The threat was aimed at Mary Stuart. Weary of her long restraint, of her failure to rouse Philip or Scotland to her aid, of the baffled revolt of the English Catholics and the baffled intrigues of the Jesuits, Mary had bent for a moment to submission. "Let me go," she wrote to Elizabeth; "let me retire from this island to some solitude where I may prepare my soul to die. Grant this and I will sign away every right which either I or mine can claim." But the cry was useless, and in 1586 her despair found a new and more terrible hope in the plots against Elizabeth's life. She knew and approved the vow of Anthony Babington and a band of young Catholics, for the most part connected with the royal household, to kill the Queen and seat Mary on the throne; but plot and approval alike passed through Walsingham's hands, and the seizure of Mary's correspondence revealed her connivance in the scheme. Babington with his fellow-conspirators was at once sent to the block, and the provisions of the act passed in the last Parliament were put in force against Mary. In spite of her protests a Commission of Peers sate as her judges at Fotheringay Castle; and their verdict of "guilty" annihilated under the provisions of the statute her claim to the Crown. The streets of London blazed with bonfires, and peals rang out from steeple to steeple at the news of Mary's condemnation; but in spite of the prayer of Parliament for her execution and the pressure of the Council Elizabeth shrank from her death. The force of public opinion however was now carrying all before it, and after three months of hesitation the unanimous demand of her people wrested a sullen consent from the Queen. She flung the warrant signed upon the floor, and the Council took on themselves the responsibility of executing it. On the 8th of February 1587 Mary died on a scaffold which was erected in the castle-hall at Fotheringay as dauntlessly as she had lived. "Do not weep," she said to her ladies, "I have given my word for you." "Tell my friends," she charged Melville, "that I die a good Catholic." [Sidenote: Philip and England.]