[161] He had sold Nether Gogar in 1596.
[162] Some of the papers are in the General Register House, Edinburgh.
[164] The evidence for all that occurred to Sprot, between April and July 1608, is that of a manuscript History of the Kirk of Scotland, now in the Advocates’ Library. It is written in an early seventeenth-century hand. Calderwood follows it almost textually up to a certain point where the author of the MS. history says that Sprot, on the scaffold, declared that he had no promise of benefit to his family. But Calderwood declares, or says that others declare, that Sprot was really condemned as a forger (which is untrue), but confessed to the Gowrie conspiracy in return for boons to his wife and children.
We have, of course, no evidence that anything was done by Government, or by any one, for Mrs. Sprot and the children. The author of the MS., which Calderwood used as he pleased, avers that Sprot denied on the scaffold the fact that he had any promise. Neither draft nor official account confirms the MS. history on the point of no promise. The official draft of his last moments (from its interlineations, each signed by the Clerk of Council) appears to have been drawn up on the spot, or hurriedly, as soon as Sprot was dead. This is the aspect of the draft of the account; the official printed account says that there was ‘no place of writing on the scaffold, in respect of the press and multitude of people’ (Pitcairn, ii. 261).
[169] Vol. ii. pp. 282–7.
[170] Letter I is a peculiar case, and was not, perhaps, spoken of by Sprot at all.
[183] Laing, Charters, Nos. 1452, 1474–76, 2029.
[198] Hatfield Calendar, iv. 659.
[199a] Pitcairn, iii. Appendix vii.
[199b] Border Calendar, i. 486, 487.