Next, Logan went to church at Coldinghame, on a Sunday, and met Bower: next day they dined together at Gunnisgreen. Bower was gloomy. Logan said, ‘Be it as it will, I must take my fortune, and I will tell you, Laird Bower, the scaffold is the best death that a man can die.’ Logan, if he said this, must have been drunk; he very often was.
It was at this point, in answer to a question, that Sprot confessed that Logan’s letter to Bower (No. II) was a forgery by himself. The actual letter, Sprot said, was dictated by Logan to him, and he made a counterfeit copy in imitation of Logan’s handwriting. We have stated the difficulties involved in this obvious falsehood. Sprot was trying every ruse to conceal his alleged source and model, Letter IV.
Sprot was next asked about a certain memorandum by Logan directed to Bower and to one John Bell, in 1605. This document was actually found in Sprot’s ‘pocquet’ when he was arrested, and it contained
certain very compromising items. Sprot replied that he forged the memorandum, in the autumn of 1606, when he forged the other letters. He copied most of it from an actual but innocent note of Logan’s on business matters, and added the compromising items out of his own invention. He made three copies of this forgery, one was produced; he gave another to a man named Heddilstane or Heddilshaw, a dweller in Berwick, in September 1607; the third, ‘in course hand,’ he gave to another client, ‘the goodman of Rentoun,’ Hume. One was to be used to terrorise Logan’s executors, to whom Heddilstane, but not Rentoun, was in debt. Sprot’s words are important. ‘He omitted nothing that was in the original’ (Logan’s memorandum on business matters), ‘but eikit’ (added) ‘two articles to his copy, the one concerning Ninian Chirnside’ (as to a dangerous plot-letter lost by Bower), ‘the other, where the Laird ordered Bower to tear his missive letters. He grants that he wrote another copy with his course hand, copied from his copy, and gave it to the goodman of Rentoun,’ while the copy given to Heddilstane ‘was of his counterfeited writing,’ an imitation of Logan’s hand.
Perhaps Sprot had two methods and scales of blackmail. For one, he invented damning facts, and wrote them out in imitation of Logan’s writing. The other species was cheaper: a copy in his ‘course hand’ of his more elaborate forgeries in Logan’s hand. Now the two copies of Letters I and IV,
which, at the end of his life, as we shall see, Sprot attested by signed endorsements, were in his ‘course hand.’ He had them ready for customers, when he was arrested in April 1608, and they were doubtless found in his ‘kist’ on the day before his death, with the alleged original of Letter IV. Up to August 11, at a certain hour, Government had neither the alleged original, nor Sprot’s ‘course hand copy’ of Letter IV, otherwise he would not have needed to quote IV from memory, as he did on that occasion.
Among these minor forgeries, to be used in blackmailing operations, was a letter nominally from Logan to one Ninian or Ringan Chirnside. This man was a member of the family of Chirnside of Easter Chirnside; his own estate was Whitsumlaws. All these Chirnsides and Humes of Berwickshire were a turbulent and lawless gang, true borderers. Ninian is addressed, by Logan, as ‘brother;’ they were most intimate friends. It was Ninian who (as the endorsement shows) produced our Letter V, on April 19; he had purchased it, for the usual ends, from Sprot, being a great debtor (as Logan’s will proves) to his estate.
To track these men through the background of history is to have a notion of the Day of Judgment. Old forgotten iniquities and adventures leap to light. Chirnside, like Logan and the Douglases of Whittingham, and John Colville, and the Laird of Spot, had followed the fortunes of wild Frank Stewart,
Earl of Bothwell, and nephew of the Bothwell of Queen Mary. Frank Bothwell was driven into his perilous courses by a charge of practising witchcraft against the King’s life. Absurd as this sounds, Bothwell had probably tried it for what it was worth. When he was ruined, pursued, driven, child of the Kirk as he seemed, into the Catholic faction, his old accomplice, Colville, took a solemn farewell of him. ‘By me your lordship was cleared of the odious imputation of witchcraft . . . but God only knows how far I hazarded my conscience in making black white, and darkness light for your sake’ (September 12, 1594). [198]