WHEN the historian Kate Williams was a little girl, she made a time machine out of a cardboard box and travelled to ancient Egypt, the court of Henry VIII and Victorian London. I ask her where she would go now if she had a time machine for real. A lot of the same places, she says, but it would be different this time. As a child, Kate visited the past just to watch, but now, she says, she would be tempted to rewrite the story. To interfere. To change the course of history.

The problem is that anyone who’s ever watched Star Trek or Doctor Who knows changing history is a bad idea, but Kate Williams – historian, broadcaster and occasional time traveller – is willing to take the risk and there’s one place and time in particular she would like to return to: Scotland on 16th May 1568. Once there, she would head to the banks of the Solway Firth and look for a woman in her twenties waiting to board a boat with a group of men. She would go up to the woman and tell her not to get in the boat. “Don’t do it Your Majesty,” she would say. “Don’t go to England.”

Williams would make the plea to the young Mary Queen of Scots because she knows what happened next. Mary crossed the Solway Firth to England in the hope her cousin Elizabeth I would help restore her to the Scottish throne, but instead Mary was kept a prisoner and eventually executed. It’s a story that has produced two of the strongest images in the history of these islands: Elizabeth as regina triumphant, the woman with the heart and stomach of a king, and Mary as the tragic sovereign, duped by men and unsupported by the woman she turned to for help.

Williams thinks that story needs retuning, though, which is why she’s written a new book about Elizabeth and Mary, Rival Queens. Williams has also gone back to the original letters and archives to look again at some of the most infamous moments, in particular the rape of Mary by the man who would become her husband, the Earl of Bothwell. It’s also this story that Williams thinks holds some important lessons for the present.

Williams describes the event in vivid terms. It happened at Dunbar Castle and as soon as Mary arrived, Bothwell began pressing her to marry him. She refused and sent a secret message to the governor of Dunbar to rescue her, but no rescue came and Bothwell forced himself on the Queen. It was a shocking act – a queen anointed by God was a sacred being - but perhaps more shocking is the way some modern historians have interpreted it. Some have argued that because Mary did not fight back, she must have consented; others have even argued that, after her effete former husband Lord Darnley, Mary was thrilled to receive sexual satisfaction from a “real man”.

I suggest to Williams it all goes to show that not much has changed for the better, even after 400 years. “No, I don’t think it has,” she says. “Obviously Mary didn’t have Me Too and they didn’t use words like grooming, but they did understand that people had been compelled into it. Because women were so much more powerless in those times, they might have understood the concept of consent perhaps a bit better than you could say we do now. Mary said he assaulted her, the men around her said she assaulted her, and he said he assaulted her. Even the lords who hated her accepted that’s what happened. And yet it’s since then that we’ve said ‘oh well, maybe she was complicit, maybe she enjoyed it’.”

What Williams is suggesting is that, in some ways, our attitudes to rape are just as bad as, or worse than, they were in the 16th century. She cites the so-called Wolf Pack case in Spain in 2018 in which a court ruled that because the woman remained passive throughout, the charge of rape did not apply. It’s an indication that some people still don’t understand that a woman remaining silent and unprotesting, as Mary did, is not the same as consent.

“One reason people have revised the Mary story,” says Williams, “is because people don’t like to admit that a queen can be raped and assaulted because if it can happen to a queen it can happen to any of us. The difference is that then they saw women as powerless - they would think if a man grabs a woman and she’s alone, what else is going to happen to her, she can’t fight back. Whereas now we say, ‘if he grabs her, why doesn’t she fight back?'” It’s an interesting difference, says Williams – and a depressing one: the lack of progress in 400 years.

Williams also thinks Mary’s relationship with men can help explain her place in history. Mary was popular with ordinary people who saw her as the rightful queen, but the problem was the male aristocrats around her, including her half-brother James Stewart who was plotting against her.

“Elizabeth had a network of loyal men who would do anything for her and Mary didn’t have that. She had no one she could trust. Elizabeth is brilliant and a genius but she has advantages in her situation, not least the fact that no one is going to assault her. No one would even think it with Elizabeth, but it happened to Mary.”

This is an interesting take on Mary’s story, but it’s also a familiar one in history: women as the victim or target of men. In fact, perhaps the stories of Mary and Elizabeth are popular because they are a welcome exception to the usual trope of history: men, men, men.

“I think that’s true, but things are changing,” says Williams. “Women’s history is surging – I teach it. We do witches and queens and ordinary women and nuns and housewives and the playboy bunny girl.” But it must be harder to source the history of ordinary women? “It is, but ordinary people are hard to find anyway until the First World War. People didn’t realise that what they were going through was momentous.” In fact, Williams thinks this is still a problem even now. “We have a degree of it today – we get an awful lot of memoirs of politicians but do we get memoirs of cleaners from Eastern Europe? I think part of it is that certain groups think their voices are worth more – then and now.”

Williams would like to put some of that right if she can and readjust the position of women in history but even now, she says, some of the old prejudices of the 16th century linger. She points out that when Elizabeth II came to the throne, there was a lot of resistance to her. It was the time of the 50s housewife and Churchill thought she was too young.

Williams does believe, though, that in many ways queens like Mary and Elizabeth have done much more than kings for progress. It is usually during the reign of a queen, she says, that the great leaps of constitutional progress are made. Partly, she thinks, it’s because women are less high-handed and more likely to accept the views of others; partly, it’s because parliament will push harder if it’s a female monarch. But, whatever the reason, when the crown rests on the head of a woman, it’s the people who end up with more power.

Kate Williams is appearing at the Boswell Book Festival on Saturday May 10th at 12pm - boswellbookfestival.co.uk