Vulgar History - Mary Queen of Scots： Bonus： Jean Gordon, Highland Salt Entrepreneur

00:00:00.000 Hello, and welcome to Vulgar History, a feminist women's history comedy podcast. My name is

00:00:17.260 Anne Foster, and this is part of our season about Mary, Queen of Scots. There's something

00:00:21.900 about Mary, Queen of Scots. So one of the reference books that I refer to, I think in

00:00:27.720 And so far, every episode that I've done so far about Mary Queen of Scots has been this book, Daughters of the North, Jean Gordon and Mary Queen of Scots by Jennifer Morag Henderson.

00:00:38.860 So it's a dual biography of Mary Queen of Scots, as well as Jean Gordon, who's a woman we talked about just this past week in the episode where we were talking about Bothwell.

00:00:48.440 She was daughter of Cock O'The North, George Gordon, and then Mary Queen of Scots arranged

00:00:54.000 her marriage to Bothwell, and then Bothwell ended that marriage when he did what he did

00:00:58.680 in the last episode we were just talking about. But Jean herself is such an interesting person.

00:01:04.540 And so I invited Jennifer Morag Henderson, the author of this book, to come on and talk about

00:01:09.140 Jean because nobody can speak more authoritatively about her other than her biographer. But also,

00:01:15.180 I do want to say that it was really exciting to talk to Jennifer because her book is like the

00:01:19.860 Mary Queen of Scots parts, but also her description of the whole Cock o'er the North scenario,

00:01:25.340 the way that she explains the Highlands and kind of what some of Mary Queen of Scots decision

00:01:29.340 making, even when it gets into Bothwell, was really, really helpful for me in developing

00:01:34.060 the episodes that I've done about Mary Queen of Scots. Because Jennifer is coming to this from,

00:01:39.540 which was, it's a different viewpoint than what some other biographies are coming

00:01:43.300 at it with. And it really resonated with me kind of looking at Mary as a political figure,

00:01:48.540 how she's making her decisions. Anyway, it's a really great book. So I recommend the book

00:01:53.680 for sure, Daughters of the North, Jean Gordon, Mary, Queen of Scots by Jennifer Morick Henderson.

00:01:58.860 And today we're going to be talking about Jean Gordon. And I'm posting this episode today because

00:02:03.140 that Bothwell episode was rough. That was, I didn't want to leave you for a week just with,

00:02:08.980 you know, that bad taste in your mouth. So what's nice about Jean Gordon's story,

00:02:12.660 And I think I say this right away in the interview is it's got a happy ending.

00:02:16.780 So this is a nice story.

00:02:18.340 When I was reading the book for the first time, I was like, wait a minute, is this a

00:02:21.980 love story that you can cheer for and that ends well?

00:02:26.280 Because it seems like everybody associated with Mary Queen of Scots just had some sort

00:02:30.660 of devastating tragedy happen in their life.

00:02:32.980 But Jean Gordon turned out fine.

00:02:35.260 So this is this is a treat.

00:02:37.220 I was also really happy to talk with Jennifer.

00:02:39.280 So please enjoy this discussion of Jean Gordon with Jennifer Morag Henderson.

00:02:44.980 Okay, so I'm joined by, like from Scotland, I believe, Jennifer Morag Henderson. Welcome,

00:02:52.040 Jennifer. Yeah, thank you. Thanks for inviting me. I am in Inverness in the Highlands of Scotland.

00:02:58.820 I'm really excited to talk to you because your book is so interesting. And I'm really excited

00:03:04.020 to hear you explain the story, but I'm also excited to talk to a Scottish person in a season

00:03:10.280 about Mary Queen of Scots. As a Scottish person, I'm just curious to know, like she's called Mary

00:03:17.780 Queen of Scots. For eight years, she was all over Scotland. I think every castle she stayed in now

00:03:24.900 has a plaque or something saying she was here, she slept here once. So just in terms of, but she's 0.90

00:03:30.200 such a French figure as well and I think she kind of for quite a while she wasn't I don't know what's

00:03:38.140 her relationship to Scotland now where she how do people in Scotland think about her yes I mean

00:03:43.620 it's hard to think that she was only Queen of Scots for such a short time because she had such

00:03:48.820 an impact on Scotland I think people here would definitely think of her as Queen of Scots first

00:03:54.720 i mean they they would know that she was french she's definitely in the consciousness and yeah

00:04:01.180 like as you say there are everywhere that she visited in the whole of scotland they they make

00:04:07.860 a thing of that and and people people know all about it everywhere so yes definitely it's just

00:04:13.880 it's a i don't know if i can think of a another figure for another country who is you know her

00:04:18.960 name is Mary Queen of Scots she there's I would imagine sort of a tourism industry around the

00:04:25.660 things she did but she personally had so little to do with the Scottish I don't know national

00:04:32.540 character she kind of came from away all these chaotic things happened and then she left I don't

00:04:37.200 know I don't know if there's another country with a figure who is so thought about but who is so

00:04:42.320 not actually from there yeah that's really interesting I've never thought of that because

00:04:46.540 yes you do always just think of her as scottish and yeah you think of her as being taken away to

00:04:52.460 france but she's a scot in france but yeah she when she gets back here she doesn't know enough

00:04:59.260 about scottish politics and that's like the big problem with her rule is she doesn't know all the

00:05:05.220 feuds between the different scottish noblemen and she doesn't know who should be her friend and

00:05:10.700 she just she always sees everything in terms of Europe which is one way of looking at how Scottish

00:05:18.700 history works at this point in time but yeah you really also need to know because Scotland's such

00:05:24.360 a small country really but for such a small country it's got the different parts of Scotland

00:05:30.820 are very very different like the highlands of Scotland the far north is really different to

00:05:36.920 the northeast. The northeast is really different to the borders. The borders are really different

00:05:42.300 to the western highlands. And she didn't really understand that. I think there's like one moment

00:05:49.860 in her read where she starts to get that and she could have made it work. But then she kind of

00:05:55.440 veers off again and starts thinking about England and what's happening with Elizabeth. But it's

00:06:00.360 quite a Scottish tragedy like the kind of being kind of a failure and a tragic figure that's very

00:06:07.400 Scottish and actually what you're just talking about I was hoping before we get into the story

00:06:13.520 of Jean Gordon if you could explain north north Scotland northeast Scotland how that is so

00:06:19.440 different from you know around Edinburgh and things like the clans like and all that sort

00:06:24.360 of stuff could you explain sort of how that was functioning during this time yeah so partly it's

00:06:29.880 geographic like partly you've got a big mountain range so um you know when you go north you've got

00:06:35.220 to get over the mountains it's different land it's like the in in the south of scotland that's

00:06:40.780 where the good growing land is so you get um different things can happen there in terms of

00:06:46.600 of towns and cities growing up whereas in the far north where jean gordon ends up spending a lot of

00:06:52.360 her time it's not good growing land and but then you've also got this kind of you've you've got

00:06:58.220 these kind of two systems of government which I talk about in my book and you've got the the kings

00:07:03.260 and queen of Scotland um of Scots rather not of Scotland they're kings and queens of the people

00:07:09.040 not of the land which is an important distinction so you've got them but you've also got the clans

00:07:13.860 and the clan chiefs and the clans it's quite hard to talk about the clans like one of one of the

00:07:20.940 reasons I wanted to to research Jean Gordon was I wanted to know about this because there is so

00:07:27.040 much mythology around clans and what that means and people wearing tartan and kilts and clan

00:07:34.080 chiefs and speaking Gaelic and I really wanted to know what was actually going on at the time

00:07:40.580 of Mary Queen of Scots and particularly for Jean Gordon who's in the far north of Scotland which is

00:07:46.200 not quite the same as the west of Scotland. The west coast of Scotland is kind of the area where

00:07:53.540 the clans are the strongest and remain the strongest for the longest time and that's kind 0.94

00:07:58.960 of like your images that you would get an outlander you know you've got people wearing

00:08:03.420 kilts and tartan and the clan chief is is is in charge yeah this is a little bit complicated so

00:08:10.240 historically there was the lord of the isles and the lord of the isles was genuinely as powerful

00:08:16.180 as the king of scots so the lord of the isles is that's part of the clan system and it's like a

00:08:22.600 a kind of loose alliance of clans and it's going over to Ireland, which is obviously also very,

00:08:29.160 very Celtic. You're thinking about the sea as the way that all these things are joined up.

00:08:35.240 The Lord of the Isles was defeated by the King of Scots and then the King of Scots is now in charge

00:08:40.980 of Scotland. But there were kind of ongoing claimants to be the Lord of the Isles and the

00:08:47.320 very last claimant to the lord of the isles dies the same year that gene gordon is born and this

00:08:54.760 is really important because it means that throughout gene gordon's lifetime the clans are

00:08:58.760 kind of in this state of flux where they're all kind of fighting each other and there's loads of

00:09:03.340 clan feuds and really really bloody battles but they're no longer a threat to the king of scots

00:09:09.480 or queen of scots as it becomes but they are or they were two different systems they even speak

00:09:16.940 different languages. So the Mary Queen of Scots, she speaks Scots, which is a type of English,

00:09:25.280 close to English, not quite the same as English. The clans speak Gaelic. But probably at the time

00:09:31.100 of Mary Queen of Scots, there was probably, the default would be to speak lots of languages.

00:09:37.400 So communication is, we can't, we don't know whether Jean Gordon spoke Gaelic. She definitely 0.98

00:09:44.120 spoke Scots she probably spoke French she probably had a working knowledge of Latin but we don't know

00:09:48.860 if she spoke Gaelic and but we do know that by the time of her grandson he doesn't speak Gaelic

00:09:55.920 because the power of the clans is declining as soon as the lordship of the isles is gone and

00:10:00.580 the last claimant is gone this is like the slow decline of the clans and I make quite a big thing

00:10:06.480 in my book of talking about how there are the clans like the clan Mackay and then Jean sees

00:10:13.280 herself as part of the House of Gordon. And the House of Gordon is not a clan. It operates in a

00:10:19.980 very similar way to a clan. It's a big family grouping. But their allegiance is to the Queen

00:10:26.280 of Scots or King of Scots. And they speak Scots. They don't speak Gaelic. And so I think that leads

00:10:32.160 us kind of beautifully into talking about, I think, another important context. Again, we're

00:10:36.920 going to talk about Jean Gordon. But can you explain the role that her father had at the time

00:10:42.600 that she was born and her father is such a he looms very large he's such an important person

00:10:48.320 so can you just describe where he fits into this landscape yes so he he's really really important

00:10:53.840 he's one of the most important noblemen in scotland and he has he has a huge amount of power

00:11:00.100 in the northeast where he's based that's where he's the edel of huntley and that's where he

00:11:04.780 controls loads of land he has loads of families who pay allegiance to him he grew up at court with

00:11:11.100 James V, Mary Queen of Scots father, and he's a trusted figure at court. He actually acts as

00:11:19.740 regent at more than one point, so he's been trusted to be in charge of the whole of Scotland,

00:11:25.920 and he is basically the most powerful Catholic nobleman in Scotland by the time of Mary Queen

00:11:32.500 of Scots, because a lot of people by this point have converted to Protestantism, and he's the

00:11:37.600 most powerful Catholic nobleman. And he is known as the Cock of the North, or even the King of the

00:11:44.140 North. So Jean Gordon grew up in a really, really important household. And you describe in the book

00:11:50.180 as well, the castle, which is now, you know, it's sort of a ruin now, I guess, but you really

00:11:55.280 describe how fancy it was. Can you talk about Huntley Castle? So Huntley Castle, like what I

00:12:02.900 describing the book is Mary of Guise visiting it for the first time and I mean Mary of Guise came

00:12:07.940 from France and she's used to really really opulent places and she's in Scotland she's like

00:12:14.180 oh it's kind of small the castles are cold so she's on this kind of progress north like the

00:12:21.100 further north they went they're getting into the clan lands people are speaking Gaelic like the

00:12:25.640 French kind of entourage that she was with they thought like it was pretty backward and then all

00:12:31.680 of a sudden they see Huntley Castle. And Huntley Castle is just magnificent. And it is specifically

00:12:39.060 designed to look like a French castle because Huntley, Gene Gordon's father, had spent time

00:12:44.480 in France. And then he'd come back and he'd used a lot of his money to build a French castle in

00:12:51.520 Scotland. And it was, I mean, it's a castle, but it's not one building, like it's a collection of

00:12:57.020 buildings so there's several different buildings and they're a big tower house and then they've

00:13:02.940 got it kind of arranged so that jean's father has like one floor with a suite of rooms and then

00:13:08.740 jean's mother has another floor with a suite of rooms and the castle the castle's still there

00:13:15.200 um it is a ruin it's a pretty magnificent ruin because it is it was rebuilt mainly by jean's

00:13:21.720 nephew but you still get a sense of just how big it is and how you can still see the the cobbled

00:13:29.200 roads that they would have rowed up to to get to the castle and this would have been like Mary of

00:13:34.360 Guise would have been traveling along dirt tracks and like sailing and and really like thick wooded

00:13:40.560 countryside and really in the middle of nowhere and then all of a sudden there's this cobbled

00:13:45.140 path that leads up to this French-looking amazing castle in the Northeast. So Jean Gordon, she is

00:13:53.680 born. She's got numerous siblings. So when she's born, what's the lay of the land? What's going on

00:13:59.680 there? How are things for her dad and for their family? Yeah, so she has a big family, many

00:14:07.840 brothers who are all very close to each other. She is the youngest daughter. She has older sisters,

00:14:14.820 the oldest is already married her oldest brother is already married so she's she's she's one of the

00:14:20.280 younger ones in the family so her family are doing well at this point I mean her father has

00:14:25.940 they they're wealthy they're they're doing well at the Scottish course court and everything

00:14:30.720 Scotland itself is is not doing great Jean is almost the same age as Mary Queen of Scots

00:14:38.380 so it's kind of that when she's born you know there's the rough wooing and there's kind of

00:14:44.020 wars with England. And Jean's father, of course, is involved in all of this, and he is captured

00:14:51.120 by the English more than once. But being captured, if you were a nobleman, I mean, it wasn't like

00:14:56.660 you got thrown in the worst jail ever. You got kept in quite good conditions. So even if things

00:15:02.340 are not great, he is still at the very top of things not being great. So things for the Gordon

00:15:09.060 family are still very, very good. Yeah. And so she's growing up, and this is the period of time

00:15:13.720 Mary Queen of Scots is in France so it's kind of alternating between who is the regent like Mary

00:15:20.480 of Guise is for a while there's also various other men who are doing that so what's the the status at

00:15:26.600 this point of like of her Catholic family during the regency era of Mary Queen of Scots? So during

00:15:33.120 I mean Mary of Guise obviously wants Scotland to be Catholic and she does kind of she negotiates

00:15:39.920 with Jean's father and but the thing is he is so powerful she can't let him get too much power or

00:15:46.540 he might be a threat to her so she kind of she kind of she promises him the lands of Murray which

00:15:52.560 are the lands that everybody wants their crown lands so Murray isn't at this point passed on

00:15:58.160 from father to son it's the king or queen of Scots gets to decide who has Murray and everybody wants

00:16:04.520 the lands of Murray because they're really good fertile lands and kind of she kind of strings

00:16:10.340 Dean Gordon's father along she's like if you help me and support me to be the regent then I will

00:16:14.860 give you the lands of Murray and then once she becomes regent she's like well actually I've

00:16:20.460 promised them to somebody else and I don't think you're doing a very good job of keeping the peace

00:16:25.960 up in the north of Scotland so maybe you're going to have to help me a bit more before I reward you

00:16:30.860 So although he's the most powerful Catholic, Mary of Guise is also trying to keep him so that he's not so powerful that he becomes a threat to her because he has been regent before.

00:16:43.360 So obviously she doesn't want him to take over again.

00:16:45.680 what would be the next significant thing that happens to her family during genes prior to her

00:16:52.300 first marriage which we're going to get to like between being born and that first marriage can

00:16:57.040 you sort of explain and I mean your book gets into this in detail but an overview of kind of

00:17:01.340 what happens yeah they are like right at the top okay so they're really really powerful and then

00:17:06.780 Mary Queen of Scots comes back from France and you would think that she'd be like okay these are the

00:17:11.680 most powerful Catholics in Scotland so they might be my allies and that is not what happens at all

00:17:17.120 it all goes completely wrong for the Gordons and Jean Gordons father he assumed that he would be

00:17:22.860 on Mary Queen of Scots side and he'd said to her you know when you're coming back from France why

00:17:28.140 not come to the north of Scotland you can join with me in the northeast and then we'll ride

00:17:32.980 down towards Edinburgh but of course she doesn't she lands in Leith and she puts a lot of trust

00:17:39.080 in what her half-brother, James Stewart, what he says.

00:17:43.980 And James Stewart tells her,

00:17:46.140 you don't want to trust Huntley,

00:17:48.000 you don't want to trust Jean Gordon's father,

00:17:50.360 trust me instead.

00:17:52.340 And if you remember those lands of Murray

00:17:54.220 that Jean Gordon's father wanted,

00:17:56.920 James Stewart also wants them. 0.99

00:17:59.320 Because with him being the bastard half-brother, 0.99

00:18:02.360 he doesn't have the same amount of lands and power 0.99

00:18:05.160 that he feels should be his birthright.

00:18:09.080 And he wants these lands of money. He kind of talks Huntley down and says, you know, Scotland is Protestant.

00:18:18.380 And of course, James Stewart is Protestant. He's like, you can't upset the delicate balance.

00:18:23.020 And Mary, Queen of Scots, doesn't want to do that at first. She wants to keep it so that there aren't horrific religious wars.

00:18:29.960 So she goes along with what her half brother says. And then she comes north on a kind of progress to show everybody who she is.

00:18:37.560 and this should have been the moment that that she met Jean Gordon and she met Jean Gordon's

00:18:43.060 father and things could have gone really well but there's this really awkward story with Jean's

00:18:49.020 brother John and John has been involved in this quite complicated dispute involving land and

00:18:58.720 there's a woman involved but anyway basically what's happened is Jean's brother John is on the

00:19:04.340 run. And Mary, Queen of Scots, one of her jobs, while she's on this progress in the North,

00:19:09.980 she wants to kind of catch him and put him in prison. And this kind of escalates in a really,

00:19:17.300 like really, really suddenly escalates much more than you think it could. And all of a sudden,

00:19:22.540 what happens is Jean Gordon's father and brother, John, all of a sudden, they're at war with Mary,

00:19:30.820 Queen of Scots. And they didn't really want this to happen. They wanted to be on her side. They

00:19:36.460 wanted to be like Catholics together and working together. But yeah, this has all kind of got blown

00:19:43.680 up. And part of the reason is because James Stuart, Mary's half-brother, is there poking

00:19:49.160 at everything saying, well, I think he's the bad guy. Yeah, we need to do something about this

00:19:55.020 this very, very powerful Errol of Huntley. So it all comes to a head at the Battle of Corrachy

00:20:00.940 when Jean's father dies and two of her brothers, including John, are captured. And then John

00:20:11.560 is beheaded in front of Mary, Queen of Scots. And Mary, Queen of Scots then seizes all of the

00:20:19.400 Errol of Huntley's assets, basically. So all of Jean Gordons, they strip the castle, they take

00:20:25.800 all the furniture, all the wall hangings, absolutely everything. Jean's mother is left

00:20:31.820 with nothing. It's just like this absolutely dramatic downfall from the Gordons being the 0.92

00:20:37.780 most important family down to absolutely nothing. And James Stewart becomes the Errol of Murray,

00:20:44.020 which i think is the motivation behind the whole thing and i have to say from reading your book and

00:20:51.080 watching like seeing that sequence of events was where i really understood her half-brother and

00:20:57.640 just kind of how awful he was i hadn't really there's so many other awful men in this story

00:21:04.300 that kind of upstaged him but through i was just like oh he's also arguably just as bad he is very

00:21:11.020 consequential and and yeah i i have to say he comes out in my book as definitely being the bad guy

00:21:17.740 yeah he he he knew what he wanted and he was on a mission to get it and maybe he could have been

00:21:26.060 forgiven if his regency had turned out to be not so short but it was short but yeah he he doesn't

00:21:33.240 come across well i would say he does not have the stewart charm no and then also just the fact that

00:21:40.100 Mary trusted him so much in the first place he knew how little she knew and then he was able to

00:21:46.440 sort of explain to her through his point of view like oh you should maybe not trust this guy and

00:21:51.600 then yeah yeah she always because Mary of Guise her mother had had actually left and she tried

00:21:58.280 to communicate to Mary Queen of Scots who you should trust and she'd said you know you're

00:22:02.800 going to have to be careful with the Gordons because they are so powerful but she had recommended

00:22:06.800 that she should trust them.

00:22:09.640 But Mary Queen of Scots had been brought up

00:22:11.660 at the French court to always put family first.

00:22:15.520 And she thought, this is my half-brother.

00:22:17.840 He will automatically support me as queen.

00:22:20.540 Everything my half-brother says will be for my good.

00:22:23.720 And it wasn't, it was for his.

00:22:25.820 So we've got Jean then and her family

00:22:27.700 who like very quickly went from being so powerful

00:22:31.420 and so influential to, as you described it,

00:22:33.420 the furniture taken away, everything,

00:22:35.380 turning back to her like what was her experience like when that happened would you imagine I mean

00:22:41.720 for Jean Gordon herself it must have been pretty traumatic because she would have been

00:22:45.680 she I mean everyone in the story is so young I mean Mary Queen of Scots is like 18 at this point

00:22:51.460 and Jean Gordon she's about 16 I mean she was at this point she was thinking about who am I going

00:22:57.260 to get married to oh I really like this guy Alexander Ogilvy oh things are going to be quite

00:23:02.060 good you know like she had all the money she was in this powerful family but she's the youngest

00:23:06.920 maybe she can do what she wants a little bit more than her her older siblings um and then 0.98

00:23:13.120 like all of a sudden they're the queen's enemies and she ends up in Aberdeen watching her brother

00:23:20.760 be beheaded and all these rumors are swirling like her brother is the worst person in Scotland

00:23:26.700 and he was trying to kidnap Mary Queen of Scots and she knows this isn't what happened and then

00:23:32.960 she's taken away from the place where she grew up all of her stuff is taken away she has to move

00:23:38.620 down to Edinburgh I mean what what would her mother do it's not like when I say that her and

00:23:44.940 her mother have nothing like they have nothing in the sense that they are noble women and at that

00:23:50.140 point in time like they would have seen themselves as completely different from people who have no 0.99

00:23:55.560 money and so would Mary Queen of Scots like she wouldn't have left noble women to starve so what

00:24:01.340 they have to do is they have to go to Mary Queen of Scots court they have to go to the court and

00:24:07.740 sit with this woman who she's just watched order her brother to be beheaded who's just been the

00:24:14.500 cause of her father's death and Jean and her mother end up being like Queen Mary's women they end up

00:24:22.060 being sort of like ladies at the court and that must have been yeah that must have been quite

00:24:27.520 intense I would say and but the there are I found some descriptions some contemporary descriptions

00:24:34.100 of Jean at this time and the descriptions are all extremely positive they all describe her as being

00:24:41.160 very quiet you get this impression of of someone who's wearing a mask someone who all their feelings

00:24:48.240 are inside and her all her aim at this point is to put on a show put on a good show we've got to

00:24:55.520 somehow make things better and you mentioned alex ogilvy can you talk about the the young love yeah

00:25:02.640 this is this is one of the things that drew me to to dean gordon's story because she's one of the

00:25:07.800 few people at mary queen of scotts court who kind of gets a happy ending and the very first time

00:25:13.360 that I kind of noticed her in this story I was reading Antonia Fraser's biography the classic

00:25:19.480 biography of Mary Queen of Scots and it's talking about Mary Queen of Scots and Jean Gordon and

00:25:25.040 Bothwell and there's a little asterisk and a little footnote and it said Jean Gordon she wanted to

00:25:32.200 marry someone else before she married Bothwell she wanted to marry this man called Alex Ogilvie

00:25:36.900 and she does get to marry him at the end of her life and have a happy ending and I was like I

00:25:42.820 want to know more about that so yeah so there there was this young man called alex ogilvy

00:25:48.220 alexander ogilvy who was a minor nobleman um and we know from from various different sources that

00:25:55.440 that they had some sort of connection when they were teenagers 16 17 um a very strong connection

00:26:02.380 evidently and then yeah so there jean has this very long and very eventful life she actually

00:26:08.820 marries three times but at the very end of her life she does marry the man that she loves that

00:26:14.780 she has loved since she was a teenager Alex Ogilvy. That's one of the reasons why I'm doing like this

00:26:20.880 episode is coming out when it's coming out just because we've gone through Mary Queen of Scots

00:26:25.020 and sort of like everything going so wrong I thought let's counterbalance that for a minute

00:26:29.020 with somebody who something nice happens to her but but before we get to the something nice

00:26:35.240 happening to her let's talk about her first marriage and how that came about because that's

00:26:41.120 kind of where she's as you mentioned in the Mary Queen of Scots biography in the historical record

00:26:44.920 if anyone prior to reading your book prior to your book being published knew about Jean Gore and they

00:26:49.980 knew oh she was the previous wife of Bothwell so how did she end up married to Bothwell yeah so

00:26:56.580 this is this is kind of the moment where I think it could have worked for Mary Queen of Scots

00:27:01.720 because so everything's kind of gone wrong with Darnley and Mary Queen of Scots has realised that

00:27:07.580 her half-brother is maybe not working in her best interests so she starts to look at who's at court

00:27:12.760 who's actually on her side and she's like right Bothwell is on my side and the Gordons Jean

00:27:20.200 Gordon's family despite everything Mary Queen of Scots did to them they are also on her side

00:27:25.680 Jean Gordon's brother and Bothwell are quite good friends and also Bothwell is from the borders

00:27:32.180 and Jean Gordon is from the north and this brings two parts of the country together if she can get

00:27:39.680 Jean Gordon and Bothwell to marry. So it's a really really clever union that brings together

00:27:45.000 two of her strongest supporters who can call on huge amounts of men who could fight for her

00:27:50.820 and it brings two parts of the country together and Bothwell has all sorts of connections to the

00:27:57.340 north as well because he although he's from the borders he actually grew up partly in the north

00:28:02.660 of Scotland with his great uncle in Moray in fact so he has all these connections with with the north

00:28:11.720 and he understands it so it could have been a great success if Jean Gordon and Bothwell had

00:28:17.760 actually liked each other which they didn't is this a true you say this in your book and whether

00:28:23.760 it's true or not it's a good story but wasn't there something like on their wedding night

00:28:27.720 jean gordon appeared dressed in like black mourning dress to be like i don't love you

00:28:32.200 i will never love you i love alex ogilvy yes i'm in mourning for my lost love i was forced to marry

00:28:39.200 you is it true i spent a long time looking for the source for this because it came up in a lot

00:28:45.280 of secondary sources and I was like where is this story from I want to know more about this

00:28:49.580 it's obviously quite an intimate moment um their honeymoon so I think the source that I could trace

00:28:56.660 it back to is um Bothwell's mistress Anna the Scottefruen from Norway the casket letters um

00:29:05.940 and you'd probably need like a whole two hours or to go into the casket letters the casket letters

00:29:12.140 are probably based on letters that Mary, Queen of Scots wrote, that Jean Gordon wrote, and that one

00:29:18.240 of Bothwell's mistresses or former wives, Anna, wrote. And the story about Jean Gordon wearing

00:29:25.140 warning clothes seems to come from Anna, because Bothwell had this mistress, and this becomes

00:29:31.720 entangled with Jean's story, and they were kind of sniping at each other, and Bothwell was telling

00:29:38.440 both of them a lot of details. So yeah, I think it's a very, very good story. There certainly

00:29:45.780 seems to have been something very dramatic happen on their honeymoon because it's cut very short

00:29:51.740 and Bothwell comes back to Edinburgh to maybe Queen of Scottish Court a lot earlier than planned.

00:29:58.580 I'm going to talk about the casket letters in the next episode, but effectively they were letters

00:30:06.340 that were later rewritten or reinterpreted as like these were from Mary, Queen of Scots. But

00:30:12.800 actually, what you found is they were probably letters from Anna, letters like from Jean,

00:30:19.500 like these were the people writing to him, not Mary. Yeah.

00:30:23.020 I think they make a lot more sense if you see them in the context of Bothwell's life rather

00:30:27.360 than in the context of Mary, Queen of Scots life. Obviously, they're kind of altered and

00:30:32.820 used as evidence against Mary Queen of Scots and some of them certainly came from Mary Queen of

00:30:37.460 Scots but yeah I use my books all kind of referenced and you can you can follow the

00:30:42.560 footnotes to to see where I got where I got the the references for the casket letters but

00:30:47.880 yeah there's a there's a biography of Bothwell and which is a very passionate biography which is

00:30:53.580 it's quite old now and by a guy called Robert Gore Brown and I very much kind of that was my

00:31:00.020 starting point for learning more about Bothwell's life and about his mistresses and about kind of

00:31:04.700 exploring the casket letters that way. I will say, and what I have attempted to do in my own

00:31:11.240 Mary Queen of Scots episodes, because I'm coming in knowing how the story ends, but a lot of

00:31:16.080 listeners don't. So I'm trying to do inspired by what you did in your book to just like, here's

00:31:20.760 Bothwell and he's helpful and he's in her corner. Like, I don't want to spoil how it all ends,

00:31:26.360 but you do such a good job in your book I was just like wow I've never especially early on

00:31:31.600 when he's there and he's by Mary Queen of Scots's side I'm like I've never seen him be treated so

00:31:37.080 evenly I guess he's I find Boswell fascinating I mean he raised such strong emotions at the time

00:31:45.620 and he still raises such strong emotions now but yeah it's hard to look at his story without

00:31:51.180 knowing what happened to him but i think it's really important to see how he was seen when he

00:31:57.840 first appears on the scene and how mary would have seen him and and to understand where he's

00:32:02.260 coming from and and his background as well side note and we don't need to get into this

00:32:07.700 but on the television show rain which i don't know how people in scotland feel about that show

00:32:14.080 but there's i thought it was really an interesting choice that the show made when they introduced

00:32:18.860 bothwell as a character he's this strapping handsome guy who is helping her and i thought

00:32:24.100 what are they doing why would they ever but in your book it's like that's how he comes on the

00:32:28.300 scene yeah i would say that i haven't seen rain well that's not true i've seen i managed 10 minutes

00:32:33.720 of rain yeah i would say when when he first appears he's he's not he's not how he's seen

00:32:41.820 later on and also a lot of how we see him is through the eyes of the like in terms of contemporary

00:32:49.680 sources a big contemporary source that everybody uses is the English ambassador's notes and the

00:32:56.000 English ambassador does not like Bothwell because Bothwell at a time when people's allegiances were

00:33:02.820 often to their religion first Bothwell his allegiance is to Scotland so the English ambassador

00:33:10.140 is not going to like him and this partly comes from where he lives because he's he's from the

00:33:14.640 borders and the borders are the region that suffer the most when scotland and england fight because

00:33:19.540 the fight is obviously going to be on the border so he he sees things differently from a a lot of

00:33:26.480 the the lords who who are whose lands are not the ones that are being fought over but he's also i do

00:33:32.320 want to mention it's not like he comes in and he's great and then he turns great like he's a he's a

00:33:37.880 wild card he is like he's coming into this he's got Anna who is maybe his wife but like they had

00:33:45.080 some sort of entanglement he is married to Jean in this and if he and Jean had had a different

00:33:52.680 personal relationship things could have gone very differently but they right away clearly don't get

00:33:59.220 on with each other he very quickly starts having an affair with one of the servants right yes yeah

00:34:05.640 Well, the affair with the servants, that's what's cited in the divorce that he gets from Jean.

00:34:11.080 So that's why we know so much about that.

00:34:13.280 But yeah, you can't really say, oh, he was the good guy.

00:34:16.620 I mean, he's got his own character quirks.

00:34:22.240 I find Bothwell so interesting because he's like, here is point A and here is point B.

00:34:28.060 And I'm going to go from point A to point B, no matter what is in the way.

00:34:32.740 And what is in the way might be other people. You might cause all sorts of problems, all sorts of hurt. But he he has a vision. People with a vision are uncomfortable.

00:34:43.320 So we're going to get to how this marriage unravels. I don't know. But if we're just kind of going sequentially, the next major historical event that Jean is tertiarily involved is the murder of Rizzio.

00:34:57.080 Yes. So she would have been there that night. Yeah, she would have been in, she was living in, in, in Hollywood at that point, in married quarters with Bothwell. And Bothwell is, yeah, Bothwell is there. Her brother is there. Her mother is really involved in the escape that Mary has to make afterwards.

00:35:18.040 so yeah that is that is like another moment when it's the moment where this thing that

00:35:23.820 Mary Queen of Scots has set up with Bothwell and Jean it seems to work because she's in trouble

00:35:29.680 who's going to come in and save her an alliance of the Gordons and the Borders and it works it yeah

00:35:37.220 there's a part in your book where and again I don't want to be like is this true is it not true

00:35:41.540 but you say it and it's a great story so in the part where Rizzio has been murdered Mary is sort

00:35:47.400 of trapped in a room and she's being sort of held hostage gene's mother comes in with a rope ladder

00:35:53.460 in a tray pretending like it's food so she can escape yeah she was um so gene's mother was uh 0.65

00:36:01.600 one of mary's kind of ladies-in-waiting like person lady who would help her um and she comes

00:36:08.580 in and mary queen of scotts is pregnant obviously very very pregnant she's like i'm not feeling 0.92

00:36:13.900 great someone's going to have to check me jean gordon's mother she had what like 12 14 children

00:36:20.620 so she's like right i i will go with her to the to the toilet and we will we will make sure

00:36:25.840 everything is okay and she's and she goes in and she's like right i can take a note to my son and

00:36:31.360 to bothwell and then we can get and then i will come back in later and and how are we going to

00:36:35.960 do this how are we going to escape i will bring a rope ladder in and we will and you can escape

00:36:40.720 down the rope ladder and Mary Queen of Scots is like I'm six months pregnant I'm not going to

00:36:46.040 escape down a rope ladder um I will write a letter with instructions get the letter to your son and

00:36:51.740 to Bothwell and we will we will that's when she decides to speak to Darnley and get out that way

00:36:57.160 but yeah and Jean's mother was like yeah we'll get a rope ladder we'll get out that way I've

00:37:01.200 had 14 kids you could totally do it yeah that I love that detail and I love that uh just especially

00:37:09.220 the first part of gene's life is so entwined with what's happening with mary queen of scotts like

00:37:15.160 the fact she's there the night that that murder happens and the fact that her like again this is

00:37:19.380 a part where it's kind of like oh this is working the gene bothwell marriage brought together these

00:37:24.460 groups and that's part of why mary was able to escape yeah and then and then she's there as well

00:37:30.120 the night that darnley dies um she is bothwell's alibi for the night that darnley dies they say

00:37:36.560 where were you and he said I was in bed with my wife for most of the night so yes she is right in

00:37:42.960 the middle of court and and she would have known everything that was going on I mean the stories

00:37:47.760 that she must have had I imagine her as an older woman with her own children like she must have

00:37:55.200 been able to tell them so much and so the Darnley actually you described this in a really interesting

00:38:01.540 way I hadn't thought about this before in this way the fact that Darnley's death is because of

00:38:07.500 an explosion that was the first time what okay his death was mysterious but an explosion was

00:38:14.100 involved whether or not that's what killed him but that was shocking to everybody because like

00:38:19.380 not a bomb but just like gunpowder that had never been used in that way right yeah so this is one of

00:38:25.480 the really interesting things about this period in history like it's it's the early modern period

00:38:30.940 And one of the things that makes it modern is the advances in weapons and gunpowder and guns.

00:38:38.340 And it's, yeah, an explosion.

00:38:41.320 Like, they hadn't had the technology to do that before.

00:38:44.560 People in Edinburgh heard this explosion where the house that Darnley was living in was blown up.

00:38:49.720 They would never have heard a man-made noise like that before.

00:38:54.060 I mean, it must have been.

00:38:55.180 imagine hearing a bomb going off for the first time and you didn't know what a bomb was it must

00:39:02.080 have and it really affected how like other heads of states they kind of looked at this and they

00:39:08.420 were like we it didn't even occur to them that this could have happened before like the world

00:39:13.840 that they lived in was changing it was it was becoming this modern thing with with access to

00:39:19.240 these horrific new technologies. So yeah, I think that's a really key way of kind of understanding

00:39:25.920 the early modern time period. Well, and then later on, a similar thing happens when Moray,

00:39:33.240 her half-brother, is assassinated by being shot. And that's the first assassination by gun, right?

00:39:39.960 Yes, one of Scotland's fantastic records there to have the first head of state who is assassinated

00:39:45.000 by a firearm yeah but it hadn't occurred to kings and queens that an ordinary person could

00:39:52.980 shoot them in the street like that that's a real shifted mindset that's that's a world-changing

00:40:00.360 thing that that this could happen that that potentially somebody who's because like things

00:40:06.880 would be really rigid in terms of like class at this point like you would have your noblemen and

00:40:12.100 you would have your poorer people and you would never switch. But anyone can fight a gun. I mean,

00:40:17.640 not anyone can access a gun, obviously, because guns are expensive and whatnot, but potentially

00:40:22.360 anyone can fight a gun. It's a world altering thing. Yeah, one of the trickle down effects

00:40:29.280 you said was right away, just other heads of state heard about this, specifically the assassination

00:40:33.160 of Moray. Elizabeth suddenly, dramatically, I think you said, increased her security and of

00:40:38.500 like suddenly they increased their security yeah yeah yeah because they're like oh we did we

00:40:44.340 didn't this didn't occur to us before yeah i mean scotland was pretty violent at that point in

00:40:50.200 in time so yeah leading the way in new forms of violence so from a gene point of view as much as

00:40:58.140 possible given that she's not an active member of this thing but how did it affect her the sort of

00:41:04.640 fallout so Darnley was murdered Bothwell was the sheriff of like he was leading the investigation

00:41:13.600 right yeah it's one of his titles at this point is one of his sort of positions of responsibility

00:41:19.740 is he's officially in charge of justice and pursuing who is who might the murderer be

00:41:26.620 but all these placards are going up saying well we think it's Bothwell who's the murderer

00:41:31.340 so yeah so it's really awkward so they end up putting on this show trial basically at the

00:41:37.140 sort of insistence of Darnley's father but Jean is actually really ill at this point so she is not

00:41:46.880 even like you only hear about what's happening between Bothwell and Mary Queen of Scots at this

00:41:52.100 point Jean is barely in this story and because she she would have been because her job is to run 0.79

00:41:59.720 Bothwell's estate. That's what she would have done as Countess of Bothwell. So she would have 1.00

00:42:05.700 been in his main castle, which is a little bit south of Edinburgh. But yeah, the report is at

00:42:11.860 this time that she's just really, really ill. And we don't know, it's hard to tell what illnesses are

00:42:17.220 at this distance. She does retrospectively say it's partly stress because she's married to

00:42:23.440 Bothwell. Honestly, fair. So why did people immediately suspect Bothwell of being involved 1.00

00:42:31.520 in the Darnley murder? Well, he was probably involved. Yeah, definitely. But also Mary's

00:42:40.320 half-brother, Murray, he does not want Bothwell on the scene. Yeah, he would be a useful fall guy

00:42:49.100 for a plot that probably an awful lot of people were involved in well yeah well when you think

00:42:54.680 about if you need to get make the plan to blow up a house which no one's ever done before

00:43:00.460 to acquire the gunpowder to do everything to do that like one person didn't murder yeah

00:43:07.340 Darnley like this was a group of people so the half-brother again he's still on the scene and

00:43:13.900 still being like to me like a surprise bonus villain in a story full of villains so you make

00:43:21.980 a point in your book and you do it in a very subtle way every time something major happens

00:43:27.040 like this he happens to be out of town he's yeah he's he's never there he's he's like well it

00:43:32.980 definitely me wasn't me because I definitely wasn't in Edinburgh on the night when that

00:43:38.240 happened and also I wasn't there the week before or the week after but he's always not there I mean

00:43:44.460 he knew what week he had to not be there yeah but yeah he's he he knew what was going on practically

00:43:51.300 everybody I think knew what was going on because nobody wanted Darnley at that point and the whole

00:43:57.140 I mean there's this big explosion but Darnley escapes from the explosion he's found strangled

00:44:02.540 outside he's not he doesn't actually die in the explosion and there were kind of reports of like

00:44:08.840 because there's the big explosion so everyone comes running out their houses so there's these

00:44:13.200 reports of kind of ordinary edinburgh citizens say that they heard darnley saying oh pity me

00:44:20.300 kinsman so presumably it was a kinsman possibly douglas who strangles him but i mean if you're

00:44:28.160 an ordinary edinburgh citizen and and all of a sudden you're embroiled in this plot that all the

00:44:33.800 nobles in scotland seem to be embroiled they would never have got a sensible witness to the witness

00:44:40.440 box nobody would want to draw attention to themselves in that way so there's this show trial

00:44:44.760 and just through the book and you've done and i want to tell the listeners like jennifer does such

00:44:49.760 a fantastic job of explaining who is who even though everybody is named george you you find

00:44:56.240 other things to call them but when you talk about the show trial and you're like and here's the jury

00:45:00.460 and the jury is like alex ogilvy gene's brother it's like right yeah it's like all people who

00:45:06.300 we've met before in the book yes the jury is if they're not a bothwell supporter they're a gordon

00:45:13.380 supporter and because the gordons and bothwell at this point are still i mean all the nobles knew

00:45:19.140 each other it's a small country and it's a small elite but yeah the jury was very heavily weighted

00:45:24.840 towards people who would do what the Gordons and Bothwell wanted them to do and so Bothwell is found

00:45:31.780 innocent and I mean this I talked about this in the previous episode like what happens next like

00:45:38.160 no one could have foreseen which is that he decides he's gonna marry marry Queen of Scots

00:45:46.960 and makes that happen in a very violent way but so gene he's already married to her so how like

00:45:55.560 how do you think i think you suggest in your book maybe she was so ill he might have thought oh she's

00:45:59.820 about to die so that'll make this easy but she didn't die so how yeah how did that marriage

00:46:05.520 dissolve so that he could marry mary queen of scots yeah so they divorced very comprehensively

00:46:11.500 both Catholic and Protestantly

00:46:13.780 when Bothwell

00:46:15.860 is in Dunbar with Mary Queen of Scots

00:46:17.920 and all the stuff is happening there

00:46:19.380 he kind of sends an express

00:46:21.560 rider to Jean and he's like

00:46:23.960 we're going to get divorced and she says

00:46:25.720 no we are absolutely not going

00:46:27.840 to get divorced and he

00:46:29.780 says oh yes we are

00:46:31.200 with how much force

00:46:33.600 we don't actually know but eventually

00:46:35.640 she's like okay I suppose we're going to get

00:46:37.720 divorced and they 0.65

00:46:39.540 yeah, they do. She manages somehow to hold on to the land that he gave her in their marriage 0.85

00:46:50.620 settlement, despite the fact that they get divorced. She didn't want to be, because she'd

00:46:56.260 already seen her family code from really powerful to absolutely nothing. She didn't want to end up

00:47:02.360 with absolutely nothing again. That's kind of her, one of her kind of reasons probably for saying,

00:47:08.360 I don't want to get divorced. And also she was Catholic, so she couldn't really get divorced.

00:47:14.260 It's a kind of separation. And yeah, just like the whole thing was becoming a mess and she just

00:47:19.540 didn't want it to happen and become like this. So she's trying to stay out of the mess and trying

00:47:25.440 to keep herself safe and still with some money and land. It all happens very quickly.

00:47:32.300 Really quickly. For the time period. Just a few weeks. Yeah. And it's like, oh yeah,

00:47:36.800 it's over yeah and so but then also what happens with mary and bothwell's new marriage which i

00:47:43.900 talked about in the last episode like that all goes bad really quickly like bothwell is now a

00:47:49.200 poisonous person to be to have anything to do with and so gene how does this affect her reputation

00:47:56.240 to be the ex-wife of this guy who is now public enemy number one and now we're just going to take

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00:51:09.580 Yeah, so I mean, she needs to try and make herself safe.

00:51:14.660 So she goes to the person she thinks is going to be able to help her the most,

00:51:19.260 which is her cousin Agnes.

00:51:20.780 because Agnes is married to Mary, Queen of Scots, half-brother, James Stuart, the Errol of Murray.

00:51:26.880 So she goes to Agnes and she says, I don't want anything more to do with Bothwell.

00:51:31.740 I'm completely innocent and all of this. And also I'm going home to the northeast.

00:51:36.940 And that it kind of gets her out of the situation.

00:51:39.380 And she's kind of publicly allied herself with Murray, who's who's in the ascendant.

00:51:46.020 Yeah. And then she goes back up to the northeast where her brother is now the Errol of Huntley,

00:51:50.200 back to Huntley Castle where she grew up. What I appreciated in this story that I don't often see

00:51:56.500 in the women whose stories I research is that her family was always there for her and helped her.

00:52:02.740 So I appreciated that she had a place that she could go and that the Gordons were family first,

00:52:08.520 like no matter what had happened, Jean always had a support system.

00:52:12.660 She seems to, like they seem as a group of siblings, all these absolutely terrifying

00:52:17.380 brothers that she had they seem to have been particularly close and one of the sources that

00:52:24.040 we have for this is Jean's son who she has eventually Robert writes a family history

00:52:29.280 and he kind of describes the Gordon siblings as being like really really close like even at a

00:52:36.840 time when family was everything because that family was absolutely everything in the 16th

00:52:41.380 century in Scotland even at a time when family was everything this was a close family. She was

00:52:46.980 probably brought up closely with her brothers and educated alongside them she had a very good

00:52:51.360 education because it's a high point for girls education and yeah they are there for her when

00:52:56.760 when she needs them her brother george because everyone is called george and but her brother

00:53:01.860 george who's now the edel he he was bothwell's friend and bothwell comes to him and says can

00:53:07.980 you help me and he says no because of what you've done to my sister so yeah so when it came down to

00:53:13.940 it was he going to help his friend or his sister he was going to help his sister he was going to

00:53:18.080 help Jean that it's just it's really rare and it's this is again where I feel like gee there's

00:53:24.840 obviously so much drama and stuff but this is to me in the context of this podcast a nice story

00:53:30.520 yes I mean apart apart from all the blood and feuds and and horrific injuries yeah but they do

00:53:37.900 They have the kind of image of these strong brothers and Jean and her sisters as well, because they stand up for her other sister, Margaret.

00:53:47.640 Her older sister, Elizabeth, is dead by this point, but her sister, who's closer to her in age, the brothers stand up for her as well.

00:53:57.020 And they help her sort out her marriage, which also goes horribly wrong.

00:54:01.600 And you just get this impression of this strong family.

00:54:04.620 there are some descriptions of of gene's brother george kind of playing football with the with the

00:54:11.500 men in huntley castle and having meals with them and you just get this impression of of this really

00:54:17.940 convivial family group who genuinely got on with each other again like all the details are in your

00:54:24.400 book but if we're just going to kind of like focus on gene and her story the next thing that kind of

00:54:28.840 what happens that affects her in a profound way is that she thinks both well is dead which gives

00:54:34.920 her the freedom now whether she believed that she was divorced or not to now find a new husband or

00:54:39.980 makes her family realize that like gene could maybe be remarried this is the part in your book

00:54:46.000 listeners this is such uh i was reading this book with the frantic pace that i usually read like a

00:54:52.360 psychological thriller or murder mystery because jennifer puts these cliffhanger endings at the

00:54:56.900 ends of chapters and you say something like to explain about gene's next husband first let's move

00:55:01.640 back a bit i need to tell you the story of a poisoning and my my break at work was over and i

00:55:06.980 thought i can't i can't put down this book she's going to tell me the story of a poisoning so but

00:55:12.300 explain who her next husband is please yeah i mean there are so many like the stories around

00:55:18.640 mary queen of scott's life are well known but the stories around dean gordon's life they're amazing

00:55:23.440 and the Helmsdale poisoning and what happens to her, her future husband is just, I mean,

00:55:29.340 even people in Scotland don't know these stories so well. And it's just like, you need to know this

00:55:33.860 because it is such a good story. But yeah, she does, she remarries, when she believes Bothwell

00:55:40.140 is dead, to the Errol of Sutherland, who is Alexander Gordon. Alexander Gordon, the Errol

00:55:48.820 of Sutherland has this dramatic escape and there's the poisoning and there's all sorts of stuff

00:55:52.420 happens and so he's had this kind of traumatic life and also former forced marriage and Jean's

00:55:58.980 had this traumatic life and forced marriage with so these two people kind of find each other

00:56:04.020 and they get married and it's a happy marriage this isn't the man that she was in love with

00:56:09.520 when she was a teenager this is someone else and this is she would have believed at the time this

00:56:14.060 was it this was the person she was going to marry this was going to be the rest of her life

00:56:17.620 And it turns out really, really well. And they are happy. And so she moves over to the far north of Scotland. So that's north of where I am here in Inverness. And they live at Dunrobin Castle. And she's the Countess of Sutherland. And she does all sorts of things because her husband is not really, she's the power.

00:56:40.500 She and her brothers, the Gordons, are the power.

00:56:43.780 And she does all these incredible things.

00:56:46.600 And she's this amazing businesswoman.

00:56:48.480 And she starts this coal mine and salt pans and just industry at a time in the Highlands.

00:56:55.780 But people do not, they're thinking the Highlands are clans and wild men.

00:57:00.640 And she's doing this incredible industrial development.

00:57:04.320 and really what she does in the far north really alters Highland history. At the same time,

00:57:12.320 it's a happy marriage. So it's an incredible part of her story that's not as well known as

00:57:17.180 the part with Bothwell. Can you talk about or just explain what the business was? What is a salt

00:57:23.000 pan? Okay. So salt is really, really important at this time because you don't have fridges yet.

00:57:30.540 so how do you preserve food you need salt okay so salt is people sometimes called it white gold

00:57:37.380 that's how important salt is so if you have salt it's a commodity that you can sell for cash

00:57:44.860 and this is still at a time when the economy is still kind of people are swapping food and

00:57:49.500 when she got her rent on the estates it would be rent in kind so it would be it would be food

00:57:54.700 rather than than money but she figures out this way to make salt which she can then sell for cash 0.99

00:58:01.200 So it's sea salt. 0.67

00:58:03.580 So what she's doing essentially is you get a big pan and you put loads of seawater in it and you boil off the water and you're left with the salt.

00:58:11.300 In order to do this, you need a ready source of fuel.

00:58:14.580 But she knew that there was a coal mine.

00:58:18.080 There was a seam of coal near to where she was now living with her new husband, the Earl of Sutherland.

00:58:23.380 so she sets up a coal mine and they can dig the coal and use the coal to boil off the seawater

00:58:30.260 to make salt she can then sell the salt they were selling it as far as as far away as France

00:58:36.260 and not just selling salt but also selling things like salted fish so there's lots of fish in the

00:58:43.180 rivers round about so they're catching the fish they're salting the fish they can then pack it and

00:58:46.920 send it on boats and sell it and you're making money yeah which is a big thing i think this is

00:58:53.740 where in your book you have like part one and then part two but to me slash to the average you know

00:58:59.780 history aficionado if you've heard of jean gore and it's like yeah she was the previous wife of

00:59:04.700 bothwell and so everything we just talked about like she was all up in the mary queen of scott

00:59:08.580 story but then the whole rest of your book is like and then she did other stuff too and it's

00:59:14.900 not like it slows down i mean it keeps on going because there's there's all the stuff with the

00:59:21.020 she's doing with salt but there's also this whole other story with the clan makai that's going on

00:59:27.140 as well yeah how long do you have i could talk about this for hours well and this is the thing

00:59:33.560 this is where like we got to the like the mary could have scott stuff i was just like i know that

00:59:37.640 story in another context so just seeing what gene's involvement was like okay this part yeah

00:59:42.020 Darnley Bothell okay and then this stuff where you're just like what was happening here's what

00:59:47.240 I know now which is just that Scottish history is really exciting like there's always a rivalry

00:59:52.980 there's always a murder poisoning is involved like it's it's it's a very action-packed what's

01:00:01.140 going on in Scotland yes it's there's a lot going on and I think the the history of the north of

01:00:08.760 Scotland because eventually over time like the north of Scotland the the population is much

01:00:13.440 smaller up here now and but at the time that Jean Gordon was living that hadn't happened yet the

01:00:17.920 clearances hadn't happened yet so but because of everything that's happened since the history of

01:00:23.520 the far north of Scotland is really understudied and I really like obviously my own way into the

01:00:31.220 story was Mary Queen of Scots and I was interested in Mary Queen of Scots but then I was interested

01:00:35.860 in the North because I'm from the North. And I just became, I was like, you know, the bit with

01:00:41.160 Mary Queen of Scots is interesting, but there's all this other stuff, which is also fantastic.

01:00:47.260 And there's just the stories and you get such a strong impression of the personalities of everyone

01:00:55.260 involved. And it seems, I wanted to tell all the stories because they just, they seem so real,

01:01:01.260 like they are real but but it's it's so modern like one of my main sources for my book was Jean

01:01:07.820 Gordon's own letters like written in her own handwriting and I was I was reading these letters

01:01:14.840 and it's this really weird balance between things that we know about from history books

01:01:20.160 and then she's also talking about her servant and so-and-so's baby and oh did you hear about this

01:01:27.260 and half the stuff she's talking about is stuff that you know and the rest of it is just like

01:01:32.380 this family story and I love that mixture of the the kind of grand stories of history

01:01:39.060 and not just Scottish history but European history but then also it was a very very personal thing

01:01:44.960 and there's so many colorful characters like if I think of your book it's like kind of or

01:01:50.260 Jean Gorn's life really it's kind of like from birth until the end of her marriage to Bothwell

01:01:55.840 is kind of one era and then the whole rest of her life which is a much longer period of time

01:02:01.760 it's this northern scotland stuff and it's just like when i talk about the cliffhangers in your

01:02:06.420 book it's not just like okay now she's married she has these salt pans everything it's like no

01:02:10.340 no there's still drama is still happening there's still you've got these really colorful characters

01:02:15.240 with great names you've got the wizard earl you've got his brother the wicked earl you've got the

01:02:21.160 Herod of the North. You've got it just. Yeah. I mean, everyone's called George. So I had to find 0.68

01:02:28.020 a way to distinguish everybody. But all of the names, I was saying this to you before, all of

01:02:32.220 the names are contemporary names. And particularly up here, like by names are kind of, they're kind

01:02:39.840 of still a thing. Like there's a lot of people with the same name. So you never just say, oh,

01:02:44.240 it's Donald. It's always, oh, Donald the taxi, you know, that's the guy that drives the taxi.

01:02:49.040 So her grandson, for example, is Donald of the Troubles, which gives you a little bit of an insight into what happens to poor Donald, who I like very much.

01:02:59.560 But yeah, these kind of bi-names, they were contemporary names, and I think they hopefully really helped the reader to picture them.

01:03:08.820 The Mad Wizard Earl.

01:03:10.620 So we've got the Mad Wizard Earl, we've got his brother, the Wicked Earl, and then the third brother is of the Battle Axe.

01:03:16.000 What was his name?

01:03:16.700 Yeah, Dark Uyston of the Battleaxe. That is who Jean marries her daughter to, Dark Uyston of the Battleaxe. Would you want to marry your daughter to someone called that? But yeah, I like Uyston as well. He is Donald of the Tribbles' father. So yeah, he was the chief of Mackay. This is where the clan history really gets going.

01:03:39.660 and so Jean's married life so her husband is I think ill a lot of the time which is part of why 0.70

01:03:48.280 she I don't know if that's part of why she really stepped up or just like she finally was in a

01:03:52.920 position where this is what she was like and this is what she wanted to do and she did it but they

01:03:57.120 had this successful marriage I think a bit of both yeah yeah yeah definitely I mean he can't

01:04:04.280 of been too sickly because he does lead his men into battle but in order to be an edel at that

01:04:09.740 time you had to be like super fit because you were going to be on the battlefields you were

01:04:13.980 going to be leading from the front so certainly towards the end of his life he does seem to have

01:04:18.460 some health problems which is partly why she marries her daughter to dark uiston of the

01:04:23.280 battle axe because they need a strong ally but yeah she is very much kind of using at this point

01:04:30.520 in Scottish history as well kind of people are moving away from just hacking at each other with

01:04:35.220 swords they're trying to settle things a bit more like through the courts and sensibly and as a woman 0.99

01:04:41.000 that's what she can do like she can she can come in through the courts and try and do things on 0.99

01:04:45.940 paper and do things legally um and and she really manages to to use that as a strength and really 0.98

01:04:53.300 she she kind of helps to manage the estates for her husband and then when he dies she manages the

01:04:58.740 estates in the minority of her son. Unfortunately, he inherits his father's constitution. So she ends

01:05:05.220 up managing the estates in the minority of her grandson as well. So it's basically this one woman 0.97

01:05:11.960 in charge for three generations. And any analysis that looks only at the male line of the Edels of 0.98

01:05:18.380 Sutherland misses a huge part of the story because it is this one woman in charge. And I think part

01:05:24.540 of it as well because it's her second marriage and she's a little bit older she's just like

01:05:28.880 we're not going to do all that nonsense like what happened with Bothwell we're just going to go for

01:05:33.780 it and her her mother is incredible all the women in her family are incredible they're all these

01:05:39.320 really really strong-minded capable estate managers and she's she's just really really 1.00

01:05:47.600 good at that and quite ruthless actually not always in the in the nicest way. Just as a

01:05:53.740 contrast I find this really interesting from reading your book and reading about her experience

01:05:58.260 and her mother just her family and the other women involved like that to me seems like that's 0.93

01:06:03.340 that's the history of women in Scotland is these kind of like women who grew up kind of rough and

01:06:08.220 tumble you know around the brothers and then crazy chaos is happening around them constantly

01:06:14.100 there's all these feuds but they're all kind of strong like they're up for the challenge

01:06:17.520 and then you've got the national heroine Mary Queen of Scots who that's not her constitution

01:06:23.060 like nothing against Mary Queen of Scots but that wasn't her experience that's not the kind of person 0.99

01:06:26.880 she was like I would think that a Scottish heroine would be more of the Jean Gordon style than the

01:06:32.340 Mary Queen of Scots who was just kind of she had her skillset and we talked about that three hours

01:06:37.040 of podcasting so far but it's a completely different kind of person yeah I think I think

01:06:42.580 there's the kind of the moment where Bothwell abducts maybe I kind of I started to change how

01:06:50.340 I thought about that when I realised that Bothwell was with his sister, Janet, and his former lover,

01:06:56.260 also called Janet. And those two women were just like, why is Mary Queen of Scots making so much

01:07:02.700 fuss? You just have to get on with it. And they both had these horrific things happen to previous 1.00

01:07:09.460 husbands and they buried husbands and they were living in this violent country in this violent

01:07:14.780 time and they were tough whereas mary queen of scots is brought up in the french court where you

01:07:21.720 just don't have to be like that so yeah i mean jean gordon she's brought up in luxury in scotland

01:07:27.460 but she's brought up in an area which is full of feuding clansmen she knows you have to be tough 0.95

01:07:33.500 it's just constitutionally jean gordon was the right sort of person to be living the life she

01:07:40.420 was living I think. Yes you can see you can see how the Gordons got so much power when you look

01:07:48.060 at her and her brothers. And so she has various children and then eventually she is widowed her

01:07:54.780 second husband passes away and coincidentally her long-lost childhood love Alex Ogilvie

01:08:02.440 also widowed at around the same time and then what happens? Yeah he he married one of the four

01:08:09.560 Mary's, the famous attendants who supported Mary, Queen of Scots. He married Mary Beaton

01:08:15.140 and she dies. And so he's a widower and she's a widow. And they're like, nothing is in our way

01:08:22.500 anymore. We can have the teenage dream. We can finally get married. And they do.

01:08:30.320 About how old are they at this time?

01:08:32.440 So he is slightly older than her, but she would have been in her 50s. So I think he would have

01:08:37.660 been late 50s early 60s maybe and even just to have lived that long at that time they've already 0.60

01:08:44.480 kind of beaten the odds but yeah they were very very lucky I mean women women in Scotland widows

01:08:51.640 in Scotland were in a fairly good financial position they didn't have to remarry they would

01:08:56.680 have been guaranteed money so any second marriage and definitely a third marriage is usually a

01:09:02.160 marriage of choice if it's a rich woman and I managed to track down the marriage certificate

01:09:08.460 it's kind of like a big long document that that kind of goes into the financial details of their

01:09:14.120 marriage and normally it would be like that how the man is going to provide for the woman

01:09:19.400 and how their families are going to intertwine but Jean was so much wealthier than Alex Ogilvie at

01:09:26.180 this point and the marriage certificate kind of falls over itself to say you know that the man

01:09:31.500 will provide for the he's not providing for her she's not getting remarried because she needs the

01:09:36.400 money and then like normally marriage certificates would be you know talk about how to and this this

01:09:42.040 marriage certificate is like well the children are not involved this is not a marriage that

01:09:46.020 involves children the states are not going to get mixed up which was the other thing that usually

01:09:50.240 happened gene is going to keep all her stuff alex ogilvy and his family are going to keep all their

01:09:55.700 stuff this is purely a marriage of two people who want to be together it's a love match it's it's a

01:10:02.560 happy ending that's so rare not just in anything I look into for this podcast but in the story of

01:10:11.160 Mary Queen of Scots where it just seems like everybody has the worst possible ending this is

01:10:17.200 such a nice thing yes it's it is a happy ending I mean it's not the well I'll spoil your happy

01:10:24.240 ending because it's not the end of jean's life she actually lives until her 80s so there's like

01:10:28.940 another bit that happens with with donald of the troubles and all the stuff but yeah i mean i mean

01:10:34.600 she she got what she wanted when she was 16 how many people get that it's just such a i i do want

01:10:41.860 to just sit in this moment for for a minute because it's just so nice like that they were in

01:10:46.340 love they when they wanted to be together as teenagers and then they both went off had their

01:10:50.680 lives have their children and then to be able to come together like as you explained like there's

01:10:55.200 no other explanation except this is a love match to get to be even if the this marriage was not

01:11:01.560 decades and decades but just to be able to do that I think that's just so nice they get a few

01:11:07.800 years together and it was it was we're really really lucky with Jean Gordon that there's two

01:11:13.120 portraits of her so you can picture what she looks like as a young woman and then as an older woman

01:11:18.020 I spent quite a long time trying to find out more about Alex Ogilvy because he's this barely

01:11:23.420 minor nobleman and he probably couldn't even afford to get his portrait painted so I was

01:11:29.000 kind of like right well what was it what was it about him that that made her hold this image of

01:11:33.600 him in her head since she was a teenager and I was kind of going through the archives and going

01:11:38.980 through old documents and I found in Jean's son's archive in amongst his papers I found this

01:11:47.140 really unusual little booklet and it's a herbal and it's someone's handwritten it all and it's

01:11:55.040 a list of plants and flowers and trees and loads of information about them their latin names

01:12:01.680 their medicinal properties and it's it's written by alex ogilvy and that's that's who he was he was

01:12:09.460 kind of a gentleman gardener and i just have this image of him he had a beautiful castle as well

01:12:15.320 which is now very very overgrown but you can see the ruins of an old garden there

01:12:20.200 and I have this image of him because this this amazing little herbal and I showed it to the

01:12:25.800 archivists I was like this is something special isn't it and they were like we we don't usually

01:12:29.720 see documents that look like this because it's covered in doodles and on the front cover there

01:12:35.840 there's lots of little drawings of like trees and there's a little tiny sketch of a man in

01:12:43.520 a shady sun hat in a garden with a stick I think it's Alex Ogilvie that's the image of him in my

01:12:52.760 head is this this older man this gentleman gardener who's lived quite he had an uneventful

01:12:58.960 life too but he eventually comes back up north and I just have this image of him in the garden

01:13:04.320 of his incredibly romantic castle and him and Jean finally together I can't prove that the

01:13:11.280 picture is of him but i like to think it is that's such a nice like again we're going to keep talking

01:13:16.300 because her life keeps going but in such a life lived of just non-stop crisis this is a nice pause

01:13:25.400 where they get married picturing them just like he said you know he's in his garden he's just like

01:13:29.760 writing down the plants and their properties like she can maybe sit i don't know do some stitching

01:13:35.060 like they just a nice moment for them being together yeah he's not usually a restful person

01:13:42.000 I would say okay it's nice it's nice to think that she there was a moment of peace that's true

01:13:48.680 she reminds me in that way of my mother her favorite sort of day off is like okay I had

01:13:52.980 the day off so I woke up early and I did this and this and this and this and I cleaned this and I

01:13:56.100 yeah Jean is maybe that that's restful for her yes okay so then Alex sadly passes away a few years

01:14:03.740 into their marriage and then what what happens with Jean next um so she goes back to her married

01:14:11.580 married home Dunrobin uh up in Sutherland um where her her son unfortunately has died and her

01:14:19.680 grandson becomes the arrow and she kind of takes over once more and starts leading the

01:14:26.540 heralddom of Sutherland once more yeah and I went through like estate papers and it's just like

01:14:32.540 it's you get estate papers and they're signed by like seven or eight men and Jean Gordon at the

01:14:39.320 bottom and sometimes it's just like signed by Jean Gordon and then underneath it says and sundry

01:14:44.120 other gentlemen because she was the one that was important yeah so it all carries on for her up

01:14:50.440 there well she has three sons um who who survive infancy so her oldest son eventually dies but then

01:14:57.020 she has two other sons robert and alexander um who are very very different brothers um and robert

01:15:04.980 ends up down in london at the court of james the sixth while alexander stays up north and marries

01:15:11.860 a local woman so they are they are kind of managing the estates so she's got she's got

01:15:17.040 these two sons and lots of grandchildren. And the whole thing, like, you know, she was growing up

01:15:22.520 and as a young woman, her brothers, you know, there was so much, the strong family. And then

01:15:26.680 this continues on with her, her children, her grandchildren, like the Gordon family, you know,

01:15:32.920 continues to be a very strong and meaningful presence in her life, I think.

01:15:38.540 Yeah, she is always all about the Gordons. But towards the end of her life, it does become more

01:15:44.440 about the Sutherland Gordons rather than the Huntley Gordons.

01:15:48.320 Their surname is Old Gordon.

01:15:50.260 But the ones over in the northeast, her brother's children,

01:15:55.020 they do kind of gradually grow apart as people get older.

01:15:57.820 But yeah, and she remains Catholic and she's still very involved

01:16:04.340 because Scotland is firmly Protestant by this time.

01:16:07.400 And one of her brothers had become a Jesuit.

01:16:09.900 So she spends quite a lot of time kind of sheltering him,

01:16:13.320 which is fairly dangerous to do at that time. 1.00

01:16:16.980 She's really promoting the Catholic cause

01:16:18.780 at a time when Catholics are banned in Scotland.

01:16:23.720 And she was seen as a threat because of that.

01:16:26.940 She was excommunicated when she's in her 80s

01:16:30.120 from the Protestant church,

01:16:32.220 from the pulpit in the local church.

01:16:35.640 Yeah, and she kind of does a lot

01:16:37.420 for the Catholic cause in Scotland

01:16:38.840 and as do her brothers and their children.

01:16:42.000 I love that well I don't love that but what I love is that this is evidence that she did not

01:16:49.020 decide but you know I'm 80 years old I'm just gonna kind of hang back and just go with the 1.00

01:16:53.360 flow no she was like excommunicated because she was harboring Catholics like she was just 0.88

01:16:57.840 non-stop this is she doesn't stop it's not like she she retires into the background quietly she 0.88

01:17:05.380 She is, I mean, her brother James was probably the last serious threat to Protestantism in Scotland.

01:17:14.780 Not a very serious threat because it was very entrenched by that time.

01:17:18.120 But yeah, a lot of stuff is still going on with James VI and her family end up.

01:17:26.180 It's a little bit like her father in that they end up on his side and then against him.

01:17:31.380 And they go from the very top to the very bottom again.

01:17:34.260 And yeah, a lot is going on. And there's a Gordon Murray feud, a very long blood, a very bloody blood feud that takes up quite a lot of the second half of my book.

01:17:46.920 At what age was it that she passed away and from what?

01:17:49.880 um so she dies of old age in her bed yeah in her in her early 80s and she was buried with

01:17:57.880 the full ceremony that would normally be given to a male ero yeah she got the she got the full

01:18:04.580 respect from her from her children and the people around her i don't often get to say this on this

01:18:10.520 podcast but it was a life well lived you know yes yeah she she she got everything she could

01:18:17.480 she she was such a good subject for a biography I think yeah to you what a gift of I mean I'm sure

01:18:27.120 you know all the work that you needed to do to find all this information but sometimes in the

01:18:31.660 biographies that I read for this podcast or just for fun you know there's an exciting part of their

01:18:35.880 life it's like and then for the next 25 years she managed the home and you know it's just which is

01:18:41.480 nice for her that's a nice life to have but you just had in this story like so many things kept

01:18:48.000 happening around her and she was always tertiary involved in in so much drama yeah i mean she's

01:18:56.160 involved she's involved as a woman she is managing the home but she is managing like she's managing

01:19:02.480 dunrobin castle in the middle of loads of hostile clans and an ongoing feud with the edels around

01:19:09.760 about her whilst promoting her religion and yeah she's she's managing the home was exciting

01:19:18.100 there was a lot going on yes exactly she did manage a home for for numerous years but it wasn't

01:19:24.320 just you know choosing staff and I don't know decorate choosing a curtain fabric definitely

01:19:31.520 not so I know that you have listened to some of my episodes before so you're familiar with

01:19:36.300 I do a scoring at the end. It's the Fredegund Memorial Scandalicious Scale. So there's four

01:19:42.600 categories. I'm going to entirely let you choose the numbers because you're so intimately familiar

01:19:47.060 with this subject, but I'll just sort of explain what the categories are and then you can think

01:19:51.220 about in the context. Because we're thinking of her not in the context of her compared to anyone

01:19:56.800 else that I've talked about on the podcast, but just her in her life and how she was seen by the

01:20:02.360 people around her so the first category is scandalousness which just means did any was she

01:20:08.960 seen as a scandalous person by anyone in her life my instinct is to say not really no not really

01:20:17.580 I mean she was scandal adjacent but she was blameless in it yeah she she does a very good

01:20:26.480 job of presenting herself as completely blameless at all times possibly slightly scandalous towards 0.93

01:20:33.960 the end of her life because even her own son says she had an almost masculine understanding

01:20:40.760 and he kind of he talks around like why is this woman in charge of everything when normally it's

01:20:47.180 a man so I think people had started to notice by the end of her life that she she'd done some

01:20:53.160 pretty unusual things but yeah most of the time not very scandalous no and I guess what in terms 0.94

01:21:00.160 of harboring fugitive Catholics that would be seen as scandalous to Protestant people so that's true 0.53

01:21:06.160 but like on a scale of zero to ten how what would you score her for scandalousness um I'm not sure 0.80

01:21:14.720 maybe quite low like four or five yeah maybe like four not very scandalous yeah there's some there's

01:21:21.600 some there but there's not a lot and you know to her credit that's why she was able to live into

01:21:26.800 her 80s because yep well and the fact that she got out of the Bothwell Mary Queen of Scots

01:21:33.640 situation with her name and reputation intact I think speaks well of her family connection

01:21:41.000 but also her yeah because poor Bothwell ends up in a terrible place yeah no we we talk about

01:21:48.120 in my episode about that. Actually, side note, when we were emailing each other arranging this

01:21:55.640 interview, you had mentioned that you find him, Bothwell, a fascinating person. You have sort of

01:22:00.820 a chapter in your book that is, what happened to Bothwell? Because, you know, we kind of have to

01:22:05.540 tie that up. What do you think about him? Well, first of all, it's a sequence of improbable

01:22:12.360 coincidences that led him to being trapped in that it's Norway right in this like dungeon prison

01:22:19.500 yeah I mean first Norway and then eventually Denmark towards the end yeah he gets moved around

01:22:25.320 a wee bit in Scandinavia but yeah I mean it's it's it's like the worst possible karma whatever

01:22:31.600 he did and he did some pretty awful things I mean he gets punished for it and just to end up in in

01:22:40.180 that horrible, horrible dungeon. Such an active man to be trapped in that way. It's just, I find

01:22:48.560 it very sad. And I mentioned that there was this Bothwell biography that I read by Robert Gore

01:22:55.520 Brown, which is quite a revisionist kind of, I don't know if you've read, my first biography

01:23:01.100 that I wrote was a biography of a crime writer called Josephine Tay. I don't know if you've

01:23:07.080 heard of her i've heard of her i haven't read your book yet yet yeah josephine tay wrote um her best

01:23:13.280 known novel is the daughter of time which is this kind of it's very hard to describe it's this kind

01:23:18.520 of revisionist it's a murder mystery but it's it's this kind of revisionist thing about richard

01:23:23.300 the third and how he wasn't a monster um so this this biography of of bothwell um is kind of like

01:23:31.220 revisionist and that it's like he's not a monster and it went into some detail about how about the

01:23:37.400 prison and what happened and and the karma that that he was served and the i found that such a

01:23:45.220 striking image in this biography where the author visited the castle where bothwell was imprisoned

01:23:53.200 and his bothwell's body was mummified by the sea air and it was on display for years and and there's

01:24:02.360 a very vivid description of it um and then I was kind of got to know these other people who were

01:24:10.060 very very keen on history and and eventually kind of got to know there was a a wee group of people

01:24:15.900 in Scotland who who thought it might be a good idea if bothwell's body was brought back to Scotland

01:24:22.140 and one of the people involved in this was a descendant of Bothwell,

01:24:27.800 slightly sideways, obviously, because he doesn't have children with Jean or anybody.

01:24:32.240 And he described to me how he ended up visiting Bothwell's tomb

01:24:38.740 and eventually Bothwell's body was placed in a closed tomb.

01:24:44.720 And he gave me this very vivid description of finally going there

01:24:48.920 and this was his ancestor and he knew all the history.

01:24:52.140 And he thought it might be a good idea to bring him back.

01:24:54.460 And then he was like, I just felt this sense of peace that we brought attention to this story and that that was what needed to be done, that the story needed to be told.

01:25:05.700 Yeah, it's all in my book. I explain it better. I'm better at writing than speaking.

01:25:10.240 But yeah, it's just history means so much to so many people.

01:25:14.400 People get so into it, so worked up about it.

01:25:18.120 so it's their ancestors and it's part of their part of how they see themselves and it's just I

01:25:24.780 love it I love all the passion I love I love how intimate people are I really appreciate in your

01:25:31.580 book like you're very even-handed I think in describing the Bothwell situation and I'm you

01:25:38.520 know I went into your book coming in hot you know I hate Darnley now I hate Mary's half-brother and

01:25:44.280 I'm just like oh Bothwell he sucks and it's like yes but also isn't this interesting and also he

01:25:50.440 I think paid for what he did so we don't need to keep and you can kind of like I mean you can kind 0.97

01:25:57.320 of be flippant when you're talking about like kings and queens and things that happened 500

01:26:01.480 years ago but you also have to remember that they were real people and they really they suffered and

01:26:07.760 they loved and they yeah I mean like my because my first biography of Josephine T

01:26:13.720 occasionally people come to talks that I've given about Josephine T and they tell me that

01:26:18.960 they know her or they were related to her or they know people that I've written about

01:26:22.580 so I was very aware that I'm writing about real people and even with this book it's 500 years ago

01:26:29.180 but when I was researching in archives often I'd have to go to family archives

01:26:33.740 and I did go to the Errol of Murray's castle for example where the current Errol of Murray is like

01:26:40.800 you can he can trace his descendants descendants from from Mary's half-brother so I was although

01:26:47.420 it's 500 years ago they were real people and yeah you have to you have to think about that and yeah

01:26:55.040 yeah and what does that if that's someone's ancestor what does that mean to them versus

01:27:00.640 it's just, oh, it's a character in a novel or it's a story. It's like, no, this was like a person.

01:27:05.260 Yeah. I wanted to tell it like story. That's how people respond to life is through stories. But

01:27:11.800 I never wanted to lose sight of the fact that these were real people.

01:27:16.220 And I think that's a real, like part of what made your book so compelling to me and I think

01:27:21.700 to other people is that combination of like your storytelling is so propulsive. You know,

01:27:27.920 I can't wait to read the next chapter. But at the same time, yeah, I think you kind of you you

01:27:32.780 respect the people you're talking about, which I also appreciate. The next category on our scale

01:27:37.800 is I call it scheminess. You know, it's basically so all the categories can start with an S. The

01:27:42.420 word I chose is scheminess. So what it means is if we're thinking about schemes, but in terms of

01:27:46.980 like, it's not a negative necessarily, it's just like coming up with plans, being resilient, you

01:27:51.700 know, being an active person, you know, like if you're backed in a corner coming up with a clever

01:27:57.160 thing to do or and i think this is she could score high on this like the the salt pans like

01:28:03.620 always landing on her feet like figuring out what to do in a variety of bizarre situations but

01:28:10.240 i think she was a very thoughtful person and a very intelligent person yeah definitely intelligent

01:28:15.620 well educated and she knows which direction she's going in she's got goals gordons must come first

01:28:22.500 yeah and she she puts plans into place executes them brilliantly so yeah she's not a she's not a

01:28:29.880 sort of sideways schemey person very direct person um but yeah quite high quite high maybe

01:28:37.540 maybe seven or eight less because she's not kind of i think of schemey as being like quite devious

01:28:43.380 and she's not devious at all yeah but i think i'm comfortable with an eight for scheminess

01:28:48.800 the next category and I'm interested to hear what you're going to say I've got some thoughts based

01:28:53.680 on what you've been saying significance like my first thought was what you said about the

01:28:59.200 significance of the coal mine and the salt pans to industry in northern Scotland it sounds like

01:29:05.720 that was a significant thing she did but it's also her historic her significance not necessarily to

01:29:13.100 like world history because that's not the sort of life she was living but just to her significance

01:29:19.840 you know it drew you to write a biography of her so what what do you think yeah i would i would put

01:29:25.840 her significance pretty high for the north of scotland she created the house of sutherland

01:29:32.540 and the house of sutherland had then such a massive influence throughout the subsequent years

01:29:39.220 on what happens in the north of Scotland.

01:29:42.240 So yeah, I think it's got to be quite high

01:29:44.420 because she was there.

01:29:45.920 She was there for her husband, her son, and her grandson.

01:29:48.680 So I reckon it's got to be up like a nine or something.

01:29:52.940 Yeah, well, and I think also the fact

01:29:54.500 that she was leading this household

01:29:57.480 for three generations inherently is significant

01:30:01.580 because they thrived under her care.

01:30:05.280 If someone else had been there,

01:30:06.440 the same sequence of events wouldn't have happened.

01:30:08.280 i'm comfortable with a nine for significance i think and that was where i really i'm relying on

01:30:13.060 you for all of these numbers obviously but you know the history of northern scotland to an extent

01:30:18.460 that i do not so i don't exactly the house of southern that's good to know that that and the

01:30:23.400 coal the coal mines existed in brora until the 1970s really yes not i mean it kind of died and

01:30:33.320 got revived three or four times I think altogether but yeah yeah a big and yeah for people thinking

01:30:39.640 the highlands are are kind of remote um yeah they weren't well and also just gonna say after this

01:30:47.280 I'm like really excited to learn more about it's the same way as when I first read about I don't

01:30:51.980 know the history of Angola or Peru for the first time I was just like oh this is great like northern

01:30:58.160 Scotland like I think when I was reading your book I was like wow you know I felt like oh yeah

01:31:02.420 I know about Scottish history, but I don't because everything I'd read until your book was about the border area, like Edinburgh and really Scotland in relation to England is what I know.

01:31:13.260 And that's an entirely different story from like the clans and what was happening up north.

01:31:17.380 So I'm excited to learn more about that because clearly it's really dramatic and exciting.

01:31:25.260 Yes, there's a lot. But yeah, not enough about the north of Scotland, I think. I think there should be more.

01:31:30.500 definitely definitely well it's like honestly my concept of Scotland before I was researching this

01:31:37.160 Mary Queen of Scots season I was just thinking okay have you seen the the Saoirse Ronan Mary

01:31:42.420 Queen of Scots movie yes I went to see that with one of my good friends who is a professor of

01:31:47.440 history and we had a great time we were in hysterics we were like whispering pointing out

01:31:53.600 all the historical inaccuracies we particularly liked the men from Thurso we had a lot of thoughts

01:32:00.260 about that yeah the denim dresses yeah a great film we had a great time possibly not in the way

01:32:06.260 the filmmakers intended I think that's one I'm definitely going to cover on vulgar peace theater

01:32:11.280 where I do where I talk about costume dramas with my friends but when I was reading your book I was

01:32:15.600 thinking about because I for various reasons and it's most of what I know about Scottish history

01:32:19.400 is from pop culture basically you know like I don't know brigadoon things like that so I just

01:32:25.600 sort of thought how even outlander like i know it's the highlands but i just sort of conflated

01:32:30.080 everything so it's like mary queen of scots you know she gets to scotland and she comes to the

01:32:34.180 scottish court and i was picturing them like in the saoirse ronan movie her brother her half

01:32:38.720 brother he looks like mel gibson is braveheart he's got like dreadlocks eyeliner yeah no they

01:32:45.800 looked the hair the big hair no they would have had neat hair they would have not wanted to look

01:32:52.020 like Klansmen definitely yeah yeah we had we had fun with that no exactly so like in my defense 0.54

01:32:58.460 the reason why I was imagining Mary Queen of Scots or even Marie de Guise or Margaret Tudor

01:33:03.220 coming to Scotland and I pictured the people who they would meet would look like that

01:33:07.060 but I have since been told by um my friend who also is in Scotland but also just from your book

01:33:14.760 and just from reading I'm like oh no like Edinburgh was like people there like they would look the same

01:33:20.000 as they looked in England effectively like tidy hair courtly dress yeah yeah so I don't okay good

01:33:26.900 I was I was wondering what you thought about the portrayal of James Stewart in that film as kind of

01:33:31.620 a wild highland looking guy yeah no he would have been nothing nothing like that at all there are

01:33:38.320 portraits of him looking very dressed in black and very proper yeah it's so for me I guess it's

01:33:48.000 similar to other regions I've read about where my understanding of them is so much based just on

01:33:52.780 movies I've happened to watch or that sort of thing and then when you read the history you're

01:33:56.200 like oh this is wrong and I see why people from that country don't like this because yeah but

01:34:02.260 there were clansmen there were clansmen in kilts speaking Gaelic yeah that that was a big part of

01:34:10.040 Scotland's history as well it's just that that didn't happen absolutely everywhere it's yeah

01:34:16.680 for for a small country it's got a lot of different areas with a lot of complex history

01:34:21.980 going on in each separate area yeah and the men like the highlanders in the kilts speaking gallic

01:34:28.220 were not in royal court advising mary queen of scots no yes well okay yeah so yes later in my

01:34:38.380 book donald of the tribbles who is dean gordon's grandson and also the chief of mackay he does go

01:34:44.700 to court in london to meet james vi but he would not have worn a kilt to do that he would have

01:34:50.240 worn there's descriptions of him he would have worn like a slash doublet um but when he was back

01:34:56.260 up north he probably wore a kilt then yeah because there's pictures of him in europe because he ends

01:35:02.940 up in the 30 years war which you definitely don't want to get into but yeah then they're wearing

01:35:07.480 plaid with like the old-fashioned kilt yeah so yeah outlander style i grew up in culloden like

01:35:14.940 i grew up next to the battlefield so that's why i'm interested in history you would be like oh

01:35:20.340 my gosh yeah whether one believes in ghosts or not i think there's just so much history you could

01:35:25.220 feel when you're around there every day um the last category and i'm not sure how she's gonna

01:35:31.220 how this is gonna go so the last category is what i call the sexism bonus and what that is there for

01:35:37.420 it's not so much in her story but if you think about a story of I don't know the sort of woman 1.00

01:35:43.760 who maybe did something scandalous and then got locked away for 25 years and had no freedom or

01:35:49.200 somebody who just didn't have any opportunities in life it's the sexism bonus it's a way to give

01:35:52.960 points to those people who maybe didn't get the opportunity to scheme or to be scandalous but

01:35:59.160 also we just consider it like how much did sexism get in her way and I would say very little yeah

01:36:05.000 very very little I was really interested when writing my biography to kind of think about what

01:36:10.320 life was like for women in Scotland and even just legally the position is really different to women

01:36:16.620 in England women were in like things like when they were widowed women in England could be left

01:36:22.620 with nothing in Scotland they were they had something so yeah very low I would say about

01:36:28.420 one on that score maybe yeah I mean maybe maybe two for being with Boswell and Boswell's mistresses

01:36:36.100 yeah Boswell yeah maybe she should get more for that I think so having to deal with being married 0.59

01:36:41.380 to Boswell but yeah and that was also interesting to see the difference in just culturally well even

01:36:46.140 the fact like her brothers supported her the fact that when Boswell went for help they sided with

01:36:50.940 her instead of him I could see in another cultural context a woman's brother might have sided with

01:36:55.540 the husband because they're like, well, you're the man, you know, but in her situation, family

01:36:59.580 trumps everything. Like it's all about family, whether it's a girl or a boy, like family is

01:37:06.400 number one. Also Bothwell's Protestant and she's Catholic, but her brother kind of was a Protestant

01:37:13.880 at one point, but then switches back to being Catholic. So yeah, so that's going on as well.

01:37:19.400 So her total then is 23, which on it's, I don't know, I do the score at the end just because it's a way to sort of wrap things up. But it's she's certainly that's not the lowest score. Like Boudicca, the queen of the Roman. She has a 23. So like she's in good company there. Lola Montez. I don't know if you know her. She's got a 23. So it's interesting. Like it's rare for somebody to score high in all four categories.

01:37:47.660 but a 23 generally means you live a good life and nothing and you did okay for yourself if you're a

01:37:55.540 high scandalousness that also goes with sort of a very stressful situation i think and actually

01:38:00.300 there's one more thing i wanted to ask you so there's another category that i've added it's

01:38:06.280 called the lady jane seymour memorial award for outstanding supporting performance it's named

01:38:11.160 after lady jane seymour who is the best friend of lady catherine gray jane gray's sister just

01:38:16.960 because lady jane seymour was a really good best friend and by the time i did that episode it was

01:38:22.920 rare for me to find somebody who was helped someone i talk about so many women on this podcast

01:38:28.480 who are just wholly abandoned and left to their own devices so i like to say if somebody if somebody

01:38:34.800 was there for her and i would nominate frankly the gordon family i think her siblings her family

01:38:41.400 her family and her siblings maybe also her cousin Agnes Keith because Agnes is she she's the wife of

01:38:50.340 of James Stewart half-brother of Mary Queen of Scots which should make her an enemy but because

01:38:57.940 she's related to Jean on Jean's mother's side she's kind of she kind of helps Jean but again

01:39:04.440 that's Gordon family isn't it it's it's family so yeah I would say family yeah the Gordon Gordon

01:39:10.760 siblings including Gordon siblings I'll say Gordon family including Agnes Keith just so that

01:39:16.080 she's specifically noted Agnes Keith which hate to be counted as a Gordon Gordon family comma

01:39:21.700 and Agnes Keith yes so just to all remember what story that relates to but yeah it was that's part

01:39:28.860 of what makes this story as much as it involves so much crisis and drama and murder a nice story

01:39:35.400 because she was never abandoned.

01:39:38.260 There's always somebody in her corner.

01:39:40.100 Her family was just always there supporting her.

01:39:42.680 The fact that she ends up with Alex Ogilvie at the end,

01:39:45.020 like these are nice things.

01:39:47.900 And then just the fact that she got to be this woman

01:39:51.440 running the household, running a business,

01:39:53.700 and everyone was basically okay with it.

01:39:57.060 For the time and era, couldn't have done better, I don't think.

01:40:01.660 She's got to be the only one from Mary Queen of Scots Court

01:40:05.020 who doesn't die horribly.

01:40:08.580 And that's why I wanted to do this episode

01:40:10.040 where I'm posting it,

01:40:11.860 just because it feels just like unrelenting

01:40:14.420 to do the Mary Queen of Scots,

01:40:16.020 all the episodes all in a row.

01:40:17.260 It's just like, and then this person died horrifically.

01:40:19.540 Here's a nice story,

01:40:20.640 just to kind of brighten up the mood

01:40:22.080 before we get into Mary Queen of Scots

01:40:23.620 and her time in prison.

01:40:25.640 So tell everybody the title of your book

01:40:29.100 and where they can find your book

01:40:30.860 and things like that.

01:40:31.580 Okay, so my book is called

01:40:33.660 Daughters of the North, Jean Gordon and Mary Queen of Scots. It's published in the UK by

01:40:39.780 Sandstone Press. You should be able to get it in North America though, because they have North

01:40:44.580 American distribution. So if you go to a large retailer like Amazon or Barnes and Noble,

01:40:49.340 and it's also available as an ebook and an audio book.

01:40:54.740 Does the narrator of the audio book, is it a Scottish person or a Scottish accented person?

01:40:58.680 Do you know?

01:40:59.500 Yes, but they don't sound anything like me. They have a very different Scottish accent.

01:41:03.140 it's beautifully read by an actress called joan walker okay i just feel like this story the names

01:41:10.540 the place names i was hoping you would say that it needs to be somebody who knows how to pronounce

01:41:15.260 those words scottish we we had discussions about that yes how to pronounce all the different names

01:41:21.340 i'm sure you did i'm sure the way that i said some of them in my head is incorrect but i won't

01:41:27.140 embarrass myself by saying them like the the brother the of the battle axe how do you say his

01:41:33.000 name? Oostin. Oostin and Oostin's father is Ooch. Yeah. Is that the one that's spelled A-O-D-H?

01:41:42.360 A-O-D-H yeah. I had no idea to me I was just I would embarrass myself it'd sound like I was

01:41:48.740 talking Klingon I think if I tried to pronounce it. There's some debate over how to pronounce it

01:41:53.920 but yeah okay well good um so it's not just me being confused as a canadian person

01:41:59.700 and then also if people you have a website is there social media where people can keep up with

01:42:04.640 what you're doing yeah i have a website which is just my name jennifer morag henderson.com

01:42:10.400 and i am on instagram at north underscore morag and i'm on twitter at jennifer underscore morag

01:42:19.340 and morag is m-o-r-a-g is that a scottish name morag it is yes very scottish there was a book

01:42:28.880 i read as a child i just had this sudden vivid memory i'm going to share with you for no reason

01:42:33.400 um as a child there was a i love to read historical fiction and there was a book about

01:42:38.040 a girl from modern times whose name is meg in canada or the u.s and then she time traveled back

01:42:44.020 to like the colonial era and into the body of her ancestor and her ancestor's name was Morag.

01:42:50.260 Very good.

01:42:51.160 Clearly Scottish immigrant family. So I've just always thought of Morag as kind of like

01:42:56.080 Meg, but the old fashioned version of it. But that's incorrect. That's just what happened in

01:43:01.060 that book.

01:43:01.820 Yeah, I'm not sure. Meg would be from Margaret, wouldn't it? I'm not sure if Morag is. Yeah,

01:43:06.840 I don't know.

01:43:07.880 I don't know.

01:43:08.500 I was named after a family friend.

01:43:10.240 so yeah and I wanted to mention well I just wanted to have you say about your website and

01:43:14.680 about your social media especially because you've been nominated for this Highland Book Award and I

01:43:20.160 know you've been doing various readings and things so people can follow you there to see where they

01:43:23.860 can catch you to see you presenting yes I do have some readings coming up but actually not till

01:43:31.540 after this summer but yeah I put them I put them on my social media when I have them and I try to

01:43:37.560 put nice pictures as well I was up in Brora the other week which is where Jean Gordon had her

01:43:42.780 salt pans and coal mines and it was such a nice sunny day and I got all these photos of us in

01:43:49.140 in raincoats and sunglasses so they're very Scottish pictures but it was it yeah I tried

01:43:55.040 to put the nice pictures of ruined castles up because I know people like them yeah okay I was

01:44:00.860 just thinking yeah because I was looking at your Instagram I think earlier and there was I was like

01:44:04.860 that's that castle and that's that castle. So some are kept and a lot of them are just kind of,

01:44:10.660 you can see the skeleton of what it was. I think there was a picture of Huntley Castle on your

01:44:14.500 website or on your Instagram. And I thought, okay, you get a sense of scale, even though it's

01:44:19.740 fallen into district. Huntley Castle is massive. Yeah. Yeah. And it's, it's a very well managed

01:44:25.600 site. Last time I was there, it was a few years ago, but they had some reenactors

01:44:29.980 setting off cannon in the courtyard, which was very cool.

01:44:33.460 that's so interesting I hope one day to be able to travel around not just Scotland but all of

01:44:39.960 the British Isles just to see to have history just right there you know it's like this is

01:44:45.440 where the castle was like even just to see what it was I think that would be just really

01:44:49.360 magical for someone like me who lives in a country with not so much old buildings

01:44:56.020 shall we say yes yeah yeah it was when I lived in Canada for a year and people would be like oh

01:45:01.980 this is the old bits. And I was like, really? You know, this building was built in 1950. It's

01:45:09.520 the old building. Yeah, that's, that's the vibe here. Anyway, thank you so much for taking your

01:45:14.920 time to talk to me about this. I was really excited when I first realized the existence of

01:45:19.860 your book. And I loved reading your book. And I loved getting to have you on here to share the

01:45:25.120 story with the listeners. Great. Well, thanks for inviting me. And yeah, I hope I haven't talked for

01:45:30.320 for too long. But yeah, I could talk for a long time more about Jean Gordon.

01:45:36.920 So again, this book is Daughters of the North, Jean Gordon and Mary Queen of Scots by Jennifer

01:45:41.880 Morag Henderson. And it's available as a book, you can get the ebook, you can get the audiobook,

01:45:46.400 it's available wherever you like to get books from, including your local public library.

01:45:51.080 There's a link in the show notes if you want to buy it through bookshop.org,

01:45:54.300 then a little bit of money goes to support this podcast. And so you can also support this podcast,

01:45:59.860 We have merch, which is at vulgarhistory.com slash store that takes you to the Tee Public

01:46:06.620 store.

01:46:07.420 And as I understand it, that's best for people in the US just in terms of shipping costs. 0.78

01:46:12.040 If you're living somewhere internationally, the shipping is a bit better on the Red Bubble

01:46:15.520 store, which is vulgarhistory.redbubble.com.

01:46:19.560 So many great designs are in there.

01:46:21.760 Most recently, I just added two new designs by Siobhan Gallagher, which are based on some

01:46:28.100 just memorably bad reviews this podcast has gotten from people who just like don't get it but

01:46:33.880 in this kind of poetic way I enjoy so one of them is a really cute design that says very biased

01:46:39.360 which is what somebody called me and I own that and I am very biased and I think everybody is

01:46:46.340 every historian is if you go all the way back to reading transcripts from Mary Queen of Scots this

01:46:51.320 time lots of people are very biased for or against her it's not you can't tell history in an objective

01:46:57.120 of way. Anyway, it's a really cute design. It's very biased. It's in this bubbly pink font. And

01:47:01.340 then kind of as a companion in the sort of bubbly purple font, also designed by Siobhan Gallagher,

01:47:06.720 it says rambling and unscholarly, which is what somebody called me in a review. And you know what,

01:47:12.700 I'll own that as well. This podcast is not a textbook, although I do do a lot of research.

01:47:18.380 Anyway, so you can get all that at our regular merch stores. And if you want to leave a nice

01:47:22.100 review, you know, I can't say that I'm going to turn that into merch necessarily, but it could

01:47:26.700 help counterbalance some of these other reviews. If you go to Apple podcasts, you can leave me a

01:47:31.560 nice review if you want. You can also, there's a place if you're listening on Spotify, when you go

01:47:35.380 into each episode, there's a place where you can leave nice comments too, or mean comments, you

01:47:39.320 know, whatever moves you. You can also support this podcast by joining my Patreon, which is

01:47:44.620 patreon.com slash Anne Foster writer, where if you pledge at least $1 a month, you get early ad free

01:47:50.860 access to all the episodes. And then you also, if you pledge at least $5 or more a month, you get

01:47:55.480 access to our special bonus podcasts. So that is So This Asshole, where I talk about men from

01:48:01.360 history who are terrible. And I have pledged that if and when I get 500 people supporting me on 0.96

01:48:08.660 Patreon, I will do So This Asshole, John Knox. So, you know, if that persuades you. And then we also

01:48:14.780 do Vulgar Peace theater episodes on the Patreon. That's where I'm joined by Alison Epstein and

01:48:20.320 Lana Wood Johnson. And we talk about various costume dramas and just have a really good time.

01:48:24.240 Most recently, we talked about The Woman King. The next one we have coming up is going to be about Ned Kelly, the Australian film starring Heath Ledger. We're also going to be talking about Chevalier, the movie about the Chevalier to St. George that just came out, which is a really good movie, although, you know, spoiler for that episode of the podcast.

01:48:40.740 and I'm just trying to think

01:48:43.400 are there other other reminders to tell you

01:48:45.700 yeah you can follow this podcast

01:48:47.460 we're on Instagram at Vulgar History Pod

01:48:49.400 and I'm also on TikTok at Vulgar History

01:48:51.480 and we're going to be back next week

01:48:53.140 continuing the story of Mary Queen of Scots

01:48:56.140 but I hope you enjoyed this break

01:48:58.180 from the grimness with Jean Gordon

01:49:00.620 and her like I was going to say delightful love story

01:49:03.420 and I will say delightful love story

01:49:05.140 in the midst of you know

01:49:06.580 lots of murders and other things happening around

01:49:09.480 It's just nice to know that something nice could happen to somebody in this narrative.

01:49:14.560 Anyway, thank you so much for listening.

01:49:16.420 I'll talk to you next time. 1.00

01:49:17.660 And until then, keep your pants on and your tits out. 1.00

01:49:22.060 Vulgar History is hosted, written, and researched by Anne Foster and edited by Christina Lumagi. 0.99

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Vulgar History - June 30, 2023

Mary Queen of Scots： Bonus： Jean Gordon, Highland Salt Entrepreneur

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