An Accidental Tragedy (45 page)

Finally, on 24 September, Elizabeth sent a ‘Memorial for the proceedings of Norfolk, Sussex and Sadler, with the Queen of Scots and her son’s commissioners at the city of York’ to her commissioners. Mary’s involvement in the murder of Henry, Lord Darnley, as well as her adulterous relationship with Bothwell, would be examined, and after a complete vindication of these charges she would be restored to her throne by her cousin, Elizabeth. Moray, on the other hand, wanted nothing less than the condemnation of Mary and Elizabeth’s endorsement of his rule. Elizabeth herself had issued precise instructions to her commissioners. They were to hear both sides apart from each other, with Mary’s case heard first, and if there was to be no firm proof of the charges, then Mary must be restored. The proposals, that is to say, the rebuttals, were to come from Mary or from Moray and a treaty was to be agreed jointly by Elizabeth, Mary and Moray. The terms of this treaty would include an Act of Oblivion for past crimes, and a council to be appointed to assist Mary; her future marriage would be agreed by the three estates;
Bothwell was to be punished; the legal status of the Reformed Church would be ratified; the infant James would be kept in England and raised by Scots; and titles to the crown of England were to be clarified. Elizabeth was to be the umpire for all this, and if Mary were to break any part of the treaty, then James would immediately succeed as ruler. Inevitably the Treaty of Edinburgh was to be ratified and Mary was forbidden to enter into foreign leagues.

Elizabeth and Cecil saw this examination as a golden opportunity to tidy up old business, and they felt she could rely on her commissioners. Norfolk was England’s only duke, and was recently widowed for the third time. Thin-faced and with a high forehead, he looked permanently worried, giving the impression that he was trying to look as if he understood what was going on around him. Nominally Protestant, he had many Catholic relations and would need Elizabeth’s permission to remarry; he could, therefore, be relied on. Sadler, who had seen Mary as a naked baby twenty-six years previously, was, like the Earl of Sussex, a professional courtier and could be relied on to do his sovereign’s bidding without too much thought. Mary would have to rely on reports from York being carried back to her at Bolton. Her life would be closely examined in public, but she would only be able to answer through proxies.

On 29 September Mary sent precise instructions to her commissioners in a document which was to be the sole authority for them to act on her behalf, since her great seal was still in Scotland. Like the quartering of her arms with England, the absence of her seal may seem trivial to us today, but to Mary it represented another petty reduction in her status. In her letter she rehearsed the offences of the Lords: her seizure after Carberry and imprisonment at Lochleven Castle. She pointed out that her abdication was invalid since it had been made under threat and had been ratified by a parliament she did not endorse. Similarly, the coronation of James without her permission had no validity. Now on slightly thinner ice, she denied any knowledge of the murder of Darnley and did ‘nothing thereunto but by the
advice of the nobility of the realm’. Mary obviously knew of the existence of the secret Casket Letters and insisted that if they were to be used in evidence against her, then she must be allowed to see the originals and ‘make answer thereto’. She also pointed out that there were ‘divers in Scotland’ who could counterfeit her handwriting and copy her prose style. She did not ask for revenge against Moray, but promised to accept Elizabeth’s judgment, maintaining the freedom of Protestantism, and assuring her of agreement in the matter of succession. There were no wild threats of foreign intervention and her case against the rebel lords was put reasonably and calmly. Mary was certain she would be vindicated and restored.

Five days earlier, on 24 September, Mary had written a long letter to her childhood friend Elisabeth, now Queen of Spain. She assured her that she was surrounded by adoring Catholics and, further, that Elizabeth of England was jealous of Mary’s strength of faith, but would restore her in spite of the unjust accusations against her. Mary told Elisabeth of her plans to marry James to a Spanish princess, but could not have known that Elisabeth would die in childbirth before she could read this letter from her friend of the far-off days of tournaments at Chambord and of the nursery at St Germain. Mary Stewart was whistling in the dark and Cecil, who intercepted all her correspondence, knew it only too well. He would also know that his most Catholic Majesty Philip II of Spain was now free to remarry. With a satisfactory verdict from York, Cecil would be able to tie up a lot of the loose ends, which were starting to resemble a nest of writhing snakes.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

A lawful prisoner?

By 7 October 1567 the three groups of commissioners had met in York and sworn oaths to deal only in truth, with each side showing a profound distrust of the other two. On the first day, 8 October, Mary’s commissioners made a formal presentation of their case, and two days later Moray asked for a guarantee that if Mary was found guilty, she would be ‘delivered in our hands’, and declared that without such a guarantee he could not proceed. While Norfolk was considering this extravagant request an indictment arrived from Lennox. This was a compilation of Buchanan’s fantasy with additions by Lennox himself and, according to John Hosack in his
Mary Queen of Scots and her Accusers
, ‘the English commissioners were not greatly impressed by the taradiddles of Lennox and they wanted stronger stuff and they got it’.

On 11 October, Lethington, Buchanan, and James Macgill met with the commissioners without the knowledge of Mary’s advisers. Macgill was clerk to the register of the Privy Council, described as a ‘subtle chicaner and embroiler of the laws’. This group produced the various bonds they had signed agreeing to Bothwell’s ‘purgation’ of the murder, the Ainslie Tavern Bond supporting him, and their agreement to his marrying the queen, claiming that all of this had been done under threat of violence from Bothwell’s 200 arquebusiers. Since Bothwell was ‘purged’ of his treason in carrying off the queen, they claimed that by law he was also purged of all lesser crimes, including the murder of Darnley. This fantastic piece of legal logic-chopping – ‘a fit policy for a detestable fact’ – was followed by the Scots commissioners’
trump card: they showed Elizabeth’s commissioners the Casket Letters.

This action was completely invalid in legal terms and the letters would have been declared inadmissible in any court. They were ‘closed in a little coffer of silver and gilt, heretofore given by her to Bothwell’, but there was no forensic link with either Mary or Bothwell. There was no method of verification given to the commissioners. Neither Mary nor her commissioners had seen these letters or were given opportunity to confirm or deny their veracity. No comparisons of handwriting were made with known examples of her handwriting. Norfolk, who was making up the rules governing the commission as he went along, read the letters and was appalled to discover ‘such inordinate love between her and Bothwell, her loathsomeness and abhorring of her husband that was murdered’. The letters were locked away again in their casket.

The Casket Letters which so appalled Norfolk have been the subject of intense debate and many books. They consisted of letters and other documents supposedly sent by Mary to Bothwell and kept by him in the celebrated silver casket, only to come into the hands of Morton on 19 June 1567. Thereafter they were the property of Moray. The originals no longer exist, having vanished from history in May 1584, and evidence based on copies translated from the French is extremely doubtful.

In the first letter – known as the Short Glasgow Letter and, like all the documents, undated and unsigned – the writer, presumably Mary, tells Bothwell that she is bringing Darnley to Craigmillar. It is an affectionate and chatty letter in which she gives good news of the infant James, but complains of the pain in her side. Mary must have written it in Stirling and the note at the foot of the document, ‘from Glasgow, this Saturday morning’ is a later addition, meant to add further veracity to what is almost certainly a genuine document.

The second letter, however – the Long Glasgow Letter – is altogether another matter. It recounts Mary’s visit to Darnley in January 1567, just before he left for Craigmillar, and varies from
the prosaic ‘I thought I should have been killed with his breath’, to the amorous ‘God forgive me, and God knit us together for ever’. While this variance is possible for anyone writing while in love, Mary’s other letters are normally as brisk and as businesslike as she could manage. This reads like a genuine letter of Mary’s but heavily ‘salted’ with interpolations of passion to increase the presumption of her guilt. She shows herself to be disenchanted with Darnley and besotted with Bothwell, but there is no evidence of, or even ambition for, adultery. It is clearly a forgery that uses fragments of truth to stitch together the whole.

This is followed by what seems to be a genuine love-letter in which the writer sends a locket and wishes to be ‘bestowed under your regiment’ during their forthcoming marriage. The style is hugely different from Mary’s normal register – even in her informal letters to friends – and it has grammatical eccentricities which she always avoided. It may have been written to Bothwell by one of his many admirers, but it was certainly not written by Mary Stewart.

Next is another avowal of undying love which has so many mistranslations from the French that the original meaning is obscure. There are mistakes in French grammar – ‘malheureuse’ for ‘malheureux’ – and the page Bastiane changes sex to become Bastienne. It is a clumsy pastiche and reads as if a grown man was unsuccessfully imitating the style of a young girl, which is probably the case.

A fifth letter was claimed to have been found among the papers of Margaret Carwood and is an unashamed love letter by someone looking forward to marriage. Again it has the long involved sentences of a love-lorn teenager, this time the writer imagining herself becoming a countess. Since Mary was a queen and Bothwell stood to become a king, the claim that Mary wrote the letter to him is complete nonsense.

A clerk has endorsed the sixth letter ‘From Stirling before her ravishing – it shows her mask of ravishing.’ It was obviously written by another woman, who reproaches Bothwell for being slow in his advances: ‘You had promised me that you would
resolve all . . . You have done nothing thereof.’ Huntly is described as ‘your false brother-in-law’, although at that time he and Bothwell were firm friends. The writer does say, ‘I could never marry you seeing that being married you did carry me away’, but ravishment of future brides continued at least to the eighteenth century in the Scottish Borders, and it is most likely that this letter was written by an earlier conquest of Bothwell’s.

The seventh letter, however, reads exactly as one might expect from Mary. If it does refer to Bothwell’s proposed abduction, then the opening is typically brisk: ‘Of the place and time I remit myself to your brother and to you.’ Bothwell is instructed, ‘make yourself sure of the Lords and free to marry’. This is a sovereign writing to a subject. Last is a letter that was probably written by Mary after her marriage, during Bothwell’s absence in Melrose. In it she voices her earliest fears of the likelihood of a rebellion by the nobility.

In addition to the eight letters there followed a sequence of twelve poems, incorrectly described as sonnets. Together they form, in fact, an interminable love poem, extremely badly written, often with faulty scansion. It is impossible to believe that a woman trained by du Bellay and a keen student of Ronsard could have produced such infantile versifying; Mary’s natural inclination was to the high Renaissance style that she had learnt in her childhood. A crucial indicator of its falsity comes in line 17 when she describes Scotland as ‘my country’. Elsewhere, it was always ‘my kingdom’, ‘my realm’, or ‘this our land’ since Mary’s emotion towards Scotland was principally one of ownership.

The commissioners were also shown two marriage contracts and in each case the signature was a forgery. Mary’s signature was very formal and would have been simple to forge, so why such an easy task was botched is difficult to understand.

To sum up the affair of these letters, it seems that some of them were genuine, while others were letters in Bothwell’s possession adapted to read as if they came from Mary. There were no dates – at least up until the time the letters came into the hands of Morton – and, apart from the marriage contracts, no signatures.
The extant versions are all copies of translations, so errors will have occurred and handwriting comparisons are impossible.

In 1754 Walter Goodall published
An examination of the letters said to be written by Mary Queen of Scots to James, Earl of Bothwell: shewing by intrinsick and extrinsick evidence that they are forgeries.
In 1849 the barrister John Hosack was more cautious: ‘If antecedent probabilities are rather in favour of the genuineness of the letters there is nevertheless a considerable amount of presumptive evidence that they are forgeries.’