Mary, Queen of Scots: Murder, the Casket Letters, and the Crown She Could Not KeepMary Queen of Scots:

The letters that convicted Mary, Queen of Scots have not been seen in four hundred years. Eight letters and a cycle of sonnets, produced from a silver casket at Westminster in December 1568, were last recorded in the hands of the Earl of Gowrie in 1584. What survives is copies, made by the men who deposed her.

She was queen of Scotland at six days old, queen of France at sixteen and a widow at eighteen. She came home to a kingdom that had turned Protestant in her absence and governed it for four years with more skill than she is usually allowed. Then, in a little over two years, she lost everything. Her secretary was stabbed at her supper table. Her husband's house at Kirk o' Field blew up at two in the morning, and he was found dead in the garden some forty yards from the rubble, without a mark from the blast. Three months later she married the man most of Scotland believed had killed him. By twenty-five she had been deposed, had escaped, had lost a battle in under an hour and had crossed the Solway in a fishing boat into the custody of a cousin she had never met and never would.

The captivity lasted nearly nineteen years, and this book gives it a full quarter of its length: the Earl of Shrewsbury and Bess of Hardwick, the embroidery, the ciphers, the plots built around her with and without her consent, and the beer-barrel post at Chartley that Walsingham built to catch her. It ends with her letter of 17 July 1586, the postscript that Walsingham's codebreaker Thomas Phelippes forged onto it, and the trial at Fotheringhay she refused to recognise and then attended. She was forty-four.

Kirk o' Field, the days at Dunbar, the Casket Letters and the Babington reply are each presented as what they are: open questions with serious evidence on more than one side. Every witness is labelled for what he wanted. Mary is paraphrased from her own letters and never given a thought the sources do not record. The two appendices are built as evidence files, so a reader who disagrees with a chapter has the material to argue back.

What you'll learn:

• Who the suspects at Kirk o' Field were, what each stood to gain, and why the body in the garden is the centre of the mystery
• What the Casket Letters say, who copied them, and why the question of their authorship cannot now be settled by examination
• How the cipher post at Chartley worked, and why what her reply to Babington consented to is still argued
• Why the two queens never met, and what twenty-five years of letters between them did instead
• How she lost every crown she held, and how her son came to inherit them all

This book is for you if:

• You have read the six queens of Henry VIII and Elizabeth I and want the story from the other side of the border
• You know Mary from the films and want the evidence rather than the romance
• You read unsolved cases and want a sixteenth-century one with a documentary trail
• You want a book that shows its working and trusts you to weigh it

She lost every crown she ever held. Sixteen years after her death, her son inherited all of them.