At York on 4 October Norfolk, Thomas Radcliffe, third earl of Sussex, and Sadler opened the tribunal. Representing Mary were a mixture of Protestants and Catholics: a cousin of Châtelherault, Gavin Hamilton, archdeacon of St Andrews and commendator of Kilwinning, Bishop Leslie, Lords Livingston, Boyd, and Herries, Sir John Gordon of Lochinvar, and Skirling. Leslie had accepted the appointment reluctantly because he believed that the proceedings not only would fail to hasten her restitution but would also actually increase her estrangement from her half brother. Attending Moray were Morton, Lindsay, Maitland, Bishop Hepburn, and Robert Pitcairn, commendator of Dunfermline. Although technically representing the two-year old king for whom he served as regent, Moray was, in fact, the Scottish ruler and possessed a distinct advantage over the other participants, who had to wait for instructions from Elizabeth or Mary when new issues were raised.
With Moray also were Makgill, the clerk register, Henry Balnaves, a lord of the session, and Buchanan, whose motives for supporting Mary’s opponents are unclear. It is usually alleged that the king’s death outraged Buchanan because his ancestor served as chamberlain to an earlier earl of Lennox. At the Scottish council’s request, Buchanan prepared a book of articles for the inquiry.
On the first few days they read their commissions, took oaths, and heard Herries’s denunciation of Mary’s ill treatment. On the 8th Moray condemned her support for Orkney, an evil and ambitious man, claimed she abdicated because she was weary of ruling, and interpreted her defeat at Langside as God’s will. Moray and his associates emphasized her sexual liaison with Orkney because it offered a motivation for their later charge that she was an accessory to the king’s death and because many contemporaries viewed fornication not only as more criminal than murder but also as inevitably leading to murder. Knollys believed that Lethington hoped to prevent this accusation and to obtain an agreement that would restore her authority with certain limitations. Preferring that she remain an English prisoner, Moray secretly had some evidence revealed about her to the English commissioners to gauge their response.
On the 11th Norfolk, Sussex, and Sadler reported to Elizabeth that Lethington, Buchanan, Makgill, and Balnaves presented to them without the knowledge of Mary’s representatives some documents deposited in a foot-long silver and gilt casket with the Roman F under a crown in several places, obviously a gift from Francis to Mary. These are the Casket Letters, which include eight French epistles, allegedly written by Mary to Bothwell, two contracts of marriage for them, one undated and one signed in April prior to his trial, and a French love ballad of twelve unequal verses. As transcripts of the letters have neither subscriptions (Mary’s signature) nor addressees, and only one of them has a date, the presumption is, as Leslie maintained, that the originals, which have disappeared, also lacked these identifying items. Not only are the originals of these no longer extant, but neither are the originals and copies of two other documents described by the commissioners: Mary’s request to the noblemen that they sign the Ainslie band and her admission to engineering a quarrel between Henry and Lord Robert.
Before discussing the employment of the Casket Letters at the inquiry, the question of whether they were forged will be addressed by examining several topics: the practice of forgery in Britain, the official version of how the confederates obtained the documents, the question of whether Edinburgh Castle held Bothwell’s correspondence, the contents of Letter II, the most damaging of the eight letters, and the speculation that Balfour was their author. Finally, it will follow Moray’s references to them in 1567 to his introduction of them in the inquiry in 1568.
The documents were almost certainly forgeries, perhaps some parts entirely invented and others distortions of actual messages composed by Mary to Henry or other recipients. It is highly unlikely that she would have written down in any language her illicit passion for Bothwell or any other lover. Aware from childhood that her correspondence might be intercepted, she used ciphers to communicate sensitive material. In 1563 she complained to Randolph that someone had opened up her dispatches, and in 1569 she explained to Elizabeth that even if she had imagined the foolish remarks in the Casket Letters, she would never have put them in writing.
In early modern Britain forgeries often for political reasons were not an aberration. Richard Bentley even admitted, for example: “The greatest part of mankind are so easily imposed upon in this way, that there is too great an invitation to put the trick on them.”10 As previously noted, Mary of Guise had a letter from Châtelherault forged and her daughter probably invented one from Lorraine. In July 1569 after Grange joined Mary’s party, he even falsified an order from Moray to obtain Lethington’s release from confinement.
How the Casket Letters were discovered depends partly on Morton’s declaration in December 1568. Supposedly, on 19 June 1567 shortly after the Carberry Hill confrontation, Orkney sent his servant, George Dalgleish, a tailor, to retrieve the casket with his documents at Edinburgh Castle. Both Leslie in his Defence of Mary and Buchanan in his History of Scotland asserted that Balfour, the castle’s captain, released the casket to Dalgleish. The next day, 20 June, according to Morton, his men captured Dalgleish, confiscated the casket but waited another day before breaking its lock and in front of witnesses removing its documents. The date, 21 June, on which Morton said he first viewed the casket’s documents is interesting because nine days later on 30 June, he and some other confederate lords issued a summons against Orkney for murdering the king and taking the queen by force.
It is puzzling that Dalgleish did not immediately return the casket to the duke, who was attempting to raise troops on the Borders. Since Orkney was short of funds, it is even more puzzling that he ordered Dalgleish to fetch only these documents, most of which were allegedly written by Mary. Surely he could have used some of her jewels which were at the castle to finance a challenge to the confederates’ control of her. Although Dalgleish’s accusers asked him about the king’s murder for which he was convicted and executed, they neglected to inquire about the casket probably because it had never been in his possession.
The evidence that Balfour had betrayed Orkney also raises doubts about whether the duke sent Dalgleish to him for the casket. After Balfour refused to turn the castle guns on the confederates in May 1567, Orkney planned to replace him as its keeper. James Melville recalled assuring him that he was fortunate to be in the duke’s bad graces because their alliance had made him one of the rebels’ prime targets. Leslie later confirmed that Balfour had become Orkney’s enemy. Why then, only one month later in June, would Orkney trust Balfour as the captain of the castle to permit Dalgleish to obtain the incriminating documents? And even if he did, why would Balfour surrender the casket that Orkney so clearly valued?
It is highly unlikely that Bothwell would have deposited his personal correspondence in the crown archive at the castle. His only known residence there in 1567 was from 6 to 12 May after he abducted Mary. He would normally not have carried his documents with him but would have kept them secured either at the places he acquired them or at Crichton or Dunbar. Furthermore, he could have received at Edinburgh (the town not the castle) only one of the two Casket Letters, usually labeled as I and II, that Mary allegedly sent him there after reaching Glasgow about 22 January 1567. When he was arrested, French Paris, her supposed letter-bearer, admitted delivering both of them to Bothwell at Edinburgh. It is possible, but unlikely, that Paris could have found Bothwell there with Letter II (which was written before Letter I) on the 24th, the day he left for Jedburgh to pursue Border criminals. However, Paris would have arrived too late at the capital about the 26th to give Bothwell Letter I. After confessing, Paris was summarily executed but not before publicly retracting these admissions.11
The most damaging to Mary’s honor of the eight Casket Letters is Letter II. At 3,300 words it is the longest of the epistles, has a rambling style, and is structurally disjointed, but states in unequivocal language that she loved Bothwell and loathed her husband. In addition, i
t has several asides, including allusions to Henry’s bad breath and the assembling of a bracelet. Some statements are inaccurate, for example, her inability to see Lennox, who was said to be closeted in his chamber but was actually at another residence. From her enemies’ point of view, however, Letter II confirmed her adulterous passion for Bothwell, which provided her with a strong motivation for colluding in Henry’s murder. Thus, two of the weapons Moray used in attempting to destroy Mary’s reputation were her sexuality and her literacy, especially her ability to write.
On the assumption that these documents were forged, previous historians have identified Buchanan, Lethington, or Archibald Douglas as their author, but Balfour, who later claimed that Mary asked him to kill her husband, seems a more likely suspect. Even if he were not the forger, information about Balfour’s life is useful because he played such a pivotal role in the king’s murder and in later negotiations about it. It would be ironic if Balfour invented these letters, which may have gone through several drafts, to focus blame on Mary and her third husband in order to deflect attention away from himself.
Educated individuals in early modern Britain gained experience in creating fictional letters because their tutors regularly assigned them epistle-writing tasks, but Balfour, especially, possessed more training and more opportunities than many of his contemporaries for forging documents attributed to Mary. A legal expert skilled in preparing briefs and reports, he served since 1565 as her clerk register, whose duties, according to privy council guidelines, included assisting the lord chancellor in receiving the letters the queen sent to her councilors. Besides having occasion to study her handwriting, his positions as lord of session, as chief of the four commissaries of Edinburgh, and as captain of Edinburgh Castle, offered him access to evidence he could easily plagiarize. These legal experiences would also have taught him the value of documentary evidence even of a fictional nature in judicial proceedings.
While he obviously possessed extensive legal and governmental experience, less information is known about his vernacular skills beyond his native tongue. His biographers, among them David M. Walker, a noted legal expert, could only speculate about his formal education. Balfour probably attended St Andrews University in 1539 or 1540 and the University of Wittenberg in 1544. Occasionally, he was identified as maister, a title indicating he probably earned a master of arts. He became a fine Latin scholar, but French, the apparent original language of the Casket Letters, was not included in university studies. It was a language educated Scotsmen often chose to learn, however, because of Franco-Scottish cultural and political connections.
If Balfour had not already begun on his own volition to acquire an understanding of French, he was given ample opportunity to do so as a result of joining the murderers of Cardinal Beaton at St Andrews in 1546. With some limited English aid, these men, the Castilians, controlled the castle until July 1547 when a French fleet arrived and forced their surrender. Their conquerors impressed Balfour, a few of his relatives and, among others, John Knox, to serve as galley slaves. Sometime in 1548 or 1549 Balfour either escaped or was freed. Knox later recalled that his own imprisonment lasted 19 months.
Balfour’s biographers failed to note whether they found any French documents in his handwriting. They have, however, revealed some important evidence about his language skills in the Practicks, which they believe is justifiably attributed to him, although he had assistance in assembling the materials. A pre-eminent record of Scottish law, the Practicks is the earliest collection of rules and propositions enunciated in the Auld Laws, the Acts of Parliament, and the decrees of the session and the council. Its existence has led David Walker to exclaim that “Balfour may have been a scoundrel but he deserves our gratitude.”12
A section at the end of the Practicks, entitled “the constitutiounis of Francois King of France, annis 1543, 1547,” offers evidence of Balfour’s French skills. Between May 1579 and December 1580 following political disputes with Morton who was then James VI’s regent, Balfour joined the Hamiltons in France. During his exile, he reportedly met on more than one occasion with Henry, third duke of Guise, and Esmé Stuart, sixth seigneur of Aubigny, the future duke of Lennox, in the company of Archbishop Beaton and Bishop Leslie. Balfour was also said to have advised Lennox to confer with Lord John Hamilton, commendator of Arbroath and the third son of Châtelherault, before departing for Scotland. It could have been during this sojourn that Balfour collected the French laws cited in the Practicks. Almost certainly, he could read French, and if he could not write it, he could have employed a scribe. It is also possible that the original version of the Casket Letters was in the Scots language. The only extant French versions are apparently translations from a Latin or Scots rendition. This issue will be revisited later in this chapter in a discussion of the English inquiry concerning Mary’s return to Scotland and in a section in Chapter 8 on the Letters’ publication.
Some of Balfour’s activities after the king’s death support the speculation that he was desperate enough to create these Letters. He demonstrated concerns about his criminal status by ensuring that his name was on the list of pardons Mary granted in May 1567. Besides obtaining Morton’s goodwill in June by informing him that Dalgleish had possession of the casket, Balfour won Moray’s favor when he returned to Scotland in August to become the king’s regent. For turning Edinburgh Castle over to him, Moray gave Balfour the priory of Pittenween, a pension out of the Priory of St Andrews, a lump sum of £5,000, and income from lands in Fife for his son, Gilbert. Moray also appointed Balfour president of the court of session and continued him on the council when he resigned the position of clerk register. At the parliament in December 1567, he served as a member of the lords of the articles. While most of Moray’s concessions to Balfour were undoubtedly rewards for surrendering this strategic castle, the regent’s continued favor raises the possibility that Balfour maintained some kind of hold over him. When damaging information surfaced in 1569 pointing to Balfour’s share in the king’s murder, some officials ordered his arrest, but Moray’s somewhat mysterious and indirect interference in the proceedings led to his liberation.
Although Balfour attempted to keep his political options open, supporting Mary’s petition for a divorce from Orkney in 1569, for example, he enjoyed the regent’s protection from criminal prosecution until James Hamilton of Bothwellhaugh assassinated Moray in 1570. After Lennox became regent, Balfour encountered some difficult times and supported the Marian party, but in 1572 he gained protection from Morton, who succeeded Mar as regent. Only when confronting political problems in 1578 did Morton turn against Balfour, who fled to France. Following Morton’s fall from power, Balfour returned home and won James VI’s favor perhaps for offering to provide evidence about the former regent’s complicity in Henry’s murder. Although before Balfour’s death from natural causes in 1583, he still faced some legal problems, he seems never to have been convicted of the king’s assassination, one of Orkney’s few non-noble allies to escape that plight.13
Regardless of who actually wrote the letters, the first extant references to them, which Morton later claimed he obtained in June 1567, are in the dispatches of de Silva to Philip. On 12 July he reported that Jacques Bochetel de la Forest, the French ambassador, revealed he knew of some incriminating letters in Mary’s own hand. A few weeks later on 2 August, de Silva related that while in England en route to Scotland, Moray described to him one of the letters Mary allegedly wrote.
After discussing her imprisonment with Moray, de Silva concluded that his manner of speech and the difficulties he perceived about his sister’s restoration indicated that although expressing a desire to help her, he was unlikely to do so. When de Silva explained that her confessor denied she had any knowledge of Henry’s death, Moray responded that he knew differently and revealed he had heard of a letter containing three sheets of paper, written with her own hand and signed by her, in which she explained she would go to Glasgow to fetch her husband, attempt to poison him on the retur
n, and if she failed, take him to a house where he could be blown up. Moray seems to have been describing Letter II but with significant differences: it was composed after, not before, she went to Glasgow and lacked explicit references to Henry’s murder. Either Moray’s source gave him incorrect information or he was deliberately exaggerating the contents of Letter II to the ambassador of a Catholic monarch.
No extant evidence indicates Moray referred to the letters again until December 1567 when he faced challenges to his regency. On the 4th the privy council recommended that parliament justify the conduct of the lords in opposing and imprisoning Mary because of the private letters that she wrote and subscribed to Bothwell, the king’s chief murderer, which proved she aided and abetted that crime. Parliament subsequently endorsed this request but referred only to letters written by her to Bothwell, omitting the word subscribed. It also passed acts of attainder against Orkney and other named traitors who had not appeared to answer the charges of murder against them.
Moray’s next extant statement about the Casket Letters, some six months later, relates to preparations for the proposed English inquiry. In June 1568 copies of these documents that Moray identified as Scots translations of the French originals were presented by his agent, John Wood, to Elizabeth. Moray hoped to discover from her whether they might be introduced as evidence into the inquiry, which he labeled a trial. It is odd that he chose to send Scots versions to Elizabeth because he knew she was at least as fluent in French, if not more so, than in his native tongue. He, himself, had an understanding of French and surely could read the letters if they were in that language. In October 1565 when he was a Chaseabout raider, Elizabeth permitted him an audience with her but insisted that he communicate in French rather than in Scots because their conversation occurred in the presence of de Foix and Mauvissière.
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