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The other species was cheaper: a copy in his ‘course hand’ of his more elaborate forgeries in Logan’s hand.
But, in April 1608, Sprot has blabbed and is arrested. The forgeries are found among his papers, or given up by Chirnside. Sprot confesses to the plot, to Logan’s share of it, and to the authenticity of the letters and papers. He is then tortured, recants his confession, and avows the forgery of the papers. The Government is disappointed.
Logan will be true, ‘although the scaffold were already set up.’ This is a phrase of Letter IV, and recurs in Letter III and in the torn letter. Logan’s elevation of heart on receipt of Gowrie’s letter. This occurs in IV and in V.
Thus, at the examination of Logan’s real and forged letters, as at the examination of Queen Mary’s real and Casket letters, in spelling and handwriting ‘no difference was found.’ Yet the plot-letters were all forged, and Mr. Anderson shows that, though ‘no difference was found,’ many differences existed. Logan had a better chance of acquittal than Mary.
Logan said, ‘Be it as it will, I must take my fortune, and I will tell you, Laird Bower, the scaffold is the best death that a man can die.’ Logan, if he said this, must have been drunk; he very often was. The actual letter, Sprot said, was dictated by Logan to him, and he made a counterfeit copy in imitation of Logan’s handwriting.
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.
A curious conference it was. Bower asked Sprot to read to him the other of Logan’s two letters, directed to himself. It ran, ‘Laird Bower,—I wot not what I should say or think of this world! It is very hard to trust in any man, for apparently there is no constancy or faithfulness.
This extreme vagueness undeniably throws great doubt on Logan’s part in the plot; Letter IV, if genuine, being the source of our perplexity. But, if it is not genuine, that is, in substance, there is only rumour, later to be discussed, to hint that Logan was in any way connected with Gowrie. We left Bower and Logan conversing dolefully some days after the failure of the plot.
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.
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.
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