THE MOST HOTLY debated question about Mary is whether she was involved in Darnley’s assassination. Only if she was already an adulteress and Bothwell was her lover is the case against her convincing. The subject is bound up with the controversy surrounding the eight letters produced by Moray to justify the charges in Buchanan’s dossier. The sole evidence that she was a party to the murder plot comes from them. There is no other proof. Her guilt or innocence depends on whether the letters are true or false.
The first hint that the Confederate Lords had unearthed incriminating material had come in the summer of 1567. A month after Mary was taken to Lochleven Castle, the Spanish ambassador in England, Guzman de Silva, reported to Philip II that Moray had visited him on his way back to Scotland from exile in France and told him that his sister had known all along about the murder. This had supposedly been proved by a letter she had written to Bothwell from Glasgow.
At this stage, it seems the lords had one letter, not eight. After Mary’s imprisonment, Morton’s men had looted the apartments she and Bothwell had occupied at Holyrood, which is when they had stolen the pearls later sold by Moray to Elizabeth. No doubt they would have also found some documents, but what these might have been is unknown.
De Silva said that du Croc, the French ambassador to Scotland, had visited London on his way home to France. He was reported as saying that the Confederate Lords “positively assert” she had been an accomplice in Darnley’s murder, which was “proved by letters under her own hand.” The same claim had reached Throckmorton, then Elizabeth’s crisis manager in Scotland. He put in one of his reports that the lords “mean to charge her with the murder of her husband, whereof (they say) they have as apparent proof against her as may be, as well by the testimony of her own handwriting, which they have recovered, as also by sufficient witnesses.”
Five months later, when the Confederate Lords summoned Parliament to give legal sanction to their revolt, they passed an act solemnly declaring that “the cause and occasion of their taking the said queen’s person upon the said 15th day of June” was “by divers [of] her privy letters” said to be wholly in her own handwriting.
These lords confidently assured Parliament that Mary’s letters had been found before they had forced her to surrender on the field at Carberry Hill. They justified their taking up arms against their queen by claiming they had already obtained the damning evidence that she was a party to Darnley’s murder.
The lords’ declaration did not go unchallenged. Mary’s supporters vigorously protested: “And if it be alleged that Her Majesty’s writing should prove her culpable, it may be answered that there is in no place mention made in it by which she may be convicted, albeit it were in her own handwriting which it is not.”
Far more harmful to their cause, the Confederate Lords contradicted their own statement to Parliament in their sworn testimony to Elizabeth and Cecil. When called upon to explain how such incriminating documents had been found, Morton deposed under oath that it was not until June 19, four days after Mary had surrendered, that an informer had told him how three of Bothwell’s servants had come to Edinburgh and gone inside the castle. One of them was captured and jailed in the Tolbooth.
Next day, this servant confessed under torture that he had taken a silver box or casket from Bothwell’s rooms at the castle the day before. The box was then fetched and brought to Morton. It was locked but missing its key, so Morton kept it all night without opening it. Then, on June 21, in the presence of ten witnesses, the lock was broken open and the contents examined. Twenty-two documents were found: the eight letters, two marriage contracts said to prove that Mary had consented to marry Bothwell before he was divorced, and twelve allegedly adulterous sonnets said to have been written by Mary to Bothwell.
One of the biggest challenges in discussing these momentous documents is that the originals, which were all in French, have disappeared. They are now known only from word-for-word transcripts (in French) or Scots or English translations made at the time the originals were examined in England, or else from later printed copies.
The handwritten transcripts and translations provide the most reliable information about them, as the variants later published to vilify Mary were of a glaringly propagandist intent. Even the standard scholarly editions of the Casket Letters contain a worrying number of mistranscriptions. And astonishingly, not all the manuscripts have been edited. Two were missed completely, perhaps because they had not yet been catalogued at the time these various editions were made. They will be discussed here for the first time.
The fate of the original Casket Letters is a mystery. After they were officially scrutinized in England, they were returned to Moray, who took them back to Scotland. In 1571, Morton obtained them, and in 1581 they descended to his heir, only to vanish from sight a few years later. There is no proof that they were deliberately destroyed, but that is the most likely reason for their loss. By then James VI was approaching eighteen and wished to protect his family’s reputation.
Nevertheless, their impact when they were first submitted to Elizabeth and Cecil can, if anything, be judged more accurately from the transcripts and translations than from any other source. This is because several of these versions have Cecil’s notes or qualifying comments on them. A careful reexamination of these intriguing documents enables us to glimpse his thoughts as he eagerly pored over them. He knew every one of them inside out, instantly recognizing that they were dynamite.
If the Casket Letters were genuine, an anointed queen could justifiably be deposed from her throne, Elizabeth’s “safety” would be guaranteed and the threat of an international Guise conspiracy ended forever. Mary would be utterly discredited. It might even be possible to try her for murder and execute her.
If they were forgeries, there was no other proof of her culpability. Elizabeth would be likely to release her. She would refuse to recognize Moray as regent in Scotland. She might even restore Mary to the throne. The lords would then be forced to flee into exile, destroying all of Cecil’s hard work and precipitating a fresh crisis, since the lords would choose England as their refuge, and Mary would angrily demand their extradition.
Why were there so many documents? The reason is that some key elements of the lords’ story as it had evolved under Buchanan’s surveillance were not covered by the letters. They shed no light, for instance, on Mary’s alleged adultery in the six months between her visit to Alloa and purportedly luring Darnley to his doom. The sonnets were meant to plug that gap. Likewise, none of the letters proved she had agreed to marry Bothwell before he was divorced. The marriage contracts were supposed to take care of that oversight.
The sonnets were said to be Mary’s own reflections on her adultery. They were intended to prove that her consuming passion for Bothwell gave her a powerful motive for murder. Very few literary experts believe them to be genuine. They are clumsy and would pass only with the greatest difficulty as the work of a native French speaker. As imitations of the genre of courtly love poetry, in which Mary had been trained by Ronsard, they fail every test. The most incriminating poem, “Entre ses mains et en son plein pouvoir,” if not said in advance to be inspired by sexual passion, could easily be read as a religious poem:
In his hands and in his full power,
I put my son, my honor and my life,
My country, my subjects, my soul all subdued
To him, and none other will I have
For my goal, which without deceit
I will follow in spite of all envy
That may ensue. For I have no other desire,
But to make him perceive my faithfulness:
For storm or fair weather that may come,
Never will it change dwelling or place.
Shortly I shall give of my truth such proof,
That he shall know my constancy without pretense,
Not by my tears or feigned obedience,
As others have done, but by fresh ordeals.
Even if this were a genuine work, the evidence is inconclusive. The addressee is not mentioned, and the sonnet is just as likely to be a pious exercise giving thanks to God after Mary’s ordeal in childbirth as it is to be an outpouring of her infatuation for Bothwell. A genuine poem or poems may well have been found by Morton’s men when they ransacked Mary’s apartments. If so, they adapted what they discovered to suit their own purposes.
The contracts are even less problematic. Royal and aristocratic marriages were always preceded by a written contract, a form of prenuptial agreement that settled the property rights of both parties. Mary and Bothwell signed such a contract on May 14, 1567, the eve of their marriage. But for some reason this was not one of the documents found in the casket. According to the Confederate Lords, their “discoveries” meant the couple must have signed earlier contracts.
One was said to be in Huntly’s handwriting, dated April 5, 1567, “at Seton.” It is a blatant forgery, because although Mary and Bothwell were indeed at Seton on that day, the wording includes extracts from the Ainslie’s Tavern Bond, and yet that document was not ready for another two weeks. The contract even refers to the gathering of the lords at Ainslie’s Tavern, because it says that Mary “among the rest” had chosen Bothwell as the most suitable man to be her husband. As the italicized words could only refer to the discussions at the tavern, though Mary was not present, it follows that the contract could not have been written earlier than April 19, when the supper had been held.
The other contract, undated but supposedly signed “Marie R,” cannot be conclusively pinned down. Yet even if it is genuine, it is innocuous. It is less a contract than a written promise by Mary to marry Bothwell:
We Mary, by the grace of God, Queen of Scotland, Dowager of France, etc., promise faithfully and in good faith, and without constraint, to James Hepburn, Earl of Bothwell, never to have any other spouse or husband but him . . . And since God has taken my late husband, Henry Stuart called Darnley, and that hence I am free . . . and since he [Bothwell] is also free, I shall be ready to perform the ceremonies requisite for marriage . . .
This wording, which is unambiguous, could only have been framed after Darnley’s death and Bothwell’s divorce. Whatever it might suggest about Mary’s feelings, if genuine, it tells us nothing about her complicity in murder or adultery. Moray knew that he was grasping at straws when he submitted it. He acknowledged it was written “without date and though some words therein seem to the contrary, yet it is upon credible grounds supposed, to have been made and written by her before the death of her husband.”
Cecil decided that the sonnets and the marriage contracts were irrelevant. Everything turned on the Casket Letters, especially the first two (letters 1 and 2).* These were potentially the most devastating. In fact, letter 2, usually called “the long Glasgow letter” to distinguish it from “the short Glasgow letter” (letter 1), would, if genuine, be enough by itself to prove that Mary was Bothwell’s illicit lover and co-conspirator in Darnley’s murder. The only surprise is why, if indeed it was true, the lords needed to cast their net wider.
Both Glasgow letters were said to have been written while Mary was visiting Darnley on his sickbed. Letter 1 is the complaint of a woman who begins by chiding her correspondent for his forgetfulness. He had promised to send her news, but had forgotten to do so. He had left her to go on a journey, and the woman accused him of deliberately delaying his return.
She would accordingly “bring the man” on Monday to Craigmillar, “where he shall be upon Wednesday.” “And I go to Edinburgh to be let blood if I have no word to the contrary.” Whoever this man was, he was “the merriest that ever you saw, and doth remember unto me all that he can to make me believe that he loveth me.”
The woman was suffering from a pain in her side. “I have it sore today. If Paris [Nicholas Hubert] doth bring back unto me that for which I have sent, it should much amend me.” She ended with a request for news. “I pray you, send me word from you at large, and what I shall do if you be not returned . . . For if you be not wise, I see assuredly all the whole burden fallen upon my shoulders.” The letter was sent “from Glasgow, this Saturday morning.”
One of the least satisfactory features of the Casket Letters is that only this one was dated. In addition, not a single letter was directed to a named addressee, and all ended abruptly without any indication whatever of who might have written them.
The short Glasgow letter would be highly incriminating if read in a certain way. The words “from Glasgow, this Saturday morning” meant it must, to be genuine, have been written on January 25, 1567, the only Saturday on which Mary had been in Glasgow on her visit to Darnley.
The reader is expected to assume this. We are also asked to guess that “the man” who is to be brought to Craigmillar is Darnley, but this does not quite add up. Even today, “the man” is a common colloquial expression in Scotland for a male child, and the suspicion that Prince James was really meant here is reinforced by the writer’s description. To depict the sulky and syphilitic Darnley as “the merriest that ever you saw, and doth remember unto me all that he can to make me believe that he loveth me” beggars belief. On the other hand, a doting Mary could well have been expected to say such things about her growing baby.
But if Prince James was “the man,” and the author his mother, the letter could not have been written at Glasgow. The child was never there; he had stayed with Mary at Stirling Castle until she returned to Edinburgh after the baptism celebrations, and afterward he was with his nurse at Holyrood, where Mary had left him when she had set out for Glasgow to visit Darnley. Later he was returned to the safekeeping of the Earl and Countess of Mar.
Then again, the writer was returning to Edinburgh “to be let blood.” The letter does not say “to let blood.” According to the medical understanding of the time, a person’s health was governed by correctly balancing the four cardinal “humors,” or bodily fluids: blood, phlegm, choler (yellow bile) and melancholy (black bile). Bloodletting was a routine part of a physician’s practice, in the same way that he might prescribe rhubarb pills for choler or licorice tablets for digestive disorders. And we know that Mary’s doctors practiced it when they felt her state of health required it.
The writer of the letter had sent Paris to fetch something. Paris was, of course, the valet Nicholas Hubert, the man Mary had seen to be unusually dirty on the night before Darnley’s murder. The writer had a pain in her side, and the likely interpretation is that Paris had been sent somewhere for medicine. Paris was Mary’s servant. He had formerly been Bothwell’s servant for twenty years, but Mary’s household accounts show that he had changed employers a year or so before.
This could raise suspicions, because Paris was clearly still in Bothwell’s pay, as his role in the explosion at Kirk o’Field suggests. In that case, he might have been the missing link between Mary and Bothwell. Could he have been running errands between them while Mary was at Glasgow?
The Confederate Lords always maintained that Paris had been the trusted messenger who assisted the conspiracy. They said he had taken letters to and fro between Mary in Glasgow and Bothwell in Edinburgh, but this is highly problematic. By Saturday, January 25, Bothwell had already left Edinburgh. He had set out for Liddesdale the previous day after escorting Mary to Callander House on the first stage of her journey to Glasgow.
The date of Bothwell’s departure is incontrovertible. Moray’s own “journal” describing Mary’s and Bothwell’s movements between January 21 and 30, 1567, admits that Bothwell had left Edinburgh on the evening of the 24th. Moray was brazen enough to submit his diary to Cecil, despite the conflict of this evidence with letter 1.
And Bothwell’s movements can be checked. They are corroborated by a handwritten report sent to Cecil four days later by Lord Scrope, the English official based at Carlisle, on the western side of the border. In his report, Scrope vividly described Bothwell’s excursion.
This was because Bothwell had been involved in another big fight. He had left Edinburgh accompanied by eighty men for the “reformation” of thieves and other malefactors on the border, traveling as far as Jedburgh on the first night. From there he had continued into Liddesdale, where his men captured a dozen brigands, one of whom was Martin Elwood, the leader of the border gang comprising the associates of the Elliots of Liddesdale.
Elwood got word to his men and a rescue attempt was made. One of Bothwell’s men was killed and five more captured. Bothwell went in hot pursuit of his assailants “until his servants and horses were wearied and spent, and he could not make any recovery and so was forced to return to Jedburgh again.”
If the logic of the short Glasgow letter is to be believed, Bothwell was supposed to be keeping his promise to write to Mary about the final arrangements for Darnley’s murder while he was intent on a sortie to deal with the Elwoods and the Elliots.
More puzzling still, Mary was said to be accusing him of delaying his return from Liddesdale, where he had scarcely arrived. If his absence was a sore point by Saturday the 25th, she must have expected his return before Saturday. But he had not left Edinburgh until Friday evening, and Liddesdale was seventy miles away.
And yet several aspects of letter 1 ring true. The writer had a pain in her side requiring medical treatment and a young son who was “the merriest that ever you saw.” It is possible—perhaps likely—that this was a draft or copy of one of Mary’s genuine letters, written to an unknown recipient at another time and in a different context from that claimed by Moray and his allies. In that case, all the Confederate Lords had to do was to add the words “from Glasgow, this Saturday morning.” At the stroke of a pen, an otherwise unremarkable letter could be turned into something incriminating. The reference to Craigmillar is easily explained, as it was one of Mary’s favorite retreats where she had regularly stayed for periods ranging from a few days to several weeks.
Letter 2 is the longer of the two letters said to have been written from Glasgow while Mary attempted to persuade Darnley to return with her to Craigmillar. It is also the longest of the eight Casket Letters. Selected by the lords for its seemingly graphic allusions to the murder plot, it is also interspersed with its author’s protestations of longing and desire for her lover.
The letter opens on an elegiac note: “Being gone from the place where I had left my heart, it may be easily judged what my countenance was.” The author, a woman, had said her fond goodbyes to her lover, then continued on her journey to Glasgow, where she had been met by a gentleman from the Earl of Lennox and by the Laird of Luss with forty men and others, but no one from the town.
When she had arrived, she found that Darnley had already been asking questions about her. When she saw him on his sickbed, she was surprised at how well informed he seemed to be about events at Holyrood. After her first meeting with him, she had gone to eat her supper.
Later that evening, he had recalled her, making all his usual complaints and blaming her for his illness, which he was convinced was brought on by her disdain. He asked her for a reconciliation. He even pleaded for a pardon. She answered that he had been pardoned many times before, only to return to his dissolute ways.
“I am young,” he protested. “May not a man of my age for want of counsel fail twice or thrice, and miss of promise [i.e., break his promises], and at the last repent and rebuke himself by his experience?” Darnley offered to amend his behavior if he could receive just one more pardon. “I ask nothing,” he said, “but that we may be at bed and table together as husband and wife. And if you will not, I will never rise from this bed.”
The writer asked him why, in that case, he had tried to leave the country in an English ship. He denied it, but finally admitted he had spoken to the sailors. She turned next to the rumors about his plotting. She asked him about Hiegate’s reports that he was conspiring with the Lennoxes to put her in prison and rule in the name of her son. “He denied it till I told him the very words, and then he said that . . . it was said that some of the Privy Council had brought me a letter to sign to put him in prison, and to kill him if he did resist.”
Darnley at first denied all knowledge of his conspiracies, but next day changed his mind and was willing to confess. He made a clean breast of everything, after which he asked for sex with the writer. “He desired much that I should lodge in his lodging. I have refused it. I have told him that he must be purged and that could not be done here.”
The writer refused to sleep with Darnley, offering instead to take him to Craigmillar in a horse litter: “I told him that so I would myself bring him to Craigmillar, that the physicians and I also might cure him without being far from my son.”
Darnley flatly refused. He wanted no one to see him with his pockmarked skin. He became angry when further questioned about his plotting: “He hath no desire to be seen, and waxeth angry when I speak to him of Walker, and saith that he will pluck his ears from his head and that he lieth.”
The writer asked Darnley why he had been complaining about the lords, threatening to kill those who had lately been reconciled to her. “He denieth it, and saith that he had already prayed them to think no such matter of him. As for myself, he would rather lose his life than do me the least displeasure.”
Darnley, it seems, was far less afraid of the writer than he was of some of the lords. This makes sense, because the lords most recently pardoned and who had only just crossed the border back into Scotland—that is, Morton and the Douglases—were his co-conspirators in the Rizzio plot. He had brazenly betrayed them, causing them to seek revenge.
Darnley’s train of thought led him to attempt a reconciliation with the writer. He “could not believe that his own flesh (which was myself) would do him any hurt.” He appealed to her not to leave him. She almost had pity on him until she compared his heart of wax with hers, which was as hard as a diamond.
The letter writer then veered almost randomly from topic to topic. Darnley’s father, Lennox, “hath bled this day at the nose and at the mouth. Guess what token that is?” The woman said she had not seen Lennox herself: “He is in his chamber.” And she said that she hated deceiving Darnley. “I do here a work that I hate much, but I had begun it this morning.”
There followed a passionate outburst from the woman to her lover: “We are tied to with two false races.* The good year untie us from them. God forgive me, and God knit us together forever for the most faithful couple that ever he did knit together. This is my faith. I will die in it.” She longed to be in bed with him again. “I am ill at ease and glad to write unto you when other folks be asleep, seeing that I cannot do as they do according to my desire, that is between your arms, my dear life.”
She said she was becoming weary, but could not stop herself scribbling while any paper was left. “Cursed be this poxy fellow,” she exclaimed, “that troubleth me this much!” His health was stable, but his body was disgusting. His breath stank whenever she approached his bedside. “I thought,” she said, “I should have been killed with his breath, for it is worse than your uncle’s breath, and yet I was sat no nearer to him than in a chair by his bolster.”
At this point, halfway through the letter, a hiatus occurs. A memo appears from nowhere, a set of jottings or headings that the writer referred to as a “memorial”—a list of topics she had so far wished to include in her letter and were obviously meant to jog her memory as she wrote. The letter then continues as if the memo were not there.
The woman said she had remembered that Lord Livingston, during supper, had openly teased her in the presence of Lady Reres about her lover. This (somewhat implausibly) was when she was leaning on him while warming herself at the fire. Livingston had drunk a toast to her inamorato.
In Cecil’s copy of the letter, this paragraph is followed by an unexplained double-line space. When the transcription resumes, the woman informs us that she was making her lover a bracelet. “I have had so little time that it is very ill. but I will make a fairer. And in the meantime take heed that none of those that be here do see it, for all the world will know it.”
She had been seen working on the bracelet, and was anxious because anyone who later noticed her lover wearing it would guess their secret. This seems a bit odd, since only a few sentences earlier the woman’s relationship with her lover had been a topic of general banter.
It is usually said that the hiatus caused by the memo was the result of the writer’s ending her work on one evening and starting again on the next. That is certainly a possibility, because by the next paragraph it seems that another day had passed and the writer had resumed her “tedious talk” with Darnley.
And once more, she hated herself for her dissimulation. “You make me dissemble so much,” she now reproached her lover, “that I am afraid thereof with horror, and you make me almost to play the part of a traitor. Remember that if it were not for your-sake obeying you I had rather be dead.”
Darnley would not accompany the woman back to Edinburgh unless she would promise to have sex with him. The matter was argued back and forth, and she finally agreed as the only way to persuade him. She promised to sleep with him as soon as he was cured of his pockmarks.
Darnley was still somewhat suspicious, but since he was too afraid of the reprisals of the lords to take any chances, he decided to travel in the litter with her and they would lead a happy life together. “To be short,” said the woman, “he will go anywhere upon my word.”
She said that she would follow such instructions as she hoped to receive shortly from her lover. “And send me word what I shall do, and whatsoever happens to me, I will obey you.” She then added her own chilling suggestion: “Think also if you will not find some invention more secret by physick, for he is to take physick at Craigmillar and the baths also. And shall not come forth of long time.”
She still had deep misgivings about what she was doing. “I shall never be willing to beguile one that putteth his trust in me. Nevertheless, you may do all, and do not esteem me the less therefore, for you are the cause thereof. For my own revenge I would not do it.”
She did not visit Darnley on the second evening of her stay, as she was too busy finishing her lover’s bracelet. She had not found clasps for it yet. “Send me word whether you will have it and more money, and when I shall return and how far I may speak. Now as far as I perceive, I may do much with you. Guess you whether I shall not be suspected.”
Changing the subject again, the writer remarked that Darnley would become enraged whenever he heard any mention of his enemies among the lords. His father, Lennox, meanwhile, would not emerge from his room. Darnley himself had asked to see the woman again early the next morning.
She would send her letter by a messenger, who would also tell her lover the rest of the news. She ended with a grim warning: “Burn this letter, for it is too dangerous, neither is there anything well said in it, for I think upon nothing but upon grief if you be at Edinburgh.”
A second unexplained double-line space follows in Cecil’s transcript of the letter, after which is written a damning last paragraph:
Now if to please you my dear life, I spare neither honor, conscience, nor hazard, nor greatness, take it in good part, and not according to the interpretation of your false brother-in-law, to whom, I pray you, give no credit against the most faithful lover that ever you had or shall have . . . Excuse my evil writing and read it over twice . . . Pray remember your friend and write unto her and often. Love me always.
A second memo concludes the letter. The final headings are: “Of the Earl of Bothwell” and “Of the Lodging in Edinburgh.” If letter 2 really had been written on two consecutive evenings, this second memo might not have raised so many suspicions, but the references to Bothwell and the “lodging” (we may assume this means the Old Provost’s Lodging at Kirk o’Field) tacked on at the end are too much to swallow. Of all these jottings, these are the only two that fail to match the contents of the letter.
According to the Confederate Lords, Mary was the author of letter 2, Bothwell was its recipient, and the messenger to whom it was entrusted was Paris. When she had stayed at Callander House on the first leg of her journey to see Darnley, she had allegedly told Paris to accompany her to Glasgow, where he was to wait to take letters back to Bothwell in Edinburgh.
After she had been two nights at Glasgow, she had supposedly given Paris a packet of letters, some for Bothwell and others for Maitland, which Bothwell was also to be shown. On reaching Edinburgh, Paris was said to have found Bothwell and delivered his letters. Bothwell ordered him back to Glasgow with the message that everything was ready and Mary was to lure Darnley to his fate at Kirk o’Field.
Viewed in conjunction with letter 1, this scenario becomes a farce. Mary had left Edinburgh on January 20 or 21. She did not arrive at Glasgow until the 22nd. Huntly and Bothwell had returned to Edinburgh after leaving her at Callander House. Bothwell then departed for Jedburgh on the evening of the 24th and continued the next day into Liddesdale.
If Mary had done no more at Glasgow than write letter 2 on the consecutive evenings of January 22 and 23, it might just have been possible for Paris to catch Bothwell in Edinburgh on the 24th before he left for Jedburgh. But the rest is beyond belief. Paris was supposed to have returned to Glasgow on the 25th to inform Mary that the “place” was to be Kirk o’Field, and then left Glasgow “this Saturday morning,” also the 25th, for Edinburgh to deliver letter 1. But Edinburgh and Glasgow are fifty miles apart, a hard day’s ride in each direction. He would have had to leave Glasgow on the 25th before he had even arrived. Moreover, had he achieved this miraculous feat, Bothwell would no longer have been in Edinburgh to receive letter 1, because he had already arrived at Jedburgh.
The lords’ allegations put Paris firmly in the spotlight. He had sought refuge in Denmark after Mary was taken to Lochleven, but after her defeat at Langside and flight to England, the lords set out to extradite him, and if that failed, to kidnap him. This was not to produce him as a witness before Elizabeth and Cecil. On the contrary, it was to make sure he never appeared to give his testimony. Dead men tell no tales.
Paris would be brought back to Scotland in June 1569. He was kept in prison until August 9 and 10, when he was secretly interrogated at St. Andrews by George Buchanan and Moray’s private secretary, John Wood. On the first day of questioning, Paris did not say what his inquisitors wanted to hear. On the second day he was tortured, and confessed to everything.
No sooner had Moray received a transcript of this confession than poor Paris was silenced forever. There was no trial: Mary’s loyal valet was summarily hanged. But he, and not Moray, had the last word. On the scaffold, he shouted out the truth to the assembled crowd. He denied everything he had said about carrying the two Glasgow letters from Mary to Bothwell.
Moray sent a copy of Paris’s confession to Cecil, who instantly wrote in Elizabeth’s name demanding that the execution be deferred. As soon as he had trawled through the confession, he must have realized how flimsy and far-fetched it was. He demanded that Paris be kept alive for further interrogation, presumably in England. But it was too late.
Despite the fabrications, lengthy passages of letter 2 can only have been taken from a genuine document Mary is likely to have sent to an unknown recipient while she was visiting Darnley. Several key extracts ring true:
“I thought I should have been killed with his breath, for it is worse than your uncle’s breath, and yet I was sat no nearer to him than in a chair by his bolster.”
“He desired much that I should lodge in his lodging. I have refused it. I have told him that he must be purged and that could not be done here.”
“I told him that so I would myself bring him to Craigmillar, that the physicians and I also might cure him without being far from my son.”
“To be short, he will not come but with condition that I shall promise to be with him as heretofore at bed and board, and that I shall forsake him no more, and upon my word he will do whatsoever I will, and will come.”
The first extract clearly relates to Darnley’s treatment for syphilis by salivation of mercury. After a while, the patient’s breath began to stink. But who was the mysterious uncle whose breath was almost as bad as Darnley’s?
Bothwell no longer had a living uncle, so this part of the letter could not possibly have been addressed to him.* Some historians have suggested that Mary had written a detailed report on Darnley’s condition to Moray, and that a whole run of paragraphs from this lost document were spliced into letter 2. If that is true, the “uncle” would have been the Earl of Mar, whom Mary entrusted with the care of her son. That, however, remains a matter of conjecture.
The other three extracts refer to Darnley’s characteristic demands for sex, first refused and then accepted by Mary. They confirm that she knew exactly how to handle her debauched and degenerate husband. Her tactics closely resembled her approach after the Rizzio plot, when she had offered to sleep with Darnley to win his affection, but knew he would be too drunk to take advantage of her offer.
If indeed these passages are true, it is less rather than more likely that Mary was involved in Darnley’s murder. Although afterward highlighted by Moray to claim that his sister was a party to the plot, the third extract severely undermines the charges against her. To make the fanciful chronology of the Glasgow letters somehow add up, Buchanan had asserted that Mary had “devised” with Bothwell to lure Darnley to Kirk o’Field before ever leaving Edinburgh for Glasgow.
But the third extract confirms that she sought to bring Darnley not to Kirk o’Field but to Craigmillar, even though the charge that she had plotted to lure him to Kirk o’Field was the crux of the case against her.
Other sections of letter 2 tell us just what it was that Darnley was thinking.
“He hath no desire to be seen, and waxeth angry when I speak to him of Walker, and saith that he will pluck his ears from his head and that he lieth.”
“I asked him of the inquisition [i.e., investigation] of Hiegate. He denied it till I told him the very words, and then he said that . . . it was said that some of the Council had brought me a letter to sign to put him in prison, and to kill him if he did resist.”
“I asked him . . . what cause he had to complain of some of the lords and to threaten them. He denieth it, and saith that he had already prayed them to think no such matter of him. As for myself, he would rather lose his life than do me the least displeasure.”
Such extracts fit hand in glove with what is known of Darnley’s plotting and Mary’s fears as expressed to her ambassador to France. They also suggest that Darnley had heard whispers of Morton’s rendezvous with Bothwell and Maitland at Whittingham Castle, and that he suspected a plot to imprison or kill him.
But even if this means that whole paragraphs of letter 2 are true, others are either forged or interpolated. In particular the final paragraph, where the writer castigates her correspondent’s “false brother-in-law,” cannot be genuine.
By “your false brother-in-law,” Mary was supposed to have referred to Huntly.* If so, the paragraph could not possibly have been taken from a genuine letter written in January 1567, because Huntly was then still her stalwart supporter. He did not quarrel with her until the last week in April 1567, when Bothwell’s divorce was pending.
And there is further evidence of cheating. The second memo ended with the jottings “Of the Earl of Bothwell” and “Of the Lodging in Edinburgh.” We have already asked, Why would Mary, if she were already writing to Bothwell, have made such a note? Letter 2 runs to more than three thousand words, yet it contains not one word on Bothwell or the “lodging.” It seems that these final jottings were added in a blank space on the last page of the letter to make it appear more incriminating. We have already noted that letter 2 looks to be in two parts. It is becoming a distinct possibility that pages culled from different places were surreptitiously spliced together.
This line of inquiry can be pursued further. All the passages in which Mary is said to have openly admitted her love for Bothwell are curiously placed in the text. The woman had said she was “ill at ease and glad to write unto you when other folks be asleep, seeing that I cannot do as they do according to my desire, that is between your arms, my dear life.” She had asked her beloved to “Love me always.” Elsewhere in the letter, Lord Livingston had supposedly teased her. And yet only a few lines later, she could warn her lover to beware that “none of those that be here” ever saw him with the bracelet she was making for him.
Each of these “love” passages appears either just before or just after the jottings that Mary is supposed to have made when preparing her thoughts for the letter. We already know there are two sets of jottings, which reinforces the suspicion that perhaps the pages of more than one letter had been combined.
Still more suggestively, just before the curious remarks on the bracelet, and then again immediately before the concluding and (as we now know) interpolated paragraph in which the writer castigated “your false brother-in-law”—which also happens to be the very same section in which the words “Love me always” appear—there are unexplained double-line spaces in Cecil’s transcript of the letter. These have never been noticed before.
Although Cecil’s copy is an English translation of the document, its only gaps are in these two places. Since neither falls at the top or bottom of a page, it is likely that they represent blanks in the original (and unfortunately lost) French version of the letter. It is a remarkable coincidence that these double-line spaces appear exactly at points where the text seems to have been doctored. A plausible hypothesis is that these spaces also appeared in the original French text, possibly at page breaks or other places where spaces had been left on the paper, which enabled forged material to be inserted later. To prevent similar interpolations, it had been Elizabeth’s practice to draw hatch marks in pen across the blank spaces of her sensitive and important letters to prevent forged material from being added.
Returning to the charges leveled by the Confederate Lords, their case in the end rested on these passages:
“I do here a work that I hate much, but I had begun it this morning.”
“We are tied to with two false races. The good year untie us from them. God forgive me, and God knit us together forever for the most faithful couple that ever he did knit together. This is my faith. I will die in it.”
“His father hath bled this day at the nose and at the mouth. Guess what token that is?”
“You make me dissemble so much that I am afraid thereof with horror, and you make me almost to play the part of a traitor. Remember that if it were not for obeying you I had rather be dead.”
“Think also if you will not find some invention more secret by physick, for he is to take physick at Craigmillar and the baths also. And shall not come forth of long time.”
“Send me word whether you will have it and more money, and when I shall return and how far I may speak. Now as far as I perceive, I may do much with you. Guess you whether I shall not be suspected.”
“Burn this letter, for it is too dangerous, neither is there anything well said in it, for I think upon nothing but upon grief if you be at Edinburgh.”
If Mary wrote all of these extracts, she was involved in a plot that Darnley had good reason to think would put him in mortal danger. If the fifth extract in particular is authentic, it would seem to point to poison as a possible method of assassination, and Mary would rightly stand condemned of conspiracy to murder.
However, apart from the fifth extract, there is no reason to connect any of these passages to a murder plot. The first extract is compatible with an intention to fetch Darnley and keep him under house arrest. The second extract cannot have been written from Glasgow in January 1567, since the phrase “two false races” refers again to Darnley, who is “tied” to Mary, and to Huntly’s sister, Lady Jean Gordon, who is “tied” to Bothwell. But Huntly was not “false” until the end of April, which means this passage was interpolated.
Likewise, the fourth, sixth and seventh extracts do not add up. They would, of course, make sense if culled from the pages of genuine letters from Mary to Bothwell in late April or May 1567. Such pages could have been written after her abduction, when she was anxiously waiting at Dunbar for his return from Edinburgh, where he had gone to encourage his wife to file her divorce petition and while Mary was quarreling with Huntly, or they may have been written after she had returned to Edinburgh with Bothwell to call the banns for their marriage.
The sixth extract suggests that Bothwell needed money, possibly as pay for his soldiers or bribes for his divorce. And whereas the seventh extract suggests that Mary expected him to be in Edinburgh while they were apart, that is easier to credit if the letter was written three months after the Confederate Lords said it was. As has already been shown, Bothwell had left Edinburgh for Liddesdale on the evening of January 24. He was, however, in Edinburgh for several days, filing his divorce papers at the end of April, when Mary was at odds with Huntly and anxious for reassurance.
That leaves the third and fifth extracts. The third is difficult to judge. Lennox, Darnley’s father, had suffered a nosebleed. What did it signify? Obviously it was some sort of omen. That was exactly Mary’s point, assuming the question was not itself interpolated. But since she did not venture an answer, the innuendo was hardly proof of a conspiracy to murder Darnley.
All along, it was the fifth extract that packed the punches. And yet this was far from being what it seemed to be. Although the extract was supposedly the proof that Mary had wanted Darnley to be poisoned at Craigmillar, the lords’ story—as scripted by Buchanan in his dossier and written with this very same letter on his desk (see chapter 24)—had made no mention whatsoever of this particular charge.
The whole force of the lords’ accusation, as it had been compiled by Buchanan, was not that Mary and Bothwell planned to poison Darnley at Craigmillar. It was that they had conspired to lure him to Kirk o’Field where he was to be blown up in a gunpowder plot. That was why it was so important to add the crucial words “Of the Earl of Bothwell” and “Of the Lodging in Edinburgh” to the jottings on the last page of the letter. Otherwise these details were not adequately covered.
The trouble with the lords’ story is that it was getting far too complicated for any one person to remember. An unnecessarily elaborate tale was becoming a mangled one in which plot was piled on plot, making it difficult to keep all the details under control.
The main objection to the genuineness of the fifth extract is that the suggestion that Darnley was to be poisoned at Craigmillar is wholly inconsistent with Buchanan’s principal accusation, which is that Mary and Bothwell had already “devised” with each other to lure Darnley to his death at Kirk o’Field before Mary traveled to Glasgow to fetch her errant husband. If the fifth extract really was a genuine passage by Mary, it would have been seized upon and given the highest priority in Buchanan’s original list of charges. As the most incriminating section of either of the two Glasgow letters, it would have been far too juicy to pass over.
The fact that it was missed can only mean that it did not exist by the time Buchanan’s material was sent to Cecil in June 1568. It has to be regarded as a later forged interpolation.
This is all the more likely because, after Buchanan’s dossier had been compiled but before the Confederate Lords made their final accusations against Mary, they changed their story. They added the additional charge that an attempt had been made to poison Darnley at Stirling after the baptism of Prince James. They argued that because of this, Darnley had fallen victim to a “grievous sickness.”
Just two months before the Casket Letters were shown to Elizabeth and Cecil, Moray drew Cecil’s attention to Darnley’s illness as the supposed “proof” of the fifth extract. By this sleight of hand, Darnley’s syphilis had turned into an attempted poisoning.
But Moray’s charge does not add up. If the fifth extract was genuine, then Mary and Bothwell must have intended to poison Darnley after she had lured him to Craigmillar, not before at Stirling. And since Darnley was already sick when he arrived at his father’s house in Glasgow, the failed attempt must have been made before he had left Stirling.
It is impossible to explain why so clumsy and improbable a charge was added to the roster of allegations against Mary at such a late stage. But the slipperiness of the lords is established. We already know that letter 2 contained interpolations about Huntly and his sister: “your false brother-in-law” and “two false races.” The final jottings—“Of the Earl of Bothwell” and “Of the Lodging in Edinburgh”—are also extremely suspicious.
In the absence of the original handwritten pages of letter 2 in the form in which they were submitted to Elizabeth and Cecil, no final and unassailable conclusions about this extraordinary document can be reached. But all the evidence points in a single direction. Between 1500 and 1800 words are likely to be genuine, even if the passage about Darnley’s treatment by salivation of mercury could not possibly have been addressed to Bothwell. And between 1000 and 1200 words of the text we now have are likely interpolations from letters that Mary wrote several months later, or else are outright forgeries.
Probably most of the interpolations were from genuine (if later) letters. This shows the true extent of Moray’s cunning, because Elizabeth and Cecil were nobody’s fools. They wanted the handwriting in the documents to be authenticated. Cecil never relaxed his guard in dealing with them. When the original letters were finally inspected, he demanded a supporting affidavit, signed by Moray, Morton and Lord Lindsay, the chief architects of Mary’s forced abdication, to declare that all were Mary’s, all in her “own proper handwriting.” Thereafter, comparisons with genuine letters from Mary to Elizabeth from the collection in the royal archives were to be made before a verdict could be reached.
The lords knew that they could not expect to get away with crude forgeries. To establish Mary’s guilt, they needed to find pages of genuine letters that, if doctored up here and there, would clinch what they wanted to prove.
This hypothesis would also explain the curious incongruities in the contents of letter 2 as old and new pages were spliced together to make up a composite document. It would also explain why the most suspect passages are relatively brief. If they were filled in using blank spaces on the existing sheets, Moray could be fairly confident that they would pass undetected. Since Mary was known to scribble her letters and also to use the most expensive paper as profligately as only a queen might be expected to do, it could prove to be a risk worth taking.