great earnestness; and the words which he used, as well as Mary's reply, are of great importance, as exhibiting the relative position of the two parties in the dark and all but hopelessly entangled schemes which pervade this painful history. "Do not imagine, madam," he said "that we, the principal nobility of the realm, shall not find the means of ridding your majesty of him without prejudice to your son; and albeit my Lord Murray here present be no less scrupulous for a Protestant than your grace is for a Papist, be assured that he will look through his fingers and behold our doings, saying nothing to the same." Against the significant though cautious menace thus conveyed the Queen at once made earnest protest. "I will," she replied, "that ye do nothing through which any spot may be laid on my honour or conscience; and therefore I pray you rather let the matter be in the state that it is, abiding till God of His goodness put remedy thereto.” *

Thus, according to the conspirators themselves, the course taken by Mary in reference to this proposal for a divorce was formally to disconnect herself from any unlawful or dishonourable proceeding in furtherance of it; while the conspirators, on the contrary, resolved on the murder of Darnley, and soon afterwards "drew up a bond, in which he was described as a 'young fool and tyrant,' who was unworthy to rule over them, and in which the subscribers bound themselves to remove him by some expedient or other, each engaging to stand by the other in this deadly enterprize at the hazard of his life and fortune." Whether Murray was a party to this proceeding has been warmly disputed. He was alleged to have signed the bond for the murder. This he formally denied; but he went little farther; his protest does not call in question the accuracy of the words imputed to Lethington, but merely denies that purposes were held at Craigmillar in his audience." Froude of course gives him credit for not having heard accurately; but when it is remembered that by Paris's first confession (which Mr. Froude implicitly upholds) Murray is distinctly convicted of at least guilty knowledge of the plot, and that his leaving Edinburgh falls in most suspiciously with the very eve of its execution, more impartial readers will feel that the whole course of his conduct fully justified the engagement held out to the Queen by Maitland that, in his own expressive words, "the Lord of Murray would look through his fingers and behold their doings, saying nothing to the same."

Mr.

It must be added, moreover, that this general imputation of

* See Protestation of the Lords Huntly and Argyle, in Keith, iii. 290.

recklessly unscrupulous treachery against the confederate nobles applies with special force to their proceedings against the unhappy Queen; inasmuch as throughout these proceedings they were impelled by the double motive at once of compassing her destruction by convicting her of the murder, and of screening their own guilt by diverting suspicion into another quarter. Nor need it be inferred from the rude violence and brutality which characterized their age and country that it was only by deeds of violence and blood they could carry out their designs of revenge or aggrandizement; and that a crafty and ingenious forgery, such as that of the Casket documents, would be out of keeping with the spirit, or beyond the capacity, of the supposed actors in the conspiracy. There is unhappily but too much evidence of the subtle ingenuity as well as the unscrupulous boldness with which the arts of forgery were wielded in that age, and by the very men whose footsteps may be tracked through all the successive stages of the dark story of the ill-fated Queen. We have already pointed out numerous examples in a former article of it. A forged correspondence with the Earl of Sunderland was placed in the pockets of Lord Huntly, who was slain at the battle of Corrichie in 1562, for the purpose of compromising the Earl. Randolph, Elizabeth's ambassador in Scotland, produced a forged correspondence of the Earl of Lennox in 1581. Mary's own signature was forged to a warrant for the execution of the Earl of Huntly; and a pretended letter of hers to Bothwell, dated June 15th, 1567, the day after her surrender at Carberry, was shown to her by Kirkaldy, of Grange, and by her indignantly repudiated. That the genuineness of this letter was plainly unsustainable may be inferred from the fact that it was never produced after her denial. She herself, indeed, declared that there were many in Scotland, "both men and women," who were able to counterfeit her writing. Among the women was one of her maids of honour, Mary Bethune. Of men, she herself, in 1568, told Sir F. Knollys that she suspected a Frenchman then in Scotland; and Whitaker enumerates several instances of direct and palpable forgery, which he traces home to the very Maitland who acts so prominent a part in the whole history of the Darnley murder and its unhappy sequel.

Now it is only common justice, in entering upon the examination of the evidence, whether internal or external, of the genuineness of the contents of the Casket, to carry these facts with us into the inquiry. We shall consider separately the external and the internal evidences of authenticity.

I. It is difficult to conceive documents more utterly devoid f external proofs of authenticity.

The Casket documents come to us directly and exclusively from the deadly enemies of the Queen; and yet the story of their discovery and seizure as told by them is one which, had it been true, admitted of ample confirmation by independent testimony.

(1) The Casket was first produced by the Earl of Morton, as having, on the 20th June, 1567, been seized in the possession of James Dalgleish, a servant whom Bothwell had sent to Sir James Balfour, governor of Edinburgh Castle, with an order for the delivery of the Casket. Balfour, according to the tale, gave up the Casket, but sent such information to Morton as enabled him to intercept Dalgleish and seize the Casket. This story, it is clear, might, if true, have been confirmed by Balfour, by the officer who arrested Dalgleish, and above all by Dalgleish himself. Now, not one of these was ever produced in evidence, nor does it appear that a single inquiry was ever addressed to any one of them, in reference to the Casket. On the contrary, as regarded the principal witness Dalgleish, such inquiry was studiously avoided, although every opportunity, and indeed almost necessity, for inquiry arose immediately after his arrest. Six days afterwards, on the 26th of June, he was examined before the Council; but not a word was said about the Casket, its seizure, or its contents. He was detained in prison for upwards of half a year; but, although meanwhile the affair of the Casket had been brought before the Privy Council, and subsequently before the Parliament, and although the authenticity of its contents had been denied by the Queen's friends in the Parliament, Dalgleish, who could have placed the matter beyond the possibility of question, was persistently left in the background. In the following January he was tried as an accomplice in the murder of Darnley. Still the same silence as to this damning discovery. And eventually he was sent to the scaffold without a single interrogatory on what may fairly be described as the turning-point of the entire story!

(2) The same reticence was observed as to Balfour, and as to the officer who arrested Dalgleish.

(3) Of the letters themselves, two at least, and these the most vital, namely, the first and second, purporting to be written from Glasgow, furnish what would have been a crucial test. Both these letters indicate the names of the respective messengers by whose hands they were sent to Bothwell. The first letter is sent "by Betoun, who goes one day of law to the Lord of Balfours." The person here indicated was Archibald Betoun, a servant of Queen Mary. Betoun could at once have declared whether he had carried any letters to

Bothwell from Mary during her stay in Glasgow. He was in the power of Morton and the confederate lords at the time of the procedure before the Council and also of that before the Parliament. His evidence would at once have silenced the protest of the Queen's friends, at least as to the one fatal letter in which she promises to bring the man to Craigmillar. Now Betoun was never called before the Council. Still further: when, at the Commission at York in the following year, the genuineness of the letter was again and still more formally denied, and when, in truth, the genuineness of these letters may be said to have formed the whole subject of the investigation, Betoun was still in the service of the Queen; and to have called him at any moment would have been to put an end, at once and for ever, to all pleas of doubt or denial of the latter; still he never was produced or even alluded to.

(4) The second or longer Glasgow letter, on which are founded all the terrible details of that hideous plot, the shadow of which has blackened the memory of the unhappy Queen through all the generations which have since arisen, repeatedly mentions the bearer, and refers to him for particular information on various points indicated in the letter but omitted in detail. The name, it is true, is not expressed; but in all the subsequent proceedings the person alleged to have been the bearer was the French servant Hubert, or Paris, already referred to. We need only call attention to the passages in the letter which allude to the bearer in order to show how intimate must have been that bearer's acquaintance not merely with the facts connected with the transmission of the letters but also with its contents and even with other details of the conspiracy, and of the entire course of the alleged criminal relations between the Queen and Bothwell. It is hardly credible, therefore, that evidence so vital for the proof of the genuineness of the letters and for the whole body of the accusers' cause, could have been overlooked by them, had it been really available, or, at least, had it been producible with safety. It is true that Paris fled in company with Bothwell, and escaped to Denmark, and thus was not in the power of the confederates during the time of the first proceedings in Edinburgh before the Council and in the Parliament, in December, 1567. But this explanation of his non-production is not available for the later periods of the procedure. Paris was delivered up by the King of Denmark, in February, 1568, and remained a prisoner in Murray's hands for about eighteen months. He was in Murray's hands long before the Commission at York and Westminster, and during the entire time of these proceedings, but he was never pro

duced, nor is it alleged that he had ever up to that time been even privately interrogated. Will any one believe that, with the charge of having forged the letters made and reiterated against him, Murray would have failed to produce Paris at York or Westminster, could he have done so with safety? Now Paris was not produced at York or at Westminster. On the contrary, even after Murray's return to Edinburgh, Paris was left in prison, without examination, for upwards of six months. At length, the existence of a witness so important having transpired in England, Elizabeth, in the end of the following July, 1569, wrote to require that he should be produced and sent up for examination. It turned out that, just on the eve of this demand Paris, who till then had been a prisoner in the ordinary royal jurisdiction, had, without examination or judicial process at Edinburgh, been suddenly transferred to the private jurisdiction of the Earl of Murray at St. Andrew's, and had there been subjected secretly to examination, not by any official of the Crown, but by the officers of the private baronial court. He was examined on two successive days, July 9th and July 10th. On the first examination he not only persistently denied the carrying of the letter, but also declared that the Queen had no knowledge whatever of the intended murder of Darnley. There was a second examination, which resulted in a detailed confession incriminating the Queen, and bearing out in the broad outline the story of the Glasgow letter; but this examination was under torture; and we shall show, when we come to the examination of the internal marks of the authenticity of the letters, that its detailed statements furnish the most complete demonstration of the fabrication. For the present, even taking the most favourable view of the procedure, we shall point to a variety of suspicious circumstances.

First, although Paris, by the very necessity of his own story, must have known all the conspirators in the murder of Darnley, as well as the Queen and Bothwell, his confession carefully avoids the mention of any other individual, and particularly of the other parties to the Craigmillar bond.

Secondly, the confession does not contain the name of the official by whom or in whose presence it was taken. It is not authenticated by the attestation of the proper officer of the court or of the prison, or indeed of any subscribing witness. The document itself, it is true, bears the attestation of Andrew Hay, the clerk of the Privy Council; but that attestation would at best be only evidence of the document's having been produced as a genuine document of the Regent's Court at St. Andrew's, and would in no way lend weight or formality to the original