Quote, Together, the letters constitute voluminous bodies of new primary material on Mary Stewart, about 50,000 words in total, shedding new light on some of her years of captivity in England. Brilliant in itself, this is also a huge deal, because while historians have a strong inkling that these letters actually existed, the actual proof of the documents has long been considered to be lost in time. Mary, Queen of Scots, has left an extensive corpus of letters held in various archives