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,
Mary Beaton Ogilvy of Boyne in April 1566, having one son, James, born in 1568. Little else is known of her life. After the execution of Queen Mary, it was claimed by the writer Adam Blackwood in 1587 that Mary Beaton's handwriting was similar to the Queen's and so some of her private letters might have formed the basis for the casket letters produced to incriminate Queen Mary. She died in 1598 at the age of 55. Beaton is portrayed by Eileen O’Higgins in the 2018 film Mary, Queen of Scots. Mary Beaton Mary Beaton (1543–1598) was a Scottish noblewoman and an