14. Wrong: Despite serving as the climax of the film, Elizabeth and Mary never met in person but did nevertheless exchange letters and correspond including during the latter’s captivity
The most controversial scene in Mary, Queen of Scots, provoking considerable debate among academics regarding the ethical limitations of making narrative changes in historical dramas, the movie’s climax comes down to a secret meeting between Elizabeth and Mary after the latter’s escape to England. Despite serving as a cathartic and vital scene, wherein Mary declares that should Elizabeth kill her then she would “murder [her] queen”, in actuality neither monarch ever physically encountered one another. Spending most of their lives hundreds of miles apart, even after Mary’s imprisonment in England the duo never came face-to-face.
Although a meeting was planned in 1562, the year after Mary’s return to Scotland, it was abandoned due to political turmoil on both sides of the border and civil war in France. Mary, Queen of Scots is not the first dramatic production to fall foul of this historical inaccuracy, becoming a staple of period pieces exploring the duo’s relationship ever since Friedrich Schiller’s production of his play Mary Stuart in 1800. Despite being fictitious, the scene does offer audiences an acceptable mode to represent decades of written correspondence between the pair. More than fifty letters between Mary and Elizabeth have survived just from the time of the former’s imprisonment, depicting Mary’s fruitless efforts to mend her relationship with her English cousin.