Page images
PDF
EPUB

THE TRIAL OF MARY STUART, SOMETIME QUEEN OF

ON

SCOTS.

EDITED BY SHirley.

PART II.

N the re-opening of the Court, the Solicitor-General continued his speech for the defence.

Gentlemen, in constructing the picture of Mary Stuart which I have presented to you, I have availed myself of every legitimate source of information. But he who would arrive at tolerably safe conclusions about this remarkable career, is called upon to appraise, with critical exactness and vigilance, an immense mass of documentary evidence. A good deal of that evidence is sufficiently reliable to be accepted without qualification by the cautious historian: a good deal of it can be accepted only after it has been sifted and winnowed and attested by independent authority: a good deal of it must be laid aside as unauthentic and worthless. I in clude in the first class whatever evidence, from neutral sources, is extant: I include in the second the letters and despatches and histories which were prepared, by the enemies of the Queen, for the information of the English Government, for their own vindication, or for other purposes: the third includes the depositions of Nicolas Hubert (French Paris), and the series of documents known as the Casket Letters.

In dealing with the second class, I have endeavoured to proceed upon the ordinary principles which guide the critical interpreter of historical records. The source is to a certain extent tainted, and therefore, except when the witness records what he himself observed, or where the hearsay which he reports is otherwise corroborated, his nar

rative is to be received with critical watchfulness. For instance, in a letter from Randolph to Cecil, dated February 7, 1566, the writer says that Mary had signed the Catholic League. But on February 14, Bedford informs the English minister that she had not done so. In Randolph's letter it is stated that France was a party to the League: in Bedford's letter there is no mention of France. In point of fact, France was at that time standing warily aloof from the combination; and as Bedford's letter was subsequent in date, and as he appears to have written with Randolph's latest despatches before him, it may fairly be concluded that Randolph had been originally misinformed. It is nowhere else, in any contemporary document, asserted or hinted that Mary had joined the League: and history, therefore, is entitled to hold that she was not a member of the Catholic Confederacy. Or take another example. In a letter from Drury it is stated, that as Bothwell rode off to the Tolbooth on the morning of his trial, the Queen gave him a friendly nod from a window of the palace. But in a previous letter, which contained the narrative given to Drury by an eye-witness of the scene (the Provost-Marshal of Berwick), no notice is taken of this incident. On the contrary, the Provost-Marshal was denied an audience on the ground that the Queen was asleep; and it is, therefore, highly improbable that, had she been visible at a window of the palace, this flagrant evidence of discourtesy to the English envoy would have been omitted. In these circumstances the historical student

cannot undertake to affirm that such an incident occurred. Sir William Drury himself was, as I have said, the most credulous of gossips, and his letters are stuffed full of marvels that might satisfy the most voracious appetite for the supernatural. Randolph was an able diplomatist, but a harsh and unscrupulous partisan: and, in fact, the whole of this English correspondence, from the date of the Darnley marriage, was conceived in a spirit of bitter hostility to the Queen.

The only documents produced by my learned friend which I absolutely refuse to entertain, are the second deposition of French Paris, and the Casket Letters. Only one word upon the former is needed. Hubert's depositions were emitted before Buchanan, but Buchanan never publicly referred to them, and their existence was unknown until one hundred and fifty years later, when they were discovered in the Register Office. Buchanan was not particularly scrupulous; and the fact that he abstained from using these ugly documents shows that he was conscious that they would would not bear investigation. There are many suspicious circumstances connected with all the depositions then taken, which go to show that they were subjected to a somewhat severe process of revision by the party in power; but it is enough to say at present that the only one which seriously compromised the Queen was Hubert's second deposition. The first which he emitted did not implicate her, and in the first he may possibly have told the plain truth. But he was afterwards warned-Bring the Queen's name into your narrative. If you make her guilty, you will save your neck.' And he brought her in with a vengeance, inventing exactly such a story as a vulgar indecent knave might be expected to inventstory so incredible in the coarseness of soul and the brutality of manners which it attributes to the most ac

a

complished lady of the age, that even George Buchanan refrained from using it.

The authenticity of the Casket Letters is a question that must be more deliberately considered. But, gentlemen, I shall somewhat shorten your labours by directing your attention almost exclusively to what is known as the Glasgow Letter or Letters. This is the letter which, if written by Mary, can leave no doubt on any reasonable mind that she was a murderess and adul teress. On the other hand, if this letter be spurious it follows, as a matter of course, that the letters which were produced at the same time, and which must stand or fall along with it, do not require to be separately examined. Prove that one of the documents is forged, and you discredit the whole for if it was possible to forge one, it was possible to forge all.

:

It is in this light that the disappearance of the alleged warrant from the Queen becomes of such surpassing importance. There can be no doubt that the Confederate Lords privately exhibited to Elizabeth's commissioners at York what they averred to be a letter from the Queen requiring the nobles assem bled at Ainslie's Tavern to sign the famous 'band.' The Lords alleged that this document was (along with the others) found in the Silver Casket. If such a document existed, its production against Mary would have been positively fatal. The authenticity of the other documents might be challenged. They had been seen by Bothwell alone. But here was a document which had been perused by all the chief nobility of the kingdom. Yet at the solemn Conference at Westminster the warrant was not produced. It was never shown, except surreptitiously at York. Now, the warrant produced at York was either written by Mary or it was not. If it was written by Mary, it is impossible to believe that such a damnatory piece of evidence would

have been afterwards withdrawn by the Lords: if it was not written by Mary it was forged, and the Lords did not produce it at the public Conference because they knew that the fraud would be immediately detected and summarily exposed. We are thus driven to conclude that the warrant was forged, and then the question recurs-If one, why not all? I believe that I might rest my case against the Casket Letters on this single fact-the mysterious and otherwise unaccountable disappearance of the warrant: but I consent, gentlemen, to meet my friend on his own ground, and I select with this view the most damaging of the documents which the Lords actually ventured to lay before the English Council.

These letters, as my friend has told you, were said to have been taken from a Silver Casket which had belonged to Francis, Mary's first husband, and which were found by Morton in the possession of George Dalglish, one of Bothwell's retainers. The Casket at least was genuine (so much may be admitted), and it was a stroke of genius to find the documents in a case which so plainly, nay dramatically, pointed to the Queen. There were besides the Glasgow and Stirling letters, two contracts of marriage, some verses, and one or two letters which (as I think may be gathered from their contents), had been addressed to Darnley. These letters and the verses are possibly in the main genuine; the Lords had enjoyed abundant opportunity to ransack the private repositories of the writer and her correspondent; and, assuming that it was intended to forge an incriminating letter, it was obviously advisable to shuffle it up, and pass it off along with writings that were genuine. It was advisable for two reasons-(1) because the attention of those examining the letter would be diverted from a close, exclusive, and dangerous examination of the fabricated docu

ment; and (2) because, assuming that the forgery was not palpable, the genuine letters would incline the mind to accord a readier reception to the other. The sonnets are very indifferent, and unworthy of Mary, who could write fair verse. If she were the authoress, as is by no means impossible, they were probably written at an earlier period of life, and are to be regarded as the mere play of imaginative idleness. There is nothing very special or individual about the feelings which they portray, and nothing to connect them, directly or indirectly, with a frantic passion for Bothwell. The notion of the Queen during these stormy agitated months sitting calmly down in her boudoir, and scribbling pages of indifferent French poetry, is not one that will be readily accepted. The poetical language of a soul a-blaze with passion would have been very different.

I hope, gentlemen, that I have made it clear that, if my friend's accusation is true, Mary during a few weeks of her life behaved in a way utterly inconsistent with the whole of her previous and with the whole of her subsequent career. He himself will be ready to admit as much; but he will account for it by assuming that a violent unreasoning passion mastered and upset this ordinarily astute and politic intellect. It is obvious, however, that the evidence by which an assertion, more or less incredible, is recommended to our minds, must be ample. A miracle, I suppose, is capable of being proved; but it requires far more proof to convince us that a man rose from the dead than to convince us that he died. But, gentlemen, I have shown you that the only testimony, in support of what my friend admits to be an anomalous and abnormal event in Mary Stuart's history are the two or three letters found in the casket. Even if this evidence was unimpeachable in quality, you will admit, looking

to the inherent improbability of the story, that it is somewhat limited in quantity. And I undertake to convince you before I sit down, that the testimony on which the Queen of Scotland is to be convicted of adultery and murder would not be admitted in any Court of Justice to prove a petty theft.

either the conspirator or the victm of the conspiracy. Now the Casket Letters are devoted exclusively to these two events, and they remove all dubiety about their true character. Their brilliant light dispels the darkness. By some extraordinary coincidence the letters which oblige us to read these events in the way unfavourable to the Queen were placed in the same Casket. Of the many letters which, in any view of their relations, Mary must have addressed to Bothwell, those only were discovered in the Casket which were needed by her accusers to establish their accusation. This was rare luck-almost incredible good fortune. In fact, it suggests something more than good fortune it suggests design.

Contemporary letters, says my learned friend, are often the most important evidence that the historian can obtain. They may be implicitly relied on, and it will not do two hundred years after their date to maintain that they are forgeries. Had the Casket with its contents been accidentally discovered to-day, it would have been difficult to resist the application of my friend's proposition. But the Casket Letters stand in a peculiar position. They were produced by Mary's enemies, with the avowed object of ensuring her condemnation. They were produced as evidence at what was in effect a criminal trial. Their genuineness was challenged at the time by the Queen's friends, and was emphatically denied by the Queen herself. There is an air of unconscious veracity and abandon about the old letter which the historical enquirer accidentally brings to light. But the Casket Letters come from a tainted source, and are very conscious. They are not historical documents, in the legitimate sense of the term, and cannot be received as such; on the contrary, having been used as evidence in a contemporary suit, all the usual rules applicable to the admission of evidence ought to have been, and may now without unfairness be, applied to them.

There are two equivocal events -and two only-in Mary's life her share in the murder of Darnley, and her consent to the Bothwell marriage. By equivocal, I mean capable, in so far as ascertained facts are concerned, of being read in two ways. She might have been

Now, gentlemen, my learned friend is very indignant that the charge of tampering with letters should be brought against the Protestant nobility of Scotland. I am afraid that in an age prolific of forgery, it would hardly have been resented with the same warmth. It was not necessary that Murray should be a party to the deceit. The letters were prepared in his absence, and he had merely to believe what he was told. The master wit of Lethington was there to shape the [plot-Lethington, with numberless scraps of the Queen's handwriting in his possession, and with a divine or diabolic spark of genius in his nature, which might have made him on a larger theatre one of the leaders of mankind. To produce a passable imitation of Mary's handwriting was an easy matter. Her letters were written in that Italian style which she was the first to practise in Scotland, and which plainly distinguishes her manuscripts from the ordinary Gothic writing of the period. One disadvantage of such a marked peculiarity was, that it could be imitated even by an unskilful performer without exciting suspicion.

There were no slight and subtle peculiarities of style that needed to be carefully reproduced: if a general resemblance to the new mode of writing were retained, it was sure to pass current with men who were not very skilful with their pens, and who saw that it bore a much closer resemblance to the Queen's handwriting than to their own. The severity of the enactments against the crime prove, I think, not only that forgery was prevalent, but that forged documents obtained ready currency a state of matters accounted for by the fact, that while a small minority of priests and clerks were highly accomplished, the bulk of the community was illiterate.

My friend interrupts me. The Confederate Lords, he says, when the charge of conspiracy is brought against them, are entitled to the benefit of all the doubts which are claimed for the Queen. Is this true? The Queen was accused of the murder of Darnley at the instance of men who were undoubtedly Bothwell's accomplices in the murder. What a volume of falsehood, fraud, and perfidy is here unclosed! Their whole conduct was a lie-they were pursuing another for a crime which they had themselves committed. When the murderer becomes the accuser a false colour is necessarily imparted to the charge. These men, I maintain, are entitled to the benefit of no doubts. They were traitors and hypocrites, and we are entitled to presume that in playing their game they would not hesitate to employ any of the weapons which hypocrites and traitors use.

I propose to satisfy you, gentlemen, that those letters or the portions of those letters which incriminate the Queen were not written by her. The external evidence, consisting mainly of the circumstances which attended their discovery and production, and the

internal, including all those indications of authorship which appeal to the critic and philologist, must be alike carefully considered. Both, to a certain extent, are relevant to our enquiry. The jurist, as а general rule, seeks to exclude internal evidence. Internal evidence is too slight, too deceptive, too inconstant, to be readily accepted as a guide in a Court of Law. Universal experience has convinced the makers of law that no document should be even looked at until it is proved to be that which it professes to be. A false witness may break down and speak the truth when placed in the witness box; but you cannot cross-examine a statement made in writing. From the peculiarities of this case, however, the learned judge has ruled that he would not be justified in withdrawing these letters entirely from your consideration, and it is therefore necessary that I should lay before you briefly the whole evidence, internal and external, which demonstrates beyond the possibility of reasonable doubt, that they were not written by Mary.

The observations which I have to offer on the internal evidence need not detain us for many minutes. If you will take the trouble to read any half-dozen of the genuine letters written by the Queen, and then compare them with the Glasgow Letters, you will see that the two series must have been composed by different persons. Mary's letters, as a rule, are refined in tone, elegant in expression, harmonious in texture and composition. letters are coarse, awkward, and the merest patchwork. Why, a rustic wench trying painfully to write a letter to her sweetheart would have succeeded better ! My friend has discovered that among the numer ous letters written by Mary, which have been preserved, another coarse one exists which is true; but he forgets that it is less a letter than a

The Glasgow

« PreviousContinue »