CHAPTER TWENTY
‘By divers her privy letters written wholly with her own
hand … it is most certain that she was privy, art and
part of the actual devise and deed of the fore-named
murder of the King, her lawful husband.’
From the Act of the Scottish Parliament, 15th December 1567
The conference of York, which opened in October 1568, was remarkable from the first for the confusion of aims among its participants. Elizabeth had already left conflicting impressions upon Mary and the Scottish nobles as to what she regarded the desirable outcome of this conference to be. Their own intentions were equally at variance. Of those present, only Moray was able to show true singleness of purpose, in that he intended to prove the queen of Scotland’s guilt up to the hilt in order to prevent her return north; with this object in view he officially took custody from Morton of the debatable ‘privy letters’ in their silver casket on 16th September, before setting out for England. However, the incriminating documents had signally increased from the solitary letter of Lennox’s supplication, and the briefly mentioned litterae of Buchanan’s June Book of Articles. They were now named in the receipt as ‘missive letters, contracts or obligations for marriage, sonnets or love-ballads, and all other letters contained therein’.1 Buchanan’s English translation of his Articles, prepared at the end of September for use in front of the commission, also contained an additional long postscript on the specific subject of the letters, in contrast to the single phrase used three months earlier.
Moray’s supporters were much less single-minded than their chief in their aims; Maitland in particular still dangled after his old scheme of Anglo-Scottish union, in which a restored Mary could play her part. Nor were Mary’s own commissioners, including John Leslie, bishop of Ross, and Lord Herries, as resolute in their determination to prove her innocence as was the queen herself; having lived through the troubled times of the queen’s marriage to Bothwell, they conceived their role as rather to secure some sort of compromise by which Mary could be brought back to Scotland, than to shout out Queen Mary’s freedom from guilt from the house-tops. As for the English ‘judges’, the earl of Sussex, Sir Ralph Sadler and the duke of Norfolk, it soon transpired that they too were not immune to private considerations. Norfolk had recently been widowed; he was England’s leading noble, and himself a Protestant, although he had many Catholic relations; the queen of Scots was now generally regarded as once more marriageable, despite the fact that divorce from Bothwell was not yet secured, and Norfolk’s name had been mentioned in this context, even before the opening of the conference. As a ‘judge’, therefore, Norfolk might be supposed to be somewhat parti pris.
Under these circumstances, it was hardly surprising that the conference at York seemed at first to achieve but little. On 11th October Moray decided to make a bold essay to resolve matters. Copies of the ‘privy letters’ were secretly shown to the English commissioners. Maitland, however, seems to have leaked the news to Mary’s own commissioners for the next day they rode over to Bolton and informed her of this development, although they had not actually seen the letters themselves. Moray was still acting cautiously: Norfolk reported back to London that the letters had not been shown to them officially as commissioners, but merely ‘for our better instruction’.2 Moray asked Norfolk to find out how Elizabeth would react to the letters, and whether they would be considered sufficient proof to condemn the queen of Scots of murder. Despite the judicial irregularity of Moray’s behaviour, Norfolk professed himself to be horrified by the contents of the letters; although he had only seen copies, he expressed the view that so many letters could hardly be counterfeited; in asking Elizabeth’s advice on how to proceed next, he gave the opinion that conviction of the Scottish queen would scarcely be avoided, if indeed the letters were written in her own hand.
Elizabeth’s reaction to this communication was to send for the whole conference to start again at Westminster. It was felt that away from the frenetic atmosphere which seemed to have developed at York, calmer counsels might prevail, and some solid solution emerge from out of this morass in which, as Sussex truly pointed out, the crown of Scotland was being tossed about on wave after wave of private feud and interest. Elizabeth was as yet unaware that only five days after Norfolk wrote in such shocked terms concerning Mary’s letters, he had had some private conference with Maitland in which it seems likely that Maitland held out to him the bait of Mary’s hand in marriage. From Maitland’s point of view, the marriage of Mary with a leading English Protestant noble was an excellent step forward in his plans. It had been suggested that at this point Maitland must also have revealed to Norfolk that the so-called Casket Letters were not all they seemed, and that the allegations against Mary as a murderess were not really to be taken too seriously. After all, in this strange quasi-judicial world of a trial which was not a trial, guilt might also be considered non-guilt. At all events, Norfolk now allowed himself to be involved secretly in certain schemes for a marriage between himself and Mary.
Sussex, another English commissioner, did not seem to take the letters particularly seriously himself. In a letter back to London, he neatly summed up the course future developments might be expected to take, if Mary was allowed to appear before the tribunal at Westminster:3 she would obviously deny the authenticity of the letters in toto as a result of which she could never be convicted on their evidence; after this Elizabeth would be compelled to acquit her, and set her free. If on the other hand Mary was not allowed to appear personally, the whole matter could probably be ‘huddled up’ with some show of saving Mary’s honour, and yet without exposing the Scottish lords as forgers; after this Mary could still be kept in prison. It was a shrewd summary, and with its emphasis on the need to prevent Mary making a personal appearance at Westminster, a prophetic one. Knollys, from Bolton, put his finger on the same urgent necessity to condemn Mary somehow or other, if she was to be kept in captivity: he could not see how Elizabeth could with honour and safety detain Mary, unless she was utterly disgraced to the world and ‘the contrary party [Moray] thoroughly maintained’.
Knollys’s solution to the problem of Mary was to marry her off to his wife’s nephew, and Queen Elizabeth’s own cousin, young George Carey, Lord Hunsdon’s son. This handsome young man had called on Mary at Bolton in September, on his way north to join his father, the newly appointed governor of Berwick. The visit was probably prompted by Knollys’s matchmaking. Carey was courteously received by Mary, although her mind seems to have been more on politics than on dalliance: she spent most of their conversations retailing to him a list of messages to give to his father about border matters, where conditions were by now exceptionally turbulent, as always during a period of governmental unrest in Scotland. Mary was still blithely unaware of the cool conclusions which Sussex had drawn concerning the paramount need to prevent her appearing personally in London. To Cassillis in Scotland she wrote quite confidently on 23rd October of the ‘good procedure’ at York where nothing had been proved against her. At first puzzled by the transference of the conference, she then consoled herself with the thought that from the first she had always wanted Elizabeth to take personal control of the whole matter, and now she was achieving her wish. Her letter to Elizabeth of 22nd October was a model of docility: ‘Since you, my good sister, know our cause best, we doubt not to receive presently good end thereof; where through we may be perpetually indebted to you.’4
The commission of Westminster opened officially on 25th November. It was a considerably enlarged body from that of the three commissioners at York, and now included both Leicester and Cecil. Shortly before its opening, on hearing that Elizabeth was constantly receiving her rival plaintiff Moray into her presence, Mary wrote commandingly to her own commissioners saying that they were on no account to take part in the conference if she, Mary, were not allowed to attend it on exactly the same footing as Moray; nevertheless she still does not seem to have believed that this right could actually be denied to her throughout the proceedings.5 On 29th November, Moray presented his ‘Eik’ or list of accusations, followed by the presentation of a personal accusation by Lennox. It was not, however, until 1st December that Mary’s commissioners put in their first protest, that Mary also should be allowed formal access to the court, since Moray was personally appearing in it; they demanded that Mary should be allowed to speak in her own defence in front of the English Council and the foreign ambassadors. Elizabeth, however, refused the request on the ingenious grounds that no proofs had as yet been shown against Mary (the Casket Letters had not yet been produced in court); there was therefore no point in her appearing at this juncture, when as far as Elizabeth knew, it might never be found necessary at all, and Mary might be able to be declared innocent in absentia. Winter had come early that year. Thick snow piled the ground between London and distant Bolton, 250 miles and days of hard riding away. Mary’s enforced isolation proved once more a disastrous hindrance to her cause. For without consulting her, her commissioners continued to try and bring about some sort of compromise to restore her to Scotland, in spite of the fact that Moray in his Eik had openly accused the queen of murder. They thus acted in direct contradiction of Mary’s specific instructions to break off from the conference if she personally was not allowed to appear on the same terms as Moray: ‘since they have free access to accuse us’.
On 6th December Mary’s emissaries made their first protest on the subject; but the English still retained the Marian commissioners within the conference, by the expedient of arguing over the condition of withdrawal. Moray was now asked to produce additional proofs to his Eik; he exhibited the December 15 67 Act of Parliament, and Buchanan’s Book of Articles. Finally, on 7th December the casket itself was produced by Moray and his supporters in front of Mary’s own commissioners. According to the Journal of the Commission for that day, the tribunal saw ‘a small gilded coffer not fully one foot long, being garnished in many places with the Roman letter F. set under a royal crown’.6 The circumstances of its finding, outlined earlier in Chapter 18, were now solemnly declared by Morton. Before the casket’s contents were exhibited, however, the tribunal were shown two marriage contracts which were not included in it: after this the first two letters from the casket were produced. The next day seven letters out of the casket were displayed, all said to be in French, written in the Roman hand. The English tribunal, according to their account, duly had the letters copied out for themselves, collated the copies with the originals, and then, at Moray’s own request, handed him back the originals. This done, Moray produced the cases against Bothwell’s servants, Hepburn, Hay, Powrie and Dalgleish, including their depositions.
The next day, 9th December, while Mary’s commissioners made renewed attempts to withdraw from the conference, which had for them become a travesty of justice, since they were not even admitted to the proceedings, the tribunal continued to examine the copies of the letters they had taken and the sonnets ‘written in French, being duly translated into English’. Morton made a further official declaration about the finding of the casket, and the evidence of Darnley’s servant Nelson, and one of Lennox’s servants, Thomas Crawford, was also produced. It was now decided to enlarge the tribunal still further with other leading English nobles including Northumberland, Westmorland and Shrewsbury. On 14th December the new tribunal was given a résumé of proceedings up to date. In the meantime Elizabeth gave Mary at Bolton three choices: she could answer the accusations through her own commissioners, in writing herself, or personally to some English nobles sent expressly to Bolton for that purpose. To all these alternatives Mary returned an indignant negative: she could hardly be expected to answer accusations based on evidence she was not allowed to see, or surrender the traditional right of the prisoner to face her accusers. But Elizabeth said that if Mary refused these three alternatives ‘it will be thought as much as she were culpable’.7
At last Mary was beginning to have some inkling of the treacherous nature of the quagmire into which she had so unwarily walked. Her frantic state of mind at this point, cut off at Bolton, dependent on slow-moving letters for news from London, may be judged from her letter to the earl of Mar in Scotland, in which she begs him to guard the infant James well at Stirling, and not allow him to be either brought by agreement to England, or snatched away from him by surprise: Mary adds a postscript in her own hand, reminding Mar that when she handed her son over to him, ‘comme mon plus cher joiau’, he promised never to hand him over to another without the queen’s consent.8 On 19th December she belatedly drew up her own Eik for the accusation of Moray, presented on 25th December. Naturally she waxed especially furious over the accusation that she had planned the death of her own child to follow that of his father: the nobles ‘cover themselves thereanent with a wet sack; and that calumny should suffice for proof and inquisition of all the rest; for the natural love of a mother towards her bairn confounds them’. Beyond that Mary dwelt on her previous troubles with the lords – the murder of Riccio when they would have ‘slain the mother and the bairn both when he was in our womb’, and the manifest illegality of Moray’s regency.9
Despite Mary’s counter-accusations, and despite her continued requests to be shown the writings which were said to arraign her, the conference at Westminster was officially ended by Elizabeth on 11th January without either Mary or her commissioners being allowed to glimpse these debatable documents. The verdict of the tribunal was indeed as ambivalent as the rest of the proceedings: it was decided that neither party had had anything sufficiently proved against them. Mary had not proved that her nobles had rebelled against her – ‘there has been nothing deduced against them as yet that may impair their honour and allegiances’. But on the other hand, all the prolonged inspection of the so-called Casket Letters had not apparently convinced the tribunal of the guilt of the Scottish queen. Elizabeth pronounced on the subject of the evidence brought forward by the Scottish nobles that ‘there had been nothing sufficiently produced nor shewn by them against the Queen their sovereign, whereby the Queen of England should conceive or take any evil opinion of the Queen her good sister, for anything yet seen’.10 In short, neither side was adjudged guilty at the end of the ‘trial’, the only difference being that whereas Moray was now allowed to depart for Scotland, after a personal interview with Elizabeth – and incidentally with a £5000 subsidy in his pocket – Mary was still held at Bolton, with preparations afoot to move her to a still more secure prison.
Now at last Elizabeth offered to let Mary have copies of the writings produced against her, provided she would promise to answer them. (The originals had of course gone back to Scotland with Moray.) But at this point Mary’s commissioners, who all along had shown themselves so little match for the English politicians, rallied sufficiently to point out that since Moray had by now left England for Scotland, and the conference had no other judicial basis except in so far as it was supposed to judge between Mary and Moray, it was far too late for Mary to answer Moray’s accusations. Mary’s commissioners were themselves allowed to return to Scotland on 31st January. Thus ended what was surely one of the strangest judicial proceedings in the history of the British Isles, with a verdict of not proven given to both parties, yet one plaintiff allowed to return freely to rule in the place of the other plaintiff, who in the meantime continued to be held a prisoner.
It is time to consider the Casket Letters themselves, those debatable documents, and see how much if anything they genuinely prove against the moral character of Mary Stuart – her adulterous liaison with Bothwell before the death of Darnley, and her guilty foreknowledge of his murder. It is an interesting point that Mary Stuart’s contemporaries apparently attached a great deal less importance to the Casket Letters than has been given to them ever since by the studies of historians. In the four hundred years since their appearance, more ink has been spilt on the subject – textual difficulties, language difficulties, theories of authorship, theories of interpolation – than on almost any other textual mystery. Yet at the time when the actual letters were exhibited it has been seen that not only Norfolk took a sufficiently dégagé view of the whole matter to pursue marriage to Mary ardently thereafter, but Sussex, another Englishman, was of the opinion that as proofs, the letters alone would never be sufficient to condemn the Scottish queen. Subsequently, due to yet another revolution in Scottish internal politics, Maitland himself became one of Queen Mary’s most ardent champions in Scotland, apparently undismayed by the depths of villainy she was said to have revealed in the letters. Despite this contemporary reaction, succeeding generations of historians have attempted to do what Elizabeth’s tribunal specifically did not do, and give a verdict on Mary’s character based on these letters. Yet every modern argument concerning the Casket Letters, and indeed every argument on the subject since the conference of Westminster in 1568, has of necessity to leave out of account the most important consideration in any discussion of letters said to be forged – the question of handwriting – for the Casket Letters now disappeared from sight as mysteriously as they had appeared.
In January 1569, they were taken to Scotland by Moray, to whom they had been redelivered by the tribunal. On 22nd January, 1571, they were handed over once more to Morton, although what should have been twenty-two documents (eight letters, two marriage contracts and twelve sonnets making up one poem) had mysteriously become only twenty-one, raising a doubt that one document might have been left behind in England. Copies were once more made, but these copies vanished immediately and have never been seen since. After Morton’s execution, the letters passed to the earl of Gowrie, who was executed in turn in 1584, after which the original letters were never seen again from that day to this, despite repeated efforts on the part of Elizabeth to get hold of them, ranging from bribery to suggestions of theft.*
Today, in order to consider the authenticity of the Casket Letters, we are dependent on two sources: firstly those contemporary copies made by the clerks at Westminster which have survived. Some of these copies are in the original French, others in the English translation made for the use of the tribunal; all of these contemporary copies (with the exception of one) are in the Elizabethan ‘secretary’ hand in marked contrast to Mary’s infinitely more legible Roman or Italian hand. There are four of these contemporary copies in the Public Record Office, and four others among the Cecil Papers at Hatfield House; a contemporary copy of one of the marriage contracts is among the Cotton MSS at the British Museum.13 These are the only ‘original’ manuscripts available for the study of the Casket Letters – all of them purporting to be only contemporary copies. Otherwise we are dependent on the secondary published sources – and in the case of two of the letters, the twelve sonnets, and one of the marriage contracts, for all of which not even a contemporary copy survives totally dependent on them. The contemporary published versions consist of Buchanan’s Latin ‘Detection’ which appeared in 1571, and gave three of the letters; in the same year a Scottish version of the ‘Detection’ also appeared, giving all eight letters, with the first sentence in the original French; the next year an Anglicized version of the Scottish translation appeared, following the same principle. In 1573 a French edition was published giving seven of the letters; this was not the original French (as can be seen by comparing it with the contemporary manuscript copies) – merely a French version retranslated out of the Scots or English. This retranslation leads to considerable differences between the two French versions.
Quite apart from the lack of originals, the situation over the letters is complicated by the fact that none of them has any dates attached to it and none has any proper beginning or ending or signature; the fact that none is signed by the queen makes the letters particularly remarkable, compared to the rest of Mary’s correspondence, since Mary, in all her other letters, always took especial trouble with her endings, and the individual phrase before the characteristic signature MARIE was always carefully suited to the recipient. Furthermore there is not one letter which does not have some internal problem of its own, either of dating or of sheer sense, so far as one can judge from the copy. As forgeries, then, if forgeries they were, these were no smooth and expert job, but botched up – even patched up – efforts, done in a hurry by men who were trying to prove something, and because they had to prove it quickly, were not too particular about details, so long as the broad facts of the case appeared as they wished. These are of course exactly the sort of results which might be expected to emerge from the events of the summer of 1568 – Queen Mary’s unexpected flight to England, Moray’s desperate need to keep her there, his anguished inquiries to the English as to what sort of evidence they would accept, and his final secretive, deliberately ‘unofficial’ production of the letters at York to Norfolk. The Casket Letters were to be regarded then as a collection of accusing briefs in a trial: in this context it is significant that the contemporary copies are all endorsed at the top in an English hand, sometimes that of Cecil himself, with a sentence giving the exact point they were said by the lords to prove. But regarded as a bundle of love letters, the Casket Letters are not only quite incomprehensible, but also in places manifestly absurd when applied to the relationship possible between Queen Mary and Bothwell.
Letter I,14 of which no contemporary French copy survives, only a contemporary English translation, is marked at the top ‘proves her disdain against her husband’. It is, however, not a love letter, but a calm and practical communication, from its style evidently written by Queen Mary herself at some point, although not necessarily ‘From Glasgow this Saturday morning’, as it states at the head of the letter – a phrase easily added. In it, Queen Mary refers to ‘the man’ who is ‘the merriest that ever you saw, and doth remember unto me all that he can to make me believe that he loveth me. To conclude: you would say that he maketh love to me, wherein I take so much pleasure that I never come in there but the pain of my side doth take me.’ This ‘man’ is to be brought by Mary to Craigmillar on Wednesday. From the endorsement, it is clear that the lords maintained this ‘man’ was Darnley whose advances at Glasgow, when Mary went to fetch him towards the end of January, were causing Mary a pain in her side. But the dates do not fit with Darnley’s journey: he could never have expected to reach Craigmillar on the Wednesday; the person whom Mary did take on a journey also in January from Stirling to Edinburgh, arriving there on Wednesday, 15th January, was her son James. And it has been pointed out that Mary’s language makes it at least possible she was talking of her baby son, ‘the merriest that ever you saw … you would say that he maketh love to me …’; just as the term ‘the man’ makes more sense as a mother’s fanciful term for a little boy, than as Mary’s description of Darnley, to whom in all other letters even to her most intimate relative she refers impersonally as ‘the King’. However, these details were not likely to bother the English tribunal. At a rough inspection, prodded on by the Scottish lords’ explanations, such a letter could easily be held to prove the queen’s disdain of Darnley at Glasgow nearly two years back. It was easy to add the phrase ‘From Glasgow …’ at the head of the letter to give verisimilitude; and a phrase about Paris being commanded to bring back medicine was probably interpolated in the middle of the letter for good measure – Paris being by now a notorious guilt-inferring name in the history of Mary–Bothwell relations. But of course, in the absence even of a French contemporary copy of this letter, it is impossible to be certain about this.
Letter II,15 the famous ‘Long Casket Letter’, is an extraordinary document which must have baffled the English judges if they had ever considered it in detail almost as much as it has baffled historians ever since.* Once again, no contemporary French copy survives to guide us, only the contemporary English copy and the Scottish version later published by Buchanan. The English copy was endorsed by the clerk: ‘The long letter written from Glasgow from the Queen of Scots to the Earl Bothwell.’ This letter is susceptible of almost any interpretation except that of being one single letter, written on a single occasion from Mary Stuart to Bothwell. It is extremely long – over 2000 words altogether. The contemporary English copy runs to seven pages of manuscript with a long unexplained gap on the fifth page. As before, it begins without any salutation: ‘Being gone from the place where I had left my heart; it may be easily judged what my countenance was …’, but after these first few affectionate but not amorous sentences, it turns into a long account of Mary’s journey to Glasgow to fetch Darnley, her meeting with a gentleman of Lennox’s, and other meetings en route with James Hamilton and the laird of Luss. The letter now gives a long intimate account of Mary’s interview and relations with Darnley while at Glasgow: Darnley pleads with Mary to lodge ‘nigh’ unto him, blames his sickness for Mary being ‘so strange unto him’, and attacks Mary for her cruelty who will not accept his ‘offers and repentance’. These phrases ring very true of what is already known of Darnley’s character, and Mary’s relations with him, especially when he begs Mary to forgive him on grounds of his youth and inexperience; ‘May not a man of my age, for want of council, fail twice or thrice, and miss of promise, and at the last repent and rebuke himself by his experience …’ The words echo the phrases, related by Nau, which Darnley used to Mary after the death of Riccio.
Mary now taxes Darnley with his plans to depart in an English ship, and the rumours of his plotting spread by Hiegate – matters which we know from her letter to Beaton just before she left for Glasgow were very much on her mind. The conversation ends with Darnley pleading with Mary to spend the night in his lodging, and with her refusing to do so until he is ‘purged’ of his disease; Mary then offers to bring Darnley to Craigmillar where he can be cured, and she can be near her son – an offer which we know did take place. She also promises to resume physical relations after he is cured. To this Darnley asserts that he knows Mary will never harm him, and as for the others, he will sell his life dear enough – sentiments which again fit neatly with Darnley’s character and with his continued trust of Mary, proved by the fact he did accompany her to Edinburgh. Up to now it is evident that we are receiving from Mary a frank report on her relations with Darnley at Glasgow, written to some close confidante. But in the next phrases the tenor of the letter changes and the sense becomes more obscure. Mary writes of Darnley’s attempts to win her: ‘Fear not, for the place shall continue till death. Remember also in recompense thereof not to suffer yours [Bothwell’s heart] to be won by that false race that would do no less to us both …’ Later she writes: ‘We are tied to two false races; the goodyeere untie us from them. God forgive me, and God knit us together for ever for the most faithful couple that ever he did knit together. This is my faith. I will die in it.’
These phrases which, on quick reading, seem to show that Mary was cold-bloodedly planning Darnley’s murder with Bothwell, her lover, with a view to marrying him, make no sense on a second reading, if applied to the Mary–Bothwell relationship. Who was the ‘false race’ which might win Bothwell’s heart, and to which he was tied, to the exclusion of Mary? Not the Gordons surely, who were now among Mary’s most faithful adherents; Huntly, Bothwell’s brother-in-law, had been Mary’s loyal supporter over the Chaseabout Raid, and the Riccio murder, and was to continue as such throughout his sister’s divorce proceedings (to which he agreed with alacrity) up to and beyond Carberry Hill. As for the rest of his family, after July 1565 Mary had no more devoted adherents; his mother was one of her chief ladies; his sister Jean allowed herself to be divorced with incredible speed in order that Bothwell might marry the queen. Yet throughout the rest of the letter, there is a theme of constant, agonizing jealousy on the part of the writer for some other woman in Bothwell’s life, who from the angry references to Huntly as ‘your false brother-in-law’ is clearly Bothwell’s wife Jean Gordon. This ‘false brother-in-law’ is making mischief between the writer and Bothwell, and is to be given no credit ‘against the most faithful lover that ever you had or shall have’, to please whom the writer will ‘spare neither honour, conscience, nor hazard nor greatness’. It would have been quite impossible in January 1567, or indeed at any other date, for Mary to have referred to Huntly in those terms.
It becomes apparent therefore that some letter, or draft of a letter, written by Mary herself, has been loosely and not particularly skilfully run together with a love letter written to Bothwell by some other woman. There is more than one possible candidate for the role of the other woman: Anna Throndsen in particular had every reason to consider herself badly treated by Bothwell and tricked out of a promise of marriage; but as she had left Scotland by the date of Bothwell’s marriage it seems that the charge of writing these tortured jealous letters cannot be laid at her door, although they fit with what we know of her character. However, Bothwell had many mistresses previous to his marriage: in the autumn of 1565 Randolph referred to some mysterious French mistress imported by Bothwell to Scotland. Bothwell did not marry Jean Gordon until the spring of 1566, and the match could well have aroused the most poignant jealousy in some discarded mistress, seeing herself passed over in favour of the rich and powerful Huntly connection. Whereas it is highly unlikely that Bothwell would have retained an incriminating letter from Mary written before Darnley’s death among his papers, he might easily have preserved a bundle of love letters of no political implications, from an insignificant but passionate mistress; these could have been seized either in June 1567 from George Dalgleish, or at any other point after Bothwell’s departure from the Scottish scene and before October 1568, during which time the lords were totally in power in Scotland.
The interpolation of a love letter from the other woman makes sense not only of the inordinate length of this letter – and Mary, who was only at Glasgow two nights, was already supposed to have written one letter from thence to Bothwell – but also of the strange activities she described herself as doing there: she writes on two separate occasions in the same letter of a bracelet she is making for her lover, a bracelet which she is staying up late to finish in secret, an amazing occupation for Queen Mary to adopt in the course of her critical mission to Glasgow. The pleading tone of the latter half of the letter is also strangely at variance with Mary’s character. ‘Alas, and I never deceived anybody but I remit myself wholly to your will, and send me word what I shall do, and whatever happens to me I will obey you. …’ Bothwell is said to be almost making Mary a traitor – an odd phrase for a queen to use, who could hardly be accused of treason towards herself. Still more puzzling, if the whole letter had indeed been written by Mary, is the concluding sentence: ‘Remember your friend and write unto her and often.’ For not only have no love letters from Bothwell to Mary survived (it is surely strange that the allegedly reckless Mary should have been so much more prudent than the theoretically cold-blooded Bothwell), but also Mary was about to return to Edinburgh, where she would actually sleep under the same roof as Bothwell at Holyrood; Bothwell being here in constant attendance on her, she would surely have no need for these constant communications for which the writer cravenly begged.
If parts of this long letter are dismissed as interpolations of another hand, this still leaves the problem of Mary’s own highly confidential letter, and to whom it was addressed. One piece of internal evidence points to the fact that it might have been Moray: the queen compares Darnley’s evil breath (due in fact to syphilis, although she did not know it) to ‘your uncle’s breath’. Bothwell had no uncles; and only one great-uncle, the bishop of Moray, whom Mary had met once over four years ago. His personal hygiene can scarcely have been so vividly in her mind. But Moray’s uncle, the earl of Mar, was a prominent courtier, had been so over a number of years, and was now guardian of the queen’s son. Mary would have every reason to know such an intimate detail about Mar. Another piece of internal evidence suggests even more strongly that the queen’s part of the letter was not intended for Bothwell: at the very end of the published Scottish version of the letter there follows a mysterious list of headings: ‘Remember you … of the purpose of Lady Reres, of the Inglismen, of his mother, of the Earl of Argyll, of the Earl Bothwell,* of the lodging in Edinburgh.’ These headings were clearly intended to remind the writer of certain points she was to raise: but Mary would hardly remind herself to raise the subject of the Earl Bothwell in a letter written to Bothwell himself. These are not the only headings in the letter: half-way through the letter occurs a further list of headings, referring back to subjects already discussed. The existence of two such groups of memoranda lead one to suppose that Mary’s part of the Long Casket Letter might have been only a draft for a letter which was never in fact sent. As a draft, it would have remained in her possession, and might therefore have been seized among her other papers when she was taken to Lochleven.
Whether such a draft was intended for Moray, or possibly even one of Mary’s French relations, who would all have uncles known to her, to follow up her letter to Beaton the day before is less relevant than the light this letter casts on Mary’s state of mind at Glasgow. The report of the Spanish ambassador in July 1567, the statement in Parliament in December of the same year, Lennox’s supplication to Elizabeth in May 1568, and Buchanan’s early mention of litterae applicable to a single letter, show that quite early on in their rule of Scotland, the lords did feel they possessed some sort of written evidence against Mary – to be distinguished from the actual Casket Letters themselves. It is quite possible that this evidence was the draft of Mary’s letter from Glasgow, in which she discusses her relations with Darnley with such candour, and relates her own promise to renew their married life once he was cured. It is significant that Crawford’s deposition to the English tribunal was apparently tailored from the Marian parts of this letter, to the extent of virtually copying it.
Darnley’s docile acceptance of his removal from Glasgow, into what he must have known was danger, is one of the more puzzling aspects of the Kirk o’Field tragedy. It has been seen that Mary more or less certainly suspended physical relations with her husband from the late summer onwards: perhaps the promise of renewal was made to bring the invalid to Edinburgh. This still incidentally provides no proof of Mary’s adulterous liaison with Bothwell, merely of her own desire to get Darnley to Edinburgh, by promise if not threats, and under her influence once away from his own conspiracies. When the lords came to present their evidence to the English tribunal, they too did not find this draft letter sufficiently damning, and therefore laced it with a few classically villainous phrases – such as a suggestion that Darnley’s ‘physic’ at Craigmillar should be poisoned – as well as interpolating, very roughly, another love letter to Bothwell.
Letter III,16 of which a copy in the original French survives, is marked ‘to prove the affections’ in a clerkly hand. No attempt was made by the lords to date it, which would indeed have been very difficult, and it is of course not signed. It is quite inconceivable that it should have been written by Mary to Bothwell at any point in their relationship: the writer appears to have followed Bothwell’s fortunes over a long period (as he is said to know) and have been brought into ‘a cruel lot’ and ‘continual misadventure’ as a result. Nothing was less true of Mary, to whom Bothwell brought good fortune up to the last moment, after which she was not able to write love letters to him. There is a reference to a secret ‘marriage’ of bodies, which the writer hugs to her bosom until their marriage can be made in public – the classical delusion of the girl who has been seduced. For all Bothwell’s unkindness, the writer will in no way accuse him: ‘neither of your little remembrance, neither of your little care, and least of all of your promises broken, and of the coldness of your writing, since I am so far made yours, that that which pleases you is acceptable to me’. This is hardly the pattern of Bothwell’s relations with Mary: he broke no promises to her, was never cold, but acted for many years as a loyal servant and lieutenant before he aspired – his aspirations, not hers – to become still more powerful as her consort. Letter III, on the other hand, comes from the pen of someone who has had a long, passionate and unhappy love affair with Bothwell, over many years – in short, the other woman. If it be true that in all love affairs, il y a un qui baise et l’autre qui tend la joue, with the other woman and Bothwell it was always she who kissed and he who extended the cheek. Mary Stuart’s relations with Bothwell took place on the less fanciful plane of politics: and it was Bothwell, as the seeker after power, rather than Mary as the fount of it, who was the aggressor in their relationship.
Letter IV17 refers to that mysterious incident which Buchanan also mentioned in his ‘Detection’ (but to which Moray never referred although said to be a witness of it) in which Mary was supposed to have incited Lord Robert Stewart to quarrel with Darnley, with a view to getting him neatly killed in the course of the dispute.18 This letter was marked by the English clerk ‘Letter concerning Holyrood House’ – a mistake for the house at Kirk o’Field. Apart from backing up Buchanan’s dubious story which seems to be its main point in the lords’ scheme of accusation, it is an extraordinarily obscure letter, despite the existence of both French and English contemporary copies, suggesting that the copyist found the original difficult to decipher, or else that the original was somewhat clumsily forged. It is a long letter – which makes it implausible that Mary should have written it to Bothwell on 7th February, two days before Darnley’s death, during a week when Bothwell was in constant attendance on her both at Holyrood and at the provost’s lodging. Again, many of the references are quite out of keeping with Mary at this point, including the reiterated theme of the ‘ill luck’ of the writer (quite inconsistent with Mary’s fortunes at this date) and her jealousy of some rival who has not ‘the third part of the faithfulness and voluntary obedience that I bear unto you’. Who was the rival who in February 1567 had the advantage over Mary in Bothwell’s affections? The only possible answer was his wife Jean Gordon. Yet the writer of the letter deliberately compares herself to Medea, the first wife of Jason, whom he deserts to marry Glauce – the implication being that the writer, unlike Queen Mary, had been first in the field with Bothwell.
The letter concludes with the most enigmatic phrase in the entire Casket documents: in the French copy it reads, ‘Faites bon guet si l’oiseau sortira de sa cage ou sens son per comme la tourtre demeurera seulle a se lamenter de l’absence pour court quelle soit.’This translates literally as ‘Beware lest the bird fly out of its cage, or without its mate like the turtle-dove live alone to lament the absence however short it may be.’ The only possible implication is that the writer is the bird who may fly out of her cage, if badly treated, or else go into a decline out of melancholy. But, of course, such a sentiment could hardly be applied to Mary. Therefore the contemporary English translation, presumably at the instruction of the Scottish lords present, tries to make Darnley the bird who may fly out of the cage, and by mistranslating per (mate) as father (père), implies that the absence of Lennox is making Darnley mourn like the dove. The published Scottish version, on the other hand, while making Darnley the bird who may fly out of the cage without his mate, makes the writer the dove who will remain alone to mourn his absence, an interpretation which fits neither the French nor Mary’s alleged disdain of Darnley – since there was no reason why she of all people should mourn the absence of Darnley.
Letter V,19 of which the contemporary French copy survives, is endorsed ‘Anent the dispatch dismissal of Margaret Carwood; which was before her marriage; proves her affection.’ This endorsement is indeed essential to explain the production of this letter, which is otherwise of little guilty import in the history of Mary’s relations with Bothwell. The writer – whose style one has now come to recognize as that of the other woman – expostulates against the folly and ingratitude of a certain woman who has made trouble between her and her lover: ‘I beseech you that an opinion of another person be not hurtful in your mind to my constancy …’ and whom she now detests in consequence. There is as usual no signature and no proper names are mentioned. In point of fact Margaret Carwood was never in any disgrace with Mary: she was married from her service and as has been seen her wedding was attended by Queen Mary herself on the Tuesday after Darnley’s death, a mark of signal favour; the queen also paid for her weddinggown as the inventories show. There was certainly no question of her ‘dispatch’ from Mary’s service. These facts were either forgotten or ignored by the lords presenting the ladies, in their inspiration at fitting this particular letter into the scheme of things, or else they rightly banked on such details of Scottish court life nearly two years before being unknown to the English tribunal.
Letter VI20 is ostensibly written from Stirling where Mary went on 22nd April to visit Prince James. It was on her return journey that she was abducted by Bothwell, and the letter is thus endorsed ‘From Stirling before the ravishment – proves her mask [pretence] of ravishing.’ It exists in the contemporary French copy, and the English translation among the Cecil MSS at Hatfield House. Once again this love letter contains many internal references which make it impossible to have come from the pen of Mary. The external theme of jealousy on the part of the other woman for her rival is once again present: Bothwell is accused of having ‘two strings to his bow’, and Huntly is once more described as ‘your false brother-in-law’ who has come to the writer and warned her that Bothwell will never marry her ‘since being married you did carry me away’. Yet Huntly at this point had just signed the Ainslie bond, backing Bothwell’s marriage to the queen, and he certainly never seems to have been morally troubled by the abduction in any way. Furthermore, the other woman repeatedly reproaches Bothwell with being a negligent suitor, who has promised to resolve everything, but in fact: ‘Vous n’en avez rien fait.’ Yet Bothwell in April 1567, as far as Mary was concerned, was a man of consummate vigour and resource, as the organization of the Ainslie bond itself goes to prove. Clearly the lords were struck by the coincidence of the phrases concerning Bothwell carrying his mistress away, referring in fact to some other earlier adventure, and adapted the letter to their own purposes.
There is, however, one interesting point to note about the contemporary copies of this letter. the original French copy at Hatfield is in an italic hand, in contrast to the ‘secretary’ hand of all the other copies. This hand, while clearly distinguishable from Mary’s on close inspection (the c’s and d’s are completely different, the writing is smaller and neater), is nevertheless of the same Roman type, and might even be taken for it at a quick glance, particularly by a group of men used to dealing with a very different type of handwriting. Why should this one letter survive in the Roman hand? No explanation has ever been offered. But its existence does seem to argue that it may quite possibly be one of the original Casket Letters, masquerading as a clerk’s copy; perhaps the prudent Cecil took one of the originals away with him, in place of a copy, as a piece of wise reinsurance bearing in mind always Queen Mary’s close relationship to the English throne, which might at any minute, by the premature death of Elizabeth, make her his sovereign. The fact that the twenty-two documents had mysteriously sunk to twenty-one by the time they were handed over to Morton in 1571 may be explained by this piece of abstraction, which was not noticed at the time.
It is a fascinating, if speculative, thought. If this Hatfield letter is accepted as one of the original documents shown to the English tribunal, it still leaves us no nearer knowing whether this Roman hand was that of a Scottish forger, or that of the other woman, who, being brought up on the Continent, happened to write in very much the same manner as Mary herself. The Hatfield group of Casket documents were only discovered at Hatfield House in 1870 by Mr R. Gunton, private secretary and later librarian to the 3rd marquess of Salisbury. They were first published in the Calendar of the Historical Manuscripts Commission in 1883. If any further copies of the text were ever discovered in French, in this same handwriting, akin to Mary’s but not hers, or in any other Roman hand, fresh light might yet be cast on the whole complicated subject of the Casket Letters.
Letters VII and VIII,21 for which no contemporary copies exist, are like Letter VI supposed to have been written from Stirling during the day and two nights Mary spent there before her abduction. Letter VII has a genuine Marian ring: the tone is regal in contrast to the self-abasement of the others, and Bothwell is here addressed very much as the faithful servant – the role which he occupied also to outward eyes in April 1567. If Letter VII is accepted in its entirety as being written by Mary from Stirling, then it certainly proves that she had foreknowledge of the abduction. Mary writes that she leaves ‘the place and the time’ to Bothwell. As for marrying her afterwards, Mary believes that Bothwell will deserve a pardon for his behaviour through ‘your services and the lang amities … if above the duty of an subject you advance yourself’, especially if he gives as his motive the need to preserve the queen from a foreign marriage. This need to save her from the arms of a foreign-born prince was one of the arguments Mary always gave afterwards for believing that Bothwell was the nobles’ own choice of consort. This letter also stresses another point on which Mary was known to be anxiously concerned at the time: Bothwell is firmly adjured to make sure of the support of the lords, and to take particular trouble to smooth down Maitland (Bothwell’s known antagonist). This eminently practical letter, which Bothwell would have good reason to preserve among his most important papers, lest he could be accused of treason in that he had abducted the queen against her will, is another possible candidate for the queen’s incriminating ‘privy letters’ which the lords might have discovered in the summer of 1567.
Letter VIII, on the other hand, although also said to have been written from Stirling, must have been written by Mary at some other date, since it refers to Huntly as ‘your brother-in-law that was’. The divorce of Bothwell and Jean Gordon did not take place until after the abduction; at Stirling Huntly was still very much Bothwell’s brother-in-law; it was a mistake which Mary could not possibly have made. Letter VIII is once more a Marian letter, calm, without words of passion, warning Bothwell of various problems, and hoping in unemotional terms to see him soon: ‘pray God send us an happy interview shortly’. The letter would seem to have been written to Bothwell some time after their marriage, the most likely date, as Dr Armstrong-Davison suggests, being 8th June when Bothwell had gone to Melrose to raise help against the rebels, and Mary was in Edinburgh. It won a place in the dossier, however, through the wording of this passage: ‘there be many folks here, and among others the Earl of Sutherland who would rather die, considering the good they have so lately received of me, than suffer me to be carried away’. Although the apprehensions of the ‘folks’ applied to Mary’s probable fate at the hands of her rebels, the lords tried to interpret the words as applying once more to the abduction, ignoring the erroneous description of Huntly.
The twelve love sonnets, as they were termed, consist in fact of one long love poem of twelve verses. We are dependent on the published French and published Scottish version for their text, since no contemporary copies have survived.22 Brantôme and Ronsard, who both had intimate knowledge of Mary’s earlier verses, indignantly denied that these poems could have been by Mary Stuart. These long, rather turgid verses are certainly remarkably unlike Mary’s known poetic efforts, her early simple poems and her later more complicated poetry, which tends to be extremely courtly in phrase and analogy, as might be expected from the atmosphere of the High Renaissance in which she had been educated. But style apart, these verses contain sufficient material to convince one once more that they are the works of the other woman. This unhappy poetess has abandoned all her relatives and friends for her lover, unlike Mary who neither did nor was asked to do any such thing. There are references also to Bothwell’s wealth, which were unthinkable for Mary to make. To her, Bothwell was a comparatively poor man, who had to be subsidized with grants of money from their earliest meeting; it was she who encouraged the profitable Gordon marriage on his behalf, and finally she gave him grants of money after their marriage. Furthermore, the habitual theme of jealousy pervades the whole long poem. The only lines in the total of 158 which might seem to apply to Mary, and Mary only, are those in which she describes how she has subjected herself, her son, her country and her subjects to Bothwell:
Entre ses mains & en son plein pouvoir
Je mets mon fils, mon honneur, & ma vie,
Mon pays, mes subjects, mon ame assujetie
Et tout à lui, & n’ai autre vouloir.
Apart from the fact that Mary neither placed nor tried to place James in Bothwell’s hands (it was a favourite accusation of her enemies but untrue: throughout the Bothwell marriage he remained in the care of the earl of Mar), the third line has an odd ring, as if the words ‘mes subjects’ (so pointedly applicable to Mary, so inapplicable to any other woman) had somehow been substituted for another shorter word in a line which already ended ‘mon ame assujetie’: ‘mon coeur’, for example, fits the rhythm much better. Although erasions and substitutions are impossible to describe with any certainty in a poem of which only a published version survives, the natural inference is that here once again the interpolator has been at work. In order to apply a melancholy, rather verbose love poem to the particular case of the queen of Scots and Bothwell, the interpolator has altered one small word – not difficult to do – on the same principle as the words ‘From Glasgow this Saturday morning’ were added to the head of Letter I, to adapt it to the fatal fetching of Darnley.
There remain the two marriage contracts which the lords produced. One of these, in French, is a manuscript from among the Cotton MSS in the British Museum.23 It has been argued in the past that this is the original document, which was somehow never redelivered to Moray, using the previously cited alteration in the number of documents handed over to Morton in 1571. But the Journal of the Commission specified that this contract was ‘written in a Roman hand in French’;24 unless the Journal was mistaken, the Cotton contract cannot possibly be the original, since it is in an Elizabethan not Roman hand, whose salient feature is the thick backward strokes given to certain letters. Moreover, the signature MARIE R at the end of the contract is a manifest forgery, if indeed this is the original contract shown to the tribunal. The most marked characteristic of Mary Stuart’s signature, seen on letters and documents throughout her life, is the even level of all the letters, including the first letter M; there is sometimes a slight rise in the level of the word towards the end, on the R or I, but M is never of greater height than the A. The Cotton signature on the other hand is conspicuous for its capital M, which is twice the height of the other letters.
The lords themselves exhibited this French contract with some doubts and the explanation: ‘although some words therein seem to the contrary, they suppose [the contract] to have been made and written by her before the death of her husband’. Certainly some words do seem to the contrary, for the queen specifically refers in the text to ‘my late husband Henry Stuart called Darnley’, before declaring herself once more free to marry, in consequence of which she chooses Bothwell. If an original French contract in her own handwriting, signed by her, did ever exist, this might well have been a document written and signed by the queen at Dunbar at Bothwell’s dictation, shortly after her abduction; in which case, Bothwell would certainly have preserved it among his papers. The absence of any date would be explained by the fact that the lords lopped it off, thus optimistically hoping to incriminate the queen by pretending the contract had been signed before Darnley’s death, despite the wording of the contract which states to the contrary. The fact that Mary, in the contract, says that she makes her promise to marry Bothwell ‘without constraint’ does seem, on the principle of qui s’excuse s’accuse, to suggest that this document was drawn up at Dunbar.
The second contract does not survive in a contemporary copy but was printed by Buchanan.25 It is said to be a marriage contract signed on 5th April at Seton, between Mary and Bothwell, at a time when he was not yet ‘cleansed’ of Darnley’s murder. It is a long document in official language, quite unlike the other contract, said to have been witnessed by Huntly and Thomas Hepburn, parson of Oldamstock: the fact that Huntly should have witnessed such a contract made nonsense of many of the other letters, but these details were obviously considered unimportant. It is reminiscent of Queen Mary’s actual wedding contract, signed on 14th May, and binds the queen to marry Bothwell, rather than some foreign prince, once Dame Jean Gordon, his ‘pretended spouse’, shall have been removed from his matrimonial path. Although Mary, Bothwell and Huntly were all at Seton on 5th April, it seems highly unlikely that she would have signed such a document before Bothwell had been divorced. It has been suggested that the clerk, as sometimes happens with official documents, mistook the month, and this contract really dated from 5th May, when marriage preparations were very much under way. If this coincidence is dismissed, the most likely explanation of the contract is that Bothwell and Huntly drew it up at Seton, but only presented it to the queen for signature at Dunbar nineteen days later; otherwise her signature might have been quite plainly forged, as on the copy – this being impossible to tell without a sight of the original document.
So much for the Casket Letters on which Mary’s reputation was so thoroughly blasted in later centuries, although Queen Elizabeth herself understandably found nothing in them which was proof against her dearest sister. Compounded of Bothwell’s previous love letters, some textual interpretations from other letters and a certain amount of inexpert forgery, all glossed over by a great deal of optimistic explanation on the part of the lords who presented them, they were plainly never intended to be exposed to the fierce glare of criticism and discussion which has been directed on to them ever since. The intensity of this discussion results from the fact that they are the only direct proof – inadequate as they are – of Mary’s adultery with Bothwell before Darnley’s death. Yet a rational consideration of the letters, in so far as is possible from mere copies, shows that at most Mary can be accused of two ‘crimes’, neither of them anything like as serious as the murder of her husband. In the first place it is likely that she induced Darnley to leave Glasgow for Edinburgh with the promise of resuming physical relations with him once he was cured of his pox; but this does not in itself constitute a proof of adultery with Bothwell, and Mary’s partisans might even point out in her defence that there was no proof that she would not have implemented her promise if Darnley had lived. Secondly, and much more cogently, she can be accused of foreknowledge of her own abduction by Bothwell. Once more this is not criminal so much as unwise behaviour and has no specific bearing on the death of Darnley six weeks earlier. It reflects much more acutely on Mary’s total inability at this point to deal with the internal politics of Scotland without leaning on some sort of support, and in the event she chose the wrong sort of support. These aspects of Mary Stuart’s behaviour in the first half of 1567 are certainly not enough to brand her as a murderess or even as a scarlet woman, deserving the vengeance of society.
As to the hand of the forger, the finger of accusation must inevitably point in the direction of Maitland. He, who had been Mary’s secretary for so many years, must have known her handwriting by heart; it would have been an easy task to produce something of sufficient verisimilitude to convince men who were not in themselves experts on handwriting. The collation of the writings does not seem to have been particularly prolonged: the passage in the Journal is in any case ambiguous and it is just possible that the collation refers to Morton’s two declarations rather than the queen’s handwriting;26 even if such a hasty collation were made, Leicester and his company were certainly inexperienced in the delicate science of judging forged handwriting. Furthermore, as Queen Mary herself stated, her handwriting is a particularly easy one to forge for anyone who had made a study of her letters.* Of course, if it is accepted that Maitland performed the forgery, he still should not be blamed utterly for the ruin which fell upon the queen as a result of the use made of the letters: Maitland, like his contemporaries, certainly did not foresee the enormous prominence which history was to give to these botched-up documents; the mere fact that he subsequently supported Mary shows what a swift temporary expedient was the production of the famous letters. On the other hand, even if Maitland is acquitted of performing – or directing – the forgery, he cannot be acquitted altogether of participation in the fraud: from the first moment he set eyes on the letters he must have realized that they had not in fact been written by his mistress, since of all the Scottish nobles it was Maitland who had the most profound and sympathetic knowledge of Mary, from the years of service spent with her.
It has been further adduced against Maitland as being the forger that he was married to one of the queen’s ladies, Mary Fleming, who would have been able to assist him in the task. Once again Mary Stuart herself hinted, in her declaratory statement on the subject before the conference at York, in September 1568, that her ladies might be able to counterfeit her handwriting27 – ‘There are divers in Scotland, both men and women, that can counterfeit my handwriting, and write the like manner of writing which I use, as well as myself, and principally such as are in company with themselves,’ she pronounced, before going on to add (surely with truth), ‘I doubt not, if I had remained in my own realm, but I would have gotten knowledge of the inventors and writers of such writings before now. …’ All her Maries had been educated like herself in France and therefore wrote in different forms of the italic hand. The handwriting of Mary Beaton is the most similar to that of the queen; furthermore Mary Beaton was at this point involved in a dispute with her former mistress over some jewels. This dispute has led some students to suggest in turn that Mary Beaton was the actual forger. It would be sad indeed if Mary Stuart, who always loved and nourished her attendants with a quasi-maternal passion, was rewarded by this ultimate treachery at such a critical moment in her fortunes, by one of those who had once been nearest and dearest to her. But there is no proof against Mary Beaton or indeed Mary Fleming except the merest supposition: Mary Fleming like her husband Maitland subsequently became one of Queen Mary’s keen advocates in Scotland itself; furthermore it would surely have been highly indiscreet to have involved one of the Maries in such a confidential business, when ancient loyalties might so easily have prevailed later and unloosed the tongue of the forger at some future date to reveal her own villainy and that of her confederates. There were those much closer to home, in the heart of the nobles’ party, foremost among them Maitland, who could do the job as well as any former Marie. In any case, as Queen Mary herself was never shown the letters, she at least never knew for certain the answer to that classic conundrum of history – who wrote the Casket Letters? Had she seen them, the result would surely have been, as she herself put it, ‘to the declaration of my innocence, and confusion of their falsity’.
* The only link with the Casket Letters which remains to be seen in Scotland is the beautiful silver casket in the Lennoxlove Museum; although not garnished all over with the Roman letter F. under a crown, as the Journal of the Commission described it, it is the right size, and a French work of the early sixteenth century; its lock is also stricken up in the manner Morton described. There is room for two crossed Fs and a crown where the Hamilton arms are now engraved; alternatively the Journal’s description may have been misleading, and the Fs may have been embroidered on the velvet cover of the box, as in another velvet coffer sent to Mary on Lochleven.11 The Lennoxlove casket has a long provenance: it was purchased some time after 1632 from ‘a Papist’ by the marchioness of Douglas, daughter of the 1st marquess of Huntly. After her death, her plate was sold but her daughter-in-law Lady Anne Hamilton, later duchess of Hamilton in her own right, purchased it back, and, at her husband’s request, had the Hamilton arms engraved on the casket, in place of those of Douglas.12
* See the Appendix, p. 693, for the two versions of this letter. The full text of all the letters has most recently been published in The Casket Letters by M. H. Armstrong-Davison, London 1965, to which the reader is recommended for a more prolonged survey of this complicated subject. The full text is also to be found in A. Lang, The Mystery of Mary Stuart, London 1901, and T. F. Henderson,The Casket Letters, London 1890.
* Author’s italics.
* Lang prints some examples of modern forgeries of Mary’s handwriting impossible to tell from the originals printed beside them, in The Mystery of Mary Stuart.