both their handwritings to testify the same, which I am willed to signify to you, that you may consider thereof. You know her goodwill towards you, and how prompt of spirit she is to invent anything that might tend to your hurt. The rest I remit to your wisdom.... Mr. Secretary’ (Cecil) ‘and Sir Nicholas’ (Throckmorton) ‘are both direct against your coming here to this trial.’[264] But it was less unsafe for Lethington to come, and perhaps try to make his peace with Mary, than to stay in Scotland. Mary also, in her appeal to all Christian Princes, declares that the handwriting of several of her accusers proves that they are guilty of the crime they lay to her charge.[265] It is fairly certain that she had not the murder band, but something she probably did possess. And Nau says that she had told Lethington what she knew on June 16, 1567. If the Casket Letters were now produced, and if Mary were allowed to defend herself, backed by her own charms of voice and tears, then some, at least, of her accusers would not be listened to by that assemblage of Peers and Ambassadors before which she constantly asked leave to plead, ‘in Westminster Hall.’ The Casket Letters, produced by men themselves guilty, would in these circumstances be slurred as probable forgeries. Mary would prefer not to come to extremities, but if she did, as Sussex, one of Elizabeth’s Commissioners, declared, in the opinion of some ‘her proofs would fall out the better.’ This I take to have been Mary’s attitude towards the Letters, this was her last line of defence. Indeed the opinion is corroborated by her letter from Bolton to Lesley (October 5, 1568). She says that Knollys has been trying _tirer les vers du nez_ (‘to extract her secret plans’), a phrase used in Casket Letter II. ‘My answer is that I would oppose the truth to their false charges, _and something which they perchance have not yet heard_.’[266] Mr. Froude thinks that Mary trusted to a mere theatrical denial, on the word of a Queen. But I conceive that she had a better policy; and so thought Sussex. Much earlier, on June 14, 1568, soon after her flight into England, Mary had said to Middlemore, ‘If they’ (her accusers) ‘will needs come, desire my good sister, the Queen, to write that Lethington and Morton (who be two of the wisest and most able of them to say most against me) may come, and then let me be there in her presence, face to face, to hear their accusations, and to be heard how I can make my own purgation, but I think Lethington would be very loath of that commission.’[267]