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 of York, and his wife, Cecily Neville as well as his son Edmund, Earl of Rutland, who with Richard himself, fell at the Battle of Wakefield in 1460, are buried in the church. After the choir of the church was destroyed in the 16th century, Elizabeth I ordered the removal of the smashed York tombs and created the present monuments to the third Duke and his wife around the altar. The birthday of Richard III is commemorated annually by the Richard III Society by the placing of white roses in the church. Fotheringhay Fotheringhay is a village and civil parish