This episode focuses on a tale of two widely contrasting visions of Britain – the vision of Mary, Queen of Scots, and her son James. Mary was the child, who had grown up among the French royal household, groomed to one day be its Queen, as well as Queen of Scotland, and perhaps through her bloodline, Queen of England, potentially at the helm of a vast Catholic empire.

But her husband, the Dauphin of France, died young and as Neil explains, "The glittering future that Mary had been brought up to believe in, started to slip away..."

And so eventually this Catholic Queen, still tilting towards a bigger, grander prize, came to Scotland, a land which had been greatly touched by the advent of the new Protestant thinking.

Her unwise choice of husbands yielded a son and Protestant heir but also led to her abdication and then her flight into Elizabeth's custody. Aware of his mother's imprisonment down south, young James grew up a prisoner of another sort, within the confines of a castle with limited company including a tutor George Buchanan.

The young James VI Scotland (I of England)
[Source: Wikimedia]

Buchanan tried to instil – often with the backing of physical violence – a new sense of kingship into his young charge; a kingship with a sense of the limits of royal authority. But the young James escaped from his shackles, and he too coveted the English throne.

As Neil Oliver says at the outset of the episode Project Britain: "The ambition of an unconquered nation and its royal family, will be the driving force that unites two ancient enemies and sets them on the road to the Great Britain we know today..."

Content last updated: 22/10/2008

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