Award-winning writer Jimmy McGovern and film director Gillies MacKinnon bring the story behind the Gunpowder Plot to BBC TWO in two original films exploring the lives of Mary Queen of Scots and her son James 1st.

The first concentrates on Mary's short-lived reign and the battles she has to fight with both her Protestant subjects and the English Queen, Elizabeth 1st. She conspires with the Earl of Bothwell to assassinate her miscreant husband Lord Darnley.

The story continues with her son James VI of Scotland (who, on Elizabeth's death, became James 1st of England), and the plot against his reign masterminded by the influential Catholic Robert Catesby - a plot planned by Guy Fawkes to blow up the Houses of Parliament in order to rid the nation of an oppressive Protestant monarch.