Dr. Henry, the historian of England and Scotland, gave his private and most impartial opinion on this controversy in a letter to William Tytler, printed in “Transactions of Scottish Antiquarian Society,” in these words: “I have been long convinced that the unfortunate Queen Mary was basely betrayed and cruelly oppressed during her life, and calumniated after her death. Many things contributed to involve her in difficulties and dangers on her return to Scotland; her invincible adherence to her religion, her implicit submission to the dictates of her French friends, her having roused the jealousy of Elizabeth by assuming the English arms, the ambition of her brother James, and the faithless, plotting characters of others near her person,—in a word, an invisible political net seemed to have been spread around her, from which it was hardly possible for her to escape. Your efforts, sir, to relieve the memory of a much injured princess from a load of calumny are generous and commendable, and I can assure you they have not been unsuccessful. There is a great and general change in the sentiments of the public on that subject. He would be a bold man who should publish a history of Queen Mary now in the same strain with our two late historians,—Malcolm Laing and Robertson, whose sophistries were rightly estimated by that clear-headed and honest historian, Dr. Henry. Dr. Johnson, a person of a very different way of thinking from either, pronounced a most decided opinion in favor of Mary’s innocence, and expressed his firm conviction ‘that the Silver-casket Letters were spurious, and would never again be brought forward as historic evidences.’” Regarding these same “Silver-casket Letters,” Froude says: “These letters were found in the celebrated casket with the others to which reference was made in the preceding volume; I accept them as genuine, because, as will be seen, they were submitted to the scrutiny of almost the entire English peerage, and especially to those among the peers who were most interested in discovering them to be forged, and by them admitted to be indisputably in the handwriting of the Queen of Scots; because the letters in the text especially refer to conversations with Lord Huntley, who was then and always one of Mary Stuart’s truest adherents,—conversations which he could have denied had they been false, and which he never did deny; because their contents were confirmed in every particular unfavorable to the queen by a Catholic informant of the Spanish ambassador, who hurried from the spot to London immediately after the final catastrophe for which they prepared the way; and lastly, because there is no ground whatever to doubt the genuineness of the entire set of the casket-letters, except such as arises from the hardy and long-continued but entirely baseless denial of interested or sentimental partisans.”