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,
Valentine Dale treason. On 22 March following he was presented to the mastership of Sherburn Hospital, County Durham. His name occurs in the special commission for Middlesex (5 September 1586), under which Anthony Babington and others were indicted for treason. He assisted at the trial of Mary, Queen of Scots, at Fotheringhay, in October the same year; and to the parliament which met on the 15th of that month he was again returned for Chichester. He acted as one of the high commissioners for causes ecclesiastical at the deprivation of Robert Cawdrey on 30 May 1587. In February 1588 Dale, Henry Stanley,