Making a Martyr of Mary, Queen of Scots

In the early hours of the morning on 8 February 1587, Mary, Queen of Scots picked up the pen for the last time. She was sentenced to be executed later that day for plotting against her cousin and captor of 19 years, Elizabeth I. Among her last acts before she journeyed to the scaffold was to write a letter to her brother-in-law, Henry III of France, in which she painted her death sentence as persecution for her Catholic faith, rather than the charge of treason the Protestant English government had levied against her. The letter became a crucial part of Mary’s posthumous legacy of Catholic martyrdom which endures to this day – and that is exactly what she would have wanted.

In the letter, Mary claimed:

The Catholic faith and the assertion of my God-given right to the English crown are the two issues on which I am condemned, and yet I am not allowed to say that it is for the Catholic religion that I die, but for fear of interference with theirs.

As a Catholic queen of a Protestant country, Mary’s religion had caused problems for the entirety of her adult reign in Scotland, but it became more problematic when she escaped to England in May 1568 following her deposition. There were many in England – Catholics chief among them – who believed that Mary’s claim to the English throne was stronger than Elizabeth’s. For the Elizabethan government the best course of action was to keep Mary detained under close scrutiny in a range of northern castles and houses for the following 19 years.

This outraged Mary. As a queen regnant since she was six days old, she refused to accept that she could be subjected to the dominion of any foreign monarch. In defiance of her incarceration, Mary leaned into her role as a figurehead for English Catholics wholeheartedly. When Pope Pius V excommunicated Elizabeth in February 1570, her Catholic subjects were released from any obligations to obey her, giving legitimacy to their plots to overthrow her. Mary found herself increasingly at the centre of such attempts, including the Ridolfi Plot of 1571 and the Babington Plot of 1586, which would prove to be her ultimate undoing. Though her active role in these plots was limited, she would also wield her Catholicism as a rhetorical weapon prominently in her writing.