THE TWO Glasgow letters were the principal documents produced by Moray and the Confederate Lords to suggest that Mary had been involved in Darnley’s murder. Yet they were not the only evidence. Three of the six remaining Casket Letters were love letters, of which two were also said to have referred to Darnley’s murder. The last three letters were said to relate to Mary’s abduction at Almond Bridge, which had supposedly been planned collusively. None of the handwritten transcripts or translations of the lost originals makes it possible to verify the real author, the intended recipient or recipients, or the date of composition. And all six of these letters will raise almost as many questions as they answer.
Letters 3 through 5 were said to be the love letters that Mary had written to Bothwell. Letter 3 was written by a woman to her estranged husband. She bitterly complained of his cruelty, absence and neglect, but “for all that, I will in no wise accuse you, neither of your little remembrance, neither of your little care, and least of all of your broken promises or of the coldness of your writing.”
The woman was doing her best to keep up appearances and to defer to her husband in the way that he expected. “I am else so far made yours that what pleases you is acceptable to me, and my thoughts are so willingly subdued unto yours that I suppose that all that comes of you proceeds . . . for such [reasons] as be just and reasonable, and such as I desire myself.”
She was still a woman of spirit. To make clear her true feelings for her husband, she was sending him a jewel, a ring designed as a locket. But this was no ordinary lover’s token. It was not a diamond in the shape of a heart, as such gifts usually were, but a stone in the shape of a sepulcher. Mounted in black enamel and set with small jewels representing tears and bones, the locket contained a ringlet of the woman’s hair—she called this “the ornament of the head”: “And to testify unto you how lowly I submit myself under your commandments, I have sent you in sign of homage by Paris [Nicholas Hubert] the ornament of the head, which is the chief guide of the other members [i.e., parts of the body].” The woman’s words veered from the ironic to the macabre. She would defer to her husband just as he had commanded, but her deference would be such that she would rather die than lose her sense of dignity and autonomy:
I send unto you a sepulchre of hard stone colored with black, sewn with tears and bones. The stone I compare to my heart, that is carved in a sure sepulchre or harbor of your commandments, and above all of your name and memory that are therein enclosed, as is my hair in this ring, never to come forth until death grant unto you to a trophy of victory of my bones.
This letter is so different in sentiment and tone from letter 2, with its author’s fervent expressions of longing and desire for her lover, it is hardly possible to suppose it was written by the same person. And it is impossible to judge on stylistic grounds whether Mary was the author, because she wrote no other indisputably genuine letters of this kind of emotional nakedness.
The debate has to focus on the letter’s contents. In this instance, the woman’s spouse was a brute. He had rejected her, and so she had forced herself into a despairing appeal to the better side of the nature she knew he really lacked. Words and phrases like “your broken promises,” “the coldness of your letters,” “your name and memory” and “the tears for your absence” made it clear that this was a couple whose marriage was in serious trouble.
We have seen that Bothwell could behave like a brute. The lords might well have been trying to add some verisimilitude to the quarrels and tears of his relationship with Mary in the month between the date of their marriage and the final showdown with the rebel lords at Carberry Hill.
But that would mean overlooking the problem of the handwriting. It would have been essential, for the letter to look convincing, to discover a genuine letter in which Mary had expressed her feelings in this way. But Mary and Bothwell had scarcely been apart—and certainly not for more than a few days at a time—between their marriage and Mary’s surrender. Moreover, their acknowledged moments of separation, as when Mary stood on the flat roof of Borthwick Castle looking down over the battlements and trading insults with the lords, or when she was mustering her forces at Dunbar while Bothwell was heading for Melrose, were so full of feverish activity that it hardly seems likely she would have found time to commission an elaborate jewel from a goldsmith.
If the letter was to pass the handwriting test when exhibited to Elizabeth and Cecil, it would have been advisable to produce a genuine letter that Mary had addressed to Darnley at one of the low points of their relationship, but which the lords would now claim had been written to Bothwell. In this instance, it would most likely have been Mary’s draft of the letter, or the document as sent and later ransacked from Darnley’s old cabinets in the royal apartments by Morton’s men.
Two handwritten transcripts of this letter are extant, one in French, the other in Scots. The latter, until now completely unrecognized, since it was catalogued at the British Library only in 1994, at which time no one seems to have realized it contained unique information, has copies of Cecil’s annotations. His comments show that he was baffled by the letter. “A head,” “a sepulchre,” “a ring with her hair,” he carefully noted at the end. What did it all mean?
A further complication is that if the letter was genuine but written by Mary to Darnley, the jewel could only have been delivered by Paris, as the writer said it was, after he became her valet rather than while in Bothwell’s service. This would limit the date of the letter to one not earlier than the spring of 1566, but that would fit comfortably with the known facts of Mary and Darnley’s estrangement and with their rows and lengthy separations as reported by du Croc. The convergence is such that it is highly probable that letter 3 is genuine, but was written to Darnley and not Bothwell, and had nothing to do with a murder plot.
Letter 4 is even less convincing than its predecessor as a supposed love letter to Bothwell. It was also taken by the Confederate Lords to contain chilling references to the murder plot, since the opening lines included the words “I have promised him to bring him tomorrow. If you think it, give order thereunto.”
The writer was far from happy with her lover: he had recently betrayed her. He had been unfaithful, ungrateful, and had ordered her not to write to him or contact him. He was sulking, and she was mortified by his latest affair. His new flame did not have “the third part of the faithfulness or voluntary obedience” that she did. She compared herself to Medea, the first wife of Jason, the mythical hero who led the Argonauts in search of the Golden Fleece. It was Jason who, in one version of the myth, had deserted his wife to marry Glauce, only to be forever deprived of happiness when his new love was murdered on her wedding day by the jealous Medea, who also killed her own children.
In theory, this letter could have been written by Mary to Darnley or Bothwell. We know that both men had enjoyed illicit sexual affairs, although Bothwell is not known to have slept with Lady Reres or Bessie Crawford while he was actually married to Mary. But as elaborated by the writer, the comparison has to refer to Darnley. The woman had likened herself to Medea. She was Jason’s first wife, not his second, whereas Bothwell was still married to Lady Jean Gordon at the time Mary was said to have written the letter.
Mary was Darnley’s first wife, even if he was her second husband. She could very well have imagined herself to be Medea if her sentiments had been addressed to him, and since we know that she had watched the pageant of the ships on the theme of Jason and the Argonauts at her first wedding banquet in Paris nine years before, it is hardly likely that she would have confused Glauce and Medea. She had studied classical literature with the leading experts at the court of Henry II. Either the letter is to Bothwell but is not from Mary, or else it is from Mary but not addressed to Bothwell.
The discrepancy pales into insignificance when compared to the next. The Confederate Lords alleged that letter 4 had been written on February 7, 1567, two days before Darnley’s murder. Transcripts in French and English are still among Cecil’s papers. The French version ends: “Faites bon guet si 1’oiseau sortira de sa cage ou sens [sic] son per comme la tourtre demeurera seulle a se lamenter de l’absence pour court quelle soit.” This literally translates as: “Take good care lest the bird fly out of its cage or without its mate, as the turtledove shall live alone to mourn its absence, however short it may be.” The metaphor may refer back to a poem that Darnley had sent to Mary before they split:
The turtle for her mate.
More dule may not endure,
Than I do for her sake,
Who has mine heart in cure.
(“Dule” means grief or mourning; “cure,” care or keeping.)
If Mary subsequently sent Letter 4 to Darnley, it could only mean that she was the bird who might fly away, leaving her partner to grieve for her loss. It could well have been sent to him while she was staying at Craigmillar Castle, in the weeks immediately before Prince James’s baptism, when Maitland and his allies were lobbying for a divorce between them.
The Confederate Lords, however, insisted that the allusion referred not to a divorce but to the murder plot, even though it is contained within a letter primarily concerned with infidelity. As they advised Cecil, this passage “proved” that Mary had warned Bothwell shortly before the murder to “make good watch that the bird escape not out of the cage.” To clinch it, they doctored the letter. This time, the deception can be pinned down more or less conclusively. Cecil had been given a transcript of the French version of the document by the Scots. This is proved by the handwriting, which belongs to one of the clerks accompanying Moray’s delegation. The same hand can be seen in the delegation’s official papers and reports, and when compared to that of this transcript, they are identical. But when the clerk prepared the transcript, whether on his own initiative or on Moray’s instructions, the word “per” was rendered as “pere.” “Mate” became “father,” meaning Lennox, Darnley’s father. (The fact that Lennox was at Glasgow and not Kirk o’Field on February 7 does not seem to have worried the lords.)
The transcript was then given to Cecil’s clerk to translate into English. And not surprisingly, he construed it thus: “And watch well if the bird shall fly out of his cage or without his father.”
This was too much even for Cecil. He was a brilliant linguist, who had won accolades for languages as a student at St. John’s College, Cambridge. He knew the metaphor of the turtledove, which was repeatedly used in literature. When he spotted the sleight of hand, he struck out the word “father” in his clerk’s translation and wrote “mate” above it.* Next he corrected “pere” to “per” in the French transcript by striking out the last letter. This obliterated the innuendo and should have called everything else into question but for the fact that Cecil wanted so badly for Mary to be incriminated, he either could not see, or else chose to ignore, the wider implications of the deception.
Letter 5 was said to have been written by Mary to Bothwell a few days before the marriage of Margaret Carwood, her favorite bedchamber woman, at Holyrood on Shrove Tuesday 1567, and therefore only a day or two before Darnley’s murder. It began with an anguished rebuke: “My heart, alas! Must the folly of a woman whose unthankfulness toward me you do sufficiently know, be occasion of displeasure unto you?”
There is no internal evidence to prove that this referred to Carwood, who, far from being unthankful to Mary, was one of her most loyal and devoted servants. But whoever the woman was, her inconsiderate gossip had shamed and embarrassed the unfaithful lover—still said to be Bothwell—who had bitterly complained and insisted that she be replaced at the earliest opportunity.
The writer—still said to be Mary—said she could do little about it until she knew more precisely what it was that the servant was alleged to have said. In this she had been greatly hindered by the fact that she was not supposed to be in communication with her lover. If he did not write to her by that evening, she would have no choice but to take matters into her own hands. She would confront the servant and look for a replacement. Since the servant was about to be married, this could quickly be arranged.
The writer asked the man not to be so mistrustful. She reminded him of her “faithfulness, constancy and voluntary subjection.” Their relationship was more than usually strained. She concluded the letter by saying, “You could do me no greater outrage, nor give me more mortal grief” than to doubt her honesty and her word.
When Cecil questioned the identity of the mysterious female servant, he was informed by the Confederate Lords that “Margaret Carwood was one special in trust with the Scottish queen and most privy to all her most secret affairs.” Needless to say, Carwood would not be called to give evidence to Elizabeth and Cecil in support of the lords’ interpretation of the letter or to testify to whom it had been addressed.
It would seem that the letter on its own proved nothing. Why then had it been selected for inclusion in the bundle of casket documents sent to England for inspection?
The answer lies in the newly discovered handwritten translation of the letter into English. Until now, the only known handwritten transcript of this document was in French. For some reason, the English translation among Cecil’s working papers in the Public Record Office had not been identified in time for inclusion in the scholarly editions of the Casket Letters in the 1890s. Then, when the document was finally catalogued, no one appears to have seen anything new in it, and so it did not seem necessary to remark on it.
As a result, no one knew how Cecil interpreted the words “Je m’en deferay au hazard de la fayre entreprandre ce qui pourroit nuire à ce à quoy nous tandons tous deux.” This literally translates as: “I will unburden myself of it at the risk of making her attempt something that could be harmful to what we are both aiming at.”
What could Mary—assuming she was the author of the letter—have been talking about? The sentence is so obscure and indirect it is impossible to guess its meaning. All that is clear is that it does not explicitly refer to a murder plot.
The English translation made by someone in Cecil’s office read: “I will rid myself of it, and hazard to cause it to be enterprised and taken in hand” (italics added). That is a misconstruction, a phony attempt by the English to refer to Darnley’s assassination and a misrepresentation of the French. Cecil should have hung his head in shame, because he personally corrected the translation of the letter. At the top, he changed the words “My lord” to “My heart,” where the original said “Mon coeur,” but left the remainder as it stood.
No one examining this evidence with an open mind could regard letters 3 through 5 as incriminating. They are often said to be forgeries. That is very unlikely. They could easily be genuine letters Mary had written in 1566 to the narcissistic and adulterous Darnley. He had engaged in illicit affairs. He had been forever moping and sulking. He had deserted her and threatened to go and live abroad. His character closely resembles that of the recipient of these idiosyncratic and unusual “love” letters.
In letter 3, the unhappy couple were estranged and living apart, which Mary and Bothwell were not in the month after their marriage. In letter 4, the writer is Medea and not Glauce, the wife and not the lover. Lastly, in both letters 4 and 5, the writer reminds her partner that she has “voluntarily subjected” herself to him—a remark typical of Mary, who always believed that by marrying Darnley she had stooped beneath herself, and told him so when they had quarreled.
That leaves the last three letters, numbers 6, 7 and 8, which relate to the Confederate Lords’ charge that Mary was a willing accomplice in her abduction at Almond Bridge. Letter 6 is probably a genuine letter from Mary to Bothwell that the lords had mischievously redated. It was almost certainly written after, not before, the abduction, since it contains references to events that we know to have occurred after Mary had arrived at Dunbar and Bothwell had left for Edinburgh to get his wife to file her divorce petition.
“Alas my lord,” it begins, “why is your trust put in a person so unworthy to mistrust that which is wholly yours?” Or, expressed in simpler language, “Why have you gone and trusted someone so unworthy? Their interventions have led you to mistrust the one person who really cares about you.” As the writer explained:
You had promised me that you would resolve all, and that you would send me word every day what I should do. You have done nothing thereof. I advertised you well to take heed of your false brother-in-law. He came to me and without showing me anything from you, told me that you had willed him to write to you . . .
Huntly was this “unworthy” individual, and he was once again described as “your false brother-in-law.” The alarm bells ring, because it was only after Mary’s abduction, on April 24, 1567, that Huntly and Bothwell had fallen out over Bothwell’s plan to divorce Huntly’s sister and marry Mary.
Mary had quarreled violently with Huntly, but not until after his sister’s divorce petition was filed. We also know that Bothwell, when he returned from arranging his divorce, had argued bitterly with Mary. Drury’s handwritten reports show that there had been a “great unkindness” between them lasting half a day. It had been their one spectacular fight before their marriage.
The writer said that her lover had “willed” Huntly to offer his advice as to what she should say and “where and when you should come to me.” But it had not gone according to plan. Instead, Huntly had given the writer a dressing down. He had railed against her “foolish enterprise,” saying that she could never marry a man who not only was married already but had kidnapped her, and that his family, the Gordons, would never allow it.
According to the Confederate Lords, Mary had sent this letter “from Stirling” to warn Bothwell of the risks he was about to take at Almond Bridge. Moray’s chronology asserted that she had written it on April 21, 22 or possibly early on the morning of April 23, 1567, before her abduction on the 24th.
But nowhere do the words “from Stirling” appear in the letter. Neither does Moray’s claim that the letter preceded the abduction add up. The lords maintained that the writer’s purpose was to encourage Bothwell to abduct her, using Huntly as his intermediary to inform her of the time and place where the pretend kidnapping would occur. We are expected to believe that she had so far given Bothwell no idea of when and where the event was to be staged. Bothwell, who had promised to settle everything, could not in the end decide, so he took advice from Huntly, asking him to ask the writer what she wished to say about it and “where and when you should come to me.”
There are two handwritten transcripts of this letter in Cecil’s papers, one in the original French and one in an English translation. The original French reads: Huntly (your “false brother-in-law”) “m’a presché que c’estoit une folle enterprise, et qu’avecques mon honneur je ne vous pourries jamais espouser, veu qu’estant marié vous m’amenies et que ses gens ne l’endureroient pas et que les seigneurs se dédiroient.” This literally translates as: He “preached to me that it was a foolish enterprise, and that with my honor I could never marry you, seeing that being married you brought me away, and that his folk would not endure it and that the lords would go back on their word.”
Moray maintained that the meaning of the French was: He “preached to me that it would be a foolish enterprise . . . seeing that being married you would bring me away . . .”
But Mary was a native French speaker. If she had used the past tense, the events she would have been describing were in the past and not the future, as in the interpretation of her accusers. Moreover, the use of the past tense makes far better sense and corresponds to what we know’really happened at Dunbar after Bothwell had left for Edinburgh to arrange his divorce, leaving Mary on her own with Huntly.
On the 26th, Bothwell had galloped to Edinburgh. There, he had arranged for his wife to lodge her divorce suit in the Protestant court. Next day, Mary had asked the Archbishop of St. Andrews to grant Bothwell an annulment in the Catholic court. When Bothwell returned to Dunbar, he found that Huntly and Mary had quarreled. Then Mary and Bothwell had their first big row.
If letter 6 was genuine, but was written after rather than before Mary’s abduction, it would also add considerably to our understanding of her feelings for Bothwell while he was away in Edinburgh and she was quarreling with Huntly:
I wish I were dead. For I see everything is going badly. You promised something very different in your prediction, but absence has power over you who have two strings to your bow.* Hasten your answer so that I may not fail and put no trust in your brother[-in-law] for this enterprise. For he speaks and is all against it. God give you good night.
All this makes a great deal of sense. We will never know exactly what it was that Bothwell had promised Mary. But her feelings tally with those she later expressed in telling her story to Robert Melville and the Bishop of Dunblane for their respective diplomatic missions to Elizabeth and Catherine de Medici. There, she knew she had done wrong in sleeping with a married man and was attempting to justify her behavior to herself as much as to others.
But not everything went Moray’s way. When Cecil gave the original French version of letter 6 to his clerk to translate, the tenses were rendered accurately. “And thereupon,” he wrote, Huntly “hath preached unto me that it was a foolish enterprise and that with mine honor I could never marry you, seeing that being married, you did carry me away . . .”
When docketing the translation (i.e., labeling it for filing), the clerk put, “Copie from Stirling after the Ravissement . . .” Exactly. Whoever he was, he was an honest man. He had understood the sense of the document he had just translated, which could not have been written before Mary’s abduction and so “proved” none of Moray’s claims.
And Cecil saw the danger. He was getting seriously worried. This “evidence” was not turning out to be anything near as good as Moray had said it would be. Sometimes the ends have to justify the means. With a stroke of his pen, he crossed out “after” and wrote “afore” above it in his own inimitable scrawl. Now it read, “Copie from Stirling afore the Ravissement . . .” In a second or two, an innocuous and fully comprehensible document was turned into something that was both incriminating and complete gibberish. This “afore” was perhaps the most important single word that Cecil ever put into any document connected with Mary Queen of Scots.
Letters 7 and 8 are tame in comparison, which may explain why there are no handwritten transcripts of either. They are known only from the versions later printed in Scots by Mary’s enemies.
Letter 7 is almost an exact duplicate of the core of letter 6. It is once again supposedly a letter from Mary to Bothwell, written on the eve or a few days before her abduction. “Of the place and the time,” it began, “I remit myself to your brother and to you . . . He finds many difficulties.”
The letter seems to have been no more than a variant Scots translation of letter 6, included to fill out the case. Perhaps the overriding reason why it was introduced as evidence is that it described Huntly to Bothwell as “your brother” and not “your false brother-in-law,” thereby softening the clash with the known fact that Huntly had not quarreled with Bothwell until after the abduction, when Mary had consented to marry him.
Letter 8 is the last of the letters said to have been written on the eve of the abduction and the third Mary is supposed to have sent to Bothwell in less than twenty-four hours. It too reiterated the gist of letter 6. But whereas letter 7 had attempted to correct an anachronism in the lords’ description of Huntly, this time he was described as “your brother-in-law that was.”
The letter begins, “My Lord, since my letter written, your brother-in-law that was, came to me very sad, and has asked me my counsel, what he should do after tomorrow, because there be many folks here, and among others the Earl of Sunderland . . .”
That description of Huntly is less plausible even than “your false brother-in-law.” And there was a second careless mistake, because the Earl of Sunderland did not accompany Mary from Stirling to Linlithgow and on to Almond Bridge after her visit to her son, nor was he later at Dunbar. Those attending Mary on her journey were Maitland, Huntly and Sir James Melville. Even Moray’s own retrospective account of Mary and Bothwell’s proceedings failed to mention Sunderland, who does not figure in the story. It is a mystery why his name ended up in letter 8.
Of letters 6 through 8, the three “abduction” letters, only number 6 is worthy of serious attention. It is likely to be genuine, but far from making it seem that Mary colluded with Bothwell in her abduction, it proves nothing of the sort. “I wish I were dead,” she was alleged to have said. “For I see everything is going badly. You promised something very different in your prediction . . .” These are hardly the sentiments one would expect from a willing partner about to engage in a daring escapade.
Beyond that, the past tenses were fatal to Moray’s case. He probably knew it and thought something more concrete would be needed if the lords were to win the argument. This led to the manufacturing of letters 7 and 8, which tried to amplify the text of letter 6, but which in the process further exposed the invalid assumptions on which the argument rested.
And yet superficially the Casket Letters were damning if they were genuine and in Mary’s handwriting. Two months after first reading Buchanan’s dossier and the sample copies of the evidence Moray had supplied to whet his appetite, Cecil decided to act. He persuaded Elizabeth to empower a special tribunal—often ambiguously called a “conference” to avoid the use of the word “court”—to examine the case against Mary.
A legal trial would shortly take place under the auspices of impartial arbitration. Elizabeth was probably sincere when she said that her aim in appointing commissioners was to bring about a “good end to the differences, debates and contentions grown and continued between her dear sister and cousin, Mary Queen of Scots, and her subjects.” But the tribunal as Cecil was to engineer it was closer to a special court set up to convict Mary on a charge of conspiracy to murder Darnley. The judges were to be the Duke of Norfolk, the Earl of Sussex and that veteran of Scottish business Sir Ralph Sadler, Henry VIII’s former secretary and ambassador to Edinburgh.
Cecil’s idea, an ingenious one, was that Elizabeth would appear to act as an unbiased referee over the Casket Letters, whereas in reality she had been persuaded to appoint a committee that was authorized to pronounce them genuine or forgeries, and so determine the extent of Mary’s guilt.
Mary was hesitant about accepting the tribunal’s legality, but was scarcely in a position to argue. She had everything to gain from a careful scrutiny of documents that she claimed were outright forgeries. She took the Duke of Norfolk’s nomination as a positive signal, since his opinion of the Confederate Lords as the congenital foes of monarchy was unconcealed. She therefore accepted the tribunal’s terms of reference and named her advocates, even if she did not formally concede Elizabeth’s right to detain her in England or to try her.
The tribunal opened on October 4 at York, when Mary’s advocates were allowed to speak first and bring their own charges against Moray and the Confederate Lords. They protested against the “great injuries, wrongs and damages” inflicted on Mary and her loyal subjects by the rebel lords, and appealed to Elizabeth for relief as an honorable umpire. If Moray and his allies had any evidence, they said, it should be exhibited in writing so that it could be lawfully examined and challenged.
Then it was Moray’s turn. Not surprisingly, he was reluctant to pursue the murder charge or exhibit the evidence he said he had collected. He was watching his back, fearful of Elizabeth’s wrath should he accuse his sister of murder and adultery and then fail to prove it. He also wanted guarantees in advance that if he was successful in establishing Mary’s guilt, she would never be returned as queen to Scotland.
This was the heart of the matter. Moray feared that even if he did prove Mary to be an accomplice in Darnley’s death, Elizabeth still would not recognize his appointment as regent, agree to hand over Mary to the lords to be dealt with as they thought fit, or keep her safely locked away in an English prison. Until he was assured of victory one way or the other, he was unwilling to place the originals of the Casket Letters on file before the court as evidence—at least officially.
Moray wanted it both ways. He declined to introduce the letters formally, but happily showed them to the English judges “privately and secretly.” The letters were not shown to Mary’s representatives, and under the procedure Cecil had laid down for the tribunal, they had no right to demand to see them.
The English judges were unimpressed by Moray’s tactics. The allegations were infamous, but were the letters Mary’s? The judges had seen nothing to prove it. The most hardheaded of them, the Earl of Sussex, gave Cecil a blunt warning. He wrote on October 22: “If the party adverse to her accuse her of the murder by producing the letters, she will deny them, and accuse the most of them [i.e., the Confederate Lords] of manifest consent to the murder, which could hardly be denied.”
Sussex had realized that if Moray and his delegation exhibited the Casket Letters, all Mary’s lawyers had to do was deny they were hers. She could turn the tables on the rebel lords, accusing them of complicity in Darnley’s murder. Then they would be in the dock, not her. And since a majority of her accusers had been involved, Moray’s case would collapse.
Norfolk was even more disturbed. “This cause,” he explained to Cecil, “is the doubtfullest and most dangerous that ever I dealt in.” Mary’s advocates had already hinted that if the Casket Letters came formally to trial, she would demand to attend the tribunal in person. For his part, Norfolk was shocked by the implications of letter 2 (the long Glasgow letter) and letter 6 (the most compelling of the three abduction letters), but it was also perfectly clear, he said, that the lords were not interested injustice, but “seek wholly to serve their own private turns.” In their eagerness to vindicate themselves, “they care not what becomes neither of queen nor king!”
Cecil’s plan was starting to go wrong. What Sussex and Norfolk had said made it plain that the English judges knew that many of Mary’s accusers were themselves accomplices in Darnley’s murder, and the last thing Moray wanted was for this to come out.
Cecil hastily intervened. He arranged for the tribunal to be temporarily adjourned. It was moved south to Westminster and five extra judges were appointed, chief among them Cecil and his brother-in-law Sir Nicholas Bacon, shifting the balance of opinion decisively in Moray’s favor. The enlarged tribunal resumed its hearings on November 26.
Cecil, meanwhile, talked Elizabeth into giving Moray the assurances he sought. If the Casket Letters were genuine, Elizabeth would hand Mary over to the Confederate Lords, provided they guaranteed her safety, or else keep her in England. She would also recognize Moray as regent. This gave Moray what he wanted, and shortly afterward, he formally charged Mary with complicity in Darnley’s murder.
Mary was stunned by her cousin’s change of heart. She had been assured that the English judges would not seek to try her, but only to act as umpires in her dispute with her rebel lords. She refused as a queen to be called to account by a jurisdiction she did not recognize, and ordered her advocates to withdraw immediately from the tribunal.
They left on December 6, but it was too late. The next day, Moray laid the originals of the casket documents on the table. They were closely examined in lengthy sessions lasting two full days, and then again on the 14th at Hampton Court.
When correcting the tribunal’s minutes describing how the documents had finally been submitted as evidence, Cecil took care to cross every t and dot every i. “And so,” his secretary’s draft suggested, “they produced a small coffer of silver and gilt, wherein were certain letters and writings they said [were] of the Queen of Scots to the Earl Bothwell.”
It sounds simple enough, but that would not do for Cecil. He rewrote the minute in his own handwriting:
And so they produced a small gilt coffer of not fully one foot long, being garnished in many places with the Roman letter “F” set under a king’s crown [the monogram of Francis II), wherein were certain letters and writings which they said and affirmed to have been written with the Queen of Scots’ own hand to the Earl Bothwell.
These were not just Mary’s letters. They were the letters “affirmed” to be in her “own hand.” And it was not just any old casket. The added detail gave credence to the investigation.
The irony is that forever after, the casket containing the famous letters has come down in history exactly as Cecil described it. The Scots’ delegation, who had so far thought the object unremarkable and called it just “the box” or “the silver box,” would not even be allowed to describe their own trophy.
The tribunal was rigged. Moray’s delegation did not submit the originals of the Casket Letters for close examination until Mary’s advocates had withdrawn. And under the highly irregular rules that Cecil had engineered, Mary was to be denied access to them, at least until after they had been judged by the tribunal itself.
To her credit, Elizabeth now balked. Deep down, she wanted Mary to be found innocent and restored as queen to Scotland. She disliked and distrusted Moray, and did not believe that the Casket Letters were genuine. The whole point of the tribunal in her eyes had been to uncover the extent to which they had been forged. Now the proceedings were getting out of hand. They were far too one-sided. Her reputation was at stake if she acted unfairly or dishonorably.
She intervened to reassert control over Cecil and her own policy. She suspended the tribunal a second time, then added the Earls of Northumberland, Shrewsbury, Huntingdon, Westmorland and Warwick to the roster of judges, herself supervising the proceedings at Hampton Court on the 14th, when the letters were examined for the last time. She had the minutes of the tribunal’s sessions so far read aloud, then Moray’s accusations, and finally the “evidence,” notably the Casket Letters.
Cecil took the minutes as usual. “There were produced,” he said, “sundry letters written in French, supposed to be written by the Queen of Scots’ own hand to the Earl Bothwell”:
Of which letters, the originals* . . . were then also presently produced and perused, and being read, were duly conferred and compared for the manner of writing and fashion of orthography with sundry other letters long since heretofore written and sent by the said Queen of Scots to the Queen’s Majesty. And next after these was produced and read a declaration of the Earl Morton, of the manner of the finding of the said letters, as the same was exhibited on his oath the 9 December. In collation whereof no difference was found.
Cecil’s minute is too good to be true. It is almost certainly misleading. Read uncritically, it appears that the handwriting test had been passed with flying colors when the original Casket Letters were compared to genuine letters from Mary to Elizabeth that had been filed away over the years in the royal archives.
This is intrinsically unlikely. At least so far as the crucial long Glasgow letter is concerned, the text itself explained that it had been “scribbled” late at night. “Excuse my evil writing,” it said, “and read it over twice. Excuse also that I scribbled . . .” Moreover, we have already seen that letters 7 and 8 were forgeries on the evidence of their contents.
It is inconceivable that Mary’s scrawling hand could have been compared and collated to the genuine letters she had sent to Elizabeth without some differences being noticed. Anyone who has looked at the dozens of examples of Mary’s autograph letters to Elizabeth in the archives would immediately spot that when writing to her “sister queen” she used her very best handwriting. These letters are usually immaculate, with only infrequent signs of haste. If they had been compared to Mary’s scribbling hand, it would have been impossible to reach any definitive conclusion one way or the other. At most, a certain resemblance might have been observed.
And what exactly was it that had been “collated”? Had all eight Casket Letters been scrupulously checked against Mary’s genuine letters to compare the handwriting letter for letter? Or was it merely that the list of casket documents as given in Morton’s declaration to the tribunal, explaining the circumstances in which they were found, had been compared to the items laid on the table to see if they corresponded to the description given under oath? Cecil’s minute is tantalizingly ambiguous, as every one of Mary’s biographers has been obliged to point out.
If, on the other hand, the handwriting test had been cursorily conducted or was based only on a few sample pages, it is conceivable that it could have been passed. We have already seen that apart from letters 7 and 8, Moray is likely to have submitted genuine if artfully chosen pages, some of which were culled from earlier letters to Darnley and others from later letters to Bothwell, and that the most damning interpolations in Letter 2 were most likely fitted into blank spaces on the paper. Since it would have taken many hours to scrutinize every folio of every one of the Casket Letters, and since we know that by the time the tribunal had reached Hampton Court there were too many judges for everyone to sit around a small table and look closely at every single document, it is possible that just enough was done to make it appear that the handwriting test had been passed.
When Mary heard of the proceedings at Hampton Court, she demanded to address the tribunal in person, which was refused. But Elizabeth told Moray’s delegation that she would allow the judges to continue with their hearings only if her cousin was allowed to depute someone to answer the charges on her behalf, or else speak to a deputation sent to her by Elizabeth.
Mary finally issued a statement. She would decline to answer until she was allowed to appear before Elizabeth in person. Otherwise, she would not recognize the tribunal. She had made too many concessions. “I am not an equal to my rebels,” she said, “neither will I submit myself to be weighted in equal balance with them.”
Mary stood on her dignity. She refused to be treated so disrespectfully. Moray and his delegation had lied, she protested. They had maliciously charged her with Darnley’s murder, “whereof they themselves are authors.” The only further thing she would instruct her advocates to say was: “I never wrote anything concerning that matter to any creature. And if any such writings be, they are false and feigned, forged and invented by themselves, only to my dishonor and slander.”
If only Mary had known it, Elizabeth largely agreed with her. She had watched the first day of the proceedings at Hampton Court, but saw herself as no more than an “observer.” She did not think it right for one queen to sit in judgment of a fellow sovereign. In her own words, the purpose of these hearings had been “to understand truly and plainly the state of the cause of the Queen of Scots,” but “without prejudicing one side or the other.”
When this had manifestly not occurred and Cecil had written minutes that upheld Mary’s guilt, Elizabeth brought the proceedings to an abrupt end. She refused to allow Mary to come into her presence, but said that if Mary was unwilling to answer to the charges as they were explained to her by a deputation, she would adjourn the trial indefinitely. This is exactly what happened. By Christmas 1568, Mary had not been found innocent, but neither had she been convicted. The matter lay in abeyance. No conclusion about the truth of the Casket Letters could be drawn one way or the other. Elizabeth was guided by the principles of natural justice. Cecil’s tribunal had been grossly unfair, and it was Mary’s right to put her side of the story to the judges. The one thing Elizabeth could not bring herself to do was meet Mary and listen to her argue her case in person.
Mary found this insulting. It implied that she was Elizabeth’s inferior. She was convinced she had been wronged by her cousin. “Alas, madam,” she demanded, “when did you ever hear a prince censured for listening in person to the grievances of those who complain that they have been falsely accused?”
Mary spiritedly advised Elizabeth to put out of her mind the notion that she had fled to England to save her life. She went only to recover her honor and obtain support to be revenged on her rebels. She would not “answer them as their equal.” She would never abase herself in that way. She had always regarded the English queen as her “nearest kinswoman and perfect friend.” She had supposed that Elizabeth would be honored to be called “the queen restorer,” and had hoped to receive that kindness from her.
Mary saw now that she was mistaken. And Cecil was behind it all. “You say,” she berated Elizabeth, “that you are counseled by persons of the highest rank to be guarded in this affair. God forbid that I should be cause of dishonor to you when it was my intention to seek the contrary.”
Following events as best she could from her imprisonment by correspondence, Mary reacted in the only way she knew: the way the Cardinal of Lorraine would have behaved. She wrote to Philip II, the leader of the Catholic cause in Europe, to protest her innocence and seek his aid. “I am deprived of my liberty and closely guarded,” she said. In consequence, she wanted all the Catholic princes in the world to know that she was “an obedient, submissive and devoted daughter of the holy Catholic and Roman Church, in the faith of which I will live and die, without ever entertaining any other intention than this.”
Her letter was no more than a feeler. But it was a dramatic turnabout for a queen who, apart from a brief interlude before the Rizzio plot, had made religious compromise the cornerstone of her policy. A seismic shift was about to occur, one that discounted her kinship bonds to Elizabeth and linked her cause to that of Philip II and the papacy, and therefore posed a greater threat to Elizabeth’s “safety” and the Protestant cause than anything since Mary had returned home to Scotland.
Mary had been bloodied by Cecil, but she was unbowed. A new phase was about to open in her life.