3. One of the internal difficulties is more apparent than real. It turns on the internal chronology, which seems quite impossible and absurd, and must, it is urged, be the result of treacherous dovetailing. The circumstance that Crawford, a retainer of Lennox, was put forward at the Westminster Commission, in December, 1568, to corroborate part of the Letter makes a real difficulty. He declared that Darnley had reported to him the conversations between himself and the Queen, described by Mary, in Letter II., and that he wrote down Darnley’s words ‘immediately, at the time,’ for the use of Lennox. But Crawford proved too much. His report was, partly, an English translation of the Scots translation of the French of the Letter. Therefore he either took his corroborative evidence from the Letter, or the Letter was in part based on Crawford’s report, and therefore was forged. Bresslau, Cardauns, Philippson, Mr. Hosack, and Sir John Skelton adopted the latter alternative. The Letter, they say, was forged, in part, on Crawford’s report. 4. The contents of the Letter are alien to Mary’s character and style: incoherent, chaotic, out of keeping. We take these objections in the order indicated. First, as to the internal dates of the Letter. These are certainly impossible. Is this the result of clumsy dovetailing by a forger? There is no date of day of the month or week, but the Letter was clearly begun on the night of Mary’s arrival in Glasgow (by our theory, January 21). Unless it was finished in the night of January 22, and sent off on January 23, it cannot be genuine: cannot have reached Bothwell in time. We are to suppose that, on sitting down to write, Mary made, first, a list of twelve heads of her discourse, on a separate sheet of paper, and then began her epistle on another sheet. Through paragraphs 1, 2, 3,[337] she followed the sequence of her notes of heads, and began paragraph 4, ‘The King sent for Joachim’ (one of her servants) ‘yesternicht, and asked why I lodged not beside him.’[338] If this means that Mary was in Glasgow on the day before she began writing, the dates cannot be made to harmonise with facts. For her first night of writing must then be January 22, her second January 23; Bothwell, therefore, cannot receive the letter till January 24, on which day he went to Liddesdale, and Paris, the bearer, declared that he gave the letter to Bothwell the day _before_ he rode to Liddesdale. The answer is obvious. Joachim probably reached Glasgow on the day before Mary’s arrival, namely on January 20. It was usual to send the royal beds, carpets, tapestries, and ‘cloth of State’ in front of the travelling prince, to make the rooms ready before he came. Joachim would arrive with the upholstery a day in advance of Mary. Therefore, on her first night, January 21, she can speak of what the King said to Joachim ‘yesterday.’