Talk:Casket letters

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Corrected spelling.(IchBin 09:24, 1 January 2006 (UTC))

Quote at end of paragraph 16
This looks like a direct quotation, and so it should be in quotation marks, but I can't figure out where the quote ends. Could someone with more knowledge on the subject than I take a look at it and put in the quotes? The quote begins "Darnley showed me, amongst other talk..." -- Badger151 00:14, 2 January 2006 (UTC)


 * The quote begins after the word "Darmley," i.e., at "showed me, . . . " and ends with the paragraph, at: " . . . his (Darnley's) chamber." This is from p. 451 of Vol. V of Encyclopedia Britannica, 11th Ed., 1910, from which the article is, in large part, an abridged quote.AlwaysLearninSuppin (talk) 07:01, 6 January 2009 (UTC)

Plagiarism
Judging by the 19th century-style writing and the lack of context and explanation, I suspect much of this article was plagiarised from the Encyclopedia Britannica. Spoonkymonkey (talk) 22:40, 23 February 2008 (UTC)
 * Actually, we can. The Wikipedia community is not being graded on this article. It's in the public domain and the facts of the matter are unlikely to undergo any serious revision. John Nevard (talk) 22:10, 8 March 2008 (UTC)


 * It is an abridged version, with several key omissions, of the Britannica article. The complete article Casket Letters, Encyclopedia Britannica (11th Ed., Vol V., p. 449) article may be found at:
 * http://www.archive.org/details/Encyclopedia_Britannica_1911_CompleteAlwaysLearninSuppin (talk) 07:01, 6 January 2009 (UTC)

Improve This Article
The "Casket Letters" are likely to be of interest to any reader chiefly because, to quote, e.g., the 1910 Encyclopedia Britannica ("EB") article's introduction (omitted from this abridgment of it), they are often said to be "If authentic throughout, . . . perfect proof of Mary's complicity in the murder of her husband, Henry, Lord Darnley." A reader of David Hume's 1750s History of England, for example, might seek to read the letters themselves in order to judge the evidence for him or her self, since Hume does not quote them in any detail, but gives only the same broad conclusory statement. Nor does the Britannica article quote any key part of their text (other than a hearsay version of a letter given by Moray from "a man who had read the letter," a version said by the article to contain highly a incriminating statement by Mary that is not, in fact found in the actual letter, "Letter II"). The Encyclopedia's failure to include the text of the letters is repeated in this abridgment.

Without the text of the letters, this article is not really, nor could it be, about the Casket Letters themselves, so much as it is primarily about the debate over their authenticity or forgery, and especially one of them.

So is the EB original, from which this article is abridged. It is largely addressed to the debate in the three works of Henderson and Lang, then recently published, cited in the Commentary and Analysis section of this article, over the forgery/authenticity of "Letter II." It appears from both articles only that Letter II is supposedly the most damning to Mary, though the reader cannot independently judge its weight, because the incriminatory portions of the text is not given in the EB, or in this article.

The only text quoted and clearly attributed to Mary does not seem to implicate her in the murder, and is quoted only to support the details of the debate over forgery. These non-incriminatory statements are treated as corroborative of the authenticity of Letter II, chiefly because an hypothetical forger would have no reason to add trivialities to the incriminating matter. Unconsidered is the possibility that the hypothetical forger could have had very good reason for doing so: to "pad" the incriminatory matter with trivialities, just to make it "look good," i.e., not a forgery. By arguing in favor of authenticity on the grounds that no forger would go to such trouble, the article's author may have proved nothing more than: it worked.

Worse yet, where clearly incriminating text is mentioned, the article is fatally ambiguous whether any of that text is is from Letter II, or all of it comes only from Moray's hearsay summary. There is reference to Mary's purported advice to Bothwell to poison or put away his own wife, the third of three highly incriminating statements. This last is followed by the comment that "No such matters occur in Letter II; . . ." This comment is ambiguous because it is unclear whether it refers only to the preceding sentence ("poison or put away"), or, being plural, to all three incriminating statements. If none of them appear in Letter II, and all come only from Moray's summary, Letter II would seem not to be incriminatory at all, as to Darnley's murder, at least from the text given.

How easily this difficulty would be erased by simply quoting the letters in full.

The question of Mary's guilt can be independently judged only by reading the text of the letters; their authenticity is obviously critical to that question--Mary's accusers were ruthless people who would stop at nothing, including murder, in which several of them were implicated. If stopping not at murder, then why not forgery? And the accusers had ample motive: if Mary were ever to be restored to the Scottish throne, the rebellious subjects' liberties, their vast estates, if not their very heads, would be at risk. But the question of forgery is a distinct, and subsidiary, issue. Even if authentic, the reader wishing to independently evaluate her guilt still needs to know exactly what she said.

For example, Hume seems to base his judgment of Mary's guilt largely on the fact that they show a scandalous love affair of Mary with Bothwell during her husband Darnley's lifetime. While this might supply a motive for Mary to murder him, it would seem to fall far short of proof of knowledge, consent or approval, or, still less, actual participation in the plot. The accusers may have hoped that all readers would jump to the same conclusion, if there were any authentic letters at all.

But, having ample motive, they might easily been moved to add forgeries, or forged passages, to what they found, to establish Mary's supposed crimes, and thereby save themselves from her retribution for their rebellion if she should ever be restored to the throne.

The difficulty of evaluating the authenticity or forgery of any of the letters is compounded by the fact that the French originals are said to be lost, never having been seen again after the death of their custodian, the earl of Gowrie. It is clear that if there were ever any "French originals," they were translated into "Scots," the "lowland Scotch" language of the south of Scotland (presumably a variant of English that Elizabeth's English authorities could read), as well as Latin, and back from that into French.

Such "translations" would be easily subject to insertion of incriminating text into otherwise wholly innocent (insofar as the murder is concerned), albeit sexually scandalous, with the originals proving only an adulterous affair by Mary and Bothwell.

The question whether originals or translations were viewed by those judging Mary's guilt is important. Letters of one sort or another were submitted to the Scottish Council and Parliament, to the English Commissioners at York, and later to the same at London. Could all the members of the Scottish forums read French? Or did they see only the Scots translations? It appears clear that at least the first submission by the Scottish accusers to the English authorities were nothing but the Scots translations, from the direct affirmation in the article, and by the messenger Woods' asking "if the French originals are found to tally with the Scots translations, will that be reckoned good evidence."

This question is easily susceptible to the inference that the accusers may have been motivated to later provide supposedly "French originals" that matched "sufficiently incriminating" Scots translations, or, what would be even easier to forge, attested true "copies" of "French originals."

What is unfortunate is that neither this article, nor even Hume's history, makes it entirely clear what versions were available to which readers, who formed their judgments of Mary's guilt on reading them; and specifically whether any particular reader was looking at a supposedly French original, a copy in French, or a translation. Hume does assert that at least something in French was submitted to the English authorities, which appear to be originals, since he asserts the handwriting was compared with letters from Mary that were already in the English official archives. But he does not explicitly state whether any of the portions containing the text incriminating Mary in the murder that were shown to the English were in French or in the translations.

Nor does Hume seem to consider the question whether any portion of the letters might be forgeries, as he seems to judge the question of the letters as a whole, without consideration whether any part of them might be authentic, and some, the incriminating portions, forged.

If his judgment of the guilt of Mary is highly dependent on the circumstantial inference that Mary had ample motive for Darnley's death, by reason of her affair with Bothwell, this might be understandable; but anyone else might not agree with the strength of this evidence, and want to read the original. And Hume does not give us the means to judge for ourselves, by examining text to see if directly incriminating statements are a small portion of the whole, and thereby more easily forged, even if much of the matter was indeed authentic.

It seems, therefore, inconceivable to publish an encyclopedic article about the Casket Letters without quoting the supposedly incriminating portions directly. This is particularly the case since they are not readily or easily available anywhere in the public domain. The websites of the depositories of the versions referred to, Cambridge University Library, and the British Museum, do not provide access to them. The EB's 1911 edition article on Mary Queen of Scots (Vol. XVII, p. 824) lists ancient publications containing the actual text, that are not readily accessible: works published in 1754, 1790, 1788, 1890, 1889 and 1900.

Since they are not readily available, the article should be improved by resort to the original texts of those versions of the letters that remain intact in historical archives in Great Britain, or the later historical publications of their text.

On the one subject which the article does address at some length--the authenticity or forgery of the letters--it needs considerable improvement on several important scores.

First, there is the matter of the different versions, the translations referred to above. While the language used in the various extant versions of the letters, and of "Crawford's Declaration," is practically never stated, nevertheless, the "close verbal identities" between them is asserted to be critical to evaluating the forgery. Did Crawford speak and "declare" in French, as Mary is stated to have written the originals of the letters? The article asserts the "close verbal identities" between the two documents to be substantial proof of the authenticity of Letter II. The one example it gives, however (the conversation between Mary and Darnley about "why he would pass away in the English ship"), while it indeed contains exactly identical phrases, verbatim, is said to be between the Scots version of Letter II, and Crawford's declaration, presumably in English, but perhaps in Scots; while the article gives them both in English. However weighty, on the question of authenticity, such a coincidence might be, if the originals of both texts were known to be in the same language, such a coincidence would be astounding if Crawford's evidence were in English, or Scots, and the letter with the identical verbiage was nothing but a translation from the "French original"--a "coincidence," in fact, that might strongly favor exactly the opposite conclusion: that it was a forgery. This one question is a significant deficiency in the article, and in the EB article from which it is abridged.

Second, clarity is a major problem leaving the article in places practically unreadable. Omissions from this article of significant portions of the text of the EB original leaves one unable to decipher what, precisely, is the point of many of the details argued in favor of or against a forgery (a quality which the original EB article is not entirely free of). One can spend hours studying its particulars, and still be left unsure of its thrust. Or again, what does the statement mean, quoted verbatim from the EB, that Mary's accusers "rang the changes [sic] on Scots translations of the alleged French originals, and on the French itself."? "Rang the changes . . . ??" Perhaps this was a colloquialism in Britain in 1911; what does it mean?

Elsewhere, even where clear, the text is problematic. For example, the article states that Mary's accusers ". . . put in a list of dates which made Mary's authorship of Letter II impossible, . . ., " while the major conclusion of the article is that " . . . we seem compelled to believe that she wrote the whole of Letter II; that none of it is forged." There is no explanation of the seeming contradiction. And, of course, even if none of it is forged, the question still remains whether Letter II contains any of the supposedly critical text which proves her implication in the murder, or merely that she was having an adulterous affair that might give her the motive.

Finally, one instance of copying from the EB original is simply wrong: The article states, in Ref. 6: "The letters of Lennox were published in Miscellany of the Maui and Club, vol. iv." The EB original states: "The letters of Lennox were published in Miscellany of the Maitland Club, vol. iv." ("Maitland" of Lethington is said to have been one of Mary's accusers). AlwaysLearninSuppin (talk) 08:19, 6 January 2009 (UTC)

The published versions of the copy letters and sonnets are now readily available via googlebooks, archive.org, and British History Online, and I have added a list with cross-references, and a list of online references.Unoquha (talk) 09:53, 9 June 2012 (UTC)

Letters a Red Herring
It is amazing that so much "ink" is spent on these forgeries surrounding this so innocent woman! These letters are simply not of any relevance as to Mary's guilt: The Craigmillar conference and her behaviour with Bothwell are damning enough. The constant analyzing of these letters is only distracting from the main issues, which one should see in the same light as one would do with almost any other person in history! I have put a cautious clarification at the beginning of the article as to the letter's relevance for Mary's guilt or lack thereof. I have also put in some essential info about the the York conference etc. and cleaned up the intro a bit. Buchraeumer (talk) 16:36, 11 April 2009 (UTC)