Letter II
Round this long Letter, of more than 3,000 words, the Marian controversy has raged most fiercely. Believing that they had demonstrated its lack of authenticity, the Queen’s defenders have argued that the charges against her must be false. A criminal charge, supported by evidence deliberately contaminated, falls to the ground. But we cannot really argue thus: the Queen may have been guilty, even if her foes perjured themselves on certain points, in their desire to fortify their case. Yet the objections to Letter II. are certainly many and plausible.
1. While the chronology of ‘Cecil’s Journal’ was accepted, the Letter could not be regarded as genuine. We have shown, however, that by rectifying the dates of the accusers, the external chronology of the Letter can be made to harmonise with real time.
2. The existence of another long letter, never produced (the letter cited by Moray and Lennox) was another source of suspicion. While we had only Moray’s account of the letter in July 1567, and while Lennox’s version of about the same date in 1568 was still unknown, Mr. Hosack argued thus: ‘What is the obvious and necessary inference? Is it not that the forgers, in the first instance, drew up a letter couched in far stronger terms than that which they eventually produced?’ ‘Whenever,’ says Robertson, ‘a paper is forged with a particular intention, the eagerness of the forger to establish the point in view, his solicitude to cut off all doubts and cavils, and to avoid any appearance of uncertainty, seldom fail of prompting him to use expressions the most explicit and full to his purpose.’ ‘In writing this passage, we could well imagine,’ says Mr. Hosack, ‘that the historian had his eye on the Simancas’ (Moray’s) ‘description of the Glasgow Letter (II.), but he never saw it.... We must assume that, upon consideration, the letter described by Moray, which seems to have been the first draft of the forgery, was withdrawn, and another substituted in its place.’[336] This reasoning, of course, is reinforced by the discovery of Lennox’s account of the Letter. But Mr. Hosack overlooked a possibility. The Lords may have, originally, after they captured the Casket, forged the Letter spoken of by Moray and Lennox. But they may actually have discovered Letter II., and, on reflection, may have produced that, or a garbled form of that, and suppressed the forgery. To Letter II. they may have added ‘substantious clauses,’ but if any of it is genuine, it is compromising.
3. One of the internal difficulties is more apparent than real. It turns on the internal chronology, which seems quite impossible and absurd, and must, it is urged, be the result of treacherous dovetailing. The circumstance that Crawford, a retainer of Lennox, was put forward at the Westminster Commission, in December, 1568, to corroborate part of the Letter makes a real difficulty. He declared that Darnley had reported to him the conversations between himself and the Queen, described by Mary, in Letter II., and that he wrote down Darnley’s words ‘immediately, at the time,’ for the use of Lennox. But Crawford proved too much. His report was, partly, an English translation of the Scots translation of the French of the Letter. Therefore he either took his corroborative evidence from the Letter, or the Letter was in part based on Crawford’s report, and therefore was forged. Bresslau, Cardauns, Philippson, Mr. Hosack, and Sir John Skelton adopted the latter alternative. The Letter, they say, was forged, in part, on Crawford’s report.
4. The contents of the Letter are alien to Mary’s character and style: incoherent, chaotic, out of keeping.
We take these objections in the order indicated. First, as to the internal dates of the Letter. These are certainly impossible. Is this the result of clumsy dovetailing by a forger?
There is no date of day of the month or week, but the Letter was clearly begun on the night of Mary’s arrival in Glasgow (by our theory, January 21). Unless it was finished in the night of January 22, and sent off on January 23, it cannot be genuine: cannot have reached Bothwell in time. We are to suppose that, on sitting down to write, Mary made, first, a list of twelve heads of her discourse, on a separate sheet of paper, and then began her epistle on another sheet. Through paragraphs 1, 2, 3,[337] she followed the sequence of her notes of heads, and began paragraph 4, ‘The King sent for Joachim’ (one of her servants) ‘yesternicht, and asked why I lodged not beside him.’[338]
If this means that Mary was in Glasgow on the day before she began writing, the dates cannot be made to harmonise with facts. For her first night of writing must then be January 22, her second January 23; Bothwell, therefore, cannot receive the letter till January 24, on which day he went to Liddesdale, and Paris, the bearer, declared that he gave the letter to Bothwell the day before he rode to Liddesdale.
The answer is obvious. Joachim probably reached Glasgow on the day before Mary’s arrival, namely on January 20. It was usual to send the royal beds, carpets, tapestries, and ‘cloth of State’ in front of the travelling prince, to make the rooms ready before he came. Joachim would arrive with the upholstery a day in advance of Mary. Therefore, on her first night, January 21, she can speak of what the King said to Joachim ‘yesterday.’