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While the people busied themselves at Harrodsburg, Boonesborough and Logan’s Fort, Simon Kenton, disappointed in a love affair in Virginia, seeking relief from sorrow by satisfying his hunger for hunting and at the same time acting in the interest of Lord Dunmore, came to Kentucky.
In Sprot’s account of his revels there, and his bad reception, we have either proof of Logan’s guilt, if the tale be true, or high testimony to Sprot’s powers as an artist in fiction. He says that Matthew Logan accompanied the Laird to town in September 1605, and in November was sent back with letters to Bower.
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. 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.
He gives, as grounds of his knowledge of Logan’s guilt, certain conversations among Logan’s intimates, yeomen or ‘bonnet lairds,’ or servants, from which he inferred that Logan was engaged in treason. Again, just before Logan’s death in July 1606, he was delirious, and raved of forfeiture. But Logan had been engaged in various treasons, so his ravings need not refer to the Gowrie affair.
We have noticed that all these forts were built near a spring of unfailing water. The pioneers seem always to have left the spring outside the inclosure, however, and since this worked a great hardship in time of siege, it seems to have been bad judgment. Girty’s Indians attacked Logan’s Fort. The supply of water inside the fort was exhausted, and the suffering was intense.
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. 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.
XIII April 1608.’ Another is Letter V, endorsed ‘produced by Ninian Chirnside,’ a fact first noted by Mr. Anderson. Yet another is the letter in twelve torn pieces. Logan, in the first of these three letters, requests Chirnside to find a letter which Bower lost in Dunglas. The letter imperils Logan’s life and lands. Here we cite the letter of the twelve fragments.
He grants that he wrote another copy with his course hand, copied from his copy, and gave it to the goodman of Rentoun,’ while the copy given to Heddilstane ‘was of his counterfeited writing,’ an imitation of Logan’s hand. Perhaps Sprot had two methods and scales of blackmail. For one, he invented damning facts, and wrote them out in imitation of Logan’s writing.
He would have been invited to dine at Fastcastle. The cliffs are steep, the sea is deep, and tells no tales. Thus where was Sprot’s motive for forging letters in Logan’s hand, and incriminating the Laird of Restalrig, and for carrying them about in his pocket in 1608?
And next we find it as good as explicitly stated, by Hart, that this letter of Logan’s to Gowrie was never produced in open Court. ‘Being demanded where this above written letter, written by Restalrig to the Earl of Gowrie, which was returned again by James Bower, is now? He falsified the real facts.
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