Plate B A

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EXAMPLES OF MARY’S HAND

In one some parts are not genuine, but imitated

The text is Mary to Elizabeth, B. Museum, Calig. C.I. Number 421 in Bain. Calendar II. p. 659 (1900)

As to problems of handwriting, they are notoriously obscure, and the evidence of experts, in courts of justice, is apt to be conflicting. The testimony in the case of Captain Dreyfus cannot yet have been forgotten. In Plates BA, AB the reader will find a genuine letter of Mary to Elizabeth, and a copy in which some of the lines are not her own, but have been imitated for the purpose of showing what can be done in that way. ‘The puzzle is’ to discover which example is entirely by the Queen, and which is partly in imitation of her hand. In Plate F is an imitation of Mary’s hand, as it might have appeared in writing Letter VIII (Henderson’s Letter III.). An imitator as clever as Mr. F. Compton Price (who has kindly supplied these illustrations) would easily have deceived the crowd of Lords who were present at the comparison of the Casket Letters with genuine epistles of Mary to Elizabeth.

Scotland, in that age, was rich in ‘fause notaries’ who made a profession of falsification. In the Burgh Records of Edinburgh, just before Mary’s fall, we find a surgeon rewarded for healing two false notaries, whose right hands had been chopped off at the wrists. (Also for raising up a dead woman who had been buried for two days.) But these professionals were probably versed only in native forms of handwriting, whereas that of Mary, as of Bothwell, was the new ‘Roman’ hand. An example of Mary Beaton’s Roman hand is given in Plate C. Probably she had the same writing-master as her Queen, in France, but her hand is much neater and smaller than that of Mary, wearied with her vast correspondence. Probably Mary Beaton, if she chose, could imitate the Queen’s hand, especially as that hand was, before the Queen had written so much. The ‘Maries’ of Mary Stuart, Mary Beaton, and Mary Flemyng are all very similar. But to a layman, Mary Beaton’s hand seems rather akin to that of the copyist of the Sonnets in the Cambridge MSS. (Plate A). The aunts of Mary Beaton, Lady Reres and the Lady of Branxholme, were, after April 1567, on the worst terms with the Queen, railing at her both in talk and in letters. But that Mary Beaton forged the Casket Letters I utterly disbelieve.

Kirkcaldy, whose signature is given, could not have adapted fingers hardened by the sword-hilt to a lady’s Roman hand. Maitland of Lethington, whose signature follows Kirkcaldy’s, would have found the task less impossible, and, if there is any truth in Camden’s anecdote, may perhaps have been able to imitate the Queen’s writing. But if any forged letters or portions of letters were exhibited, some unheard-of underling is most likely to have been the actual culprit.

Plate C