'Mary and George Villiers, the most fascinating mother-and-son duo
in British history that you've probably never heard of.
Mary, a down-and-out aristocrat
with a cunning wit and insatiable desire for power.
And George, her impossibly beautiful son,
who proved the ultimate weapon for penetrating
and then dominating King James's court.
The two rocked the foundations of 17th-century England,
performing an astonishing display of social climbing
to wreak political havoc and seize a terrifying volume of power.
As someone with a lifelong obsession with iconic women,
and something of a penchant for niche trivia,
I want to know more about this tumultuous period of Jacobean history
and about the lives of the courtiers and royals
as they romped their way - on horseback, obviously -
through the early 1600s.
So I'm here to meet the new wave of historians unravelling
these complex, messy, emotional versions of our past
and the creative forces responsible for bringing it all back to life.
This is Jacobean history, but not as you know it.
This is Mary & George...
& me.
The audacious historical psychodrama Mary & George
has resurrected these formidable characters to portray
a twisted battle of sex, love and power.
But in order to fully grasp the societal structures
that Mary so elegantly dismantled, I wanted to know a little bit more
about Jacobean Times and King James I's English reign,
which is where my new best friend, author, scholar and lowkey genius
Katherine Rundell, comes into play.'
So to begin with, do you mind giving us just a kind of broad overview
to what's so fascinating about this section of British history?
If you picked up the Jacobean court
and turned it upside down and shook it...(CHUCKLES)
..out of it would fall so many
schemes and love affairs
and a thousand machinating souls.
It was a time where, if you could not strategise,
you fell by the wayside. And it was also
incredibly glamorous.
It was a moment where people were moving away from the more
strict chivalric code of Elizabeth
and toward something a little bit looser, a little bit wilder.
'Cut! Hold it there.
OK, so short intermission for those who slept through history class.
The Jacobean Era - 'Jacobus' being Latin for 'James' -
spans from 1603 to 1625,
and is best known for its cultural bangers,
namely Shakespeare, Guy Fawkes' gunpowder plot,
and King James's v popular translation of the Bible,
which remains one of the most widely read texts in the world.
Starting life with a bang, no pun intended,
in 1567, barely out of nappies,
James, aged one, becomes king of Scotland
after his mother, Mary, Queen of Scots,
was forced off the throne and imprisoned.
In 1603, when Queen Elizabeth I died without an heir,
James inherited the English crown to become King James I of England
and VI of Scotland: a step towards unifying the two nations.
And now back to the main event.'
What can you tell us about James I and how he rose to power?
Shortly after he became king,
a secretary wrote to the Doge of Venice that,
"he seems to have forgotten that he is king
except in his kingly pursuit of stags
to which he is much dedicated." Wow.
He also had terrible table manners.
His tongue was slightly too big for his mouth,
so when he drank, he used to dribble.
So, there's this version of the king, a literal dribbling idiot.
(LAUGHS) But then there's a reimagining
of the king, the scholar king. And is there a particular way
that James I ruled that we can see now?
Was he any different to other monarchs?
James' court was more fluid,
a little bit more open.
Everything was a little bit looser and newer.
And we have these fascinating letters,
written by people who had been prominent in Elizabeth's court,
panicking that they no longer understood the rules
and are utterly dismayed
at what they experiencing is a kind of... snake pit.
'So it was clear from the beginning of James's reign
that he was going to rewrite the rulebook of British aristocracy.
Fast forward 20 years and you find Mary,
ready to take advantage of this new loose society
for her own gains.'
I'm here at the National Portrait Gallery,
which is my favourite place in London.
It's very exciting today because, apparently,
there's a portrait of Mary Villiers here in the archive
that they've agreed to, you know, get out and dust off for us.
Follow moi.
Obviously, she's absolutely stunning.
Where does she normally live? She's part of our reference
collection, so she's normally kept in the archive basement.
How many other images have you ever seen of Mary Villiers?
Well, I guess the most beautiful one is a full-length painted portrait,
but we haven't seen that since it was sold at Christie's in 1938.
No one knows where it is now. So someone's just got that
hanging in their house potentially? I hope so, yes.
Do many people come asking to see images of Mary Villiers?
No. That's really sad!
It is, given the significance of her life and her achievements.
'Eyes fresh from the real deal Mary, it was time
for a coffee with Julianne Moore to find out how she brought her version
of this devious woman to life on screen.'
Mary's character was outrageous in a sense.
Here was this person who had absolutely no agency of her own,
no autonomy, didn't own any property,
had such a strong sense of self and a directness
and a kind of ambition for herself and particularly for her children.
And when you think about what she managed to achieve,
she really left everyone set up very, very well.
Can you describe this relationship she has with her children?
In particular, of course, there's George.Right.
What was it about him that she saw that she felt she could sort of...
manipulate more than her other children?
In her educating them, she learned
that George was utterly charming and a great dancer.
So he wasn't great at academics,
but he was great at entertaining people.
She sees his charm and his beauty
and how attractive he is to other people.
Especially to someone like King James I.Yeah.
Who was, kind of, her main prize. Her idea is
to find a way to, you know...
after the death of her first husband,
who we portray as a brutal and difficult man,
she's looking for a way
to educate our children and keep herself alive.
And the only way she's able to do that
is through her relationships with powerful men.
And she herself therefore becomes powerful,
but she's quite a complex character. Right.
How did you go about playing someone like Mary Villiers?
There was something so outrageous about her,
something so direct. She seemed to have
her own desire for power
in a situation where she might possibly have none.
It felt really unusual and clever.
I think she's written brilliantly. DC Moore, Dave, our writer,
I think, wrote a really interesting, compelling,
very funny, ambitious woman.
What if I come later? When I'm older?
You could.
But if you miss this chance, you'll fail us all
and live like your father, smeared in the unwashable excrement
of eternal shame.
Bon voyage. (THUMPS CARRIAGE)
Do you have an opinion about what was motivating Mary Villiers?
I think ambition. (LAUGHS) Right.
Just raw, kind of, like thirst? Well,
I think... yeah, yeah, but also survival.
Yeah.You know, when you have no autonomy, you have no agency.
All you have is really, you know, through who you're married to
and realising that she has to wield her own charm
or sexuality to gain that agency.
So it's either going to be through someone that she marries
or someone that her sons are aligned with.
And so she did manage to do that really pretty well.
No, it's so impressive! Yeah.As you say,
like, women obviously were completely disenfranchised
at that time.Mm-hm. There were very few options.
'It's pretty impressive stuff. She's like a chess master manoeuvring
her men around like pawns. I'm personally intrigued
to find out what it's like to be on the receiving end of her powers.'
What is George's relationship with Mary like?
And how does that kind of evolve? It's a very complex relationship,
but he's the second son. Mary sees the potential in him,
chooses him out of all her children,
to really put her faith in and back.
He's just desperate for her validation
and her love, and he'll do anything to achieve that.
She really manipulates him and there's obvious, genuine love there,
but it never really comes
unconditionally, which is a very difficult thing for a child to have.
It's interesting as well that your character is
kind of raised like a girl.
It's things we've seen in other series where they're playing
the piano or whatever, or kind of using their wiles.
It's very interesting. I think it lends some
level of femininity to this masculine character.
And I think, you know, we're obviously in this really
interesting time nowadays where the sort of borders
between masculinity and femininity are blending a little bit.Yeah.
There is something within that that modern audiences, I think,
will really appreciate and be able to connect with. This is a woman
operating in a male-dominated world and...
no family rose this quickly
in such a high trajectory during this period of time.
Her power and, you know, Julianne's performance
and portraying Mary, it's hard not to admire.
'It took a team of creatives to excavate
this dark and twisted history where it seems to have lain hidden
for the past few hundred years.
That's until exec producer Liza Marshall got involved.'
It's kind of your fault, all of this.
I suppose so, yes. I was reading an article about five years ago
and I saw a little piece about James I being gay.
I started doing loads of research and tried to find
a really interesting way into his story.
And then I came across Ben Woolley's book, King's Assassin,
then took it to Dave, who then wrote the brilliant scripts.
Obviously you read Ben's book. What happens next?
How do you approach fictionalising this text?
The amount of information there is about Mary for me is perfect.
There are glimmers of this astonishingly
powerful and influential person working behind the scenes.
And as a writer, that really appeals to me because it means
I get to make a lot up, but I also can sort of return
to the well of truth every now and then for the general curve of it.
When you're writing the scripts, you're like, "How do I give
this person an agency, an intelligence
and a wit that she must have had?"
Sir Thomas Compton? Afraid so. You?
Your next wife.
Sorry, love? Don't be.
She clearly had enormous ambition, but that doesn't show up
in the historical record basically until later in her life
when people start to get annoyed with her.
They're very puzzled how this woman from a relatively lowly
gentry background managed to achieve this enormous influence
in James's court. There was a kind of scramble
to understand who she was and where she came from.
I do not own my home.
Or any asset. My children are unwed.
If the king's affection for you curdles, we have nothing.
What was it about Mary Villiers in particular
that you found so compelling? What I always want
to do is try and put women at the centre of history,
because too often history has been written by the men.
In fact, entirely, history's been written by men.
She's a minor character in the book,
but I just think the idea that she essentially pimped out
her very hot second son to seduce James I
was a brilliant jumping-off point for a story.
Her behaviour is complicated in the sense that it's hard
to know whether she's this iconic woman
managing to find her way to power
or whether she was just using someone and is kind of...
a bit of a dark lord. How do you view her?
I think without doubt she was the smartest person in the room,
cos I think to go from the outer reaches of the gentry,
she was essentially a serving woman, so not quite a servant,
but was working in service, you know,
as a sort of gentlewoman to a lady.
And to go from there to become the closest woman
to James I is such an extraordinary rise
at a time when women had virtually no power.
Do you see Mary as a feminist?
Depends what the definition of feminism is.
I mean, if it means supporting other women,
I think probably the answer is no,
because she's definitely prepared to throw other women under the bus
if... you know, if it helps her rise to power.
She's not a sympathetic woman, but she's doing whatever she can
at that time to survive.
So, I think you like her, despite the fact that maybe sometimes
she does some dark things. Yeah.She doesn't have to be
a nice person for us to be compelled by her journey.
What do you think the value is of portraying
these amazingly kind of complex female characters?
Cos that's how women are in real life.
Yeah, you got it! Correct. I think these stories are
really important. I think you need to refocus history
and remember all the powerful women that were there.
Even though it's a slightly heightened world that we're in
and that Dave has created with his scripts,
pretty much everything you see in the drama is true.Yeah.
So she really did do all of these crazy things.
I think it's pretty astonishing that Mary Villiers
is someone that's kind of ostensibly been written out of history,
but actually her actions and her gumption and this kind of
propulsion she had to better her life and that of her families
has led to very meaningful
historical events,
and yet it's someone that we've overlooked.
Think of how many more women there are in history
to explore that have had this butterfly effect
on the way we are.
'Despite the fact that the Swinging Sixteens
were clearly a time of loosening social order,
how Mary infiltrated King James's court was
an outrageously bold achievement, begging the question:
what was royal life like in the 17th century and how might someone
lark their way into it, should they have the taste for power?'
We see a lot of scenes taking place
in Mary & George happening around the king's orbit.
Can you tell us what the king's court actually is?
So the king's court is not one physical place.
It's the group of people around the king
moving from maybe St James's Palace to Hampton Court,
which had kitchens that could feed a thousand people.
So this was an enormous number of people,
and it would be dukes and nobles and hangers-on,
and of course, ravishingly beautiful young men.
'Well, that sounds amazing.
So as Mary clawed her way up the ranks,
her style changed dramatically,
knowing, like many a successful social climber,
the power of looking the part.'
How was it for people in the 17th century?
What did your clothes mean and could they be
wielded as a powerful tool?
Clothes have always been a way of speaking,
whether they're saying, "Oh, ignore me" or "Admire me" or...
"Endow my words with greater seriousness
than you would were I not wearing this enormous hat."
Like, it's always been a way of talking
and Jacobean clothes spoke.
How did people in the 17th century know what was trending?
There was an aisle in St Paul's Cathedral
called Duke Humphrey's Walk. It was said
that if you wanted the most precise
and new set of clothes, you took your tailor by the wrist
and you made him stand behind a pillar and watch the gallants
walking up and down the aisle. And by the end of half an hour,
he would have seen every fresh, new fashion and within the week,
you could have your clothes with the first printing.
Wow! I love that. God, people don't really change, do they?
'Clearly, the power of a great outfit
has stayed true for the past 400 years.
But beyond the obvious, what I'm really here for
is to find out what was hot and what was not circa 1620.
Because fashion's cyclical, isn't it?
So it's only a matter of time before this stuff comes back around.'
I'd wear that now with jeans.
This is my dream wardrobe, legit.
If I could open my wardrobe and it was just like, ye-olde-y...
white frilly things... I'd be thrilled.
I feel like these fabrics are the more drab end
cos they're for the crowd rather than the main characters.
Peasants.
It's a sexy hat.
Incredible.
Isn't that nice?
Sup. Too much?
'And enough messing around.
It was time to remember the reason I was here.'
So the lady who heads up this entire department,
who's like kind of the imagination behind
all of these beautiful costumes is a woman called Annie.
And I'm going to go and find her and ask her to tell me
what the hell is going on here.
So much effeminate bow scenarios going on.
It's nonsense. I love it. (CHUCKLES)
That's like when I try and, like, scuff up my Converse
so they look a bit cooler. Well, send them over to us. (LAUGHS)
Bum rolls. Bum rolls. I love them.
Beautiful. So nice.
'Well, we obviously got on like a house on fire.'
Shall we talk about Jacobean fashion in general?
Like, how did you start to put all of this together?
The first port of call is a painting.
At this period, court paintings were very heavily stylised.
So what you get is a very abstract line of beauty,
which is actually very useful for design,
because designing costume, you're always trying to find
the keys into the period. I think for me,
certainly it's very clear what the Jacobean shapes are
and they're very exciting cos they haven't really been done.
There's a lot of Elizabethan and Tudor costume
and then later Stuart stuff around but not this period.
When it came to approaching Mary's costume, where did you start?
I met Julianne and basically fitted shapes on her to see
what worked on her figure
and what worked with the timeline.
This is Mary. All of this is her costume.Right.
This is her kind of most iconic sort of look.Mm-hm.
I think this shape and it...
it's getting, I think, quite modern.
It's almost new-lookish. It's... Totally.
It has a contemporary simplicity,
but that seemed quite important for her as a character
that, you know, we understood her as a woman with power
and not cluttered with all
the artifice of courts.
This, for example, is when she becomes Countess.
Wow.It really is her Cinderella moment.
Yeah! Beautiful. So we went a bit flash.
This is a more quiet version, but this is her portrait,
just before the height of her wealth and powers.
In Mary's story, the start of her story,
she's fallen on hard times. She's got a grotty hem.
She's got a very grotty hem. She had had money.
Yeah. And it all went terribly wrong.
She ended up dragging herself through the mud,
metaphorically and physically. Mm-hmm.
I wanted to describe that whole world as...
mouldy cheese, stale bread, parched bones, congealed blood.
Some of my favourite patterns in that list.(LAUGHS)
As she moves through her story,
she becomes more and more
eloquent in her clothing choices
and...
wears a ridiculously wrong dress at court,
when she finally gets into court, which is purple,
which is a complete taboo thing to wear.Mm, that's a no no.
And she wears it in the style of Elizabeth I.
But she's doing that to get noticed? Oh, yeah.Yeah.
Everything she does is... she's calculating.
See, this is the power of clothes, isn't it?Absolutely.
What was the most surprising thing to learn about Jacobean dress?
Other than the arm cages, is there anything else?
The falling ruff, this sort of strange transition
from wide sticky-outey ruff
to a soft falling ruff that then developed
into these huge lacy collars.
Oh, that's where that comes from? Yeah, because it all started off
with a little frill at the neck in Tudor times.
And as people got more extravagant,
the frill got bigger and bigger and bigger,
and then it started flopping down again. (LAUGHS)Yeah.
'I was seeing some real potential in this iconic accessory,
and luckily enough, just a few desks down,
I found Marija, resident ruff maker
and authority on all things frilly collar.'
What typifies a Jacobean ruff?
Everything you see before was solid, very, very plain shape,
maybe with a little trim around. Yeah.
And then from 1570s, they started using lace.
Cool that men and women both had them on, so it wasn't just the girls.
The guys were really giving it their best shot as well.
Like Annie said, it was a transition time
from this masculine Tudor stuff into more baroque, feminine.
Everything just became less rigid and square.
But also that might be more a king
that's more open-minded about these things.
Like, if Henry VIII is more kind of like, "I'm a dude."
Yeah. "And I'm big," but old mate James
is more like, "Meh. Let's enjoy some snacks and then we'll shag."
James I seems more masculine in a way, in the fact that he's able
to dress more effeminately. He's probably more confident.
This is George's collar.
That's actually back to front. Oh, my God.
(LAUGHS) Mortified!
This is upside down. Oh, my God. Come on then.
'Next, Annie was taking me to meet David,
the principal costume cutter.' Very noble.
'I couldn't help but get a little bit distracted along the way.'
It feels right. That's amazing.
Ah, we found him.
How is Jacobean men's fashion different to the women's?
In terms of, like, societal position,
they were running the show, so they didn't need the dresses,
the cumbersome dresses. Their costume and their fashion was
a bit more wearable. Still, this silhouette was...
extreme compared to what it is today.
This is for George. This is our main boy.
So Nick is wearing this. The main body or the main jacket
was the doublet, and that would be worn as a modern-day jacket.
Yeah.Clothing was expensive, so normal men of the time
could only afford, say, one doublet or maybe two doublets.
But then they would say, "Let's order six more sleeves."
Oh, great! So it's like a modular outfit.
A bit like a kind of modern capsule wardrobe.Yeah!
The line of it is sort of like a modern leather jacket.
Yeah.Like a biker jacket. So we've softened the silhouette
a little bit and looked to try and bring in modern interpretations.
That's also the thing which we need to remember.
We've been interpreting a Jacobean silhouette for a modern body.
All of our body shapes as men and are completely different
to what they were in Jacobean times. In what way?
More athletic, more broad shoulders,
taller as well, so...
it's been quite interesting
trying to explain the silhouette to our actors as well,
because the shape is not something that we see in modern day.
I googled George Villiers
just to see what he looked like and found a portrait where
he looks like he's wearing, like, a black leather jacket,
barnacled in pearls? Yeah. They loved pearls.
The pearl was a symbol of their might at sea.
And they're beautiful and also they're light-emitting
and it was Queen Anne's favourite jewel as well, apparently.
I like the idea that George might have been conquered by James.
That's why he's got so many
pearls on his costume. (LAUGHS) Yes.
It's also got a bit of a Blackadder vibe to it.
(LAUGHTER)
Once seen, never unseen. Exactly.
'Leaving the makers in peace to work their craft,
it was finally time for what I'd really come here for.'
We're looking for a dress to try on.
Can I nick that?
Do I need underpants?
I'm going to get changed and when I come back,
I'm going to be a dazzling Jacobean lady.
Dazzled. Come on in.
This chemise is soft as butter.
I'm just into how it looks now.
It's so comfy, the bum roll. I feel like you could sit anywhere
and it would be cosy. Junk in the trunk there.
Oof. Lovely!
It just feels like you're being held.
So it's not uncomfortable, it's actually quite reassuring.
It's like being swaddled as a baby.
# I'm just a lonely Jacobean woman... #
(BLOWS KISS)
'Another day, another glorious trailer.'
WOMAN: (KNOCKING) Alexa, hair and makeup are ready for you!Thank you.
'Time to get to work.'
For the period that we're doing, the Jacobean,
ladies wouldn't wear makeup. Really?!
It was more prostitutes that would use it.(GASPS)
Oh, my God. So our aim is to make you look...
flawless, cos that was the fashion.
Very pale. If you were tanned,
you were perceived as working outdoors or a labourer,
whereas pale skin indicates that you live indoors.
You have servants, people to do everything for you.
And how pale would they go? Is it... As pale as they could be.
Similar to Elizabethan times? Like those pictures
of Queen Elizabeth we see with, like, white...
She used a white lead on her skin,
but unfortunately that ate the skin
and it poisoned the wearer.
So they had other things like ground up rice
or starch powder that they would mix to make base.
There was no commercial products as such.
Behind me, I noticed a photograph of a guy with a silver nose on.
That is the advanced stage of syphilis,
and it would eat all the soft bones of your face.
So your nose would be eaten away.
You would go mad because it ate the brain, so the pewter nose
is because he's lost his nose. Wow.
Paul, I love the makeup so much.
Can we add a wig so I can have the full experience?Yes, indeed.
So the fashion was to have
some height at the front, keep it flat on top,
and then a bun at the back, and that was almost universal.
The influence came from the French court.
So Britain followed French fashions. Classic.
So we've prepped one here for you. Great.
Which we'll put on now to complete the effect.I'm so jazzed.
In our story, we have Queen Anne of Denmark.
She was the wife of King James I.
They didn't live together or anything,
they had a very distant relationship, but her hairdos
which we have here, were very, very high,
which we achieve with a cage inside.
Amazing. That denoted a status.
So other courtiers would never have hair as big as she did.
They weren't allowed or it just... It just wasn't done.Right.
And later on in this century,
it became a real thing in society
that the bigger your hair, the more important you were.
"The higher the hair, the closer to God," as Dolly Parton once said.
That's right. Just put your fingers underneath, if you could.
That's it and get it on there at the front.(GASPS)
Oh, my God, and I'm blonde! (LAUGHS)
A lot of dreams coming true today for me.
(LAUGHTER) (GASPS)
Don't think of Mickey Mouse. Oh, I love it!
Wow!
I think I was born in the wrong time. This might be my look.
'To set, for my long-awaited period drama debut.
Turns out I wasn't actually needed, and Queen Anne wanted her hair back,
so here we are.
Deflated hair aside, I was thrilled to find myself
in the grounds of Crowhurst Place, a sprawling English residence
dating back to the 15th century.'
I actually am genuinely interested in interiors.
And this is like the dream house
from the outside, so I'm kind of gagging to get in.
If the clothes are anything to go by, maybe they quite like chintzy fabrics
and, like, opulent, decadent things. But actually, do you know what?
It's looking kind of medieval in there.
'The house is one of many featured in Mary & George,
where a sizeable art department have been breathing life
back into banqueting halls and bed chambers...'
This is very beautiful. That's amazing, the carving.
Oh, my God. Oh, yeah.
'..allowing us a glimpse of Jacobean times
in their full post-medieval glory.'
Wow. You've got a fireplace.
I'll take it. This is where I want to stay now.
Just the height is insane, isn't it? Yeah.
This to us is Mary's London residence. She's made it big time.
Is it a typical Jacobean house?
Short answer is no. It's not a Jacobean house,
in that it wasn't built in Jacobean period.
But that was quite a short period of time.Yes.
Most people would have been living in houses that were...
Built much earlier? Like, now my house is from, like, the 1800s,
but obviously that's not how I've kept it, sadly.
But for someone that's a bit of a novice when it comes to sort of...
Jacobean interiors, what might a signifier be of that era?
So Jacobean interior, they were really...
into things looking flashy,
It was... sort of renaissance interiors.
A lot of wood carving.
A lot of specialist detail.
Let's just say that I'm...
a very wealthy Jacobean person
and I've moved into these beautiful dwellings.
What kind of thing could I look at in terms of decoration?
Your friends are going to think you're quite flash
because you've got a lot of glass, which was very expensive.
On occasion, people would take them out if they were going away
on a long trip because they were like a hot commodity.
'It takes a leap of imagination to picture a scenario
where one might take a window on holiday.
Series director Oliver Hermanus conjured up an entire world
within these harsh limitations.'
A lot of our locations I'd walk into and I couldn't stand up straight.
Life was pretty grim if you were poor.
We dirtied everyone's teeth and we dirtied everyone's fingernails,
including Mary's. I mean, I think that's an interesting thing,
is that there was an extreme. Mmm.
The vast majority of people were not having a great time.Yeah.
So you understand the desire to climb.
Once our story enters the court of the king
and the main characters are around the king a lot,
the king's life is full of hunting and banquets
and he turned his world into this opulence.
It was very unbridled, which I kind of love.
When it came to entertainment,
what would they have for their guests?
A lot of food and the food is interesting.
Our food economist really took this very seriously.
Right.And sometimes I would say that on the set...
We have a scene where the king visits Mary's house
for the first time, and there's this U-shaped table full of food.
Everything that we made, we really made. So this was all done
in the sort of traditional way they would've done it.
They could have anything from, like, 5 to 12 courses.
Lamb, boar, venison,
even things like peacocks.
They would eat peacocks? They would eat peacocks.
It would just be such an extravagant affair.
You'd have like the head table and then you'd have
separate tables for perhaps people that were less noble
or close to the family that were hosting.
Candelabras everywhere. Mmm.
You'd even have musicians coming in,
theatrical things going on. Brilliant.
So it was a vibrant and exciting thing.
And as the drinks flow,
the party just... it just continues.
Wine was very French. There was also the sort of tension of wine
because they didn't really like the French.I like the idea
of them going, "Sorry, are you drinking... Is that a wine?
Get it out of here. He's not gonna like this."(LAUGHS)
James I spent so much time in France. He was kind of French,
and so he loved his wine. So we play into that with the king,
and then there are the live musicians who are in the background,
and I can't imagine how hard that must have been for them,
because there's no sort of, like, volume button on...
(LAUGHTER)
..on the playlist.Right. So it must've just been very noisy.
This is the viola da gamba. "Da gamba" means legs,
so the way you play it, it goes between the legs.
That is how you hold the bow. Oh!So your finger is always
touching the string. Love. If you don't mind,
I'm just going to... (PLAYS DULL NOTE)
..entertain myself for a while. (CONTINUES PLAYING)
'Having tried my hardest, I seem to have failed to land myself
a gig in Mary & George. So it was back to the day job.
Beyond the backstabbing and banqueting, the other
ever-present theme in this odyssey through Jacobean England
is... sex.
What I've gleaned thus far is that the power of sexual desire has played
a huge but underreported part in history.
Luckily for us, contemporary sleuths like sex historian Kate Lister
are throwing back the sheets to reveal a much fuller picture
of what was really going on in the bed chambers of those
who shaped our modern world.'
Why is it important to look at sex
from the perspective of a historian in particular?
Well, how important is sex today?
Right? It's something that we still obsess about and we talk about
and we endlessly pore over and people research.
Everyone's got opinions. Well, it's been like that
as long as people have been having sex.Yeah.
So it's important that we know, first of all, what...
or as close as we can get to know what was going on
in people's bedrooms of yore, but how we've ended up
where we are right now. Yeah.That's important.
How have the attitudes that we have today...
have they always been the same or have they changed? Like, what...
How were gay, bisexual people viewed in the past?Yeah.
And that's really, really important.
I think understanding sex,
that's how you understand humans and human history.Absolutely.
Can you paint a sort of broad picture for us
about what sex lives were like in the Jacobean era?
It depends who you were. Money always talks.
So the more money, the more power, the more influence you have,
the more sex or... whatever it is that you want to do,
you can do that, but there were very strict punishments in place
for regular, everyday people. The church said things like,
"You can't have sex on Advent or Lent
or Wednesdays or Sundays
or feast days or before menstruation
or after menstruation or after you've been pregnant."
Like, when you actually add it all up, you could have sex
like two days a year. Only in ovulation.
Yep. (CHUCKLES)They're like, "It is for getting pregnant."
That's what they taught. "It's for getting pregnant
and have as little fun as possible while you're actually having it."
That was the church's take. Now, that doesn't mean anyone listened.
'In Mary & George, rule-breaking is turned
into something of an art form, presenting a new vision
of Jacobean sexuality captured from a distinctly modern perspective.'
How did you design the sexual cadence of the show?
The characters are very sexually liberated.
It's the characters do not hesitate in having sex.
With George and the king, you know,
when we meet the king, all we know is that he likes orgies
and there are lots of orgies that we shot.
And that was a journey for me in terms of...
inventing many different sexual positions.
(LAUGHTER) You were like, "We've done that one."
Yeah."Sorry." You could do bingo with it, maybe.
Our intimacy coordinator literally had to come
with, like, loads of diagrams and... (LAUGHS)
"We've done that one." I love the idea of everyone
looking at that being like, "Wow, OK."
In fact, the very last day that Tony and Nick worked together,
it was a scene with me and it was them having sex under a tree.
And because we'd been shooting for six months, we were literally
all stood there going, "What haven't we done?"(LAUGHS)
We've been very excited about the fact
that we've... hopefully will show the world
the many different ways two men can have sex.
So in the show, there's a lot of bonking going on.
There's orgies, there's everyone sort of at it.
Everyone's got side lovers. How accurate is that
in terms of history? (LAUGHS) We're not the first ones
to have invented sex. There would certainly have been mass orgies
occurring somewhere and people having all kinds of sex.
We just don't have the documents to prove it.
It's very rare to find, like, an 'I went to an orgy' ticket slip...
(LAUGHS) ..in the 17th century, that we go,
"That definitely happened."Yeah. It's really easy to look at the past
and think that everyone was really repressed and prudish,
but these people would have been a lot more familiar with sex
and naked bodies than we are today in ways
that we can't really conceive of. Like space, for example.
Families would probably be growing up in one room.
So you would probably
have been aware of your parents having sex
cos they'd have been in the bed next to you.
You would certainly have seen everybody naked.
And if you went into work, like, if you were a servant
or something like that, you'd be sharing rooms
and sharing close quarters, so you would see people getting undressed.
You would probably see people having sex in ways
that today would be a little bit strange to us.
Yeah, I guess just by proximity. By proximity, right.
'Sadly, no tickets to the orgy were available.
So I've gone with the next best option:
a trip to a very glamorous studio where King James and George
took a minute out of their busy lovemaking schedule
to reflect upon their characters' expansive sex lives
where spouses and lovers were all carefully attended to.'
What are the main things I can learn about sex and relationships
in the Jacobean era? The more the merrier.
(LAUGHS) I'd say that's...
It's OK to have a threesome. Don't limit it at three.
Don't limit yourself to... Bump those numbers up.
Those are rookie numbers. Monogamy...At least 12, 13 people.
You want to get lost in limbs. It's a snake pit.
It's a snake pit.James, at the time when I first read it,
he was obviously a man who was fluid.
You know, I had a wife, Anne of Denmark.
He had nine children. Three only made it to adulthood.
Obviously there was a marriage of convenience there,
but his sensuality, his sexuality,
he liked men and he fell in love with,
you know, not a handful, but he had his favourites.
At the time, there was no terminology.
People just did what they did.
And I guess because he was the king,
he was not a fan of politics. He was not a fan of going to court.
He was a fan of hunting, he was a fan of the arts,
of writing, and he was a fan of making love, I guess.
He was a very modern man. There you go.
Fuck me alive again.
In the 1600s, was there the identity politics around
that exist today? They didn't have language.
Like today, you'd say, "I am gay" or you'd come out.
Gay today is an identity, your sexuality.
You'd say, "I'm straight, I'm gay, I'm bi," whatever it is.
When we talk about this period in the 17th century,
it's not so much part of your identity
so much as something that you do.
But that doesn't mean that there wasn't
what we now call the gay community. Mm-hm.
We know that there was language being used.
Catamite, sodomite, mollies was a very affectionate term,
used within the queer community. Lesbians were known as
tribades and fricatrices. So there were...
Come again? Fricatrice. (CHUCKLES)
Fricatrices... Yeah, friction.Oh, great.
So we know that this language existed. We know that these
communities existed, but it wasn't...
as open as it is today. But people knew.
Like, there were satirical pamphlets about James
and his many lovers written all the time.
Like, courtiers talk about it, joke about it.
There was an ongoing joke at the time of Elizabeth was the king,
and now James is the queen. Oh!(FEIGNS LAUGHTER)
And then they all fall about laughing. So it was...
I fell for it too. Right? It's very clever.
(LAUGHTER)
Were you surprised to learn that about Jacobean times?
That they were so fluid?The sort of fluidity? Yeah, I think so,
because I think we obviously, you know, as modern people
in the 21st century, we consider ourselves,
you know, at the forefront of being
liberal and conceptual about all these things.Yes.
For George, it's like his sex
and his ability to be so fluid,
you know, it's his power in a lot of ways,
his ability to kind of slip into... you know,
different modes to accomplish what he needed to accomplish.
What do you think his motivation is?
He's driven by this matriarch in Mary, you know?
He is... Everything he does is to kind of achieve
some semblance of validation in Mary's eyes.
But then I think as he goes along,
he realises that he can attain power by himself,
and then it just becomes this voracious appetite for the wealth
and, you know, climbing within this court, you know?
The higher you climb, the more that is possible and...
The more you get laid. A bonk fest.It's a bonk fest.
What's your take on their relationship?
In the beginning, when I read the show and I got to understand
the nature of King James,
he sort of... you meet him as a sort of buffoon in a sense.
The first time you meet him, he's naked
and walking around with an erection in episode one.
But by episode three and four, he deepens as a character
and you realise that he's a very complicated man
and he does very much love George.
And then from George's side, you sense
that he too is in love with James in his way.Mm.
And I remember when we researched the show,
we were made aware of these letters that James had sent George over time
and the nature of those letters and the language of those letters,
are very clearly a love relationship.
I think the letters I wrote, he was deeply in love.
He was in love with a few men in his time.
There was a gentleman in Scotland called Lord Lennox as well.
I think his romantic exploits
and sensual sexual exploits were an escapism, most definitely.
And plus, the fact that, you know, his father was blown up,
Lord Darnley. His mother, Mary, Queen of Scots
was decapitated by Queen Elizabeth,
and he was raised by a bunch of men, a bunch of regents.
They all wanted a piece of him, you know? So it is very much...
Just got to fuck the pain away. Yeah.(LAUGHS)
Heavy sleeps the head that wears the crown, as it were.
If I am Prometheus,
you are the eagle plucking at my liver.(MEN LAUGH)
King James I obviously partial to a male love affair.
How did that influence his decisions in terms of lawmaking?
He actually strengthens the sodomy laws.
He argues that there shouldn't be any room for interpretation
in these cases, that judges should just execute people straight away.
But I thought it was like an open secret to those around him
that he was enjoying this. He doesn't seem to have been
particularly ashamed of this at all, and yet,
when it comes to other people, he was vicious.
The fact that he was falling in love with men,
I thought of that era as being kind of more open.
So we know that by the 18th century,
there is a molly house culture in London.
It probably existed much before that.
We just don't have the records. A molly house wasn't quite
a brothel, it wasn't quite a tavern.
It was somewhere between them.
This is an underground, secretive, marginalised group of people
who will pay a huge price if they get caught.
And was it only for queer people? It was for queer men.
A woman wasn't allowed to go into a bar.
We know that women were having sex with women, definitely.
I'd have put money on it, that there were lesbian gatherings of women,
but it would've been behind closed doors and you'd have to know someone
who knew someone who knew somebody. They were just better at hiding it.
'Reflective of this feminine cunning in Mary & George,
Mary is having her own illicit love affair
across forbidden lines of gender and class.'
Mary, particularly, is probably the more exciting journey, I guess,
as a character, because you make an assumption, I think, about
her sexuality at the start of the show and she kind of defies that
and her major love relationship in the show is with another woman.
The sexual nature of it is incredibly liberated
and exploratory and unapologetic.
Mary's conducting a little business in a brothel,
and she meets this enchanting young woman
played by Niamh Algar named Sandie.
She challenges her and interests her
and they end up in a relationship together.
And it's interesting that there's this tenderness
with a female relationship that she maybe doesn't experience
through her male relationships. Right. I think she feels
a sense of equality with her.
And in a society and in a world where she feels so,
so dominated by the male figures in her life and so powerless,
here she meets someone who recognises her
for what she is and is able to kind of meet her head on.
Were you surprised when you first got this script
to see sexuality in the Jacobean era being represented in this way?
No. (LAUGHTER)
You're like, "Humans are humans." I think people have sex.
Yeah. I mean, I think that's the thing, right?
None of us would be here if they didn't. (LAUGHS)
Why then has history...
or mainstream history kind of focussed on this
sort of straight perspective, then?
Why has so much of it been eradicated?
History tends to be told from the perspective of people who write it,
and throughout most of our history, the people repeating it
have been within a very heteronormative society.
Even if they thought they were gay,
they'd probably struggle to actually say that.
"You're going to out the king? Are you?"Yeah.
You know? So it's not that... I mean, it has been straight-washed.
It has. And we're now in the process of reclaiming it.
But I think maybe we're just ready to have those conversations
in a way that that we haven't been before.Mm.
How important do you think it is to have this incredible
historical queer story living today?
For me personally, of course, it's really important
to make inclusive stories where we look back in history
and tell stories in a way that includes people
and highlights the fact that our assumptions
about the past aren't as clear as we thought they were.
So that's really fun. But I also think it's important
to not drive that home too much because I think the real sign
of inclusion is to not have to label it all the time.
Right. And Mary & George does not
spend its time trying to educate the audience about queerness
or trying to advertise it as a primary.
I think what's really great about it is that we make it
as part of it and it's not the reason for the show
and the nature of the characters in the show
are allowed to be who they are and we don't vilify them for it
and we don't sort of highlight them in a way that makes it seem
like we're trying to be preachy about it.
What do you think is so important about bringing stories like this
to the screen?I think they're entertaining, for one thing.
I think that people really, really love historical fiction.
It's a lot of fun. It's a kind of way to have one foot
in actual history and another foot in fantasy.
You know, it is storytelling and it's beautiful.
It's sumptuously done. The production design is gorgeous.
The costumes are wonderful. Hair and makeup,
all of the terrific actors. I think it's a lot of fun to watch,
but it's also illuminating because I think this is a period of time
that people aren't terribly familiar with.Yeah.
Now that you've had distance from playing this character,
do you have a perception of Mary and whether she was kind of...
this social climbing person
or whether she should be kind of...
more notable in history and someone that's a bit of an iconoclast?
I think it's interesting what she achieved
in a time when women couldn't even own property.Yeah.
And the fact that she actually managed to be buried
in Westminster Abbey? That's a pretty amazing achievement.
When you think about where she came from and what she did
and actually how she set up each and every one of her children
for success, it's pretty remarkable.
So I guess the Jacobeans, not too dissimilar from us.
They loved frolicking and fashion,
major parties. They were all so open-minded
in this attitude towards sex and sexuality,
really in keeping with modern times.
And then we've got this new vision of the royal family.
King James I, lover of banquets and beautiful men,
including his much younger male lover, George Villiers,
who's managed to social climb to this position of incredible power.
And then there's Mary Villiers, who went on this incredible journey,
ending up being buried at Westminster Abbey among kings and queens,
having a portrait of herself, albeit very, very tiny,
stored here at the National Portrait Gallery.
I'm pleased that I got to learn more about her.
'As my excursion through Jacobean England draws to an end,
I'm more acutely aware that the past has been selectively recounted
by those telling the stories.
What's clear is that history is less a static record of facts,
but rather an ever-shifting series of stories,
a multiverse of interpretations of artefacts
left behind by our predecessors.
So all it takes is a fresh lens from a different perspective
and a new version of our past, this time with Mary
and George Villiers centre stage, emerges.'
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