In this final installment of the life of Mary, Queen of Scots, we follow Mary’s flight from Scotland into England, the domain of her cousin, Queen Elizabeth, in 1568. Historians believe that Mary thought – or at least hoped – that her cousin would assist in returning her to the throne in Scotland, but instead, Mary and her retinue would spend a strange decade and a half imprisoned – in some of the finest homes in England. In the custody of the Earl of Shrewsbury and his wife, Bess of Hardwick, Mary gradually became a unifying figure for English Catholics chafing under the rule of a Protestant queen.
A prolific letter writer throughout her time in the custody of Elizabeth, she became enmeshed in the Babington Plot to assassinate her cousin in 1586. She was convicted at trial and sentenced to death; a situation that Elizabeth struggled with. She feared the precedent it set and certainly the impacts on her conscience and her relations with James VI of Scotland, Mary’s son and Elizabeth’s eventual successor, but in the end, she signed the death warrant of her cousin. Mary, Queen of Scots, one-time Queen of France, and aspirant to the English throne, was executed by beheading on February 8, 1587.
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