Francis Throckmorton (Throgmorton), was executed at Tyburn on this date in 1584 for his plot to make Mary, Queen of Scots the Queen of England, too.
The son of a prominent Warwickshire family — his father’s monumental tomb still adorns the church at Coughton, while London’s Throgmorton Street is named for our guy’s uncle Nicholas — Francis was a staunch Catholic who as a 20-something man on the make did a continental tour where he huddled with papist exiles cogitating how to win England back for the faith.
Naturally many a plot centered on the Catholic Queen of Scotland Mary, who as Henry VIII’s great-niece stood well within the scope of consanguinity necessary to rule England with legitimacy. (Mary’s son James VI of Scotland and James I of England would do justice that.)
On his return to London in 1583, the subtle agents of Elizabeth’s spymaster Francis Walsingham sniffed out his project to establish a line of communication from Mary to the Duke of Guise who contemplated a pro-Mary invasion.
“I have seen as resolute men as Throckmorton stoop, notwithstanding the great shew he hath made of a Roman resolution,” Walsingham prophesied of the obdurate young man whose fidelity to his project was to be tested by torture in the Tower. “I suppose the grief of the last torture will suffice, without anye extremity of racking, to make him more comformable than he hath hitherto showed himself.”
Indeed Throckmorton did succumb.
The ensuing bust-up of his plot forms a station on Queen Mary’s own path to Calvary: the treasonable design empowered Walsingham successfully to impel creation of the Bond of Association, a sort of legal pledge to execute anyone who attempted to usurp Elizabeth. That “bond” was called in two years later by Mary’s connection to the Babington Plot, leading directly to the Scots queen’s own trial and execution.
* Throckmorton’s plot also resulted in the expulsion of Spanish ambassador Bernardino de Mendoza, an energetic spy for the Catholics’ overseas allies.
On this day..
- 1919: Henry Perry, made more vicious
- 1507: Paolo da Novi, Doge of the people
- 1941: George Johnson Armstrong, under the Treachery Act
- 1835: Ruel Blake, "often seen among negroes"
- 1535: Jacob van Campen, Amsterdam Anabaptist
- 1654: Gerard the conspirator, and the Portuguese envoy's brother
- 1917: "John Nelson", mystery man
- 1946: Public Execution in Debica
- 1950: American soldiers during the Korean War
- 1976: Costas Georgiou and three other mercenaries in Angola
- 2000: Dmitry Chikunov, secretly
- 2007: Zheng Xiaoyu, former Director of the State Food and Drug Administration