and didn’t want any hard feelings. (James protested his mother’s execution because it was proper, not because he had any feelings for a woman he hadn’t seen since birth and had been taught was the murderer of his father.) Elizabeth pretended that she hadn’t meant for the execution to be carried out, casting the blame on her ministers, neatly avoiding culpability should the world react in outrage.
In reality, she knew full well what would happen when she signed Mary’s death warrant. Her ministers hurried things along, lest she change her mind, but they did not act without authorization.
Lissa, what’s your take on the scene of the meeting between Elizabeth and Mary (of Scots)? I thought conventional wisdom was that they never met, but I haven’t read much of the recent works on either one of them.
I haven’t seen the film, but historically, no such event ever took place. The closest Elizabeth ever got to Mary was when was on progress and came within fifteen miles of the house where Mary was held.
I doubt highly if Elizabeth would have ever even wanted such a meeting. She and Mary had tried to arrange one while Mary was still queen, but it never happened. After Mary was disgraced and overthrown, there would have been no reason for such a meeting, especially since Elizabeth likely was aware of what the eventual outcome would be.
Not only was Mary a Catholic, but she was also a supposed husband-murderer. Darnley (Mary’s husband) was never officially crowned, but he was considered by many to be the King of Scotland by his marriage to the queen. Even if she didn’t accept him as a true royal, Elizabeth had to acknowledge the sanctity of marriage. Mary was a petty traitor if she really had her husband killed, and a capital traitor if she had killed a king.
Visiting Mary could have had the political meaning of acknowledging her as the queen of Scotland. Since Elizabeth wanted to cultivate James’ friendship, this would not have been a smart move. At one point, Elizabeth had considered naming Mary her heir, and Mary herself insisted that she had a better claim of the English throne than Elizabeth did. If she visited Mary, some might start to believe that she still intended to make Mary her heir, or had secret Catholic sympathies, or believed that Mary was innocent of her accused crimes. Simply put, no good could come of it.
<trivia nitpick>
Jean Plaidy & Phillipa Gregory are the same author, Eleanor Hibbert, a.k.a. Victoria Holt.
Can one author truly have a different perspective on one “side” of the family than the other author if they’re the same person?
</trivia nitpick>
Sorry to resurrect the thread; I just watched Part One tonight, and loved it. It was wonderful…I’ve always been a little bit of an Elizabeth buff. 
Shoot, I forgot to add that one of my favorite (albeit very fictional) novels about the time period is My Enemy the Queen by Victoria Holt (aka others as referenced above).
The heroine of this novel is Lettice Knollys, mother of Essex & the “secret” marriage that Elizabeth banishes Robert for in Part One. It’s very well written & entertaining. Probably not terribly factual, overall, but entertaining.
Jean Plaidy is a.k.a. Philippa Carr, not Philippa Gregory.
Philippa Gregory’s writing is compelling but her characterizations can be awful. Don’t get me started on her ridiculous treatment of Anne Boleyn in The Other Boleyn Girl.
Jean Plaidy, on the other hand, I have found unoffensive but fairly boring. She writes with a first-person voice that I don’t like.
And uses a lot of exclamation points to punctuate histrionic dialogue!
Her style is best described as “quaint” in my opinion-- very Victorian and melodramatic, and she sometimes subscribes to historical “urban legends.” But I’d recommend them for anyone who wants historical fiction to introduce them to historical figures.
I’ve always had a fondness for Margaret George’s Autobiography Of King Henry VIII. She does the same thing with the “urban legends” (i.e Anne’s sixth finger and Katheryn Howard’s ghost running to ask Henry for forgiveness.) but it’s a vastly entertaining read.
My bad. 
I read Carr, typed Gregory, & didn’t proofread well enough. Oh, well.
Mary commited neither petty or high treason in having her husband killed. It couldn’t be high treason because Darnley was not the Scotting sovereign, Mary was. Darnley was king-consort and had no more power or status than a queen-consort. Petty treason is the killing of own’s immediate superior (wife/husband, apprentice/master) even though Darnley was Mary’s husband he was not her superior since she was the sovereign. She did commit murder like any husband who killed his wife.
I haven’t seen the HBO version yet (looking forward to catching it on re-runs); but if we’re talking about the same scene – as I recall, the Glenda Jackson (Elizabeth R) version of this scene was filmed with 2 troops; so HBO has raised the bar. And also IIRC, the speech is historical/verbatim.
Yeah, if your parents are infertile, it does tend to complicate your ability to procreate. (snerk)
Only seen the first part so far. Liked it a lot; Helen Mirren is phenomenal, and of course Jeremy Irons is great.
I’ve only noticed one anachronism, but it was a doozy – and doubly irritating for being completely unnecessary. There’s a scene where the Queen and Leicester are watching a ship sail into harbor. It brings either good news – that the Spanish Armada has been defeated, or bad news – that a land invasion is imminent. They’re waiting to see if it shows the colors that mean good news – and Leicester pulls out a telescope to get a better view. In 1588. The show had been so good up to that point that this completely gratuitous item seemed like an insult to the viewer. I slapped my own forehead and said, “Well, why doesn’t he just call the captain on his cellphone?”
And it wasn’t just one person’s mistake or indifference – the writer, director, propsmaster, and director all collaborated to piss me off.
Otherwise, excellent production.
This is not a comment on whether or not Mary and Elizabeth actual did meet, but in the movie, Elizabeth’s visit to Mary is secret. The movie claims that Elizabeth was trying to reason with Mary to stop her treasonous plotting so she would not have to be executed. Her advisors were dead set against it for the reasons outlined by Lissa. Elizabeth does it anyway, and the fact that it was supposedly a dead secret accounts for the fact that the meeting has no ill effects for Elizabeth. Also, it makes good story, right?
Any opinions on what kind of person Mary Stuart was? From the accounts I’ve read, she sounds pretty manipulative, vain, and self-serving (moreso than the average monarch, I mean).
I’m not so sure. When Mary I was preparing to marry Phillip of Spain, there was a lot of debate and resistance because a woman was bound to obey her husband, and many thought that the fact that the woman happened to be a queen did not trump that God-given mandate.
Secondly, as I understand, Darnley’s status was somewhat vague. He and Mary signed some documents jointly. (Kings did not usually have their wives sign with them, with the notable exception of Isabella and Ferdinand.*) This indicates, to me at least, that he was considered to be more than a mere consort. He was also felt by the council to have the authority to imprison Mary right before the birth of the prince, and to kill her servant David Riccio. He was never crowned, but he was styled “King of Scotland”.
Perhaps it makes for a good story, but it makes no sense. Fiction always has Elizabeth meeting secretly with Mary or her supposed lovers, but a queen (or king, for that matter) was never alone for an instant. Her maids slept in her bedroom-- even on the toilet, she was attended. If Elizabeth had dissapeared for hours on end, it certainly would have been noticed, and Elizabeth was very careful of her reputation. There was no practical way for a sovereign to meet with anyone in secret.
I’ve always thought of her as a bubble-brained girl who was NOT queen regnant material. (She was just fine as a consort, but not as a ruler.) Certainly, she was manipulative, vain and self-serving like most royalty of the day, but worse, she had no political instincts and was willing to let emotion rule her head. She was weak, unable to control her unruly court. Whereas Elizabeth knew how to use her feminity for political gain, Mary just cried and relied on her charm to try to persuade people. She put her own desires before what was best for her country and fully deserved to be booted out of Scotland.
I read an interview on the Elizabeth I mini series Web site that mentioned the put in a meeting with Elizabeth and Mary because it was the only effective way to dramatize their long correspondence and their relationship with each other.
I always considered Mary Queen of Scots to be an okay person who would have done reasonably well in a stable time, but she just wasn’t up to the task given her. She hadn’t been to Scotland since she was a small child (she grew up in France for the most part), she was a female ruler, she was Catholic in a very protestant country, and she had many factions lined up against her (John Knox went after her and her own half brother couldn’t be trusted). She also made a disastrous marriage to Darnley who seems to have been half crazy and definitely not trustworthy.
From what I’ve read, Mary seems to have been quite intelligent and certainly strong willed. However, she never had Elizabeth’s political savvy. As mentioned, Elizabeth held out the marriage card to keep her potential enemies from lining up against her. Mary decided on marriage and, after having a son, most of the Scottish nobility didn’t see much of a use for her.
OK, granted, but you didn’t see the movie, so let me elaborate. She’s not “alone” in the sense that no one knows where she is and she’s AWOL. She goes to Scotland with her trusted retinue and meets with Mary. They are right outside the door when she talks with Mary. Perhaps it’s farfetched to think that it would remain a secret if her retinue was with her, but that’s how they played it. Also, the meeting wasn’t for “hours on end.” It was quite brief. I don’t recall, but she may have had a pretext for going to Scotland.
Well, if she was meeting Mary while she was in captivity, it wasn’t in Scotland, it was in England.
The closest Elizabeth ever officially came to Mary was within fifteen miles, a distance which in those days would mean needing to be gone for hours justto be able to make the trip and back.
Secondly, even if Elizabeth’s people were loyal enough to remain silent, Mary had her own servants and people working in her interests at Elizabeth’s court and they would have spread the word.
Hey, I understand dramatic license and all that, but in reality, keeping such a meeting secret would have been utterly impossible.
Most of it was in England, and you’re right, this scene was in Sheffield Castle.
Three hours would not have been impossible, and if she said she was just going riding in the countryside with a small retinue, would that have been so far fetched?
I would imagine Elizabeth would have been disguised (she was hooded in the movie), and she and Mary were alone in the room.
I’m not doubting it’s pretty highly unlikely, but utterly impossible? Maybe I’m giving Elizabeth credit for more power than she had, but as queen of England, couldn’t she have made a meeting like this happen if she really wanted to? I could be wrong, of course.