Casket Letters is the name generally given to a group of eight letters and a sequence of irregular sonnets said to have been addressed by Mary, Queen of Scots, to the Earl of Bothwell, between January and April 1566 or 1567. If authentic throughout, they would provide definite proof of Mary's complicity in the murder of her husband, Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley. The letters are, however, only one detail of the whole problem; even if accepted as fake, this alone does not prove that Mary was uninvolved in her husband's death.
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The Earl of Morton claimed to have found the letters in a locked silver casket in the possession of George Dalgleish, a servant of Bothwell, at Edinburgh on 19 June 1567.[1]
After Mary Stuart's flight into England, Elizabeth I ordered an inquiry into the question of whether Mary should be tried for the murder of Darnley. A conference was held in York and later Westminster between October 1568 and January 1569. The accusers were the Scottish Lords who had deposed Mary the year before, and they presented the Casket Letters to underpin their argument. For overriding political reasons, Elizabeth neither wished to convict Mary of murder nor acquit her of the same. So the conference was intended as a political show. The outcome was that the Casket Letters were accepted by the conference as genuine after a study of the handwriting, and of the information contained therein. Yet, as Elizabeth had wished, the inquiry reached the conclusion that nothing was proven.
The Letters were purportedly found by James Douglas, 4th Earl of Morton in Edinburgh in a silver box engraved with an F (supposedly for Francis II), along with a number of other documents, including the Mary-Bothwell marriage certificate. The originals were probably destroyed in 1584 by Mary's son, King James.[2] Only copies exist, one in French, the others are translations from the French into Scots and English. The nature of these documents—authentic, forged, or only partly forged—has been the subject of much discussion for more than a hundred years.
Purportedly the silver casket itself was acquired by Mary Gordon, wife to the 1st Marquis of Douglas. Following her death, it was sold to a goldsmith, but was later reacquired by her daughter-in law, Anne Hamilton, 3rd Duchess of Hamilton. The casket originally had the Queen's arms engraved engraved upon it, but was replaced successively by the arms of the Marchioness, then the Duchess. Together with other memorabilia related to the Queen, the casket is currently on display at Lennoxlove House, East Lothian.[3][4]