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, Queen of Scots (opera) Stewart, Earl of Moray; her husband Lord Darnley; and her seducer the Earl of Bothwell. These relationships are foreshadowed in her Act 1 aria "The Three Stars of my Firmament". The libretto takes some liberties with the actual historical facts. The character Lord Gordon is fictitious although partly based on Lord Huntly. The real Earl of Moray was murdered two years later than depicted in the opera. Another character in the opera, Cardinal Beaton, was already dead before the opera's action begins in 1561. A commission from Scottish Opera, "Mary, Queen of Scots" was given its world premiere by the