Cassette letters
The cassette letters are eight letters allegedly written by Queen Mary of Scots to James Hepburn , the Earl of Bothwell. They were the main means of evidence in the investigation of the Conference of York and Westminster from 1568 to 1569. Here Scottish nobles who had deposed Mary tried to prove Mary's complicity in the murder of her husband, Lord Henry Darnley , before an English arbitration tribunal . James Douglas, 4th Earl of Morton , claimed they were found in Edinburgh in a silver case with an engraved F (supposedly for Francis II ), along with other documents (including Mary and James Hepburn's marriage certificates and a poem) . Maria was not allowed to see the letters.
Although the letters, after an examination of the handwriting and contents, were found to be authentic, the court concluded that they could not prove Lord Darnley's murder. However, this had purely political reasons, since Elizabeth I neither wanted Mary to be acquitted nor to be convicted.
The authenticity of the cassette letters is still controversial among historians today. The originals were lost in 1584 and none of the numerous existing copies forms a complete set. Maria argued that it wasn't difficult to imitate her handwriting. It was also suggested that the letters were completely forgeries, that suspicious passages were inserted before the York conference, or that the letters to Bothwell were written by someone else. It is impossible to reconstruct the case today. It is considered certain that the letters of Maria Stuart's son King James VI. were destroyed.
Stefan Zweig argues in the spirit of his Sigmund Freud -influenced poetics in the literary biography Maria Stuart that the cassette letters must be genuine because they are so psychologically convincing. He sees the portrayal of contemporaries as proof of authenticity and states that hardly anyone in Scotland with the necessary knowledge of private processes could have been able to create a French text in such a short time. On this basis, Zweig assumes that Mary Queen of Scots knew about the murder plot. He sees Bothwell, to whom she was a slave, as the main culprit who manipulated Maria and thus classifies her act as humanly understandable.
Individual evidence
- ^ A sonnet, supposed to have been written by Mary Queen of Scots, to the Earl of Bothwell; previous to her marriage with that nobleman. Translated into English. To which is subjoined a copy of the French sonnet, written, as it is said, with the Queen's own hand; and found in casket, with other secret papers. London: printed by John Crowder, for GGJ and J. Robinson, No 25, Pater-Noster-Row, 1790
- ^ Stefan Zweig: Maria Stuart . Reichner, Vienna 1935
- ↑ Ulrike Tanzer : 11.4 Maria Stuart (1935). In: Arturo Larcati, Klemens Renoldner, Martina Wörgötter (eds.): Stefan-Zweig-Handbuch. De Gruyter, Boston / Berlin 2018, ISBN 978-3-11-030415-2 , pp. 418-420 (accessed online from de Gruyter ).