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.
