Mary Queen of Scots Executed: A Catholic Martyr's End

Three blows of the axe were needed to kill Mary Queen of Scots on February 8, 1587, in the Great Hall of Fotheringhay Castle in Northamptonshire. The first struck the back of her head. The second severed most of her neck. When the executioner held up what he believed was her head, it dropped to the floor, revealing that the auburn hair was a wig. Mary’s real hair was grey and cropped close. Her lips continued moving for several minutes. Her small dog, hidden beneath her skirts, crept out and lay beside the body. Mary had been a prisoner in England for nineteen years. She fled Scotland in 1568 after a series of disastrous political and personal decisions, including her probable complicity in the murder of her second husband Lord Darnley and her hasty marriage to the chief suspect, the Earl of Bothwell. She crossed the border expecting her cousin Elizabeth I to help restore her to the Scottish throne. Instead, Elizabeth kept her confined in a succession of English castles, unable to release a Catholic queen with a legitimate claim to the English throne but unwilling to execute an anointed monarch. The crisis came to a head with the Babington Plot of 1586, a conspiracy by Catholic supporters to assassinate Elizabeth and place Mary on the throne. Elizabeth’s spymaster, Sir Francis Walsingham, had been intercepting Mary’s coded correspondence for months. He allowed the conspiracy to develop until he had enough evidence to implicate Mary directly. Whether Walsingham fabricated or embellished some of the evidence remains debated, but the letters showed Mary had approved the plan to "dispatch" Elizabeth. Elizabeth signed the death warrant but agonized over the decision for weeks, reportedly throwing the signed document at her secretary and later claiming she never intended it to be delivered. The execution shocked Catholic Europe. Pope Sixtus V praised Mary as a martyr. Philip II of Spain accelerated plans for the Armada. Elizabeth maintained the fiction that the execution had been carried out without her final consent. The killing of a queen by a queen shattered the principle that crowned heads were inviolable.