Tudor Times is the online repository for all things Tudor and Stewart (1485–1625)

On 8th February 1587 Mary, Queen of Scots was executed at Fotheringhay Castle. She had been held captive in England since 1568, when, following defeat at the Battle of Langside, she fled across the Solway Moss to seek support from her cousin and fellow-monarch, Elizabeth I, to regain her throne. Mary had been deposed following the death of her husband, Lord Darnley, and her subsequent marriage to the Earl of Bothwell, widely believed to have been behind the assassination. During her time in England, once it became apparent that Elizabeth would not help her, she sought to escape. She became embroiled in plots to free her, and eventually, seemed to be party to a plan to assassinate the English queen. This was enough for a trial to be held, whose validity she refused to recognised, and for her to be condemned and executed.

On 7th February 1527, Dorothy de Vere, first wife of John Neville, 3rd Baron Latimer, died. She had borne two children, John, and Margaret. Dorothy, married before 1520, was the sister of John de Vere, 14th Earl of Oxford. The de Veres were solidly Lancastrian. Dorothy’s uncle had been one of the commanders in the victorious forces of Henry Tudor at Bosworth. Although Latimer was from a Yorkist family, by 1520 these divisions had been largely overcome. Through her son, Dorothy became the grandmother of the Countesses of Northumberland and Oxford, and the great-grandmother of one of the signatories to Charles I’s death warrant. Following her death, Dorothy’s husband married twice more, his third wife being the widowed Mrs Burgh, better known as Katherine Parr.

The picture shows Snape Castle, Dorothy’s married home © Tudor Times Ltd

On 6th February 1587, in the Great Hall at Fotheringhay Castle, the warrant for her execution was read aloud to Mary, Queen of Scots. It bore the flamboyant signature of her cousin, Elizabeth I, Queen of England, and was the culmination of nearly 20 years of captivity. Mary had come to England as a supplicant, following the defeat of her forces at the Battle of Langside in 1568. She hoped the English Queen would support her in regaining the throne that she had lost following the tumult that erupted after the assassination of her husband. Elizabeth, strongly influenced by her Secretary, Sir William Cecil, who had an implacable distrust of the Catholic Mary, had held her captive in a series of locations across the north and midlands of England. Numerous plots to free her and put her on the English throne, some undoubtedly with Mary’s support, had finally culminated in a trial that Mary refused to recognise and a death sentence.