Part 13 (1/2)

But, if readers do not accept our conclusions, they may still rest, perhaps, on the arguments adduced in the earlier chapters of this essay, to demonstrate that neither accident nor the machinations of the King, but an enterprise of their own, caused the Slaughter of the Ruthvens.

The infamous conduct of the Privy Council in 16081609 does not prove that, in 1600, the King carried out a conspiracy in itself impossible.

I have found nothing tending to show that King James was ever made aware of Sprot's confessions of forgery. It is true that Sir William Hart, the Lord Justice, went to Court after Sprot's death, and, in September, the Scottish Privy Council asked James to send him home again. {239} But Hart need not have told all the truth to James.

There is a kind of rejoicing _navete_ in all of James's references to the Gowrie affair, which seems to me hardly consistent with his disbelief in his own prowess on that occasion. If one may conjecture, one would guess that the Privy Council and the four preachers managed to persuade themselves, Sprot being the liar whom we know, that he lied when he called his Logan papers forgeries. The real facts may have been concealed from the King. Mr. Gunton, the Librarian at Hatfield, informs me that, had he not seen Letter IV (which he is sure was _written_ by Sprot), he does not think he should have suspected the genuineness of Letters II and III, after comparing them with the undoubted letters of Logan in the Cecil ma.n.u.scripts. The Government and the four preachers, with such doc.u.ments in their hands, doc.u.ments still apt to delude, may easily have brought themselves to disbelieve Sprot's a.s.sertion that they were all forgeries. Let us hope that they did!

XVII. INFERENCES AS TO THE CASKET LETTERS

The affair of Sprot has an obvious bearing on that other mystery, the authenticity of the Casket Letters attributed to Queen Mary. As we know, she, though accused, was never allowed to see the letters alleged to be hers. We know that, in December 1568, these doc.u.ments were laid before an a.s.sembly of English n.o.bles at Hampton Court. They were compared, for orthography and handwriting, with genuine letters written by the Queen to Elizabeth, and Cecil tells us that 'no difference was found.' It was a rapid examination, by many persons, on a brief winter day, partly occupied by other business. If experts existed, we are not informed that they were present. The Casket Letters have disappeared since the death of the elder Gowrie, in 1584. From him, Elizabeth had vainly sought to purchase them. They were indispensable, said Bowes, her amba.s.sador, to 'the secrecy of the cause.' Gowrie would not be tempted, and it is not improbable that he carried so valuable a treasure with him, when, in April 1584, he retired to Dundee, to escape by sea if the Angus conspiracy failed.

At Dundee he was captured, after defending the house in which he was residing. That house was pulled down recently; nothing was discovered.

But fable runs that, at the destruction of another ancient house in Dundee, 'Lady Wark's Stairs,' _a packet of old letters in French_ was found in a hiding hole contrived within a chimney. The letters were not examined by any competent person, and n.o.body knows what became of them.

Romance relates that they were the Casket Letters, entrusted by Gowrie to a friend. It is equally probable that he yielded them to the King, when he procured his remission for the Raid of Ruthven. In any case, they are lost.

Consequently we cannot compare the Casket Letters with genuine letters by Mary. On the other hand, as I chanced to notice that genuine letters of Logan's exist at Hatfield, I was enabled, by the kindness of the Marquis of Salisbury, and of Sir Stair Agnew, to have both the Hatfield Logan letters, and the alleged Logan letters produced in 1609, photographed and compared, at Hatfield and at the General Register House in Edinburgh. By good fortune, the Earl of Haddington also possesses (what we could not expect to find in the case of the Casket Letters) doc.u.ments in the ordinary handwriting of George Sprot, the confessed forger of the plot-letters attributed to Logan. The result of comparison has been to convince Mr. Gunton at Hatfield, Mr. Anderson in Edinburgh, Professor Hume Brown, and other gentlemen of experience, that Sprot forged all the plot-letters. Their reasons for holding this opinion entirely satisfy me, and have been drawn up by Mr. Anderson, in a convincing report. To put the matter briefly, the forged letters present the marked peculiarities of Logan's orthography, noted by the witnesses in 1609.

But they also contain many peculiarities of spelling which are not Logan's, but are Sprot's. The very dotting of the 'i's' is Sprot's, not Logan's. The long 's' of Logan is heavily and clumsily imitated. There is a distinct set of peculiarities never found in Logan's undisputed letters: in Sprot's own letters always found. The hand is more rapid and flowing than that of Logan. Not being myself familiar with the Scottish handwriting of the period, my own opinion is of no weight, but I conceive that the general effect of Logan's hand, in 1586, is not precisely like that of the plot-letters.

My point, however, is that, in 1609, Sprot's forgeries were clever enough to baffle witnesses of unblemished honour, very familiar with the genuine handwriting of Logan. The Rev. Alexander Watson, minister of the Kirk of Coldinghame (where Logan was wont to attend), alleged that '_the character of every letter_ resembles perfectly Robert's handwrit, _every way_.' The spelling, which was peculiar, was also Logan's as a rule.

Mr. Watson produced three genuine letters by Logan, before the Lords of the Articles (who were very sceptical), and satisfied them that the plot-letters were the laird's. Mr. Alexander Smith, minister of Chirnside, was tutor to Logan's younger children; he gave identical evidence. Sir John Arnott, Provost of Edinburgh, a man of distinction and eminence, produced four genuine letters by the Laird, 'agreeing perfectly in spelling and character with the plot-letters. The sheriff clerk of Berwick, William Home, in Aytoun Mill (a guest, I think, at Logan's 'great Yules'), and John Home, notary in Eyemouth, coincided.

The minister of Aytoun, Mr. William Hogg, produced a letter of Logan to the Laird of Aytoun, but was not absolutely so certain as the other witnesses. 'He thinks them' (the plot-letters) 'like [to be] his writing, and that the same appear to be very like his write, by the conformity of letters and spelling.' {243a}

Thus, at the examination of Logan's real and forged letters, as at the examination of Queen Mary's real and Casket letters, in spelling and handwriting 'no difference was found.' Yet the plot-letters were all forged, and Mr. Anderson shows that, though 'no difference was _found_,'

many differences existed. Logan had a better chance of acquittal than Mary. The Lords of the Articles, writes Sir Thomas Hamilton to the King (June 21, 1609), 'had preconceived hard opinions of Restalrig's process.'

{243b} Yet they were convinced by the evidence of the witnesses, and by their own eyes.

From the error of the Lords of the Articles, in 1609, it obviously follows that the English Lords, at Hampton Court, in 1568, may have been unable to detect proofs of forgery in the Casket Letters, which, if the Casket Letters could now be compared with those of Mary, would be at once discovered by modern experts. In short, the evidence as to Mary's handwriting, even if as unanimously accepted, by the English Lords, as Cecil declares, is not worth a 'hardhead,' a debased copper Scottish coin. It is worth no more than the opinion of the Lords of the Articles in the case of the letters attributed to Restalrig.

APPENDICES

APPENDIX A. THE FRONTISPIECE

_Gowrie's Arms and Ambitions_

The frontispiece of this volume is copied from the design of the Earl of Gowrie's arms, in what is called 'Workman's MS.,' at the Lyon's office in Edinburgh. The s.h.i.+eld displays, within the royal treasure, the arms of Ruthven in the first and fourth, those of Cameron and Halyburton in the second and third quarters. The supporters are, dexter, a Goat; sinister, a Ram; the crest is a Ram's head. The motto is not given; it was DEID SCHAW. The s.h.i.+eld 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. His left hand grasps his sword-hilt, his right is raised to an imperial crown, hanging above him in the air; from his lips issue the words, TIBI SOLI, 'for thee alone.' Sir James Balfour Paul, Lyon, informs me that he knows no other case of such additional supporter, or whatever the figure ought to be called.

This figure does not occur on any known Ruthven seal. It is not on that of the first Earl of Gowrie, affixed to a deed of February 15831584. It is not on a seal used in 1597, by John, third Earl, given in Henry Laing's 'Catalogue of Scottish Seals' (vol. i. under 'Ruthven'). But, in Crawford's 'Peerage of Scotland' (1716), p. 166, the writer gives the arms of the third Earl (John, the victim of August 5, 1600). In place of the traditional Scottish motto _Deid Schaw_, is the Latin translation, _Facta Probant_. The writer says (Note C), 'This from an authentic copy of his arms, _richly illuminated in the year_ 1597, with his name and t.i.tles, _viz._ ”Joannes Ruthven, Comes de Gowry, Dominus de Ruthven,”

&c., in my hands.'

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. He certainly had his arms richly illuminated, and he added to his ancestral bearings what Crawfurd describes thus: 'On the dexter a chivaleer, garnish'd with the Earl's coat of arms, _pointing with a sword upward to an imperial crown_, with this device, TIBI SOLI.'

In Workman's MS., the figure points to the crown with the open right hand, and the left hand is on the sword-hilt. The illuminated copy of 1597, once in the possession of Crawfurd, must be the more authentic; the figure _here_ points the sword at a crown, which is _Tibi Soli_, 'For thee' (Gowrie?) 'alone.'