Letter II. (as when Mary wishes Bothwell in her arms) and with the Casket

Sonnets. It certainly was not a genuine document, and certainly raises a strong presumption that fraud was being attempted by Mary’s enemies. But we need not, for that reason, infer that Letter II. is a forgery. It may be genuine, and may have been in the hands of Mary’s enemies. Yet they may have tried to improve upon it and make it more explicit, putting forward to that end the epistle quoted by Lennox and Moray. If so they later fell back on Letter II., possibly garbled it, and suppressed their first version.

Lennox, as we shall see, did not rest on his earlier form of the indictment, with its description of Mary’s letter about poisoning Darnley and Lady Bothwell, which he originally drew up, say in July-August, 1568. In his letters from Chiswick he asked for all sorts of evidence from Scotland. He got it, and, then, dropping his first indictment (which contained only parts of such matter), he composed a second. That second document was perhaps still unfinished, or imperfect, just before the meeting of Commissioners at York (October 6, 1568).

That the second indictment, about October 1, 1568, was still in the making, I at first inferred from the following passage which occurs in a set of pieces of evidence collected for Lennox, but without date. ‘Ferder your h. sall have advertisement of, as I can find, but it is gude that this mater’ (Lennox’s construction of a new indictment) ‘be not endit quile’ (until) ‘your h. _may haif copie of the letter_, quhilk I sall haif at _York_, so sone as I may haif a traist berar’ (a trusty bearer to carry the copy to Lennox). So I read the letter, but Father Pollen, no doubt correctly, in place of ‘York’ reads ‘your h.;’ that is, ‘Your Honour,’ a common phrase. The date yielded by ‘York’ therefore vanishes. We can, therefore, only infer that this correspondent, writing not to Lennox, it appears, but to some one, Wood perhaps, engaged in getting up the case, while sending him information for his indictment, advises that it be not finished till receipt of a copy of a certain letter, which is to be sent by a trusty bearer. It may be our Letter II. We can have no certainty. In his new indictment, substituted for his former discourse, Letter II. is the only one to which Lennox makes distinct allusion.

He now omits the useful citations of the mysterious epistle which he had previously used; and, instead, quotes Letter II. The old passages cited were more than good enough for Lennox’s purpose, but they are no longer employed by him. There can be no doubt as to which of his discourses is the earlier and which the later. That containing the report of Mary’s letter which agrees with Moray’s report to de Silva, lacks the numerous details about Hiegait, Crawford, Mary’s taunts to Darnley, their quarrel at Stirling, and so forth, and we know that, on June 11, 1568, Lennox had sent to Scotland asking for all these particulars. They all duly appear in the second discourse which contains reference to Letter II. They are all absent from the discourse which contains the letter about the scheme for poisoning Darnley and Lady Bothwell. Therefore that indictment is the earlier: written on evidence of Darnley’s servants, and from ‘the sayings and reports’ of Mary’s servants.

For what reason should Lennox drop the citations from the poisonous letter, which he quoted in his earlier discourse, if such a letter was to be produced by the Lords? The words were of high value to his argument. But drop them he did in his later discourse, and, in place of them, quoted much less telling lines from Letter II.

All this is explained, if Letter II. was a revised and less explicit edition of the letter first reported on by Lennox; or if the letter first quoted was an improved and more vigorous version of a genuine Letter II. Mr. Hosack, when he had only Moray’s account of the mysterious letter before him, considered it fatal to the authenticity of Letter II., which he thought a cleverly watered-down version of the mysterious letter, and, like it, a forgery. Mr. Hosack’s theory is reinforced by Lennox’s longer account of the mysterious epistle. But he overlooked the possibility that