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,
Bolton Castle Knollys (the elder), whom Mary nicknamed 'Schoolmaster', taught her English, as she only spoke French, Latin and Scots. She even met with local "Papists" (Catholics), something for which Knollys and Scrope were severely reprimanded. In January 1569, Mary was removed from Bolton Castle for the last time, being taken to Tutbury in Staffordshire where she would spend much of the 18 years before her execution in 1587. After the death in 1630 of Emanuel Scrope, 1st Earl of Sunderland, without any legitimate children, Bolton Castle was inherited by Mary the eldest of his three illegitimate daughters. She married Charles Powlett,