y's accusers on their oaths. When they all went, in October-December
1568, to York and London to accuse their queen--and before that, in
their proclamations--they contradicted themselves freely and frequently;
they put in a list of dates which made Mary's authorship of Letter II.
impossible; and they rang the changes on Scots translations of the
alleged French originals, and on the French itself. For example, when
Moray, after Mary was in Elizabeth's power (May 16, 1568), wished
Elizabeth to have the matter tried, he in May-June 1568 sent John Wood
to England with Scots translations of the letters. Wood was to ask, "if
the French originals are found to tally with the Scots translations,
will that be reckoned good evidence?" It was as easy to send copies of
the French, and thus give no ground for the suspicion that the Scots
letters were altered on the basis of information acquired between May
and October 1568, and that the French versions were made to fit the new
form of the Scots copies. Another source of confusion, now removed, was
the later publication in France of the letters in French. This French
did not correspond with French copies of some of the originals recently
discovered in Cecil's MSS. and elsewhere. But that is no ground of
suspicion, for the published French letters were not copies of the
alleged originals, but translations of Latin translations of them, from
the Scots (see T.F. Henderson, _The Casket Letters_, 1890). German
historians have not made matters more clear by treating the Letters on
the principle of "the higher criticism" of Homer and the Bible. They
find that the documents are of composite origin, partly notes from Mary
to Darnley, partly a diary of Mary's, and so on; all combined and edited
by some one who played the part of the legendary editorial committee of
Peisistratus (see HOMER), which compiled the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_ out
of fragmentary lays! From all these causes, and others, arise confusion
and suspicion.

So much information unknown to older disputants such as Goodall, the
elder Tytler, Chalmers, and Malcolm Laing, and in certain cases unknown
even to Froude and Skelton, has accrued, that the question can now best
be studied in _The Casket Letters_, by T.F. Henderson (1889; second
issue, 1890, being the more accurate); in _The Mystery of Mary Stuart_,
by Andrew Lang (4th edition, 1904), and in Henderson's criticism of that
book, in his _Mary, Queen of Scots_ (1905) (Appendix A).