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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.
This letter, harmless enough, was never produced in Court, and Mr. Barbé supposes that it was a concoction of Hart’s. This is an unlucky conjecture. The Haddington MSS. prove that Sprot really recited Gowrie’s letter, or professed to do so, from memory, in one of his private examinations. The prosecution never pretended to possess or produce Gowrie’s letter.
The Master, the apology goes on, whom the King had sent for ‘divers times before, and on August 5,’ rode early to Falkland, accompanied by Andrew Ruthven, and Andrew Henderson. Here they clash with ‘The Verie Manner’ &c. issued at the time by Gowrie’s defenders. It avers that the Master, and his two men, did not intend to return from Falkland to Perth.
When they had nearly finished, Gowrie returned to them in the hall, and sent round a grace-cup, in which all pledged the King. Herries, and others went into the garden, where, one of them tells us, they ate cherries. While they were thus engaged, Gowrie’s equerry, or master stabler, a Mr.
I am disinclined to conjecture, being only certain that a young man with Gowrie’s past—‘Italianate,’ and of dubious religion—was more apt to form a wild and daring plot than was his canny senior, the King of Scots. But that a plot of some kind Gowrie had laid, I am convinced by his secrecy, and by his falsehoods as to the King’s departure.
The motto is not given; it was DEID SCHAW. The shield is blotted by transverse strokes of the pen, the whole rude design having been made for the purpose of being thus scored out, after Gowrie’s death, posthumous trial and forfeiture, in 1600. On the left of the sinister supporter is an armed man, in the Gowrie livery.
Having criticised the contemporary criticism of the Gowrie affair, we must look back, and examine the nature of Gowrie’s ancestral and personal relations with James before the day of calamity. There were grounds enough for hatred between the King and the Earl, whether such hatred existed or not, in a kind of hereditary feud, and in political differences.
‘The Earl and Cranstoun were alone with the four in the fatal chamber. The others who were wounded there went up after Gowrie’s death.’ It may be so, but the bulk of the evidence is on the other side. ‘It is reported’ that Henderson was eating an egg in the kitchen, and went into the town when the fray arose.
The Master, too, was seen on the stairs by Craigengelt. If Gowrie’s behaviour is correctly described, it might be attributed to anxiety about a Royal meal so hastily prepared. If engaged in a conspiracy, Gowrie would have reason for anxiety.
Anderson believes, as I do, are, none the less, genuine Logan. If readers accept these conclusions, there was a Gowrie conspiracy, and Logan was in it. ‘I trow your Lordship has a proof of my constancy already ere now,’ he says in Letter IV, and Gowrie may have had a proof, in his early conspiracies of 1593–1594, or in a testimonial to Logan from Bothwell, Gowrie’s old ally.
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