An Accidental Tragedy (46 page)

Two questions remain. Who carried out the forgeries and why did the English commission take them so seriously? When Morton received the casket he had high hopes of finding incriminating documents, but the letters were not incriminating enough. Certainly Mary admitted to preferring Bothwell to Darnley and might be thought to have agreed to her abduction, but these admissions had to be strengthened. Further, once the chain of evidence was broken and the decision made to deal only in copies of the originals, then all of Bothwell’s seized correspondence would have been available to Lethington, who was known to be able to initate the queen’s hand and to create the desired effects. The commissioners, for their part, were told they were being shown ‘secret’ documents that would bring about a definite decision and, from then on, they were all-too-keen to believe them. Here was evidence of amorous passion in a female, loathsome to the macho culture of the nobility; there was evidence of Mary accompanying Darnley to Edinburgh, although no evidence that she knew that he would then be murdered; there was evidence of what was wrongly taken for unbridled lust in the writing of French love poetry, although it is unlikely that anyone ever read the verses; and all of this was enough for the commissioners immediately to refer the matter to higher authority.

The conclusive proof of Mary’s complicity would have been found in the Craigmillar Bond – which Mary herself did not sign – but, since it would have incriminated most of the nobility, all copies had been burned and, at this stage, it was never mentioned. There was enough ‘evidence’ without it.

The English commissioners were also given a translation of
The Book of Articles
drawn up by Buchanan. This was a compilation of the ‘evidence’ contained in the Casket Letters, evidence from Lennox, and a summary of Buchanan’s own
Detectio
. Mary and Bothwell were now also accused of an unsuccessful attempt to poison Darnley en route from Glasgow. In the face of this, Norfolk simply did what all good civil servants did when faced with a hard decision and referred the matter upstairs in a long letter to Elizabeth asking for a decision. Knowing that he was unlikely to receive one, Norfolk also wrote to Cecil advising him of the letters and that their effect would be to completely condemn Mary – if the letters were to be believed – or completely vindicate her – if they were thought to be false.

When news of the production of the letters arrived at Bolton Castle, Mary affected astonishment and assured Knollys that her commissioners would refute all charges. Her refutation was simple: the murder of Darnley was not mentioned at all while the treachery of the nobility was described in detail. The Lords claimed everything they had done had been done under duress; Mary maintained that they had done these things willingly. Bothwell had left the field at Carberry in order to prevent bloodshed and she had given herself willingly into the protection of the nobility. She had been unjustly imprisoned, forced to abdicate under threat ‘of that present death which was prepared for her’. In the face of this revolt, it was ‘therefore required that her grace may be supported by the Queen of England’.

To add to Norfolk’s confusion, while the commission sat in York, Lethington met with the duke and suggested that a marriage between Norfolk and Mary might be arranged. Should Mary agree to ratify her abdication then Moray would be glad to accept Mary back in Scotland as the Duchess of Norfolk. Elizabeth would be delighted to have her troublesome cousin removed, with the possibility that she might even ratify the Treaty of Edinburgh, and, as the Duchess of Norfolk, she would technically be under the control of the English crown. Norfolk, who had been sent with a firm indication from Cecil that he was to
establish Mary’s guilt as an adulteress and murderer, was now being encouraged to marry her. It would not be difficult for Norfolk to come to some arrangement as to Mary’s Catholic faith – his religious faith was a matter of convenience – and her guilt really depended on the somewhat flimsy evidence of the Casket Letters. Few knew better than Lethington how unreliable paperwork could be made to appear, and Norfolk was hardly the most intelligent courtier in England. Norfolk could return with her to Scotland. Lethington knew very well that any sort of evidence could be produced – a ‘dodgy dossier’ – so that Mary could appear pure as the driven snow. Mary unmarried was a threat, but Mary married to Norfolk was less dangerous. Norfolk would also believe anything he was told, and as an ambitious nobleman, he might have liked the idea of being married to a queen, even though her husbands had had a poor life expectancy.

On 15 October, Knollys, on his own initiative, tried to remove some of the dangers surrounding Mary and her marriageable state by suggesting that she might marry George Carey, his cousin, whom she had met in September. The suggestion was quietly ignored.

For all the careful instructions sent to Norfolk by Elizabeth, he was totally at a loss to determine what exactly Elizabeth and Cecil wanted as the outcome of the inquiry. While the marriage suggestion was still in the air, Norfolk had a long conference with Lethington on 16 October and both men agreed that the best conclusion would be a compromise in which Mary would have the suspicion of unproven guilt attached to her, thus allowing Elizabeth more time to confine her cousin and to refuse her a formal audience. With no firm conclusion, Elizabeth was also excused from giving her wholehearted support to Moray. This fog of indecision allowed Elizabeth to move in whatever direction she wished.

Elizabeth closed the inquiry at York, sent Norfolk to examine the defences of the Northern Marches and instructed Sussex to continue as President of the Council in the North. Sadler, Lethington, Macgill, Herries and the Abbot of Kilwinning were
all summoned to London, where the investigation could continue under the watchful eye of Cecil and Elizabeth herself. Mary, naïvely, was delighted that her ‘good sister would hear the matters herself’.

On 21 October, a few days after the inquiry in York had been closed, Moray wrote to Cecil telling him that as regent, or governor, he had to return to Scotland – he had not, in fact, been invited to London – to see to the safety of the king; he also told Cecil to ignore all arguments in favour of Châtelherault as the proper heir and successor to Mary. Moray strongly advised Cecil to support the establishment of his government in Scotland without delay ‘or nourish faction, hurt her friends, maintain her enemies, endanger the state of religion and amity, and provoke the entry of strangers within the isle’. Mary’s guilt or innocence was completely forgotten in the revival of the Stewart–Hamilton feud. Cecil would have filed the letter under ‘background’, although he had received a letter from Sussex suggesting that some kind of ‘composition to save her honour if she were defaced and dishonoured’ should be found to avert the possibility of a Hamilton coup d’état which might occur if Moray’s plan of total condemnation was carried through. In the end, Sussex concluded it would be best if Moray could produce such evidence as to find Mary judicially guilty and then kept in England ‘at the charges of Scotland’.

The ever-careful Knollys also wrote to Cecil, inevitably hoping he would soon be released from his task as gaoler and advising that the sooner Elizabeth made a decision the better, since, if Mary suspected she was to be kept permanently as a prisoner, she would ‘leave no practise untried for escape’. She rode whenever the weather permitted and it would be simple for a rescue party to take her, since she could outride most of Knollys’s household.

Meanwhile, Elizabeth was preparing to move Mary to Tutbury Castle near Derby, over 100 miles further south. Knollys pointed out that all the furnishings in Bolton were borrowed and could not be moved south. He ended his letter to Cecil, ‘I beseech you let neither me nor my sons be longer troubled with this service.’ Cecil ignored his plea.

Cecil also ignored a letter from Francis Walsingham on 20 November. Walsingham informed Cecil that if sufficient proof against Mary could not be found, one of his agents could readily supply it. Walsingham was a Puritan zealot and a member of Elizabeth’s Privy Council. He ran the most efficient spy service in Europe, employing ciphers, agents and torture to further Elizabeth’s cause. Walsingham adored the queen to the point of mania, while, for her part, Elizabeth distrusted the possibly expensive results of his obsessive zealotry.

A few days later, on 24 November, Elizabeth established a second commission to meet at Westminster and to conclude the matters begun at York. The original trio was increased by the Marquis of Northamptonshire, the Earls of Arundel, Pembroke and Leicester, lords Saye, Clinton and Howard, Sir William Cecil, Sir Walter Mildmay and Sir Nicholas Bacon. This formidable array of English nobility agreed that they would not meet judicially, but once again as commissioners. Moray was recalled, nominally to represent James VI, and Mary’s team included the Bishop of Ross, Lord Herries and others to represent her side. Since James VI could not appear, there would equally be no need for Mary to appear in person, and Elizabeth herself would take no part in the proceedings. Elizabeth also claimed that the London meeting was to examine Moray for his effrontery in accusing Mary of such foul crimes. Elizabeth probably didn’t believe a word of what she had said, but she was making sure that she could never be accused of putting her cousin and sister queen in jeopardy.

The hearing – great pains were taken to avoid the word ‘trial’ – opened on 25 November in the Painted Chamber, Westminster, with Elizabeth’s commissioners seated at a long table on which lay the impressive royal commission. After swearing in the commissioners, the first move was made by Moray the next day in an ‘eik’, or addition, to their former accusation, that not only did Bothwell murder Darnley with the compliance of Mary but also that the adulterous pair planned to murder the infant James and so to ‘transfer the crown from the
right line to a bloody murderer and godless tyrant’. To this end the loyal nobility had forced Mary to abdicate, had crowned her son and then established Moray as regent.

Since plague had broken out in London, the commission transferred the whole proceedings to Hampton Court and, on hearing the ‘eik’, Mary’s commissioners asked permission for her to appear and answer the charges directly. Elizabeth replied that the matter of Mary’s guilt in Darnley’s murder should be cleared up first, for ‘I never could believe, nor yet will, that she ever did consent thereto’, but that to appear before the commission might ‘endanger her honour and estate’. Since this gave access only to Moray, Mary’s commissioners refused to accept the decision and withdrew from the proceedings on 6 December.

In reply, Moray offered Buchanan’s
Book of Articles
and produced the Act of the Scottish parliament ratifying his position as regent. The day after Mary’s representatives withdrew, Moray once again produced ‘a small gilt coffer, of not fully a foot long’. The Casket Letters were read and dutifully copied – with the occasional mistakes and mistranslations into English – by Cecil’s clerks. Moray produced the depositions of Hay, Powry and Dalgleish and a ‘writing signed by Macgill’ in which Mary agreed to her abduction by Bothwell. The Bishop of Ross protested violently at this presentation of unsupported evidence, produced either by torture or, at least, the threat of torture, but Morton solemnly swore to his story of finding the casket. Moray, having agreed with this version, swore that the letters were genuine and in the ‘said Queen’s proper hand write’. Further verification was sought by comparing the letters with some of Mary’s extant writings, but it proved inconclusive since there were no handwriting experts present. The commissioners had no intention of reaching a conclusion without firm guidance from Elizabeth, who would neither give a judgment, nor meet with Mary until she had heard Mary’s case in full. Mary refused to declare herself or to meet anyone but Elizabeth in person. Elizabeth’s Tudor temper was becoming overstretched and she insisted that either Mary responded herself in writing or
‘answered some nobleman whom the Queen shall send or the Queen must deem her culpable’. The stalemate seemed unbreakable since Mary’s intransigence meant that she could no longer appear to deny Moray’s accusations, which would then be liable to acceptance. Elizabeth, however, would not accept them without more evidence and knew that since her cousin refused to appear before anyone but herself, the matter could not be resolved. And she herself could not be forced into taking any action.

Lethington and the Bishop of Ross continued to meet with Norfolk, ostensibly to go on hawking expeditions, occasionally pressing the idea of the marriage to Mary, even considering the espousal of Norfolk’s daughter, Margaret, to the infant James VI. While they made efforts to keep the plan secret, especially from Elizabeth, ‘a bruit ran among men of note’ with Throckmorton and Leicester lending their weight to this scheme, while it seemed that no one bothered to consult Mary as to her next bedfellow.

Lethington made a subtle proposition to break the logjam, whereby Mary would acknowledge her abdication as only a demission of the throne in favour of James, so that she could still continue as queen while he was accepted as king, but should he predecease her then she would be restored to her full state. Sadly, nothing came of this elegant proposal. Mary’s answer to Moray’s ‘eik’ was, with more than a little reason behind it, to ‘charge them [Mary’s accusers] as authors, inventors and doers of the said crime that they would impute to us’. Cecil, meanwhile, wrote himself more lengthy memos of how Mary might be kept in England – ‘a lawful prisoner’.

Knollys pleaded with Mary to yield to Elizabeth’s requests that she appear before Moray and the English commissioners. Mary simply replied, ‘I am not an equal to my rebels, neither will I submit myself to be weighed in equal balance with them.’ This is almost a parallel to the defence put forward by her grandson Charles I, who stated that since he, as king, had no peers, no one could legally try him. The eventual outcome was the same in both cases.

Also in December 1568, Mary unwisely wrote to an unidentified correspondent to ‘assemble our friends, my subjects – proclaim and hold a parliament, if you may’. This was unwise since the letter, like most of her private correspondence, was intercepted by Cecil and forwarded to Moray. On another occasion, on 10 January, her messenger Thomas Kerr was intercepted at Berwick by the commander Lord Hudson with ‘matter worth the knowing’, but his secrets remain a mystery.