James VI and the Gowrie Mystery

But James also, says Calderwood, was as anxious as Carey declares that the Queen was, to bring Gowrie to Falkland. ‘When the Earl was in Strabran, fifteen days before the fact, the King wrote sundry letters to the Earl, desiring him to come and hunt with him in the wood of Falkland; which letters were found in my Lord’s pocket, at his death, as is reported, but were destroyed.’ 73

So James was not jealous; both he and the Queen were inviting Gowrie to their country house, the Queen adding the gift of a bracelet. She may have worked it herself, like the bracelet which Queen Mary is said to have sent to Bothwell.

All this is the idlest gossip. But it is certain that, on one occasion, at the end of July, ‘close letters’ were sent from the Court at Edinburgh to Atholl and Gowrie; and, later, to Inchaffray and the Master, the first three are in Bothwell’s list of Catholics ready to meet the Spanish invaders. The fact of the letters appears from the Treasurer’s accounts, where the money paid to the boy who carried the letters is recorded, without dates of the days of the month. The boy got 33 shillings, Scots, for the journey from Edinburgh to the Earls of Gowrie and Atholl; 24 for the other two, which he carried from Falkland. Craigengelt, in his deposition, ‘denies that during my Lord’s being in Strabran, neither yet in Perth, after his coming from Strabran, he knew any man or page to come from Court to my Lord, or that he commanded to give them any meat or drink.’ 74

No conclusion as to James’s guilt can be drawn, either from the fact that he wrote to Atholl, Inchaffray, the Master, and Gowrie at the end of July, or from the circumstance that Craigengelt professed to know nothing about any messenger. James might write to ask the Earl to hunt, we cannot guess what he had to say, at the same time, to Atholl or Inchaffray or the Master. He may even have written about the affair of the Abbey of Scone, if it is true that the Master wished to get it from his brother. We really cannot infer that, as the Ruthvens would not come and be killed, when invited, at Falkland, James went to kill them at Perth. Even if he summoned the Master for August 5, intending to make it appear that the Master had asked him to come to Perth, the Master need not have arrived before seven in the morning, when the King went and hunted for four hours. What conceivable reason had the Master, if innocent, for leaving Perth at 4 a. m. and visiting his sovereign at seven in the morning?

As to the coming of the Gowries to Perth from Strabran or Strabane before the tragedy, we only know what Craigengelt stated. His language is not lucid.

‘Depones that, my Lords being in Strabrand, Alexander Ruthven’ (a kinsman) ‘came from Dunkeld to my Lord. And that upon Friday (August 1) my Lord commanded Captain Ruthven to ride, and tell my Lady’ (Gowrie’s mother), ‘that he was to come, and Captain Ruthven met my Lord at the ferry-boat, and rode back to Dunkeld with my Lord, where he’ (Gowrie) ‘having supped, returned to his bed at Trochene, the deponer being in his company.’

Where, at the end of July, was Lady Gowrie? Was she within a day’s ride of her sons? Was she at Perth? We know that she was at Dirleton Castle, near North Berwick, on August 6. Had she left the neighbourhood of Perth between the 1st and 5th of August? Captain Ruthven seems to have ridden to Lady Gowrie, and back again to Dunkeld with Gowrie. If so (and I can make no other sense of it), she was in Perthshire on August 1, and went at once to Dirleton. Did she keep out of the way of the performances of August 5?

It is curious that no apologist for Gowrie, as far as I have observed, makes any remark on this perplexing affair of ‘my Lady.’ We know that she had once already set a successful trap for the King. He had not punished her; he took two of her daughters, Barbara and Beatrix, into his household; and restored to Gowrie his inheritance of the lands of Scone, which, as we know, had been held by his father. He had written a loving letter to Gowrie at Padua, after the young man had for many months been conspiring against him with his most dangerous enemy, the wild Earl of Bothwell.

On the morning of the fatal August 5, Gowrie went to sermon. What else he did, we learn from John Moncrieff, who was the Earl’s cautioner, or guarantee, for a large sum due by him to one Robert Jolly. 75 He was also brother of Hew Moncrieff, who fled after having been with Gowrie in arms, against Herries, Ramsay, and Erskine. Both Moncrieffs, says John, were puzzled when they found that the Master had ridden from Perth so early in the morning. Gowrie, says Moncrieff, did not attend the Town Council meeting after church; he excused himself on account of private affairs. He also sent away George Hay who was with him on business when Henderson arrived from Falkland, saying that he had other engagements. For the same reason, he, at first, declined to do a piece of business with Moncrieff, who dined with him and two other gentlemen. ‘He made him to misknow all things,’ that is affected to take no notice, when Andrew Ruthven came in, and ‘rounded to him’ (whispered to him) about the King’s approach. Then the Master entered, and Gowrie went out to meet the King.

The rest we know, as far as evidence exists.

We now have all the essential facts which rest on fairly good evidence, and we ask, did the Ruthvens lay a plot for the King, or did the King weave a web to catch the Ruthvens? Looking first at character and probable motives, we dismiss the gossip about the amorous Queen and the jealous King. The tatlers did not know whether to select Gowrie or the Master as the object of the Queen’s passion, or whether to allege that she had a polyandrous affection for both at once. The letters of the age hint at no such amour till after the tragedy, when tales of the liaison of Anne of Denmark with the elder or younger Ruthven, or both, arose as a myth to account for the events. The Queen, no doubt, was deeply grieved in a womanly way for the sake of her two maidens, Beatrix and Barbara Ruthven. Her Majesty, also in a womanly way, had a running feud with Mar and the whole house of Erskine. To Mar, certainly one of the few men of honour as well as of rank in Scotland, James had entrusted his son, Prince Henry; the care of the heir to the Crown was a kind of hereditary charge of the Erskines. The Queen had already, in her resentment at not having the custody of her son, engaged in one dangerous plot against Mar; she made another quarrel on this point at the time (1603) when the King succeeded to the crown of England. Now Mar was present at the Gowrie tragedy, and his cousin, Sir Thomas Erskine, took part in the deeds. Hating the Erskines, devoted to the Ruthven ladies, and always feebly in opposition to her husband, the Queen, no doubt, paraded her grief, her scepticism, and her resentment. This was quite in keeping with her character, and this conduct lent colour to the myth that she loved Gowrie, or the Master, or both, par amours. The subject is good for a ballad or a novel, but history has nothing to make with the legend on which Mr. G. P. R. James based a romance, and Mr. Pinkerton a theory.

Leaving fable for fact, what motives had James for killing both the Ruthvens? He had dropped the hereditary feud, and had taken no measures against the young Earl to punish his conspiracies with Bothwell in 1593–1594. Of Gowrie, on his return to Scotland in May, he may have entertained some jealousy. The Earl had been for months in Paris, caressed by the English ambassador, and probably, as we have seen, in touch with the exiled and ceaselessly conspiring Bothwell. In London the Earl had been well received by Elizabeth, and by Lord Willoughby, who, a year earlier, as Governor of Berwick, had insulted James by kidnapping, close to Edinburgh, an English gentleman, Ashfield, on a visit to the King’s Court. Guevara, a cousin of Lord Willoughby, lured Ashfield into the coach of the English envoy Bowes, and drove him to the frontier. Lord Willoughby had a swift yacht lying off Leith, in case it was thought better to abduct Ashfield by sea. This is an example of English insolence to the Scottish King – also of English kidnapping – and Lord Willoughby, the manager, had made friends with Gowrie in England.

Thus James, who was then on the worst terms, short of open war, with England, may have suspected and disliked the Earl, who had once already put himself at the service of Elizabeth, and might do so again. In the April of 1600, rumours of a conspiracy by Archibald Douglas, the infamous traitor; Douglas of Spot, one of Morton’s brood, and John Colville – who, with Bothwell and, later, independently, had caught James, had tried to catch him, and proposed to Essex to catch him again, – were afloat. Colville was in Paris at the same time as Gowrie; Bothwell was reported to have come secretly to Scotland in April or May, and this combination of facts or rumours may have aroused the King’s mistrust. Again, the Kirk was restive; the preachers, in need of a leader, were said by Colville to have summoned Gowrie home. 76 Moreover there were persons about James – for example, Colonel Stewart – who had reason to dread the Earl’s vengeance for his father. The Ruthven Apologist mentions this fact, and the predilection of the Kirk for Gowrie, among the motives for destroying him.

Once more there are hints, very vague, that, in 1593, Bothwell aimed at changing the dynasty. 77 The fable that Gowrie was a maternal grandson of Margaret Tudor, widow of James IV, by Henry Stewart, Lord Methven, her third husband, and that Gowrie was thus a candidate for the succession to the English throne, perhaps also for the hand of Arabella Stuart, may conceivably have existed. (Compare Appendix A.) Again, Gowrie had sided with the burgesses and minor barons, as against the nobles, by refusing a grant of money to James, in the convention of June 1600, and James owed money to Gowrie, as he did to most people. But we have already seen that an exemption had been granted to Gowrie for a year from pursuit of creditors, as far, that is, as regarded his father’s debts (80,000l. Scots), (June 20, 1600). The College of Justice refused to grant any new legal summonses of creditors against Gowrie, and suspended all that were extant.

Mr. Barbé accuses the King of ‘utter and unblushing disregard for common truth and common honesty.’ Be this as it may, the exemption granted to Gowrie was not regarded by his father’s creditors as extending to his mother, after his dishonoured death. On November 1, 1600, Lady Gowrie implored Elphinstone, the Secretary, to bring her suit for relief before the King. The security for these debts was on her ‘conjunct fee lands,’ and creditors, because, I suppose, the Gowrie estates were about to be forfeited, pressed Lady Gowrie, who, of course, had no exemption. We know nothing as to the success of Lady Gowrie’s petition, but we have seen that her daughters married very well. I presume that Gowrie, not his mother, had previously paid interest on the debts, ‘he had already paid many sums of money.’ James had already restored to Gowrie the valuable lands of Scone. 78

However, taking things as the King’s adversaries regard them, the cumulative effect of these several grudges (and of the mystery of Gowrie’s Catholicism) would urge James to lay his very subtle plot. He would secretly call young Ruthven to Falkland by six in the morning of August 5, he would make it appear that Ruthven had invited him to Perth, he would lure the youth to a turret, managing to be locked in with him and an armed man; he would post Ramsay below the turret window, and warn him to run up the dark staircase at the King’s cry of treason. By the locked door he would exclude Lennox and Mar, while his minions would first delay Gowrie’s approach, by the narrow stairs, and then permit him to enter with only one companion, Cranstoun. He would cause a report of his own departure to be circulated, exactly at the right moment to bring Gowrie under the turret window, and within reach of his cries. This plot requires the minutest punctuality, everything must occur at the right moment, and all would have been defeated had Gowrie told the truth about the King’s departure, or even asked ‘Where is the King’s horse?’ Or Gowrie might have stood in the streets of Perth, and summoned his burgesses in arms. The King and the courtiers, with their dead man, would have been beleaguered, without provisions, in Gowrie’s house. Was James the man, on the strength of the grudges which we have carefully enumerated, to risk himself, unarmed, in this situation? As to how he managed to have the door locked, so as to exclude the majority of his suite, who can conjecture? How, again, did he induce Gowrie to aver, and that after making inquiry, that he had ridden homewards?

I cannot believe that any sane man or monarch, from the motives specified, would or could have laid, and that successfully, the plot attributed to the King.

Turning to Gowrie, we find that his grudges against James may have been deep and many. If revengeful, he had the treacherous method of his father’s conviction, and the insults to his mother, to punish. For a boy of seventeen he had already attempted a good deal, in 1593–1594. His mother had set him an example of King-catching, and it looks as if his mother had been near him in Perth, while he was at Strabane. If ambitious, and devoted to Elizabeth and England (as he had been), Gowrie had motives for a new Raid of Ruthven, the unceasing desire of the English Government. He might, if successful, head a new administration resting on the support of England and the Kirk. Such a change was due in the natural course of things. Or, quite the reverse, if a secret Catholic he might hand the King over to Bothwell.

Thus Gowrie may well have wished to revenge his father; his mother had once already helped to betray James to an attack of the most insulting nature; he himself was strong for the Kirk, over which James was playing the despot; or, he desired toleration for Catholics; he had been well received in England, where all such plots – their name was legion – had always been fostered; he was very young, and he risked everything. Only his method was new – that of strict secrecy. He had previously spoken to Mr. Cowper, minister of Perth, in a general way, about the failure of plots for lack of deep secrecy, and through the admission of too many confederates. Cowper told this to Spottiswoode, at Falkland. Mr. Rhynd, Gowrie’s tutor, told Cowper and the Comptroller, ‘unrequired’ (not under torture, nor in answer to a question under examination), that Gowrie, when abroad, several times said that ‘he was not a wise man that, having the execution of a high and dangerous purpose, communicated the same to any but himself.’

As to this secrecy, we must remember that Gowrie was very young; that in Italy he may have heard or read of romantic and crafty plots; and may long have dreamed (as Robert Oliphant’s reported allegation declared) of some such scheme as that in which he failed. We must remember, too, that James’s own account at least suggests a plan quite feasible. To bring James to Gowrie House, early in the day, when the townsmen were at kirk, to bring him with only three or four attendants, then to isolate him and carry him off, was far from impossible; they might hurry him, disguised, to Dirleton, a castle garrisoned and provisioned, according to Carey, who reports the version of Gowrie’s friends. A Scottish judge, Gibson (the ancestor of Sir Thomas Gibson-Carmichael), was later carried from Leith Sands across the Border, with perfect success. A fault of the plan was that, once undertaken, it could not be dropped, even though James came late and well attended. Ruthven could not tell the King that his story about a captive and a pot of gold was false. To do that would have subjected him to a charge of treason. He could have only one motive for thus deceiving his Majesty. Thus the plot had to go on, even under circumstances very unfavourable. There was no place for repentance.

Thus considered, the conspiracy looks like the plot of a romance, not without meritorious points, but painfully amateurish.

As proof of Gowrie’s guilt, the evidence, I think, distinctly proves that he intentionally concealed from those about him the ride of his brother, Henderson, and Andrew Ruthven to Perth; that he concealed his knowledge, derived from Henderson, of the King’s approach; and that Ruthven concealed from Craigengelt, on his return, his long ride to Falkland, saying that he had been on ‘an errand not far off.’ Moncrieff swore that Henderson gave him a similar answer. Asked by Moncrieff where he had been, he said ‘he had been two or three miles above the town.’ Henderson corroborated Moncrieff’s evidence on this point. There can have been no innocent motive for all this secrecy. It would have been natural for Gowrie to order luncheon for the King to be prepared, as soon as Henderson arrived.

Finally, the Earl’s assertions that James had ridden away, assertions repeated after he had gone upstairs to inquire and make sure, are absolutely incompatible with innocence. They could have only one motive, to induce the courtiers to ride off and leave the King in his hands.

What was to happen next? Who can guess at the plot of such a plotter? It is perhaps least improbable that the King was to be conveyed secretly, by sea or across Fife, to Dirleton in the first place. Gowrie may have had an understanding with Guevara at Berwick. James himself told Nicholson that a large English ship had hovered off the coast, refusing communication with the shore. Bothwell, again, now desperate, may have lately been nearer home than was known; finally, Fastcastle, the isolated eyrie on its perpendicular rock above the Northern Sea, may have been at Gowrie’s disposal. I am disinclined to conjecture, being only certain that a young man with Gowrie’s past – ‘Italianate,’ and of dubious religion – was more apt to form a wild and daring plot than was his canny senior, the King of Scots. But that a plot of some kind Gowrie had laid, I am convinced by his secrecy, and by his falsehoods as to the King’s departure. 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. 79

XII. LOGAN OF RESTALRIG

We now arrive at an extraordinary sequel of the Gowrie mystery: a sequel in which some critics have seen final and documentary proof of the guilt of the Ruthvens. Others have remarked only a squalid intrigue, whereby James’s ministers threw additional disgrace on their master. That they succeeded in disgracing themselves, we shall make only too apparent, but if the evidence which they handled proves nothing against the Ruthvens, it does not on that account invalidate the inferences which we have drawn as to their conspiracy. We come to the story of the Laird and the country writer.

That we may know the Laird better, a brief description of his home may be introduced. Within a mile and a half of the east end of Princes Street, Edinburgh, lies, on the left of the railway to the south, a squalid suburb. You drive or walk on a dirty road, north-eastwards, through unambitious shops, factories, tall chimneys, flaming advertisements, and houses for artisans. The road climbs a hill, and you begin to find, on each side of you, walls of ancient construction, and traces of great old doorways, now condemned. On the left are ploughed fields, and even clumps of trees with blackened trunks. Grimy are the stacks of corn in the farmyard to the left, at the crest of the hill. On the right, a gateway gives on a short avenue which leads to a substantial modern house. Having reached this point in my pilgrimage, I met a gentleman who occupies the house, and asked if I might be permitted to view the site. The other, with much courtesy, took me up to the house, of which only the portion in view from the road was modern. Facing the west all was of the old Scottish château style, with gables, narrow windows, and a strange bulky chimney on the north, bulging out of the wall. The west side of the house stood on the very brink of a steep precipice, beneath which lay what is now but a large deep waterhole, but, at the period of the Gowrie conspiracy, was a loch fringed with water weeds, and a haunt of wild fowl. By this loch, Restalrig Loch, the witch more than three centuries ago met the ghost of Tam Reid, who fell in Pinkie fight, and by the ghost was initiated into the magic which brought her to the stake.

I scrambled over a low wall with a deep drop, and descended the cliff so as to get a view of the ancient château that faces the setting sun. Beyond the loch was a muddy field, then rows on rows of ugly advertisements, then lines of ‘smoky dwarf houses,’ and, above these, clear against a sky of March was the leonine profile of Arthur’s Seat. Steam rose and trailed from the shrieking southward trains between the loch and the mountain, old and new were oddly met, for the château was the home of an ancient race, the Logans of Restalrig, ancestors of that last Laird with whom our story has to do. Their rich lands stretched far and wide; their huge dovecot stands, sturdy as a little pyramid, in a field to the north, towards the firth. They had privileges over Leith Harbour which must have been very valuable: they were of Royal descent, through a marriage of a Logan with a daughter of Robert II. But their glory was in their ancestor, Sir Robert Logan, who fell where the good Lord James of Douglas died, charging the Saracens on a field of Spain, and following the heart of Bruce. So Barbour sings, and to be named by Barbour, for a deed and a death so chivalrous, is honour enough.

The Logans flourished in their eyrie above the Loch of Restalrig, and intermarried with the best houses, Sinclairs, Ogilvys, Homes, and Ramsays of Dalhousie. It may be that some of them sleep under the muddy floor of St. Triduana’s Chapel, in the village of Restalrig, at the foot of the hill on the eastern side of their old château. This village, surrounded by factories, is apparently just what it used to be in the days of James VI. The low thick-walled houses with fore-stairs, retain their ancient, high-pitched, red-tiled roofs, with dormer windows, and turn their tall narrow gables to the irregular street. ‘A mile frae Embro town,’ you find yourself going back three hundred years in time. On the right hand of the road, walking eastward, what looks like a huge green mound is visible above a high ancient wall. This is all that is left of St. Triduana’s Chapel, and she was a saint who came from Achaia with St. Regulus, the mythical founder of St. Andrews. She died at Restalrig on October 8, 510, and may have converted the Celts, who then dwelt in a crannog in the loch; at all events we hear that, in a very dry summer, the timbers of a crannog were found in the sandy deposit of the lake margin. The chapel (or chapter-house?), very dirty and disgracefully neglected, has probably a crypt under it, and certainly possesses a beautiful groined roof, springing from a single short pillar in the centre. The windows are blocked up with stones, the exterior is a mere mound of grass like a sepulchral tumulus. On the floor lies, broken, the gravestone of a Lady Restalrig who died in 1526. Outside is a patched-up church; the General Assembly of 1560 decreed that the church should be destroyed as ‘a monument of idolatry’ (it was a collegiate church, with a dean, and prebendaries), and in 1571 the wrought stones were used to build a new gate inside the Netherbow Port. The whole edifice was not destroyed, but was patched up, in 1836, into a Presbyterian place of worship. This old village and kirk made up ‘Restalrig Town,’ a place occupied by the English during the siege of Leith in 1560. So much of history may be found in this odd corner, where the sexton of the kirk speaks to the visitor about ‘the Great Logan,’ meaning that Laird who now comes into the sequel of the Gowrie mystery.

For some thirty years before the date of which we are speaking, a Robert Logan had been laird of Restalrig, and of the estate of Flemington, in Berwickshire, where his residence was the house of Gunnisgreen, near Eyemouth, on the Berwickshire coast. He must have been a young boy when, in 1560, the English forces besieging Leith (then held by the French for Mary of Guise) pitched their camp at Restalrig.