Mary, Queen of Scots is beheaded
On this day · 8 February 1587
After 19 years a prisoner, the Scottish queen was executed at Fotheringhay for plotting against her cousin Elizabeth I.
On 8 February 1587, Mary, Queen of Scots was executed in the great hall of Fotheringhay Castle in Northamptonshire. Forced to abdicate the Scottish throne, she had fled to England in 1568 only to spend nineteen years in captivity under her cousin, Elizabeth I.
Her fate was sealed by the Babington Plot, a scheme to assassinate Elizabeth and free Mary that was exposed when her spymaster Francis Walsingham intercepted and deciphered the conspirators’ letters. Convicted of treason, Mary was condemned, and Elizabeth, after long hesitation, signed the death warrant.
She dressed for the scaffold in black over a scarlet bodice, the color of Catholic martyrdom.
The execution made Mary the first anointed European monarch put to death by judicial order, a precedent that unsettled crowned heads across the continent. Her son went on to inherit Elizabeth’s throne as James I of England in 1603, uniting the two crowns she had never reconciled.
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