James VI And The Gowrie Mystery E-Book

Andrew Lang

• Herausgeber: Jazzybee Verlag
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Seitenzahl: 338

Beschreibung

An old Scottish lady, many generations ago, used to say, 'It is a great comfort to think that, at the Day of Judgment, we shall know the whole truth about the Gowrie Conspiracy at last.' Since the author, as a child, read 'The Tales of a Grandfather,' and shared King Jamie's disappointment when there was no pot of gold, but an armed man, in the turret, he had supposed that we do know all about the Gowrie Conspiracy, that it was a plot to capture the King, carry him to Fastcastle, and 'see how the country would take it,' as in the case of the Gunpowder Plot. But just as Father Gerard has tried to show that the Gunpowder affair may have been Cecil's plot, so modern historians doubt whether the Gowrie mystery was not a conspiracy by King James himself. This book is annotated with a rare extensive biographical sketch of the author, Andrew Lang, written by Sir Edmund Gosse, CB, a contemporary poet and writer. Contents: Introduction I. The Mystery And The Evidence II. The Slaughter Of The Ruthvens III. The King's Own Narrative IV. The King's Narrative-II. The Man In The Turret V. Henderson's Narrative VI. The Strange Case Of Mr. Robert Oliphant VII. The Contemporary Ruthven Vindication VIII. The Theory Of An Accidental Brawl IX. Contemporary Clerical Criticism X. Popular Criticism Of The Day XI. The King And The Ruthvens XII. Logan Of Restalrig XIII. The Secrets Of Sprot XIV. The Laird And The Notary XV. The Final Confessions Of The Notary XVI. What Is Letter Iv? XVII. Inferences As To The Casket Letters

Leseprobe

James VI And The Gowrie Mystery

Andrew Lang

Contents:

Andrew Lang (1844-1912)

James VI And The Gowrie Mystery

Introduction

I.  The Mystery And The Evidence

II.  The Slaughter Of The Ruthvens

III.  The King’s Own Narrative

IV.  The King’s Narrative—II.  The Man In The Turret

V.  Henderson’s Narrative

VI.  The Strange Case Of Mr. Robert Oliphant

VII.  The Contemporary Ruthven Vindication

VIII.  The Theory Of An Accidental Brawl

IX.  Contemporary Clerical Criticism

X.  Popular Criticism Of The Day

XI.  The King And The Ruthvens

XII.  Logan Of Restalrig

XIII.  The Secrets Of Sprot

XIV.  The Laird And The Notary

XV.  The Final Confessions Of The Notary

XVI.  What Is Letter Iv?

XVII.  Inferences As To The Casket Letters

Appendices

Appendix A.  The Frontispiece

Appendix B: The Contemporary Ruthven Vindication

Appendix C. Five Letters Forged By Sprot, As From Logan

James VI. and the Gowrie Mystery, A. Lang

Jazzybee Verlag Jürgen Beck

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ISBN: 9783849606930

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ANDREW LANG (1844-1912)

Biographical Sketch from "Portraits And Sketches" by Edmund Gosse

INVITED to note down some of my recollections of Andrew Lang, I find myself suspended between the sudden blow of his death and the slow development of memory, now extending in unbroken friendship over thirty-five years. The magnitude and multitude of Lang's performances, public and private, during that considerable length of time almost paralyse expression; it is difficult to know where to begin or where to stop. Just as his written works are so extremely numerous as to make a pathway through them a formidable task in bibliography, no one book standing out predominant, so his character, intellectual and moral, was full -of so many apparent inconsistencies, so many pitfalls for rash assertion, so many queer caprices of impulse, that in a whole volume of analysis, which would be tedious, one could scarcely do justice to them all. I will venture to put down, almost at haphazard, what I remember that seems to me to have been overlooked, or inexactly stated, by those who wrote, often very sympathetically, at the moment of his death, always premising that I speak rather of a Lang of from 1877 to 1890, when I saw him very frequently, than of a Lang whom younger people met chiefly in Scotland.

When he died, all the newspapers were loud in proclaiming his "versatility." But I am not sure that he was not the very opposite of versatile. I take "versatile" to mean changeable, fickle, constantly ready to alter direction with the weather-cock. The great instance of versatility in literature is Ruskin, who adopted diametrically different views of the same subject at different times of his life, and defended them with equal ardour. To be versatile seems to be unsteady, variable. But Lang was through his long career singularly unaltered; he never changed his point of view; what he liked and admired as a youth he liked and admired as an elderly man. It is true that his interests and knowledge were vividly drawn along a surprisingly large number of channels, but while there was abundance there does not seem to me to have been versatility. If a huge body of water boils up from a crater, it may pour down a dozen paths, but these will always be the same; unless there is an earthquake, new cascades will not form nor old rivulets run dry. In some authors earthquakes do take place as in Tolstoy, for instance, and in S. T. Coleridge but nothing of this kind was ever manifest in Lang, who was extraordinarily multiform, yet in his varieties strictly consistent from Oxford to the grave. As this is not generally perceived, I will take the liberty of expanding my view of his intellectual development.

To a superficial observer in late life the genius of Andrew Lang had the characteristics which we are in the habit of identifying with precocity. Yet he had not been, as a writer, precocious in his youth. One slender volume of verses represents all that he published in book-form before his thirty-fifth year. No doubt we shall learn in good time what he was doing before he flashed upon the world of journalism in all his panoply of graces, in 1876, at the close of his Merton fellowship. He was then, at all events, the finest finished product of his age, with the bright armour of Oxford burnished on his body to such a brilliance that humdrum eyes could hardly bear the radiance of it. Of the terms behind, of the fifteen years then dividing him from St. Andrews, we know as yet but little; they were years of insatiable acquirement, incessant reading, and talking, and observing gay preparation for a life to be devoted, as no other life in our time has been, to the stimulation of other people's observation and talk and reading. There was no cloistered virtue about the bright and petulant Merton don. He was already flouting and jesting, laughing with Ariosto in the sunshine, performing with a snap of his fingers tasks which might break the back of a pedant, and concealing under an affectation of carelessness a literary ambition which knew no definite bounds.

In those days, and when he appeared for the first time in London, the poet was paramount in him. Jowett is said to have predicted that he would be greatly famous in this line, but I know not what evidence Jowett had before him. Unless I am much mistaken, it was not until Lang left Balliol that his peculiar bent became obvious. Up to that time he had been a promiscuous browser upon books, much occupied, moreover, in the struggle with ancient Greek, and immersed in Aristotle and Homer. But in the early days of his settlement at Merton he began to concentrate his powers, and I think there were certain influences which were instant and far-reaching. Among them one was pre-eminent. When Andrew Lang came up from St. Andrews he had found Matthew Arnold occupying the ancient chair of poetry at Oxford. He was a listener at some at least of the famous lectures which, in 1865, were collected as "Essays in Criticism"; while one of his latest experiences as a Balliol undergraduate was hearing Matthew Arnold lecture on the study of Celtic literature. His conscience was profoundly stirred by "Culture and Anarchy" (1869); his sense of prose-form largely determined by "Friendship's Garland" (1871). I have no hesitation in saying that the teaching and example of Matthew Arnold prevailed over all other Oxford influences upon the intellectual nature of Lang, while, although I think that his personal acquaintance with Arnold was very slight, yet in his social manner there was, in early days, not a little imitation of Arnold's aloofness and superfine delicacy of address. It was unconscious, of course, and nothing would have enraged Lang more than to have been accused of "imitating Uncle Matt."

The structure which his own individuality now began to build on the basis supplied by the learning of Oxford, and in particular by the study of the Greeks, and "dressed" by courses of Matthew Arnold, was from the first eclectic. Lang eschewed as completely what was not sympathetic to him as he assimilated what was attractive to him. Those who speak of his "versatility" should recollect what large tracts of the literature of the world, and even of England, existed outside the dimmest apprehension of Andrew Lang. It is, however, more useful to consider what he did apprehend; and there were two English books, published in his Oxford days, which permanently impressed him: one of these was "The Earthly Paradise," the other D. G. Rossetti's " Poems." In after years he tried to divest himself of the traces of these volumes, but he had fed upon their honey-dew and it had permeated his veins.

Not less important an element in the garnishing of a mind already prepared for it by academic and aesthetic studies was the absorption of the romantic part of French literature. Andrew Lang in this, as in everything else, was selective. He dipped into the wonderful lucky-bag of France wherever he saw the glitter of romance. Hence his approach, in the early seventies, was threefold: towards the mediaeval lais and chansons, towards the sixteenth-century Pleiade, and towards the school of which Victor Hugo was the leader in the nineteenth century. For a long time Ronsard was Lang's poet of intensest predilection; and I think that his definite ambition was to be the Ronsard of modern England, introducing a new poetical dexterity founded on a revival of pure humanism. He had in those days what he lost, or at least dispersed, in the weariness and growing melancholia of later years a splendid belief in poetry as a part of the renown of England, as a heritage to be received in reverence from our fathers, and to be passed on, if possible, in a brighter flame. This honest and beautiful ambition to shine as one of the permanent benefactors to national verse, in the attitude so nobly sustained four hundred years ago by Du Bellay and Ronsard, was unquestionably felt by Andrew Lang through his bright intellectual April, and supported him from Oxford times until 1882, when he published " Helen of Troy." The cool reception of that epic by the principal judges of poetry caused him acute disappointment, and from that time forth he became less eager and less serious as a poet, more and more petulantly expending his wonderful technical gift on fugitive subjects. And here again, when one comes to think of it, the whole history repeated itself, since in " Helen of Troy " Lang simply suffered as Ronsard had done in the "Franciade." But the fact that 1882 was his year of crisis, and the tomb of his brightest ambition, must be recognised by every one who closely followed his fortunes at that time. Lang's habit of picking out of literature and of life the plums of romance, and these alone, comes to be, to the dazzled observer of his extraordinarily vivid intellectual career, the principal guiding line. This determination to dwell, to the exclusion of all other sides of any question, on its romantic side is alone enough to rebut the charge of versatility. Lang was in a sense encyclopaedic; but the vast dictionary of his knowledge had blank pages, or pages pasted down, on which he would not, or could not, read what experience had printed. Absurd as it sounds, there was always something maidenly about his mind, and he glossed over ugly matters, sordid and dull conditions, so that they made no impression whatever upon him. He had a trick, which often exasperated his acquaintances, of declaring that he had " never heard " of things that everybody else was very well aware of. He had " never heard the name " of people he disliked, of books that he thought tiresome, of events that bored him; but, more than this, he used the formula for things and persons whom he did not wish to discuss. I remember meeting in the street a famous professor, who advanced with uplifted hands, and greeted me with " What do you think Lang says now? That he has never heard of Pascal! " This merely signified that Lang, not interested (at all events for the moment) in Pascal nor in the professor, thus closed at once all possibility of discussion.

It must not be forgotten that we have lived to see him, always wonderful indeed, and always passionately devoted to perfection and purity, but worn, tired, harassed by the unceasing struggle, the lifelong slinging of sentences from that inexhaustible ink-pot. In one of the most perfect of his poems, " Natural Theology," Lang speaks of Cagn, the great hunter, who once was kind and good, but who was spoiled by fighting many things. Lang was never " spoiled," but he was injured; the surface of the radiant coin was rubbed by the vast and interminable handling of journalism. He was jaded by the toil of writing many things. Hence it is not possible but that those who knew him intimately in his later youth and early middle-age should prefer to look back at those years when he was the freshest, the most exhilarating figure in living literature, when a star seemed to dance upon the crest of his already silvering hair. Baudelaire exclaimed of Theophile Gautier: " Homme heureux! homme digne d'envie! il n'a jamais aimé que le Beau!" and of Andrew Lang in those brilliant days the same might have been said. As long as he had confidence in beauty he was safe and strong; and much that, with all affection and all respect, we must admit was rasping and disappointing in his attitude to literature in his later years, seems to have been due to a decreasing sense of confidence in the intellectual sources of beauty. It is dangerous, in the end it must be fatal, to sustain the entire structure of life and thought on the illusions of romance. But that was what Lang did he built his house upon the rainbow.

The charm of Andrew Lang's person and company was founded upon a certain lightness, an essential gentleness and elegance which were relieved by a sharp touch; just as a very dainty fruit may be preserved from mawkishness by something delicately acid in the rind of it. His nature was slightly inhuman; it was unwise to count upon its sympathy beyond a point which was very easily reached in social intercourse. If any simple soul showed an inclination, in eighteenth-century phrase, to " repose on the bosom " of Lang, that support was immediately withdrawn, and the confiding one fell among thorns. Lang was like an Angora cat, whose gentleness and soft fur, and general aspect of pure amenity, invite to caresses, which are suddenly met by the outspread paw with claws awake. This uncertain and freakish humour was the embarrassment of his friends, who, however, were preserved from despair by the fact that no malice was meant, and that the weapons were instantly sheathed again in velvet. Only, the instinct to give a sudden slap, half in play, half in fretful caprice, was incorrigible. No one among Lang's intimate friends but had suffered from this feline impulse, which did not spare even the serenity of Robert Louis Stevenson. But, tiresome as it sometimes was, this irritable humour seldom cost Lang a friend who was worth preserving. Those who really knew him recognised that he was always shy and usually tired.

His own swift spirit never brooded upon an offence, and could not conceive that any one else should mind what he himself minded so little and forgot so soon. Impressions swept over him very rapidly, and injuries passed completely out of his memory. Indeed, all his emotions were too fleeting, and in this there was something fairy-like; quick and keen and blithe as he was, he did not seem altogether like an ordinary mortal, nor could the appeal to gross human experience be made to him with much chance of success. This, doubtless, is why almost all imaginative literature which is founded upon the darker parts of life, all squalid and painful tragedy, all stories that " don't end well" all religious experiences, all that is not superficial and romantic, was irksome to him. He tried sometimes to reconcile his mind to the consideration of real life; he concentrated his matchless powers on it; but he always disliked it. He could persuade himself to be partly just to Ibsen or Hardy or Dostoieffsky, but what he really enjoyed was Dumas pêre, because that fertile romance-writer rose serene above the phenomena of actual human experience. We have seen more of this type in English literature than the Continental nations have in theirs, but even we have seen no instance of its strength and weakness so eminent as Andrew Lang. He was the fairy in our midst, the wonder-working, incorporeal, and tricksy fay of letters, who paid for all his wonderful gifts and charms by being not quite a man of like passions with the rest of us. In some verses which he scribbled to R.L.S. and threw away, twenty years ago, he acknowledged this unearthly character, and, speaking of the depredations of his kin, he said:

Faith, they might steal me, w? ma will,

And, ken'd I ony fairy hill

I#d lay me down there, snod and still,

Their land to win;

For, man, I maistly had my fill

O' this world's din

His wit had something disconcerting in its impishness. Its rapidity and sparkle were dazzling, but it was not quite human; that is to say, it conceded too little to the exigencies of flesh and blood. If we can conceive a seraph being fanny, it would be in the manner of Andrew Lang. Moreover, his wit usually danced over the surface of things, and rarely penetrated them. In verbal parry, in ironic misunderstanding, in breathless agility of topsy-turvy movement, Lang was like one of Milton's " yellow-skirted fays," sporting with the helpless, moon-bewildered traveller. His wit often had a depressing, a humiliating effect, against which one's mind presently revolted. I recollect an instance which may be thought to be apposite: I was passing through a phase of enthusiasm for Emerson, whom Lang very characteristically detested, and I was so ill-advised as to show him the famous epigram called " Brahma." Lang read it with a snort of derision (it appeared to be new to him), and immediately he improvised this parody:

If the wild bowler thinks he bowls,

Or if the batsman thinks he's bowled,

They know not, poor misguided souls,

They, too, shall perish unconsoled.

I am the batsman and the bat,

I am the bowler and the ball,

The umpire, the pavilion cat,

The roller, pitch and stumps, and all

This would make a pavilion cat laugh, and I felt that Emerson was done for. But when Lang had left me, and I was once more master of my mind, I reflected that the parody was but a parody, wonderful for its neatness and quickness, and for its seizure of what was awkward in the roll of Emerson's diction, but essentially superficial. However, what would wit be if it were profound? I must leave it there, feeling that I have not explained why Lang's extraordinary drollery in conversation so often left on the memory a certain sensation of distress.

But this was not the characteristic of his humour at its best, as it was displayed throughout the happiest period of his work. If, as seems possible, it is as an essayist that he will ultimately take his place in English literature, this element will continue to delight fresh generations of enchanted readers. I cannot imagine that the preface to his translation of " Theocritus," "Letters to Dead Authors," "In the Wrong Paradise," " Old Friends," and " Essays in Little " will ever lose their charm; but future admirers will have to pick their way to them through a tangle of history and anthropology and mythology, where there may be left no perfume and no sweetness. I am impatient to see this vast mass of writing reduced to the limits of its author's delicate, true, but somewhat evasive and ephemeral. genius. However, as far as the circumstances of his temperament permitted, Andrew Lang has left with us the memory of one of our most surprising contemporaries, a man of letters who laboured without cessation from boyhood to the grave, who pursued his ideal with indomitable activity and perseverance, and who was never betrayed except by the loftiness of his own endeavour. Lang's only misfortune was not to be completely in contact with life, and his work will survive exactly where he was most faithful to his innermost illusions.

JAMES VI AND THE GOWRIE MYSTERY

INTRODUCTION

An old Scottish lady, four generations ago, used to say, ‘It is a great comfort to think that, at the Day of Judgment, we shall know the whole truth about the Gowrie Conspiracy at last.’  Since the author, as a child, read ‘The Tales of a Grandfather,’ and shared King Jamie’s disappointment when there was no pot of gold, but an armed man, in the turret, he had supposed that we do know all about the Gowrie Conspiracy, that it was a plot to capture the King, carry him to Fastcastle, and ‘see how the country would take it,’ as in the case of the Gunpowder Plot.  But just as Father Gerard has tried to show that the Gunpowder affair may have been Cecil’s plot, so modern historians doubt whether the Gowrie mystery was not a conspiracy by King James himself.  Mr. Hume Brown appears rather to lean to this opinion, in the second volume of his ‘History of Scotland,’ and Dr. Masson, in his valuable edition of the ‘Register of the Privy Council,’ is also dubious.  Mr. Louis Barbé, in his ‘Tragedy of Gowrie House,’ holds a brief against the King.  Thus I have been tempted to study this ‘auld misterie’ afresh, and have convinced myself that such historians as Sir Walter Scott, Mr. Frazer Tytler, and Mr. Hill Burton were not wrong; the plot was not the King’s conspiracy, but the desperate venture of two very young men.  The precise object remains obscure in detail, but the purpose was probably to see how a deeply discontented Kirk and country ‘would take it.’

In working at this fascinatingly mysterious puzzle, I have made use of manuscript materials hitherto uncited.  The most curious of these, the examinations and documents of the ‘country writer,’ Sprot, had been briefly summarised in Sir William Fraser’s ‘Memorials of the Earls of Haddington.’  My attention was drawn to this source by the Rev. John Anderson, of the General Register House, who aided Sir William Fraser in the compilation of his book.  The Earl of Haddington generously permitted me to have copies made of the documents, which Lady Cecily Baillie-Hamilton was kind enough to search for and rediscover in an enormous mass of documents bequeathed by the learned first Earl.

On reading the Calendars of the Hatfield MSS. I had observed that several letters by the possible conspirator, Logan of Restalrig, were in the possession of the Marquis of Salisbury, who was good enough to permit photographs of some specimens to be taken.  These were compared, by Mr. Anderson, with the alleged plot-letters of Logan at Edinburgh; while photographs of the plot-letters were compared with Logan’s authentic letters at Hatfield, by Mr. Gunton, to whose acuteness and energy I owe the greatest gratitude.  The results of the comparison settle the riddle of three centuries.

The other hitherto unused manuscripts are in no more recondite place than the Record Office in London, and I do not know how they managed to escape the notice of previous writers on the subject.  To Dr. Masson’s ‘Register of the Privy Council’ I am indebted for the sequel of the curious adventure of Mr. Robert Oliphant, whose part in the mystery, hitherto overlooked, is decisive, if we accept the evidence—a point on which the reader must form his own opinion.  For copies made at the Record Office I have to thank the care and accuracy of Miss E. M. Thompson.

To Mr. Anderson’s learning and zest in this ‘longest and sorest chase’ (as King James called his hunt on the morning of the fatal August 5) I am under the deepest obligations.  The allurements of a romantic conclusion have never tempted him to leave the strait path of historical impartiality.

I have also to thank Mr. Henry Paton for his careful copies of the Haddington MSS., extracts from the Treasurer’s accounts, and other researches.

For permission to reproduce the picture of Fastcastle by the Rev. Mr. Thomson of Duddingston, I have to thank the kindness of Mrs. Blackwood-Porter.  The painting, probably of about 1820, when compared with the photograph of to-day, shows the destruction wrought by wind and weather in the old fortalice.

My obligations to Sir James Balfour Paul (Lyon King of Arms) for information on points of Heraldry ought to be gratefully acknowledged.

Since this book was written, the author has had an opportunity to read an Apology for the Ruthvens by the late Andrew Bisset.  This treatise is apt to escape observation: it is entitled ‘Sir Walter Scott,’ and occupies pp. 172–303 in ‘Essays on Historical Truth,’ long out of print.   On many points Mr. Bisset agreed with Mr. Barbé in his ‘Tragedy of Gowrie House,’ and my replies to Mr. Barbé serve for his predecessor.  But Mr. Bisset found no evidence that the King had formed a plot against Gowrie.  By a modification of the contemporary conjecture of Sir William Bowes he suggested that a brawl between the King and the Master of Ruthven occurred in the turret, occasioned by an atrocious insult offered to the Master by the King.  This hypothesis, for various reasons, does not deserve discussion.  Mr. Bisset appeared to attribute the Sprot papers to the combined authorship of the King and Sir Thomas Hamilton: which our new materials disprove.  A critic who, like Mr. Bisset, accused the King of poisoning Prince Henry, and many other persons, was not an unprejudiced historian.

I.  THE MYSTERY AND THE EVIDENCE

There are enigmas in the annals of most peoples; riddles put by the Sphinx of the Past to the curious of the new generations.  These questions do not greatly concern the scientific historian, who is busy with constitution-making, statistics, progress, degeneration, in short with human evolution.  These high matters, these streams of tendency, form the staple of history, but the problems of personal character and action still interest some inquiring minds.  Among these enigmas nearly the most obscure, ‘The Gowrie Conspiracy,’ is our topic.

This affair is one of the haunting mysteries of the past, one of the problems that nobody has solved.  The events occurred in 1600, but the interest which they excited was so keen that belief in the guilt or innocence of the two noble brothers who perished in an August afternoon, was a party shibboleth in the Wars of the Saints against the Malignants, the strife of Cavaliers and Roundheads.  The problem has ever since attracted the curious, as do the enigma of Perkin Warbeck, the true character of Richard III, the real face behind ‘The Iron Mask,’ the identity of the False Pucelle, and the innocence or guilt of Mary Stuart.

In certain respects the Gowrie mystery is necessarily less attractive than that of ‘the fairest and most pitiless Queen on earth.’  There is no woman in the story.  The world, of course, when the Ruthvens died, at once acted on the maxim, cherchez la femme.  The woman in the case, men said, was the beautiful Queen, Anne of Denmark, wife of James VI.  That fair and frivolous dame, ‘very very woman,’ certainly did her best, by her behaviour, to encourage the belief that she was the cause of these sorrows.  Even so, when the Bonny Earl Moray—the tallest and most beautiful man in Scotland—died like a lion dragged down by wolves, the people sang:

He was a brave gallant,    And he rode at the ring, And the Bonny Earl Moray,    He might have been the King.

He was a brave gallant,    And he rode at the glove, And the Bonny Earl Moray    He was the Queen’s love.

On one side was a beautiful Queen mated with James VI, a pedant and a clown.  On the other side were, first the Bonny Earl, then the Earl of Gowrie, both young, brave, handsome, both suddenly slain by the King’s friends: none knew why.  The opinion of the godly, of the Kirk, of the people, and even of politicians, leaped to the erroneous conclusion that the young men perished, like Königsmarck, because they were beautiful and beloved, and because the Queen was fair and kind, and the King was ugly, treacherous, and jealous.  The rumour also ran, at least in tradition, that Gowrie ‘might have been the King,’ an idea examined in Appendix A.  Here then was an explanation of the slaying of the Ruthvens on the lines dear to romance.  The humorous King Jamie (who, if he was not always sensible, at least treated his flighty wife with abundance of sense) had to play the part of King Mark of Cornwall to Gowrie’s Sir Tristram.  For this theory, we shall show, no evidence exists, and, in ‘looking for the woman,’ fancy found two men.  The Queen was alternately said to love Gowrie, and to love his brother, the Master of Ruthven, a lad of nineteen—if she did not love both at once.  It is curious that the affair did not give rise to ballads; if it did, none has reached us.

In truth there was no woman in the case, and this of course makes the mystery much less exciting than that of Mary Stuart, for whom so many swords and pens have been drawn.  The interest of character and of love is deficient.  Of Gowrie’s character, and even of his religion, apart from his learning and fascination, we really know almost nothing.  Did he cherish that strongest and most sacred of passions, revenge; had he brooded over it in Italy, where revenge was subtler and craftier than in Scotland?  Did this passion blend with the vein of fanaticism in his nature?  Had he been biding his time, and dreaming, over sea, boyish dreams of vengeance and ambition?  All this appears not improbable, and would, if true, explain all; but evidence is defective.  Had Gowrie really cherished the legacy of revenge for a father slain, and a mother insulted; had he studied the subtleties of Italian crime, pondered over an Italian plot till it seemed feasible, and communicated his vision to the boy brother whom he found at home—the mystery would be transparent.

As to King James, we know him well.  The babe ‘wronged in his mother’s womb;’ threatened by conspirators before his birth; terrified by a harsh tutor as a child; bullied; preached at; captured; insulted; ruled now by debauched favourites, now by godly ruffians; James naturally grew up a dissembler, and betrayed his father’s murderer with a kiss.  He was frightened into deceit: he could be cruel; he became, as far as he might, a tyrant.  But, though not the abject coward of tradition, James (as he himself observed) was never the man to risk his life in a doubtful brawl, on the chance that his enemies might perish while he escaped.  For him a treachery of that kind, an affair of sword and dagger fights on staircases and in turrets and chambers, in the midst of a town of doubtful loyalty, had certainly no attractions.  Moreover, he had a sense of humour.  This has been the opinion of our best historians, Scott, Mr. Tytler, and Mr. Hill Burton; but enthusiastic writers have always espoused the cause of the victims, the Ruthvens, so young, brave, handsome; so untimely slain, as it were on their own hearthstone.  Other authors, such as Dr. Masson in our own day, and Mr. S. R. Gardiner, have abstained from a verdict, or have attempted the via media; have leaned to the idea that the Ruthvens died in an accidental brawl, caused by a nervous and motiveless fit of terror on the part of the King.  Thus the question is unsettled, the problem is unsolved.  Why did the jolly hunt at Falkland, in the bright August morning, end in the sanguinary scuffle in the town house at Perth; the deaths of the Ruthvens; the tumult in the town; the King’s homeward ride through the dark and dripping twilight; the laying of the dead brothers side by side, while the old family servant weeps above their bodies; and the wailing of the Queen and her ladies in Falkland Palace, when the torches guide the cavalcade into the palace court, and the strange tale of slaughter is variously told, ‘the reports so fighting together that no man could have any certainty’?  Where lay the actual truth?

This problem, with which the following pages are concerned, is much darker and more complex than that of the guilty ‘Casket Letters’ attributed to Mary, Queen of Scots.  The Queen did write these, in the p. 6madness of a criminal passion; or she wrote parts of them, the rest being garbled or forged.  In either case, her motives, and the motives of the possible forgers, are distinct, and are human.  The Queen was in love with one man, and hated another to the death; or her enemies desired to prove that these were her moods.  Absolute certainty escapes us, but, either way, motives and purposes are intelligible.

Not so with the Gowrie mystery.  The King, Mary’s son, after hunting for four hours, rides to visit Lord Gowrie, a neighbour.  After luncheon, that nobleman and his brother are slain, in their own house, by the King’s attendants.  The King gives his version of the events instantly; he never varies from it in any essential point, but the story is almost incredible.  On the other hand, the slain men cannot speak, and only one of them, if both were innocent, could have told what occurred.  But one of their apologists, at the time, produced a version of the events which is, beyond all doubt, boldly mendacious.  It was easy to criticise and ridicule the King’s version; but the opposite version, hitherto unknown to historians, destroys itself by its conspicuous falsehoods.  In the nature of the case, as will appear, no story accounting for such wild events could be easily credible, so extraordinary, motiveless, and inexplicable do the circumstances appear.  If we try the theory that the King wove a plot, we are met by the fact that his plot could not have succeeded without the voluntary and vehement collaboration of one of his victims, a thing that no man could have reckoned on.  If we adopt the idea that the victims had laid a trap for the King, we have only a vague surmise as to its aim, purpose, and method.  The later light which seemed to fall on the affair, as we shall see, only darkens what was already obscure.  The inconceivable iniquity of the Government, at a later date, reflects such discredit on all concerned on their side, that we might naturally, though illogically, be inclined to believe that, from the first, the King was the conspirator.  But that, we shall find, was almost, or quite, a physical impossibility.

Despite these embroilments, I am, in this case, able to reach a conclusion satisfactory to myself, a thing which, in the affair of the Casket Letters and Queen Mary, I was unable to do.   There is no doubt, in my own mind, that the Earl of Gowrie and his brother laid a trap for King James, and fell into the pit which they had digged.

To what precise end they had plotted to seize the King’s person, what they meant to do with him when they had got him, must remain matter of conjecture.  But that they intended to seize him, I have no doubt at all.

These pages, on so old and vexed a problem, would not have been written, had I not been fortunate enough to obtain many unpublished manuscript materials.  Some of these at least clear up the secondary enigma of the sequel of the problem of 1600.  Different readers will probably draw different conclusions from some of the other documents, but perhaps nobody will doubt that they throw strange new lights on Scottish manners and morals.

The scheme adopted here is somewhat like that of Mr. Browning’s poem, ‘The Ring and the Book.’  The personages tell their own stories of the same set of events, in which they were more or less intimately concerned.  This inevitably entails some repetition, but I am unable to find any plan less open to objection.

It must, of course, be kept in mind that all the evidence is of a suspicious nature.  The King, if he were the conspirator, or even if innocent, had to clear himself; and, frankly, his Majesty’s word was not to be relied upon.  However, he alone was cross-examined, by an acute and hostile catechist, and that upon oath, though not in a court of justice.  The evidence of his retinue, and of some other persons present, was also taken on oath, three months after the events, before a Parliamentary Committee, ‘The Lords of the Articles.’  We shall see that, nine years later, a similar Committee was deceived shamelessly by the King’s Government, he himself being absent in England.  But the nature of the evidence, in the second case, was entirely different: it did not rest on the sworn testimony of a number of nobles, gentlemen, and citizens, but on a question of handwriting, comparatio literarum, as in the case of the Casket Letters.  That the witnesses in 1600 did not perjure themselves, in the trial which followed on the slaughter of the Ruthvens, is what I have to argue.  Next, we have the evidence, taken under torture, of three of the slain Earl’s retainers, three weeks after the events.  No such testimony is now reckoned of value, but it will be shown that the statements made by the tortured men only compromise the Earl and his brother incidentally, and in a manner probably not perceived by the deponents themselves.  They denied all knowledge of a plot, disclaimed belief in a plot by the Earl, and let out what was suspicious in a casual way, without observing the import of their own remarks.

Finally, we have the evidence of the only living man, except the King, who was present at the central point of the occurrences.  That this man was a most false and evasive character, that he was doubtless amenable to bribes, that he was richly rewarded, I freely admit.  But I think it can be made probable, by evidence hitherto overlooked, that he really was present on the crucial occasion, and that, with all allowances for his character and position, his testimony fits into the facts, while, if it be discarded, no hypothesis can account for him, and his part in the adventure.  In short, the King’s tale, almost incredible as it appears, contains the only explanation which is not demonstrably impossible.  To this conclusion, let me repeat, I am drawn by no sentiment for that unsentimental Prince, ‘gentle King Jamie.’  He was not the man to tell the truth, ‘if he could think of anything better.’  But, where other corroboration is impossible, by the nature of the circumstances, facts corroborate the King’s narrative.  His version ‘colligates’ them; though extravagant they become not incoherent.  No other hypothesis produces coherency: each guess breaks down on demonstrated facts.

II.  THE SLAUGHTER OF THE RUTHVENS

In the month of August 1600 his Majesty the King of Scotland, James, sixth of that name, stood in more than common need of the recreation of the chase.  Things had been going contrary to his pleasure in all directions.  ‘His dearest sister,’ Queen Elizabeth (as he pathetically said), seemed likely ‘to continue as long as Sun or Moon,’ and was in the worst of humours.  Her minister, Cecil, was apparently more ill disposed towards the Scottish King than usual, while the minister’s rival, the Earl of Essex, had been suggesting to James plans for a military demonstration on the Border.  Money was even more than normally scarce; the Highlands were more than common unruly; stories of new conspiracies against the King’s liberty were flying about; and, above all, a Convention of the Estates had just refused, in June, to make a large grant of money to his Majesty.  It was also irritating that an old and trusted servant, Colonel Stewart, wished to quit the country, and take English service against the Irish rebels.  This gentleman, sixteen years before, had been instrumental in the arrest and execution of the Earl of Gowrie; the new young Earl, son of the late peer, had just returned from the Continent to Scotland, and Colonel Stewart was afraid that Gowrie might wish to avenge his father.  Therefore he desired to take service in Ireland.

With all these frets, the King needed the refreshment of hunting the buck in his park of Falkland.  He ordered his own hunting costume; it was delivered early in August, and (which is singular) was paid for instantly.  Green English cloth was the basis of his apparel, and five ounces of silver decorated his second-best ‘socks.’  His boots had velvet tops, embroidered; his best ‘socks’ were adorned with heavy gold embroidery; he even bought a new horse.  His gentlemen, John Ramsay, John Murray, George Murray, and John Auchmuty, were attired, at the Royal expense, in coats of green cloth, like the King.