Books: Perennial Mystery

THE CASKET LETTERS by M. H. Armstrong Davison. 352 pages. University Press of Washington, D.C., and Community College Press. $8.

The plot is surefire. Beautiful young Queen of Scotland takes a lover, plots to kill off her sottish husband, succeeds but loses her throne and flees into the hands of her homely rival, Queen Elizabeth of England, who throws her into prison and, some years later, has her beheaded.

But history has not made it clear whether Mary Stewart, Queen of Scots, was a wanton schemer or a woman wronged—particularly since the whole evidence of her presumed adultery and complicity in her husband’s murder rests on the eleven documents that comprise the “Casket Letters.” In this highly packed piece of literary sleuthing, Dr. M. H. Armstrong Davison concludes that the Casket Letters were frauds.

The Blowup. All that is known for certain is that on the morning of Feb. 10, 1567, conspirators ignited a massive charge of gunpowder and demolished Kirk o’Field, a royal residence where Lord Darnley, Mary’s dissolute young husband, lay recovering from a severe case of pox that most likely was secondary syphilis. But Darnley was not a victim of the blast. In some manner, which has always bemused and tantalized historians, he and a servant got away to a nearby garden, where they were waylaid and strangled.

Since Mary had left the residence only a few hours before the explosion, and since it was well known that she detested her husband, she was instantly suspected of being involved in the plot to do him in. Suspicion crystallized into widespread indignation when some three months later she married the profligate and domineering Earl of Bothwell, believed to be her lover and the actual murderer of her husband. A group of Protestant noblemen, who had always been hostile to their Catholic Queen, seized Mary and forced her to abdicate. She soon escaped to England and threw herself on the mercy of Elizabeth, her cousin and longtime rival.

Elizabeth resolved to keep Mary a prisoner, and to provide a pretext Mary was persuaded to submit her cause to an English commission. Before this commission, the Scottish Regency produced its evidence that Mary was madly infatuated with Bothwell and had conspired with him to do away with her husband. Called the Casket Letters because allegedly they were recovered from a silver casket belonging to Mary, the documents consisted of eight letters, a love ballad supposedly written by Mary, and two marriage contracts she reputedly signed with Bothwell. On this evidence, historians have generally concluded that Mary was involved in, or at least aware of, the plot to kill her husband.

Wrong Victim. Davison, a British doctor and lecturer in the history of medicine at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, spent ten years researching and analyzing everything written about Mary and the Scotland of her age to produce his defense. Some of the letters, he concludes, were written by one of Bothwell’s mistresses. Others were actually written by Mary to Bothwell in the course of legitimate business, but then doctored to suggest illicit passion and intrigue. One of Mary’s maids-in-waiting had been taught by the same writing master as Mary, and as a result her handwriting was almost indistinguishable from Mary’s. Davison claims that at the urging of her husband, who turned against Mary, she forged and inserted incriminating passages.

But Davison’s most startling thesis is that Mary, far from being a party to the gunpowder plot at Kirk o’Field, was really marked to be its victim. On the basis of meticulously constructed evidence, he charges that Darnley conspired with a faction of power-hungry lords to have the gunpowder planted in the residence, then touched it off himself, believing that Mary had returned to the house. Darnley fled to the garden, and there was strangled by his fellow conspirators.

Furthermore, Dr. Davison confirms the diagnosis of other historians that Mary suffered from an acutely active gastric ulcer. He also concludes that in terms of modern psychiatry she was a medically certifiable hysteric. He blames her neurosis on her troubled childhood in the first instance, and unusual height. As a child, she fell into sobbing tantrums in times of stress. In later life, she always got sicker when her fortunes ebbed—in one crisis she lost the use of her legs for some weeks. If she was a hysteric, Author Davison considers it highly unlikely that Mary was driven by lust to contrive the death of her husband. Instead, like most hysterics, Mary was probably sexually frigid.