Andrew Lang

“ The ghost of his guilt haunts Logan, he cannot drown it in a red sea of burgundy: life has lost its flavour; if he returns, it will be with the true Scottish desire to die in his own country, though of his ancient family’s lands he has not kept an acre. Pleasant rich Restalrig, strong Fastcastle, jolly Gunnisgreen of the ‘great Yules,’ all are gone. Nothing is left. ”

“ In his confessions he paints with sordid and squalid realism, the life of a debauched laird, tortured by terror, and rushing from his fears to forgetfulness in wine, travel, and pleasure; and to strange desperate dreams of flight. As a ‘human document’ the confessions of Sprot are unique, for that period.
On July 5, 1608, Sprot, in prison, wrote, in his own ordinary hand, the tale of how he knew of Logan’s guilt: the letter was conveyed to the Earl of Dunbar, who, with Dunfermline, governed Scotland, under the absent King. ”

“ There are enigmas in the annals of most peoples; riddles put by the Sphinx of the Past to the curious of the new generations. These questions do not greatly concern the scientific historian, who is busy with constitution-making, statistics, progress, degeneration, in short with human evolution. These high matters, these streams of tendency, form the staple of history, but the problems of personal character and action still interest some inquiring minds. Among these enigmas nearly the most obscure, ‘The Gowrie Conspiracy,’ is our topic. ”

“ Then, knowing the topography, Gowrie and Cranstoun would necessarily make for the murder-chamber, by the dark stair, and perish. The Royal wit never conceived a subtler plot, it is much cleverer than that invented by Mr. G. P. R. James, in his novel, ‘Gowrie.’ Nothing is wrong with the system of the apologist, except that the facts are false, and the idea a trifle too subtle, while, instead of boldly saying that the King had the gallery chamber locked against his friends, the apologist never hints at that circumstance. ”

“ To a man like Henderson, the peril in simply listening to treasonable proposals from the Ruthvens would be even greater. If he merely declined to be a party, and kept silence, or fled, he lost his employment as Gowrie’s man, and would be ruined. If the plot ever came to light, he would be involved in guilty concealment of foreknowledge. ”

“ He was knighted and rewarded: every one almost was rewarded out of Gowrie’s escheats, or forfeited property. But that was natural, whether James was guilty or innocent; and we repeat that the rewards, present or in prospect, did not produce witnesses ready to say that they saw Henderson at Falkland, or in the tumult, or in the turret. Why men so freely charged with murderous conspiracy and false swearing were so dainty on these and other essential points, the advocates of the theory of perjury may explain. How James treated discrepancies in the evidence we have seen. ”

“ Calderwood’s critics only pick holes in the King’s narrative, but do not advance or report any other explanation of the events, any complete theory of the King’s plot from the Ruthven side. Any such story, any such hypothesis, must be to the full as improbable as the King’s narrative.
There is nothing probable in the whole affair; every system, every hypothesis is difficile à croire. Yet the events did occur, and we cannot reject James’s account merely because it is ‘unlikely.’ The improbabilities, however, were enormously increased by the King’s theory that the Ruthvens meant to murder him. ”

“ The shield is blotted by transverse strokes of the pen, the whole rude design having been made for the purpose of being thus scored out, after Gowrie’s death, posthumous trial and forfeiture, in 1600.
On the left of the sinister supporter is an armed man, in the Gowrie livery. His left hand grasps his sword-hilt, his right is raised to an imperial crown, hanging above him in the air; from his lips issue the words, Tibi Soli, ‘for thee alone.’ Sir James Balfour Paul, Lyon, informs me that he knows no other case of such additional supporter, or whatever the figure ought to be called. ”

“ Rather senior to Gowrie at the University of Padua, and in the same faculty of law, was an Archibald Douglas. He may have been a kinsman of Sir Robert Douglas, himself of the Glenbervie family, and from him Sir Robert, while still in Scotland, may have heard of Gowrie’s device, left by him at Padua, and of his mot about in umbra and in facto. But, even if these two Douglases were not akin, or did not meet, still Keith, Lindsay, and Ker of Newbattle, all contemporaries of Gowrie at Padua, might bring home the report of Gowrie’s enigmatic device, and of his mot there-anent. ”

“ He himself had seen Bower when he brought him Logan’s letter from London, take his son, Valentine, apart, and knew that Valentine read a letter to him. ‘It was a meikle letter,’ Matthew said, and, if Sprot tell truth, it contained three enclosures. Bower may have stopped his son from reading the melancholy and compromising epistle, and kept it to be read by Sprot. Logan’s folly in writing at all was the madness that has ruined so many men and women. ”

“ But they also contain many peculiarities of spelling which are not Logan’s, but are Sprot’s. The very dotting of the ‘i’s’ is Sprot’s, not Logan’s. The long ‘s’ of Logan is heavily and clumsily imitated. There is a distinct set of peculiarities never found in Logan’s undisputed letters: in Sprot’s own letters always found. The hand is more rapid and flowing than that of Logan. Not being myself familiar with the Scottish handwriting of the period, my own opinion is of no weight, but I conceive that the general effect of Logan’s hand, in 1586, is not precisely like that of the plot-letters. ”

“ At this time Lady Restalrig was deeply distressed, she wished Logan at the Indies, if only he would first settle Flemington on herself. ‘If it be God’s will, I desire never to have a child to him,’ she said. ‘I have a guess what this mystery means, woe’s me for his motherless children,’ that is, children of former marriages. Later, Lady Restalrig had a daughter, Anna, by Logan.
Matthew Logan, as usual, denied every word attributed to him by Sprot, except regrets for his own condition. Matthew could do no less to save his own life. ”

“ But Sprot, alas, had a religious conscience. He had a soul to be saved. The preachers had prayed with him. When death was but forty-eight hours distant, he feared to die with a lie in his mouth. So now, at last, he spoke of Letter IV as his real model. Perhaps he hoped that it would not be found, and probably it was in some secret drawer or false bottom of his kist. It was found, and was used, along with the confessed forgeries (which even Sprot could not have anticipated) , to destroy the inheritance of the children, at Logan’s posthumous trial in 1609. ”

“ But, if we grant that Mar, Lennox, and the rest—gentlemen, servants, retainers and menials of the Ruthvens, and citizens of Perth—were abandoned perjurers on some points, while scrupulously honourable on others equally essential, the narrative of the Ruthven apologist has a method, a consistency, which we do not find in modern systems unfavourable to the King.
For example, the modern theories easily show how James trapped the Master. He had only to lure him into a room, and cry ‘Treason.’ Then, even if untutored in his part, some hot-headed young man like Ramsay would stab Ruthven. ”

“ If there was an armed man in the turret, he was either placed there by the King, to protect him while he summoned his minions by feigned cries of treason, or he was placed there by Gowrie to help the Master to seize the King. In the latter case, the Master’s position was now desperate; in lieu of an ally he had procured a witness against himself. Great need had he to consult Gowrie, but though Gowrie certainly entered the house, went upstairs, and returned to Lennox with the assurance that James had ridden away, it is improbable that he and his brother met at this moment. ”

“ They had privileges over Leith Harbour which must have been very valuable: they were of Royal descent, through a marriage of a Logan with a daughter of Robert II. But their glory was in their ancestor, Sir Robert Logan, who fell where the good Lord James of Douglas died, charging the Saracens on a field of Spain, and following the heart of Bruce. So Barbour sings, and to be named by Barbour, for a deed and a death so chivalrous, is honour enough. ”

“ Suppose that men like the Ruthvens, great and potent nobles, had secretly invited their retainer, Andrew Henderson, to take the rôle of the armed man in the turret, what could Henderson have done? Such proposals as this were a danger dreaded even by the most powerful. Thus, in March 1562, James Hepburn, the wicked Earl of Bothwell, procured, through John Knox, a reconciliation with his feudal enemy, Arran. ”

“ We must suppose that Gowrie, with his small force of himself and Cranstoun, both fencers from the foreign schools, would allow that force to be cut off in detail, one by one. We must suppose that Erskine was where he certainly was not, in two places at once, and that Ramsay and Herries and he, unseen, left the hall and joined the King, on a message brought by the Master, unmarked by any witness. We must suppose that the King’s witnesses, who professed ignorance on essential points, perjured themselves on others, in batches. ”

“ James himself told Nicholson that a large English ship had hovered off the coast, refusing communication with the shore. Bothwell, again, now desperate, may have lately been nearer home than was known; finally, Fastcastle, the isolated eyrie on its perpendicular rock above the Northern Sea, may have been at Gowrie’s disposal. I am disinclined to conjecture, being only certain that a young man with Gowrie’s past—‘Italianate,’ and of dubious religion—was more apt to form a wild and daring plot than was his canny senior, the King of Scots. ”

“ In certain respects the Gowrie mystery is necessarily less attractive than that of ‘the fairest and most pitiless Queen on earth.’ There is no woman in the story. The world, of course, when the Ruthvens died, at once acted on the maxim, cherchez la femme. The woman in the case, men said, was the beautiful Queen, Anne of Denmark, wife of James VI. That fair and frivolous dame, ‘very very woman,’ certainly did her best, by her behaviour, to encourage the belief that she was the cause of these sorrows. ”

“ The crucial question now arises, What is Letter IV? If it be genuine (in substance) , then, whatever the details of the Gowrie Conspiracy may have been, a conspiracy there was. This can only be denied by ignorance. If the enterprise fails, says the author of Letter IV, the plotters will lose their lives, their lands and houses will be ‘wrecked,’ their very names will be extirpated; and, in fact, James did threaten to extirpate the name of Ruthven. The letter deliberately means High Treason. ”

“ Now if Margaret Tudor had issue by Henry Stewart, Lord Methven, and if that issue was Dorothea, mother of John, third Earl of Gowrie, or was Dorothea’s father or mother, that Earl was Elizabeth’s cousin. Now Burnet, touching on the Gowrie mystery, says that his own father had ‘taken great pains to inquire into that matter, and did always believe it was a real conspiracy. . . . Upon the King’s death, Gowrie stood next to the succession of the crown of England,’ namely, as descended from Margaret Tudor by Henry (Burnet says ‘Francis’!) , Lord Methven. ”

“ James might write to ask the Earl to hunt, we cannot guess what he had to say, at the same time, to Atholl or Inchaffray or the Master. He may even have written about the affair of the Abbey of Scone, if it is true that the Master wished to get it from his brother. We really cannot infer that, as the Ruthvens would not come and be killed, when invited, at Falkland, James went to kill them at Perth. ”

“ It follows that the whole affair of Sprot, and of the alleged Logan letters, adds nothing certain to the reasons for believing that there was a Gowrie conspiracy. As far as Sprot and his documents are concerned, we know that all, as they stand, are pure fictitious counterfeits by that unhappy man, while, as to whether one letter (IV) and perhaps another (I) are genuine in substance, every reader must form his own opinion, on literary grounds, and no opinion is of much value. ”

“ The ministers Hall and Hewatt, in August 1600, had at first, as we saw, declined to accept James’s version of the affair at Gowrie House (pp. 99–103) .
Sprot now confesses that he knows he is to die, deposes that no man has promised him life, and that he has stated nothing in hope of life. With tears he deplores that he has taken God’s name in vain, in swearing to the truth of his depositions before that of July 5. ”

“ Passing down South Street, or ‘Shoe Gait,’ the chief street in Perth, then a pretty little town, you found it crossed at right angles by a street called, on the left, Water Gate, on the right, Spey Gate. Immediately fronting you, as you came to the end of South Street, was the gateway of Gowrie House, the garden wall continuing towards your right. On your left were the houses in Water Gate, occupied by rich citizens and lairds. Many will understand the position if they fancy themselves walking down one of the streets which run from the High Street, at Oxford, towards the river. ”