APPENDIX B.

571 tions turned on no other point. So much for Calderwood. Mr Barbé, in his "Tragedy of Gowrie House" (125-131), accepts both the MS. in the Advocates' Library and Calderwood's account of "promise of benefit" to Sprot's family, without observing that Calderwood cites the MS. where it suits him, and ignores and contradicts it-always without quoting his sources-where it does not suit him. The official statements about Sprot's evidence are falsified and garbled, but Calderwood's version, when analysed, is not irreproachable. But, of course, he is not to be censured severely. It was then unusual to cite authorities, and he may have thought that his information was better than that of his author. At last, on July 5, and in subsequent examinations, Sprot averred that the letters in possession of the Council were impostures, but that Logan's share in the plot, and his own guilty foreknowledge, were actual facts.

The only letters in the case hitherto known to history are five; the originals were found by Mr Pitcairn, in the Warrants of Parliament, and were published by him in the second volume of his 'Criminal Trials in Scotland.' They were also copied into the record of the proceedings of the Scottish Parliament of November 1609. Of these five letters, dating from between July 18 and the last of July 1600, Nos. i., iii., and v. are, to one or more unknown persons, addressed as 'Right Honourable Sir." One (ii.) is to James or "Laird" Bower, a retainer of Logan. One (iv.), dated July 29, 1600, is to the Earl of Gowrie. These letters indicate frankly that Logan and his correspondents are engaged in high treason. Failure means death, forfeiture, and extirpation of the names of the associates. The scheme, whatever its details, is based (according to the letters). on an incident which occurred, or a romance which was in circulation, at Padua, where Gowrie had been a scholar (1595-1598 ?). These five letters have been accepted as authentic beyond doubt by Mr Hill Burton and Mr Tytler, though Mr Mark Napier and others proved that they were in the highest degree suspicious. The confessions of Sprot, in the Haddington MSS., allege that Letters ii., iii., and v. are forgeries, while i. is doubtful, and only iv. (Logan to Gowrie, July 29, 1600) is admitted by him as genuine, and as his model for the fraudulent imitations. That even one letter was admitted to be genuine, Calderwood did not know. If accepted, Letter iv. suffices to establish the guilt both of Gowrie and Logan, but, as we have it, letter iv. is a forgery, whether the substance be copied from a real letter by Logan or not.

The reason why Sprot forged the three certainly fraudulent letters, and a number of others never publicly produced, was a purpose of extortion. After 1600, Logan of Restalrig sold all his estates, although the records of "hornings" for debt, in the "Register of the Privy Council," never show that he was pressed by creditors. Already, in 1596, he had sold his estate of Lower Gogar. This haste to get rid of landed property after 1600 must have aroused the suspicion that Logan feared forfeiture, in consequence of some treasonable enterprise; and that, probably, the Gowrie affair. Logan was of ancient family; he was of royal descent; his lands were Restalrig, near Leith, Flemingtoun (with a house, Gunnisgreen, near Eyemouth), and Fastcastle, a fortress of great strength, on a perpendicular cliff of the Berwickshire coast, above the northern sea. The possession of this impregnable fortalice, in a region still roadless, made Logan a useful ally in a conspiracy. His life had been passed in conspiracies. A halfbrother of Lord Hume, a cousin of the Master of Gray, and of the Ogilvys and Sinclairs, a friend of the family of Gowrie's Mr Thomas Cranstoun, Logan belonged to the clique of Archibald Douglas, and the other Whittingham Douglases, the Laird of Spot, John Colville, Ninian Chirnside, and all the southern partisans,

of the adventurous Francis Stewart, Earl of Bothwell. In 1586 Logan was one of the packed jury which shamefully acquitted Archibald Douglas of a part in Darnley's murder. In 1592-1594, when Bothwell was chasing the King like a partridge on the mountains, Logan was his abettor, probably harboured him at Fastcastle, and was denounced rebel for his pains. When Bothwell joined the Catholics, and deserted the Kirk, Logan did not abandon the renegade, but associated with and harboured George Ker (of the Spanish Blanks), and the Jesuit, Father Andrew Clerk. In 1599 he was charged not to yield Fastcastle to the King's rebels or enemies, and in 1599 Cecil was inquiring of Lord Willoughby, at Berwick, as to his character and position. Logan had been a pirate; a Queen's man in the castle during the last agony of Mary's party; an associate of Gowrie's after the raid of Ruthven; a spy of Walsingham's (1586-1587); an accomplice of all the perfidious Douglases of Spot and Whittingham, and Mowbrays of Barnbogle; and, as we saw, an ally of Bothwell when Bothwell was an ally of Atholl, and of the Gowrie of the Gowrie tragedy. He was also lie with Lord Willoughby and Sir John Guevara at Berwick, the kidnappers of Richard Ashfield (1599).

With this record, it may be judged whether Logan was an unlikely man to be a conspirator. He was a neighbour to Gowrie's castle at Dirleton, close to the sea, near North Berwick, and within a short sail of Fastcastle. The lands of Dirleton (according to Sprot) were to be Logan's if the conspiracy succeeded. When we remember that, in April 1600, Nicholson had announced to Cecil that a plot by Archibald Douglas, the Laird of Spot, and John Colville was in hand; when we add that Colville and Gowrie were both in Paris in the early spring of 1600, while Bothwell was reported to have arrived secretly and to be skulking in Scotland, it may be granted that Logan was apt to be concerned in whatever enterprises of a treasonable nature were on foot. The Gowrie conspiracy failed; Logan sold his lands (this is certain), and went partners with Lord Willoughby in a ship, wherein, Sprot says, he meant to sail to "the Indies." By 1605 Logan had sold all and was a landless man. Lord Balmerino and Lord Dunbar, the purchasers of his estates, owed him 33,000 marks on the price. In September 1605 Logan went to London to try to get his money, in which he failed. He then visited France, returned in 1606, to find Bower, his trusted old servant, dead; and he died himself in Edinburgh in July 1606. His elder children, by his first and second marriages, refused to "give up the inventory" of his estate. His heir was a girl, of about four or five years of age, born of his last marriage, and the main part of her property was the money owed to her by Dunbar and by Balmerino, who, in 1608, fell from power, and was a dying prisoner.

In these circumstances, the propriety of robbing the orphan was conspicuous to all. Sprot not only destroyed the acknowledgments of debt to Logan's heiress by one Heddilstane and by Ninian Chirnside (Logan's most intimate friend, and a trusted retainer of Bothwell), but he forged the Logan plot letters, ii., iii., v., and perhaps i., and a number of other compromising papers and letters, in an imitation of Logan's hand. These forgeries Sprot sold to Heddilstane, Ninian Chirnside, the Goodman of Rentoun (Home), and others. They were to exhibit the forged documents as genuine to Logan's executors, and so terrify them into forgiving the debts owed by Logan's surviving friends to his daughter. The whole of the dead Logan's possessions would be forfeited if his connection with the Gowrie plot came to light, and thus the forged papers were much coveted by Logan's friends and debtors, and were a source of revenue to Sprot. This branch of the notary's business was, of course, destroyed by his arrest in April 1608. In July, Dunbar,

says Calderwood, following his MS. authority, came to Scotland, “and caused take the said George Sprot out of ward, and cure his legs, bruised with the boots." Sprot now, on July 5 and later, confessed that the plot was a genuine plot, that Logan was engaged in it, that he himself had guilty foreknowledge, announced that he knew he must die, and deserved to die, but maintained that the plotletters and other compromising papers, then before the Privy Council, were all forgeries. His own words are, "I confess to my own shame and God's glory, I formed and framed them all to the true meaning and purpose of the letter that Bower let me see" (Gowrie's first letter, merely asking for an interview with Logan), "to make the matter the more clear by these arguments and circumstances, for the cause I shewed to the Lords," that is, for purposes of extortion. The letter of Gowrie had been shown by Bower to Sprot "with a direction that he got from the Laird to come to him in haste for to ride in his commission to the Earl of Gowrie concerning the lands of Dirleton" (Logan's reward), “which direction to Bower is among the rest of the letters produced." Thus, on July 5, Sprot confessed that Gowrie's harmless first letter to Logan was his source, but he obviously includes what he says he knew of Logan's hope of getting the lands of Dirleton.

The letter about them (ii.) Sprot almost certainly forged, on oral information from Bower. But, as certainly, Sprot, in the recorded confessions, never mentions Letter iv., from Logan to Gowrie, till August 10. Under examination, Sprot cited the first letter of Gowrie to Logan (July 6, 1600), in which Gowrie says that Logan understands his purposes, and asks for an interview. Sprot cited various witnesses to corroborate some of his statements, but they all, very naturally, refused to corroborate, and Chirnside, with others, was long "warded" in prison. So far, the Privy Council had no valid evidence before it; only rumour, Sprot's word, contested and often demonstrably false, and the letters and papers which were confessed forgeries. On August 9 Sprot was told that he must die, and that he should see the faces of the Lords no more. He repeated that his confessions, since July 5, were true, and, in his own hand, subscribed the record of his confession "in the presence of God and his messengers, auditors hereof." The messengers of God were the Bishop of Ross, with the King's preacher, Mr Galloway, and Messrs Hall and Hewat, ministers of Edinburgh. Sprot was to see the Lords no more, but he must have sent to let them know that he had more to divulge. On the 10th of August the Lords and ministers visited him again, and, after a prayer made by Mr Galloway, he was asked, "Where is that letter which Restalrig wrote to the Earl of Gowrie, whereupon the said George Sprot wrote and formed the missives produced?" This must refer to some unrecorded statement just made by Sprot, for this letter, the now confessed model of Sprot's forgeries, has never hitherto been mentioned. In his written confession of July 5, he said that he forged the papers "to the true meaning and purpose of the letter that Bower let me see," meaning either Gowrie's first and not compromising letter, or Logan's letter to Bower, or both (No. ii.). Never before August 10 has Sprot mentioned a letter of Logan to Gowrie, as known to him, or as his model. That letter is a new feature in the case, and, on August 10, was not in possession of the Council.

now.

Sprot was asked point-blank, after Mr Galloway's prayer, where the letter was He first gave an account of how he found it, unfinished, behind a bench and the wall, at Fastcastle. He must have meant Gunnisgreen, for the letter bears that date, unless, as Logan (in Letter iv.) says that he wrote it "on two sundry idle days," he began it at Fastcastle, and finished it, and, at the end, dated it, from

Gunnisgreen. But Gunnisgreen was quite close to Eyemouth, where Sprot lived, and he is unlikely to have been at Fastcastle. Sprot went on to say that, months after the conspiracy, Logan bade Bower, who kept all his papers, find and bring him this letter, which had been returned by Gowrie, through Bower, according to their method of correspondence. Bower, who could not read, asked Sprot to help him to find the letter. Sprot found it, told Bower that he could not find it, and carried it off till on this Letter iv., as a model, he forged all the rest. Now this is so far true : any reader of Letters iii., v., and a torn letter in the Haddington MSS. must see that they are all mere copies of Letter iv. Except in what personally applies to Gowrie, Letters iii., v., and the torn letter say nothing that is not in Letter iv. The case of Letter i. is dubious, for reasons too minute to be discussed here. Sprot now quoted Letter iv. (Logan to Gowrie), from memory, recognisably, but not correctly. Asked if he was at last speaking the truth, as a man under the very shadow of death, Sprot vowed to God that he was. Again required to say where the letter now was, he said that "he believes it is in his kist" (chest), sealed ("closed"), "and folded in a piece of paper." Search must have been instantly made at Eyemouth for this letter, which was probably in a secret compartment of Sprot's "kist." On August II, at a certain hour, the Council had neither the letter nor a copy of it, for Sprot now recollected, almost correctly, a passage which he thought was in a postscript. This he would not have done had the letter, or a copy of it, been accessible, for really, the passage is in the body of the Letter iv. Sprot was to die, and did die on August 12. At a certain hour on August II the letter had not yet arrived, for, by racking his memory, he recovered, though incorrectly, more of its contents. But before he was hanged, Sprot endorsed, in his own ordinary hand, a copy in his "course or current hand, of Letter iv., and another of Letter i. Now Lord Cromarty, writing in 1713, at the age of eighty-three, tells us that the Sheriff-depute was instructed to search for this letter (iv.), that he found it, and that he gave it to Sir Thomas Hamilton. The copy, endorsed by Sprot, a copy not before the Council at a certain hour of August II, was doubtless found with the alleged original (in Logan's hand or an imitation of it) of Letter iv. This endorsed copy is still in the papers left by Sir Thomas Hamilton.

Thus Letter iv., unlike the rest, is alleged by Sprot to be genuine, and the model (as it undeniably is) of his forgeries. In my opinion, Letter iv. is, at least in substance, genuine, and it suffices to prove Logan's acquiescence in Gowrie's plot. The reader who is in doubt may read the letters and form his own opinion. It does not follow, if the substance of Letter iv. be genuine, that the handwriting is Logan's. It is certainly not Logan's, but the hand of Sprot, counterfeiting that of the Laird of Restalrig. Sprot's confession of August 10 is that, after surreptitiously reading the first part of Logan's unfinished letter to Gowrie, and after, later, seeing Gowrie's first harmless letter, he put two and two together, and conceived suspicions. He later stole Logan's letter to Gowrie (iv.), "which letter he retained till he framed three new letters upon it." He may have then returned the genuine Letter iv. to Bower, as if he had found it in a new search among the papers, after he had copied it, in a forgery of Logan's hand. That copy may be our Letter iv., genuine in substance, but not in handwriting. This theory would account for the firmness of the writing, the slip in spelling "protection," and so on. The substance of the letter, from internal evidence, I believe to be Logan's, but this is a matter of opinion.

On August 12 Sprot was hanged, after confessing his guilt from every corner of the scaffold, and singing a psalm. This dying confession of his own, of

Logan's, and of Gowrie's guilt (in which nothing about the letters is reported) was trying to Presbyterian sceptics. They were wont to say that they would believe in a dying confession. But it did not suit them to believe in Sprot's, and Calderwood treated the case in the way we have explained.

But Archbishop Spottiswoode, who was present at Sprot's public trial on August 12, and at his death, believed him to be an hysterical self-accuser. The man never showed the letter, says Spottiswoode. He did, but Spottiswoode was kept in the dark. Government, in the indictment of Sprot, and in a tract officially published (both are in Pitcairn), said not a word about any letters being produced. They garbled and falsified the facts, they cited Gowrie's first letter (never found at all), and Logan's letter to Gowrie (iv.), as quoted by Sprot from memory.

In June 1609, the dead body of Logan was tried, before the Lords of the Articles, for treason. The Lords, who were sceptical at first, convicted the dead mian. They were converted to a belief in his guilt, when the prosecution produced the Five Letters, of which Sprot had confessed that three, or perhaps four, were forgeries, Letter iv. alone being genuine. Seven honourable witnesses, who knew Logan well, produced real letters of his, and compared them with the Five Letters, in which no difference of handwriting or of spelling could be detected. The case is precisely similar to the Hampton Court comparison of Queen Mary's letters with the Casket Letters. By virtue of this conviction Logan's heirs lost all their inheritance, and Lord Dunbar was not obliged to pay the 18,000 marks which he owed to Logan's estate. All the documents of the trials, as officially published, are in Pitcairn, vol. ii. pp. 256-293. On these transactions, so long concealed, it is needless to offer any commentary.

As to the guilt of Logan with Gowrie, the evidence of Sprot is tainted, and not fit, in daily life, to go to a jury. After July 5 he lied variously to conceal his possession of our Letter iv. He confessed to it when death was absolutely certain. Yet that long-concealed letter, as it stands, is pronounced by experts to be as much a forgery as the others. How is the conduct of Sprot to be explained? He confessed to the plot, and to his guilty knowledge, which carried his doom. Government was sure to hang him, not so much for the crime, as to present a dying confession to the godly sceptics. But why did Sprot admit that he had forged the letters? If he had any faint hope of life, his chance lay in giving the Government documentary evidence. This he refused. And why did he keep back Letter iv. till death was absolutely certain? Why did he then give it up, and aver that it was genuine, whereas modern experts condemn it with the rest? A study of the Haddington MSS. leads me to the opinion that Logan was really in the plot, and the internal evidence, the contents of Letter iv., confirm that belief. But all this is opinion, not knowledge.

1 A brief abstract is given in Sir William Frazer's Memorials of the Earls of Haddington, vol. i. 1889.

2 Calderwood, vi. p. 779, bis (779 is printed twice by error).

3 Spottiswoode, iii. pp. 199-200.

END OF THE SECOND VOLUME.