Mary, Queen of Scots on Trial at Fotheringhay

Mary, Queen of Scots on Trial at Fotheringhay

By the autumn of 1586, Mary, Queen of Scots had lived in England for more than eighteen years. She had arrived in 1568 after fleeing Scotland following her defeat at the Battle of Langside, hoping that Elizabeth I might help restore her to the Scottish throne. Instead, she spent the years that followed under guard in a succession of houses and castles. By October 1586 she was at Fotheringhay, and the discovery of the Babington Plot had placed her in immediate danger of prosecution and execution.

In my previous post, I looked at Anthony Babington and the secret correspondence intercepted by Francis Walsingham’s intelligence network. When the plot was uncovered, Mary’s rooms were searched and her papers taken. Her ciphers and correspondence were examined, while her secretaries, Claude Nau and Gilbert Curle, were questioned about letters which the English government believed connected her directly to the conspiracy against Elizabeth.

Before the main proceedings at Fotheringhay began, there was already disagreement over whether Mary should answer to Elizabeth’s commissioners. On the 12th of October she refused to submit to them and repeated her objections in further answers that day and on the 13th. Mary had been forced to abdicate the Scottish throne in 1567, but for most of her life she had been treated as royalty. She had been crowned Queen of Scots as a baby, ruled Scotland in her own right and briefly been Queen of France during her marriage to Francis II. She regarded her imprisonment in England as very different from being one of Elizabeth’s subjects.

The hearing finally began on the 14th of October and continued the following day. The commissioners questioned Mary about the Babington correspondence and the claim that she had approved a conspiracy which included Elizabeth’s assassination. Nau and Curle also appeared repeatedly in the evidence because of their involvement in handling Mary’s correspondence.

Mary had to answer the accusations before the commissioners herself. Her papers were already in government hands, and she questioned the use of copies of letters rather than originals. She denied approving Elizabeth’s murder and disputed evidence attributed to the men who had worked in her household.

Something I think is easily lost when we reduce this story to “Mary was tried and found guilty” is just how much argument took place at Fotheringhay. She challenged the letters, the testimony and the authority of the men sitting before her. Her objections about jurisdiction were serious enough that lawyers had already been considering the problem of proceeding against a woman who claimed the privileges of a sovereign ruler.

Once the hearings finished, the commissioners returned to London. They met again in the Star Chamber at Westminster on the 25th of October, where Mary was found guilty without being present. Parliament then pressed Elizabeth to carry out the sentence, with petitions presented during November, and Mary’s condemnation was publicly proclaimed in December.

For the rest of that winter Mary remained at Fotheringhay. Elizabeth still had to decide whether the conviction should end in execution, and this was a decision involving far more than the fate of one prisoner. Mary had once ruled Scotland, her son James VI now sat on the Scottish throne, and her treatment was being followed outside England as well as within it.

On the 1st of February 1587, Elizabeth signed the warrant authorising Mary’s execution. A week later, on the 8th of February, Mary was executed at Fotheringhay Castle.

The warrant itself would now become part of the controversy. Elizabeth’s secretary William Davison was later blamed for the way it had been handled and for the execution going ahead when it did.

That is where I want to pick up the story in my next Tudor post: Elizabeth, the death warrant and what happened during Mary’s final days at Fotheringhay.

What do you think mattered more at Fotheringhay - the evidence against Mary, or whether England had the right to judge her at all?

Image info:

Mary, Queen of Scots, engraving by James Thomson, 1829. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public Domain.