United States or Netherlands ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Some might guess thus: till Letter IV was confessed to and found, Government had not received from Sprot one scrap of documentary evidence that could be used against Logan’s heirs. Scoundrel as he was, Sprot could not guess that the Privy Council would use papers which were confessed forgeries to save Dunbar and Balmerino from paying some 33,000 marks to Logan’s executors.
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.
She said to me, which was a great knell to my heart, that since her coming to the town, she knew that I had been in some dealing with the Earl of Gowrie about Dirleton.’ Now Dirleton, according to Sprot, was to have been Logan’s payment from Gowrie, for his aid in the plot.
Once more, Sprot later confessed, as we shall see, that this letter to Bower was dictated to himself by Logan, and that the copy produced, apparently in Logan’s hand, was forged by him from the letter as dictated to him. He thus contradicted his earlier statement that Letter II was shown to him by Bower. He never says that he was in Edinburgh with Logan on July 18.
Moreover, he could not but have heard of Logan’s qualities and his keep, Fastcastle, in the troubles and conspiracies of 1592–1594.
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.
Lumisden, minister of Duddingston, were present on occasions when Sprot confessed to having forged the letters. Yet these four preachers said nothing, as far as we hear, when the letters, confessedly forged, were produced as evidence, in 1609, to ruin Logan’s innocent child. Did the preachers think the letters genuine in spite of the confession that they were forged?
But one of Logan’s retainers, when this affair of Percy was spoken of among them, said, according to Sprot, that the Laird had been engaged in treason ‘nearer home.’ Sprot then writes that ‘about the time of the conspiracy,’ Logan, with Matthew Logan, rode to Dundee, where they enjoyed a three days’ drinking bout, and never had the Laird such a surfeit of wine.
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.
This precaution on the part of the General prevented exhaustion during the next attack on Logan’s Fort. The Indians, unable to understand how the settlers in the fort could do so long without water, supposed them to be miraculously defended by the Great Spirit, and never afterward could Girty lead his band to attack Logan’s Fort.
Word Of The Day