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Updated: June 17, 2025
Gowrie was their one hope among the peers, and the story which James told is so strange that nothing could be stranger or less credible except the various and manifestly mendacious versions of the Gowrie party. James's version of the occurrences must be as much as possible condensed, and there is no room for the corroborating evidence of Lennox and others.
Hart goes on to describe, as if on Sprot’s testimony, certain movements of the Laird’s after he received Gowrie’s reply to his own answer to Gowrie.
Ruthven could not have known that they were coming at that moment; it was Gowrie’s ill-timed falsehoods, to the effect that the King had ridden away, which brought them there. Gowrie had not allowed for Henderson’s failure. ‘How could the King struggle successfully with the stalwart Master?’ He fought for his life, and Ruthven probably even then did not wish to injure him bodily.
We must suppose that Gowrie, with his small force of himself and Cranstoun, both fencers from the foreign schools, would allow that force to be cut off in detail, one by one. We must suppose that Erskine was where he certainly was not, in two places at once, and that Ramsay and Herries and he, unseen, left the hall and joined the King, on a message brought by the Master, unmarked by any witness.
Having put Lennox off with a false reason for his accompanying Ruthven alone in the house of Gowrie, James privately arranges that Ruthven shall quietly summon him, or Erskine, to follow upstairs, meaning to goad Ruthven into a treasonable attitude just as they appear on the scene.
James acquiesced; his relations with the house of Mar remained most friendly. The house of Ruthven was now restored to its lands and dignities, in 1586, the new Earl being James, who died in early youth. He was succeeded by his brother, the Gowrie of our tragedy, who was born about 1577. He had many sisters; the eldest, Mary, married the Earl of Atholl, a Stewart, in January 1580.
A servant of James’s, says the apologist, now brought the news that the King had ridden away. Cranstoun, Gowrie’s man, really did this, as he admitted. Gowrie, the author goes on, hearing of James’s departure, called for his horse, and went out into the street. There he stood ‘abiding his horse.’ Now Cranstoun, as he confessed, had told Gowrie that his horse was at Scone, two miles away.
Among the traps for the King contrived by Bothwell and Colville, and reported by Colville to his English paymasters, were schemes quite as wild as that which Gowrie probably entertained. The King once in the pious hands of so godly a man as Gowrie, the party of the Kirk, or the party of the Church, would have come in and made themselves useful.
It is not on that of the first Earl of Gowrie, affixed to a deed of February 1583–1584. In place of the traditional Scottish motto Deid Schaw, is the Latin translation, Facta Probant. In 1597, as the archives of the Faculty of Law, in the University of Padua, show, Gowrie was a student of Padua. It is also probable that, in 1597, he attained his majority.
Gowrie had two younger brothers, Patrick and William, who fled to England from his castle of Dirleton, the day after the tragedy, and were forfeited and persecuted by James; Patrick was long imprisoned in the Tower. The new Earl, John, the victim of 1600, does not come into public notice till 1592, when he was elected Provost of Perth.
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