by Alison Weir
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.2Goodall 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.3All 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.”6This 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.”8This 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.”9In 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.”10Today, 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.11It 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.
Some have argued that Casket Letter II supports Crawford’s deposition, but, as has been noted, the two documents are so similar that one must have been copied from the other, which supports the manipulation theory. Furthermore, Casket Letter II is almost certainly by two different hands.
Jenny Wormald, one of Mary’s most virulent detractors, states that it would not have made sense for the Lords to forge the letters and then been reluctant to use them as evidence, but in fact the letters had originally been used as justification of the deposition of the Queen, at a time when the Lords could not have envisaged that they would be required to produce them publicly in evidence against her. In 1568, Moray had no guarantee that Mary would not be restored, and producing such evidence against a sovereign who might be in a position to punish him for it was a very serious step indeed, hence his reluctance.
It was also useless for the English commissioners to conclude that there were things in the letters that were known only to Mary and Bothwell, for neither Mary nor Bothwell was ever given a chance to see the letters and corroborate this. The Lords could have made up anything they liked to put in the letters. The omission of signatures, addresses and dates may argue the furtiveness of genuinely illicit letters, but may also have been a deliberate ploy on the part of the forger; it should be remembered, however, that the letters were originally said to have been signed by Mary. It is significant that the mere addition of a place and day to the genuine Casket Letter I, thereby placing it in what was almost certainly a different context, proved highly advantageous to the Lords.
Forgery was a flourishing political industry in the sixteenth century, an age in which ambassadors commonly numbered among their suites men who were experts at counterfeiting or ciphering. It would not have been difficult for the Lords to find someone capable of manipulating their evidence to the required standard.
As has been seen, there is plenty of evidence that the Casket Letters were either forgeries or genuine documents that had been tampered with. It is surely no coincidence that they had conveniently come to light at a time when the Lords most needed them, and when Mary was safely confined at Lochleven. The Lords certainly had compelling motives for fabricating them: they needed to justify their sensational deposition of their anointed sovereign in an age in which monarchy was virtually sacrosanct, and they were critically aware that they were safeguarding their political survival and also, when it came to it, their lives. It seems that the letters were also fabricated in order to make it appear that the motive for Darnley’s murder was purely domestic, in order to deflect public interest from the Lords’ political aims. There is no doubt that, without the Casket Letters, Moray’s case would have been extremely weak.
It is significant that, before December 1567, the Lords aimed their accusations solely at Bothwell. As soon as he had passed beyond their reach, they looked to Mary as the nearest available scapegoat. However, they were supposed to have had in their possession letters proving her guilt six months earlier; certainly their failure to use such compromising evidence when it would have been to their advantage to do so is highly suspicious. Had it been genuine, it would have enabled them to get rid of Mary once and for all. It was only later, when they had to justify themselves before the world, that the Lords reluctantly produced the letters. Furthermore, Moray’s anxiety to have them accepted as reliable evidence prior to the inquiry suggests he was worried that someone might challenge their authenticity.
Strangely, during the months leading up to the inquiry, one of the Casket Letters seems to have undergone some metamorphosis: early descriptions of it by de Silva and Lennox do not correspond to any of the final versions exhibited to the commission. Had such a damaging letter existed, the Lords would have been mad not to use it against Mary, but instead, it was apparently replaced with the far less compromising Casket Letter II. This suggests that the Lords had first experimented with complete forgeries, but had later decided that it was safer to base their evidence on genuine letters.
Herries admitted that a casket had been found, but insisted that Morton had later exchanged the original documents in it for false ones, which corroborates the evidence of Drury. Herries also claimed that, had the letters been genuine, the Lords would have happily used them to convict Mary and put her to death.
Then there i
s the technical evidence, revealed through study of the translations, that the original letters were unlikely to have been written by Mary. Although there was a definite attempt to imitate her characteristically elegant style, there are clumsy discrepancies. Hundreds of her genuine letters have survived, but none in which there appear the kind of “coarse” sentiments that feature in Casket Letter II. Furthermore, computerised comparisons of orthographic patterns have revealed that the letters were not all by the same hand. A few writers subscribe to the recent unsubstantiated theory that some were by an unknown mistress of Bothwell; Gore-Browne even suggested that they were written by Anna Throndssen, but she is unlikely to have been able to write good French, and as she was in Norway from 1563, is also unlikely to have written of her jealousy of Jean Gordon; neither could her handwriting ever be mistaken for Mary’s. Both Ronsard and Brantôme dismissed the abysmal, unpolished love poem as a fabrication, and declared it could not possibly have been written by Mary. There is no escaping the fact that every single letter poses a problem, whether in sense, style or timing.
It is enormously telling that neither Moray nor Queen Elizabeth wanted Mary or her representatives to see the Casket Letters. Nor, despite the latter’s insistent pleas, were they ever allowed to do so. Of course, Mary had secretly been sent copies, but she could not reveal that; all she could do was protest that she had not written the letters, and offer to prove that they were forgeries and accuse the Lords of being the “principal authors.” But she was given no opportunity to do so.
