The executioner needed three strikes of the axe. After the first blow missed Mary Stuart's neck and struck the back of her head, witnesses heard her lips moving in prayer. The second blow severed most of her neck but left a sinew of skin, which the executioner sawed through with his blade. When he lifted what he believed was her head, the auburn hair came away in his hand—it was a wig—and Mary's grey-stubbled skull rolled across the scaffold at Fotheringhay Castle. She was forty-four years old and had spent the last nineteen of them as her cousin's prisoner.
February 8, 1587, ended one of the longest and most agonizing political standoffs in English history. For nearly two decades, Queen Elizabeth I had possessed both the power and, many argued, the justification to execute Mary. She had done neither. Understanding why requires examining not just the famous plots but the impossible position of a queen who genuinely believed killing another anointed monarch would damn her—and possibly destroy her realm.
The Prisoner Who Was Also a Queen
Mary arrived in England in May 1568, fleeing Scotland after a catastrophic sequence of events: the suspicious death of her second husband Lord Darnley, her hasty marriage to the Earl of Bothwell (widely suspected of Darnley's murder), and the subsequent uprising that forced her to abdicate in favor of her infant son James. She crossed the border expecting Elizabeth's help in reclaiming her throne. Instead, she received a lifetime of captivity.
Elizabeth's dilemma was genuine and unprecedented. No legal framework existed for holding a foreign sovereign. Mary had committed no crime in England, yet releasing her was unthinkable. As the great-granddaughter of Henry VII, Mary possessed a claim to the English throne that many Catholics considered superior to Elizabeth's own. Catholic Europe had never accepted Henry VIII's divorce from Catherine of Aragon, making Elizabeth illegitimate in their eyes and Mary the rightful Queen of England.
This wasn't abstract theology. Pope Pius V's 1570 bull Regnans in Excelsis explicitly declared Elizabeth a heretic, absolved her subjects of loyalty, and made her assassination a potential act of religious merit. With Mary alive and Catholic, every disaffected English subject had a replacement monarch ready and waiting. Elizabeth couldn't free her, couldn't return her to Scotland where Protestant lords wanted her dead, and couldn't send her to Catholic France or Spain where she might become the figurehead of an invasion. Imprisonment was not cruelty—it was the absence of any alternative.
Plots Real and Manufactured
The conspiracies came with almost monotonous regularity. The Ridolfi Plot of 1571 aimed to depose Elizabeth through a Spanish invasion and marry Mary to the Duke of Norfolk. The Throckmorton Plot of 1583 involved another Spanish-backed scheme to assassinate Elizabeth. Each discovery intensified Protestant demands for Mary's execution and each time Elizabeth refused, arguing that killing Mary would set a precedent that could endanger any monarch—including herself.
The final conspiracy, the Babington Plot of 1586, was different because Elizabeth's spymaster Sir Francis Walsingham had penetrated it from the beginning. Walsingham's agents intercepted Mary's correspondence through an ingenious method: her letters, written in cipher, were smuggled out of Chartley Manor in the bungs of beer barrels. What Mary didn't know was that her trusted courier worked for Walsingham, who decoded every message before passing it along to its intended recipient.
"Let the great plot commence," Mary allegedly wrote to Anthony Babington, explicitly endorsing a plan that included Elizabeth's assassination. Whether those exact words appeared in Mary's original letter or were added by Walsingham's agents remains debated by historians. What is certain is that Mary acknowledged the plot and discussed logistics for her own rescue—enough to condemn her under English law.
The evidence presented at Mary's trial included her deciphered letters and testimony from her secretaries Claude Nau and Gilbert Curle, who confirmed she had dictated the correspondence. Mary denied the most damaging passages but admitted to communicating with Babington. She objected that as an anointed queen, she could not be tried by any earthly court. The commissioners disagreed, found her guilty of compassing and imagining the death of the Queen, and sentenced her to death.
The Signature That Took Three Months
Elizabeth had her verdict by late October 1586. She did not sign the death warrant until February 1, 1587, and even then the document sat with Secretary William Davison while she visibly agonized. What followed reveals either Elizabeth's genuine torment or an elaborate performance designed to give her deniability—scholars still debate which.
Elizabeth hinted to Mary's jailer Sir Amias Paulet that he might "ease her burden" through private assassination. Paulet, a Puritan of rigid conscience, refused to commit murder and wrote back that he would not "make so foul a shipwreck of my conscience." Elizabeth reportedly called him a "dainty and precise" fellow, furious that he wouldn't solve her problem discreetly.
When the warrant was finally dispatched without her explicit final approval—Secretary Davison and the Privy Council sent it to Fotheringhay before Elizabeth could change her mind again—she erupted. Davison was arrested, tried, fined, and imprisoned in the Tower. Elizabeth wrote to James VI of Scotland, Mary's son, insisting the execution had happened against her express wishes. Whether this was genuine shock or calculated theater, the execution had occurred beyond recall.
The Calculation Behind the Hesitation
Elizabeth's delay wasn't simply squeamishness or indecision. Executing Mary created several genuine dangers that weighed heavily on a monarch who had survived for decades by avoiding exactly these kinds of irreversible actions.
First was the precedent. If subjects could try and execute a queen, what protected Elizabeth herself from similar treatment should Catholic forces ever triumph? The doctrine of royal inviolability protected all monarchs, even hostile ones. Second was the international response. Spain was already preparing what would become the Armada; giving Philip II a Catholic martyr and a justified grievance might accelerate invasion. Third was Scotland. James VI made threatening noises about avenging his mother, though his desire for the English succession ultimately trumped filial duty.
Finally, Elizabeth understood something about power that many of her more militant Protestant advisors missed. A living Mary, imprisoned and aging, was a diminishing threat. A martyred Mary became eternal—a symbol around which Catholic resistance could perpetually rally. Elizabeth's instincts proved correct: Mary's execution did create a surge of Catholic sentiment across Europe and contributed to the timing of the Spanish Armada the following year.
The Body, the Myth, the Legacy
Mary's remains stayed at Fotheringhay for six months before burial at Peterborough Cathedral. In 1612, her son James—by then King of both England and Scotland—had her body moved to Westminster Abbey, where she now lies in a tomb more magnificent than Elizabeth's own, directly across the aisle in the Henry VII Lady Chapel. In death, Mary finally achieved the proximity to the English crown that had eluded her in life.
The nineteen years of imprisonment reveal something essential about how power actually operates. Elizabeth possessed overwhelming force but understood that using it carried costs that patience did not. She kept Mary alive not from weakness but from a strategic calculation that a living prisoner caused fewer problems than a dead martyr. Only when the Babington letters provided undeniable evidence of active conspiracy did the political arithmetic finally tip—and even then, Elizabeth tried to find someone else to bear the responsibility.
Mary Stuart died proclaiming her Catholic faith and her innocence of any crime against Elizabeth. She wore red, the Catholic color of martyrdom, beneath her black execution gown. She had staged her own death as carefully as Elizabeth had avoided causing it. Both queens understood that their struggle was as much about narrative as about power—and that whoever controlled the story would ultimately win. Four centuries later, Mary remains the romantic martyr and Elizabeth the cold pragmatist, exactly as Mary intended.