Nicholas Galitzine is having a busy year. Following Red, White & Royal Blue and Bottoms last year, this year he stars in a pair of stories about young men and older women. One is, of course, The Idea of You, the horny age gap romance co-starring Anne Hathaway. The other is Mary & George, an equally horny if far more perverse story about Mary Villiers and her son, George, Duke of Buckingham. These are two of my favorite fantastic little freaks in history, I cannot WAIT for this show.
Mary Villiers was a psychotically ambitious woman in the court of King James VI and I, who came down from Scotland to rule England after the death of Queen Elizabeth I. Mary Villiers was especially bold, openly plotting to advance her family with naked greed and ambition, in a time when they were still burning women at the stake for that sort of thing—ESPECIALLY in the court of King James, one of history’s great hypocrites and a fantastic little freak himself. King James was deeply religious, wrote a completely bonkers volume on the hunting and killing of witches and demons called Daemonologie, and commissioned a new translation of the Bible into English which became known as the King James Version. He was also probably queer, and had a lot of “male favourites”, of which George Villiers was one.
Mary & George stars Julianne Moore as Mary Villiers, and Nicholas Galitzine as George, with Tony Curran starring as the king. The series makes no bones of portraying James and George’s relationship as sexual, something dusty historians still debate, despite the discovery of a secret passage at James’s home, Apethorpe, that connected their bed chambers. Some historians will insist the other room housed Prince Charles, James’s son, but…man, come ON. Gossip about James and his favourites proliferated during his own time, a lot of people think the reason he commissioned a translation of the Bible was to prove his godliness in the face of so many rumors about his supposed ungodly activities. (Which might explain some of the translations in the King James Version, which comes down hard on anti-queer language.)
So that’s what you need to know about Mary & George—it’s about one of the most perverse periods of English courtly life, when religion and decadence made a toxic stew of everyone who went to court, and the Villiers family determined to rise in prominence at any cost, and the cost was high. James was simultaneously an unbridled hedonist who inherited Elizabeth’s powerful political machine, but actually tried to stay out of wars on the continent, and fully believed there were witches and demons haunting every corner that needed to be flushed out and summarily killed yet had no problem keeping a practical harem of pretty young men in full view of his courtiers. Mess! The Windsors don’t know sh-t about mess, the Stuarts LIVED and BREATHED mess, so much so we’re doing prestige dramas about it today.
Check out the Mary & George red band trailer here:
