Mary Queen of Scots (29 page)

On 14 June before departing for Scotland, Middlemore sent a report about his discussion with Mary to Cecil along with a note from her to Elizabeth. Mary wrote that she regretted her confidence in requesting her cousin for assistance had been so misplaced. She asked Elizabeth’s permission to seek aid elsewhere and reminded her of her audience with Moray in 1565, when he was an English refugee. Middlemore then left to deliver Elizabeth’s letter to Moray, which informed him about the inquiry and ordered him to refrain from attacking or injuring Mary’s allies.

Although the privy council originally recommended that Mary be housed at Tutbury in Staffordshire, a royal castle of the duchy of Lancaster, she refused to move to that location. Under protest she finally agreed to go to Bolton, Scrope’s castle in Wensleydale. On 13 July claiming that she preferred relocating to Dumbarton or to France, Mary commenced the two-day journey to Bolton, a walled structure in a mountainous area of Yorkshire described by Knollys as desolate and wild. Just before their departure, more of her servants and attendants reached her, including Mary Seton with wigs for the queen’s hair, which had been clipped for the incognito flight from Langside. These newcomers, including Lady Livingston who arrived in August, increased Mary’s household to 30 gentlefolk and 45 domestics; the number of the latter, referred to by Knollys as the baser sort, grew to 60 at Bolton. In addition, another 30 allies, among them, Skirling and Lord Claud Hamilton, commendator of Paisley, the fifth and youngest son of Châtelherault, resided in town at their own charge.

At Bolton Mary installed procedures as though she were holding court. She ordered erected in her great chamber a canopy or cloth of state made of satin figured with gold, which arrived from Scotland along with some of her clothes and furnishings. The canopy was a symbol of high social rank, usually indicating some degree of royal status. Noting that she hunted and hawked daily, Knollys predicted that preventing her from pursuing these sports, which brought her such pleasure and delight, would greatly depress her.

Among Mary’s retrieved possessions were her sewing materials, making it possible for her to resume the needlework that she greatly enjoyed. One of her English guards, Christopher Norton, later described an encounter with her at Bolton. His recollection indicates that she customarily joined other members of her guardians’ household in their leisure moments at dinnertime. While Knollys and Scrope played chess and Lady Scrope stood by the fireside, Mary sat at the window knitting. Deciding to warm herself at the fire, she asked Norton to hold her sewing for her. When Knollys’s chess game was over, he noticed Norton assisting the queen with her sewing and warned him to stop watching her, for she would make a “fool” out of him.
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As Mary’s guardian, Knollys contended with many of the same problems that were to plague his successors. Her uncertain status did make his duties somewhat more awkward than theirs, however. Under his charge she was neither completely free nor yet entirely a prisoner. He struggled daily with preventing her household from increasing in size, with acquiring sufficient funds to purchase provisions, and with finding sufficient quantities of them. That she was winning support in the community for her personal cause and for her faith also deeply concerned him. Then, too, her secret correspondence and numerous visitors, especially Francis Montmorin, seigneur de Saint-Herem, a French envoy, complicated his supervision of her. Finally, he was forced to respond to claims that he was treating her too leniently.

Imprisoned with few occupations beyond her daily exercise, Mary wrote numerous letters. By 22 October four months after reaching England, she had addressed more than 20 to Elizabeth concerning several issues. Mary asked her to prevent Moray’s forfeiture of her friends’ estates at a pretended parliament and charged him with stealing her jewels. She denied she was guilty of any wrongdoing and repeated her desire for a meeting with her good sister. Other letters to Elizabeth referred to the plague at Edinburgh Castle where many of Mary’s allies were imprisoned, to Border violence, and to arrangements for the inquiry in England to settle the differences between her and her subjects.

In treating Scottish problems Cecil, among other Englishmen, advocated his realm’s feudal superiority, which he justified with documentary evidence. He claimed that it was appropriate for an investigation concerning the dissension between Mary and her subjects to occur in England because its rulers had the right to settle disputes over the Scottish crown, as could be proved by many records and precedents.

When Herries finally returned from court, reaching Bolton on 24 July, he briefed Mary about the proposed inquiry. Like Middlemore before him, Herries gave assurances to Mary that following her acquittal, the English queen would restore her cousin to her regal authority in Scotland. In her letters, as for example, one written on 22 June, Elizabeth was less specific, promising only that when Mary was found innocent, her English cousin would aid and honor her and do nothing to harm her. After consulting with Herries, Mary informed Elizabeth that she would consent to the inquiry under two conditions: she must maintain her royal rank in it, as she would not allow her subjects a status equal to hers, and its purpose must be limited to arranging her restitution. She would not accept anyone as judge over her except God. Attempting to appear conciliatory, she offered to establish English Protestantism in Scotland at her return.

In September after her attendance at prayer services fueled rumors of her conversion to Protestantism, she explained at a meeting in her great chamber that she remained a faithful Catholic. To Knollys’ protest concerning her dissimulation, she responded:

Why would you have me to lose France and Spain and all my friends...by seeming to change my religion, and yet I am not assured that...my good sister will be my assured friend to the satisfaction of my honor and expectation?
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That same month she confided to Elizabeth of Valois in Spain that her Protestant captors were trying to convert her but that she would never change her religion. If she made concessions, it was only because she was a prisoner. Later in December she confessed to Pius V that as Elizabeth had denied her a priest, she listened to a minister praying in English. She pleaded for his pardon and absolution and promised to be an obedient member of the Roman Catholic Church.

THE INQUIRY INTO MARY’S RESTITUTION AND THE CASKET LETTERS

From the outset Moray viewed the inquiry as her murder trial, believing that only if she were declared innocent of complicity in the king’s death would the English demand her restitution. Prompted by a strong dislike of rebels against legitimate authority, Elizabeth seemed initially to promise through intermediaries more favorable treatment to Mary than she ultimately delivered. Elizabeth could not, moreover, control the behavior of her councilors, many of whom were satisfied with Moray’s regency. Mary later complained that throughout the inquiry English officials conspired with her brother and his allies against her.

At York on 4 October Norfolk, Thomas Radcliffe, third earl of Sussex, and Sadler opened the tribunal. Representing Mary were a mixture of Protestants and Catholics: a cousin of Châtelherault, Gavin Hamilton, archdeacon of St Andrews and commendator of Kilwinning, Bishop Leslie, Lords Livingston, Boyd, and Herries, Sir John Gordon of Lochinvar, and Skirling. Leslie had accepted the appointment reluctantly because he believed that the proceedings not only would fail to hasten her restitution but would also actually increase her estrangement from her half brother. Attending Moray were Morton, Lindsay, Maitland, Bishop Hepburn, and Robert Pitcairn, commendator of Dunfermline. Although technically representing the two-year old king for whom he served as regent, Moray was, in fact, the Scottish ruler and possessed a distinct advantage over the other participants, who had to wait for instructions from Elizabeth or Mary when new issues were raised.

With Moray also were Makgill, the clerk register, Henry Balnaves, a lord of the session, and Buchanan, whose motives for supporting Mary’s opponents are unclear. It is usually alleged that the king’s death outraged Buchanan because his ancestor served as chamberlain to an earlier earl of Lennox. At the Scottish council’s request, Buchanan prepared a book of articles for the inquiry.

On the first few days they read their commissions, took oaths, and heard Herries’s denunciation of Mary’s ill treatment. On the 8th Moray condemned her support for Orkney, an evil and ambitious man, claimed she abdicated because she was weary of ruling, and interpreted her defeat at Langside as God’s will. Moray and his associates emphasized her sexual liaison with Orkney because it offered a motivation for their later charge that she was an accessory to the king’s death and because many contemporaries viewed fornication not only as more criminal than murder but also as inevitably leading to murder. Knollys believed that Lethington hoped to prevent this accusation and to obtain an agreement that would restore her authority with certain limitations. Preferring that she remain an English prisoner, Moray secretly had some evidence revealed about her to the English commissioners to gauge their response.

On the 11th Norfolk, Sussex, and Sadler reported to Elizabeth that Lethington, Buchanan, Makgill, and Balnaves presented to them without the knowledge of Mary’s representatives some documents deposited in a foot-long silver and gilt casket with the Roman F under a crown in several places, obviously a gift from Francis to Mary. These are the Casket Letters, which include eight French epistles, allegedly written by Mary to Bothwell, two contracts of marriage for them, one undated and one signed in April prior to his trial, and a French love ballad of twelve unequal verses. As transcripts of the letters have neither subscriptions (Mary’s signature) nor addressees, and only one of them has a date, the presumption is, as Leslie maintained, that the originals, which have disappeared, also lacked these identifying items. Not only are the originals of these no longer extant, but neither are the originals and copies of two other documents described by the commissioners: Mary’s request to the noblemen that they sign the Ainslie band and her admission to engineering a quarrel between Henry and Lord Robert.

Before discussing the employment of the Casket Letters at the inquiry, the question of whether they were forged will be addressed by examining several topics: the practice of forgery in Britain, the official version of how the confederates obtained the documents, the question of whether Edinburgh Castle held Bothwell’s correspondence, the contents of Letter II, the most damaging of the eight letters, and the speculation that Balfour was their author. Finally, it will follow Moray’s references to them in 1567 to his introduction of them in the inquiry in 1568.

The documents were almost certainly forgeries, perhaps some parts entirely invented and others distortions of actual messages composed by Mary to Henry or other recipients. It is highly unlikely that she would have written down in any language her illicit passion for Bothwell or any other lover. Aware from childhood that her correspondence might be intercepted, she used ciphers to communicate sensitive material. In 1563 she complained to Randolph that someone had opened up her dispatches, and in 1569 she explained to Elizabeth that even if she had imagined the foolish remarks in the Casket Letters, she would never have put them in writing.

In early modern Britain forgeries often for political reasons were not an aberration. Richard Bentley even admitted, for example: “The greatest part of mankind are so easily imposed upon in this way, that there is too great an invitation to put the trick on them.”
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As previously noted, Mary of Guise had a letter from Châtelherault forged and her daughter probably invented one from Lorraine. In July 1569 after Grange joined Mary’s party, he even falsified an order from Moray to obtain Lethington’s release from confinement.

How the Casket Letters were discovered depends partly on Morton’s declaration in December 1568. Supposedly, on 19 June 1567 shortly after the Carberry Hill confrontation, Orkney sent his servant, George Dalgleish, a tailor, to retrieve the casket with his documents at Edinburgh Castle. Both Leslie in his
Defence
of Mary and Buchanan in his
History of Scotland
asserted that Balfour, the castle’s captain, released the casket to Dalgleish. The next day, 20 June, according to Morton, his men captured Dalgleish, confiscated the casket but waited another day before breaking its lock and in front of witnesses removing its documents. The date, 21 June, on which Morton said he first viewed the casket’s documents is interesting because nine days later on 30 June, he and some other confederate lords issued a summons against Orkney for murdering the king and taking the queen by force.

It is puzzling that Dalgleish did not immediately return the casket to the duke, who was attempting to raise troops on the Borders. Since Orkney was short of funds, it is even more puzzling that he ordered Dalgleish to fetch only these documents, most of which were allegedly written by Mary. Surely he could have used some of her jewels which were at the castle to finance a challenge to the confederates’ control of her. Although Dalgleish’s accusers asked him about the king’s murder for which he was convicted and executed, they neglected to inquire about the casket probably because it had never been in his possession.

The evidence that Balfour had betrayed Orkney also raises doubts about whether the duke sent Dalgleish to him for the casket. After Balfour refused to turn the castle guns on the confederates in May 1567, Orkney planned to replace him as its keeper. James Melville recalled assuring him that he was fortunate to be in the duke’s bad graces because their alliance had made him one of the rebels’ prime targets. Leslie later confirmed that Balfour had become Orkney’s enemy. Why then, only one month later in June, would Orkney trust Balfour as the captain of the castle to permit Dalgleish to obtain the incriminating documents? And even if he did, why would Balfour surrender the casket that Orkney so clearly valued?