LETTER VII.

Gif _abone the dewtie of ane subject_ yow advance yourself.

That uther admonitiounis or forane _persuasiounis_ may not let me from consenting ...

To use _ane humbil requiest joynit to ane importune action_.

The whole scheme of excuse given in Letter VII. is merely expanded into the later Instructions, a piece of eleven pages in length. ‘The Instructions are understood to have been drawn by Lethington,’ says Sir John Skelton; certainly Mary did not write them, as they stand, for they are in Scots. ‘Many things we resolved with ourselves, but never could find ane outgait,’ say the Instructions. ‘How to be free of him she has no outgait,’ writes Maitland to Beaton. If Lethington, as Secretary, penned the Instructions, who penned Letter VII.?

6. We have already cited Randolph’s letter to Kirkcaldy and Lethington, when they had changed sides, and were holding the Castle for the Queen. But we did not quote all of the letter. Lethington, says Randolph, with Grange, is, as Mary herself has said, the chief occasion of all her calamities, by his advice ‘to apprehend her, to imprison her; yea, to have taken presently the life from her.’ This follows a catalogue of Lethington’s misdeeds towards Mary, exhaustive, one might think. But it ends, ‘_with somewhat more that we might say, were it not to grieve you too much herein_.’ What ‘more’ beyond arrest, loss of crown, prison, and threatened loss of life, was left that Lethington could do against Mary? The manipulation of the Casket Letters was left: ‘somewhat more that we might say, were it not to grieve you too much herein.’[394]

Randolph had been stirring the story of Lethington’s opening the coffer in a green cover, in the autumn of 1570. Charges and counter-charges as to the band for murdering Darnley had been flying about. On January 10, 1571, Cecil darkly writes to Kirkcaldy that of Lethington he ‘has heard such things as he dare not believe.’[395] This cannot refer to the declaration, by Paris, that Lethington was in the murder, for _that_ news was stale fifteen months earlier.

As to the hand that may have done whatever unfair work was done, we can hope for no certainty. Robert Melville, in 1573, being taken out of the fallen Castle, and examined, stated that ‘he thinkis that the lard of Grange’ (Kirkcaldy) ‘counterfaitit the Regentis’ (Moray’s) ‘handwrite, that was sent to Alixr Hume that nycht.’ But we do not accuse Kirkcaldy.

There is another possible penman, Morton’s jackal, a Lord of Session, Archibald Douglas. That political forgery was deemed quite within the province of a Scottish Judge, or Lord of Session, in the age of the Reformation, we learn from his case. A kinsman of Morton, one of Darnley’s murderers, and present, according to Morton, at the first opening of the Casket, Archibald was accused by his elder brother, William Douglas of Whittingham, of forging letters from Bishop Lesley to Lennox, the favourite of James VI., and others (1580-1581).[396] Of course a Lord of Session might bear false witness against his brother in the flesh, and on the Bench. But perhaps Archibald himself, a forger of other letters, forged the Casket Letters; he had been in France, and may have known French. All things are conceivable about these Douglases.

It is enough to know that experts in forgery, real or reputed, were among Mary’s enemies. But, for what they are worth, the hints which we can still pick up, and have here put together, may raise a kind of presumption that, if falsification there was, the manager was Lethington. ‘The master wit of Lethington was there to shape the plot,’ said Sir John Skelton, though later he fell back on Morton, with his ‘dissolute lawyers and unfrocked priests’--like Archie Douglas.

I do not, it will be observed, profess to be certain, or even strongly inclined to believe, that there was any forgery of Mary’s writings, except in the case of the letter never produced. But, if forgery there was, our scraps and hints of evidence point to Lethington as manager of the plot.

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