446

GOWRIE AT COURT.

Robert Cecil, Elizabeth, and Willoughby, in England, with any malcontents of the Scottish Kirk party, may, or rather must, have pointed out to Gowrie the path already indicated to him by religious prepossession, ambition, and revenge. True religion required the aid of an enemy of idolatry, like Gowrie, against a king who was trafficking with the Scarlet Woman that sitteth on the Seven Hills, and "stramping" on the Kirk. We know that the name of Ruthven and its allies were still hankering to avenge the death of "Greysteil" that Gowrie executed in 1584; at least, Colonel Stewart, who had taken part in his fall, showed a sudden desire to be employed by Elizabeth in Ireland as soon as young Gowrie came home. But the Earl seemed to be on the friendliest terms with James, who liked learned talk with a young scholar home from Italy.

We think of the king and his discourse, in Latin, with "Glenvarlochides," Nigel Oliphant, in the "Fortunes of Nigel." But Gowrie had been rather too well received by Elizabeth, with whom James was so enraged. According to Carey, writing to Cecil (May 29), the king gave Gowrie "many jests and pretty taunts" about "the great conference held with the queen's majesty, and that he had been offered some gold." The Earl said that he owed her kindness to her affection for James, and that he "had gold enough for himself." He had not; for James owed him money for his father's outlay when governor of Scotland, and Gowrie was pressed by creditors. James gave him a year's grace as to his father's creditors, and promised one day to pay him.12 In banter "the king marvelled that the ministers met him not" when he entered Edinburgh; and Calderwood reports other taunting or tactless speeches-for example, as to Riccio's murder.13

The sisters of Gowrie were maids of honour to the queen, and Alexander Ruthven, his brother, made suit to be a gentleman of the bedchamber, but his suit was not accepted. Tattle alleged alternately that the queen was in love with the young Ruthven or with Gowrie. It is needless to dwell on such idle gossip. By the end of May Gowrie retired to his town house at Perth, a chateau with a garden sloping to the Tay. Nicholson, reporting this fact, announced impending storms which Gowrie might intend to avoid (May 27).14

A convention was to have been held in June, but the murder of the Border Warden, Sir John Carmichael, by the Armstrongs,

THE CONVENTION ON FINANCE.

447

caused it to be postponed for some days.15 On June 29 Nicholson reported the meeting of the convention, and the speech in which the king demanded money, with a view to securing his succession and "honourable entering to the crown of England after the death of the queen." Nothing could have been more cruelly tactless, more apt to anger Elizabeth; and an arrangement with Essex was probably in the mind of the king. The Lord President, Seton, lately one of the Octavians, a man of upright and resolute character, skilled in finance, opposed the king's demands. It was insane for a small, poor country like Scotland to hope to win by arms what could only be gained by consent of the English people. This was true; but it also seems that if, on the death of Elizabeth, Protestant England was for James, Catholic England for the Infanta, James ought to be in a position to help his own faction. But the Scots never would endure taxation for military purposes. They reckoned their feudal levies potent enough, and while the king had no money and no 66 waged men they were always masters of the king. This policy had caused many disasters in war, and many sanguinary revolutions. Mary herself only acquired a small guard of musketeers in consequence of the murder of Riccio and the danger to her person.

James, as we saw, had lately admitted the barons, or lairds, to Parliament. They and the burgess members were now as recalcitrant about taxation as if they had been English knights of the shires. They offered James their swords when they were needed, and, on condition that he should never tax them again, about £4000, at most (£40,000 Scots). James refused, and demanded Gowrie replied in a

100,000 crowns to be paid by 1000 persons. speech reported by Nicholson. James was dishonouring himself by his demands, and his people by laying bare their poverty. James angrily replied he could call a Parliament and disenfranchise the lairds as easily as he had enfranchised them-a pretty example of the constitutional value of a Scottish Parliament. The laird of Easter Wemyss retorted that they had paid for their seats, and would have the seats conferred on them in 1587. The convention broke up, and Robert Cecil learned, from a cyphered and anonymous despatch, that James "intends not to tarry upon her majesty's death, but take time so soon as without peril he can." This message was probably a piece of mere mischief-making.

The Government was bitterly in need of money. Nicholson again

448

CONSPIRACIES OF COLVILLE (1598).

and again refers to the poverty prevailing. The islands were (as is shown later, in an account of Highland affairs) unusually turbulent. The king had intended to conduct an expedition himself to take order with Kintyre and Isla; "but," writes Nicholson, "the 'rode' to the isles is deferred on account of the great scarcity in the country" (July 22). At the same time James was gratified by the recantation of his old enemy, John Colville, the spy and ally of Bothwell. This man had either written a book against James's legitimacy, or such a book had certainly been attributed to him. For years he had been a spy half out of employment; Cecil would After 1598 he was abandoned by Essex. An exile in France, this once earnest professor was now converted to Catholicism. He wrote a recantation of the book attributed to him against the king's legitimacy, and was reconciled to Archbishop Beaton in Paris. The recantation pleased the king; but Colville continued to spy for the English Ambassador in France, spied his way to Rome, and begged of the Pope. He died, in deserved poverty, not long afterwards.16

not pay.

As we approach the Gowrie mystery, it may be observed that Colville and other agents of his kind perpetually flattered Cecil and the English ministers with promises to kidnap the king of Scotland. Such hopes are a regular element in their letters.

As to Colville, this needy, vindictive, and desperate man, writing to Essex from Scotland on April 29, 1598, makes the following strange promise: "And for the service I mind to do, if matters go to the worst, it shall be such, God willing,-if I lose not my life in doing thereof,- -as no other can do with a million of gold, and yet I shall not exceed the bounds of humanity. But for conscience' sake and worldly honesty I must first be absolved of my natural allegiance." 17 Colville has just been speaking evil of James, and now he promises to do a desperate and treasonable deed, "within the bounds of humanity" (that is, not involving murder), a deed which only he can do. This means kidnapping the king. He elsewhere drops a similar hint (October 20, 1598).18

We now draw near that fifth of August which James ever afterwards kept as a public holiday in memory of his escape from the Gowrie conspirators. Gowrie himself, with his brother, the Master, was hunting in Atholl during the latter part of July. His mother, Lady Gowrie, was apparently at the town house of the family in At the beginning of August the court moved from Holy

GOWRIE IN AUGUST.

449 rood to Falkland, a charming palace of the modern French château order, unfortified, save for the strong round towers and the gateways. In spite of time and restoration, Falkland is still, perhaps, the best example of grace and comfort in a Scottish royal residence of great age. The park and woods were well suited for sport, and in these woods, as we saw, Bothwell had once hoped to trap the king along with his huntsmen,

It appears from the treasurer's accounts that, late in July, letters were sent from the court, then at Edinburgh, to the Earls of Atholl and Gowrie, and from Falkland to the Master of Ruthven, and to Drummond, lay Abbot of Inchaffray. We know nothing of the contents of these letters, which have been conjectured about by writers on the mystery of the Gowrie conspiracy. We learn, however, from an unpublished MS. that James had been trying to induce Gowrie to resign the lands of Scone (of which James had presented him with the rents for life) to his younger brother.20 To this matter the letters may have referred; nothing is known. On one of the last days of July a kinsman of Gowrie, Alexander Ruthven (the ancestor, in the female line, of the present house of Ruthven), rode from Dunkeld to Gowrie's hunting lodge in Atholl (Strabane). On Friday, August 1, Gowrie sent Captain Ruthven from Atholl to tell his mother that "he was to come," and the confused language of his servant, Craigengelt, who deponed to this, makes it probable that Lady Gowrie was then at Perth. If so, she left at once for Gowrie's Castle of Dirleton, now a beautiful ruin near the sea hard by North Berwick.21 To Dirleton-according to the contemporary Vindication in MS., to Calderwood, and to Carey (writing to Cecil from Berwick on August 11)-Gowrie himself intended to go on August 5. Most of his men and all his provisions were there already, says Carey; but Gowrie never saw Dirleton again.2

We now reach August 5, the day of the Gowrie tragedy. Something must first be said as to the evidence. It is vitiated, on the king's side, by his theory that murder was intended against him by the Ruthvens, whereas the plot, if plot there was, must have been merely one out of scores of schemes for kidnapping the royal person, and working a revolution in favour of England, the Kirk, or Rome. Nothing was reckoned more constitutional. The evidence, again, in the nature of the case, is mainly that of the king, and of a mysterious personage, corroborated in part by James's retinue, and by citizens of Perth and others, who were present. The opponents

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of James, contemporary or modern, discount this evidence, as a rule, where it does not suit them. But the most important witnesses declined, on the most essential points, to say things quite necessary to the success of their cause, or even to stretch a point, where the temptation was great and obvious. Again, the discrepancies between the versions of the king, and of the other most important witnesses, are so manifest, being publicly acknowledged by James himself, that, on the theory of collusion, they could not have occurred. The stories, if collusive, would have been brought into harmony before they were laid before the world and a court of justice. Of course, had this been done, opponents would have called the very harmony suspicious. No two men can give absolutely identical accounts of the same sudden, confused, and startling occurrence, as daily experience proves.

Our earliest testimony as to the events of August 5 is Nicholson's account of the letter written for the king to the chancellor and others on the night of August 5. The substance of this letter was orally narrated by the secretary to Nicholson at Edinburgh on the morning of August 6. In such circumstances, where we have, first a hasty letter, then an oral repetition of its tenor, and then that tenor redescribed, absolute accuracy is impossible. But the account is, essentially, that which James always gave.

We now turn to James's official version, a pamphlet sent by Nicholson to Robert Cecil as early as September 3, 1600. This version we can check by the depositions of witnesses. His majesty says that he went out to hunt, in beautiful weather, between six and seven in the morning. He and his suite were clad in green-the king, as we know to have been his custom, wearing a hunting-horn, and no sword. The Master of Ruthven accosted him before he mounted. Why was Ruthven at Falkland so early? That he was there the lay Abbot of Inchaffray, Drummond, with many others, declared; the abbot asked him to breakfast, but Ruthven declined. To James, apart, Ruthven told how, the night before, he had caught a fellow with a pot of gold, and, unknown even to Gowrie, had shut him up in a private room, "and locked many doors behind him." James, after saying that he had no claim to the gold, was induced to suspect that it was foreign gold (as Ruthven implied) brought in for seditious purposes. He, therefore, said that he would send a

*

* The word used is "house," often equivalent to "room" in Scots, and so employed elsewhere by James.