LETTER V

On the night of April 19, 1567, Bothwell obtained the signatures of many nobles to ‘Ainslie’s Band,’ as it is called, a document urging Mary to marry Bothwell.[365] On Monday, April 21, Mary went to Stirling, to see her child. She was suspected of intending to hand him over to Bothwell. If she meant to do this, her purpose was frustrated. On Wednesday, April 23, she went to Linlithgow, and on Thursday, April 24, was seized by Bothwell, near Edinburgh, and carried to Dunbar. This Letter, if genuine, proves her complicity; and is intended to prove it, if forged. On the face of it, the Letter was written at Stirling. Mary regrets Bothwell’s confidence in an unworthy person, Huntly, the brother of his wife. Huntly has visited her, and, instead of bringing news as to how and when the abduction is to managed, has thrown cold water on the plot. He has said that Mary can never marry a married man who abducts her, and that the Lords _se dédiroient_, which the Scots translator renders ‘the Lordis wald unsay themselves, and wald deny that they had said.’ The reference is to their acquiescence in the Ainslie band of April 19. Mary, as usual, displays jealousy of Bothwell, who has ‘two strings to his bow,’ herself and his wedded wife. The Letter implies that, for some reason, Mary and Bothwell had not arranged the details of the abduction before they separated. A transcript of the original French is at Hatfield; the English translation, also at Hatfield, is not from the French, but is a mere Anglicising of the Scots version. Oddly enough the French copy at Hatfield, unlike the rest, is in a Roman hand, such as Mary wrote. The hand resembles that of the copyist of the Casket Sonnets in the Cambridge (Lennox) MSS., and that of Mary Beaton, but it is not Mary Beaton’s hand.