Mary Queen of Scots (71 page)

20 Her Privy Letters

The conference of York, which opened in October 1568, was remarkable from the first for the confusion of aims among its participants. Elizabeth had already left conflicting impressions upon Mary and the Scottish nobles as to what she regarded the desirable outcome of this conference to be. Their own intentions were equally at variance. Of those present, only Moray was able to show true singleness of purpose, in that he intended to prove the queen of Scotland’s guilt up to the hilt in order to prevent her return north; with this object in view he officially took custody from Morton of the debatable ‘privy letters’ in their silver casket on 16 September, before setting out for England. However, the incriminating documents had signally increased from the solitary letter of Lennox’s supplication, and the briefly mentioned
litterae
of Buchanan’s June
Book of Articles.
They were now named in the receipt as ‘missive letters, contracts or obligations for marriage, sonnets or love-ballads, and all other letters contained therein’.
¹
Buchanan’s English translation of his
Articles
, prepared at the end of September for use in front of the commission, also contained an additional long postscript on the specific subject of the letters, in contrast to the single phrase used three months earlier.

Moray’s supporters were much less single-minded than their chief in their aims; Maitland in particular still dangled after his old scheme of Anglo-Scottish union, in which a restored Mary could play her part. Nor were Mary’s own commissioners, including John Leslie, bishop of Ross, and Lord Herries, as resolute in their determination to prove her innocence as was the queen herself; having lived through the troubled times of the queen’s marriage to Bothwell, they conceived their role as rather to
secure some sort of compromise by which Mary could be brought back to Scotland, than to shout out Queen Mary’s freedom from guilt from the house-tops. As for the English ‘judges’, the earl of Sussex, Sir Ralph Sadler and the duke of Norfolk, it soon transpired that they too were not immune to private considerations. Norfolk had recently been widowed; he was England’s leading noble, and himself a Protestant, although he had many Catholic relations; the queen of Scots was now generally regarded as once more marriageable, despite the fact that divorce from Bothwell was not yet secured, and Norfolk’s name had been mentioned in this context, even before the opening of the conference. As a ‘judge’, therefore, Norfolk might be supposed to be somewhat
parti pris.

Under these circumstances, it was hardly surprising that the conference at York seemed at first to achieve but little. On 11 October Moray decided to make a bold essay to resolve matters. Copies of the ‘privy letters’ were secretly shown to the English commissioners. Maitland, however, seems to have leaked the news to Mary’s own commissioners for the next day they rode over to Bolton and informed her of this development, although they had not actually seen the letters themselves. Moray was still acting cautiously: Norfolk reported back to London that the letters had not been shown to them officially as commissioners, but merely ‘for our better instruction’.
²
Moray asked Norfolk to find out how Elizabeth would react to the letters, and whether they would be considered sufficient proof to condemn the queen of Scots of murder. Despite the judicial irregularity of Moray’s behaviour, Norfolk professed himself to be horrified by the contents of the letters; although he had only seen copies, he expressed the view that so many letters could hardly be counterfeited; in asking Elizabeth’s advice on how to proceed next, he gave the opinion that conviction of the Scottish queen would scarcely be avoided, if indeed the letters were written in her own hand.

Elizabeth’s reaction to this communication was to send for the whole conference to start again at Westminster. It was felt that away from the frenetic atmosphere which seemed to have developed at York, calmer counsels might prevail, and some solid solution emerge from out of this morass in which, as Sussex truly pointed out, the crown of Scotland was being tossed about on wave after wave of private feud and interest. Elizabeth was as yet unaware that only five days after Norfolk wrote in such shocked terms concerning Mary’s letters, he had had some private conference with Maitland in which it seems likely that Maitland held out to him the bait of Mary’s hand in marriage. From Maitland’s point of view, the marriage of Mary with a leading English Protestant noble was
an excellent step forward in his plans. It had been suggested that at this point Maitland must also have revealed to Norfolk that the so-called Casket Letters were not all they seemed, and that the allegations against Mary as a murderess were not really to be taken too seriously. After all, in this strange quasi-judicial world of a trial which was not a trial, guilt might also be considered non-guilt. At all events, Norfolk now allowed himself to be involved secretly in certain schemes for a marriage between himself and Mary.

Sussex, another English commissioner, did not seem to take the letters particularly seriously himself. In a letter back to London, he neatly summed up the course future developments might be expected to take, if Mary was allowed to appear before the tribunal at Westminster:
³
she would obviously deny the authenticity of the letters
in toto
as a result of which she could never be convicted on their evidence; after this Elizabeth would be compelled to acquit her, and set her free. If on the other hand, Mary was not allowed to appear personally, the whole matter could probably be ‘huddled up’ with some show of saving Mary’s honour, and yet without exposing the Scottish lords as forgers; after this Mary could still be kept in prison. It was a shrewd summary, and with its emphasis on the need to prevent Mary making a personal appearance at Westminster, a prophetic one. Knollys, from Bolton, put his finger on the same urgent necessity to condemn Mary somehow or other, if she was to be kept in captivity: he could not see how Elizabeth could with honour and safety detain Mary, unless she was utterly disgraced to the world and ‘the contrary party [Moray] thoroughly maintained’.

Knollys’s solution to the problem of Mary was to marry her off to his wife’s nephew, and Queen Elizabeth’s own cousin, young George Carey, Lord Hunsdon’s son. This handsome young man had called on Mary at Bolton in September, on his way north to join his father, the newly appointed governor of Berwick. The visit was probably prompted by Knollys’s match-making. Carey was courteously received by Mary, although her mind seems to have been more on politics than on dalliance: she spent most of their conversations retailing to him a list of messages to give to his father about border matters, where conditions were by now exceptionally turbulent, as always during a period of governmental unrest in Scotland. Mary was still blithely unaware of the cool conclusions which Sussex had drawn concerning the paramount need to prevent her appearing personally in London. To Cassillis in Scotland she wrote quite confidently on 23 October of the ‘good procedure’ at York where nothing had been proved against her. At first puzzled by the transference of the
conference, she then consoled herself with the thought that from the first she had always wanted Elizabeth to take personal control of the whole matter, and now she was achieving her wish. Her letter to Elizabeth of 22 October was a model of docility: ‘Since you, my good sister, know our cause best, we doubt not to receive presently good end thereof; where through we may be perpetually indebted to you.’
⁴

The commission of Westminster opened officially on 25 November. It was a considerably enlarged body from that of the three commissioners at York, and now included both Leicester and Cecil. Shortly before its opening, on hearing that Elizabeth was constantly receiving her rival plaintiff Moray into her presence, Mary wrote commandingly to her own commissioners saying that they were on no account to take part in the conference if she Mary were not allowed to attend it on exactly the same footing as Moray; nevertheless she still does not seem to have believed that this right could actually be denied to her throughout the proceedings.
⁵
On 29 November, Moray presented his ‘Eik’ or list of accusations, followed by the presentation of a personal accusation by Lennox. It was not, however, until 1 December that Mary’s commissioners put in their first protest, that Mary also should be allowed formal access to the court, since Moray was personally appearing in it; they demanded that Mary should be allowed to speak in her own defence in front of the English Council and the foreign ambassadors. Elizabeth, however, refused the request on the ingenious grounds that no proofs had as yet been shown against Mary (the Casket Letters had not yet been produced in court); there was therefore no point in her appearing at this juncture, when as far as Elizabeth knew, it might never be found necessary at all, and Mary might be able to be declared innocent
in absentia.
Winter had come early that year. Thick snow piled the ground between London and distant Bolton, 250 miles and days of hard riding away. Mary’s enforced isolation proved once more a disastrous hindrance to her cause. For without consulting her, her commissioners continued to try and bring about some sort of compromise to restore her to Scotland, in spite of the fact that Moray in his Eik had openly accused the queen of murder. They thus acted in direct contradiction of Mary’s specific instructions to break off from the conference if she personally was not allowed to appear on the same terms as Moray: ‘since they have free access to accuse us’.

On 6 December Mary’s emissions made their first protest on the subject; but the English still retained the Marian commissioners within the conference, by the expedient of arguing over the conditions of withdrawal. Moray was now asked to produce additional proofs to his Eik; he
exhibited the December 1567 Act of Parliament, and Buchanan’s
Book of Articles.
Finally, on 7 December the casket itself was produced by Moray and his supporters in front of Mary’s own commissioners. According to the Journal of the Commission for that day, the tribunal saw ‘a small gilded coffer not fully one foot long, being garnished in many places with the Roman letter F. set under a royal crown’.
⁶
The circumstances of its finding, outlined earlier in Chapter 18, were now solemnly declared by Morton. Before the casket’s contents were exhibited, however, the tribunal were shown two marriage contracts which were not included in it: after this the first two letters from the casket were produced. The next day seven letters out of the casket were displayed, all said to be in French, written in the Roman hand. The English tribunal, according to their account, duly had the letters copied out for themselves, collated the copies with the originals, and then, at Moray’s own request, handed him back the originals. This done, Moray produced the cases against Bothwell’s servants, Hepburn, Hay, Powrie and Dalgleish, including their depositions.

The next day, 9 December, while Mary’s commissioners made renewed attempts to withdraw from the conference, which had for them become a travesty of justice, since they were not even admitted to the proceedings, the tribunal continued to examine the copies of the letters they had taken and the sonnets ‘written in French, being duly translated into English’. Morton made a further official declaration about the finding of the casket, and the evidence of Darnley’s servant Nelson, and one of Lennox’s servants, Thomas Crawford, was also produced. It was now decided to enlarge the tribunal still further with other leading English nobles including Northumberland, Westmoreland and Shrewsbury. On 14 December the new tribunal was given a
resumé
of proceedings up to date. In the meantime Elizabeth gave Mary at Bolton three choices: she could answer the accusations through her own commissioners, in writing herself, or personally to some English nobles sent expressly to Bolton for that purpose. To all these alternatives Mary returned an indignant negative: she could hardly be expected to answer accusations based on evidence she was not allowed to see, or surrender the traditional right of the prisoner to face her accusers. But Elizabeth said that if Mary refused these three alternatives: ‘it will be thought as much as she were culpable’.
⁷

At last Mary was beginning to have some inkling of the treacherous nature of the quagmire into which she had so unwarily walked. Her frantic state of mind at this point, cut off at Bolton, dependent on slow-moving letters for news from London, may be judged from her letter to the earl of Mar in Scotland, in which she begs him to guard the infant James well at
Stirling, and not allow him to be either brought by agreement to England, or snatched away from him by surprise: Mary adds a postscript in her own hand, reminding Mar that when she handed her son over to him,
‘comme mon plus cher joiau’
, he promised never to hand him over to another without the queen’s consent.
⁸
On 19 December she belatedly drew up her own Eik for the accusation of Moray, presented on 25 December. Naturally she waxed especially furious over the accusation that she had planned the death of her own child to follow that of his father: the nobles ‘cover themselves thereanent with a wet sack; and that calumny should suffice for proof and inquisition of all the rest; for the natural love of a mother towards her bairn confounds them’. Beyond that Mary dwelt on her previous troubles with the lords – the murder of Riccio when they would have ‘slain the mother and the bairn both when he was in our womb’, and the manifest illegality of Moray’s regency.
⁹