by John Guy
In his hands and in his full power,
I put my son, my honor and my life,
My country, my subjects, my soul all subdued
To him, and none other will I have
For my goal, which without deceit
I will follow in spite of all envy
That may ensue. For I have no other desire,
But to make him perceive my faithfulness:
For storm or fair weather that may come,
Never will it change dwelling or place.
Shortly I shall give of my truth such proof,
That he shall know my constancy without pretense,
Not by my tears or feigned obedience,
As others have done, but by fresh ordeals.
Even if this were a genuine work, the evidence is inconclusive. The addressee is not mentioned, and the sonnet is just as likely to be a pious exercise giving thanks to God after Mary’s ordeal in childbirth as it is to be an outpouring of her infatuation for Bothwell. A genuine poem or poems may well have been found by Morton’s men when they ransacked Mary’s apartments. If so, they adapted what they discovered to suit their own purposes.
The contracts are even less problematic. Royal and aristocratic marriages were always preceded by a written contract, a form of prenuptial agreement that settled the property rights of both parties. Mary and Bothwell signed such a contract on May 14, 1567, the eve of their marriage. But for some reason this was not one of the documents found in the casket. According to the Confederate Lords, their “discoveries” meant the couple must have signed earlier contracts.
One was said to be in Huntly’s handwriting, dated April 5, 1567, “at Seton.” It is a blatant forgery, because although Mary and Bothwell were indeed at Seton on that day, the wording includes extracts from the Ainslie’s Tavern Bond, and yet that document was not ready for another two weeks. The contract even refers to the gathering of the lords at Ainslie’s Tavern, because it says that Mary “among the rest” had chosen Bothwell as the most suitable man to be her husband. As the italicized words could only refer to the discussions at the tavern, though Mary was not present, it follows that the contract could not have been written earlier than April 19, when the supper had been held.
The other contract, undated but supposedly signed “Marie R,” cannot be conclusively pinned down. Yet even if it is genuine, it is innocuous. It is less a contract than a written promise by Mary to marry Bothwell:
We Mary, by the grace of God, Queen of Scotland, Dowager of France, etc., promise faithfully and in good faith, and without constraint, to James Hepburn, Earl of Bothwell, never to have any other spouse or husband but him . . . And since God has taken my late husband, Henry Stuart called Darnley, and that hence I am free . . . and since he [Bothwell] is also free, I shall be ready to perform the ceremonies requisite for marriage . . .
This wording, which is unambiguous, could only have been framed after Darnley’s death and Bothwell’s divorce. Whatever it might suggest about Mary’s feelings, if genuine, it tells us nothing about her complicity in murder or adultery. Moray knew that he was grasping at straws when he submitted it. He acknowledged it was written “without date and though some words therein seem to the contrary, yet it is upon credible grounds supposed, to have been made and written by her before the death of her husband.”
Cecil decided that the sonnets and the marriage contracts were irrelevant. Everything turned on the Casket Letters, especially the first two (letters 1 and 2).* These were potentially the most devastating. In fact, letter 2, usually called “the long Glasgow letter” to distinguish it from “the short Glasgow letter” (letter 1), would, if genuine, be enough by itself to prove that Mary was Bothwell’s illicit lover and co-conspirator in Darnley’s murder. The only surprise is why, if indeed it was true, the lords needed to cast their net wider.
Both Glasgow letters were said to have been written while Mary was visiting Darnley on his sickbed. Letter 1 is the complaint of a woman who begins by chiding her correspondent for his forgetfulness. He had promised to send her news, but had forgotten to do so. He had left her to go on a journey, and the woman accused him of deliberately delaying his return.
She would accordingly “bring the man” on Monday to Craigmillar, “where he shall be upon Wednesday.” “And I go to Edinburgh to be let blood if I have no word to the contrary.” Whoever this man was, he was “the merriest that ever you saw, and doth remember unto me all that he can to make me believe that he loveth me.”
The woman was suffering from a pain in her side. “I have it sore today. If Paris [Nicholas Hubert] doth bring back unto me that for which I have sent, it should much amend me.” She ended with a request for news. “I pray you, send me word from you at large, and what I shall do if you be not returned . . . For if you be not wise, I see assuredly all the whole burden fallen upon my shoulders.” The letter was sent “from Glasgow, this Saturday morning.”
One of the least satisfactory features of the Casket Letters is that only this one was dated. In addition, not a single letter was directed to a named addressee, and all ended abruptly without any indication whatever of who might have written them.
The short Glasgow letter would be highly incriminating if read in a certain way. The words “from Glasgow, this Saturday morning” meant it must, to be genuine, have been written on January 25, 1567, the only Saturday on which Mary had been in Glasgow on her visit to Darnley.
The reader is expected to assume this. We are also asked to guess that “the man” who is to be brought to Craigmillar is Darnley, but this does not quite add up. Even today, “the man” is a common colloquial expression in Scotland for a male child, and the suspicion that Prince James was really meant here is reinforced by the writer’s description. To depict the sulky and syphilitic Darnley as “the merriest that ever you saw, and doth remember unto me all that he can to make me believe that he loveth me” beggars belief. On the other hand, a doting Mary could well have been expected to say such things about her growing baby.
But if Prince James was “the man,” and the author his mother, the letter could not have been written at Glasgow. The child was never there; he had stayed with Mary at Stirling Castle until she returned to Edinburgh after the baptism celebrations, and afterward he was with his nurse at Holyrood, where Mary had left him when she had set out for Glasgow to visit Darnley. Later he was returned to the safekeeping of the Earl and Countess of Mar.
Then again, the writer was returning to Edinburgh “to be let blood.” The letter does not say “to let blood.” According to the medical understanding of the time, a person’s health was governed by correctly balancing the four cardinal “humors,” or bodily fluids: blood, phlegm, choler (yellow bile) and melancholy (black bile). Bloodletting was a routine part of a physician’s practice, in the same way that he might prescribe rhubarb pills for choler or licorice tablets for digestive disorders. And we know that Mary’s doctors practiced it when they felt her state of health required it.
The writer of the letter had sent Paris to fetch something. Paris was, of course, the valet Nicholas Hubert, the man Mary had seen to be unusually dirty on the night before Darnley’s murder. The writer had a pain in her side, and the likely interpretation is that Paris had been sent somewhere for medicine. Paris was Mary’s servant. He had formerly been Bothwell’s servant for twenty years, but Mary’s household accounts show that he had changed employers a year or so before.
This could raise suspicions, because Paris was clearly still in Bothwell’s pay, as his role in the explosion at Kirk o’Field suggests. In that case, he might have been the missing link between Mary and Bothwell. Could he have been running errands between them while Mary was at Glasgow?
The Confederate Lords always maintained that Paris had been the trusted messenger who assisted the conspiracy. They said he had taken letters to and fro between Mary in Glasgow and Bothwell in Edinburgh, but this is highly problematic. By Saturday, January 25, Bothwell had already left Edinburgh. He had se
t out for Liddesdale the previous day after escorting Mary to Callander House on the first stage of her journey to Glasgow.
The date of Bothwell’s departure is incontrovertible. Moray’s own “journal” describing Mary’s and Bothwell’s movements between January 21 and 30, 1567, admits that Bothwell had left Edinburgh on the evening of the 24th. Moray was brazen enough to submit his diary to Cecil, despite the conflict of this evidence with letter 1.
And Bothwell’s movements can be checked. They are corroborated by a handwritten report sent to Cecil four days later by Lord Scrope, the English official based at Carlisle, on the western side of the border. In his report, Scrope vividly described Bothwell’s excursion.
This was because Bothwell had been involved in another big fight. He had left Edinburgh accompanied by eighty men for the “reformation” of thieves and other malefactors on the border, traveling as far as Jedburgh on the first night. From there he had continued into Liddesdale, where his men captured a dozen brigands, one of whom was Martin Elwood, the leader of the border gang comprising the associates of the Elliots of Liddesdale.
Elwood got word to his men and a rescue attempt was made. One of Bothwell’s men was killed and five more captured. Bothwell went in hot pursuit of his assailants “until his servants and horses were wearied and spent, and he could not make any recovery and so was forced to return to Jedburgh again.”
If the logic of the short Glasgow letter is to be believed, Bothwell was supposed to be keeping his promise to write to Mary about the final arrangements for Darnley’s murder while he was intent on a sortie to deal with the Elwoods and the Elliots.
More puzzling still, Mary was said to be accusing him of delaying his return from Liddesdale, where he had scarcely arrived. If his absence was a sore point by Saturday the 25th, she must have expected his return before Saturday. But he had not left Edinburgh until Friday evening, and Liddesdale was seventy miles away.
And yet several aspects of letter 1 ring true. The writer had a pain in her side requiring medical treatment and a young son who was “the merriest that ever you saw.” It is possible—perhaps likely—that this was a draft or copy of one of Mary’s genuine letters, written to an unknown recipient at another time and in a different context from that claimed by Moray and his allies. In that case, all the Confederate Lords had to do was to add the words “from Glasgow, this Saturday morning.” At the stroke of a pen, an otherwise unremarkable letter could be turned into something incriminating. The reference to Craigmillar is easily explained, as it was one of Mary’s favorite retreats where she had regularly stayed for periods ranging from a few days to several weeks.
Letter 2 is the longer of the two letters said to have been written from Glasgow while Mary attempted to persuade Darnley to return with her to Craigmillar. It is also the longest of the eight Casket Letters. Selected by the lords for its seemingly graphic allusions to the murder plot, it is also interspersed with its author’s protestations of longing and desire for her lover.
The letter opens on an elegiac note: “Being gone from the place where I had left my heart, it may be easily judged what my countenance was.” The author, a woman, had said her fond goodbyes to her lover, then continued on her journey to Glasgow, where she had been met by a gentleman from the Earl of Lennox and by the Laird of Luss with forty men and others, but no one from the town.
When she had arrived, she found that Darnley had already been asking questions about her. When she saw him on his sickbed, she was surprised at how well informed he seem ed to be about events at Holyrood. After her first meeting with him, she had gone to eat her supper.
Later that evening, he had recalled her, making all his usual complaints and blaming her for his illness, which he was convinced was brought on by her disdain. He asked her for a reconciliation. He even pleaded for a pardon. She answered that he had been pardoned many times before, only to return to his dissolute ways.
“I am young,” he protested. “May not a man of my age for want of counsel fail twice or thrice, and miss of promise [i.e., break his promises], and at the last repent and rebuke himself by his experience?” Darnley offered to amend his behavior if he could receive just one more pardon. “I ask nothing,” he said, “but that we may be at bed and table together as husband and wife. And if you will not, I will never rise from this bed.”
The writer asked him why, in that case, he had tried to leave the country in an English ship. He denied it, but finally admitted he had spoken to the sailors. She turned next to the rumors about his plotting. She asked him about Hiegate’s reports that he was conspiring with the Lennoxes to put her in prison and rule in the name of her son. “He denied it till I told him the very words, and then he said that . . . it was said that some of the Privy Council had brought me a letter to sign to put him in prison, and to kill him if he did resist.”
Darnley at first denied all knowledge of his conspiracies, but next day changed his mind and was willing to confess. He made a clean breast of everything, after which he asked for sex with the writer. “He desired much that I should lodge in his lodging. I have refused it. I have told him that he must be purged and that could not be done here.”
The writer refused to sleep with Darnley, offering instead to take him to Craigmillar in a horse litter: “I told him that so I would myself bring him to Craigmillar, that the physicians and I also might cure him without being far from my son.”
Darnley flatly refused. He wanted no one to see him with his pockmarked skin. He became angry when further questioned about his plotting: “He hath no desire to be seen, and waxeth angry when I speak to him of Walker, and saith that he will pluck his ears from his head and that he lieth.”
The writer asked Darnley why he had been complaining about the lords, threatening to kill those who had lately been reconciled to her. “He denieth it, and saith that he had already prayed them to think no such matter of him. As for myself, he would rather lose his life than do me the least displeasure.”
Darnley, it seems, was far less afraid of the writer than he was of some of the lords. This makes sense, because the lords most recently pardoned and who had only just crossed the border back into Scotland—that is, Morton and the Douglases—were his co-conspirators in the Rizzio plot. He had brazenly betrayed them, causing them to seek revenge.
Darnley’s train of thought led him to attempt a reconciliation with the writer. He “could not believe that his own flesh (which was myself) would do him any hurt.” He appealed to her not to leave him. She almost had pity on him until she compared his heart of wax with hers, which was as hard as a diamond.
The letter writer then veered almost randomly from topic to topic. Darnley’s father, Lennox, “hath bled this day at the nose and at the mouth. Guess what token that is?” The woman said she had not seen Lennox herself: “He is in his chamber.” And she said that she hated deceiving Darnley. “I do here a work that I hate much, but I had begun it this morning.”
There followed a passionate outburst from the woman to her lover: “We are tied to with two false races.* The good year untie us from them. God forgive me, and God knit us together forever for the most faithful couple that ever he did knit together. This is my faith. I will die in it.” She longed to be in bed with him again. “I am ill at ease and glad to write unto you when other folks be asleep, seeing that I cannot do as they do according to my desire, that is between your arms, my dear life.”
She said she was becoming weary, but could not stop herself scribbling while any paper was left. “Cursed be this poxy fellow,” she exclaimed, “that troubleth me this much!” His health was stable, but his body was disgusting. His breath stank whenever she approached his bedside. “I thought,” she said, “I should have been killed with his breath, for it is worse than your uncle’s breath, and yet I was sat no nearer to him than in a chair by his bolster.”
At this point, halfway through the letter, a hiatus occurs. A memo appears from nowhere, a set of jottings or headings that the writer refe
rred to as a “memorial”—a list of topics she had so far wished to include in her letter and were obviously meant to jog her memory as she wrote. The letter then continues as if the memo were not there.
The woman said she had remembered that Lord Livingston, during supper, had openly teased her in the presence of Lady Reres about her lover. This (somewhat implausibly) was when she was leaning on him while warming herself at the fire. Livingston had drunk a toast to her inamorato.
In Cecil’s copy of the letter, this paragraph is followed by an unexplained double-line space. When the transcription resumes, the woman informs us that she was making her lover a bracelet. “I have had so little time that it is very ill. but I will make a fairer. And in the meantime take heed that none of those that be here do see it, for all the world will know it.”
She had been seen working on the bracelet, and was anxious because anyone who later noticed her lover wearing it would guess their secret. This seems a bit odd, since only a few sentences earlier the woman’s relationship with her lover had been a topic of general banter.
It is usually said that the hiatus caused by the memo was the result of the writer’s ending her work on one evening and starting again on the next. That is certainly a possibility, because by the next paragraph it seems that another day had passed and the writer had resumed her “tedious talk” with Darnley.
And once more, she hated herself for her dissimulation. “You make me dissemble so much,” she now reproached her lover, “that I am afraid thereof with horror, and you make me almost to play the part of a traitor. Remember that if it were not for your-sake obeying you I had rather be dead.”
