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A law written for one woman
The Mary problem
Mary alive was a massive threat to Elizabeth. She was Catholic and Elizabeth's most obvious heir, which gave Catholic dissidents a constant reason to assassinate the queen. Yet Elizabeth refused to countenance Mary's removal, the legal apparatus for it did not exist, and Mary could argue that a sovereign queen cannot be a subject guilty of treason. After the Throckmorton plot, Burghley and Walsingham were set on eliminating her no matter what it cost, so they tightened her confinement and throttled her correspondence.
The second provision
The Bond of Association never named Mary. By the time the Privy Council signed it off at Hampton Court on October 19, 1584, it carried a second provision: anyone responsible for Elizabeth's death would be put to death whether they were aware of the assassination plot or not. If a Catholic assassin killed Elizabeth to put Mary on the throne, Mary would face death even if she knew nothing about it. The council knew it was aimed at her alone, and knew it committed them to a kind of lynch law.
The signatures
Thousands of loyal English men and women added their signatures, and those who could not write signed with a cross. On January 5, 1585, Mary herself put her name to it.
Why was Mary's claim to the throne so strong?
Mary was the granddaughter of Margaret Tudor, the sister of Henry VIII. Many Catholics held that Henry's marriage to Anne Boleyn was invalid in the eyes of Rome, which made Elizabeth illegitimate and Mary the rightful heir. Her claim made her the natural focus of every Catholic plot.
How did the Bond become a law?
Parliament passed the Act for the Queen's Safety in 1585, which turned the idea behind the Bond into statute. It set up a commission of peers and privy councillors to judge anyone linked to a plot. In 1586 a commission of this kind tried Mary at Fotheringhay Castle. She was executed there on February 8, 1587.
Why could Mary claim immunity from English law?
Under the legal thinking of the time, a sovereign answered only to God and not to the courts of another country. Mary had been Queen of Scotland since she was an infant. She used that argument at her trial in 1586, insisting she was not subject to English law. The commission rejected it.
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