Balfour and Mary corresponded in cypher through Archbishop Beaton, her ambassador in France. On March 18, 1580, she had written to Beaton, ‘if possible make Balfour write to me fully about the band which he has seen, with the signatures, for the murder of my late husband, the King, or let him give you a copy in his own hand.’ If she really possessed the band which Nau says Bothwell gave her at Carberry, she needed no copy from Balfour. She does not seem to have believed in him and his band. On May 20, 1580, she writes to Beaton: ‘I put no faith in what Balfour has sent me, so far, and cannot trust him much having been so wretchedly betrayed by him,’ for Balfour had put Morton on the trail of the Casket, had sold the Castle, and later, had betrayed Kirkcaldy and Lethington when they held the Castle against Morton. However, she sent to Balfour a civil message, and bade him go on undermining Morton, in which he succeeded, in the following year. But the murder-band was never produced. On March 16, 1581, Randolph described a conference which had passed between him and James VI. ‘I spoke again of the _band in the green box_, containing the names of all the chief persons consenting to the King’s murder, which Sir James Balfour either hath or can tell of.’ Randolph, who was working for Morton, obviously knew that _he_ did not sign that band: otherwise he would have avoided the subject.[422]
We have no account of Morton’s trial, save what Foster tells Walsingham. ‘The murder of the King was laid to him by four or five witnesses. The first is the Lord Bothwell’s Testament’ (usually thought to be forged), ‘the second, Mr. Archibald Douglas, when he was his man.’ But Douglas, surely, dared not appear in Court, or in Scotland. Foster clearly means that Archibald’s servant, Binning, proved _his_ guilt, and that it reflected on Morton, whose ‘man’ Archibald was, in 1567, and later. Next came the charge that Morton ‘spoke with’ Bothwell, as he confessed that he did, at Whittingam, about January 20, 1567, when he says that he declined to join the plot without Mary’s written warrant. How could this be known, except through Mary or Archibald Douglas? Possibly his brother, at whose house the conference was held, may have declared the matter, as he ‘split,’ in 1581, on Archibald, and all concerned. ‘And then’ Morton was condemned on ‘the consenting to the murder of the King’ (how was _that_ proved?), on Ainslie’s band to support Bothwell’s quarrel, ‘no person being excepted,’ and finally, ‘the Queen’s confession at Carberry Hill,’ when she confessed nothing, but accused Morton.