On June 25, Drury, writing from Berwick, reports that ‘the Queen has had a _box_,’ containing papers about her intrigues with France. ‘It is promised Drury to have his part of it.’ This rumour of a ‘box’ _may_ refer to the capture of the Casket.[213] On June 29, Drury again wrote about the ‘box,’ and the MSS. in it, ‘part in cipher deciphered.’ Whether this ‘box’ was the Casket, a false account of its contents being given to Drury, is uncertain. We hear no more of it, nor of any of Mary’s own papers and letters to her: no letters to her from Bothwell are reported.
The earliest known decided reference to the Letters is that of the Spanish Ambassador, de Silva, writing from London on July 12, 1567. He says that du Croc, the French Ambassador to Mary, has passed through town on his return from Scotland. The French Ambassador in London, La Forest, reports to de Silva that Mary’s ‘adversaries assert positively that they know she had been concerned in the murder of her husband, which was proved by letters under her own hand, copies of which were in his [whose?] possession.’[214] Major Martin Hume writes, in his Preface to the Calendar, ‘The many arguments against their genuineness, founded upon the long delay in their production, thus disappear.’
It does not necessarily follow, however, that the letters of which du Croc probably carried copies (unless La Forest merely bragged falsely, to vex his Spanish fellow diplomatist) were either wholly genuine, or were identical with the letters later produced. It is by no means certain that Lethington and Sir James Balfour had not access, before June 21, to the Casket, which was in Balfour’s keeping, within Edinburgh Castle. Randolph later wrote (as we have already seen) that the pair had opened a little ‘coffer,’ with a green cloth cover, and taken out the band (which the pair had signed) for Darnley’s murder.[215] Whether the Casket was thus early tampered with is uncertain. But, as to du Croc’s copies of the Letters, the strong point, for the accusers, is, that, when the Letters were published, in Scots, Latin, and French, four years later, we do not hear that any holders of du Croc’s copies made any stir, or alleged that the copies did not tally with those now printed, in 1571-1573, by Mary’s enemies. This point must be kept steadily in mind, as it is perhaps the chief objection to the theory which we are about to offer. But, on November 29, 1568, when Mary’s accusers were gathered in London to attack her at the Westminster Conference, La Forest’s successor, La Mothe Fénelon, writes to Charles IX. that they pretend to possess incriminating letters ‘_escriptes et signées de sa main_;’ written and _signed_ by her hand. Our _copies_ are certainly not signed, which, in itself, proves little or nothing, but Mary’s contemporary defenders, Lesley and Blackwood, urge that there was not even a pretence that the Letters were signed, and this plea of theirs was not answered.