Mary Queen of Scots (74 page)

Letter VI
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is ostensibly written from Stirling where Mary went on 22 April to visit Prince James. It was on her return journey that she was abducted by Bothwell, and the letter is thus endorsed: ‘From Stirling before the ravishment – proves her mask [pretence] of ravishing.’ It exists in the contemporary French copy, and the English translation among the Cecil MSS at Hatfield House. Once again this love letter contains many internal references which make it impossible to have come from the pen of Mary. The external theme of jealousy on the part of the other woman for her rival is once again present: Bothwell is accused of having ‘two strings to his bow’, and Huntly is once more described as ‘your false brother-in-law’ who has come to the writer and warned her that Bothwell will never marry her ‘since being married you did carry me away’. Yet Huntly at this point had just signed the Ainslie bond, backing Bothwell’s marriage to the queen, and he certainly never seems to have been morally troubled by the abduction in any way. Furthermore, the other woman repeatedly reproaches Bothwell with being a negligent suitor, who has promised to resolve everything, but in fact:
‘Vous n’en avez rien fait.
’ Yet Bothwell in April 1567, as far as Mary was concerned, was a man of consummate vigour and resource, as the organization of the Ainslie bond itself goes to prove. Clearly the lords were struck by the coincidence of the phrases concerning Bothwell carrying his mistress away, referring in fact to some other earlier adventure, and adapted the letter to their own purposes.

There is, however, one interesting point to note about the contemporary copies of this letter: the original French copy at Hatfield is in an italic hand, in contrast to the ‘secretary’ hand of all the other copies. This hand, while clearly distinguishable from Mary’s on close inspection (the c’s and
d’s are completely different, the writing is smaller and neater), is nevertheless of the same Roman type, and might even be taken for it at a quick glance, particularly by a group of men used to dealing with a very different type of hand-writing. Why should this one letter survive in the Roman hand? No explanation has ever been offered. But its existence does seem to argue that it may quite possibly be one of the original Casket Letters, masquerading as a clerk’s copy; perhaps the prudent Cecil took one of the originals away with him, in place of a copy, as a piece of wise reinsurance bearing in mind always Queen Mary’s close relationship to the English throne, which might at any minute, by the premature death of Elizabeth, make her his sovereign. The fact that the twenty-two documents had mysteriously sunk to twenty-one by the time they were handed over to Morton in 1571 may be explained by this piece of abstraction, which was not noticed at the time.

It is a fascinating, if speculative, thought. If this Hatfield letter is accepted as one of the original documents shown to the English tribunal, it still leaves us no nearer knowing whether this Roman hand was that of a Scottish forger, or that of the other woman, who, being brought up on the Continent, happened to write in very much the same manner as Mary herself. The Hatfield group of Casket documents were only discovered at Hatfield House in 1870 by Mr R. Gunton, private secretary and later librarian to the 3rd marquess of Salisbury. They were first published in the Calendar of the Historical Manuscripts Commission in 1883. If any further copies of the text were ever discovered in French, in this same handwriting, akin to Mary’s but not hers, or in any other Roman hand, fresh light might yet be cast on the whole complicated subject of the Casket Letters.

Letters VII and VIII,
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for which no contemporary copies exist, are like Letter VI supposed to have been written from Stirling during the day and two nights Mary spent there before her abduction. Letter VII has a genuine Marian ring: the tone is regal in contrast to the self-abasement of the others, and Bothwell is here addressed very much as the faithful servant – the role which he occupied also to outward eyes in April 1567. If Letter VII is accepted in its entirety as being written by Mary from Stirling, then it certainly proves that she had foreknowledge of the abduction. Mary writes that she leaves ‘the place and the time’ to Bothwell. As for marrying her afterwards, Mary believes that Bothwell will deserve a pardon for his behaviour through ‘your services and the lang amities … if above the duty of an subject you advance yourself’, especially if he gives as his motive the need to preserve the queen from a foreign marriage. This need to save
her from the arms of a foreign-born prince was one of the arguments Mary always gave afterwards for believing that Bothwell was the nobles’ own choice of consort. This letter also stresses another point on which Mary was known to be anxiously concerned at the time: Bothwell is firmly adjured to make sure of the support of the lords, and to take particular trouble to smooth down Maitland (Bothwell’s known antagonist). This eminently practical letter, which Bothwell would have good reason to preserve among his most important papers, lest he could be accused of treason in that he had abducted the queen against her will, is another possible candidate for the queen’s incriminating ‘privy letters’ which the lords might have discovered in the summer of 1567.

Letter VIII, on the other hand, although also said to have been written from Stirling, must have been written by Mary at some other date, since it refers to Huntly as ‘your brother-in-law that was’. The divorce of Bothwell and Jean Gordon did not take place until after the abduction; at Stirling Huntly was still very much Bothwell’s brother-in-law; it was a mistake which Mary could not possibly have made. Letter VIII is once more a Marian letter, calm, without words of passion, warning Bothwell of various problems, and hoping in unemotional terms to see him soon: ‘pray God send us an happy interview shortly’. The letter would seem to have been written to Bothwell some time after their marriage, the most likely date, as Dr Armstrong-Davison suggests, being 8 June when Bothwell had gone to Melrose to raise help against the rebels, and Mary was in Edinburgh. It won a place in the dossier, however, through the wording of this passage: ‘there be many folks here, and among others the Earl of Sutherland who would rather die, considering the good they have so lately received of me, than suffer me to be carried away’. Although the apprehensions of the ‘folks’ applied to Mary’s probable fate at the hands of her rebels, the lords tried to interpret the words as applying once more to the abduction, ignoring the erroneous description of Huntly.

The twelve love sonnets, as they were termed, consist in fact of one long love poem of twelve verses. We are dependent on the published French and published Scottish versions for their text, since no contemporary copies have survived.
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Brantôme and Ronsard, who both had intimate knowledge of Mary’s earlier verses, indignantly denied that these poems could have been by Mary Stuart. These long rather turgid verses are certainly remarkably unlike Mary’s known poetic efforts, her early simple poems and her later more complicated poetry, which tends to be extremely courtly in phrase and analogy, as might be expected from the atmosphere of the High Renaissance in which she had been educated. But style
apart, these verses contain sufficient material to convince one once more that they are the works of the other woman. This unhappy poetess has abandoned all her relatives and friends for her lover, unlike Mary who neither did nor was asked to do any such thing. There are references also to Bothwell’s wealth, which were unthinkable for Mary to make. To her, Bothwell was a comparatively poor man, who had to be subsidized with grants of money from their earliest meeting; it was she who encouraged the profitable Gordon marriage on his behalf, and finally she gave him grants of money after their marriage. Furthermore, the habitual theme of jealousy pervades the whole long poem. The only lines in the total of 158 which might seem to apply to Mary, and Mary only, are those in which she describes how she has subjected herself, her son, her country and her subjects to Bothwell:

Apart from the fact that Mary neither placed nor tried to place James in Bothwell’s hands (it was a favourite accusation of her enemies but untrue: throughout the Bothwell marriage he remained in the care of the earl of Mar), the third line has an odd ring, as if the words
‘mes subjects’
(so pointedly applicable to Mary, so inapplicable to any other woman) had somehow been substituted for another shorter word in a line which already ended
‘mon ame assujetie’: ‘mon coeur’
, for example, fits the rhythm much better. Although erasions and substitutions are impossible to describe with any certainty in a poem of which only a published version survives, the natural inference is that here once again the interpolator has been at work. In order to apply a melancholy rather verbose love poem to the particular case of the queen of Scots and Bothwell, the interpolator has altered one small word – not difficult to do – on the same principle as the words ‘From Glasgow this Saturday morning’ were added to the head of Letter I, to adapt it to the fatal fetching of Darnley.

There remain the two marriage contracts which the lords produced. One of these, in French, is a manuscript from among the Cotton MSS in the British Museum.
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It has been argued in the past that this is the original document, which was somehow never redelivered to Moray, using the previously cited alteration in the number of documents handed over to Morton in 1571. But the Journal of the Commission specified that this contract was ‘written in a Roman hand in French’
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; unless the Journal was
mistaken, the Cotton contract cannot possibly be the original, since it is in an Elizabethan not Roman hand, whose salient feature is the thick backward strokes given to certain letters. Moreover, the signature M
ARIE
R at the end of the contract is a manifest forgery, if indeed this is the original contract shown to the tribunal. The most marked characteristic of Mary Stuart’s signature, seen on letters and documents throughout her life, is the even level of all the letters, including the first letter M; there is sometimes a slight rise in the level of the word towards the end, on the R or I, but M is never of greater height than the A: The Cotton signature on the other hand is conspicuous for its capital M, which is twice the height of the other letters.

The lords themselves exhibited this French contract with some doubts and the explanation: ‘although some words therein seem to the contrary, they suppose [the contract] to have been made and written by her before the death of her husband’. Certainly some words do seem to the contrary, for the queen specifically refers in the text to ‘my late husband Henry Stuart called Darnley’, before declaring herself once more free to marry, in consequence of which she chooses Bothwell. If an original French contract in her own hand-writing, signed by her, did ever exist, this might well have been a document written and signed by the queen at Dunbar at Bothwell’s dictation, shortly after her abduction; in which case, Bothwell would certainly have preserved it among his papers. The absence of any date would be explained by the fact that the lords lopped it off, thus optimistically hoping to incriminate the queen by pretending the contract had been signed before Darnley’s death, despite the wording of the contract which states to the contrary. The fact that Mary, in the contract, says that she makes her promise to marry Bothwell ‘without constraint’ does seem, on the principle of
qui s’excuse s’accuse
, to suggest that this document was drawn up at Dunbar.

The second contract does not survive in a contemporary copy but was printed by Buchanan.
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It is said to be a marriage contract signed on 5 April at Seton, between Mary and Bothwell, at a time when he was not yet ‘cleansed’ of Darnley’s murder. It is a long document in official language, quite unlike the other contract, said to have been witnessed by Huntly and Thomas Hepburn, parson of Oldamstock: the fact that Huntly should have witnessed such a contract made nonsense of many of the other letters, but these details were obviously considered unimportant. It is reminiscent of Queen Mary’s actual wedding contract, signed on 14 May, and binds the queen to marry Bothwell, rather than some foreign prince, once Dame Jean Gordon, his ‘pretended spouse’, shall have been
removed from his matrimonial path. Although Mary, Bothwell and Huntly were all at Seton on 5 April, it seems highly unlikely that she would have signed such a document before Bothwell had been divorced. It has been suggested that the clerk, as sometimes happens with official documents, mistook the month, and this contract really dated from 5 May, when marriage preparations were very much under way. If this coincidence is dismissed, the most likely explanation of the contract is that Bothwell and Huntly drew it up at Seton, but only presented it to the queen for signature at Dunbar nineteen days later; otherwise her signature might have been quite plainly forged, as on the copy – this being impossible to tell without a sight of the original document.

So much for the Casket Letters on which Mary’s reputation was so thoroughly blasted in later centuries, although Queen Elizabeth herself understandably found nothing in them which was proof against her dearest sister. Compounded of Bothwell’s previous love letters, some textual interpretations from other letters and a certain amount of inexpert forgery, all glossed over by a great deal of optimistic explanation on the part of the lords who presented them, they were certainly never intended to be exposed to the fierce glare of criticism and discussion which has been directed on to them ever since. The intensity of this discussion results from the fact that they are the only direct proof – inadequate as they are – of Mary’s adultery with Bothwell before Darnley’s death. Yet a rational consideration of the letters, in so far as is possible from mere copies, shows that at most Mary can be accused of two ‘crimes’, neither of them anything like as serious as the murder of her husband. In the first place it is likely that she induced Darnley to leave Glasgow for Edinburgh with the promise of resuming physical relations with him once he was cured of his pox; but this does not in itself constitute a proof of adultery with Bothwell, and Mary’s partisans might even point out in her defence that there was no proof that she would not have implemented her promise if Darnley had lived. Secondly, and much more cogently, she can be accused of foreknowledge of her own abduction by Bothwell. Once more this is not criminal so much as unwise behaviour and has no specific bearing on the death of Darnley six weeks earlier. It reflects much more acutely on Mary’s total inability at this point to deal with the internal politics of Scotland without leaning on some sort of support, and in the event she chose the wrong sort of support. These aspects of Mary Stuart’s behaviour in the first half of 1567 are certainly not enough to brand her as a murderess or even as a scarlet woman, deserving the vengeance of society.