Elizabeth Signed Mary’s Death Warrant. Then Her Secretary Was Sent to the Tower

Elizabeth Signed Mary’s Death Warrant. Then Her Secretary Was Sent to the Tower.

On the 1st of February 1587, Elizabeth I signed the warrant that would send Mary, Queen of Scots to the scaffold. Within weeks, William Davison, the secretary who handled it, would be imprisoned in the Tower.

Mary had been in England since 1568 and, after the Babington Plot was uncovered in 1586, the case against her had finally come to a head. Coded correspondence intercepted and deciphered by Walsingham’s intelligence network formed an important part of the evidence used against her. She was tried at Fotheringhay Castle in October, found guilty and sentenced to death.

Elizabeth still did not allow the sentence to be carried out immediately.

Mary had been a queen in her own right, she was Elizabeth’s cousin and she still had supporters who regarded her as the rightful Catholic heir to the English throne. There was also the deeply uncomfortable question of one anointed monarch authorising the judicial execution of another.

By February, the warrant had been prepared.

William Davison, one of Elizabeth’s principal secretaries, took it to her and she signed it. The document then passed under the Great Seal.

Davison later left his own account of what happened afterwards.

He wrote that Elizabeth asked whether the warrant had already been sealed. When he told her that it had, she questioned why it had been dealt with so quickly. Davison replied that he had done no more than he believed she had instructed him to do.

His account also shows just how uneasy he had become. Davison later wrote that he feared Elizabeth might try to shift responsibility away from herself, and he did not want to deal with the matter alone. He went to Sir Christopher Hatton and explained what had passed between himself and the Queen.

On the 3rd of February, Lord Burghley brought the warrant before members of the Privy Council. According to Davison, the councillors were told what had happened between him and Elizabeth and agreed that the warrant should be sent to Fotheringhay without going back to the Queen again.

Robert Beale, Clerk of the Privy Council, was chosen to carry it.

Mary knew nothing of this until the evening of the 7th of February, when she was told that she would die the following morning.

On the 8th of February 1587, she was executed in the Great Hall of Fotheringhay Castle.

Davison was soon in serious trouble.

Elizabeth maintained that although she had signed the warrant, she had not given authority for it to be carried out in the way it had been. Davison was arrested and sent to the Tower, and on the 28th of March he appeared before the Star Chamber.

He was fined 10,000 marks and ordered to remain imprisoned at the Queen’s pleasure.

One of the things I find most striking about this episode is that Davison was not acting entirely on his own. Senior councillors had discussed the warrant, read it and agreed that it should be sent. Yet once Mary was dead, it was Davison who faced the most obvious punishment.

We cannot know exactly what Elizabeth intended at every stage, and the surviving accounts do not give us a simple answer. Davison believed he had followed her instructions. Elizabeth later insisted that the warrant had gone further than she intended.

That disagreement sits at the heart of what happened next.

Next in my Tudor series, I’ll be looking at Mary’s final evening and her execution at Fotheringhay on the 8th of February 1587.

Image info:

Mary, Queen of Scots’ death warrant, signed by Elizabeth I, 1587. Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons