The next indication of date is in paragraphs 7, 8. Paragraph 7 ends: ‘The morne I wil speik to him upon this point’ (part of the affair of Hiegait); paragraph 8 is written on the following day: ‘As to the rest of Willie Hiegait’s, he’ (Darnley) ‘confessit it, bot it was the morne efter my cumming or he did it.’ The English is, ‘The rest as [to?] Wille Hiegait [he?] hath confessed, but it was the next day that he’ (Darnley) ‘came hither,’ that is, came so far on in his confession. Paragraph 8, therefore, tells the results of that examination of Darnley, which Mary promised at the end of paragraph 7 to make ‘to-morrow.’ We are now in a new day, January 22, at night.
But, while paragraphs 9, 10, 11 (about 500 words) intervene, paragraph 12 opens thus, ‘This is my first journey’ (day’s work); ‘I will end to-morrow. I write all, of how little consequence so ever it be, to the end you may take of the whole that shall be best for your purpose. I do here a work that I hate much, but I had begun it this morning.’[339]
Here, then, after 500 words confessedly written on her second night, Mary says that this is her first day’s work. The natural theory is that here we detect clumsy dovetailing by a forger, who has cut a genuine letter into pieces, and inserted false matter. But another explanation may be suggested. Mary, on her first night, did not really stop at paragraph 7: ‘I will talk to him to-morrow on that point.’ These words happened to come at the foot of her sheet of paper. She took up another fresh page, and wrote on, ‘This is my first journey ...’ down to ‘I had begun it this morning.’ Then she stopped and went to bed. Next night (January 22) she took up the same sheet or page as she had written three sentences on, the evening before, but she took it up on the clean side, and did not observe her words ‘This is my first journey.... I had begun it this morning’ till she finished, and turned over the clean side. She then probably ran her pen lightly across the now inappropriate words, written on the previous night, ‘This is my first journey,’ as she erased lines in her draft for a sonnet in the Bodleian Library.[340] The words, as in the case of the sonnet in the Bodleian, remained perfectly legible, and the translators—not intelligent men—included them in their versions.
The letter should run from paragraph 7, ‘I will talk to him to-morrow upon that point’ to paragraph 12, ‘This is my first journey.... I had begun it this morning.’ Then back to paragraph 8, ‘As to the rest of Willie Hiegait’s,’ and so straight on, merely omitting the words written on the previous night, ‘This is my first journey, ... but I had begun it this morning.’
Mary’s mistake in taking for virgin a piece of paper which really had writing on the verso, must have occurred to most people: certainly it has often occurred to myself.
There is one objection to this theory. In paragraph 25, at the end of the letter, Mary apologises for having written part of a letter on a sheet containing the memoranda, or list of topics, which, as we saw, she began by writing. She says, in Scots, ‘Excuse that thing that is scriblit’ (MS. C,[341] ‘barbulzeit’) ‘for I had na paper yesterday quhan I wrait that of ye memoriall.’ The English runs, ‘Excuse also that I scribbled, for I had yesternight no paper when I took the paper of a memorial.’
Now the part of Mary’s letter which is on the same paper as the ‘memorial,’ or scribbled list of topics, must have been written, not ‘yesternight,’ but ‘to-night’ (on the night of January 22), unless she is consciously writing in the early morning, after 12 P.M., January 22; in the ‘wee sma’ hours ayont the twal’,’ of January 23: which does not seem probable.
If this however meets the objection indicated, the chronology of the letter is consistent; it is of the night of January 21, and the night of January 22, including some time past midnight. The apparent breaks or ‘faults,’ then, are not the result of clumsy dovetailing by a forger, but are the consequence of a mere ordinary accident in Mary’s selection of sheets of paper.
We now come to the objections based on Crawford’s Deposition. Of Letter II., as we have it, paragraph 2, in some degree, and paragraphs 6 (from ‘Ye ask me quhat I mene be the crueltie’), 7, 9, 10, and parts of 21 also exist, with, in many places, verbal correspondence in phrase, in another shape. The correspondence of phrase, above all in 6, is usually with the Scots translation, sometimes, on the other hand, with the English. Consequently, as will be seen on comparison of the Scots Letter II. with this other form of part of its contents, these two texts have a common source and cannot be independent.[342] This new form is contained in a Deposition, made on oath by a gentleman, a retainer of Lennox, named Thomas Crawford, the very man who met Mary outside Glasgow (Letter II. 2). He had attended Darnley in Glasgow, and had received from Darnley, and written, a verbatim report of his discussions with Mary. Crawford was therefore brought forward, by the accusers, on December 9, 1568, before the Commission of Inquiry at Westminster. The object was to prove that no one alive but Mary could have written Letter II., because she, and she only, could know the nature of her private talk with her husband, as reported in Letter II., and, therefore, no one could have forged the Letter in which that talk was recorded. Providentially, however, Darnley had informed Crawford about those private talks, and here was Crawford, to corroborate Letter II.
But it escaped the notice of the accusers that all the world, or all whom Crawford chose to inform as to what Darnley told him about these conversations, might know the details of the talk even better than Mary herself. For the precise words would fade from Mary’s memory, whereas Crawford, as he swore, had written them down at once, as reported to him by Darnley, probably as soon as Mary left his sick-room. The written copy by Crawford must have preserved the words with fidelity beyond that of human memory, and the written words were in the custody of Crawford, or of Lennox, so long as they chose to keep the manuscript. This fact is proved on Crawford’s oath. On December 9, 1568, before the Commissioners, he swore that, when with Darnley, in Glasgow, in January, 1567, ‘he was secretly informed by the King of all things which had passed betwixt the said Queen and the King, ... to the intent that he should report the same to the Earl of Lennox, his Master, and that he did, immediately at the same time, write the same word by word as near as he could possibly carry the same away.’ He was certain that his report of Mary’s words to himself, ‘the words now reported in his writing,’ ‘are the very same words, on his conscience, that were spoken,’ while Darnley’s reports of Mary’s talk (also contained in Crawford’s written deposition) are the same in effect, ‘though not percase in all parts the very words themselves.’[343]