We have exhausted the three conceivable alternatives as to the date, occasion, and circumstances of this Letter. Its contents fit none of these dates and occasions. Mr. Froude adds a fourth alternative. This Letter ‘was written just before the marriage’[380] when Bothwell (whose absence is complained of) was never out of Mary’s company. There is not, in short, an obvious place for this Letter in the recorded circumstances of Mary’s history, though the lack of obviousness may arise from our ignorance of facts. XVI _THE CASKET SONNETS_ When the ‘Detection’ of Buchanan was first published, La Mothe Fénelon, French ambassador in England, writing to Charles IX., described the Sonnets as the worst, or most compromising, of all the evidence. They never allude to Darnley, and must have been written after his death. As is well known, Brantôme says that such of Mary’s verses as he had seen were entirely unlike the Casket Sonnets, which are ‘too rude and unpolished to be hers.’ Ronsard, he adds, was of the same opinion. Both men had seen verses written hastily by Mary, and still ‘unpolished,’ whether by her, or by Ronsard, who may have aided her, as Voltaire aided Frederick the Great. Both critics were, of course, prejudiced in favour of the beautiful Queen. Both were good judges, but neither had ever seen 160 lines of sonnet sequence written by her under the stress of a great passion, and amidst the toils of travel, of business, of intense anxiety, all in the space of two days, April 21 to April 23. [Illustration: PLATE A TWO SONNETS FROM THE CAMBRIDGE MS. The hand somewhat resembles that of Mary in early youth, and that of Mary Beaton The copyist is unknown]