What, if any, was Elizabeth I's culpability for the execution of Mary Queen of Scots?

Question

Some historians claim that Elizabeth I never really wanted Mary Queen of Scots, a cousin, to be executed but allowed herself to be dominated by English magnates. Thus, these historians absolve her of any culpability. Others are less forgiving: Elizabeth signed the death warrant, and soon, the lovely and luckless, if frivolous, Queen of Scots was no more. What's the real score?

Answer 1

There can be only one. As long as Mary was alive she was a rivial for the throne. Elizabeth claim to the throne was not unquestionable. The religous conflict and the intrigues with France and Spain brought other problems and concerns that could not have pleasing to Elizabeth.

Answer 2

Elizabeth was the ruler in the time of her cousins execution. She was th eonly one who could approve or disapprove the execution. regardless of all the excuses and controversies Elizabeth was in charge and she could have just let Mary rott in jail instead of executing her.

Answer 3

It was a complicated issue.

While Elizabeth signed Mary's death warrant, she certainly claimed afterwards that she was tricked, and even cast the poor secretary who placed the warrant in front of her into the Tower of London for a while because she did sign it.

However, no one ever pressured Elizabeth into doing anything she did not want to do. To quote Elizabeth herself years later when Robert Cecil was telling her she "must" appoint King James VI of Scotland to be her designated successor:
"...Must is not a word that is used to princes."

I believe with the political situation what it was after Mary Queen of Scots' execution, that being tricked into signing the death warrant was Elizabeth's "out" and the above mentioned secretary was Elizabeth's "fall guy."

Let's backtrack a bit.

Both Mary and Elizabeth were the descendants of English King Henry VII. Because of her father King Henry VIII's dynastic wranglings in the 1520s -1530s in search of a male heir to the English throne, Elizabeth was designated as his third heir to the throne at his death in 1547.

She was also the product of his infamous marriage to Anne Boleyn, and a Protestant princess. At various times in her father's and subsequent reigns, she was also considered a bastard, and therefore, unfit to inherit the English crown.

This was the basis for Mary Queen of Scots claim to the English throne beginning in 1558, the year Elizabeth I became queen. Mary was a Catholic and a French-reared Scotswoman ... in other words, a foreigner, and the English people after the reign of Queen Mary I (commonly called "Bloody Mary" by the English Protestants) were notoriously xenophobic.

Elizabeth allowed her peers of England to try Mary Queen of Scots in the first place. Mary was plotting to assassinate the Queen of England as the price for her own freedom. These plots happened for the entire 19 years Mary was imprisoned in England.

Mary had been forced to abdicate the Scots' throne in 1568 in favor of her son because it was widely believed in that country that she had murdered her third husband King Henry Darnley. Such unbecoming behavior in a woman cost Mary her crown in 1568 and more unbecoming behavior in the various plots in the following years cost Mary her life in February 1587.

So, if Elizabeth had not had Mary beheaded, Mary's supporters would certainly have assassinated Elizabeth had Mary been freed. It was a matter of kill or be killed.

There is a footnote to the royal cousins' deadly dealings.

As part of Mary Queen of Scots' will, she granted her right to the English throne (by conquest this time) to King Philip II of Spain, another Catholic and the most powerful monarch in Europe at the time of her death. As soon as he heard of the unlucky queen's death in the spring of 1587, Philip began to build the equally unlucky and ill named "Invincible Armada," now called "the Spanish Armada."

When Philip's fleet finally did attack in September 1588, it was destroyed by the much smaller and more mobile English fleet and unlucky bad weather. The was the true birth of the supremacy of England's mastery of the Seven Seas and the resulting British Empire.

And, despite potrayals otherwise in many movies about the queens, Queen Elizabeth I of England and her cousin Mary Queen of Scots never met face to face. Ironically, they are both buried at Westminster Abbey, London, a few feet apart. Closer in death than ever in life.