The True Life of Mary Stuart: Queen of Scots

by John Guy

  About the fifth day of November, removing from Jedburgh to Kelso . . . she said that unless she were quit of the king by any means or other, she could never have one good day in her life, and rather than that she should fail therein, she would rather be the instrument of her own death.

  Returning to Craigmillar beside Edinburgh, where she rested until the end of November, she renewed the same purpose which she spoke of before at Kelso in an audience with my Lord of Moray, the Earl of Huntly, the Earl of Argyll and Maitland, propounding that the way to be quit of the king and make it look best was to begin an action of divorce against him . . . whereunto it was answered how that could not goodly be done without hazard, since by the doing thereof the prince her son should be declared [a] bastard . . . , which answer, when she had thought over it, she left that conceit and opinion of the divorce and ever from that day forth imagined and devised how to cut him away as by the sequel of this discourse more plainly shall appear . . .

  Buchanan was distorting the known facts to create an interpretation of almost complete fantasy. The truth was that the lords had suggested a divorce to Mary, not the other way around. She had said that she wished herself dead at Craigmillar Castle, but not at Kelso. And she had never asked to be quit of Darnley “by any means or other.” When Maitland’s plan to offer her a divorce from Darnley had been put to her at Craigmillar, she had replied: “I will that ye do nothing whereto any spot may be laid to my honor or conscience, and therefore I pray you rather let the matter be in the state as it is” (see chapter 18).

  None of this was of any concern to Buchanan. He was determined to establish a motive for Darnley’s murder, and according to his account, Mary had slept with Bothwell after her son’s baptism for eight successive nights, “using that filthiness almost without cloak or respect of shame or honesty.” While in bed with her lover, she had plotted a “device” to kill her husband, choosing a deserted house at Kirk o’Field as the place where the murder would be committed. She had then ridden to Glasgow to fetch her doomed spouse, all the while conveniently laying down a paper trail for posterity in her letters to Bothwell, who had stayed behind in Edinburgh to bait the trap:

  Her mind, as well appears by her letters,* [was] to bring him to Edinburgh to his fatal end and final destruction, which she would never attempt not having her son in her own hands. She left [Prince James] at Holyroodhouse. She then left [for Glasgow] accompanied by the Hamiltons and such others as bore her husband no favor.

  Buchanan was enjoying himself, discarding the true chronology of events. In reality, Mary had been escorted by Huntly and Bothwell as far as Callander House on the first stage of her journey to Glasgow to fetch her husband. It was only on the second stage that the Hamiltons—the family of Châtelherault, enemies of the Lennoxes—had been her bodyguards. And no sooner had Bothwell returned to Edinburgh than he departed again for Liddesdale, on the border, which means he could not have been in Edinburgh receiving Mary’s final instructions to prepare the scene of the crime at Kirk o’Field at the time Buchanan claimed he was (see chapter 25 for more details of this chronology).

  Perhaps aware of a possible discrepancy, Buchanan again alleged that Mary had “devised” with Bothwell to lure Darnley to his death before leaving Edinburgh for Glasgow:

  In the meantime, the Earl of Bothwell, according to the device appointed between them, prepared for the king the lodging where he ended his life. In what place it stood, enough [people] know and enough thought even that it was a ruin unsuitable to have lodged a prince into, standing in a solitary place at the uttermost part of the town, separate from all company . . .

  He was lodged at Kirk o’Field [for the good air], howbeit in Scotland at the beginning of February a sick man will be better content with a draft-proof and warm chamber as [with] any air in the fields.

  Lay she not in the house [in the room] under his on the Thursday and Friday before he was murdered to give the people the impression that she was beginning to entertain him?

  Once Darnley had been ensnared at Kirk o’Field, Mary kept him sweet. Then, supposedly on a signal from her trusted servant Nicholas Hubert, whom she nicknamed “French Paris,” she returned abruptly to Holyrood on the pretext of attending the masque in honor of Bastian Pages and his bride:

  As soon as she saw [French Paris],* she knew that the powder was put in the lower [part of the] house under the king’s bed, for Paris had the keys both of the front and back doors of that house, and the king’s servants had all the remaining keys of the lodging. And so with feigned laughter she said, “I have given offense to Bastian by not attending the masque in honor of his marriage tonight, for which purpose I will return to Holyrood.”

  She then departed, allegedly spending the rest of the evening with Bothwell. (This sounds very unlikely, since Mary attended the wedding masque.) He later “passed to his chamber and there changed his hose and doublet and put his side cloak about him and passed up to the accomplishment of that most horrible murder.”

  Mary, insisted Buchanan, was unable to sleep because she was so animated at the prospect of Darnley’s murder. She scarcely moved when she heard the fatal “crack”: “for she needed not, understanding the purpose as she did.”

  Hearing the shock of the explosion, Bothwell quickly rose from his bed (apparently he could be in two places at once!), and, accompanied by Huntly, Argyll and others, went to her to explain “how the king’s lodging was raised and blown in the air and himself dead, [at] which news her passions were not so great nor her face so heavy as one in her state ought to have been—not even if he had not been her husband but an ordinary man—for the unworthiness and strange example of the deed.” Mary supposedly received the news in silence. She then “took her rest with no sorrowful countenance for anything that had happened.” Belatedly she ordered her household into mourning, but could not keep up the pretense for very long: “Of the forty days deuil she could not tarry at Holyroodhouse above ten or twelve days, and that with great difficulty being in most great hard case how to counterfeit deuil and nothing less in her mind.”

  In the relaxing surroundings of Seton, Mary disported with Bothwell as if the explosion had never happened. Using her customary guile, she placed her lover in a set of rooms adjacent to the kitchen so that he could creep along a servants’ passage used for the delivery of food to her apartments to cavort with her.

  But Bothwell was already married, and rumors of his affair were seeping out. To avert a scandal, it was time for him to divorce his wife and marry the queen. Since a subterfuge would be required to justify such outrageous conduct, Mary had allegedly planned a collusive abduction in which she would pretend to be kidnapped and ravished. And as with her initial conspiracy to murder Darnley, she would herself create the evidence needed by her enemies. One of her own letters written “out of Linlithgow,” according to Buchanan’s dossier, would prove her intentions:

  It could not be without scandal that the queen should go openly to bed with the Earl of Bothwell, who had a married wife of his own. Howbeit of before and then, they spared no time to fulfill their ungodly appetite, yet somewhat to cover her honesty she pretended to be ravished. This was brought to pass shortly after she returned from Stirling to Edinburgh, and whether it proceeded of herself or not, her letter written to the Earl of Bothwell out of Linlithgow can declare. (For a discussion of this alleged letter, see chapter 26.)

  As soon as the lovers had reached Dunbar, Bothwell began the proceedings to divorce his wife. After his wedding to Mary, many of the lords went into internal exile. Mary was by then a changed woman: even those lords who stood by her were badly treated.

  Being conveyed by him to Dunbar, without delay they caused a divorce [to] be moved in double form against his lawful wife . . . [When they returned to Edinburgh] she declared she was at liberty, and so within eight days passed to the consummation of that ungodly marriage that all the world counts naughty and a mocking of God.

  The time was not long between the same pretended marr
iage which was made on 15 May 1567, and the 15th day of June thereafter, when after the said earl’s fleeing, she came to the lords [who had] assembled for revenge of the murder, and yet in that month’s space what confusion and corruption was there to behold—it was marvelous! All noblemen for the most part had withdrawn themselves, and such as stayed behind, how affectionately that ever they showed themselves to Her Majesty, yet were they in no better grace than the others that utterly abandoned the court . . .

  Wrong facts apart, the Confederate Lords’ story would be clear and consistent. It set out the charges plainly. There were three counts directed at Mary:

  adultery with Bothwell both before and after Darnley’s murder;

  conspiracy to murder Darnley in January 1567;

  collusive abduction to enable Mary and Bothwell to justify their marriage.

  The sensational evidence in the form of eight incriminating letters from Mary to Bothwell, which Moray would produce as the proof of the allegations in Buchanan’s dossier, are almost evenly split among these topics. Two letters would be about Darnley’s murder, three would be love letters, and three would relate to the abduction. Of the love letters, two would also refer to the murder, and of the murder letters, one would also be a love letter.

  Moray first told Cecil he had these letters on the same day as he sent his secretary to London with the dossier. “We have,” he said, “such letters [of Mary’s] . . . that sufficiently in our opinion proves [sic] her consenting to the murder of the king her lawful husband.” He would make “copies” of them, translated into Scots, and it was these that he wished the English judges who were to consider Mary’s guilt to examine in camera and comment on before the original documents in French were finally laid on the table.

  The case against Mary had taken a dramatic new twist. How and when did these seemingly devastating documents come into the possession of Moray and the Confederate Lords? What did they actually say? And could they be genuine letters by Mary? To these, the most searching and momentous questions about the life of Mary Queen of Scots, we must now turn, for it is upon them that her honor and reputation, both then and now, depend.

  25

  Casket Letters I

  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: