These are rumours; it is certain that the King (June 20) gave Gowrie a year’s respite from pursuit of his creditors, to whom he was in debt for moneys owed to him by the Crown, expenditure by the late Earl of Gowrie when in power (1583). [131a]  It is also certain that Gowrie opposed the King’s demands for money, in a convention of June 21. [131b]  But so did Lord President Fyvie, who never ceased to be James’s trusted minister, and later, Chancellor, under the title of Earl of Dunfermline.  Calderwood reports that, after Gowrie’s speech, Sir David Murray said, ‘Yonder is an unhappy man; they are but seeking occasion of his death, which now he has given.’  This is absurd: Fyvie and the Laird of Easter Wemyss opposed the King as stoutly, and no harm followed to them; Fyvie rising steadily (and he had opposed the King yet more sturdily before) to the highest official position.

Calderwood adds a silly tale of Dr. Herries.  Beatrix Ruthven laughed at his lame leg; he looked in her palm, and predicted a great disaster.  The same anecdote, with, of course, another subject, is told of Gowrie’s own prediction that a certain man would come to be hanged, which was fulfilled.  Gowrie had been at Perth, before the convention at Holyrood of June 21.  To Perth he returned; thence, some time in July (about the 20th), [131c] he went to his castle of Strabran, in Atholl, to hunt.  Whether his brother the Master remained with him continuously till the Earl’s return to Perth on Saturday, August 2, I know not how to ascertain.  If there is anything genuine in the plot-letters produced eight years later, the Master once or twice visited Edinburgh in July, but that may have been before going to Strabran.

Legend does not say when, or in what year this occurred.  But the fancy of authors has identified the Queen’s lady with Beatrix Ruthven, and has added that the Master, in disgrace (though undetected), retired with Gowrie to Strabane, or Strabran.  History has no concern with such fables.  It is certain, however, or at least contemporary letters aver, that Queen Anne of Denmark was grieved and angered by the slaying of the Gowries.  On October 21, 1600, Carey, writing to Cecil from Woodrington, mentions this, and the tattle to the effect that, as the Queen is about to have a child (Charles I.), ‘she shall be kept as prisoner ever after.’  Was the Master supposed to be father of the Queen’s child?  Carey goes on, ‘There is a letter found with a bracelet in it, sent from the Queen to the Earl of Gowrie, to persuade him to leave his country life and come to Court, assuring him that he should enjoy any contents that Court could afford.’ [133]  Can some amorous promise underlie this, as in the case of Mr. Pickwick’s letter to Mrs. Bardell, about the warming-pan?  ‘This letter the King hath,’ says Carey.  Was it with Gowrie, not the Master, that the Queen was in love?  She was very fond of Beatrix Ruthven, and would disbelieve in the guilt of her brothers; hence these tears and that anger of the Queen.

But James also, says Calderwood, was as anxious as Carey declares that the Queen was, to bring Gowrie to Falkland.  ‘When the Earl was in Strabran, fifteen days before the fact, the King wrote sundry letters to the Earl, desiring him to come and hunt with him in the wood of Falkland; which letters were found in my Lord’s pocket, at his death, as is reported, but were destroyed.’ [134a]

So James was not jealous; both he and the Queen were inviting Gowrie to their country house, the Queen adding the gift of a bracelet.  She may have worked it herself, like the bracelet which Queen Mary is said to have sent to Bothwell.

All this is the idlest gossip.  But it is certain that, on one occasion, at the end of July, ‘close letters’ were sent from the Court at Edinburgh to Atholl and Gowrie; and, later, to Inchaffray and the Master, the first three are in Bothwell’s list of Catholics ready to meet the Spanish invaders.  The fact of the letters appears from the Treasurer’s accounts, where the money paid to the boy who carried the letters is recorded, without dates of the days of the month.  The boy got 33 shillings, Scots, for the journey from Edinburgh to the Earls of Gowrie and Atholl; 24 for the other two, which he carried from Falkland.  Craigengelt, in his deposition, ‘denies that during my Lord’s being in Strabran, neither yet in Perth, after his coming from Strabran, he knew any man or page to come from Court to my Lord, or that he commanded to give them any meat or drink.’ [134b]

No conclusion as to James’s guilt can be drawn, either from the fact that he wrote to Atholl, Inchaffray, the Master, and Gowrie at the end of July, or from the circumstance that Craigengelt professed to know nothing about any messenger.  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.  Even if he summoned the Master for August 5, intending to make it appear that the Master had asked him to come to Perth, the Master need not have arrived before seven in the morning, when the King went and hunted for four hours.  What conceivable reason had the Master, if innocent, for leaving Perth at 4 a.m. and visiting his sovereign at seven in the morning?

It is curious that no apologist for Gowrie, as far as I have observed, makes any remark on this perplexing affair of ‘my Lady.’  We know that she had once already set a successful trap for the King.  He had not punished her; he took two of her daughters, Barbara and Beatrix, into his household; and restored to Gowrie his inheritance of the lands of Scone, which, as we know, had been held by his father.  He had written a loving letter to Gowrie at Padua, after the young man had for many months been conspiring against him with his most dangerous enemy, the wild Earl of Bothwell.

On the morning of the fatal August 5, Gowrie went to sermon.  What else he did, we learn from John Moncrieff, who was the Earl’s cautioner, or guarantee, for a large sum due by him to one Robert Jolly. [137]  He was also brother of Hew Moncrieff, who fled after having been with Gowrie in arms, against Herries, Ramsay, and Erskine.  Both Moncrieffs, says John, were puzzled when they found that the Master had ridden from Perth so early in the morning.  Gowrie, says Moncrieff, did not attend the Town Council meeting after church; he excused himself on account of private affairs.  He also sent away George Hay who was with him on business when Henderson arrived from Falkland, saying that he had other engagements.  For the same reason, he, at first, declined to do a piece of business with Moncrieff, who dined with him and two other gentlemen.  ‘He made him to misknow all things,’ that is affected to take no notice, when Andrew Ruthven came in, and ‘rounded to him’ (whispered to him) about the King’s approach.  Then the Master entered, and Gowrie went out to meet the King.

Queen Anne of Denmark

We now have all the essential facts which rest on fairly good evidence, and we ask, did the Ruthvens lay a plot for the King, or did the King weave a web to catch the Ruthvens?  Looking first at character and probable motives, we dismiss the gossip about the amorous Queen and the jealous King.  The tatlers did not know whether to select Gowrie or the Master as the object of the Queen’s passion, or whether to allege that she had a polyandrous affection for both at once.  The letters of the age hint at no such amour till after the tragedy, when tales of the liaison of Anne of Denmark with the elder or younger Ruthven, or both, arose as a myth to account for the events.  The Queen, no doubt, was deeply grieved in a womanly way for the sake of her two maidens, Beatrix and Barbara Ruthven.  Her Majesty, also in a womanly way, had a running feud with Mar and the whole house of Erskine.  To Mar, certainly one of the few men of honour as well as of rank in Scotland, James had entrusted his son, Prince Henry; the care of the heir to the Crown was a kind of hereditary charge of the Erskines.  The Queen had already, in her resentment at not having the custody of her son, engaged in one dangerous plot against Mar; she made another quarrel on this point at the time (1603) when the King succeeded to the crown of England.  Now Mar was present at the Gowrie tragedy, and his cousin, Sir Thomas Erskine, took part in the deeds.  Hating the Erskines, devoted to the Ruthven ladies, and always feebly in opposition to her husband, the Queen, no doubt, paraded her grief, her scepticism, and her resentment.  This was quite in keeping with her character, and this conduct lent colour to the myth that she loved Gowrie, or the Master, or both, par amours.  The subject is good for a ballad or a novel, but history has nothing to make with the legend on which Mr. G. P. R. James based a romance, and Mr. Pinkerton a theory.

Leaving fable for fact, what motives had James for killing both the Ruthvens?  He had dropped the hereditary feud, and had taken no measures against the young Earl to punish his conspiracies with Bothwell in 1593–1594.  Of Gowrie, on his return to Scotland in May, he may have entertained some jealousy.  The Earl had been for months in Paris, caressed by the English ambassador, and probably, as we have seen, in touch with the exiled and ceaselessly conspiring Bothwell.  In London the Earl had been well received by Elizabeth, and by Lord Willoughby, who, a year earlier, as Governor of Berwick, had insulted James by kidnapping, close to Edinburgh, an English gentleman, Ashfield, on a visit to the King’s Court.  Guevara, a cousin of Lord Willoughby, lured Ashfield into the coach of the English envoy Bowes, and drove him to the frontier.  Lord Willoughby had a swift yacht lying off Leith, in case it was thought better to abduct Ashfield by sea.  This is an example of English insolence to the Scottish King—also of English kidnapping—and Lord Willoughby, the manager, had made friends with Gowrie in England.

Thus James, who was then on the worst terms, short of open war, with England, may have suspected and disliked the Earl, who had once already put himself at the service of Elizabeth, and might do so again.  In the April of 1600, rumours of a conspiracy by Archibald Douglas, the infamous traitor; Douglas of Spot, one of Morton’s brood, and John Colville—who, with Bothwell and, later, independently, had caught James, had tried to catch him, and proposed to Essex to catch him again,—were afloat.  Colville was in Paris at the same time as Gowrie; Bothwell was reported to have come secretly to Scotland in April or May, and this combination of facts or rumours may have aroused the King’s mistrust.  Again, the Kirk was restive; the preachers, in need of a leader, were said by Colville to have summoned Gowrie home. [140a]  Moreover there were persons about James—for example, Colonel Stewart—who had reason to dread the Earl’s vengeance for his father.  The Ruthven Apologist mentions this fact, and the predilection of the Kirk for Gowrie, among the motives for destroying him.

Once more there are hints, very vague, that, in 1593, Bothwell aimed at changing the dynasty. [140b]  The fable that Gowrie was a maternal grandson of Margaret Tudor, widow of James IV, by Henry Stewart, Lord Methven, her third husband, and that Gowrie was thus a candidate for the succession to the English throne, perhaps also for the hand of Arabella Stuart, may conceivably have existed.  (Compare Appendix A.)  Again, Gowrie had sided with the burgesses and minor barons, as against the nobles, by refusing a grant of money to James, in the convention of June 1600, and James owed money to Gowrie, as he did to most people.  But we have already seen that an exemption had been granted to Gowrie for a year from pursuit of creditors, as far, that is, as regarded his father’s debts (80,000l. Scots), (June 20, 1600).  The College of Justice refused to grant any new legal summonses of creditors against Gowrie, and suspended all that were extant.

Mr. Barbé accuses the King of ‘utter and unblushing disregard for common truth and common honesty.’  Be this as it may, the exemption granted to Gowrie was not regarded by his father’s creditors as extending to his mother, after his dishonoured death.  On November 1, 1600, Lady Gowrie implored Elphinstone, the Secretary, to bring her suit for relief before the King.  The security for these debts was on her ‘conjunct fee lands,’ and creditors, because, I suppose, the Gowrie estates were about to be forfeited, pressed Lady Gowrie, who, of course, had no exemption.  We know nothing as to the success of Lady Gowrie’s petition, but we have seen that her daughters married very well.  I presume that Gowrie, not his mother, had previously paid interest on the debts, ‘he had already paid many sums of money.’  James had already restored to Gowrie the valuable lands of Scone. [142]

However, taking things as the King’s adversaries regard them, the cumulative effect of these several grudges (and of the mystery of Gowrie’s Catholicism) would urge James to lay his very subtle plot.  He would secretly call young Ruthven to Falkland by six in the morning of August 5, he would make it appear that Ruthven had invited him to Perth, he would lure the youth to a turret, managing to be locked in with him and an armed man; he would post Ramsay below the turret window, and warn him to run up the dark staircase at the King’s cry of treason.  By the locked door he would exclude Lennox and Mar, while his minions would first delay Gowrie’s approach, by the narrow stairs, and then permit him to enter with only one companion, Cranstoun.  He would cause a report of his own departure to be circulated, exactly at the right moment to bring Gowrie under the turret window, and within reach of his cries.  This plot requires the minutest punctuality, everything must occur at the right moment, and all would have been defeated had Gowrie told the truth about the King’s departure, or even asked ‘Where is the King’s horse?’  Or Gowrie might have stood in the streets of Perth, and summoned his burgesses in arms.  The King and the courtiers, with their dead man, would have been beleaguered, without provisions, in Gowrie’s house.  Was James the man, on the strength of the grudges which we have carefully enumerated, to risk himself, unarmed, in this situation?  As to how he managed to have the door locked, so as to exclude the majority of his suite, who can conjecture?  How, again, did he induce Gowrie to aver, and that after making inquiry, that he had ridden homewards?

Thus Gowrie may well have wished to revenge his father; his mother had once already helped to betray James to an attack of the most insulting nature; he himself was strong for the Kirk, over which James was playing the despot; or, he desired toleration for Catholics; he had been well received in England, where all such plots—their name was legion—had always been fostered; he was very young, and he risked everything.  Only his method was new—that of strict secrecy.  He had previously spoken to Mr. Cowper, minister of Perth, in a general way, about the failure of plots for lack of deep secrecy, and through the admission of too many confederates.  Cowper told this to Spottiswoode, at Falkland.  Mr. Rhynd, Gowrie’s tutor, told Cowper and the Comptroller, ‘unrequired’ (not under torture, nor in answer to a question under examination), that Gowrie, when abroad, several times said that ‘he was not a wise man that, having the execution of a high and dangerous purpose, communicated the same to any but himself.’

As to this secrecy, we must remember that Gowrie was very young; that in Italy he may have heard or read of romantic and crafty plots; and may long have dreamed (as Robert Oliphant’s reported allegation declared) of some such scheme as that in which he failed.  We must remember, too, that James’s own account at least suggests a plan quite feasible.  To bring James to Gowrie House, early in the day, when the townsmen were at kirk, to bring him with only three or four attendants, then to isolate him and carry him off, was far from impossible; they might hurry him, disguised, to Dirleton, a castle garrisoned and provisioned, according to Carey, who reports the version of Gowrie’s friends.  A Scottish judge, Gibson (the ancestor of Sir Thomas Gibson-Carmichael), was later carried from Leith Sands across the Border, with perfect success.  A fault of the plan was that, once undertaken, it could not be dropped, even though James came late and well attended.  Ruthven could not tell the King that his story about a captive and a pot of gold was false.  To do that would have subjected him to a charge of treason.  He could have only one motive for thus deceiving his Majesty.  Thus the plot had to go on, even under circumstances very unfavourable.  There was no place for repentance.

As proof of Gowrie’s guilt, the evidence, I think, distinctly proves that he intentionally concealed from those about him the ride of his brother, Henderson, and Andrew Ruthven to Perth; that he concealed his knowledge, derived from Henderson, of the King’s approach; and that Ruthven concealed from Craigengelt, on his return, his long ride to Falkland, saying that he had been on ‘an errand not far off.’  Moncrieff swore that Henderson gave him a similar answer.  Asked by Moncrieff where he had been, he said ‘he had been two or three miles above the town.’  Henderson corroborated Moncrieff’s evidence on this point.  There can have been no innocent motive for all this secrecy.  It would have been natural for Gowrie to order luncheon for the King to be prepared, as soon as Henderson arrived.

What was to happen next?  Who can guess at the plot of such a plotter?  It is perhaps least improbable that the King was to be conveyed secretly, by sea or across Fife, to Dirleton in the first place.  Gowrie may have had an understanding with Guevara at Berwick.  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.  But that a plot of some kind Gowrie had laid, I am convinced by his secrecy, and by his falsehoods as to the King’s departure.  Among the traps for the King contrived by Bothwell and Colville, and reported by Colville to his English paymasters, were schemes quite as wild as that which Gowrie probably entertained.  The King once in the pious hands of so godly a man as Gowrie, the party of the Kirk, or the party of the Church, would have come in and made themselves useful. [147]

XII.  LOGAN OF RESTALRIG

That we may know the Laird better, a brief description of his home may be introduced.  Within a mile and a half of the east end of Princes Street, Edinburgh, lies, on the left of the railway to the south, a squalid suburb.  You drive or walk on a dirty road, north-eastwards, through unambitious shops, factories, tall chimneys, flaming advertisements, and houses for artisans.  The road climbs a hill, and you begin to find, on each side of you, walls of ancient construction, and traces of great old doorways, now condemned.  On the left are ploughed fields, and even clumps of trees with blackened trunks.  Grimy are the stacks of corn in the farmyard to the left, at the crest of the hill.  On the right, a gateway gives on a short avenue which leads to a substantial modern house.  Having reached this point in my pilgrimage, I met a gentleman who occupies the house, and asked if I might be permitted to view the site.  The other, with much courtesy, took me up to the house, of which only the portion in view from the road was modern.  Facing the west all was of the old Scottish château style, with gables, narrow windows, and a strange bulky chimney on the north, bulging out of the wall.  The west side of the house stood on the very brink of a steep precipice, beneath which lay what is now but a large deep waterhole, but, at the period of the Gowrie conspiracy, was a loch fringed with water weeds, and a haunt of wild fowl.  By this loch, Restalrig Loch, the witch more than three centuries ago met the ghost of Tam Reid, who fell in Pinkie fight, and by the ghost was initiated into the magic which brought her to the stake.

I scrambled over a low wall with a deep drop, and descended the cliff so as to get a view of the ancient château that faces the setting sun.  Beyond the loch was a muddy field, then rows on rows of ugly advertisements, then lines of ‘smoky dwarf houses,’ and, above these, clear against a sky of March was the leonine profile of Arthur’s Seat.  Steam rose and trailed from the shrieking southward trains between the loch and the mountain, old and new were oddly met, for the château was the home of an ancient race, the Logans of Restalrig, ancestors of that last Laird with whom our story has to do.  Their rich lands stretched far and wide; their huge dovecot stands, sturdy as a little pyramid, in a field to the north, towards the firth.  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.

Restalrig House

Restalrig Village

The Logans flourished in their eyrie above the Loch of Restalrig, and intermarried with the best houses, Sinclairs, Ogilvys, Homes, and Ramsays of Dalhousie.  It may be that some of them sleep under the muddy floor of St. Triduana’s Chapel, in the village of Restalrig, at the foot of the hill on the eastern side of their old château.  This village, surrounded by factories, is apparently just what it used to be in the days of James VI.  The low thick-walled houses with fore-stairs, retain their ancient, high-pitched, red-tiled roofs, with dormer windows, and turn their tall narrow gables to the irregular street.  ‘A mile frae Embro town,’ you find yourself going back three hundred years in time.  On the right hand of the road, walking eastward, what looks like a huge green mound is visible above a high ancient wall.  This is all that is left of St. Triduana’s Chapel, and she was a saint who came from Achaia with St. Regulus, the mythical founder of St. Andrews.  She died at Restalrig on October 8, 510, and may have converted the Celts, who then dwelt in a crannog in the loch; at all events we hear that, in a very dry summer, the timbers of a crannog were found in the sandy deposit of the lake margin.  The chapel (or chapter-house?), very dirty and disgracefully neglected, has probably a crypt under it, and certainly possesses a beautiful groined roof, springing from a single short pillar in the centre.  The windows are blocked up with stones, the exterior is a mere mound of grass like a sepulchral tumulus.  On the floor lies, broken, the gravestone of a Lady Restalrig who died in 1526.  Outside is a patched-up church; the General Assembly of 1560 decreed that the church should be destroyed as ‘a monument of idolatry’ (it was a collegiate church, with a dean, and prebendaries), and in 1571 the wrought stones were used to build a new gate inside the Netherbow Port.  The whole edifice was not destroyed, but was patched up, in 1836, into a Presbyterian place of worship.  This old village and kirk made up ‘Restalrig Town,’ a place occupied by the English during the siege of Leith in 1560.  So much of history may be found in this odd corner, where the sexton of the kirk speaks to the visitor about ‘the Great Logan,’ meaning that Laird who now comes into the sequel of the Gowrie mystery.

On April 17, 1573, a compact was made between Lord Ruthven and Drury, the English general.  One provision was (the rest do not here concern us) that Alexander, Lord Home; Lethington; and Robert Logan of Restalrig, if captured, ‘shall be reserved to be justified by the laws of Scotland,’ which means, hanged by the neck.  But neither on that nor on any other occasion was our Logan hanged. [152]  He somehow escaped death and forfeiture, when Kirkcaldy was gibbeted after the fall of the castle.  In 1577, we find him, with Lord Lindsay and Mowbray of Barnbogle (now Dalmeny) surety for Queen Mary’s half-brother, the Lord Robert Stewart, who vainly warned Darnley to escape from Kirk o’ Field.  Lord Robert was then confined by the Regent Morton in Linlithgow, and Logan with the rest was surety in 10,000l. that he would not attempt to escape.  Later, Logan was again surety that Lord Robert would return after visiting his dominions, the Orkney Islands. [153]

Logan, though something of a pirate, was clearly a man of substance and of a good house, which he strengthened by alliances.  One of his wives, Elizabeth Macgill, was the daughter of the Laird of Cranstoun Riddell, and one of her family was a member of the Privy Council.  From Elizabeth Logan was divorced; she was, apparently, the mother of his eldest son, Robert.  By the marriage of an ancestor of Logan’s with an heiress of the family of Hume, he acquired the fortress and lands of Fastcastle, near St. Abbs, on the Berwickshire coast.  The castle, now in ruins, is the model of Wolfscrag in ‘The Bride of Lammermoor.’  Standing on the actual verge of a perpendicular cliff above the sea, whence it is said to have been approached by a staircase cut in the living rock, it was all but inaccessible, and was strongly fortified.  Though commanded by the still higher cliff to the south, under which it nestled on its narrow plateau of rock, Fastcastle was then practically impregnable, and twenty men could have held it against all Scotland.  Around it was, and is, a roadless waste of bent and dune, from which it was severed by a narrow rib of rock jutting seawards, the ridge being cut by a cavity which was spanned by a drawbridge.  Master of this inaccessible eyrie, Logan was most serviceable to the plotters of these troubled times.

Fastcastle (circ. 1820)

In January 1600, the year of the Gowrie plot, we find Sir John Cranstoun in trouble for harbouring an outlawed Mr. Thomas Cranstoun, who was, with Douglas, the Laird of Spot, one of Bothwell’s allies in all his most desperate raids on the person of King James.  In 1592, Mr. Thomas Cranstoun was forfeited, he was informed against for ‘new conspiracies against his Majesty’s life and estate,’ and, in January 1600, Sir John Cranstoun was sheltering this dangerous and desperate Bothwellian outlaw, as was his son-in law, Mr. William Cranstoun. [155a]

Now the Mr. Thomas Cranstoun who was hanged for his part in the Gowrie affair, was brother of Sir John Cranstoun of Cranstoun, the ally of that other Mr. Thomas Cranstoun who was so deep in Bothwell’s wild raids on the King’s person.  In the spring of 1600 (as we have said, but must here repeat) there were reports that Bothwell had secretly returned to Scotland, and, on April 20, 1600, just before the date of Gowrie’s arrival in Edinburgh from London, Nicholson reports suspected plots of Archibald Douglas, of John Colville, a ruined Bothwellian, and a spy, and of the Laird of Spot. [155b]  This Colville had recently hinted to Essex that he could do a serviceable enterprise.  ‘As for the service I mean to do, if matters go to the worst, it shall be such, God willing—if I lose not my life in doing thereof—as no other can do with a million of gold, and yet I shall not exceed the bonds of humanity,’ that is, he will not murder the King.  ‘But for conscience sake and worldly honesty, I must first be absolved of my natural allegiance.’  (April 27, 1598; again, October 20, 1598.) [156]

The point for us to mark is that all these conspirators and violent men, Bothwell (in exile or secretly in Scotland), Colville (in 1600 an exile in Paris), the Laird of Spot, the Cranstouns, the infamous Archibald Douglas, with Richard Douglas his nephew, and Logan of Restalrig, were united, if not by real friendship, at least, as Thucydides says, by ‘partnership in desperate enterprises’ and by 1600 were active in a subterranean way.  If it is fair to say, noscitur a sociis, ‘a man is known by the company he keeps,’ Logan of Restalrig bears the mark of the secret conspirator.  He had relations with persons more distinguished than his Chirnsides and Whittingham Douglases, though they were of near kin to the Earl of Morton.  His mother, a daughter of Lord Gray, married Lord Home, after the death of Logan’s father.  The Laird of Restalrig was thus a half-brother of the new Lord Home, a Warden of the Border, and also was first cousin of the beautiful, accomplished, and infamous Master of Gray, the double spy of England and of Rome.

Logan, too, like the Master, had diplomatic ambitions.  In 1586 (July 29) we find him corresponding with the infamous Archibald Douglas, one of Darnley’s murderers, whom James had sent, in the crisis of his mother’s fate, as his ambassador to Elizabeth.  In 1586, Logan, with two other Logans, was on the packed jury which acquitted Douglas of Darnley’s murder.  Logan was a retainer of Bothwell, that meteor-like adventurer and king-catcher, and he asks Douglas to try to procure him employment (of course as a spy) from Walsingham, the English statesman. [157]

In October of the same year, we find the Master of Gray writing to Douglas, thus: ‘Of late I was forced, at Restalrig’s suit, to pawn some of my plate, and the best jewel I had, to get him money for his marriage’—his second marriage, apparently.  By December 1586 we find Logan riding to London, as part of the suite of the Master of Gray, who was to plead with Elizabeth for Mary’s life.  He was the Master’s most intimate confidant, and, as such, in February-March 1587, proposed to sell all his secrets to Walsingham!  Nevertheless, when Gray was driven into exile, later in 1587, Logan was one of his ‘cautioners,’ or sureties.  He had been of the party of Gowrie’s father, during that nobleman’s brief tenure of power in 1582, 1583, and, when Gowrie fell, Logan was ordered to hand his eyrie of Fastcastle over, at six hours’ notice, to the officers of the King.  Through the stormy years of Bothwell’s repeated raids on James (1592–1594) Logan had been his partisan, and had been denounced a rebel.  Later he appears in trouble for highway robbery committed by his retainers.  Among the diversions of this country gentleman was flat burglary.  In December 1593, ‘when nichts are lang and mirk,’ the Laird helped himself to the plate-chest of William Nesbit of Newton.  ‘Under silence of night he took spuilzie of certain gold and silver to the value of three thousand merks Scots.’  The executors of Nesbit did not bring their action till after Logan died, in July 1606, ‘in respect the said clandestine deed and fact came not to our knowledge, nor light as to who had committed the same,’ till just before the action was brought.

In 1599, when conspiracies were in the air, Logan was bound over not to put Fastcastle in the hands of his Majesty’s enemies and rebels. [158]

This brief sketch of a turbulent life is derived from Logan’s own letters to Archibald Douglas, now among the Cecil Papers at Hatfield; from the ‘Papers relating to the Master of Gray,’ in which we find Logan, under a cypher name, betraying the Master, his cousin and ally, and from the Register of the Privy Council of Scotland, in which all that dead world, from the King to the crofter, may be traced, often in circumstances peculiarly private.

At that time, civil processes of ‘horning,’ ‘putting to the horn,’ or outlawry, were the common resort of creditors against procrastinating debtors.  Many of the most respectable persons, gentlemen and ladies, appear in these suits; Robert Abercromby sues a lady of rank for 150l. Scots.  He is the burgess of Edinburgh, the King’s saddler, who, as the Master of Ruthven told Craigengelt, had brought the King from Falkland to Perth, ‘to take order for his debt.’  Now the singular thing is that we never find Logan of Restalrig recorded as under ‘horning’ for debt, whereas, considering his character, we might expect him never to be free from ‘the horn.’  On the other hand, we know him to have been a lender, not a borrower.  He was sui profusus.  On January 1, 1599, Cecil had been making inquiries as to Logan, from Lord Willoughby commanding at Berwick.  Cecil always had his eyes on Border Scots, likely to be useful in troubling King James.  Willoughby replies, ‘There is sutch a laird of Lesterigge as you write of, a vain lose man, a greate favourer of thefes reputed, yet a man of a good clan, as they here tearme it, and a gud felow.’ [159]

Such was Logan of Restalrig, ‘Old Rugged and Dangerous.’  In 1601, May 30, we find him appearing as surety for Philip Mowbray, one of the Mowbrays of Barnbogle, whose sister stood by Queen Mary at the scaffold, and whose brother Francis was with the bold Buccleuch, when he swam ‘that wan water’ of Esk, and rescued Kinmont Willie from Carlisle Castle.  This Francis Mowbray and his brother Philip were (1601–1603) mixed up with Cecil in some inscrutable spy-work, and intrigues for the murder of King James.  The Mowbrays were old friends of Logan: they had been engaged in privateering enterprises together, but could produce no letters of marque!  In 1603, Francis Mowbray, abandoned and extradited by Cecil, was killed in an attempt to escape from Edinburgh Castle.  He had been accused, by an Italian fencing-master, of a conspiracy to kill James.  Cecil had, of course, by this time made peace and alliance with James, who was on the point of ascending the English throne, and he gave up Francis.  Mowbray challenged the Italian fencing-master to judicial combat; the Italian came down to fight him, the lists were actually pitched at Holyrood, when (January 31, 1603) Francis preferred to try the chance of flight; the rope of knotted sheet to which he trusted broke, and he was dashed to pieces on the Castle rocks. [160a]

Since 1592, Mowbray had been corresponding with Logan’s friend, Archibald Douglas, and offering his services to Cecil.  To Cecil, in September 1600, he was again applying, regarding Elizabeth as his debtor.  In 1600, he was in touch with Henry Locke, who had been Cecil’s go-between in his darkest intrigues against James, and his agent with Bothwell, Atholl, and the Gowrie slain on August 5, 1600.  But, in the autumn of 1602, Cecil had become the secret ally of James, and gave up poor Francis, a broken tool of his and of Elizabeth’s. [160b]

We have now learned a good deal about Logan’s habitual associates, and we have merely glanced at a few of the numberless plots against James which were encouraged by the English Government.  If James was nervously apprehensive of treason, he had good cause.  But of Logan at the moment of the Gowrie Plot, we know nothing from public documents.  We do know, however, on evidence which has previously been in part unpublished, in part unobserved, that from August 1600 onwards, Logan was oddly excited and restless.  Though not in debt—or at least though no record of his ‘horning’ exists—he took to selling his lands, Restalrig, Flemington, Gunnisgreen, Fastcastle. [161]  After 1600 he sold them all; he wallowed in drink; he made his wife wretched; with his eldest son he was on ill terms; he wandered to London, and to France in 1605, and he returned to die (of plague, it seems) in the Canongate, a landless but a monied man, in July 1606.

Why did Logan sell all his lands, investing in shipping property?  The natural inference, at the time, was that he had been engaged in ‘some ill turn,’ some mysterious conspiracy, and people probably (certainly, if we believe the evidence to follow) thought that he had been an accomplice in the Gowrie affair.

He died, and his children by his first wives dissociated themselves from his executorship.  The bulk of it was the unpaid part of the purchase money for his lands, sold by him to Balmerino, and Dunbar, James’s trusted ministers, who owed some 33,000 marks to the estate.

Logan died, we saw, in July 1606.  In April, 1608, Sprot was arrested by a legal official, named Watty Doig.  He had been blabbing in his cups, it is said, about the Gowrie affair; certainly most compromising documents, apparently in Logan’s hand, and with his signature, were found on Sprot’s person.  They still bear the worn softened look of papers carried for long in the pockets. [162]  Sprot was examined, and confessed that he knew beforehand of the Gowrie conspiracy, and that the documents in his possession were written by Logan to Gowrie and other plotters.  He was tortured and in part recanted; Logan, he said, had not written the guilty letters: he himself had forged them.  This was all before July 5, 1608, while Mr. Robert Oliphant lay in prison, in London, on the same charge of guilty foreknowledge.  Early in July 1608, the Earl of Dunbar came from London to Edinburgh, to deal with the affairs of the Kirk.  He took Sprot out of his dungeon, gave him a more wholesome chamber, secluded him from gentlemen who came and threatened him (or so he said) if he made revelations, and Dunbar provided him with medical attendance.  The wounds inflicted in ‘the boot’ were healed.

For six weeks Sprot was frequently examined, before members of the Privy Council and others, without torture.  What he said the public did not know, nor, till now, have historians been better informed.  Throughout, after July 5, 1608, he persisted in declaring Logan’s complicity in the Gowrie conspiracy, and his own foreknowledge.  He was tried, solely on the evidence of guilty foreknowledge alleged in his own confessions, and of extracts, given by him from memory only, of a letter from Gowrie to Logan (not one of those which he claimed to have forged), and another of Logan to Gowrie, both of July 1600.  On August 12, Sprot was hanged at Edinburgh.  He repeated his confession of guilt from every corner of the scaffold.  He uttered a long religious speech of contrition.  Once, he said, he had been nearly drowned: but God preserved him for this great day of confession and repentance.  But ‘no unbeliever in the guilt of Gowrie,’ says Calderwood, ‘was one whit the more convinced.’  Of course not, nor would the death of Henderson—which they clamoured for—have convinced them.  They said, falsely, that Sprot was really condemned as a forger, and, having to die, took oath to his guilt in the Gowrie conspiracy, in consideration of promises of help to his wife and family. [164]

Nearly a year later, in June 1609, the exhumed remains of Logan were brought into court (a regular practice in the case of dead traitors), and were tried for treason.  Five letters by Logan, of July 1600, were now produced.  Three were from Logan to conspirators unnamed and unknown.  One was to a retainer and messenger of his, Laird Bower, who had died in January 1606.  These letters were declared, by several honourable witnesses, to be in Logan’s very unusual handwriting and orthography: they were compared with many genuine letters of his, and no difference was found.  The Parliamentary Committee, ‘The Lords of the Articles,’ previously sceptical, were convinced by the five letters, the evidence to handwriting, the energy of the Earl of Dunbar, and the eloquence of the King’s Advocate.  Logan’s children were all forfeited, and Dunbar saved the money which he owed to Logan’s estate.  This trial is not alluded to, either by Calderwood or Archbishop Spottiswoode, in their histories.  The five letters produced in the trial of Logan exist, and have been accepted as authentic by Mr. Tytler and Mr. Hill Burton, but not by writers who favour the Ruthvens.  We print all five letters in Appendix C.

Consequently the results of criticism of his confession may here be stated with brevity.  The persevering student, the reader interested in odd pictures of domestic life, and in strange human characters may read on at his own peril.  But the actual grains of fact, extracted from tons of falsehood, may be set down in very few words.

The genuine and hitherto unknown confessions of Sprot add no absolute certainty as to the existence of a Gowrie conspiracy.  His words, when uncorroborated, can have no weight with a jury.  He confessed that all the alleged Logan papers which, up to two days before his death, were in possession of the Privy Council, were forgeries by himself.  But, on August 10, he announced that he had possessed one genuine letter of Logan to Gowrie (dated July 29, 1600).  That letter (our Letter IV) or a forged copy was then found in his repositories.  Expert evidence, however, decides that this document, like all the others, is in a specious imitation of Logan’s hand, but that it has other characteristics of Sprot’s own hand, and was penned by Sprot himself.  Why he kept it back so long, why he declared that it alone was genuine, we do not know.  That it is genuine, in substance, and was copied by Sprot from a real letter of Logan’s in an imitation of Logan’s hand, and that, if so, it proves Logan’s accession to the conspiracy, is my own private opinion.  But that opinion is based on mere literary considerations, on what is called ‘internal evidence,’ and is, therefore, purely a matter of subjective impression, like one’s idea of the possible share of Shakespeare in a play mainly by Fletcher or another.  Evidence of this kind is not historical evidence.  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.  Such is a brief summary of the facts.  But the tenacious inquirer who can follow us through the tangled mazes of Sprot’s private confessions, will perhaps agree with me that they contain distinguishable grains of fact, raising a strong surmise that Logan was really involved with Gowrie in a plot.  Yet this, again, is a subjective impression, which may vary with each reader.

XIII.  THE SECRETS OF SPROT

The final and deepest mystery of the mysterious Gowrie affair rises, like a mist from a marsh, out of these facts concerning Sprot.  When he was convicted, and hanged, persisting in his confessions, on August 12, 1608, no letters by Gowrie, or any other conspirator, were produced in Court.  Extracts, however, of a letter from Gowrie to Logan, and of one from Logan to Gowrie, were quoted in Sprot’s formal Indictment.  They were also quoted in an official publication, an account of Sprot’s case, prepared by Sir William Hart, the Chief Justice, and issued in 1608.  Both these documents (to which we return) are given by Mr. Pitcairn, in the second volume of his ‘Criminal Trials.’  But later, when the dead Logan was tried in 1609, five of his alleged plot letters (never publicly mentioned in Sprot’s trial) were produced by the prosecution, and not one of these was identical with the letter of Logan cited in the Indictment of Sprot, and in the official account of his trial.  There were strong resemblances between Logan’s letter, quoted but not produced, in 1608, and a letter of Logan’s produced, and attested to be in his handwriting, in 1609.  But there were also remarkable variations.

As to the letters of 1609, Mr. Tytler wrote, ‘their import cannot be mistaken; their authenticity has never been questioned; they still exist . . . ’  Now assuredly the letters exist.  The five alleged originals were found by Mr. Pitcairn, among the Warrants of Parliament, in the General Register House, in Edinburgh, and were published by him, but without their endorsements, in his ‘Criminal Trials’ in Scotland. (1832). [169]  Copies of the letters are also ‘bookit,’ or engrossed, in the Records of Parliament.  These ‘bookit’ transcripts were made carelessly, and the old copyist was puzzled by the handwriting and orthography of the alleged originals before him.  The controversy about the genuineness of the five letters took new shapes after Mr. Pitcairn discovered those apparently in Logan’s hand, and printed them in 1832.  Mr. Hill Burton accepts them with no hint of doubt, and if Mr. Tytler was the most learned and impartial, Mr. Hill Burton was the most sceptical of our historians.  Yet on this point of authenticity these historians were too hasty.  The authenticity of the letters (except one, No. IV) was denied by the very man, Sprot, in whose possession most of them were originally found. [170]  The evidence of his denial has been extant ever since Calderwood wrote, who tells us, clearly on the authority of an older and anonymous History in MS. (now in the Advocates’ Library), that Sprot, when first taken (April 13–19, 1608), accused Logan of writing the letters, but withdrew the charge under torture, and finally, when kindly treated by Lord Dunbar, and healed of his wounds, declared that he himself had forged all the Logan letters (save one).  Yet Logan was, to Sprot’s certain knowledge (so Sprot persistently declared), involved in the Gowrie conspiracy.

Now assuredly this appeared to be an incredible assertion of Calderwood, or of his MS. source.  He was a stern Presbyterian, an enemy of the King (who banished him), and an intimate friend of the Cranstoun family, who, in 1600, were closely connected with conspirators of their name.  Thus prejudiced, Calderwood was believed by Mr. Pitcairn to have made an untrue or confused statement.  Logan is in a plot; Sprot knows it, and yet Sprot forges letters to prove Logan’s guilt, and these letters, found in Sprot’s possession, prove his own guilty knowledge.  There seems no sense in such behaviour.  It might have been guessed that Sprot knew of Logan’s guilt, but had no documentary evidence of it, and therefore forged evidence for the purpose of extorting blackmail from Logan.  But, by 1608, when Sprot was arrested with some of the documents in his pocket, Logan had been dead for nearly two years.

The guess, that Sprot knew of Logan’s treason, but forged the proof of it, for purposes of blackmailing him, was not made by historians.  The guess was getting ‘warm,’ as children say in their game, was very near the truth, but it was not put forward by criticism.  Historians, in fact, knew that Logan would not have stood an attempt at extortion.  He was not that kind of man.  In 1594, he made a contract with Napier of Merchistoun, the inventor of Logarithms.  Tradition declared that there was a hoard of gold in ‘the place of Fastcastle.’  Napier was to discover it (probably by the Divining Rod), and Logan was to give him a third of the profits.  But Napier, knowing his man, inserted a clause in the deed, to the effect that, after finding the gold, he was to be allowed a free exit from Fastcastle.  Whether he found the hoard or not, we do not know.  But, two years later, in letting a portion of his property, Napier introduced the condition that his tenant should never sublet it to any person of the name of Logan!  If he found the gold he probably was not allowed to carry off his third share.  Logan being a resolute character of this kind, Sprot, a cowering creature, would not forge letters to blackmail him.  He would have been invited to dine at Fastcastle.  The cliffs are steep, the sea is deep, and tells no tales.

A theory was suggested that Sprot really knew nothing of the Gowrie mystery; that he had bragged falsely of his knowledge, in his cups; that the Government pounced on him, made him forge the letters of Logan to clear the King’s character by proving a conspiracy, and then hanged him, still confessing his guilt.  But Mr. Mark Napier, a learned antiquary, replied (in a long Appendix to the third volume of the History by the contemporary Spottiswoode) to this not very probable conjecture by showing that, when they tried Sprot, Government produced no letters at all, only an alleged account by Sprot of two letters unproduced.  Therefore, in August 1608, Mr. Napier argued, Government had no letters; if they had possessed them, they would infallibly have produced them.  That seemed sound reasoning.  In 1608 Government had no plot letters; therefore, the five produced in the trial of the dead Logan were forged for the Government, by somebody, between August 1608 and June 1609.  Mr. Napier refused to accept Calderwood’s wild tale that Sprot, while confessing Logan’s guilt and his own, also confessed to having forged Logan’s letters.

The actual circumstances have remained unknown and are only to be found in the official, but suppressed, reports of Sprot’s private examinations, now in the muniment room of the Earl of Haddington.  These papers enable us partly to unravel a coil which, without them, no ingenuity could disentangle.  Sir Thomas Hamilton, the King’s Advocate, popularly styled ‘Tam o’ the Cowgate,’ from his house in that old ‘street of palaces,’ was the ancestor of Lord Haddington, who inherits his papers.  Sir Thomas was an eminent financier, lawyer, statesman, and historical collector and inquirer, who later became Lord Binning, and finally Earl of Haddington.  As King’s Advocate he held, and preserved, the depositions, letters, and other documents, used in the private examinations of Sprot, on and after July 5, 1608.  The records of Sprot’s examinations between April 19 and July 5, 1600, are not known to be extant.

Of these compromising papers, one, a letter to Chirnside, was found by the Rev. Mr. Anderson (in 1902) torn into thirteen pieces (whereof one is missing), wrapped up in a sheet of foolscap of the period.  Mr. Anderson has placed the pieces together, and copied the letter.  Of all these documents, only five letters (those published by Mr. Pitcairn) were ‘libelled,’ or founded on, and produced by the Government in the posthumous trial of Logan (1609).  Not one was produced before the jury who tried Sprot on August 12, 1608.  He was condemned, we said, merely on his own confession.  In his ‘dittay,’ or impeachment, and in the official account of the affair, published in 1608, were cited fragments of two letters quoted from memory by Sprot under private examination.  These quotations from memory differ, we saw, in many places from any of the five letters produced in the trial of 1609, a fact which has aroused natural suspicions.  This is the true explanation of the discrepancies between the plot letter cited in Sprot’s impeachment, and in the Government pamphlet on his case; and the similar, though not identical, letter produced in 1609.  The indictment and the tract published by Government contain merely Sprot’s recollections of the epistle from Logan to Gowrie.  The letter (IV) produced in 1609 is the genuine letter of Logan, or so Sprot seems, falsely, to swear.  This document did not come into the hands of Government till after the Indictment, containing Sprot’s quotation of the letter from memory, was written, or, if it did, was kept back.

As the Government (a fact unknown to our historians) possessed all the alleged Logan letters and papers before Sprot was hanged, and as, at his trial, they concealed this circumstance even from Archbishop Spottiswoode (who was present at Sprot’s public trial by jury), a great deal of perplexity has been caused, and many ingenious but erroneous conjectures have been invented.  The Indictment or ‘dittay’ against Sprot, on August 12, 1608, is a public document, but not an honest one.  It contains the following among other averments.  We are told that Sprot, in July 1600, at Fastcastle, saw and read the beginning of a letter from Logan to Gowrie (Letter IV).  Logan therein expresses delight at receiving a letter of Gowrie’s: he is anxious to avenge ‘the Macchiavelian massacre of our dearest friends’ (the Earl decapitated in 1584).  He advises Gowrie to be circumspect, ‘and be earnest with your brother, that he be not rash in any speeches touching the purpose of Padua.’

Fastcastle

This letter, as thus cited, is not among the five later produced in 1609; it is a blurred reminiscence of parts of two of them.  The reason of these discrepancies is that the letter is quoted in the Indictment, not from the document itself (which apparently reach the prosecution after the Indictment was framed), but from a version given from memory by Sprot, in one of his private examinations.  Next, Sprot is told in his Indictment that, some time later, Logan asked Bower to find this letter, which Gowrie, for the sake of secrecy, had returned to Bower to be delivered to Logan.  We know that this was the practice of intriguers.  After the December riot at Edinburgh in 1596, the Rev. Robert Bruce, writing to ask Lord Hamilton to head the party of the Kirk, is said to request him to return his own letter by the bearer.  Gowrie and Logan practised the same method.  The indictment goes on to say that Bower, being unable to read, asked Sprot to search for Logan’s letter to Gowrie, among his papers, that Sprot found it, ‘abstracted’ it (stole it), retained it, and ‘read it divers times,’ a false quotation of the MS. confession.  Sprot really said that he kept the stolen letter (IV) ‘till’ he had framed on it, as a model, three forged letters.  It contained a long passage of which the ‘substance’ is quoted.  This passage as printed in Sprot’s Indictment is not to be found textually, in any of the five letters later produced.  It is, we repeat, merely the version given from memory, by Sprot, at one of his last private examinations, before the letter itself came into the hands of Government.  In either form, the letter meant high treason.

Such is the evidence of the Indictment against Sprot, of August 12, 1608.  In the light of Sprot’s real confessions, hitherto lying in the Haddington muniment room, we know the Indictment to be a false and garbled document.  Next, on the part of Government, we have always had a published statement by Sir William Hart, the King’s Justice, with an introduction by Dr. George Abbot, later Archbishop of Canterbury, who was in Edinburgh, and present when Sprot was hanged.  This tract was published by Bradewood, London, in 1608, and is reprinted by Pitcairn.

To this there used to be no reply.  But now we know the actual and discreditable truth.  The Government was, in fact, engaged in a shameful scheme to which Archbishops were better not admitted.  They meant to use this letter (IV) on a later occasion, but they also meant to use some of the other letters which Sprot (unknown to Spottiswoode) had confessed to be forgeries.  The archiepiscopal conscience might revolt at such an infamy, Spottiswoode might tell the King, so the Scottish Government did not then allow the Archbishop, or the public, to know that they had any Logan letters.  No letter at all came into open and public Court in 1608.  Hart cites a short one, from Gowrie to Logan.  Gowrie hopes to see Logan, or, at least, to send a trusty messenger, ‘anent the purpose you know.  But rather would I wish yourself to come, not only for that errand, but for some other thing that I have to advise with you.’  There is no date of place or day.  This letter, harmless enough, was never produced in Court, and Mr. Barbé supposes that it was a concoction of Hart’s.  This is an unlucky conjecture.  The Haddington MSS. prove that Sprot really recited Gowrie’s letter, or professed to do so, from memory, in one of his private examinations.  The prosecution never pretended to possess or produce Gowrie’s letter.