CASKET LETTERS, the name given to eight letters and a series of irregular sonnets asserted by James, 4th earl of Mor ton, to have been found by his servants in a silver casket in the possession of a retainer of James, 4th earl of Bothwell, on June 20, 1567, six days after the surrender of Mary, queen of Scots, to her rebels at Carberry Hill. If they are genuine they prove Mary's full complicity with Bothwell in the murder of her hus band, Henry, Lord Darnley, in the preceding February. The con tents of the casket were produced at Westminster, on Dec. 14, 1568, before a body of English Commissioners appointed by Queen Elizabeth to investigate the charges brought by Mary, then a prisoner in England, against the rebel Scottish lords and by them against her. The originals were in French, but translations had already been made into Scots, and further translations were made into English. After the Conference, the casket and its contents were brought back to Scotland and entrusted to Morton's care; after his execution in 1581, they passed into the possession of William, 1st earl of Gowrie, who refused to comply with Eliza beth's request that they should be sent to England. Gowrie was executed for treason in 1584, and there is no further trace of the originals.
Elizabeth's Commissioners gave no decision about the authen ticity of the documents, and, until comparatively recent years, controversy as to their genuineness has been complicated by doubts as to the text actually produced at Westminster in 1568. Translations into Scots, English, Latin and French were published within a few years of the close of the Conference, and it was assumed that these French translations represented the text shown to the English Commissioners. Walter Goodall proved in that the printed French text was derived from the Scots or the Latin, and this unquestionably strong argument for forgery re mained a main factor in the case of Mary's defenders for over a century until the discovery of contemporary French copies of the letters in the Record Office and at Hatfield. This discovery under mined the position taken up by John Hosack in his Mary, Queen of Scots, and her Accusers (2nd ed. 187o-74). Hosack also made a very telling attack upon the most incriminating of the letters (Letter II.), on the ground of collusion with a declaration made by Thomas Crawford, a servant of Darnley, which was also produced at Westminster, and his argument for forgery was wide ly accepted until the publication of an article by Harry Bresslau in the Historisches Taschenbuch (188 2) and of T. F. Hender son's Casket Letters and Mary, Queen of Scots (2nd ed. 1890), the latter of which traversed Hosack's theory of collusion between Crawford's deposition and Letter II., of which no contemporary French copy has been found. A further development of the con troversy followed the discovery of a number of documents, notes of information, and indictments of Mary, which had originally been written for, or by, Darnley's father, Matthew, 12th earl of Lennox, and are preserved in the University library at Cambridge. Transcripts of the Lennox documents were lent by Father Pollen, S.J., to the late Mr. Andrew Lang, who used them in his Mystery of Mary Stuart 090o-04). Portions of these documents have since been printed by Maj.-Gen. R. H. Mahon in his Indictment of Mary, Queen of Scots (1923) and his Mary, Queen of Scots: a Study of the Lennox Narrative (5924). In the light of the new evidence, Lang came to the conclusion that "the least difficult theory is that Letter II. is in part authentic, in part garbled." This conclusion was controverted by Henderson in his Mary, Queen of Scots (1904), and in the Scottish Historical Review (Oct. 1907), Lang, on different grounds from those of his critic, retracted his own earlier view, and admitted that his hypothesis, that Letter II. was partly based on Crawford's deposition, was impossible. Mary, he was convinced, "wrote the whole letter." This conclusion he elaborated in the II th ed. of the Encyclo pedia Britannica (Art. Casket Letters). The authenticity of Let ter II. is the central point of the controversy, and the question is not seriously affected by exposures of false statements made in other connections by Mary's accusers. To the arguments of Hen derson and Lang no systematic reply has yet been made, and the controversy remains where they left it, though General Mahon in his two books has advanced some arguments against the genuine ness of Letter II. (R. S. R.)