James VI and the Gowrie Mystery

By all means let the reader judge.

The King knew Henderson (so the anonymous Goodman of Pitmillie said), but did not recognise the man in the turret. It was reported that Patrick Galloway, the king’s chaplain, induced Henderson to pretend to be the man in the turret.

As to the good man of Pitmillie, Calderwood did not even know his name. This is mere gossip.

Again, Calderwood, who offers these criticisms, does not ask why, of all concerned, Henderson was the only man that fled who had not been seen in connection with the fray and the tumult. If he was not the man of the turret, and if Andrew Ruthven, who also had ridden to Falkland, did not abscond, why did Henderson?

As to the man in the turret, if not a retainer of Ruthven, he was a minion of James, or there was no man at all. If there was no man at all, could James be so absurd as to invent him, on the off chance that somebody, anybody, would turn up, and claim to have been the man? That is, frankly, incredible. But if James managed to insert a man into the turret, he was not so silly as not to have his man ready to produce in evidence. Yet Henderson could not be produced, he had fled, and certainly had not come in by August 12, when he was proclaimed.

That James had introduced and suborned Henderson and that Henderson fled to give tone and colour to his narrative, is not among the most probable of conjectures. I do not find that this desperate hypothesis was put forward at the time. It could not be, for apologists averred (1) that Henderson was eating an egg in the kitchen: (2) that he was waiting on the gentlemen in the hall, at the moment when, by the desperate hypothesis, he was, by some machination of James, in the turret: (3) there is a third myth, a Perth tradition, that Henderson had been at Scone all day, and first heard the tragic news, when all was over, as, on his return, he crossed the bridge over Tay. As it is incredible that there was no man in the turret at all, and that James took the outside chance that somebody, anybody, would claim to be the man; the assailants of the King must offer a working hypothesis of this important actor in the drama. My own fancy can suggest none. Was he in four places at once, in the kitchen, in the hall, on the bridge, and in the turret? If he was in the kitchen, in the hall, or on the bridge, why did he instantly abscond? If James put him in the turret, why did he fly?

The King’s word, I repeat, was the word that no man could rely on. But, among competing improbabilities, the story which was written on the night of August 5, and to which he adhered under Bruce’s cross-examination, is infinitely the least improbable. The Master of Gray, an abominable character, not in Scotland when the events occurred, reported, not from Scotland, that Lennox had said that, if put on his oath, ‘he could not say whether the practice proceeded from Gowrie or the King.’ (Sept 30, 1600)

The Master of Gray wrote from Chillingham, on the English side of the Border, where he was playing the spy for Cecil. Often he played the double spy, for England and for Rome. Lennox may well have been puzzled, he may have said so, but the report rests on the evidence of one who did not hear his words, who wished to flatter the scepticism of James’s English enemies, and whose character (though on one point he is unjustly accused) reeks with infamy.

That of James does not precisely ‘smell sweet and blossom in the dust.’ But if the question arises, whether a man of James’s position, age, and temperament, or whether a young man, with the antecedents which we are about to describe, was the more likely to embark on a complicated and dangerous plot – in James’s case involving two murders at inestimable personal risk – it is not unnatural to think that the young man is the more likely to ‘have the wyte of it.’

XI. THE KING AND THE RUTHVENS

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. As against James’s grandmother, Mary of Guise, the grandfather of Gowrie, Lord Ruthven, had early joined the Reformers, who opposed her in arms. Later, in 1566, it was Gowrie’s grandfather who took the leading part in the murder of Riccio. He fled to England, and there died soon after his exploit, beholding, it was said, a vision of angels. His son, Gowrie’s father (also one of the Riccio murderers), when Mary was imprisoned in Loch Leven (June 1567) was in charge of her, but was removed, ‘as he began to show great favour to her, and gave her intelligence.’ 57 Mary herself, through the narrative of Nau, her secretary, declares that Ruthven (then a married man) persecuted her by his lust. He aided Lindsay in extorting her abdication at Loch Leven. Such was his record as regards Mary: James too had little reason to love him.

The early reign of James in Scotland was a series of Court revolutions, all of the same sort. James was always either, unwillingly, under nobles who were allies of Elizabeth, and who used the Kirk as their instrument, or under vicious favourites who delivered him from these influences. When Morton fell in 1581, the King was under D’Aubigny (Lennox), a false Protestant and secret Catholic intriguer, and Arran (Captain James Stewart), a free lance, and, in religion, an Indifferent. Lennox entangled James in relations with the Guises and Catholic Powers; Gowrie, and the Protestant nobles, being threatened by Arran and Lennox, captured James, in an insulting manner, at Gowrie’s castle of Ruthven. He came as a guest, for hunting; he remained a prisoner. (1582.) The Kirk approved and triumphed: James waited and dissembled, while Gowrie was at the head of the Government. In June 1583, James, by a sudden flight to St. Andrews Castle, where his friends surrounded him, shook himself free of Gowrie, who, however, secured a pardon for his share in James’s capture, in the ‘Raid of Ruthven’ of 1582. Lennox being dead, the masterful and unscrupulous Arran now again ruled the King, and a new Lennox came from France, the Duke of Lennox who was present at the tragedy of August 5, 1600.

The Lords who had lost power by James’s escape to St. Andrews now conspired anew. Angus, Mar, and others were to march on Stirling, Gowrie was waiting at Dundee. (April 1584) Arran knew of the plot, and sent Colonel Stewart to arrest Gowrie. After holding his house against Stewart’s men, the Earl was taken and carried to Edinburgh. The other Lords, his allies, failed and fled. Gowrie was brought to trial. He had a pardon for the Raid of Ruthven, he had done nothing ostensible in the recent rising, which followed his capture at Dundee. Nevertheless he was tried, condemned, executed, and forfeited. There exists a manuscript of the date, which, at least, shows what Gowrie’s friends thought of the method by which his conviction was procured. Arran and Sir Robert Melville, it is said, visited him in prison, and advised him to make his peace with James. How was that to be done? Gowrie entreated for the kind offices of Melville and Arran. They advised him to write to the King confessing that he had been in several conspiracies against his person which he could reveal in a private interview. ‘I should confess an untruth,’ said Gowrie, ‘and frame my own indictment.’

The letter, the others urged, being general, would move the King’s curiosity: he would grant an interview, at which Gowrie might say that the letter was only an expedient to procure a chance of stating his own case.

Gowrie, naturally, rejected so perilous a practice.

‘You must confess the foreknowledge of these things,’ said Arran, ‘or you must die.’

Gowrie replied that, if assured of his life, he would take the advice. Arran gave his word of honour that Gowrie should be safe. He wrote the letter, he received no answer, but was sent to Stirling. He was tried, nothing was proved against him, and Arran produced his letter before the Court. Gowrie was called, confessed to his handwriting, and told the tale of Arran’s treachery, which he repeated to the people from the scaffold.

This is, briefly, the statement of a newsletter to England, written, as usual, against the Government, and in the Protestant interest. 58 A manuscript in the British Museum gives a somewhat different version. 59 One charge against Gowrie, we learn, was that of treasonable intercommuning with Hume of Godscroft, an envoy of the Earl of Angus, who, before Gowrie’s arrest, was arranging a conspiracy. This charge was perfectly true. Godscroft, in his History of the Douglases (ii. 317–318), describes the circumstances, and mentions the very gallery whose door resisted Lennox and Mar on August 5, 1600. Godscroft rode from the Earl of Angus to Gowrie in his house at Perth. ‘Looking very pitifully upon his gallery, where we were walking at that time, which he had but newly built and decored with pictures, he brake out into these words, having first fetched a deep sigh. “Cousin” says he, “is there no remedy? Et impius haec tam culta novalia miles habebit? Barbarus has segetes?” Whereupon Godscroft was persuaded of his sincerity, and at his return persuaded the Earl of Angus thereof also.’ So the plot went on, Gowrie pretending that he meant to leave the country, says his accomplice, Godscroft, while both the Court and the conspirators were uncertain as to his trimming intentions. He trimmed too long; he was taken, the plot exploded and failed. Gowrie was thus within the danger of the law, for treasonably concealing foreknowledge of the conspiracy.

According to the British Museum MS., Gowrie now told the jury that he was being accused on the strength of his own letter, treacherously extorted under promise of life, by Montrose, Doune, Maitland, Melville, Colonel Stewart, and the Captain of Dumbarton, not by Arran. In Gowrie’s letter of confession, to the King, as printed by Spottiswoode, he does not mention Godscroft, but another intriguer, Erskine. However, in this letter he certainly confesses his concern with the conspiracy. But, says the MS., the nobles charged by Gowrie with having betrayed him under promise of life denied the accusations on oath. Gowrie himself, according to another copy of the MS., denied knowing Hume of Godscroft; if he did, he spoke untruly, teste Godscroft.

However matters really stood, the Earl’s friends, at all events, believed that he had been most cruelly and shamefully betrayed to the death, and, as the King was now eighteen, they would not hold him guiltless.

These were not the only wrongs of the Ruthvens. While the power of Arran lasted (and it was, on the whole, welcome to James, though he had moments of revolt), the family of Ruthven was persecuted. The widow of Gowrie was a daughter (see Appendix A) of Henry Stewart, Lord Methven, who, as a young man, had married Margaret, sister of Henry VIII, widow of James IV, and divorced from the Earl of Angus. As this lady, our Gowrie’s mother, knelt to implore the pity of James in the street after her Lord’s death, Arran pushed her aside, and threw her down. He received the Earl’s forfeited estate and castle of Dirleton, near North Berwick.

In October 1585, Arran fell, in his turn; Angus, Mar, and others drove him into retirement. 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. Lady Gowrie was thus mother-in-law of the Earl of Atholl, who died at Gowrie House in August 1594. Her grand-daughter, Dorothea (daughter of Atholl and Mary Ruthven, sister of our Gowrie), in 1604 married that young Tullibardine who was in Perth at the tragedy of August 5, 1600. Lady Atholl is said to have opposed the marriage. Another sister of Gowrie, Sophia, married (before 1600, she was dead by that time) the Duke of Lennox who was at the slaughter of the Ruthvens. Another sister, Beatrix, was Maid of Honour to James’s Queen, and later married Hume of Cowdenknowes; hence come the Earls of Home. 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. He went to Edinburgh University; his governor was the respected Mr. Rollock. Here a curious fact occurs. On August 12, 1593, young Gowrie read his thesis for his Master’s degree. Three weeks earlier, on July 24, the wild Francis Stewart, Earl of Bothwell, had captured, in Holyrood, his King, who was half dressed and untrussed. James at the time was suspected of favouring the Catholic Earls of the North, Huntly, Errol, and a new unpresbyterian Angus. The King was on ill terms with the Kirk; England had secretly abetted Bothwell; the clan of Stewart, including Lennox, lent aid and countenance, but Bothwell’s success was due to Gowrie’s mother, the widow of the decapitated Earl, and to his sister, Lady Atholl. Bothwell entered Lady Gowrie’s house, adjoining the palace, spent the night there, stole into Holyrood by a passage-way left open by Lady Atholl, and appeared before the King, sword in hand, when his Majesty was half dressed. Meanwhile our Gowrie, reading for his thesis, may not have been uninterested in the plot of his mother and sister. This was, in a way, the second successful Ruthven plot to seize the King; the first was the Raid of Ruthven. The new success was not enduring. James shook off Bothwell in September 1593, and, in October, Gowrie’s brother-in-law Atholl, with our Gowrie himself, entered into alliance with Bothwell against King James, and offered their services to Queen Elizabeth.

James moved out against Atholl, Gowrie, and the Master of Montrose, who were at Castle Doune, intending to join hands with Bothwell, and seize the King. But Bothwell found the plan impracticable: Atholl fled; Gowrie and the Master of Montrose were pursued and taken. No harm was done to them: their excuses were accepted, but young Gowrie and Atholl continued to conspire. In April, 1594, Atholl, signing for himself and Gowrie, and Bothwell, signing for his associates, wrote a manifesto to the Kirk. They were in arms, they said, for Protestant purposes, and wished commissioners from among the preachers to attend them, and watch their proceedings. 60 Bothwell then took action, he made a demonstration in arms against Edinburgh, but the forces of Atholl and Gowrie did not arrive and Bothwell retreated. Atholl was threatened for this affair, but pardoned by the King, and died in August.

In the same month Gowrie informed the Town Council of Perth that he was going to study abroad. They retained him in the position of Provost. He went, with his tutor, Mr. Rhynd, to Padua, an university where Protestantism was protected by the toleration of the Republic of Venice, and where there was an Anglo-Scottish ‘Nation’ among the students. In ‘The Return from Parnassus,’ a satirical play of 1601, we find Gullio, the admirer of Shakespeare, professing to have studied at Padua. Gowrie is said to have been elected Rector, but I cannot find his name in the lists. He does appear in the roll of Scottish scholars, some of them characterised (unlike the English scholars) by personal marks. Most have scars on the face or hand; Archibald Douglas has a scar on the brow from left to right. James Lindsay, of Gowrie’s year (1596–1597), has also a scar on his brow. Next him is Andrew Keith, with a scar on his right hand, and then Dominus Ioannes Ruthuen, Scotus, cum signo albo in mento, ‘with a white mark on his chin.’ Then we have his luckless tutor, Mr. Rhynd, who was tortured, Scotus cum ledigine super facie. Robert Ker of Newbattle (‘Kerrus de Heubattel’) is another of Gowrie’s college companions. All were students of law. Magic was not compulsory at Padua, though Gowrie was said to have studied that art. 61

Concerning Gowrie’s behaviour at Padua but a single circumstance is known. Probably through one of his fellow-students, Douglas, Ker, Keith, Lindsay or another, the report reached Scotland that the young Earl had left in Padua ‘a strange relique,’ an emblematic figure emblazoned; and had made, on the subject, a singular remark. The emblematic figure represented ‘a blackamoor reaching at a crown with a sword, in a stretched posture:’ the remark of Gowrie, ‘the Earl’s own mot,’ was to the effect that the emblem displayed, in umbra, or foreshadowed, what was to be done in facto. This emblem was secured at Padua, in 1609, by Sir Robert Douglas, who had heard of it in Scotland, and it was sent to King James. 62 If such ideas were in Gowrie’s mind, he showed no signs of them in an early correspondence with the King. In 1595, James wrote ‘a most loving letter’ to Gowrie; the Earl replied in a tone of gratitude. At the same time Gowrie wrote to a preacher in Perth, extolling the conduct of an English fanatic, who had thrown down and trampled on the Host, at Rome. He hoped, he said, when he returned to Scotland, ‘to amend whatever is amiss for lack of my presence.’ 63 Nevertheless, on December 25, 1598, Nicholson informed Cecil that Gowrie had been converted to Catholicism. 64 In the Venice despatches and Vatican transcripts I find no corroboration. Gowrie appears to have visited Rome; the Ruthven apologist declares that he was there ‘in danger for his religion.’ Galloway, on August 11, 1600, in presence of the King and the people of Edinburgh, vowed that Gowrie, since his return from Italy, had laboured to make James ‘revolt from Religion, at least in inward sincerity, to entertain purpose with the Pope, and he himself promised to furnish intelligence.’

If so, Gowrie was, indeed, ‘a deep dissimulate hypocrite.’

Galloway’s informant must have been the King. If Gowrie did or said anything to colour the story, it may have been for the purpose of discovering, by pretending to approve of them, these intrigues with Rome, of which James was constantly being accused.

A new complexity is added here, by a list of Scottish Catholic nobles, ready to join an invading Spanish force, which the Earl of Bothwell handed in to Philip III. of Spain, at a date not absolutely certain. At a time conjectured at by Major Hume, as 1600, Bothwell laid before the Spanish ministry a scheme for an invasion of Scotland. He made another more elaborate proposal at a date which, to all seeming, was July 1601. In the appended list of Scottish Catholic nobles appear the names of the Earl of Gowrie, and of ‘Baron Rastellerse,’ that is, Logan of Restalrig. But, in 1601, there was no Earl of Gowrie; the title was extinct, the lands were forfeited, and Gowrie’s natural heir, William Ruthven, his brother, was a poor student at Cambridge. Could Bothwell refer to him, who was no Catholic? Can he have handed in (in 1601) an earlier list of 1600, without deleting the name of the dead Gowrie? As to Gowrie’s real creed, Bothwell must have known the truth, through Home, a reluctant convert to Presbyterianism, who went from Paris to Brussels to meet Bothwell, leaving Gowrie in Paris, just before Home and Gowrie openly, and, as it was said, Bothwell secretly, returned to Scotland in April 1600. Was the Gowrie conspiracy a Bothwellian plot? 65

We know little more about Gowrie, after his letters of 1595, till, on August 18, 1599, Colville reports to Cecil that the party of the Kirk (who were now without a leader among the greater nobles) intend to summon home the Earl. 66 He is said to have stayed for three months at Geneva with Beza, the famous reformer, who was devoted to him. He was in Paris, in February and March 1600. The English ambassador, Neville, recommended Gowrie to Cecil, as ‘a man of whom there may be exceeding good use made.’ Elizabeth and Cecil were then on the worst terms with James. At Paris, Gowrie would meet Lord Home, who, as we have said and shall prove in a later connection, had an interview with the exiled Bothwell, still wandering, plotting and threatening descents on Scotland (p. 206).

On April 3, Gowrie was in London. 67 He was very well received; ‘a cabinet of plate,’ it is said, was given to him by Elizabeth; what else passed we do not know. In May Gowrie returned to Scotland, and rode into Edinburgh among a cavalcade of his friends. According to Sir John Carey, writing to Cecil, from Berwick, on May 29, James displayed jealousy of Gowrie, ‘giving him many jests and pretty taunts,’ on his reception by Elizabeth, and ‘marvelling that the ministers met him not.’ 68 Calderwood adds a rumour that James, talking of Gowrie’s entry to Edinburgh, said, ‘there were more with his father when he went to the scaffold.’ Again, as the Earl leaned on the King’s chair at breakfast, James talked of dogs and hawks, and made an allusion to the death of Riccio, in which Gowrie’s father and grandfather took part.

These are rumours; it is certain that the King (June 20) gave Gowrie a year’s respite from pursuit of his creditors, to whom he was in debt for moneys owed to him by the Crown, expenditure by the late Earl of Gowrie when in power (1583). 69 It is also certain that Gowrie opposed the King’s demands for money, in a convention of June 21. 70 But so did Lord President Fyvie, who never ceased to be James’s trusted minister, and later, Chancellor, under the title of Earl of Dunfermline. Calderwood reports that, after Gowrie’s speech, Sir David Murray said, ‘Yonder is an unhappy man; they are but seeking occasion of his death, which now he has given.’ This is absurd: Fyvie and the Laird of Easter Wemyss opposed the King as stoutly, and no harm followed to them; Fyvie rising steadily (and he had opposed the King yet more sturdily before) to the highest official position.

Calderwood adds a silly tale of Dr. Herries. Beatrix Ruthven laughed at his lame leg; he looked in her palm, and predicted a great disaster. The same anecdote, with, of course, another subject, is told of Gowrie’s own prediction that a certain man would come to be hanged, which was fulfilled. Gowrie had been at Perth, before the convention at Holyrood of June 21. To Perth he returned; thence, some time in July (about the 20th), 71 he went to his castle of Strabran, in Atholl, to hunt. Whether his brother the Master remained with him continuously till the Earl’s return to Perth on Saturday, August 2, I know not how to ascertain. If there is anything genuine in the plot-letters produced eight years later, the Master once or twice visited Edinburgh in July, but that may have been before going to Strabran.

Concerning the Master, a romantic story of unknown source, but certainly never alluded to in the surviving gossip of the day, was published, late in the eighteenth century, by Lord Hailes. ‘A report is handed down that Lord Gowrie’s brother received from the Queen a ribbon which she had got from the King, that Mr. Alexander went into the King’s garden at Falkland on a sultry hot day, and lay down in a shade, and fell asleep. His breast being open, the King passed that way and discovered part of the ribbon about his neck below his cravat, upon which he made quick haste into the palace, which was observed by one of the Queen’s ladies who passed the same way. She instantly took the ribbon from his neck, went a near way to the Queen’s closet, where she found her Majesty at her toilet, whom she requested to lay the ribbon in a drawer.’ James entered, and asked to be shown the ribbon. The Queen produced it, and James retired, muttering, ‘Devil tak’ me, but like is an ill mark.’

Legend does not say when, or in what year this occurred. But the fancy of authors has identified the Queen’s lady with Beatrix Ruthven, and has added that the Master, in disgrace (though undetected), retired with Gowrie to Strabane, or Strabran. History has no concern with such fables. It is certain, however, or at least contemporary letters aver, that Queen Anne of Denmark was grieved and angered by the slaying of the Gowries. On October 21, 1600, Carey, writing to Cecil from Woodrington, mentions this, and the tattle to the effect that, as the Queen is about to have a child (Charles I.), ‘she shall be kept as prisoner ever after.’ Was the Master supposed to be father of the Queen’s child? Carey goes on, ‘There is a letter found with a bracelet in it, sent from the Queen to the Earl of Gowrie, to persuade him to leave his country life and come to Court, assuring him that he should enjoy any contents that Court could afford.’ 72 Can some amorous promise underlie this, as in the case of Mr. Pickwick’s letter to Mrs. Bardell, about the warming-pan? ‘This letter the King hath,’ says Carey. Was it with Gowrie, not the Master, that the Queen was in love? She was very fond of Beatrix Ruthven, and would disbelieve in the guilt of her brothers; hence these tears and that anger of the Queen.