The executioner needed three strokes. The first blow struck the back of Mary Stuart's head. The second severed most of her neck. When he lifted what he believed was her head to show the crowd, the auburn hair came away in his hand—a wig—and her real head, close-cropped and grey, tumbled to the floor of Fotheringhay Castle's great hall. It was February 8, 1587, and the first legal execution of an anointed European monarch had just become a grotesque spectacle.
Mary, Queen of Scots had waited nineteen years in English captivity for this moment. Elizabeth I had waited just as long to order it. The delay wasn't indecision or mercy. It was strategy, fear, and a problem that had no clean solution: how do you kill a queen without teaching your own subjects that queens can be killed?
What Crime Could Justify Killing a Crowned Monarch?
Mary arrived in England in 1568, fleeing Scotland after her forced abdication the previous year. She was twenty-five years old, had already outlived two husbands, and carried a claim to the English throne that some Catholics considered superior to Elizabeth's. Her grandmother was Margaret Tudor, Henry VIII's sister, making Mary Elizabeth's first cousin once removed. Under Catholic doctrine, Elizabeth was illegitimate—the daughter of Anne Boleyn, whose marriage to Henry VIII the Pope had never recognized.
This made Mary a magnet for every Catholic plot against Elizabeth's Protestant regime. She didn't need to do anything; her mere existence was the problem. Over nineteen years, Mary was connected to at least three major conspiracies: the Ridolfi Plot of 1571, the Throckmorton Plot of 1583, and finally the Babington Plot of 1586. The evidence varied in quality. What Elizabeth lacked wasn't proof of Mary's treasonous intent—it was the political will to act on it.
The obstacle was theological as much as legal. Anointed monarchs ruled by divine right. If Parliament could try and execute one queen, what stopped them from trying another? Elizabeth understood this better than her councillors, who had been urging Mary's death since the early 1570s. Every petition for execution was also an implicit statement about the limits of royal power.
Why Did the Babington Plot Finally Change Everything?
The answer is a single intercepted letter with a postscript Mary should never have written. In 1586, a young Catholic gentleman named Anthony Babington organized a conspiracy to assassinate Elizabeth and place Mary on the throne, coordinated with a planned Spanish invasion. Elizabeth's spymaster, Sir Francis Walsingham, knew about it from the beginning. He had placed an agent inside the conspiracy and arranged for Mary's secret correspondence to pass through his hands.
The trap was elegant. Mary communicated with conspirators through letters hidden in beer barrels delivered to her household at Chartley Manor. Walsingham's agent, Gilbert Gifford, ensured every message was copied and decoded before delivery. When Babington wrote to Mary outlining the assassination plan, Walsingham waited. He needed Mary's response.
Mary not only approved the plot in writing—she asked for details about how the assassination would be carried out and what provisions had been made for her rescue. This letter, dated July 17, 1586, was the evidence Walsingham had spent years trying to obtain.
There is scholarly debate about whether Walsingham's agents added a forged postscript to Mary's letter, one that asked for the names of the six gentlemen who would carry out the assassination. If genuine, it showed Mary demanding specifics about murder. If forged, it was an insurance policy to guarantee conviction. Either way, the substance of Mary's approval was never in serious doubt. She had consented to Elizabeth's death in her own hand.
The Trial That Terrified Elizabeth
Mary was tried in October 1586 at Fotheringhay Castle before a commission of thirty-six nobles and privy councillors. She refused to recognize the court's authority, arguing that as an anointed queen she could not be judged by subjects. The trial proceeded anyway. The intercepted letters were read aloud. Mary denied their authenticity, demanded to see the originals, and insisted her secretaries had been tortured into false confessions.
None of her objections mattered. The commission found her guilty. Parliament petitioned for her immediate execution. Elizabeth stalled for three months.
Her reluctance wasn't squeamishness. Elizabeth had approved plenty of executions—hundreds of Catholics had died during her reign, including many priests. But those were subjects. Mary was a sovereign, anointed at nine months old in Stirling Castle, crowned Queen of France at seventeen. Killing her violated something fundamental about what monarchy meant. It also risked war with Spain and outrage from France and Scotland.
Elizabeth's councillors, particularly Lord Burghley and Walsingham, proposed alternatives. Could Mary simply be murdered quietly? Could she be handed over to her jailers with implicit instructions? Elizabeth explored these options, then backed away. A secret killing would look worse than a legal execution. It would make her seem afraid.
Why Did Elizabeth Finally Sign the Death Warrant?
Elizabeth signed Mary's death warrant on February 1, 1587. She then told her secretary, William Davison, to hold it and not to send it to Fotheringhay without further orders. What happened next remains murky. Davison showed the signed warrant to Lord Burghley, who convened the Privy Council. They decided collectively to send the warrant immediately, without consulting Elizabeth again.
Mary was executed seven days later. When Elizabeth learned it had been carried out, she erupted in fury. Davison was arrested, tried in Star Chamber, fined 10,000 marks, and imprisoned in the Tower. Elizabeth claimed she had never intended the warrant to be used—that she had signed it only as a precaution.
Historians have debated her sincerity for four centuries. Was this genuine rage or calculated theater? By punishing Davison, Elizabeth could tell the world—and more importantly, James VI of Scotland, Mary's son—that the execution had happened against her wishes. It gave her deniability. It protected the Scottish alliance. It preserved the fiction that she had not deliberately killed a crowned queen.
The truth is probably simpler and grimmer. Elizabeth had delayed for nineteen years because delay was always the safest option. The Babington letters finally made inaction more dangerous than action. Catholic Europe would plot regardless; at least with Mary dead, the plots would lose their obvious beneficiary. James VI of Scotland made angry noises but took no military action—his own claim to the English throne depended on staying in Elizabeth's good graces.
The Echo That Outlived Both Queens
Mary's execution established a precedent that Elizabeth feared but could not prevent. If one anointed monarch could be tried and executed by a legal process, the divine mystique of kingship was permanently damaged. Sixty-two years later, Mary's grandson Charles I would be tried and beheaded by Parliament. The Parliamentarians explicitly cited Mary's trial as legal precedent.
Elizabeth outlived Mary by sixteen years, dying in 1603 without ever naming an heir. James VI of Scotland inherited her throne, uniting the English and Scottish crowns. The woman Elizabeth had killed was the mother of her successor. The nineteen years of delay, the tortured reluctance, the theatrical rage at Davison—none of it prevented the Stuart line from claiming England anyway.
What the delay did accomplish was something Elizabeth probably valued more than outcome: it preserved her image as a reluctant executioner rather than an eager one. She killed her cousin, but she made certain the world knew she did it with anguish. Whether that anguish was genuine or performed, it was the story Elizabeth wanted told. Four centuries later, we're still telling it.