It has been a long road to ultimate authority for Mary Villiers (Julianne Moore) and her son George (Nicholas Galitzine). The plotting duo began Starz’s limited series Mary & George utterly powerless but rife with conviction. They were determined to claw, scrape, and grab at every loose strand of thread they could find to climb up in the world during King James I’s (Tony Curran) rule in the 17th century. When the show began, seven episodes ago, Mary was the mother of four children, suffering at the hands of her abusive husband. George, her second-born son, was haughty and hormonal, assumed to be useless, as his parents’ estate would go to Mary’s first-born son, John (Tom Victor). At the series’ end, Mary and George had riches, land, and titles—now the Countess and Duke of Buckingham, respectively.
But their splendors were not won without significant costs. Death and destruction followed the pair wherever they went, and naturally, all of their scheming eventually came between them. Once this wedge was in place, it was only a matter of time before their wealth slipped through their hands. Episode 7 of Mary & George, the series finale, tracks the collapse of the Villiers’ manufactured empire, and gives any history-oblivious viewers (myself included, believe me) a lesson in just how trivial monarchy can be. King James may have ruled England by name, but it was Mary and George Villiers who called the shots.
Our final episode begins in 1623, 11 years after the series began. In just over a decade, Mary has shepherded herself and her son to the greatness she knew they were destined for. But George’s assumption that he could maneuver matters of the state without his mother’s assistance was gravely misguided. In Madrid, hundreds of miles away from his mother’s level head, George finds himself accompanying Prince Charles (Samuel Blenkin) in a bid for the hand in marriage of the Spanish Infanta—the royal title for the daughter of the King of Spain—Maria Anna (Aine Mcnamara). Charles sings to her, earning her adoration, and potentially securing the first step in achieving long-awaited peace between England and Spain. But George, hot-headed and overzealous, mucks it all up.
George goes to the Spanish Chief negotiator, Olivares (Alex Brendemühl), who tells George that Charles must convert to Catholicism if he were to wed the Infanta. While religious conversion might be something Charles would consider, it’s entirely off the table for George. “Those who defy me regret it,” George tells Olivares instead of making him another offer, forgetting that the man’s job is literally to negotiate. But threats don’t interest Olivares. “How is it that the king and his son have given you so much power?” he asks George. “They don’t give me anything,” George replies. “I am the power. I am the king. I am England. And your insults will be repaid.”
While George and Charles prepare for their disgraced return to England, Mary is back to her old tricks. Still mourning the brutal loss of her lover Sandie at the end of Episode 6, Mary needs to fill her time with something stimulating, and that something would be getting the king’s ear. She arranges to have her carriage break down on the road to the king’s country palace, and rides with him the rest of the way. When the young men return from Spain, Mary is seated beside the king. George takes his mother aside and asks her to tell him exactly what’s going on. “The king sought new advice, new company,” she tells him, refuting George’s insistence that the king belongs to him. “He is no one’s, he’s the king,” Mary says.
George demands to know what his mother thinks she can offer the king that George can’t. “Protection from his worst instinct: you,” she replies. “He has paid a price for your love, as have I. You let Sandie die like an animal. Have you no remorse?” George tells his mother that he has nothing to be sorry for, and Mary grimaces. “I fear you might believe that.” It’s a statement that will follow George for the remainder of the episode, as his lack of regret only serves to prop up his pompous attitude.
When George tells the king about his unsuccessful trip to Madrid with Charles, he lies to James’ face, telling him that Spain refused to negotiate with them. James is angered, and for good reason: This journey was one of their last chances to save them from another Anglo-Spanish war. James leaves in a huff, and George tries to kiss him goodbye, but the king flinches at his lover’s physical touch. The recoil sends George into a spiral, screaming in the woods, realizing that his power may live and die with the king. But it’s there where George gets the idea to construct an ornate outdoor bedroom for James in a clearing in the woods. There, George and James drink and smile. James looks happier than he has in years, but George only admires him with the expression of someone trying to give a sick dog one last trip to the park. It’s a look of pity, but the two kiss anyway. “Fuck me alive again,” James pleads, and the two have sex.
That’s all it takes for George to get back in James’ good graces. Soon enough, James allows George to go to the English parliament, where he will rile up its members with grand accusations about Spain’s mistreatment of him and Charles. “Now you want to be tough?” Mary asks George when she hears of his plans. “Your arrogance is unbound. You’ll risk war to hide your failure. Have you not shed enough blood? You are not who I raised.” George looks at her for a moment, before coldly responding. “That is all I am, mother.”
In an eleventh-hour plea, Mary goes to James, who is dying and drunk in the outdoor bedroom that George made for him. “It’s all the talk in London,” she tells James. ‘War is coming.” James doesn’t understand, too sick and too wasted to comprehend that he was fooled. “I decide if war is waged or not,” James says. “I’m still king, remember?” Mary peers at him for a moment, as if to tell him that James has not been king for a very long time.
On their way back to James’ palace from parliament, George and Charles spot a fire in the woods. James has set his open-air love shack ablaze. George sends Charles back, and approaches the burning clearing, where Mary and James sit watching the flames. George tries to approach James, but James refuses his touch.
“Another step and I’ll bite out your eyes.” James reels at George, cursing him for disobeying a king’s orders and tricking James into allowing the talks with parliament to happen. “What a blessing, how good of you to come down here and deign to talk to me, oh mighty Zeus cunt! ” James sneers at George. “My whole fucking life men have tried to kill me, use me, deceive me. And the worst of them: use war for their own ends. I made myself, I did. [But] you only bring death! And you’ll turn Charles so he brings the same … What was it all nearly destroyed for? This empty boy. What have I wrought in seeking his young, hollow flesh? An old fool’s lust blinded me! But now I see. You’re a traitor.”
Mary, standing idly by, quickly realizes the extent of what is about to happen. “He is not a traitor, he has been rash, ill-advised,” she protests. But it’s too late. “From this moment forth, the Duke of Bukingham is stripped of all his titles,” James says. “And soon, at an hour I choose, on gallows I built, you’ll hang for the treason against me and my crown. Under God’s eye and mine, George will die!” Upon these last words, James coughs and collapses. George and Mary return him to the palace, and beckon Charles to seek a doctor.
Alone with the unconscious king, Mary and George have a choice to make. James’ life is in their hands, and if he should wake, all of this will be for nothing and George will be hung. George tries to feed the king poison, but James wakes, and spits it out. Panicking, George suffocates James until he turns limp, closes the king’s eyes, and props him up to look like the death was from natural causes. This ending to James’ life is a clever play on how far Mary & George can go with fictionalizing historical record. There was only so much a physician could determine in the 17th century, and James’ real death is contested by historians as either dysentery or a stroke. It is, however, noted that George was by James’ bedside.
As the series bows its head, we jump forward to 1628, in the midst of the Anglo-Spanish war that lasted between 1625 and 1630. George, still as horny as ever, tries to hit on a man at the bar. “You don’t remember me, do you?” the stranger asks George. “I served under you at La Rochelle, sir. Five thousand men, gone, just like that.” George agrees that the battle was a mess, before making another pass, causing the man to ask George if he’s sure the Duke doesn’t remember him. “Maybe I have something on my person that might remind you, though?” George can barely reply, “I would love to see that,” before the man, John Felton, puts a knife in George’s stomach. “For my lost friends, who died in a war of nothing that you made,” Felton says, before stabbing him again.
Mary is brought news of her son’s death, but refuses to hear the cause. “Why?” she asks the maid who offers her details. “How else would this end?” Mary then sits down to a meal, and looks around the room at the spoils of her and George’s interpersonal war. Everyone—her son Kit (Jacob McCarthy), George’s wife, Katherine (Mirren Mack), and all of their friends, family, and fellow members of the monarchy—looks discontent and lost.
What we understand now is that they all needed both Mary and George. The stability of the monarchy depended on having mother and son playing their twisted games together. The Villiers presented a push and pull that kept the order. At the very beginning of Episode 1, when George is born, Mary’s housemaids dropped him on the floor, and Mary didn’t flinch. “What use are you to anybody?” she asked her infant son in that moment, expecting he would be nothing but a burden. As it turns out, George was of great use to everybody. But if it weren’t for his wicked, equally nefarious mother, both Mary and George—in history, and in this wholly excellent limited series—would have amounted to nothing.
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