Mary, Queen of Scots, 1542-1587; Queens -- Scotland -- Biography; Scotland -- History -- Mary Stuart, 1542-1567
Here Lennox writes as one who has seen, or been told the contents of, the
Casket Letters on which he remarks. And well might he have seen them, for
his three despatches of June 11 are ‘all written on the same sheets, _and
in the same hand_,’ as two letters written and sent, on the following day,
by John Wood, from Greenwich, to Moray and Lethington. Thus Wood, or his
secretary, wrote out all five epistles.[249] Consequently Wood, who had
translations of the Casket Letters, was then with Lennox, and was likely
to be now and then with him, till the Conference at York in October. On
October 3, just before the Conference at York, Lady Lennox tells Cecil
that she means to speak to Mr. John Wood, if he is at Court, for he knows
who the murderers are.[250] And Wood carried to Lennox, at York, Lady
Lennox’s despatches.[251] Being allied with Wood, as the Chiswick and
Greenwich letters of June 11, 12, prove, and writing to Wood’s master,
Moray, about Mary’s Casket Letters, it is hardly probable that Lennox had
not been shown by Wood the Scots versions of the Casket Letters, then in
Wood’s custody. And when, about this date or later, Lennox composed the
long indictment against Mary, and quoted the letter already cited by
Moray, it is hardly credible that he described the long poisonous document
from mere hearsay, caught from Moray in the previous year. It is at least
as likely, if not much more so, that his description of the long letter
was derived from a translation of the letter itself, as it then existed in
the hands of Wood. Is it probable that Wood (who was known to have in his
custody the Letters to which Lennox refers, in his epistle to Moray of
June 11) could withhold them from the father of the murdered Darnley, a
noble who had been selected by the Lords as a co-Regent with Moray, and
who was, like himself, a correspondent of Moray and an eager prosecutor of
the Queen? If then Wood did in June, 1568, show to Lennox the Casket
Letters as they then existed, when Lennox presently described the long
murderous letter, he described what he had seen, namely a _pièce de
conviction_ which was finally suppressed. And that it was later than his
meeting with Wood, on June 11, 1568, that Lennox prepared his elaborate
discourse, is obvious, for what reason had he to compose an indictment
before, in June or later, it became clear that Mary’s case would be tried
in England?
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