Mary, Queen of Scots was beheaded at Fotheringhay in 1587

Mary, Queen of Scots was beheaded in the great hall of Fotheringhay Castle, Northamptonshire, on 8 February 1587, aged 44. She had been convicted of treason over the Babington Plot to put her on Elizabeth I’s throne, after Elizabeth’s spymaster Francis Walsingham intercepted the letters in which Mary approved the scheme.

She had been a prisoner in England since crossing the border in May 1568, a year after she was forced to abdicate the Scottish crown: almost 19 years in a series of castles and manor houses. At 2 a.m. on the day she died, she wrote her last letter, in French, to her brother-in-law Henri III of France. It is now in the National Library of Scotland.

“I am to be executed like a criminal at eight in the morning.” — Mary, Queen of Scots, to Henri III, 8 February 1587

Who took the blame for the death warrant?

Not Elizabeth. She signed the warrant on 1 February 1587 but later claimed she had told her secretary, William Davison, to keep it back for the time being. The Privy Council sent it to Fotheringhay without telling her, and it arrived the day before the execution. When Elizabeth heard the news the next morning, the historian William Camden wrote, she received it “with great indignation”, went into mourning and ordered her councillors out of her sight. Walsingham stayed home, pleading illness. Davison was tried, imprisoned in the Tower and heavily fined, and Lord Burghley is credited with saving him from the gallows.

Elizabeth had Mary buried with royal ceremony in Peterborough Cathedral. In 1612 her son, by then James I of England, had her remains moved to Westminster Abbey. She now lies under a marble effigy in Henry VII’s Lady Chapel, in the aisle opposite the cousin who signed her death warrant.