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 1452, and his father, Richard Plantagenet, 3rd Duke of York was re-buried at the nearby church in 1476. Duke Richard's wife, Cecily Neville, Duchess of York, was later interred in the same tomb. The tomb opposite contains the body of Edward, the 2nd Duke of York, who was killed at the Battle of Agincourt. Fotheringhay is also where Mary, Queen of Scots, was tried and beheaded in 1587, and her body lay there for some months before its burial at Peterborough Cathedral and then its final burial in Westminster Abbey. Although it is often said that James I destroyed the