Mr. Henderson (who does not admit the verbal correspondence of Letter and Deposition) clearly sees no harm in this course. ‘It is by no means improbable that Crawford refreshed his recollection by the aid of the Letter, which, in any case, he may have seen before he prepared his statement.’ But he swore that he wrote a statement, from Darnley’s lips, ‘immediately at the time.’[346] He said nothing about losing the paper, which he wrote in January, 1567. (Mr. Henderson says it ‘had apparently been destroyed’--why ‘apparently’?) But, according to Mr. Henderson, ‘he may have seen the letter before he prepared his statement. Probably he would have been ready to have admitted this.’ He would have had an evil encounter with any judge to whom he admitted that, being called to corroborate part of a letter, written in French, he copied his corroborating statement, verbally on the whole, from a Scots translation of the letter itself! I do not think that Crawford would have been ‘ready to admit’ this unconscionable villainy. Yet we must either believe that he was guilty of it, or that the Letter was forged. There is one indication which, for what it is worth, corroborates the truth of Crawford’s oath. He swore that he had written down Darnley’s report of conversations with Mary ‘immediately at the time,’ in order that he, in turn, might report them to Lennox, ‘because the said Earl durst not then, for displeasure of the Queen, come abroad,’ and speak to Darnley himself. But Crawford never swore, or said, that he wrote down his own conversation with Mary. Now, on June 11, 1568, Lennox does not ask for what Crawford swore that he _wrote_, much the most important part of his evidence, the account of Darnley’s talks with Mary. Lennox does not ask for _that_, for what Crawford swore that he wrote ‘immediately at the time.’ He merely asks ‘what purpois’ (talk) ‘Thomas Crawford held with the Queen at her coming to the town.’ This may be understood to mean that Lennox already held, and so did not need, Crawford’s written account, dictated by Darnley to him, of the conversations between Mary and Darnley. For that document, if he had it not, Lennox would most certainly ask, but ask he did not. Therefore, it may be argued, Lennox had it all the while in his portfolio, and therefore, again, parts of Letter II. are borrowed from Crawford’s written paper of January, 1567.[347] In that case, we clear Crawford’s character for probity, but we destroy the authenticity of Letter II.[348] I confess that this last argument, with the fact that we have no evidence against the character of Crawford, a soldier of extraordinary daring and resource, and a country gentleman, not a politician, rather disturbs the balance of probabilities in favour of the theory that he borrowed his Deposition textually from the Letter, and increases the probability that the Letter is a forgery based on the Deposition.[349]