Letter II. may not be a diluted copy of the forgery, but a genuine

original on which the forgery was based. It may be asked, if the Letter touched on by Lennox and Moray was a forged letter, why was it dropped, and why was another substituted before the meeting of Commissioners at York? As we have only brief condensed reports of the Letter which never was produced, our answer must be incomplete. But Moray’s description of the document speaks of ‘the house where the explosion was arranged,’ before Mary left Edinburgh for Glasgow. Now, according to one confession, taken after the finding of the Casket, namely on December 8, 1567, the explosion was not dreamed of ‘till within two days before the murder.’[253] Therefore Mary could not, on reflection, be made to write that the gunpowder plot was arranged before January 21, 1567, for that contradicted the confession, and the confession was put in as evidence.

The proceedings of Mary’s accusers, therefore, may have taken the following line. First, having certainly got hold of a silver casket of Mary’s, about June 21, 1567, they either added a forgery, or, perhaps, interpolated, as her Lords said, ‘the most principal and substantious’ clauses. They probably gave copies to du Croc: and they told Throckmorton that they had not only letters, but _witnesses_ of Mary’s guilt. These witnesses doubtless saw Mary at the murder ‘in male apparel,’ as Lennox says some declared that she was. But these witnesses were never produced. They sent, probably, by ‘Jhone a Forret,’ copies to Moray, one of which, the mysterious letter, in July, 1567, he partly described to de Silva. In June, 1568, they sent translated copies into England with Wood. These were not seen by Sussex, Norfolk, and Sadleyr (the men who, later, sat as Commissioners at York), but Wood, perhaps, showed them, or parts of them, to Lennox, who cited portions of the mysterious Letter in his first indictment. But, when Moray, Morton, Lethington, and the other Commissioners of the Lords were bound for the Inquiry at York, they looked over their hand of cards, re-examined their evidence. They found that the ‘long letter’ cited by Moray and Lennox contradicted the confession of Bowton, and was altogether too large and mythical. They therefore manufactured a subtler new edition, or fell back upon a genuine Letter II. If so, they would warn Lennox, or some one with Lennox, in framing his new indictment, to wait for their final choice as to this letter. He did wait, received a copy of it, dropped the first edition of the letter, and interwove the second edition, which may be partly genuine, with his ‘discourse.’

This is, at least, a coherent hypothesis. There is, however, another possible hypothesis: admirers of the Regent Moray may declare. Though capable of using his sister’s accomplices to accuse his sister, ‘the noble and stainless Moray’ was not capable of employing a forged document. On returning to Scotland he found that, in addition to the falsified Letter, there existed the genuine Letter II., really by Mary. Like a conscientious man, he insisted that the falsified Letter should be suppressed, and