by John Guy
The fact that it was missed can only mean that it did not exist by the time Buchanan’s material was sent to Cecil in June 1568. It has to be regarded as a later forged interpolation.
This is all the more likely because, after Buchanan’s dossier had been compiled but before the Confederate Lords made their final accusations against Mary, they changed their story. They added the additional charge that an attempt had been made to poison Darnley at Stirling after the baptism of Prince James. They argued that because of this, Darnley had fallen victim to a “grievous sickness.”
Just two months before the Casket Letters were shown to Elizabeth and Cecil, Moray drew Cecil’s attention to Darnley's illness as the supposed “proof” of the fifth extract. By this sleight of hand, Darnley’s syphilis had turned into an attempted poisoning.
But Moray’s charge does not add up. If the fifth extract was genuine, then Mary and Bothwell must have intended to poison Darnley after she had lured him to Craigmillar, not before at Stirling. And since Darnley was already sick when he arrived at his father’s house in Glasgow, the failed attempt must have been made before he had left Stirling.
It is impossible to explain why so clumsy and improbable a charge was added to the roster of allegations against Mary at such a late stage. But the slipperiness of the lords is established. We already know that letter 2 contained interpolations about Huntly and his sister: “your false brother-in-law” and “two false races.” The final jottings—“Of the Earl of Bothwell” and “Of the Lodging in Edinburgh”—are also extremely suspicious.
In the absence of the original handwritten pages of letter 2 in the form in which they were submitted to Elizabeth and Cecil, no final and unassailable conclusions about this extraordinary document can be reached. But all the evidence points in a single direction. Between 1500 and 1800 words are likely to be genuine, even if the passage about Darnley’s treatment by salivation of mercury could not possibly have been addressed to Bothwell. And between 1000 and 1200 words of the text we now have are likely interpolations from letters that Mary wrote several months later, or else are outright forgeries.
Probably most of the interpolations were from genuine (if later) letters. This shows the true extent of Moray’s cunning, because Elizabeth and Cecil were nobody’s fools. They wanted the handwriting in the documents to be authenticated. Cecil never relaxed his guard in dealing with them. When the original letters were finally inspected, he demanded a supporting affidavit, signed by Moray, Morton and Lord Lindsay, the chief architects of Mary’s forced abdication, to declare that all were Mary’s, all in her “own proper handwriting.” Thereafter, comparisons with genuine letters from Mary to Elizabeth from the collection in the royal archives were to be made before a verdict could be reached.
The lords knew that they could not expect to get away with crude forgeries. To establish Mary’s guilt, they needed to find pages of genuine letters that, if doctored up here and there, would clinch what they wanted to prove.
This hypothesis would also explain the curious incongruities in the contents of letter 2 as old and new pages were spliced together to make up a composite document. It would also explain why the most suspect passages are relatively brief. If they were filled in using blank spaces on the existing sheets, Moray could be fairly confident that they would pass undetected. Since Mary was known to scribble her letters and also to use the most expensive paper as profligately as only a queen might be expected to do, it could prove to be a risk worth taking.
26
Casket Letters II
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 pro
duce 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 my
sterious 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.”
