Chapter IV: Notable Disputes

Essex was to proceed to Ulster in Northern Ireland (above),
where instead he went to regions in the Republic of Ireland, in the South (above).

William Knollys denied hearing Cecil making that statement, ensuring the latter's innocence.

Philip II of Spain

Elizabeth I's residence when she was under house arrest
after her proven innocence in the wake of the Wyatt rebellion.

The two were married at Winchester Cathedral

To elevate his son to Mary's rank, Emperor Charles V ceded to Philip the crown of Naples as well as his claim to the Kingdom of Jerusalem. Mary thus became Queen of Naples and titular Queen of Jerusalem upon marriage. Their wedding at Winchester Cathedral on 25 July 1554 took place just two days after their first meeting. Philip could not speak English, and so they spoke a mixture of Spanish, French, and Latin.

The marriage was a disastrous and very unaffectionate one for Mary and after her false pregnancy, Philip left for Flanders to wage war against France, which undoubtedly left Mary in a depression. She considered these disgraces "God's punishment" for her having "tolerated heretics" in her realm.

Mary was a staunch Catholic, and in her view, Protestants did not worship the true God and were heretics. Mary rejected the break with Rome her father instituted and the establishment of Protestantism by her brother's regents. Philip persuaded Parliament to repeal Henry's religious laws, returning the English church to Roman jurisdiction. Reaching an agreement took many months and Mary and Pope Julius III had to make a major concession: the confiscated monastery lands were not returned to the church but remained in the hands of their influential new owners. By the end of 1554, the pope had approved the deal, and the Heresy Acts were revived.

The heretic acts were a law that granted Mary the authority to deal with heretics as she pleased. That was a bad move as the first five burnings occurred over five days in February 1555. The number and frequency of those burnings only ramped up after her depression, which no doubt brought instability and struck fear into the people's hearts.

Soon after Mary’s death in 1558, likely in an attempt to prolong his tenure on the English throne, Philip I sought to marry Elizabeth.

Unfortunately for him, Elizabeth had the backing of Parliament behind her rejection of Philip. She was a Protestant, and her regime was to reflect those views. Philip II was a Catholic and her sister’s widower. In addition, the country had proven even more wary of Catholic monarchs after Mary’s prosecution.

Even now, Elizabeth’s rule was still an unstable one. There were still foreign Catholics aboard who supported her cousin, Mary of Scots instead. Philip was involved in multiple plots to replace Elizabeth with her more popular, Catholic cousin.

Anglo-Spanish relations would only worsen from there.

The first was the Ridolfi Plot which emerged in the aftermath of the failed Northern Rebellion. Roberto Ridofi, an Italian banker, had been involved in the Northern Rebellion. Having seen it fail, he became convinced that the only way to overthrow Elizabeth was through a combination of uprising and overseas intervention. With this in mind, he approached a number of leading Catholic nobles as well as making advances to foreign powers. The plot was to have an invasion of England by the Duke of Alba from the Netherlands alongside a simultaneous uprising of English Catholics. Ridolfi intended that Elizabeth would be killed and replaced by Mary, Queen of Scots. Mary would marry the Duke of Norfolk. Ridolfi gained the support of both Mary, Queen of Scots and the Duke of Norfolk for the plot. The plot gained the support of the Pope and King Philip II of Spain.

In 1571 John Hawkins, one of Walsingham’s spies, learnt of the plot from the Spanish. The spymaster’s men then ensnared Norfolk. Letters and gold were intercepted. Norfolk’s staff were questioned, interrogated and tortured to reveal details of the plot. The letters, written largely in code, were deciphered when the code key was found in Norfolk’s home.

The letters implicated Norfolk and Mary, Queen of Scots. Norfolk admitted, in part at least, his involvement in the plot. Norfolk was put on trial, found guilty and beheaded in January, 1572. Ridolfi left England before the plot’s discovery, and the Spanish ambassador was banished due to Spanish complicity in the plot.

The second was the Throckmorton Plot which planned to utilise French and Spanish troops to oust Elizabeth and replace her with Mary. The plot was devised by brothers Francis and Thomas Throckmorton along with his brother, agents from Spain. English spies uncovered the plot and arrested Throckmorton. He was sentenced to death and the Spanish Ambassador, who was implicated, was sent back to Spain.

The hatred between Spain and England was not a unilateral one as there were multiple instances of imperial funded pirating on Spanish ships. In 1568, the Duke of Alva had 5 of his ships intercepted and robbed of £85,000 in gold bullion. The gold would have paid all his soldiers for a few years. Ten years later, on his circumnavigation of the globe, Sir Francis Drake attacked Spanish ships near Lima. Again a huge amount of gold was plundered. The English treasury was in need of gold, particularly at the beginning of Elizabeth’s reign. England also had a historic control of the Channel, the former of these incidents may have been asserting this supremacy.

Things came to a head when Elizabeth decided to execute her cousin, Mary of Scots. The execution of a Catholic ally was enough for Philip to launch an invasion against England to restore Catholicism to England. In addition, English funded piracy on Spanish ships had proved a major motivation for the Spanish invasion but the execution of Mary was the final straw.

Thankfully, it was due to the spy network of Secretary of State, Francis Walsingham who discovered the invasion and made the necessary preparations for war with Spain.

In May 1588, after several years of preparation, the Spanish Armada set sail from Lisbon under the command of the Duke of Medina-Sidonia. When the 130-ship fleet was sighted off the English coast later that July, Howard and Drake raced to confront it with a force of 100 English vessels.

The English fleet and the Spanish Armada met for the first time on July 31, 1588, off the coast of Plymouth. Relying on the skill of their gunners, Howard and Drake kept their distance and tried to bombard the Spanish flotilla with their heavy naval cannons. While they succeeded in damaging some of the Spanish ships, they were unable to penetrate the Armada’s half-moon defensive formation.

Over the next several days, the English continued to harass the Spanish Armada as it charged toward the English Channel. The two sides squared off in a pair of naval duels near the coasts of Portland Bill and the Isle of Wight, but both battles ended in stalemates.

By August 6, the Armada had successfully dropped anchor at Calais Roads on the coast of France, where Medina-Sidonia hoped to rendezvous with the Duke of Parma’s invasion army.

Desperate to prevent the Spanish from uniting their forces, Howard and Drake devised a last-ditch plan to scatter the Armada. At midnight on August 8, the English set eight empty vessels ablaze and allowed the wind and tide to carry them toward the Spanish fleet hunkered at Calais Roads.

The sudden arrival of the fireships caused a wave of panic to descend over the Armada. Several vessels cut their anchors to avoid catching fire, and the entire fleet was forced to flee to the open sea.

With the Armada out of formation, the English initiated a naval offensive at dawn on August 8. In what became known as the Battle of Gravelines, the Royal Navy inched perilously close to the Spanish fleet and unleashed repeated salvos of cannon fire.

Several of the Armada’s ships were damaged and at least four were destroyed during the nine-hour engagement, but despite having the upper hand, Howard and Drake were forced to prematurely call off the attack due to dwindling supplies of shot and powder.

With the Spanish Armada threatening invasion at any moment, English troops gathered near the coast at Tilbury in Essex to ward off a land attack. Queen Elizabeth herself was in attendance and gave a speech to her troops.

Shortly after the Battle of Gravelines, a strong wind carried the Armada into the North Sea, preventing the naval forces from joining with the infantry on land. Due to lack of disease and rampant disease, Spain sought to give up the invasion and return home.

The Spanish Armada had suffered heavy losses during its battle of the English, but the journey home would claim far more lives. The Spanish navy faced many storms on its journey home, sinking and destroying much of what remained.

By the time the Spanish Navy arrived home, almost half of the fleet and personnel had been decimated. This fight may have ended in England's favour, but it was hardly the end of the conflict between Philip II and Elizabeth I .

In 1589, Queen Elizabeth launched a failed “English Armada” against Spain. On the other hand, the Spanish attempted two further Armadas, in October 1596 and October 1597. The 1596 Armada was destroyed in a storm off northern Spain; it had lost as many as 72 of its 126 ships and suffered 3,000 deaths. The 1597 Armada was frustrated by adverse weather as it approached the English coast undetected.

The conflict between the Habsburg dynasty and the English Crown would drag on beyond Philip II and Elizabeth I’s deaths in 1598 and 1603 respectively. It wasn’t until 1604 that a peace treaty was finally signed ending the Anglo-Spanish War as a stalemate.

Ivan the Terrible

In 1551, on the initiative of the famous astronomer John Dee, the ‘Company of Merchant Adventurers for the Discovery of Regions, Dominions, Islands and Places unknown’ was founded. The company’s goal was to find a route to China. They didn’t succeed in finding it. Instead, the English merchants had established regular trade connections with the Tsardom of Muscovy. The Englishmen founded the Muscovy Trading Company and began bringing in tin, cloth and weapons. In return, they received hemp, timber, blubber and tar. Ivan the Terrible granted the company the right to conduct free trade in his territory.

The trade growth between the countries led to a lively business correspondence between Ivan the Terrible and Elizabeth I. At that, not every topic could be trusted to paper for fear of others modifying the letters to send false information. Information was instead passed through English envoy Anthony Jenkinson. In the end, from business negotiations the Russian monarch proceeded to seek the hand of the queen.

Ivan IV, now known as Ivan the Terrible for his acts of violent tyranny from the 1560s to his death, was unhappily married to his second wife and sought a better partner. In addition, a marriage to an English monarch allowed him to seek asylum in England, in case his rule took a turn for the worse.

Elizabeth I, upon receiving his proposal, carefully considered her options. While a marriage to Ivan IV would prove miserable, Russia was one of the country’s biggest trade partners and she had to proceed carefully.

Elizabeth stalled for time, waiting until Ivan gave up. Unfortunately, these tactics did not work on Ivan, sensing a refusal in the absence of an immediate reply. He was enraged.

His reply was a harsh one, where he stated, “ Thyself thou art nothing, but a vulgar wench and thou behavest like one! I give up all intercourse with thee. Moscow can do without the English peasants.” At the end of his reply, he remarked contemptuously that Elizabeth lived not like a real queen, but like a “common girl”, hinting at her inability to be a ruler in her own country, instead redirecting the power to other people. Their correspondence stopped for a long 12 years.

In that period, as an act of retaliation, Ivan opened his port to other foreign nations, and it was with great difficulty that England was able to assume trade. Thankfully, the incident proved but a mere hiccup as Anglo-Russian relations remained amiable late into the Elizabethan era. Although considering Ivan’s track record of his other six wives after the death of his first, where he reportedly poisoned one, drowned another for adultery, had another poisoned by a political enemy, three sent to convents, with two dying under suspicious circumstances, and one surviving him, it is likely Elizabeth made the right decision to not proceed in the end.

Mary of Scots

Mary, Queen of Scots was Queen of Scotland from 14 December 1542 until her forced abdication in 1567. She was the only surviving legitimate child of James V of Scotland, solidifying her claim to the throne.

As Mary was a six-day-old infant when she inherited the throne, Scotland was ruled by regents until she became an adult. From the outset, there were two claims to the regency: one from the Catholic Cardinal Beaton, and the other from the Protestant Earl of Arran, who was next in line to the throne. Beaton's claim was based on a version of the king's will that his opponents dismissed as a forgery. Arran, with the support of his friends and relations, became the regent until 1554 when Mary's mother managed to remove and succeed him.

King Henry VIII of England took the opportunity of the regency to propose marriage between Mary and his own son and heir, Edward, but the treaty fell through. Henry VIII would resort to military campaigns in Scotland to force them to accept the treaty, prompting Mary to be sent away for her safety. Soon after, her regents turned to France for assistance. King Henry II of France proposed to unite France and Scotland by marrying the young queen to his three-year-old son, the Dauphin Francis. On the promise of French military help and a French dukedom for himself, Arran agreed to the marriage.

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With her marriage agreement in place, five-year-old Mary was sent to France to spend the next thirteen years at the French court. On 4 April 1558, Mary signed a secret agreement bequeathing Scotland and her claim to England to the French crown if she died without issue. Twenty days later, she married the Dauphin at Notre Dame de Paris, and he became king consort of Scotland.

In 1561, the Dauphin, still in his teens, died. Her mother had died the year before. Hence Mary was recognised as the ruler of Scotland. However, she refused to further solidify the treaty, causing her to be sent back to Scotland where she assumed rule.

As a devout Catholic, she was regarded with suspicion by many of her subjects, as Scotland was torn between Catholic and Protestant factions. To the surprise and dismay of the Catholic party, Mary tolerated the newly established Protestant ascendancy. Her privy council of 16 men, was mainly dominated by Protestants, only 4 of them were Catholic.

Mary then turned her attention to finding a new husband from the royalty of Europe. When her uncle, the Cardinal of Lorraine, began negotiations with Archduke Charles of Austria without her consent, she angrily objected and the negotiations foundered. Her own attempt to negotiate a marriage to Don Carlos, the mentally unstable heir apparent of King Philip II of Spain, was rebuffed. Elizabeth I suggested she marry English Protestant Robert Dudley, 1st Earl of Leicester. The proposal came to nothing, most likely because the intended bridegroom was unwilling.

Mary had briefly met her English-born half-cousin Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley, in February 1561 when she was in mourning for Francis. Darnley's parents, the Earl and Countess of Lennox, were Scottish aristocrats as well as English landowners. They sent him to France ostensibly to extend their condolences, while hoping for a potential match between their son and Mary. Mary fell in love with the "long lad", as Queen Elizabeth called him since he was over six feet tall. They married at Holyrood Palace on 29 July 1565.

Although her advisors had brought the couple together, Elizabeth felt threatened by the marriage because as descendants of her aunt, both Mary and Darnley were claimants to the English throne. Their children, if any, would inherit an even stronger, combined claim. The union infuriated Elizabeth, who felt the marriage should not have gone ahead without her permission, as Darnley was both her cousin and an English subject.

David Rizzio (left), Mary's closeness and alleged affair with David Rizzio (middle), Rizzio's murder (right)

Unfortunately, the happy days were not to last as before long, Darnley grew arrogant. Not content with his position as king consort, he demanded the Crown Matrimonial, which would have made him a co-sovereign of Scotland with the right to keep the Scottish throne for himself, if he outlived his wife. Mary refused his request and their marriage grew strained, although they conceived by October 1565. He was jealous of her friendship with her Catholic private secretary, David Rizzio, who was rumoured to be the father of her child. On 9 March, a group of the conspirators accompanied by Darnley dragged Rizzio from behind the pregnant Mary and stabbed him to death in front of her.

Mary's son by Darnley, James, was born on 19 June 1566 in Edinburgh Castle. However, the murder of Rizzio led to the breakdown of her marriage.

Soon after, Mary and a few leading nobles held a meeting to discuss the resolution of the problem that was Darnley. Divorce was considered as the first option, but it is implied they decided on murder as the end solution. Darnley feared for his safety, and after the baptism of his son at Stirling and shortly before Christmas, he went to Glasgow to stay on his father's estates. At the start of the journey, he suffered a lingering illness for a few weeks.

In late January 1567, Mary prompted her husband to return to Edinburgh. He recuperated from his illness in a house just within the city. Mary visited him daily, so that it appeared a reconciliation was in progress. On the night of 9–10 February 1567, Mary visited her husband in the early evening and then attended the wedding celebrations of a member of her household, Bastian Pagez. In the early hours of the morning, an explosion devastated Kirk o' Field. Darnley was found dead in the garden, apparently smothered. There were no visible marks of strangulation or violence on the body. A few nobles and Mary herself were among those who came under suspicion.

By the end of February, Bothwell was generally believed to be guilty of Darnley's assassination. Darnley's father demanded that Bothwell be tried before the Estates of Parliament, to which Mary agreed, but his request for a delay to gather evidence was denied. In the absence of Lennox and with no evidence presented, Bothwell was acquitted. A week later, Bothwell managed to convince more than two dozen lords and bishops to sign the Ainslie Tavern Bond, in which they agreed to support his aim to marry the queen.

Between 21 and 23 April 1567, Mary visited her son at Stirling for the last time. On 6 May, Mary and Bothwell returned to Edinburgh. On 15 May, they were married. Bothwell and his first wife had divorced twelve days previously.

Originally, Mary believed that many nobles supported her marriage, but relations quickly soured as the marriage proved to be deeply unpopular. Catholics considered the marriage unlawful, since they did not recognise Bothwell's divorce or the validity of the Protestant service. Both Protestants and Catholics were shocked that Mary should marry the man accused of murdering her husband.

The confederate lords turned against Mary and Bothwell and raised their own army. Mary and Bothwell confronted the lords at Carberry Hill on 15 June, but there was no battle, as Mary's forces dwindled away through desertion during negotiations. The lords took Mary to Edinburgh, where crowds of spectators denounced her as an adulteress and murderer. The following night, she was imprisoned in Loch Leven Castle. On 24 July, she was forced to abdicate in favour of her one-year-old son James. Moray, her chief advisor, was made regent, while Bothwell was driven into exile.

On 2 May 1568, Mary escaped from Loch Leven Castle with the aid of George Douglas, brother of Sir William Douglas, the castle's owner. Managing to raise an army of 6,000 men, she met Moray's smaller forces at the Battle of Langside on 13 May. Defeated, she fled south to England. On 18 May, local officials took her into protective custody where she would be kept under house arrest for the next 19 years.

Mary apparently expected Elizabeth to help her regain her throne. Elizabeth was cautious as to Mary due to the matter’s influential political presence. Under the Third Succession Act, passed in 1543 by the Parliament of England, Elizabeth was recognised as her sister's heir, and Henry VIII's last will and testament had excluded the Stuarts from succeeding to the English throne. Yet, in the eyes of many Catholics, Elizabeth was illegitimate and Mary Stuart was the rightful queen of England, as the senior surviving legitimate descendant of Henry VII through her grandmother, Margaret Tudor, Henry VII’s sister.

Elizabeth considered Mary's designs on the English throne to be a serious threat and so confined her to a number of properties, including but not limited to Tutbury, Sheffield Castle, and Chatsworth House. These were located halfway between Scotland and London and distant from the sea.

Mary was permitted her own domestic staff. She was transported from house to house. Her chambers were finely decorated, her bed linen was changed daily and her own chefs prepared meals with a choice of 32 dishes served on silver plates. She was occasionally allowed outside under strict supervision.

Elizabeth's principal secretary William Cecil, Lord Burghley, and Sir Francis Walsingham watched Mary carefully with the aid of spies placed in her household. A number of spies were placed in her household under the pretext of servants. If Mary sent out letters, the servants would send a copy of the letter to Walsingham, who would proceed to examine it closely.

In 1571, Cecil and Walsingham (at that time England's ambassador to France) uncovered the Ridolfi Plot, a plan to replace Elizabeth with Mary with the help of Spanish troops and the Duke of Norfolk. Norfolk was executed and the English Parliament introduced a bill barring Mary from the throne, to which Elizabeth refused to give royal assent.

Mary sent letters in cipher to the French ambassador, Michel de Castelnau, scores of which were discovered and decrypted in 2022–2023. After the Throckmorton Plot of 1583, Walsingham (now the queen's principal secretary) introduced the Bond of Association and the Act for the Queen's Safety, which sanctioned the killing of anyone who plotted against Elizabeth and aimed to prevent a putative successor from profiting from her murder.

The "Bond of Association" designed by Cecil and Walsingham in 1584 stated that anyone within the line of succession to the throne on whose behalf anyone plotted against the Queen, would be excluded from the line and executed. This was agreed upon by hundreds of Englishmen, who likewise signed the Bond. Mary also agreed to sign the Bond. The following year, Parliament passed the Act of Association, which provided for the execution of anyone who would benefit from the death of the Queen if a plot against her was discovered. Because of the bond, Mary could be executed if a plot was initiated by others that could lead to her accession to England's throne.

Left: Transcripts of the Babington Plot; Middle: Mary of Scots on trial; Right: Execution of Mary of Scots

The crown had overlooked Mary’s involvement in the previous plots, likely due to lack of knowledge or her lack of participation in them. Elizabeth was also not eager to execute her as firstly, Mary was a relative, and secondly, this could set the precedent for Elizabeth’s execution in the future. However, this would change upon discovery of the Babington plot.

The long-term goal of the plot was the invasion of England by the Spanish forces of King Philip II and the Catholic League in France, leading to the restoration of the old religion. The plot was discovered by Elizabeth's spymaster Sir Francis Walsingham and used to entrap Mary for the purpose of removing her as a claimant to the English throne. The plot involved solicitation of a Spanish invasion of England with the purpose of deposing Protestant Queen Elizabeth and replacing her with Catholic Queen Mary and a plot to assassinate Queen Elizabeth.

The chief conspirators were Anthony Babington and John Ballard. Babington was recruited by Ballard, a Jesuit priest who hoped to rescue the Scottish Queen. Working for Walsingham were double agents Robert Poley and Gilbert Gifford, as well as Thomas Phelippes, a spy agent and cryptanalyst, and the puritan spy Maliverey Catilyn. The turbulent Catholic deacon Gifford had been in Walsingham's service since the end of 1585 or the beginning of 1586. Gifford obtained a letter of introduction to Queen Mary from a confidant and spy for her, Thomas Morgan. Walsingham then placed double agent Gifford and spy decipherer Phelippes inside Chartley Castle, where Queen Mary was imprisoned.

On 7 July 1586, the only Babington letter that was sent to Mary was decoded by Phelippes. Mary responded in code on 17 July 1586 ordering the would-be rescuers to assassinate Queen Elizabeth. The response letter also included deciphered phrases indicating her desire to be rescued: "The affairs being thus prepared" and "I may suddenly be transported out of this place". At the Fotheringay trial in October 1586, William Cecil and Walsingham used the letter against Mary who refused to admit that she was guilty. In the end, she was betrayed by her secretaries who confessed under pressure that the letter was mainly truthful.

The issuance of the papal bull Regnans in Excelsis by Pope Pius V on 25 February 1570, granted English Catholics authority to overthrow the English queen. Queen Mary became the focal point of numerous plots and intrigues to restore England to its former religion, Catholicism, and to depose Elizabeth and even to take her life.

Reacting to the growing threat posed by Catholics, urged on by the pope and other Catholic monarchs in Europe, Francis Walsingham, and William Cecil realised that if Mary could be implicated in a plot to assassinate Elizabeth, she could be executed and the papist threat diminished. Walsingham used Babington to ensnare Queen Mary by sending his double agent, Gilbert Gifford to Paris to obtain the confidence of Morgan, then locked in the Bastille. Morgan previously worked for the 6th Earl of Shrewsbury, an earlier jailor of Queen Mary. Through Shrewsbury, Queen Mary became acquainted with Morgan. Queen Mary sent Morgan to Paris to deliver letters to the French court. While in Paris, Morgan became involved in a previous plot designed by William Parry, which resulted in Morgan's incarceration in the Bastille. In 1585 Gifford was arrested returning to England while coming through Rye in Sussex with letters of introduction from Morgan to Queen Mary. Walsingham released Gifford to work as a double agent, in the Babington Plot. Gifford used the alias "No. 4" and functioned as a courier in the entrapment plot against Queen Mary. Unfortunately for the conspirators, Walsingham was certainly aware of some of the aspects of the plot, based on reports by his spies, most notably Gilbert Gifford, who kept tabs on all the major participants. While he could have shut down some part of the plot and arrested some of those involved within reach, he still lacked any piece of evidence that would prove Queen Mary's active participation in the plot and he feared to commit any mistake which might cost Elizabeth her life.

After the Throckmorton Plot, Queen Elizabeth had issued a decree in July 1584, which prevented all communication to and from Mary. However, Walsingham and Cecil realised that that decree also impaired their ability to entrap Mary. They needed evidence for which she could be executed based on their Bond of Association tenets. Thus Walsingham established a new line of communication, one which he could carefully control without incurring any suspicion from Mary. Gifford approached the French ambassador to England, Baron de Châteauneuf-sur-Cher, and described the new correspondence arrangement that had been designed by Walsingham. Gifford and Mary’s jailer had arranged for a local brewer to facilitate the movement of messages between Queen Mary and her supporters by placing them in a watertight casing inside the stopper of a beer barrel. Thomas Phelippes, a cipher and language expert in Walsingham's employ, was then quartered at Chartley Hall to receive the messages, decode them and send them to Walsingham. Gifford submitted a code table (supplied by Walsingham) to Chateauneuf and requested the first message be sent to Mary.

All subsequent messages to Mary would be sent via diplomatic packets to Chateauneuf, who then passed them onto Gifford. Gifford would pass them on to Walsingham, who would confide them to Phelippes. The cipher used was a substitution cipher. Phelippes would decode and make a copy of the letter. The letter was then resealed and given back to Gifford, who would pass it on to the brewer. The brewer would then smuggle the letter to Mary. If Mary sent a letter to her supporters, it would go through the reverse process. In short order, every message coming to and from Chartley Hall was intercepted and read by Walsingham.

On 14 July 1586, Mary was in a dark mood knowing that her son had betrayed her in favour of Elizabeth, and three days later she replied to Babington in a long letter in which she outlined the components of a successful rescue and the need to assassinate Elizabeth. She also stressed the necessity of foreign aid if the rescue attempt was to succeed.

Mary was clear in her support for the murder of Elizabeth if that would have led to her liberty and Catholic domination of England. In addition, Queen Mary supported in that letter, and in another one to Ambassador Mendoza, a Spanish invasion of England.

The letter was again intercepted and deciphered by Phelippes. But this time, Phelippes, on the direction of Walsingham, kept the original and made a copy, adding a request for the names of the conspirators.

Then, a letter was sent that would destroy Mary's life.

Let the great plot commence.

Signed Mary

On 11 August 1586, after being implicated in the Babington Plot, Mary was arrested while out riding and taken to Tixall Hall. In a successful attempt to entrap her, Walsingham had deliberately arranged for Mary's letters to be smuggled out of Chartley. Mary was misled into thinking her letters were secure, while in reality they were deciphered and read by Walsingham. From these letters, it was clear that Mary was complicit in the plots to dispose of Elizabeth.

In October, she was put on trial for treason under the Act for the Queen's Safety before a court of 36 noblemen. Spirited in her defence, Mary denied the charges. She protested that she had been denied the opportunity to review the evidence, that her papers had been removed from her, that she was denied access to legal counsel and that as a foreign anointed queen she had never been an English subject and thus could not be convicted of treason.

She was convicted on 25 October and sentenced to death with only one commissioner, Lord Zouche, expressing any form of dissent. Nevertheless, Elizabeth hesitated to order her execution, even in the face of pressure from the English Parliament to carry out the sentence. She was concerned that the killing of a queen set a discreditable precedent and was fearful of the consequences, especially if, in retaliation, Mary's son, James, formed an alliance with the Catholic powers and invaded England.

Elizabeth asked Mary's final custodian if he would discreetly kill Mary in a painless manner, which he refused to do in regards to his conscience. On 1 February 1587, Elizabeth signed the death warrant, and entrusted it to William Davison, a privy councillor. On 3 February, ten members of the Privy Council of England, having been summoned by Cecil without Elizabeth's knowledge, decided to carry out the sentence at once. Although today, many historians debate if Elizabeth truly did not want to sign the deaf warrant or if this was simply an attempt to wash Elizabeth's hands from being solely involved in Mary's death.

At Fotheringhay, on the evening of 7 February 1587, Mary was told she was to be executed the next morning. She spent the last hours of her life in prayer, distributing her belongings to her household, and writing her will and a letter to the King of France.

During the execution, her servants, Jane Kennedy and Elizabeth Curle, and the executioners helped Mary remove her outer garments, revealing a velvet petticoat and a pair of sleeves in crimson brown, the liturgical colour of martyrdom in the Catholic Church.

Mary was not beheaded with a single strike. The first blow missed her neck and struck the back of her head. The second blow severed the neck, except for a small bit of sinew, which the executioner cut through using the axe.

Cecil's nephew reported that after her death, a small dog, a Skye terrier owned by the queen, emerged from hiding among her skirts, whimpering. The dog had likely snuck into the hall from under her skirts. It’s said that the dog refused to eat and pined away and died. Everything touched by her blood was supposedly burnt in the fireplace of the Great Hall to obstruct relic hunters. Hence any items that were claimed to be used in her execution or owned by her do not carry sufficient claim of that truth.

When the news of the execution reached Elizabeth, she became indignant and asserted that Davison had disobeyed her instructions not to part with the warrant and that the Privy Council had acted without her authority. Davison was arrested, thrown into the Tower of London, and found guilty of misprision. He was released nineteen months later, after Cecil and Walsingham interceded on his behalf.

Mary's request to be buried in France was refused by Elizabeth. Her body was embalmed and left in a secure lead coffin until her burial in a Protestant service in late July 1587.