Elizabeth I of England Plot of 1586, Elizabeth's spymaster Sir Francis Walsingham and the royal council keenly assembled a case against her. At first, Elizabeth resisted calls for Mary's death. By late 1586, she had been persuaded to sanction her trial and execution on the evidence of letters written during the Babington Plot. Elizabeth's proclamation of the sentence announced that "the said Mary, pretending title to the same Crown, had compassed and imagined within the same realm divers things tending to the hurt, death and destruction of our royal person." On 8 February 1587, Mary was beheaded at Fotheringhay Castle, Northamptonshire. After Mary's execution,
Christopher Hatton and on one memorable occasion in December 1584 he led 400 kneeling members of the House of Commons in a prayer for the Queen's safety. Hatton was a member of the court which tried Anthony Babington in 1586, and was one of the commissioners who found Mary, Queen of Scots, guilty of treason in the following year. He vigorously denounced the Queen of Scots in Parliament, and advised William Davison to forward the warrant for her execution to Fotheringhay. In 1587 Hatton was made Lord Chancellor. Though he had no great knowledge of the law, he appears to have acted