United States or Aruba ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Sprot replied that he forged the memorandum, in the autumn of 1606, when he forged the other letters. He copied most of it from an actual but innocent note of Logan’s on business matters, and added the compromising items out of his own invention.
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 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.
He made three copies of this forgery, one was produced; he gave another to a man named Heddilstane or Heddilshaw, a dweller in Berwick, in September 1607; the third, ‘in course hand,’ he gave to another client, ‘the goodman of Rentoun,’ Hume. One was to be used to terrorise Logan’s executors, to whom Heddilstane, but not Rentoun, was in debt.
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. This confession the Government burked. 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.
He had been at Logan’s ‘great Yule’ in Gunnisgreen, where Logan, according to Sprot, made the imprudent speeches. Crockett had also been at Dundee with Logan, he said, but it was in the summer of 1603. He did not hear Logan’s imprudent speech to Bower, at the Yule supper. As to the weeping of Lady Restalrig, he had often seen her weep, and heard her declare that Logan would ruin his family.
They, of course, were robbed, by Logan’s forfeiture, of 33,000 marks, owed to Logan by Dunbar and Balmerino.
The large flowing spring one mile west of the present town of Stanford, Lincoln County, was made the site of a third settlement. Capt. Benjamin Logan headed this party of pioneers, and the station was, for a time, known as Logan’s Fort. Afterward, because of the fact that the fort was made by planting logs on end, it was called Standing Fort, and in later years the town was called Stanford.
Meanwhile, just after Logan’s death, in autumn 1606, Sprot forges Letters I, II, III, IV, V, and the torn letter, with two compromising letters to Bower, two to Ninian Chirnside, and an ‘eik,’ or addition, of compromising items to a memorandum on business, which, in September 1605, Logan gave to Bower and John Bell before he started for London and Paris. So far, all is clear.
After Logan’s restless night, Bower returned with the two letters, Ruthven’s and Clerk’s, which Logan ‘burned in the fire.’ After burning Clerk’s and Ruthven’s letters, Logan dictated to Sprot a letter to John Baillie of Littlegill, informing him of the fact.
Word Of The Day