The banging has arrived. For a sexy-history show there wasn’t a lot, and I was getting anxious. But if you wanted to watch an early 17th-century king get railed by a series of handsome young men, wow, what a show this has turned out to be for you.
Mary experiences a teenage nightmare when she walks into King James’s court and everyone turns to look at her and then starts talking about how terribly she’s dressed and how bad her makeup is. Or! Does she look terrible on purpose? Francis Bacon prompts questions. Also, Francis Bacon is there now! He is our mystery man from last week, the one who got Sir David’s information about Mary’s dirty peasant past after Sir David was murdered. It’s fun to learn that the man who was responsible for my having to slog through science labs in high school was probably gay. Makes it slightly more tolerable in retrospect. And did you know Bacon courted Lady Hatton before she rejected him in favor of Edward Coke? Everyone’s all tangled up together on this show, literally and metaphorically (literally because of sex, you see).
So why is Mary at court, what’s going on with George, and what’s that weird wax carving at the top of the episode? Is the director waving that Artemisia Gentileschi painting under our noses too much or just enough that I finally go “Ohhhhhhhh”? Well. After last week, when George sexily banged King James, we now find George relegated to orgy musician while Somerset asserts his dominance over James. Very few people are going to care if George is playing a cello or a viol, but I’m 80 percent certain it’s a viol with a cello soundtrack.
Mary knows about George’s difficulty in seeing the king, so she goes to court. She has Sandie do her makeup, which looks Elizabethan in the wrong way, and apparently, her dress is bad? We know this because everyone says it’s bad, including the king. This is why it’s important to remember that fashion is never a decadeslong monolith, and it changes frequently, especially back in the day at court. I have no idea about Jacobean fashion, though, so let’s all just trust that Mary’s dress is terrible, presumably because it’s outdated. Later, she wears a dress that seems much more acceptable to the court, and I absolutely cannot tell the difference.
George, pouting by the fire, asks Mary what happened to Sir David. She tells him not to worry about it. If I murdered someone, I also wouldn’t tell George. The next time he got upset with you because you wouldn’t listen to his sonnet, he’d end up telling the first sympathetic person he encountered that you had done a murder, and then you’d be arrested, all because George was butt-hurt about his poetry.
Somerset and his wife Frances fake-kill James with a viol bow, and everyone at court thinks it’s hilarious, including James. The Somersets are the worst. They’re the people at a party who have to have fun as loudly as possible so everyone knows how much fun they are definitely having. I do still like Somerset’s whole look, though, with his little beard and his earring, like a piratical fancy man.
Amidst this, Mary approaches James and mentions how poorly he’s being treated by the Somersets. Then she tries to jump on Lady Hatton and has to be escorted out so she can “strategically vomit” from being drunk. Again, this seems terrible, but it is maybe all on purpose? Perhaps the vomit is strategic not because of where it lands but because it’s happening at all. I don’t know. Mary is playing 4-D chess, and I am furrowing my brow at Candyland.
Frances, Countess of Somerset, had a previous husband, but she had their marriage annulled on the grounds of impotence. This man, the Earl of Essex, visits Mary to warn her not to get in Frances’s way. He claims he is only impotent because Frances used a spell. He also tells her that the Somersets murdered a man named Sir Thomas Overbury. Historically, this seems to be because Sir Thomas tried to stand in the way of the Somersets’ marriage, encouraging Somerset not to marry Frances. I would also tell my friend not to marry Frances.
George meets Francis Bacon in a brothel, and Francis encourages George to stand up to Somerset. This seems like a terrible idea. George then has sex with a male sex worker and gets smallpox. Damnit, George. He tries to stand up to the Somersets in front of the king, but he is literally already sweating from this highly feared disease, and he passes out. The Somersets make fun of him because they’re the worst.
As George is vaguely trying to accomplish one (1) thing, Mary is locating a witch, threatening her, and obtaining evidence from her to convict the Somersets of murder. Moms, am I right? This is all part of Mary’s plan, the final step of which is her son becoming the king’s primary sex partner. What a strange family. We see a montage of all the Somersets’ accomplices being tried, convicted, and hanged. Frances’s maid, Miss Turner, is hanged! I was so surprised! Also, this all really happened! This show is shockingly faithful to historical events while maintaining its Starz-required sexiness. I’m very impressed.
Somerset panics and goes to a still-very-ill George’s bedside to plead with him to intervene with James. He pulls the unbelievable move of telling George that Somerset wasn’t trying to keep him away from James; he was trying to keep James away from George because, in fact, Somerset is in love with George. Amazing. Complete and utter garbage, but he tries it. Then they bang in front of the fire. George still has smallpox, but okay! The banging scene is very good but too short, and at the end, George basically says, I’m not interceding with the king; I just wanted, like my mother, to fuck you. Hey-oooo!
The Somersets are on trial, and the weird wax figure being carved at the start of the episode is a poppet that Frances commissioned from the witch. Frances is found guilty! Somerset is found guilty! Frances is extremely pregnant, so this is very stressful, even though she is, as mentioned, the worst. In jail later, she delivers the baby, and they immediately take it away. As the parent of a tiny baby, this was very upsetting to watch (maybe also for non-parents? I have no memory of the before times), so be aware that this baby is Anne Russell, Countess of Bedford, and she is going to be fine and live until she’s 68. (Please exercise caution in clicking that link, which contains historical spoilers.)
Mary comes back to court looking amazing, and everyone is like, wow, what a transformation. Mary’s so powerful — she She’s All That’d herself. James comes up to her and asks if she can ever forgive him, and says they are both people who survive. She leads him over to George, whose viol/cello plays over a montage of his new status as primary king’s fancy man. We see the aforementioned Gentileschi painting again, Judith Beheading Holofernes, which also features in the opening credits. For those not familiar with Italian art history (or Tumblr), this is a contemporaneous painting by a woman artist depicting the biblical (depending on your Bible) character Judith, who entered an Assyrian general’s tent and cut off his head. It’s very much Mary taking control and ending the Somerset reign. I love that it was painted at the same time as these events! That’s so neat!
Francis Bacon accosts Mary and tells her he thinks her disastrous display at court was deliberate because James loves an underdog. Mary says she has never acted a day in her life. They both low-key threaten each other and then sit back and watch George play his undetermined instrument.
So now George is on top! Again, both literally and figuratively. I’m hoping for fancy man clothes, more single-ear pirate earrings, longer sex scenes, and more kissing between Mary and Sandie. Let’s just gay up everyone; Pride Month is only, like, a month away.
