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 Castle de Forz, 3rd Earl of Albemarle, in his rebellion against King Henry III. Forz abandoned the castle and Henry III took it under his control; Fotheringhay remained in royal hands until the reign of Edward II. It was a favoured residence of the Dukes of York, and King Richard III was born here in 1452. It was also the final place of imprisonment of Mary, Queen of Scots, who was tried and executed in the castle in 1587. In the 1630s the castle was dismantled and most of the masonry removed, leaving only the earthworks. The castle site is protected