Mary, Queen of Scots (73 page)

Some of the English commissioners went to Hampton Court on 2 December to see Elizabeth. They returned with a summons for Mary’s commissioners to attend the Queen there the next day. Herries and his team duly presented themselves, and gave Elizabeth a written request for Mary to appear in person at the conference, repeating the protest they had made the previous day about the inequitable treatment of their mistress and the Regent. Elizabeth told them she would give them an answer on the following day.

On 4 December, Elizabeth told Mary’s commissioners that she agreed it was “very reasonable that [Mary] should be heard in her own cause,” but she insisted that, “for the better satisfaction of herself,” the Regent must first present his proofs. Before she could answer their request “on every point,” therefore, or decide where, when and in whose presence Mary should testify, she had to confer with the Scottish commissioners. That same day, Elizabeth told her own commissioners and the Privy Council that she would not receive Mary as long as she was defamed by accusations.

Herries and Leslie were so pessimistic about the outcome of Elizabeth’s discussion with the Lords that they began to think that the best way to bring the inquiry to a conclusion without further damaging Mary’s reputation was to negotiate a compromise, or “appointment,” with the Lords. Rashly, without waiting for Mary to sanction such a course, they saw Elizabeth again in private and suggested it to her, offering to come to terms with Moray. Elizabeth told them sternly that, now that Moray had laid such charges against Mary, their proposal was inconsistent with their mistress’s honour. It should have been clear to them that an obvious desire on their part to avoid responding to the charges would be interpreted as proof that the Queen of Scots was guilty. It would be far better to have Moray’s evidence subjected to public scrutiny and seen to be unfounded, then he and his accomplices could be punished for “so audaciously defaming” their sovereign. Herries and Leslie thereupon withdrew, stressing to Elizabeth that the idea of a compromise came not from their mistress but was only “of their own consideration, partly gathered of the desire they had to have things quietly ended, partly also upon [Mary’s] disposition that this whole cause should be ended by the Queen’s Majesty with some appointment.”

Within hours of this interview, Mary’s commissioners were summoned back to see the Queen and her Privy Council, and were told by Elizabeth that she did not think Mary’s honour was sufficiently endangered to justify her appearing in person to defend herself. After all, no proofs had so far been shown against her (although Elizabeth well knew they soon would be), and she did not wish unnecessarily to subject Mary to a 250-mile journey in driving snow. Of course, Elizabeth did not want Mary winning hearts and minds by her charms and her protestations of innocence, for that would undermine Moray’s attempt to present the Casket Letters as credible evidence.

Elizabeth warned Mary’s commissioners that, if they were not allowed to answer on their Queen’s behalf, or failed to do so, it might be thought that the charges against her were not without foundation. Furthermore, she feared it might be degrading for Mary, as a sovereign princess, to have to deny such charges, and anyway, she herself thought that Moray’s case would not stand up to scrutiny, and that Mary’s name would be cleared without there being any need to resort to such desperate measures. Herries and Leslie, much dismayed, insisted that it would be better for Mary to appear in person, but Elizabeth adamantly refused to allow this.

When the conference reconvened on 6 December, the English commissioners were preparing to convey to Moray Elizabeth’s misliking of the accusations he had made against Mary, but before Moray had even arrived, Mary’s commissioners, belatedly following their instructions, announced that they were formally withdrawing from the inquiry on the grounds that Elizabeth had rejected Mary’s plea to be heard in person. Before leaving, they made a formal protest to the English commissioners that, “in case Your Lordships proceed in the contrary, then whatever has been, or shall be done hereafter, shall not prejudge in any way our sovereign’s honour, person, crown and estate; and we, for our part, dissolve and discharge this present conference, having special command thereto by our said sovereign.”

As Mary was no longer represented, the inquiry should have immediately been terminated, but it was enabled to continue by virtue of a calculated objection on the part of the English commissioners to the form of protest offered by Mary’s commissioners, which they said did not reflect Elizabeth’s true meaning. This objection, which was the inspiration of Cecil and was not entered into the Journal of the conference, gave Moray time in which to produce his evidence. Mary’s commissioners were not even aware as yet that the inquiry was continuing in their absence.

After Herries and company had left the Painted Chamber, Lord Keeper Bacon told Moray that Queen Elizabeth thought it strange that he should accuse his sovereign of “so horrible a crime,” and told him that the commission was ready to hear his answer. This was the cue for Moray, with a display of reluctance, to exhibit his proofs. He produced the Book of Articles, the depositions of some key witnesses, the Act of Parliament condemning Mary, and Lennox’s
Narrative
, and left all these documents, except the Book of Articles,
¹⁸
for the English commissioners to digest overnight. Given the falsehoods, distortions and inconsistencies in these “proofs,” Moray must have known he could count on the complacent discretion of the English Lords, who had no doubt received their instructions from Cecil.

The next day, 7 December, the Book of Articles was read out to the depleted commission. Afterwards, Moray appeared with his colleagues, and said he trusted that the English commissioners were now satisfied that the Lords were not guilty of the crimes with which they had been charged. Obviously testing the water, he said he also “required to know whether Your Lordships were not now satisfied with such things as they had seen; and if they were not, that it would please them to show if in any part of those Articles they conceived any doubt, or would hear any other proof, which they trusted needed not, considering the circumstances thereof were notorious to the world.”

To Moray’s dismay, the English commissioners made it clear that they did not intend to offer any opinion on his evidence, which made it appear that the proofs offered so far were probably insufficient for their purpose. After a hurried discussion in private, the Scottish commissioners, “with fresh protestations of loyalty and affection” to Queen Mary, produced documentary evidence of Bothwell’s trial and acquittal, and finally, the silver casket itself, the two marriage contracts, one in Scots, one in French, and Casket Letters I and II, both in French. There is no evidence that these were left for the English commissioners to peruse overnight.

On the 8th, Moray offered in evidence the remaining Casket Letters and the love poem, all in French, a journal of events from the birth of Prince James to the Battle of Langside, now known as Moray’s Journal, and the depositions of Hay, Hepburn, Powrie and Dalgleish. The English commissioners had copies made of the Casket Letters, compared them to the originals to ensure they were properly transcribed, then gave the originals back to Moray, who had now concluded his evidence. There is no record of the reactions of the English commissioners to these documents.

In publicly producing the Casket Letters, Moray had taken an irrevocable step that precluded any future reconciliation or compromise with Mary, which is what Cecil had been aiming at all along. The Regent and Elizabeth now shared a common determination to prevent the restoration of the Queen of Scots.

“PRETENDED WRITINGS”

THE CASKET LETTERS NO LONGER exist. They disappeared in 1584, during Mary’s lifetime. After the Westminster conference, Moray took them back to Scotland, then entrusted them to Morton for safe keeping, but after the latter’s death in 1581, they were given by his bastard son to William Ruthven, 1st Earl of Gowrie,
¹
who repeatedly thwarted Queen Elizabeth’s attempts to gain possession of them; she wanted them in order to justify keeping Mary in custody. In 1584, after conspiring against the eighteen-year-old James VI, Gowrie was arrested and executed, and with his forfeiture, the Casket Letters presumably came into the King’s possession. They were never seen again.

Of course, Gowrie himself could have destroyed the letters, but this is unlikely. In 1584, James VI was determined to rehabilitate his mother’s reputation; it was at this time that Buchanan’s condemnatory works were banned by Parliament. James may have felt that it would serve no purpose to rake up old scandals by exhibiting the Casket Letters as forgeries; furthermore, there were then very few people left alive who could have testified that the letters
were
forgeries. Therefore James may well have feared that their existence would compromise his policy of rehabilitation. It is unlikely that he would have been so zealous to restore the reputation of his mother had he believed that the Casket Letters were genuine, for that would have been to acknowledge that she had connived at the murder of his father. Moreover, if James destroyed the letters in the belief that they were authentic, then he would also have got rid of the highly damaging deposition of Paris, which nevertheless survives.

James probably concluded that no purpose would be served in keeping such contentious reminders of the tragedy that had cost his mother her throne: if the letters were declared forgeries, then her supporters might try to use them to claim that she had been wrongfully deposed and was still the rightful Queen of Scots, which would compromise his own position. The best course therefore was to destroy the letters.

Theories that the Casket Letters were in existence after 1584 are based on slender evidence. One is that James VI gave them to his favourite, James Stewart, Earl of Arran, which would explain why the silver casket that had allegedly held them came into the possession of the Hamilton family, since Arran held their estates for a time.
²
Goodall referred to an unnamed historian who, having researched Charles II’s restoration of 1660, asserted that the Casket Letters were at that time in the possession of James Douglas, Marquess of Douglas. Goodall, writing in 1754, claimed that the letters had since been seen at Hamilton, which had passed to Douglas’s son William through his marriage to Anne, daughter and heiress of the first Duke of Hamilton. There is no other evidence for the Casket Letters having been at Hamilton, although it is possible that the casket itself was there at one time, as will be seen. Another historian, Gabriel Naudé, claimed to have seen the letters at Rome, but again, there is nothing to corroborate his statement.

Unfortunately, the disappearance of the Casket Letters has meant that historians have never been able to give a conclusive verdict on their authenticity. Neither the first Scottish translations from the original French, nor a set of copies made in Scotland in 1571, has survived.
³
All that remains are the French copies and English translations taken and made at the Westminster conference, and printed versions of the letters in Latin, Scots, English and French, all dating from the 1570s.
⁴

Of the copies made at Westminster, all but one are in the secretary script used by the same English clerk. Each letter has a heading, written either by Cecil or the clerk, stating what the letter allegedly proved. Casket Letter VI is the only one in an Italianate hand, which is not dissimilar to Mary’s handwriting in her earlier years, but has been corrected by another hand. This has led to theories that it is one of the original Casket Letters, left by Moray in England by mistake, but it is clearly not in Mary’s writing, and Cecil himself endorsed it with the word “French,” which makes it almost certain that it is just a copy.
⁵

The Journal of the commission states that, after the copies of the Casket Letters had been made, they “were read in French, and a due collation made thereof, as near as could be by reading and inspection, which the Earl of Moray required to be redelivered, and did thereupon deliver the copies being collationed.”
⁶
This suggests that the copies made in French were exact transcriptions of the originals, and if this is so, then the originals are unlikely to have been written by Mary because her customary orthographic idiosyncrasies are nowhere evident in the surviving copies of Casket Letters III, IV, V and VI.
⁷

Mystery surrounds the casket itself, as well as its contents. The Journal of the commission describes a “little coffer of silver and gilt, not fully one foot long, being garnished in many places with the Roman letter F, set under a royal crown.”
⁸
This suggests that the casket had once belonged to Francis II, and that Mary had brought it back with her from France. A silver casket purporting to be this one is now on display at Lennoxlove in East Lothian; it was bought by the Marchioness of Douglas after 1632, but sold on her death, and was later repurchased by her daughter-in-law, Anne, Duchess of Hamilton. Of French origin, it is 8 inches long, dates from the fifteenth or early sixteenth century, and is decorated with scrollwork and the Hamilton arms, the latter being engraved on the orders of Anne, Duchess of Hamilton. Yet it does not correspond in every respect to the description of the casket produced by the Lords, for there are no crowned Fs to be seen, and this box has a key. The Lords’ casket had no key, and had had to be forced open. There is, however, evidence that the lock of the Lennoxlove casket had been broken at some stage; furthermore, the Hamilton arms may have obliterated the crowned Fs, although they are said to have been “in many places.”
⁹
In 1889, a silver casket of the right size, marked in two places with the letter F, but denuded of gilding and other ornaments, was said by Henderson to have been at Hamilton Palace. This is certainly not the casket at Lennoxlove, and disappeared when Hamilton Palace was demolished in 1927.

We have seen that the original contents of the casket were almost certainly harmless diplomatic dispatches; Herries insisted that it had contained the Craigmillar Bond between Bothwell and the Lords, but other evidence makes this unlikely. Whatever the Confederate Lords later planted in the casket, there were certainly more documents than have survived in copy form today. When, in 1571, Morton gave Lennox a receipt for the Casket Letters, he specified that the casket contained “missive letters, contracts or obligations for marriage, sonnets or love ballads, and other letters, to the number of 21.”
¹⁰
Today, we have copies of eight letters, two marriage contracts and a love poem, totalling eleven documents in all. It has been suggested that Morton meant that there were twenty-one pieces of paper, but the wording of the receipt indicates that he was referring to twenty-one separate documents. Among them must have been ten documents of which copies have not survived. We know that, at York, Moray produced a letter that he claimed had been written by Mary, which referred to the quarrel she had incited between Darnley and Lord Robert Stewart. This letter was not amongst those presented in evidence at Westminster, and no longer exists even in copy form. Nor does Mary’s alleged warrant, urging the Lords to sign the Ainslie’s Tavern Bond, which was also produced at York, but not at Westminster.
¹¹
It may therefore be inferred that there were probably other documents that were never used in evidence.

It has been made abundantly clear in this narrative why the Casket Letters are untrustworthy as evidence against Mary. Yet, for nearly 450 years, controversy has raged, and scholars have argued over them, and today there are still those—some of them eminent historians—who believe in their authenticity. Leslie, like many of Mary’s partisans both then and since, held that, even if the letters were genuine, they actually proved very little against her, for they did not contain “any express commandment of any unlawful act or deed to be committed and perpetrated,” but only “unsure and uncertain guesses, aims and conjectural supposings,” which did not constitute “any good and substantial proof.” Indeed, there is plenty of circumstantial evidence against Mary without the Casket Letters—people suspected her of involvement in Darnley’s murder weeks before they were discovered, and long before they were made public—although, as has become evident, much of this evidence can be discounted on closer analysis. Nevertheless, as far as Moray and his colleagues were concerned, the Casket Letters were the cornerstone of their evidence.

It has been argued that, if the authenticity of the letters were to be undermined, that would not prove Mary’s innocence, only that the Lords were determined to make doubly sure of her conviction. However, without the Casket Letters, the Lords’ case rested on the highly dubious
Book of Articles
and some depositions that have since been shown to have been falsified in the most important particulars. Had they had a genuine case against Mary, they could have brought forward sound witnesses and veracious evidence. But they did not. They produced the Casket Letters, which they—and the English government—calculated would have a catastrophic effect on Mary’s already sullied reputation. Thus the Casket Letters are of crucial importance in determining her guilt, for they are the only evidence of her alleged adultery with Bothwell and therefore offer a motive for her complicity in Darnley’s murder.

It is essential to examine the reasons why so many people have accepted the Casket Letters as genuine. Firstly, and perhaps most importantly, they appeared to corroborate the circumstantial evidence. Secondly, it has been said that Atholl, who was present at the opening of the casket, later came to support Mary, but never at any time protested that the letters were not genuine; Atholl, however, was a faint-heart who had fled from Edinburgh after Darnley’s murder, in the belief that he too was about to be assassinated, and was now living temporarily in retirement. It is unlikely he would have wanted to prejudice his close friendship with Lennox by undermining the Lords’ case at this time, and it was only after Lennox’s death that he began actively to oppose Morton. Furthermore, while neither Huntly nor Herries spoke out in the Parliament of December 1567 against the Act condemning Mary on the evidence of her privy letters, both hastened to join her when she escaped from Lochleven, which suggests that, in December, they had been too intimidated by Moray and the other Confederate Lords to speak out on her behalf.

It is often claimed that it would have been virtually impossible for a forger to produce the letters in the five days between the Lords’ coup and the opening of the casket on 21 June 1567. This presupposes that it was the Casket Letters as we know them today that were “sighted” on 21 June, when in fact the evidence suggests that the documents seen that day were of an innocuous nature. There seems to have been no hurry to produce the letters: some may not have been written in their final form until a year after their alleged discovery. This factor demolishes many of the arguments in favour of the letters’ authenticity.

It is also asserted that the destruction of the Casket Letters by James VI is proof of their authenticity, although it has been shown that he had other compelling reasons for getting rid of them. Furthermore, it is argued that Moray would not have risked producing forgeries in evidence, nor would Elizabeth have countenanced it. This theory does not take account of the fact that, during the inquiry, the Casket Letters were only shown to a restricted number of individuals who had been carefully selected by the English government and who were aware of the conclusions they were meant to reach, nor of the fact that the English government and the Scottish Lords shared a common aim and were effectively acting in collusion.

It has been pointed out that the letters are too long to be forgeries, are packed with authentic details and idioms that no forger could have known about or imitated, and would have been more incriminating if forged. It has been noted, however, that the evidence strongly suggests that the Lords had cunningly decided to manipulate genuine letters, or use them out of context; after Mary’s deposition, they had access to all her papers, and it appears that they found suitable material among them. Probably only two letters had to be forged. Thus the letters had the appearance of genuineness. Buchanan, Mary’s former tutor, who should have known what he was talking about, claimed that the Casket Letters were in her handwriting, but he was not only a Lennox man but also a fanatical supporter of Moray, and he was responsible for some of the most notorious lies about Mary, so cannot be relied upon.

It has also been alleged that Mary and her supporters remained silent on the matter of the Casket Letters, which argues her guilt, yet this is to ignore the fact that, at Dumbarton, in September 1568, her Lords publicly protested that she had not written them, and that she herself, and her commissioners, repeatedly condemned the letters as forgeries. It has also been said that no one at the time claimed that the letters were forged, but Mary and her supporters certainly did, and Maitland—who was in a position to know—seems to have done so too; he later became one of her staunchest supporters, which is perhaps significant in itself.

Mary’s detractors argue that she also denied writing the fatal but undeniably genuine letter authorising Anthony Babington to proceed with the assassination of Queen Elizabeth in 1586, but this does not necessarily mean that she lied about the Casket Letters. There is a great deal of corroborative evidence against her denial of 1586, and plenty of evidence to support her declaration that she did not write the Casket Letters.