Mary says that this is her _first_ day’s work. The natural theory is that
here we detect clumsy dovetailing by a forger, who has cut a genuine
letter into pieces, and inserted false matter. But another explanation may
be suggested. Mary, on her first night, did not really stop at paragraph
7: ‘I will talk to him to-morrow on that point.’ _These words happened to
come at the foot of her sheet of paper._ She took up another fresh page,
and wrote on, ‘This is my first journey ...’ down to ‘I had begun it this
morning.’ Then she stopped and went to bed. Next night (January 22) she
took up the same sheet or page as she had written three sentences on, the
evening before, but _she took it up on the clean side_, and did not
observe her words ‘This is my first journey.... I had begun it this
morning’ till she finished, and turned over the clean side. She then
probably ran her pen lightly across the now inappropriate words, written
on the previous night, ‘This is my first journey,’ as she erased lines in
her draft for a sonnet in the Bodleian Library.[340] The words, as in the
case of the sonnet in the Bodleian, remained perfectly legible, and the
translators--not intelligent men--included them in their versions.
The letter should run from paragraph 7, ‘I will talk to him to-morrow upon
that point’ to paragraph 12, ‘This is my first journey.... I had begun it
this morning.’ Then back to paragraph 8, ‘As to the rest of Willie
Hiegait’s,’ and so straight on, merely omitting the words written on the
previous night, ‘This is my first journey, ... but I had begun it this
morning.’
Mary’s mistake in taking for virgin a piece of paper which really had
writing on the verso, must have occurred to most people: certainly it has
often occurred to myself.
There is one objection to this theory. In paragraph 25, at the end of the
letter, Mary apologises for having written part of a letter on a sheet
containing the memoranda, or list of topics, which, as we saw, she began
by writing. She says, in Scots, ‘Excuse that thing that is scriblit’ (MS.
C,[341] ‘_barbulzeit_’) ‘for I had na paper _yesterday_ quhan I _wrait_
that of ye memoriall.’ The English runs, ‘Excuse also that I scribbled,
for I had yesternight no paper _when I took the paper of a memorial_.’
Now the part of Mary’s letter which is on the same paper as the
‘memorial,’ or scribbled list of topics, must have been written, _not_
‘yesternight,’ but ‘to-night’ (on the night of January 22), unless she is
consciously writing in the early morning, after 12 P.M., January 22; in
the ‘wee sma’ hours ayont the twal’,’ of January 23: which does not seem
probable.
If this however meets the objection indicated, the chronology of the
letter is consistent; it is of the night of January 21, and the night of
January 22, including some time past midnight. The apparent breaks or
‘faults,’ then, are not the result of clumsy dovetailing by a forger, but
are the consequence of a mere ordinary accident in Mary’s selection of
sheets of paper.
We now come to the objections based on Crawford’s Deposition. Of Letter
II., as we have it, paragraph 2, in some degree, and paragraphs 6 (from
‘Ye ask me quhat I mene be the crueltie’), 7, 9, 10, and parts of 21 also
exist, with, in many places, verbal correspondence in phrase, _in another
shape_. The correspondence of phrase, above all in 6, is usually with the
_Scots_ translation, sometimes, on the other hand, with the _English_.
Consequently, as will be seen on comparison of the Scots Letter II. with
this other form of part of its contents, these two texts have a common
source and cannot be independent.[342] This new form is contained in a
Deposition, made on oath by a gentleman, a retainer of Lennox, named
Thomas Crawford, the very man who met Mary outside Glasgow (Letter II. 2).
He had attended Darnley in Glasgow, and had received from Darnley, and
written, a verbatim report of his discussions with Mary. Crawford was
therefore brought forward, by the accusers, on December 9, 1568, before
the Commission of Inquiry at Westminster. The object was to prove that no
one alive but Mary could have written Letter II., because she, and she
only, could know the nature of her private talk with her husband, as
reported in Letter II., and, therefore, no one could have forged the
Letter in which that talk was recorded. Providentially, however, Darnley
had informed Crawford about those private talks, and here was Crawford, to
corroborate Letter II.
But it escaped the notice of the accusers that all the world, or all whom
Crawford chose to inform as to what Darnley told him about these
conversations, might know the details of the talk even better than Mary
herself. For the precise words would fade from Mary’s memory, whereas
Crawford, as he swore, had written them down at once, as reported to him
by Darnley, probably as soon as Mary left his sick-room. The written copy
by Crawford must have preserved the words with fidelity beyond that of
human memory, and the written words were in the custody of Crawford, or of
Lennox, so long as they chose to keep the manuscript. This fact is proved
on Crawford’s oath. On December 9, 1568, before the Commissioners, he
swore that, when with Darnley, in Glasgow, in January, 1567, ‘he was
secretly informed by the King of all things which had passed betwixt the
said Queen and the King, ... to the intent that he should report the same
to the Earl of Lennox, his Master, and that he did, _immediately at the
same time, write the same word by word_ as near as he could possibly carry
the same away.’ He was certain that his report of Mary’s words to himself,
‘the words now reported in his writing,’ ‘are the very same words, on his
conscience, that were spoken,’ while Darnley’s reports of Mary’s talk
(also contained in Crawford’s written deposition) are the same in effect,
‘though not percase in all parts the very words themselves.’[343]
We do not know whether what Crawford now handed in on December 9, 1568,
was an English version of his own written verbatim Scots report done in
January, 1567; or a copy of it; or whether he copied it from Letter II.,
or whether he rewrote it from memory after nearly two years. The last
alternative may be dismissed as impossible, owing to the verbal identity
of Crawford’s report with that in the Scots version of the French Letter
attributed to Mary. Another thing is doubtful: whether Lennox, at
Chiswick, on June 11, 1568, did or did not possess the report which
Crawford wrote for him in January, 1567. Lennox, on June 11, as we saw,
wrote to Crawford asking ‘what purpose Crawford held with her’ (Mary) ‘at
her coming to the town’ of Glasgow. He did not ask what conversation Mary
then held with Darnley. Either he had that principal part of Crawford’s
report, in writing, in his possession, or he knew nothing about it (which,
if Crawford told truth, is impossible), or he forgot it, which is next to
impossible. All he asked for on June 11 was Crawford’s recollection about
what passed between himself and Mary ere she entered Glasgow, concerning
which Crawford nowhere says that he made any written memorandum. Lennox,
then, on June 11, 1568, wanted Crawford’s recollections of his own
interview with the Queen, either to corroborate Letter II., if it then
existed; or for secret purposes of Wood’s, who was with him.
It will be observed that Crawford’s account of this interview of his with
Mary presents some verbal identities with Letter II. And this is notable,
for these identities occur where neither Crawford nor the Letter is
reporting the speeches on either side. _These_ might easily be remembered,
for a while, by both parties. But both parties could not be expected to
coincide verbally in phrases descriptive of their meeting, and its
details. Thus, Crawford, ‘I _made my Lord, my Master’s humble
commendations, with the excuse that he came not to meet her_.’ In Letter
II. we read ‘_He made his_’ (Lennox’s) ‘_commendations, and excuses unto
me, that he came not to meet me_.’
The excuses, in Crawford, are first of Lennox’s bad health (_not_ in the
Letter); next, that he was anxious ‘because of _the sharp words that she
had spoken of him to Robert Cunningham_, his servant,’ &c.
In Letter II. this runs: ‘considering _the sharp words that I had spoken
to Cunningham_.’ Crawford next introduces praises of Lennox which are not
in the Letter, but, where a speech is reported, he uses the very words of
the Scots translation of Letter II., which vary from the words in the
English translation.
It follows that, even here, the Letter, in the Scots version, and
Crawford’s Deposition, have one source. Either Crawford took the Scots
translation, and (while keeping certain passages) modified it: or the
maker of the Letter borrowed from Crawford’s Deposition. In the former
case, the sworn corroboration is a perjury: in the latter, the Letter is a
forgery.
Crawford has passages which the Letter has not: they are his own
reflections. Thus, after reporting Darnley’s remark about the English
sailors, with whom he denied that he meant to go away (Letter II. 19),
Crawford has, what the Letter has not: ‘And if he had’ (gone away) ‘it had
not been without cause, seeing how he was used. For he had neither to
sustain himself nor his servants, and needed not make further rehearsal
thereof, seeing she knew it as well as he.’ Is this Crawford’s addition or
Darnley’s speech? Then there is Crawford’s statement that Mary never
stayed more than two hours, at a time, with Darnley--long enough, in an
infected room of which the windows were never opened. It is here, after
the grumble about Mary’s brief stay, that Crawford adds, ‘She was very
pensive, whereat he found fault.’
Now Darnley may have told Crawford (though Crawford does not give this as
part of the conversation), ‘I was vexed by the Queen’s moodiness,’ or the
like. But it is incredible that Mary herself should also say, in the
Letter, just before she mentions going to supper after her first brief
interview (_Scots_) ‘he fand greit fault that I was pensive’ (Letter II.
5[344]). To Mary’s defenders this phrase appears to be borrowed by the
forger of the Letter from Crawford’s Deposition; not borrowed by Crawford,
out of place and at random (with a skip from Letter II. 5 to Letter II.
19), and then thrust in after his own reflections on the brevity of Mary’s
visits to Darnley. For Crawford is saying that her visits were not only
short, but sulky. On the other hand, in the Letter the writer is made to
contrast Darnley’s blitheness with her gloom.
Crawford does not report, what the Letter makes Mary report, Darnley’s
unconcealed knowledge of her relations with Bothwell, at least in the
passage, ‘It is thocht, and he belevis it to be trew, that I have not the
power of myself unto myself, and that because of the refuse I maid of his
offeris.’
Crawford ends with his own reply to Darnley, as to Mary’s probable
intentions: ‘I answered I liked it not, because she took him to
Craigmillar,’ not to Holyrood. The ‘Book of Articles,’ we know, declares
that Mary ‘from Glasgow, be hir _letteris_ and utherwise, held Bothwell
_continewally_ in rememberance of _the said house_,’ that is, Kirk o’
Field. But the Letters produced do nothing of the kind. Craigmillar, as we
have seen, is dwelt on. In the Deposition the idea of Darnley’s being
carried away as a prisoner is introduced as an original opinion of
Crawford’s, expressed privately to Darnley, and necessarily unknown to
Mary when she wrote Letter II. But it occurs thus, in Letter II. 9, after
mention of a litter which Mary had brought for his conveyance, and to
which Darnley, who loved riding of all things, made objection. ‘I trow he
belevit that I wald have send him away Presoner’--a passage _not_ in the
English translation. Darnley replied to Crawford’s remark about his being
taken as ‘a prisoner’ that ‘he thought little else himself.’ It is
reckoned odd that Mary in the Letter makes him ‘think little else
himself.’ ‘I trow he belevit that I wald have send him away Presoner.’
For these reasons some German defenders of Mary have decided that the
parts of Letter II. which correspond with Crawford’s Deposition must have
been borrowed from that Deposition by a forger of the Letter. About June,
1568, Lennox, on this theory, would lend a copy of Crawford’s report (made
in January, 1567, at Glasgow) to Wood, and, on returning to Scotland, Wood
might have the matter of Crawford’s report worked into Letter II.
I had myself been partly convinced that this was the correct view. But the
existence of Mary’s memoranda, and the way in which they influence Letter
II., seem to me an almost insuperable proof that part, at least, of Letter
II. is genuine. It may, however, be said that the memoranda were genuine,
but not compromising, and that the Letter was based, by forgers, on the
memoranda (accidentally left lying in her Glasgow room, by Mary) and on
Crawford’s report, obtained from Lennox. This is not impossible. But the
craft of the forger in making Mary, on her second night of writing, find
her forgotten memoranda (II. 15), be reminded by them of her last
neglected item (‘Of Monsieur de Levingstoun’), and then go on (II. 16) to
tell the anecdote of Livingstone, never publicly contradicted by him,
seems superhuman. I scarcely feel able to believe in a forger so clever.
Yet I hesitate to infer that Crawford, when asked to corroborate the
statements in the Letter, took his report from the Letter itself, and
perjured himself when he said, on oath, that his Deposition was derived
from a writing taken down from Darnley’s lips ‘immediately at the time.’
I should come to this conclusion with regret and with hesitation. It is
disagreeable to feel more or less in doubt as to Crawford’s honour. We
know nothing against Crawford’s honour, unless it be that he was cruel to
the Hamilton tenantry, and that he deposed to having received confessions
on the scaffold, from Bothwell’s accomplices, implicating Mary.[345] These
do not occur in the dying confessions printed with Buchanan’s ‘Detection,’
though Bowton hinted something against Mary, when he was in prison; so
that trustworthy work informs us. Thus Crawford’s second Deposition, as to
the dying confessions, is certainly rather suspicious. We know nothing
else against the man. He lived to be a trusted servant of James VI. (but
so did the infamous Archibald Douglas); he denounced Lethington of guilt
in the murder; he won fame by the capture of Dumbarton Castle. Yet some
are led to suspect that, when asked to corroborate a passage in a letter,
he simply took the corroboration, _textually_, from the letter itself. If
not the Letter is a forgery.
Mr. Henderson (who does not admit the verbal correspondence of Letter and
Deposition) clearly sees no harm in this course. ‘It is by no means
improbable that Crawford refreshed his recollection by the aid of the
Letter, which, in any case, he may have seen before he prepared his
statement.’ But he swore that he wrote a statement, from Darnley’s lips,
‘immediately at the time.’[346] He said nothing about losing the paper,
which he wrote in January, 1567. (Mr. Henderson says it ‘had apparently
been destroyed’--why ‘apparently’?) But, according to Mr. Henderson, ‘he
may have seen the letter before he prepared his statement. Probably he
would have been ready to have admitted this.’ He would have had an evil
encounter with any judge to whom he admitted that, being called to
corroborate part of a letter, written in French, he copied his
corroborating statement, verbally on the whole, from a Scots translation
of the letter itself! I do not think that Crawford would have been ‘ready
to admit’ this unconscionable villainy. Yet we must either believe that he
was guilty of it, or that the Letter was forged.
There is one indication which, for what it is worth, corroborates the
truth of Crawford’s oath. He swore that he had written down Darnley’s
report of conversations with Mary ‘immediately at the time,’ in order that
he, in turn, might report them to Lennox, ‘because the said Earl durst not
then, for displeasure of the Queen, come abroad,’ and speak to Darnley
himself. But Crawford never swore, or said, that he wrote down his own
conversation with Mary. Now, on June 11, 1568, Lennox does not ask for
what Crawford swore that he _wrote_, much the most important part of his
evidence, the account of Darnley’s talks with Mary. Lennox does not ask
for _that_, for what Crawford swore that he wrote ‘immediately at the
time.’ He merely asks ‘what purpois’ (talk) ‘Thomas Crawford held with the
Queen at her coming to the town.’ This may be understood to mean that
Lennox already held, and so did not need, Crawford’s written account,
dictated by Darnley to him, of the conversations between Mary and Darnley.
For that document, if he had it not, Lennox would most certainly ask, but
ask he did not. Therefore, it may be argued, Lennox had it all the while
in his portfolio, and therefore, again, parts of Letter II. are borrowed
from Crawford’s written paper of January, 1567.[347]
In that case, we clear Crawford’s character for probity, but we destroy
the authenticity of Letter II.[348] I confess that this last argument,
with the fact that we have no evidence against the character of Crawford,
a soldier of extraordinary daring and resource, and a country gentleman,
not a politician, rather disturbs the balance of probabilities in favour
of the theory that he borrowed his Deposition textually from the Letter,
and increases the probability that the Letter is a forgery based on the
Deposition.[349]
5. The contents of the Letter are said to be incoherent and inconsistent
with Mary’s style and character. The last objection is worthless. In the
Letter she says that she acts ‘against her natural’--_contre son
naturel_--out of character. As for incoherence, the items of her memoranda
are closely followed in sequence, up to paragraph 8, and the interloping
part in paragraph 12. The rest, the work of the second night, _is_
incoherent, as Mary’s moods, if she was guilty, must have been.
Information, hatred, remorse, jealousy, and passion are the broken and
blended strata of a mind rent by volcanic affections. The results in the
Letter are necessarily unlike the style and sentiment of Mary’s authentic
letters, except in certain very remarkable features.
Either Mary wrote the Letter or a forger wished to give the impression
that this occurred. He wanted the world to believe that the Queen, her
conscience tortured and her passion overmastering her conscience, could
not cease to converse with her lover while paper served her turn. Her
moods alternate: now she is resolved and cruel, now sick with horror, but
still, sleepless as she is, she must be writing. Assuredly if this Letter
be, in part at least, a forgery, it is a forgery by a master in the
science of human nature. We seem to be admitted within the room where
alone a light burns through the darkling hours, and to see the tormented
Queen who fears her pillow. She writes, ‘I would have almaist had pitie of
him.... He salutes everybody, yea unto the least, and makes pitious
caressing unto them, to make them have pitie on hym,’ a touching picture.
There is a pendant to this picture of Darnley, in Buchanan’s ‘History.’ He
is speaking of Mary’s studied neglect of Darnley at the time of his son’s
christening (December, 1566). Darnley, he says, endured all ‘not only with
patience; he was seen trying to propitiate her unjust anger in every way,
_that humbly, and almost in servile fashion_, he might keep some share in
her good graces.’[350] What an etching is this of the man, a little while
since so haughty and tyrannous, ‘dealing blows where he knew that they
would be taken’! Again the passage (Letter II. 11) about Mary’s heart
wherein only Bothwell’s ‘shot’ can make a breach, does certainly seem (as
Laing notes) to refer to a sonnet of Mary’s favourite poet, Ronsard.
Depuis le jour que la première flèche
De ton bel oëil m’avança la douleur,
Et que sa blanche et sa noire couleur,
Forçant ma force, _au cœur me firent brèche_.
As in later letters, the writer now shows jealousy of Bothwell’s wife.
The writer again and again recurs to her remorse. ‘Remember how, gyf it
were not to obey you, I had rather be deid or I dyd it, my heart bleides
at it.... Alas, I nevir deceivit anybody; but I remit me altogidder to
your will.’ The voice of conscience ‘deepens with the deepening of the
night,’ a very natural circumstance showing the almost inhuman art of the
supposed forger. What ensues is even more remarkable. Throughout, Mary
professes absolute submission to Bothwell; she is here, as Sir John
Skelton remarks, ‘the bond slave and humble minister of Bothwell’s
ambition.’ He argues that she was really ‘the last woman in the world who
would have prostrated herself in abject submission at the feet of a
lover.’[351] But, in a later letter to Norfolk, when she regarded herself
as affianced to him, Mary says ‘as you please command me, for I will, for
all the world, follow your commands....’ She promises, in so many words,
‘humble submission’--though, conceivably, she may here mean submission to
Elizabeth.[352] Again, ‘I will be true and obedient to you, as I have
promised.’[353] There are other similar passages in the letters to
Norfolk, indicating Mary’s idea of submission to a future husband, an
attitude which, according to Randolph, she originally held towards
Darnley. These letters to Norfolk, of course, were not dictated by
passion. Therefore, under stress of passion or of a passionate caprice,
Mary might naturally assume a humility otherwise foreign to her nature. It
would be a joy to her to lay herself at her lover’s feet: the argument _a
priori_, from character, is no disproof of the authenticity of this part
of the Letter.
On the whole, these reasons are the strongest for thinking the Letter, in
parts, probably genuine. The Lords _may_, conceivably, have added ‘some
principal and substantious clauses,’ such as the advice to Bothwell ‘to
find out some more secret invention by medicine’ (paragraph 20), and they
_may_ have added the words ‘of the ludgeing in Edinburgh’ (Kirk o’ Field)
to the dubious list of directions which we find at the end of the Scots,
but not in the English, version. There is no other reference to Kirk o’
Field, though the ‘Book of Articles’ says that there were many. And there
were many, in the forged letter! Paris, indeed, confessed that Mary told
him that Letter II. was to ask where Darnley should be placed, at
Craigmillar or Kirk o’ Field. But the evidence of Paris is dubious.
Lennox was very anxious, as was the author of the ‘Book of Articles,’ to
prove that the Kirk o’ Field plan was arranged between Bothwell and Mary,
before she went to meet Darnley at Glasgow in January, 1567. We have
already seen that the ‘Book of Articles’ makes Mary and Bothwell ‘devise’
this house ‘before she raid to Glasgow,’ and ‘from Glasgow by her letters
and otherwise she held him continually in remembrance of the said house.’
The ‘Book of Articles’ also declares that she ‘wrote to Bothwell to see if
he might find out _a more secret way by medicine to cut him off_’ than the
Kirk o’ Field plan. Now this phrase, ‘a more secret invention by
medicine,’ occurs in Letter II. 20, but is instantly followed by ‘for he
should take medicine and the bath at _Craigmillar_:’ not a word of the
house in Edinburgh.
Next, we find Lennox, like the author of the ‘Book of Articles,’ hankering
after, and insisting on, a mention of the ‘house in Edinburgh’ in Mary’s
Letters. There exists an indictment by Lennox in Scots, no doubt intended
to be, as it partly was, later done into English. The piece describes
Moray as present with the English Commissioners, doubtless at York, in
October, 1568. This indictment in Scots is by one who has seen Letter II.,
or parts of it, for we read ‘Of quhilk purpos reported to Heigat she makes
mention in hir lettre sent to Boithuile from Glasgow, meaning sen that
purpose’ (the plan of arresting Darnley) ‘wes reveled that he suld invent
_a mare secrete way be medecine to cutt him of_’ (the very phrase used in
the ‘Book of Articles’) ‘as alsua puttes the said Boithuil in mynde of the
house in Edinburgh, divisit betwix thame for the King hir husband’s
distructioune, termand thair ungodlie conspiracy “thair affaire.”’