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,
Fotheringhay servant and later protégé in the Admiralty). Hewer himself died without issue on 6 November 1728, when it passed to Hewer's heirs, the Blackborne family. In 1797 Samuel Pepys's great-great-nephew Samuel Pepys Cockerell sold the estate of Rev. Abraham Blackborne in Fotheringhay. Eventually the lordship of the manor and castle came to the Belsey family. After the manor came into the possession of Edward III he passed it to his son Edmund of Langley, 1st Duke of York, founder of the Yorkist line. The castle then became the home of the Dukes of York. Richard III was born there in