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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.
Why leave it with Bower for three months? At all events, as Bower could not read, Sprot helped him to look for the letter, found it, and kept it ‘till he framed three new letters upon it,’ after which he does not say what he did with it. Here Sprot cited, from memory, but not accurately, more of Letter IV. The existence of such errors is not remarkable.
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.
Logan, who had been writing it, was called by Bower, went out, and thrust it between a bench and the wall: there Sprot found, read, and restored the unfinished epistle to its place. But the letter is dated ‘from Gunnisgreen,’ at the conclusion. One day would be at Fastcastle, when he was interrupted; the other, the day of dating, at Gunnisgreen.
Then followed the lounge and the talk with Bower before supper, all in the late afternoon of a July day, the yellow light sleeping on the northern sea below. Vivid this is, and plausible, but is it true? If we make allowance for a vagueness of four or five days, this does not fit in badly. How do these dates fit into the narrative? We must not press Sprot too hard as to dates so remote in time.
One thing is certain, Letters III and V, to the Unknown, are modelled on IV, as is the torn letter. These letters contain no invention at all, they merely repeat Letter IV. Any man who could invent IV had genius enough to alter his tunes in III, V. and the torn letter. But Sprot never deserts his model.
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.
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.
Thus, if Sprot told the truth about all these men, no corroborative facts were discovered, while the only proofs of his charges against Logan were the papers which, with one exception, he confessed to be forgeries, executed by himself, for purposes of extortion. After supper, Bower and Logan called Sprot out on to the open hill-side.
Even if it were so, the fact is unimportant, for Sprot was really speaking of movements at a date much earlier than July 29; he later gave a separate account of what Logan was doing at the time of the outbreak of the plot, an account not quoted by Hart, who fraudulently or accidentally confused the dates.
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