Mary Queen of Scots has been romanticised for four hundred years. Lesley Kennedy is not doing the romantic version today. She is doing the honest one: the good, the bad, and the genuinely baffling decisions of a woman who was brilliant in some areas, catastrophic in others, and the master of her own disasters in ways the films tend to gloss over.

In this episode: Mary's birth at Linlithgow Palace, six days after which her father died, and she became Queen of Scotland. Her coronation at Stirling Castle at nine months old. Thirteen years in France. The return to a Scotland she barely knew, straight into the arms of John Knox. The three marriages: Francis, who was not her fault; Darnley, who absolutely was; and Bothwell, who finished her. The murder of Rizzio. The explosion at Kirk o' Field. The Casket Letters that proved ever ...