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. [121a] A manuscript in the British Museum gives a somewhat different version. [121b] 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.