The passion, in the Letters, is all on the side of Mary. By her eternal protests of entire submission she recalls to us at once her eager service to Darnley in the first days of their marriage, and her constant promises of implicit obedience to Norfolk. To Norfolk, as to Bothwell (we have already shown), she expresses her hope that ‘you will mistrust me no more.’[382] ‘If you be in the wrong I will submit me to you for so writing, and ax your pardon thereof.’ She will beg pardon, even if Norfolk is in the wrong! Precisely in the same tone does Mary (in Letter VIII.), after complaining of Bothwell’s forgetfulness, say, ‘But in spite of all I will not accuse you, either of your scant remembrance or scant care, and still less of your broken promise, seeing that what pleases you pleases me.’ This woman, whose pride is said to be in contradiction with her submission, as expressed in the Casket Letters, writes even to Elizabeth, ‘Je me sousmetray à vos commandemants.’[383] In Letter VIII. Bothwell is congratulated on ‘votre victoire et mon agreable perte.’ To Elizabeth Mary writes ‘Vous aurés fayt une profitable conqueste de moy.’ That any forger should have known Mary so well as to place her, imaginatively, as regarded Bothwell, in the very attitude which we see that, on occasion, she chose later to adopt in fact, as regarded Norfolk, is perhaps beyond belief. It may be urged that she probably, in early days, wrote to Darnley in this very tone, that Darnley’s papers would fall into his father’s hands, and that Lennox would hand them over as materials to the forger. But ‘it is to consider too curiously to consider thus.’ Such are the arguments, for the defence and the attack, which may be drawn from internal evidence of style. To myself this testimony seems rather in favour of the authenticity of considerable and compromising portions of the papers. Letter VIII. (intended to prove a contract of marriage with Bothwell) remains an enigma to me: the three Letters proving Mary’s eagerness for the abduction are not without suspicious traits. The epistle about bringing Lord Robert to kill Darnley in a quarrel is involved in the inconsistencies which we have shown to beset that affair. The note about the waiting-woman was hardly worth forging, compromising as it is. Letter I. seems to me certainly authentic, if we adopt the scheme of dates suggested, and reject that of ‘Cecil’s Journal,’ which appears to be official, and answers to Lennox’s demands for dates. It may be merely Lennoxian, but no other scheme of chronology is known to have been put in by the accusers. Letter I., if our dates are admitted, implies the existence of a letter answering to Letter II., which I have had to regard as, in some parts at least, genuine. If forgery and tampering were attempted (as I think they certainly were in the letter never produced, but described by Lennox and Moray, and perhaps in other cases), who was the criminal?