The True Life of Mary Stuart: Queen of Scots

by John Guy

  What could Mary—assuming she was the author of the letter—have been talking about? The sentence is so obscure and indirect it is impossible to guess its meaning. All that is clear is that it does not explicitly refer to a murder plot.

  The English translation made by someone in Cecil’s office read: “I will rid myself of it, and hazard to cause it to be enterprised and taken in hand” (italics added). That is a misconstruction, a phony attempt by the English to refer to Darnley’s assassination and a misrepresentation of the French. Cecil should have hung his head in shame, because he personally corrected the translation of the letter. At the top, he changed the words “My lord” to “My heart,” where the original said “Mon coeur,” but left the remainder as it stood.

  No one examining this evidence with an open mind could regard letters 3 through 5 as incriminating. They are often said to be forgeries. That is very unlikely. They could easily be genuine letters Mary had written in 1566 to the narcissistic and adulterous Darnley. He had engaged in illicit affairs. He had been forever moping and sulking. He had deserted her and threatened to go and live abroad. His character closely resembles that of the recipient of these idiosyncratic and unusual “love” letters.

  In letter 3, the unhappy couple were estranged and living apart, which Mary and Bothwell were not in the month after their marriage. In letter 4, the writer is Medea and not Glauce, the wife and not the lover. Lastly, in both letters 4 and 5, the writer reminds her partner that she has “voluntarily subjected” herself to him—a remark typical of Mary, who always believed that by marrying Darnley she had stooped beneath herself, and told him so when they had quarreled.

  That leaves the last three letters, numbers 6, 7 and 8, which relate to the Confederate Lords’ charge that Mary was a willing accomplice in her abduction at Almond Bridge. Letter 6 is probably a genuine letter from Mary to Bothwell that the lords had mischievously redated. It was almost certainly written after, not before, the abduction, since it contains references to events that we know to have occurred after Mary had arrived at Dunbar and Bothwell had left for Edinburgh to get his wife to file her divorce petition.

  “Alas my lord,” it begins, “why is your trust put in a person so unworthy to mistrust that which is wholly yours?” Or, expressed in simpler language, “Why have you gone and trusted someone so unworthy? Their interventions have led you to mistrust the one person who really cares about you.” As the writer explained:

  You had promised me that you would resolve all, and that you would send me word every day what I should do. You have done nothing thereof. I advertised you well to take heed of your false brother-in-law. He came to me and without showing me anything from you, told me that you had willed him to write to you . . .

  Huntly was this “unworthy” individual, and he was once again described as “your false brother-in-law.” The alarm bells ring, because it was only after Mary’s abduction, on April 24, 1567, that Huntly and Bothwell had fallen out over Bothwell’s plan to divorce Huntly’s sister and marry Mary.

  Mary had quarreled violently with Huntly, but not until after his sister’s divorce petition was filed. We also know that Bothwell, when he returned from arranging his divorce, had argued bitterly with Mary. Drury’s handwritten reports show that there had been a “great unkindness” between them lasting half a day. It had been their one spectacular fight before their marriage.

  The writer said that her lover had “willed” Huntly to offer his advice as to what she should say and “where and when you should come to me.” But it had not gone according to plan. Instead, Huntly had given the writer a dressing down. He had railed against her “foolish enterprise,” saying that she could never marry a man who not only was married already but had kidnapped her, and that his family, the Gordons, would never allow it.

  According to the Confederate Lords, Mary had sent this letter “from Stirling” to warn Bothwell of the risks he was about to take at Almond Bridge. Moray’s chronology asserted that she had written it on April 21, 22 or possibly early on the morning of April 23, 1567, before her abduction on the 24th.

  But nowhere do the words “from Stirling” appear in the letter. Neither does Moray’s claim that the letter preceded the abduction add up. The lords maintained that the writer’s purpose was to encourage Bothwell to abduct her, using Huntly as his intermediary to inform her of the time and place where the pretend kidnapping would occur. We are expected to believe that she had so far given Bothwell no idea of when and where the event was to be staged. Bothwell, who had promised to settle everything, could not in the end decide, so he took advice from Huntly, asking him to ask the writer what she wished to say about it and “where and when you should come to me.”

  There are two handwritten transcripts of this letter in Cecil’s papers, one in the original French and one in an English translation. The original French reads: Huntly (your “false brother-in-law”) “m’a presché que c’estoit une folle enterprise, et qu’avecques mon honneur je ne vous pourries jamais espouser, veu qu’estant marié vous m’amenies et que ses gens ne l’endureroient pas et que les seigneurs se dédiroient.” This literally translates as: He “preached to me that it was a foolish enterprise, and that with my honor I could never marry you, seeing that being married you brought me away, and that his folk would not endure it and that the lords would go back on their word.”

  Moray maintained that the meaning of the French was: He “preached to me that it would be a foolish enterprise . . . seeing that being married you would bring me away . . .”

  But Mary was a native French speaker. If she had used the past tense, the events she would have been describing were in the past and not the future, as in the interpretation of her accusers. Moreover, the use of the past tense makes far better sense and corresponds to what we know'really happened at Dunbar after Bothwell had left for Edinburgh to arrange his divorce, leaving Mary on her own with Huntly.

  On the 26th, Bothwell had galloped to Edinburgh. There, he had arranged for his wife to lodge her divorce suit in the Protestant court. Next day, Mary had asked the Archbishop of St. Andrews to grant Bothwell an annulment in the Catholic court. When Bothwell returned to Dunbar, he found that Huntly and Mary had quarreled. Then Mary and Bothwell had their first big row.

  If letter 6 was genuine, but was written after rather than before Mary’s abduction, it would also add considerably to our understanding of her feelings for Bothwell while he was away in Edinburgh and she was quarreling with Huntly:

  I wish I were dead. For I see everything is going badly. You promised something very different in your prediction, but absence has power over you who have two strings to your bow.* Hasten your answer so that I may not fail and put no trust in your brother[-in-law] for this enterprise. For he speaks and is all against it. God give you good night.

  All this makes a great deal of sense. We will never know exactly what it was that Bothwell had promised Mary. But her feelings tally with those she later expressed in telling her story to Robert Melville and the Bishop of Dunblane for their respective diplomatic missions to Elizabeth and Catherine de Medici. There, she knew she had done wrong in sleeping with a married man and was attempting to justify her behavior to herself as much as to others.

  But not everything went Moray’s way. When Cecil gave the original French version of letter 6 to his clerk to translate, the tenses were rendered accurately. “And thereupon,” he wrote, Huntly “hath preached unto me that it was a foolish enterprise and that with mine honor I could never marry you, seeing that being married, you did carry me away . . .”

  When docketing the translation (i.e., labeling it for filing), the clerk put, “Copie from Stirling after the Ravissement . . .” Exactly. Whoever he was, he was an honest man. He had understood the sense of the document he had just translated, which could not have been written before Mary’s abduction and so “proved” none of Moray’s claims.

  And Cecil saw the danger. He was getting seriously worried. This “evidence” was not tur
ning out to be anything near as good as Moray had said it would be. Sometimes the ends have to justify the means. With a stroke of his pen, he crossed out “after” and wrote “afore” above it in his own inimitable scrawl. Now it read, “Copie from Stirling afore the Ravissement . . .” In a second or two, an innocuous and fully comprehensible document was turned into something that was both incriminating and complete gibberish. This “afore” was perhaps the most important single word that Cecil ever put into any document connected with Mary Queen of Scots.

  Letters 7 and 8 are tame in comparison, which may explain why there are no handwritten transcripts of either. They are known only from the versions later printed in Scots by Mary’s enemies.

  Letter 7 is almost an exact duplicate of the core of letter 6. It is once again supposedly a letter from Mary to Bothwell, written on the eve or a few days before her abduction. “Of the place and the time,” it began, “I remit myself to your brother and to you . . . He finds many difficulties.”

  The letter seems to have been no more than a variant Scots translation of letter 6, included to fill out the case. Perhaps the overriding reason why it was introduced as evidence is that it described Huntly to Bothwell as “your brother” and not “your false brother-in-law,” thereby softening the clash with the known fact that Huntly had not quarreled with Bothwell until after the abduction, when Mary had consented to marry him.

  Letter 8 is the last of the letters said to have been written on the eve of the abduction and the third Mary is supposed to have sent to Bothwell in less than twenty-four hours. It too reiterated the gist of letter 6. But whereas letter 7 had attempted to correct an anachronism in the lords’ description of Huntly, this time he was described as “your brother-in-law that was.”

  The letter begins, “My Lord, since my letter written, your brother-in-law that was, came to me very sad, and has asked me my counsel, what he should do after tomorrow, because there be many folks here, and among others the Earl of Sunderland . . .”

  That description of Huntly is less plausible even than “your false brother-in-law.” And there was a second careless mistake, because the Earl of Sunderland did not accompany Mary from Stirling to Linlithgow and on to Almond Bridge after her visit to her son, nor was he later at Dunbar. Those attending Mary on her journey were Maitland, Huntly and Sir James Melville. Even Moray’s own retrospective account of Mary and Bothwell’s proceedings failed to mention Sunderland, who does not figure in the story. It is a mystery why his name ended up in letter 8.

  Of letters 6 through 8, the three “abduction” letters, only number 6 is worthy of serious attention. It is likely to be genuine, but far from making it seem that Mary colluded with Bothwell in her abduction, it proves nothing of the sort. “I wish I were dead,” she was alleged to have said. “For I see everything is going badly. You promised something very different in your prediction . . .” These are hardly the sentiments one would expect from a willing partner about to engage in a daring escapade.

  Beyond that, the past tenses were fatal to Moray’s case. He probably knew it and thought something more concrete would be needed if the lords were to win the argument. This led to the manufacturing of letters 7 and 8, which tried to amplify the text of letter 6, but which in the process further exposed the invalid assumptions on which the argument rested.

  And yet superficially the Casket Letters were damning if they were genuine and in Mary’s handwriting. Two months after first reading Buchanan’s dossier and the sample copies of the evidence Moray had supplied to whet his appetite, Cecil decided to act. He persuaded Elizabeth to empower a special tribunal—often ambiguously called a “conference” to avoid the use of the word “court”—to examine the case against Mary.

  A legal trial would shortly take place under the auspices of impartial arbitration. Elizabeth was probably sincere when she said that her aim in appointing commissioners was to bring about a “good end to the differences, debates and contentions grown and continued between her dear sister and cousin, Mary Queen of Scots, and her subjects.” But the tribunal as Cecil was to engineer it was closer to a special court set up to convict Mary on a charge of conspiracy to murder Darnley. The judges were to be the Duke of Norfolk, the Earl of Sussex and that veteran of Scottish business Sir Ralph Sadler, Henry VIII’s former secretary and ambassador to Edinburgh.

  Cecil’s idea, an ingenious one, was that Elizabeth would appear to act as an unbiased referee over the Casket Letters, whereas in reality she had been persuaded to appoint a committee that was authorized to pronounce them genuine or forgeries, and so determine the extent of Mary’s guilt.

  Mary was hesitant about accepting the tribunal’s legality, but was scarcely in a position to argue. She had everything to gain from a careful scrutiny of documents that she claimed were outright forgeries. She took the Duke of Norfolk’s nomination as a positive signal, since his opinion of the Confederate Lords as the congenital foes of monarchy was unconcealed. She therefore accepted the tribunal’s terms of reference and named her advocates, even if she did not formally concede Elizabeth’s right to detain her in England or to try her.

  The tribunal opened on October 4 at York, when Mary’s advocates were allowed to speak first and bring their own charges against Moray and the Confederate Lords. They protested against the “great injuries, wrongs and damages” inflicted on Mary and her loyal subjects by the rebel lords, and appealed to Elizabeth for relief as an honorable umpire. If Moray and his allies had any evidence, they said, it should be exhibited in writing so that it could be lawfully examined and challenged.

  Then it was Moray’s turn. Not surprisingly, he was reluctant to pursue the murder charge or exhibit the evidence he said he had collected. He was watching his back, fearful of Elizabeth’s wrath should he accuse his sister of murder and adultery and then fail to prove it. He also wanted guarantees in advance that if he was successful in establishing Mary’s guilt, she would never be returned as queen to Scotland.

  This was the heart of the matter. Moray feared that even if he did prove Mary to be an accomplice in Darnley’s death, Elizabeth still would not recognize his appointment as regent, agree to hand over Mary to the lords to be dealt with as they thought fit, or keep her safely locked away in an English prison. Until he was assured of victory one way or the other, he was unwilling to place the originals of the Casket Letters on file before the court as evidence—at least officially.

  Moray wanted it both ways. He declined to introduce the letters formally, but happily showed them to the English judges “privately and secretly.” The letters were not shown to Mary’s representatives, and under the procedure Cecil had laid down for the tribunal, they had no right to demand to see them.

  The English judges were unimpressed by Moray’s tactics. The allegations were infamous, but were the letters Mary’s? The judges had seen nothing to prove it. The most hardheaded of them, the Earl of Sussex, gave Cecil a blunt warning. He wrote on October 22: “If the party adverse to her accuse her of the murder by producing the letters, she will deny them, and accuse the most of them [i.e., the Confederate Lords] of manifest consent to the murder, which could hardly be denied.”

  Sussex had realized that if Moray and his delegation exhibited the Casket Letters, all Mary’s lawyers had to do was deny they were hers. She could turn the tables on the rebel lords, accusing them of complicity in Darnley’s murder. Then they would be in the dock, not her. And since a majority of her accusers had been involved, Moray’s case would collapse.

  Norfolk was even more disturbed. “This cause,” he explained to Cecil, “is the doubtfullest and most dangerous that ever I dealt in.” Mary’s advocates had already hinted that if the Casket Letters came formally to trial, she would demand to attend the tribunal in person. For his part, Norfolk was shocked by the implications of letter 2 (the long Glasgow letter) and letter 6 (the most compelling of the three abduction letters), but it was also perfectly clear, he said, that the lords were not interested injustice, but “seek wholl
y to serve their own private turns.” In their eagerness to vindicate themselves, “they care not what becomes neither of queen nor king!”

  Cecil’s plan was starting to go wrong. What Sussex and Norfolk had said made it plain that the English judges knew that many of Mary’s accusers were themselves accomplices in Darnley’s murder, and the last thing Moray wanted was for this to come out.

  Cecil hastily intervened. He arranged for the tribunal to be temporarily adjourned. It was moved south to Westminster and five extra judges were appointed, chief among them Cecil and his brother-in-law Sir Nicholas Bacon, shifting the balance of opinion decisively in Moray’s favor. The enlarged tribunal resumed its hearings on November 26.

  Cecil, meanwhile, talked Elizabeth into giving Moray the assurances he sought. If the Casket Letters were genuine, Elizabeth would hand Mary over to the Confederate Lords, provided they guaranteed her safety, or else keep her in England. She would also recognize Moray as regent. This gave Moray what he wanted, and shortly afterward, he formally charged Mary with complicity in Darnley’s murder.

  Mary was stunned by her cousin’s change of heart. She had been assured that the English judges would not seek to try her, but only to act as umpires in her dispute with her rebel lords. She refused as a queen to be called to account by a jurisdiction she did not recognize, and ordered her advocates to withdraw immediately from the tribunal.

  They left on December 6, but it was too late. The next day, Moray laid the originals of the casket documents on the table. They were closely examined in lengthy sessions lasting two full days, and then again on the 14th at Hampton Court.

  When correcting the tribunal’s minutes describing how the documents had finally been submitted as evidence, Cecil took care to cross every t and dot every i. “And so,” his secretary’s draft suggested, “they produced a small coffer of silver and gilt, wherein were certain letters and writings they said [were] of the Queen of Scots to the Earl Bothwell.”