Letter II. That epistle, unlike the one described by Moray, is _not

signed. We could not with certainty infer this from the want of signatures to our copies; their absence might be due to a common custom by which copyists did not add the writer’s signature, when the letter was otherwise described. But Mary’s defenders, Lesley and Blackwood, publicly complained of the absence of signatures, and were not answered. This point is not very important, but in the actual Casket Letter II. Mary does not say, as in Moray’s account, that there is danger of Darnley’s ‘bringing her round to his will.’ She says the reverse, ‘The place will hold,’ and, therefore, she does not, as in Moray’s report, indicate the consequent need of hurry. She does not say that ‘she herself will go and fetch him;’ she was there already: this must be an error of reporting. She does not speak of ‘giving him a draught’ in a house on the road. She says nothing of a house where ‘the explosion was arranged.’ No explosion had been arranged, though some of the earlier indictments drawn up by Lennox for the prosecution declare that this was the case: ‘The place was already prepared with [undermining and] trains of powder therein.’[238] This, however, was the early theory, later abandoned, and it occurs in a Lennox document which contains a letter of Darnley to the Queen, written three days before his death. The Casket Letter II. says nothing about poisoning or divorcing Lady Bothwell, nor much, in detail, about Mary’s abandonment of her God, her wealth _in France_, and her realm, for her lover. On the other hand she regards God as on her side. In short, the letter described by Moray to de Silva agrees in no one point with any of the Letters later produced and published: except in certain points provocative of suspicion. Mr. Froude thought that it did harmonise, but the opinion is untenable.

De Silva’s account, however, is only at third hand. He merely reports what Moray told him that _he_ had heard, from ‘a man who had read the letter.’ We might therefore argue that the whole reference is to the long Casket