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Matthew, being interrogated, denied that he sent any letter back to Logan, though he owned that Sprot wrote one; and he denied that Sprot and Bower had any conference at all on the occasion. But Sprot had asserted that the conference with Bower occurred after Matthew Logan left them at Corsar’s house, where they dined, as Matthew admitted, after sermon. Matthew denied too much.
He had been at Logan’s ‘great Yule’ in Gunnisgreen, where Logan, according to Sprot, made the imprudent speeches. Crockett had also been at Dundee with Logan, he said, but it was in the summer of 1603. He did not hear Logan’s imprudent speech to Bower, at the Yule supper. As to the weeping of Lady Restalrig, he had often seen her weep, and heard her declare that Logan would ruin his family.
Poor Baillie was instantly ‘put in ward’ under the charge of the Earl of Dunfermline. But, on the day after Sprot was hanged, namely on August 13, Baillie was set free, on bail of 10,000 marks to appear before the Privy Council if called upon.
If Sprot wanted to get anything out of them, he could terrify them by threatening to show the forged Logan letters, as genuine, to the Government, so securing the ruin of Logan’s heirs by forfeiture. He did not do this himself, but he gave forged letters, for money, to men who were in debt to the dead Logan’s estate, and who might use the letters to extort remission of what they owed.
Napier refused to accept Calderwood’s wild tale that Sprot, while confessing Logan’s guilt and his own, also confessed to having forged Logan’s letters. This confession the Government burked. The actual circumstances have remained unknown and are only to be found in the official, but suppressed, reports of Sprot’s private examinations, now in the muniment room of the Earl of Haddington.
They burked the fact that Sprot confessed all these, with one or, perhaps, two exceptions, to be forgeries by himself. What they quoted, as letters of Logan and Gowrie, were merely descriptions of such letters given by Sprot from memory of their contents.
The brief letter to Logan from Gowrie was not the model of Sprot’s forgeries; as he later confessed he had another model, in a letter of Logan to Gowrie, which he held back till the last day of his life. But this Letter II, about which Sprot told discrepant tales, is certainly not genuine.
Logan, according to Sprot, said to him, in Edinburgh, early in 1602, ‘Thou rememberest what my Lady Home said to me, when she would not suffer my lord to subscribe my contract for Fentoun, because I would not allow two thousand marks to be kept out of the security, and take her word for them?
Meanwhile we must keep one fact steadily in mind. That letter was never heard of by Sprot’s examiners till August 10, and never came into the hands of his examiners till late on August 11, or early on August 12, the day when Sprot was hanged. Spottiswoode was never made aware that the letter had been produced.
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.
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