History Scotland Magazine: The Casket Sonnets: New Evidence Concerning Mary Queen of Scots

Portrait of Mary, Queen of Scots - detail (Blairs Museum Trust)

THE CASKET SONNETS:
New Evidence Concerning Mary Queen of Scots

Peter Davidson

Part 1:
A Forgotten Dossier Brought to Light

It seems hardly possible at this stage in the history of Scotland that major documents concerning such a crucial figure as Mary Queen of Scots should come to light. Mary is an obviously controversial figure from her lifetime to the present, a focus of continuous professional and popular attention. Her status as a historical figure is complicated by romantic story-telling, by recollections of operatic and theatrical treatments of her life, and by the two violently opposing views of her character and actions. Depending on the writer or readers own position, she is either a martyr for Scotland and her faith or a scheming adulteress who got roughly what she deserved.

Mary presented in the worst possible light

The documents which have come again to our attention, after having been surprisingly little examined or used in the course of the twentieth century, do not solve any of the great unanswered questions of Marys life. They neither acquit nor incriminate her of the murder of her second husband, Lord Darnley. They do not shed any real light on the motives which led to her disastrous liaison with the Earl of Bothwell, although at one point, significantly, they pretend to. What they do tell us is that there clearly existed in the Scotland of the mid-sixteenth century (the time when Mary was a prisoner in England) a person or persons unknown who were wholly committed to gathering a dossier presenting Mary in the worst possible light as adulteress and murderess. A part of this dossier is a sequence of twelve sonnets (known as the casket sonnets) in French alleged to be of Marys composition, constituting a literary reflection of her murder and adultery. Whoever compiled this dossier clearly hoped that the English authorities would save them the trouble of dealing with Mary themselves: its intention is clearly to supply evidence on which she could be convicted of the treason-related crime of planning her husbands murder and executed on that charge. I assume that the documents were sent to England: they are certainly in England now, and what little can be conjectured as to their whereabouts since the sixteenth century suggests that they were sent to England in the 1580s to persons of influence in public and court affairs.

So where are these documents which have been little quoted or consulted? You hide leaves in forests, purloined letters in letter-racks. Documents can drop out of scholarly consciousness even in a major research library, and that is the case here: they are to be found among the manuscripts preserved in Cambridge University Library, where the collection shares the memorable call number Oo.7.47. How have these documents eluded notice for much of the last century, even though extracts from them have in fact been printed over the years? That is not a simple question: their existence is lucidly recorded in a printed catalogue, where it is shown that they were part of an eighteenth-century royal donation which consisted of the library of the late bishop of Ely, John Moores, together with miscellaneous additions. So a royal or court source for the documents is perfectly possible, but even the excellent printed descriptions do not immediately declare the nature of the collection as a dossier dating from sixteenth century Scotland (indeed there are some miscellaneous documents at the end of the file relating to later events).

Probably not Marys

I claim no credit for the fact that these documents came to my notice a few years ago. I was looking at the manuscript of the sonnets in French as part of a project which has nothing to do with Mary, her reputation or her legend. I was considering her purely as a poet in the French and Latin languages, as part of my contribution to a highly innovative collection of sixteenth and seventeenth poetry by women written in Scotland, Ireland and England. In a sense I was asking the manuscripts a fruitfully irrelevant question, a question simply about the authenticity or inauthenticity of a small group of sonnets by an early-modern woman, with no thought at that time of larger historical implications. I came to an almost immediate decision which much subsequent consideration has done nothing to alter: these poems were very unlike any of Marys authentic works, and they contain references to people and events which could not in any sense apply to Marys life or circumstances. They are most certainly not in Marys formal nor informal hand; they are not in the possibly secretarial hand who fair-copied the sonnets now in the British Library. Even at that early stage they looked to me very like verse episodes from one of those very weighty romances which formed the preferred reading of the early-modern elite across Europe. The first thing to leap off the page at any reader is that the poems do not stand alone. They are placed a little further to the right of the manuscript page than is usual, and the left-hand margin bristles with hostile commentary in Scots, pointing out apparent references to Darnleys murder and the developing affair with Bothwell.

[A page from the manuscript of the Casket Sonnets The italic hand in the implied autograph is unrelated to Marys own hand or to the hand of any known secretary. Observe the Scots language marginals at the left hand side, which interpret the French Sonnets as a covert confession of Mary Stuarts responsibility for the murder of her husband. (Trustees of Cambridge University Library, MS Oo 7.47)]

Thus these sonnets have a context, that of the dossier in the course of which they appear and we can be very certain of one thing. Whoever compiled the dossier was among the most implacable of Marys enemies. The other contents are highly interesting, not least as a possible indication of what the sixteenth-century mind considered to be admissible evidence in a murder enquiry. It is useful to scan those other contents to gain an idea of the context, the provenance of these incriminating verses. These are the papers: a note of Bothwells actions on 12 April 1567; evidence of the servant of Lord Lennox; the deposition of one John Hay, 13 September 1567; the confession of John Hepburne; a memorandum of suspicious actions of the queen; a conversation between Darnley and his father, together with an account of Darnleys ill-usage at the queens hands. Fascinatingly, libels and street ballads are included as evidential: a bitter pamphlet accusing Darnleys murderers, in the form of question and answer, and a street ballad on his murder:

If the blood of habell in the Lord his eare
Cried out for vengence upon cursed Cain
What shall the blood of inocent Darley dere
Requyer of them that cruelly have hem slaine.

The sequence of documents continues with examinations of the murder of the Queens secretary Rizzio and concludes with the controversial sonnets which form the main subject of this article.

Mary portrayed as alien, sexually ambiguous, aberrant and dangerous

If we are to think of the dossier as a whole as having a theme, it is a construction of Mary as alien, sexually ambiguous, aberrant and dangerous, not least in her religion. To complete the picture which these documents seek to define, it is important that Mary be seen to condemn herself out of her own mouth. Truth will out, even if truth occasionally needs a little help from her humble secretaries. Thus, religious and political imperatives call into being texts which are dubiously by Mary herself, but which are constructed as part of a case against her, circulated as the sort of things which she ought to have written.

But did she write them? Marys French contemporaries responded instantly, almost with surprise that the question was being asked at all, that she could not have possibly composed these vulgar illiteracies. It is an interesting response, one to which we must return. Recent popular historians of course are mad keen that these sonnets should be by Mary: they are part of the romantic heritage against which I warned above. More serious historians have queried their abject stance, their sheer lack of resemblance to any known court poetry of the period and have speculated interestingly about their being the product of some kind of emotional breakdown.

The only way to advance the question is to look at what Mary is known to have written. This question of her writings must begin with her education and training. Whatever she chose to express, and the means she chose to express it, inevitably drew on her formation in youth. Mary, the only surviving legitimate child of her father, James V, was betrothed in early childhood to the heir of the French throne, and conscientiously educated at the court of her father-in-law, Henri II. Her education was therefore that of a French princess. As a potential ruling queen, she was taught Latin, while French was for her the language of daily life, and remained so throughout her life, although she could speak and (to an extent) write Scots.

From the very beginning her writings were governed by the rules which transformed royal life in the sixteenth century into a set of coded and expressive gestures. Her writings express political intentions and political aspirations in the highly standardised literary language of her day. When she was still a mere child all her Latin exercises were written in the form of letters to her cousin Elizabeth, a chilling reminder of the way that the English throne was kept before her eyes even in her early youth.

Marys authentic writings

Before we can look sensibly at some poems which appear increasingly probably not to have been written by Mary, it would be wise to look at those verses which are certainly hers. They can be demonstrated to be hers (as the casket sonnets cannot) by the simple standards that can be used to establish the authenticity of any writings: their handwriting and their provenance. In this context, the term provenance is useful: simply, it means place of origin, place where a text survives, who a verse might have been written for, in whose collection or notebook a verse survives. By these classic tools for establishing authorship, we can attribute to Mary a very coherent body of verses in French, one sonnet in Italian and (possibly, on grounds of provenance alone) two Latin couplets. It is worth surveying these verses quickly. It will emerge rapidly that they are remarkably coherent, remarkably consistent. They are not always particularly interesting by modern standards of what is interesting, but they are always polished and are fascinating in themselves once we realise that they are far from being expressions of emotion, but are rather elegant counters in the complex game of elite public life in sixteenth-century Europe.

The earliest of Marys French poems to survive appears to be her brief verse in her authentic hand, in the mass-book of her aunt, Anne de Lorraine, written in 1559. More significant is the Ode on the Death of Francis, her husband, written on his death in 1560. This is preserved by her friend, the French courtier, Pierre du Bourdeilles, Seigneur de Brantme, in his Memoires de Messire Pierre du Bourdeille, Seigneur de Brantme, contenans les Vies des dames Illustres de France de son temps, printed a number of times in the seventeenth century. He is one of those who reacted to the casket sonnets with dismissive puzzlement. Once queen in Scotland, Mary also wrote a number of verses to Queen Elizabeth, which are hers beyond doubt. One written in 1568, survives in a copy, now among the Cotton manuscripts in the British Library in London. Two other, later, short poems, dating from her English captivity, are in the Public Record Office at Kew together in a single-sheet, presentation copy, Cela vraiment na poinct de courtoisie (1580), and Les Dieux, Les Cieux, La Mort (1580).

A long poem, Meditations faite par la Royne dEscosce, Douariere de France, recueillie dun livre des consolations divines, composez par lEvesque de Rosse sent to Bishop John Lesley after reading his Consolationes, appears to be quite genuine, and is rather more personal. Mary wrote a letter to Lesley from Sheffield Castle in August, 1572, in which she acknowledged receiving a copy of his meditations, and sent verses which had been suggested by them. The bishop published his work two years later, with Marys French poem and a Latin translation, later reprinted. The printed text also contains a sonnet by Mary, beginning LIre de Dieu par le sang ne saspraise, and the second edition contains a third poem by Mary, apparently sent too late to be included in the 1574 edition. Though no autograph, and no manuscript of any kind, survives for these three poems, the contextual evidence is adequate to support them. Their provenance is excellent.

The three sonnets preserved in the Bodleian Library in the manuscript numbered MS Add.C.92 are unproblematic in that they are unmistakably autograph drafts, O seigneur Dieu rescevez ma priere, Donnes Seigneur dones moy pasciance and Ronsart si ton bon cuer de gentille nature. These are in the very characteristic informal hand familiar from the (authenticated) letters, complete with revisions. What might be worth observing at this point is that they provide, at least in terms of defining a characteristic orthography, a preferred set of choices in the spelling of French words at a time when spelling was far from fixed in most European languages. In this and in their punctuation and layout, they give some sense of what autograph sonnets by Mary might look like.

And so we come to the twelve sonnets allegedly addressed to Bothwell, and published and circulated by her enemies in the Latin denunciation composed by George Buchanan and published in England in pseudo-Scots as Ane Detection of the duinges of Marie, Quene of Scottes, Touchand the murder of hir husband (1571 and 1573). As we know from the recovery of the Cambridge dossier, they seem also to have been circulated in a manuscript which tries in some ways to look like the production of Marys private circle. Marys French friend Brantme, whose sources were excellent, distrusted the sonnets completely, and his opinion, as that of a man exquisitely tuned to the court culture of Renaissance France, is one we should take seriously: he thought they were vulgar, and for that reason, that she could not have written them: his view and that of the French poet Ronsard was that her authentic verses were well-made and nothing like the sonnets addressed to Bothwell. Those are ill-polished and vulgar, impossible.

The casket sonnets

The position with the casket sonnets might not be quite as difficult as it has seemed to, for example, Lady Antonia Fraser, who states in her biography of Mary:

The twelve love sonnets, as they were termed, consist in fact of one long love poem of twelve verses. We are dependent on the published French and published Scottish versions for their text, since no contemporary copies have survived.

We now know that this is not the case. It is not certain if this manuscript was claimed as autograph by those who sent it to England: certainly in the printed denunciation which Buchanan published in 1569 Ane detection of the doings... claims on folio Qiiii, as a headnote to a rather gappy text of the sonnets, writynges...which are avowit to be written with the Scottishe Quens awne hand. So it is perhaps implicitly meant to be accepted as autograph or at least proceeding from the privy chamber of the Queenthus asking us to believe that this material would have been entrusted even to a confidential secretary. Even given the extreme unlikliness that such material would have been copied even by the most confidential of confidential secretaries, the hand is not unproblematic: it is not aiming at all for the informal hand of the Bodleian manuscript but is aiming rather for something like the formal italic of the French and Italian sonnets presented to Elizabeth as per Cotton Caligula B V, f. 316.

The match is imperfect, particularly as far as the decorated initial letters are concerned and, significantly, the column of verse is slightly nearer the right-hand margin than is usual in the layout of sixteenth-century single-column manuscripts. The Scots of the marginal comments accommodated by this layout would appear to be perfectly genuine as opposed to the unconvincing Scotticised English of the London editions of Buchanans Latin Detectioun. So far, we have some trouble with the handwriting and layout of the manuscript. It could also be observed that the spelling is not a particularly good match for that of the authentic works discussed above.

I would suggest that Lady Antonia is also wrong in trying to read these poems as one long love poem of twelve verses. One often-quoted poem, Entre ses mains et en son plein pouvoir, if its context did not offer an insistent reading as a poem of besotted sexual passion, would more naturally be read, if it survived in any other context, as a religious poem. It seems, however not unlikely that what we have here is a pre-existing French religious poem which happened to be adaptable to the shadowy purposes of whichever group of the queens enemies put together the dossier. It would also seem very likely that this text has been improved by themthe evidentially crucial mes subiects in the third line renders the line irregular, metrically inaccurate. There are no hypermetric lines in any of the other authenticable French sonnets (except for the unfinished draft of the poem to Ronsard in the Oxford manuscript). Marys authenticable verse is metrically as regular as a metronome, a distinguishing feature of the casket sonnets is that they abound in hypermetrical or a-metrical lines.

It could be said that some of the other poems do seem to form a sonnet-sequence, but the circumstances which can be deduced from them do not fit Marys circumstances particularly well. There are two groupings (second- and third-person). The poem O dieux ayez de moi compassion refers to parents or family as opposing the love described in the sonnet: Offense des parents is the original phrase. It was this phrase, with all its overtones of the stock situations of romance, which first set off the alarm when first I examined the manuscript. You see, Marys parents, long in their graves, were past being offended by her affairs, and there was no-one who, in 1567, could possibly be considered in loco parentis to her. The only living relatives that she had in Scotland were her many illegitimate half-siblings, the by-blows of James V. There are many other details of fact which do not fit, and the troubling parents make at last one other appearance.

Conclusion

The interim conclusion which suggests itself to me is, indeed, that a number of sonnets related to a romance, or a sequence conceived as heroical epistles relating to some unknown heroine, have been grafted together with a religious verse to create a sequence, which (once one is alerted to the problems of genre) looks less and less coherent. The really crucial evidence is stylistic and internal. Marys own sonnets, though not particularly distinguished (indeed containing one or two dubious rhymes) are scrupulously correct in metre and vocabulary. What we have in the Cambridge manuscript is a set of sonnets which exhibit a jumble of metres (iambics and alexandrines) and which include lines that dont scan on any system whatsoever. Clearly to the eye of a court poet they are simply vulgar, trop grossiers in Brantmes phrase, they are not of the court. The sonnets also contain numerous barbarisms, lines which fail to obey any poetic rules at all, which would have added irrefutable force to Brantmes and Ronsards judgements. Beyond this, I have confirmation from a number of specialist colleagues that these sonnets indeed would pass only with difficulty as the work of any native French speaker, particularly in the inaccurate placing of stresses. These texts are however plausible as the work of a small group of people with enough French to cut up pre-existing texts and try to make them fit roughly the circumstances of the queens alleged life, but without enough French to compose a metrically convincing line from scratch.

While it cannot be said that this re-examination pronounces Mary guiltless of any more than the composition of twelve profoundly clumsy sonnets in doubtful French, it does have real historical importance as virtual proof of the fabrication of evidence against her. We know that in the Scotland of the mid-sixteenth century, there existed a group of people, very probably including the poet George Buchanan, who composed a dossier of documents intended to be proof that Mary was guilty of murder. Striking incompetence in the imitation of French court poetry, brands the casket sonnets a forgery almost beyond doubt. We have, therefore, to accept that the historical record as we have it is at least partly the result of a person or persons unknown deliberately trying to alter that record for their own ends. In short we must proceed with a prudent suspicion as we examine the documents in the case.

So the forgery tells the truth as one group of sixteenth-century Scots saw it. These secretaries of the truth seem to have been prepared to confect the evidence which would cause the monstrous, foreign queen to condemn herself in what the English authorities might just believe to have been her own words. In the second of these two articles I will examine an opposing group of documents in the case: those pictures, objects and documents (some of them little known) brought into being by those who believed that Mary Queen of Scots could be more appropriately described as St Mary, Queen and Martyr.

Peter Davidson is the Chalmers Regius Professor of English in the University of Aberdeen.

(Part 2 of this article appears in History Scotland Vol. 2 No.1: Saint Mary, Queen & Martyr: an alternative history of Mary Stuart